Barely Professional

Prologue

ANNA

The first time they met.

Downtown Houston

The guy was drunk. Not loud or boisterous. Not completely incoherent, because he was still upright. But if I knew anything about being on the streets, it was when to spot a drunk.

He walked the few steps out of the bar, stumbled, recovered. The light from the neon sign highlighted his hair pink and green. After a few more steps, he leaned against the brick siding to gather himself.

Across from him in the alley, I glanced up and down the street and saw there was no traffic.

It was late at night and the bars in these areas usually serviced the casual diners and work happy hours. Not the hard-core drunks or the people my age who wanted to be out clubbing and hooking up until late into the morning. The place was open but was most likely closing.

This guy was last call.

I pulled my overcoat tighter around my body and considered what I was about to do.

The math was not on my side.

Nearly twenty percent of all young adults who aged out of state foster programs found themselves incarcerated in the first year after aging out.

I was actually one of the lucky ones. I’d managed to stay on in a work program until I was twenty-one, as opposed to being forced out of the state home at eighteen.

Texas, they said, was the land of opportunity. Texas, they said, was where jobs and housing abounded.

Texas, they said.

Maybe they didn’t mean Houston.

I’d been here now for seven months and none of it was getting any easier. The diner didn’t come close to paying for an apartment, and Nico, the owner’s son, was starting to look at me funny.

I wasn’t hot. Not even close. I didn’t do enough to try and change that perception either.

My hair was dark brown, that I wore in a ponytail.

No makeup. I couldn’t afford much, so I didn’t eat much.

I had no tits or ass to speak of. Clothes didn’t flatter me, because everything I owned was someone else’s first choice.

But I did fucking look vulnerable. And Nico could tell.

What would I do to keep my sucky waitress job at the diner?

I needed three hundred more dollars to be able to make first month’s rent on something decent instead of bouncing from motel room to motel room. Once I had that though, there was no real guarantee tips would cover rent, but at least it would be a starting place to start looking for real jobs.

An address on a resume. A place that was in my name.

I had my name in at every temp agency in the area, but so far I’d only gotten a handful of interviews, none of them leading to actual jobs.

I wasn’t sure why I blamed my sometimes homeless status…sorry, unhoused person status, for that, but I did.

One small score. Something that would separate me from desperation for five fucking minutes.

Hey, there, mister, you need some help?

It didn’t have to be stealing. I could help him call a fucking Uber. That had to be worth something?

A twenty isn’t going to cut it.

He pushed himself off the facade of the building, took a few steps and stopped.

His head fell back on his neck and his shoulders slumped. He looked like a man who was feeling profound heaviness.

He looked fucking vulnerable.

Knowing it was now or never, I jogged across the empty street. There were plenty of streetlights beyond the neon sign hanging from the door, so he should have seen me coming, but when I called out to him, he jerked like I’d taken him by surprise.

“You okay, mister?” I asked him as I approached with both my hands raised in the air.

Nothing to see here. I’m just going to see if your wallet is too heavy for you to carry.

He turned his head in my direction. “Go. Away.”

I wore a black hoodie, no logo on front. It was doubtful if he knew I was a boy or a woman.

“You look a little lost,” I tried again. “I can call you an Uber if you want.”

“Go. Away.”

Okay, now the guy was just rude. Here I was, an innocent bystander, trying to help an inebriated fellow citizen on his way home. Now I felt completely justified in taking his wallet.

“If you can’t see your phone,” I offered. “I’ll help you call for a car.”

“What do you want?” he asked, his voice deep and a bit slurred.

I couldn’t really tell what he looked like beyond basic impressions. He was tall, had a sharply angled face. Cheekbones and a chin that stood out from the shadows and looked like they could cut glass.

I shrugged at his question. “To help.”

He laughed then, a rough sound that didn’t sound funny at all. “Where am I?”

“Uh. Texas. Houston. How much more granular do I need to get?”

He pulled his cell phone out of his back pocket and immediately dropped it.

I had it in my hand before he’d barely bent over.

He straightened and it was clear now I had his attention.

“Are you going to steal it?” he asked me. “I couldn’t chase you now if I tried. Obviously.”

What the hell was I going to do with a phone? It’s not like I knew people who bought this shit. I would rather have the cash.

“I told you I would call an Uber for you,” I reminded him. “I’m a good Samaritan.”

“Unlikely, but I’ll give it a try. I don’t need you to call an Uber. My driver is in my contacts. If you call him, I’ll pay you.”

“Really?”

He pushed his face in my direction and I held up his phone for it to register his facial ID.

“His name is Ricky. You’ll need to tell him where I am because I don’t know.”

I found his contacts, pulled up Ricky and hit the call button.

“Yeah, boss?”

Wow, this guy answered fast. And it was after one at night.

“Uh. Not your boss. He’s a little drunk and I’m calling for him. He’s outside of O’Shanty’s in Westville and needs you to pick him up ASAP.”

“Yep. Can I trust you?”

That was an excellent question. “I could have stolen his phone,” I answered as honestly as I could.

“Yeah. Not that it matters, but it’s the anniversary of his wife’s death. Just give him a break. Okay?”

“Yep,” I said. “He’ll still be here when you get here.”

The connection ended and I handed the phone back to him. The guy with the dead wife. “He’ll be here in a few minutes.”

“You made that look very simple,” he said.

“It was,” I pointed out. “You know you could have just told Siri to call your driver for you.”

I wasn’t sure why I felt the need to point that out, especially since he hadn’t paid me yet, but I wasn’t going to be here the next time this guy got drunk.

“Fuck, Siri.” He put the phone in his back jean pocket and pulled out his wallet. He fumbled with it for a few seconds and I rolled my eyes.

“Dude, seriously?” I asked him, looking around the street for people who were way more serious than I was about taking money from this guy. “You don’t need to be flashing cash.”

He pulled out a few bills, folded them and stuffed his wallet back into his pocket.

Then he turned and leaned against the brick facade of the building, the bills still in his hand.

“I’m pretty sure you’re supposed to give that to me.” I pointed to his hand.

“Wait with me,” he demanded.

“I’ve got places to be.”

“Of course you don’t.”

He was right. I didn’t. I walked over and leaned against the wall next to him. A few inches apart. If I needed to, I could slip the money out from his fingers and take off.

“You gotta cigarette?” he asked me.

“You smoke? Do people actually still do that?”

He shrugged. “People do. I don’t. Just thought it’d pass the time.”

“It’s not good for you,” I told him.

“Hmm.”

He leaned his head back against the brick and stuffed his hands into the front pockets of his jeans, making the cash less accessible.

I was working that problem when the door to the bar opened and a blast of light exploded onto the street as two people walked out.

A couple, or a hook up. Hard to tell. They walked past us without any consideration.

“So what’s your deal?” he asked. I could see in my peripheral vision, his head rolling in my direction.

“Told you,” I said, looking straight ahead instead of at him. “I’m a good Samaritan. I roam the streets looking out for drunks and people down on their luck.”

He laughed at that, and this time he actually sounded amused.

“You a hooker?”

“No,” I said.

Except a part of me thought about Nico and wondered how long that might be true.

“Homeless?”

“Only every other night,” I said, but I could tell he was too drunk to register it. “Heard your wife died,” I told him, turning the conversation back to his misfortunes.

“Yeah,” he sighed. “Three years ago today.”

“That sucks.”

“In the most unholiest of ways,” he agreed.

A dark sedan turned down the street. The headlights lit us both up, and for a second I could make out all those sharp angles of his face again. I pushed the hood of my sweatshirt down over my forehead.

The car stopped in front of him and the driver’s side door opened. A big dude unfolded from the car quickly.

“Ricky, I’m drunk.”

“Yeah, boss,” he said. “Good thing you called.”

“I didn’t,” my drunk friend said and pointed at me. “She did.”

Ricky didn’t even acknowledge me, just moved closer to get under his friend’s arm. “Let’s get you home, boss.”

“Here, I’ll help you,” I said, as I stepped closer to the man, wrapping my arm around his other side, but Ricky was moving him faster than I could, so I pulled away after a second.

Right before Ricky was about to dump the guy into the car, I lifted my hand.

“Hey, you going to pay me or not?”

Both men turned to look at me then. Then drunk dude reached back into his front pocket where he’d stuffed those bills he’d pulled out of his wallet.

“Here you go, Good Samaritan. Keep up the good work.”

He held out his hand, the bills in between his fingers. I slipped them free, took a few steps back and gave him a small salute.

“Take care. Sorry for your loss.”

That was a thing people said, wasn’t it? I didn’t wait around to see if he acknowledged my sympathy, just tucked my chin to my neck, made sure my hoodie covered my face and walked off in the opposite direction.

It wasn’t until I got back to my motel room, locked the door, pushed the chair up under the doorknob, because a girl could never be too careful, that I reached into my pocket to see what my pay day had actually been.

I’d been prepared to steal. To take. To grab what I could because sometimes not having money was so fucking hard and I could get really, really mad about it. Until I remembered how absolutely unoriginal I was. Time and energy wasted on things like anger were unproductive.

I’m not sure what I was expecting. A couple of fives? Two twenties seemed to be too much to hope for. When I unfolded the bills though, I realized I was looking at two one-hundred dollar bills.

“Shit,” I muttered, even as I slid my hand into my other pocket and pulled out the shiny gold, overly expensive, wrist trinket, that, given modern society’s obsession with putting a clock on everything, seemed absolutely unnecessary.

“If I knew you were going to give me this kind of money, I wouldn’t have stolen your watch. ”