Repairman Jack - Motivation

Motivation

Jack performed his first "fix-it" as a teenager. A vandal continually destroyed his neighbor's lawn with his car, and he offered his services not only in repairing the damage, but ensuring that it would not recur. Upon agreeing on payment, Jack hid a series of reinforced metal spikes in a hedge surrounding the yard, which destroyed the tires and engine of the vandal's car when he again attempted to destroy the lawn. This would describe most of Jack's "fix-its" - simple yet elegant plans that turned the destructive actions of others upon themselves.

When he was in college, Jack's mother was murdered in front of him and his father when a cinder block was thrown off of a bridge through the front window of their car. This compelled Jack to perform his first self-employed fix-it; investigating the murder after police dismissed the crime as unsolvable. Jack eventually found the culprit, a vandal who Jack not only witnesses preparing to throw another cinder block off the bridge, but boasts of having performed the act on the same day and in the same location as the murder.

The culprit is thus identified to Jack's satisfaction, but Jack is left with a quandary; the crime remains unprosecutable due to lack of reproducible evidence, i.e. the spoken confession. Jack thus chooses to disable the vandal, reveal himself as the son of the woman he murdered with the cinder block, then suspend him from the underside of the bridge in a position where he will not be visible, at a height where his body will be repeatedly struck by passing semi trailers but not their cabs. The vandal's body is not found until smears of blood are found on the trailers far from the bridge and traced back to the bridge.

Though he never feels any guilt for his first act as a vigilante, he still felt transformed by it, to the point where he decided that he had no place in his old world. He dropped out and left "officialdom", entering his underground lifestyle in New York.