Purgatory

Chapter 31

Holidays were never celebrated in Purgatory, though we were all aware of each passing day.  Most of the time we kept ourselves busy on missions or in our training to where we didn’t bother to take time for trivial occasions.  It helped fight against the nagging nostalgia and thoughts of our families and friends.

It was mid-December, and the city was aglow with bright colored lights that hung from every window sill and barren tree.  People walked the streets in thick coats of leather and wool as their breaths crystalized in a puff of vaporous fog before their lips.  My mission was to follow a man to the location of an up and coming crime syndicate.  Their base of operations was currently unknown, and I was hopefully going to find it so that I could end the mission and report back to Purgatory.  For the past two hours the man was in some small corner diner.

I sat myself across from him in his booth as he ate alone.  Luckily he sat himself against a large window, but even people watching wasn’t satiating my boredom.  I couldn’t stand to watch the man eat, either.  He ate rapidly with his mouth constantly open as if he were chewing a cud like a cow.  His facial scruff would latch onto pieces of his meal that would fly from his opened lips.

“Pay attention, Helena,” Cole advised over our transmission.  As my presiding guardian, he was stationed somewhere out of sight but close enough to watch me and my target.

“He’s just eating,” I responded.  “He hasn’t even asked for the check.”  I turned my gaze back to the man with a sigh of exasperation.  He looked around the small diner with a vapid gaze, and I mused that he exerted so much energy into his mandible that he couldn’t muster a fraction of an expression.

“His eating habits look terrible, even from where I am,” Cole said thoughtfully.  I could hear a grimace in his tone, and I couldn’t help but chuckle.  “Hey, don’t laugh at me.”

“Gah!  Why won’t this man just leave already?” I asked rhetorically, and slumped in my seat.  To my relief, the man finished his greasy meal and licked each finger noisily before pilfering through his bill fold.  He placed a wad of cash on the table, and I looked at it curiously.  It had been years since I’d seen actual currency.

“Showtime,” Cole said softly as I followed the man out of the restaurant and into the cold night air.  The man shoved his hands into his coat pockets and trudged along the festive sidewalks lit with twinkling trees.  The way the lights were wrapped around each tree reminded me of the apple trees my father used to decorate for Christmas back on the farm.

He looked raggedly dressed as he passed through downtown where the rich seemed to pool in their decadent restaurants and gather in upscale bars.  The man was either ignored or met with stares from upturned noses and unmasked sneers.  He definitely did not fit in where he walked, and the people around him made it known as such.

Eventually, the man led us out of downtown and into upper midtown where Christmas decorations seemed to slowly dissipate into more darkened and less cheery regions of the city.  There were fewer people walking the sidewalks around the area, and for the most part anyone around looked just as shady as the individual I was following.  I knew if I were in the man’s shoes I would be too paranoid to walk where he was walking, and yet he never even looked over his shoulder.

I happened to look to my left as we walked down a walkway, and I saw a figure briskly walking towards my target.  The figure was a tall man adorned in a dated and faded black fabric cap and adorned a wool lined corduroy jacket.  He did not slow his pace until after he grabbed the target by his coat and slammed him up against the concrete wall of a parking garage.

“Hey, Tony,” the man in the hat said through his teeth.

“Oh, god, I swear I didn’t know what day it was,” my target, apparently named Tony, replied with his arms raised in mock surrender.  The other man slowly raised the barrel of a gun to Tony’s side and pressed it against the fabric of his shirt.