As Roscoe Mueller sat on the bed in his hotel room, flipping through the cable channels to find the porn, he experiences an introspective moment about his occupation: Hired Assassin. To his sensibility, Hired Assassin sounded better than the generic Hit Man. Why are people enthralled by guys like me? Roscoe will never quite understand this fascination.
He stops pushing the remote channel select button when he notices two naked women, wearing only red pumps kissing each other, which momentarily diverts his attention. Roscoe then says to himself, “maybe I should have a hooker sent up, maybe a red head for a change?” But Roscoe’s mind reverts to the subject at hand, Hired Assassins and the glamorous lifestyle the public seems to think they lead. “You call this glamorous?” he says out loud, in a hushed tone, as he looks around his hotel room, the exact hotel room he’s seen in the many cities Roscoe has been dispatched to eliminate other people’s problems.
Roscoe is a journeyman in the world of Hired Assassins. He has been doing this for the past 35 years and, if he must say so himself, he is pretty good at it. Roscoe adjusts his pillows, and what appears to be a cable TV repair man enters on screen with the two naked women with red pumps. He turns up the volume and reflects on how times have changed in this business.
The infringement on his privacy with omnipresent surveillance video cameras, the practically universal substitution of credit cards for cash, the cell phones, the bar codes to detect forged documents and all the other high tech innovations have sure made this job more complicated and dangerous.
Roscoe longs for the old days when he made his first “hit”; breeze in, pay cash, no picture id, no surveillance video cameras, only pay phones, no questions asked, two in the back of the head, bada bing bada boom, gone before the body is cold.
Oh well, with the realization that change is a constant, as in most businesses one must keep up with the times if one wants to continue to work.
Now the cable TV guy gets into it with both of the naked women in red pumps; “Maybe I should order up two pros, a red head and a blonde?” But being the professional that he is, he knows work comes first and starts to decide how best to accomplish this latest mission. “I didn’t come all the way out to Wisconsin just to bend my Johnson”, he laughs to himself.
Roscoe gets up from the bed, turns off the television, sits at the desk and turns on the lamp. The little black book which contains all the information given to him, as well as the information he has gathered by observing his “package” is ready for review. Of course, it is all encrypted into a verbiage and syntax only known to Roscoe and will be totally destroyed prior to any action.
Roscoe has never and will never use any computer, or e mails to electronically memorialize any work related data, “Computers and e mails are like herpes, they’re forever” he always reminds himself. Flipping through the pages of the black book, Roscoe once again reviewed the plan of action and immediate egress. This mundane process is so fine tuned, it has become second nature. Roscoe can now do the boom without the bada and without the bing.
******
So this guy whose going to get clipped by Roscoe pisses off this other guy, (for reasons that are of no concern to Roscoe) this other guy is a “business acquaintance” of Roscoe’s guy. Roscoe’s guy assures this other guy (who is nervous) that his guy (Roscoe) is a total professional and “you got nothing to worry about”. The only wrinkle in the plan is that the pissed off guy ordering the hit wants the guy who’s getting clipped to “suffer”.
Of course, this means an enhanced monetary compensation, which the pissed off guy was more than happy to add to the total when Roscoe’s guy said no problem to the description of how the pissed off guy wants the clipped guy to suffer. Got all that? Not for nothing, that’s the lingo of the badda, the bing and the boom.
One would think that Roscoe would welcome the opportunity to increase his compensation, but nowadays he just sees these enhanced techniques as unnecessary, a bit more risky and messy. Anyway, Roscoe was getting sick of blood and guts, but not because of any queasiness, it was just getting too messy. Roscoe believes in quality work and customer satisfaction, and Roscoe’s guy is the source of good paying gigs, so Roscoe will do what he has to do.
The black book is now being destroyed as Roscoe checks his wristwatch and starts the prep for the hit and his Midwest departure back to civilization. Same shit, different day.