May 7, 2010
I managed to fuck up hard enough to get myself in prison. My cellmate told me to write in a journal, keep myself sane in this fucking place.
I don't have anything to write about. The two days I've been here have been relatively uneventful. I hope the next five-to-ten years remain that way.
Ned Nelson, four months out of prison, was contemplating robbing a bank. His costume was sitting on the passenger seat of the 2007 Crown Victoria, and the opaque lenses of his mask stared up at him. He was in a parking lot outside of a bank, and he kept looking up at the small building, an oasis in the middle of a large parking lot surrounded by stores of all sorts, one of a million strip malls.
"I… really don't want to do this," he said to himself, and partly to the mask. He had really wanted to make a change for the better once he had served his time in jail.
The thing about it was, it was hard out there for a man who was some sort of specialized electronics guru with a G.E.D. he got in prison. He was a 24-year-old with no future, and the only thing he was ever good at was staring him in his face.
"I could really use a sign, Lord." He said, calling upon the god of his Catholic youth. He had grown apart from his religion as he grew up, and now considered himself Agnostic, only because he had never quite shaken the beliefs of his childhood. In moments of weakness, he'd cry out to God to see if there was anyone listening. "Please, let someone stop me."
Prison was good to him. He had been miraculously only charged with third-degree burglary in what the papers had called "a gross amount of prosecution incompetence" served 5 years in a high-security prison, and got out. He had no family anymore, they had all cut ties with him during the trial, and now lived in a studio apartment he could barely afford over a 7-11.
If he was being honest, he liked the location quite a bit. He would go into the store below him, running by his landlord's door, and order a hot dog and load it up with chili and processed cheese, which always cleared his mind.
When Ned looked up from his steering wheel there was a similar convenience store there he hadn't noticed. He decided he'd wait for his divine sign while eating a hot dog and pulled out a wad of small bills he kept in the glove box. He took a five (which was depressingly one of the last ones in the wad itself) and shoved it in the long coat he was using to cover the costume he wore.
His costume was mostly cream colored, with dark brown gloves and boots. He wore a utility belt which held a multitude of items that were useful to him and his machinations, mostly batteries and spare electronic parts that had a tendency to break in a fight. The belt was a gray he hadn't bothered to dye, and for brand recognition, in the middle of Ned's chest there was a dark brown stripe that bubbled into a circle with a "B" in it in plain lettering over his left breast.
The B stood for Blaster.
He stepped out of his cheap car that he had bought at a police auction, and pulled his coat closed tightly over his costume. The raincoat had a strong Columbo vibe, and sported a large coffee stain on the sleeve. He grabbed his mask and shoved it into the opposite pocket from the one that contained his food money, and locked his car.
The name Blaster was fairly simple. He had made gloves that shot beams of light that hurt. They were highly versatile, and weren't deadly unless he wanted them to be, which was something Ned liked very much. Although he was a criminal, he didn't like killing wantonly, and he respected the crooks who didn't kill, who needed that sort of heat? Conveniently, the thought of taking a life made Blaster quite ill, so it was win-win.
There were rules he followed, a code he had made to get the least amount of a sentence in prison if he were ever caught.
- Don't kill.
- Don't bite off more than you can chew.
- There is no "magically amazing score".
- Don't team up. (This used to add "with someone you don't trust", but THAT had changed.)
- No amount of money is worth your life.
These all had a tentative and conditional "unless" he attached to the end, but for the most part, these were his "Criminal Code" as he had heard it described.
The "Criminal Code" was a concept he had heard in prison from a lifer.
"Everyone goes in thinking they won't get caught because they see the people who make mistakes getting caught, and know they won't make those mistakes." The lifer had said. "It's bullshit. There isn't really a way to get off scot-free, and no code of conduct will keep one of the Justice Fucks from knocking your teeth down your fucking throat, so it all amounts to what you are willing to do."
He was very coarse, but there was some truth in that. Ned, after all, had gotten caught, even with his code. Having no real priors or murder accusations had helped his case though, so it was still debatable which one of them was right.
He shook his head and wished that his saved funds from before he had been locked away would have lasted him longer than they did. He thought he'd have had a job by then, something legit, so he wouldn't have to go back to this. He was wrong. It turned out that he had no marketable skills, and as soon as he settled into the mundane life of retail, he found his fingers twitching at anything valuable. So those were out.
It was back to this for Ned, the only thing that he was ever any good at, the only thing he was ever able to succeed at, that took everything from him.
As it turned out, while a maskless Blaster walked from his old Police Cruiser (gotten cheaply at auction) into the convenience store, bought a hot dog, and loaded it up with chili and processed cheese, a van pulled up in front of the bank he was basically casing, and a quintet of men jumped out with guns in hand. They rushed inside and shot a warning into the air. This was a robbery.
Ned ate the hot dog and wished the store hadn't been out of jalapenos. He liked spicy food before a job, it helped him get momentary clarity and then gave him horrible indigestion, a psychological pavlovian association he had cultivated. Ned never wanted to get too comfortable while he was at "work". Whether this had worked was debatable, but still...
It was time. He wasn't really worried about people figuring out he did this, he was already publicly known as Ned Nelson, a short Wikipedia page was dedicated to him with his old goth eyeliner and dyed black hair mugshot front and center.
Right now, he had his natural red hair cropped short, a style he had grown accustomed to in prison, and his car and apartment were all in the name of an alias, Carl Jefferson. He was now finding it very amusing that he had swapped from being protective of who he was out of costume for fear of people linking Blaster to Ned Nelson, to being afraid that people would link his civilian identity to his other civilian identity.
As he walked out into the parking lot and pulled on his mask, he let the coat open and strode into the bank.
