Now, one of the greatest difficulties of the profession is advertising.
No one can hire a hitman if they don’t know where to find him. But, if there’s one thing a hitman can’t afford, it’s to be found by just anyone. Over the years, many solutions have been proposed for this particular problem. Clubs, job fairs, personals ads and dead-drop mailboxes. The advent of the internet eased things considerably, but brought its own set of security risks.
Of course, Tuesday did not go to college with the intention of being an assassin. What kind of course load would that entail, even if such were openly offered? No, Reginald’s parents envisioned for him a life of physical ease and mental engagement – computers, in a word. Tuesday hated it. With every fiber of his being. And while he had not yet determined while at college that ‘assassin’ was to be his professional calling, he knew, beyond any shadow of a shadow of a doubt, that he would never find himself beholden to an IT professional nor any profession that required him to perform those functions. But he stuck it out, for his parents’ sakes, and for lack of any better ideas. He even discovered some very minor elements of joy in the computing world, an outlet for a previously unsuspected creative streak; he started a web comic about a serial killer clown. It spoke to a dark place in his soul that he dared not reveal to others, but which still required release.
And he still had the dojo; his father’s unexpected will to direct Reginald’s unexpected will to violence had worked better than either would have suspected.
Quiet, studious, bookish Tuesday would of course one day recognize the need for security, for anonymity. And while he honed his physical skills in gym and dojo (and the occasional back alley bare-knuckle fight for a little spending money), a series of firewalled, rerouted and randomly switching servers, and routers and wi-fi boosters and piggybacks, faced by an apparently satirical killer-clown webcomic/blog would eventually provide the minimum necessities for contact – as well as that small outlet for Tuesday’s creative side. And of course, using his IT skills and knowledge to baffle and annoy and enrage law enforcement became something of a positive. He still hated doing the work – the soul-deadening, mind-numbing tedium of it – but the end product was modestly satisfying and eminently effective. But this was yet in the future of Mr. Reginald Tuesday.
In the present, he started winning more of those alley fights than he lost, and became toughened to both delivering and receiving pain. He became disciplined, mentally and physically. He found a certain sparse spirituality in the dojo which suited his natural inclinations toward quiet and reflection, and which allowed him to rationalize physical violence as a means to securing a living. He discovered that emotional entanglement was something he wished to avoid at all costs, and that physical intimacy was…messy and sticky and unnecessary. Oh, college was indeed educational for Mr. Tuesday.
And so the unremarkable figure of Reginald Tuesday unremarkably passed through the education system, followed by an unremarkable matriculation ceremony. Which was followed just as unremarkably by a generalized loathing of everything that he had learned and done up to that point in his life. Or rather, he did not loathe anything that he had done, but more accurately loathed the very obvious path it all had prepared for him.
And then he entered the working world. It…did not go well.
