Life of Crime

[Super Weegee]

((Blake Davis Memories Start))

If someone were to ask Blake about what he was doing right now, he probably wouldn't tell them the truth.

Scratch that. He absolutely wouldn't tell them the truth. After all, how can he explain being out in the middle of the night in an alleyway wearing a dark gray hoodie with his hood up, wearing a gray bandanna, and carrying a spray bottle with gloves on?

He won't. Simple as that. Assuming that they can even talk to him before he ran away from them. Although if they were to ask why he was does what he does, he wouldn't actually know a good answer to that. One that would be considered a good excuse, anyways.

Ever since that day with the guy leaving his wallet on the wall for a reason that was alien to Blake, he found himself doing more acts of criminal activities more and more often until it eventually became routine for him. It made him uneasy by how quicker it became almost normal for him than he thought. Granted, it wasn't exactly fast to begin with, but still.

Whenever he got away from the scene and back into the comforts of his home, he felt...really happy. He felt like the stresses of keeping up with his schedule, reputation, and doing a bunch of other things went away. Feeling not as much pressure from before was a nice feeling to have.

Blake shook himself from his thoughts and kept walking through the alleyway, double-checking to make sure that it was truly empty of people and lacking cameras. Despite the fact that some of the trash bins were open and a wrench was precariously on top of one of the closed ones, he didn't bother to look through them for anything good. Diving into filthy trash wasn't his style.

He could never be too careful with these things. One good look at his face and he was utterly fucked beyond belief if they decide to report him. Any details that they get, other than the most basic of descriptions like the clothes he was wearing, means bad news. No matter how concealed he tried to be, he couldn't completely hide his skin color since he needed his peripheral vision clear, just in case.

Refraining himself from thinking about a race joke, he picked out a good spot to spray and approached it. It was farthest away from the street, but he also had another direction to run in case somebody approaches him. On the way here, he already decided on spraying his sentence in the all-time classic bubble font. Nothing too complicated or fancy, he wasn't that good of an artist after-

The fuck was that?

Snapping his head almost instantaneously to his left, Blake thought he heard something that was not typical of supposedly empty alleyway in that direction and stood silently. He paid attention to any signs of movement, any audible sounds close to him, for a solid minute. He didn't dare open his mouth and reveal himself in case they didn't realize that he was there.

After that minute passed, he eased up and began to figure out where he left off.

Ah yes, actually beginning to spray the damn wall. Shaking it up and down, he aimed the bottle towards it and pressed down on the top, allowing the fluids inside to exit the bottle. He moved his arm up, down, left, and right constantly as he sprayed letters onto the wall, which eventually formed words as the seconds went-

He could've sworn that he fucking heard that!

Blake was halfway through with his sentence, wind blowing past him as he was doing so, when he heard a small crashing sound to his right. Immediately turning his head to the right, he stared in that direction for another straight minute, looking and hearing for signs of life. He may have been imagining the first one, now that he thought about it, but he didn't imagine that!

After waiting for another straight minute, he remembered the wind blowing past him earlier and the wrench and figured that the wrench likely fell. Dismissing it as such, he turned back towards the wall and shook his spray bottle again before continuing to spray.

Fourty-five more seconds of spraying on the wall, with finishing touches and fixes and all that, and he was done! Putting the bottle into his pocket, Blake stepped back to review his masterpiece:

NOBODY BELIEVES THE MEDIA EXCEPT WHEN ITS IN THEIR OWN INTERESTS

...Ok, he stole that quote from the internet, but what does he care? It's not like he's going to brag about this to anybody, with a couple of people as an exception. What, are the other graffiti artists going to ridicule this on a forum somewhere? He doubted that there were a lot of people who would share this to an art site-

Wait, what was he doing? He had to get the hell out of there!

Cursing himself, he made sure that his bandanna and hood were on properly, walked close to the street, and double-checked both ways of the sidewalk for any people. Seeing as the coast was clear, he took off his bandanna and gloves, put them in his pockets, and brought down his hood. It would be suspicious for somebody to hide their face, after all. As he started to walk to his car, he couldn't really stop himself from looking behind him one more time to see if anybody saw him. He couldn't relax just yet.

Reaching his car a few minutes later, he proceeded to start it up and drive himself away from the crime scene, keeping himself calm. One uneventful drive later, he parked outside his home and walked inside. Fred was predictably sitting on the couch watching TV while Maria was nowhere in sight. Hearing the door open, Fred turns his head towards Blake.

"Hey kiddo," Fred said, smiling a bit, "you were gone for a while."

Blake automatically came up with an excuse in his mind, but Fred thankfully didn't seem to press him like he usually does this time around.

"Hey, Dad." Blake said before asking, "Where's Mom?"

"Oh, she's just getting some shut-eye." Fred responded, "Your dinner's on the table, just heat it up."

"Thanks, Dad!" Blake said as Fred looked at the TV again.

Putting his hands in his pockets to conceal his items, he walked up the stairs and opened the door to his room. Turning on the lights and taking a second to turn on his TV with his remote, he took off his jacket and looked at it for any residue. There wasn't any, fortunately, and he didn't have to do any cleaning. Hanging up his hoodie, he took out his gloves, bandanna, and spray bottle and put them in one of his boxes in the closet. Marked on that box was "Supplies". Asides from it being a perfectly good way to get organized, it was also good for hiding things in plain sight.

Going downstairs to heat up his dinner and going back to his room, he sat down on the bed and managed to get comfortable.

When that was all done, that feeling came back. The feeling that he just got away with another crime. That feeling of happiness.

Oh boy, did it come back.

(Blake Davis Memories Continued Elsewhere)