WANT ADS

I\'ve been leaning against this building and studying the door of the glass-front business across the street for about 20 minutes now, just getting an idea of the numbers coming in and out.
Taking a last tight-lipped drag from my cigarette, I step off the curb and flick the butt against the wall; the shower of sparks weaves a strain of sudden fiery red through the vertical static of misty rain advancing along the waterfront this cold Saturday afternoon. Crossing the street against traffic, I enter the local unemployment center.
Pushing open the double doors, I catch the first whiff of failure, floor wax, and stale body odor. The fluorescent lights flicker off and on sporadically, illuminating the three employees working behind the counter and the other eleven stiffs waiting in line; ordinary work-a-day bastards hemmed into compliance by a succession of velvet snakes, forced to jockey for minimum wage data entry positions and temporary labor in a town too small to successfully attract the interest of investors who create these types of jobs in the first place.
Three more of them have their considerable asses wedged into fiberglass chairs with clipboards balanced on their laps, hoping to work some kind of last-minute magic with the ink pens clutched in their fists. Hard times have fallen on this town, and each one of these bodies present represent three additional mouths to feed at home. All but one of them are right-handed.
There is trash on the floor and the unarmed and aged security guard has a paunch and a slight limp to his left leg, possibly from a minor stroke. His heart will blow like a bald tire if the shit ever hits the fan in here. I catch all of this in a glimpse as I march straight through; it\'s part of my job to note the details.
I stop at the end of a narrow hall before a tiny mirrored window, which I block with my body as I flash my ID. When the door to my right buzzes open, I enter a small room and type in my ID number on the keypad. An armored drawer slides out from wall, into which I deposit my guns. Lastly, the door on the opposite side of the room opens, and I walk through to a room closely resembling the first, with some differences.
For instance, there are only five people in line, and two behind the counter. The security guard is young, fit, armed, and wearing a new pair of shoes which hurt his feet. He\'d been saving up for a vacation, and got so excited he forgot to take off his sunglasses before falling asleep in the sun, which left raccoon marks around his eyes. There is no trash on the floor, but the calendar on the wall is a day off. The ratio of left- to right-hand dominant people in this room is about the same.
Again, I can\'t help to notice the details. I fill out the proper forms, and wait my turn in line.
\"Next, please.\" I hand over my completed paperwork and present my ID to the middle-aged woman behind the counter. She\'s wearing a secondhand blue dress and non-prescription eyeglasses for that \"intellectual\" look that\'s all the rage at the moment; the fresh scent of oatmeal soap and a knockoff fragrance rolls off her skin like cirrus clouds, propelled by the wall-mounted fan behind her. Her wedding band is missing.
She examines my ID halfheartedly and begins punching the pertinent information into the Assassins Guild Assistance Database, before beginning the interview with a heavy sigh.
\"Have you killed anyone this week?\"
Hers is the exasperated tone of a woman who is absolutely sick and fucking tired of asking that same question, and she doesn\'t bother to take her eyes from the flickering screen while her fingers pound the worn and grimy keys, like a midway game of Whack-The-Badger.
\"No,\" I tell her.
\"Have you made an effort to kill anyone this week?\" There is an unusual amount of stress on the word \"effort\".
\"Yes,\" I tell her, \"but the client got cold feet.\" She rolls her eyes. It sounds like an excuse, but it happens more often than you\'d think. People chicken out or change their minds, and we\'re left with a contract that isn\'t worth the paper it\'s printed on. It\'s not like we get paid hourly, you know? And we can\'t exactly force a person into honoring their agreement. There are Guild bylaws against that kind of thing.
She snapped out a few more questions before shoving another form in my hands, an AG-3507-1. Continuance of unemployment benefits to an assassin, first level. \"Take this to the financial officer at the disbursement desk over there,\" she sighed, \"and they\'ll cut you a check. Next, please.\"
I opted not to make eye contact with anyone else while I stood in line, trying not to think about how this used to be a great town to work in. It used to be a quiet little community, maybe two or three of us within a 30 mile radius. We had a tidy little operation all to ourselves.
A new golf course brought out the inherent evil in the nouveau rich, like cockroaches in the night, and there was a nasty epidemic of wife-swapping going on there for awhile. A lot of wealthy people were doing a lot of serious thinking about that \"\'til death do us part\" business. Thanks to that, I was able to earn my way up from second level to first in just six months.
It was cake, until about three months ago when suddenly there came a sudden exodus of fresh talent-- if you can call it talent-- to the suburbs from the big cities. Young punks with no class, no brains, and no style; just stupid enough to get a taste for killing, but smart enough to stay out of the way of the big dogs in the cities, the old guys who\'ve been doing things the right way since Christ was a mess cook.
Don\'t get me started on the kids today. Most of \'em wouldn\'t know subtle if it popped out of their soup with a razor blade and slit their throats! These flashy, loud-mouthed, machine gun-toting little shits showed up without the sense God gave a piggy bank and ruined everything. Now there\'s almost as many of us as there are of them. That\'s not good for people in my line of work, and it\'s not good for the community we work in.
As in nature, a certain number of wolves is required to maintain balance in the flock, and there\'s only so many times you can create a death by \"natural causes\" within a certain time frame. But when too many killers get greedy for too few contracts, even the pros start tripping over themselves, and pretty soon the wrong people wind up dead for the wrong reasons. And worse, the wrong people start asking difficult questions. That\'s bad for business.
We don\'t exactly get a lot of what you\'d consider \"repeat\" or \"loyal\" customers in these smaller communities. I mean, it\'s not like buying a new car, right? You just don\'t buy a new one every three or four months when you get sick of looking at the old one. A guy with three or four new cars in his driveway is going to raise a few eyebrows, I don\'t care what he does for a living.
I\'m next in line for my check. \"Sign here, please.\" The disbursement clerk slides a form across the counter to me. I note the white mark on his finger where his wedding band used to live, and I wonder how long he\'s been screwing Miss Blue Dress in the copier room, before scrawling my name on the line, pocketing my unemployment check with a sigh, making my way to the exit, and reclaiming my guns on the way through the outer door.
People in my line of work deal in permanent, albeit severe, solutions. And looking around me in the outer office now at all the ordinary people suffering under the ugly flicker of the lights, I don\'t see anybody here who can afford those kind of solutions anymore. Just a lot of grim faces who can\'t imagine where they\'ll be living this time next year, let alone how they can scrape up enough cash to have their boss or their wife or their lover wiped out.
I exit the center. The first wave of cool air that greets me does my head a world of good, and I move down the street, lost in thought.
People hire killers for a variety of reasons: revenge, jealously, lust, greed, or to cover up a crime, a humiliation, or a mistake resulting from any one of the previous. Like clockwork, the first thing people with money do when a job is done is get scared. The second thing they do is move as far away from their mistake as they can, and take all that lovely money with them, which, coincidentally, is the common and necessary element for one of our special \"permanent solutions\", something this town doesn\'t have room for anymore. A good death doesn\'t come cheap.
Aw, hell. I\'ve been thinking about moving on anyway. Maybe I\'ll set up camp on a quiet stretch of white sand on an isolated tropic beach somewhere and snipe fish for my dinner while considering my options. I was hoping for one or two more big scores to fatten the pot beforehand, but I don\'t think that\'s gonna happen anytime soon.
Time to pull up stakes and move on.