Robin

I came up with an idea for a story the other day. Not sure if I’ll ever write it but these are the seeds.

It’s the story about a hit man (Robin) whose main area of expertise is hunting down rapists and killing them. He’s sort of a freelancer working on the black market. His main clientele is prostitutes, call girls, and escort services. ← These girls make a living off selling their bodies, but even they have their rules and limits. If a girls says “no anal” for example, that means no anal. So if a John pays for a night of cheap sex with her, and he forces himself on her anally, that’s rape. In this story, she has an option–not a free one, but an option nonetheless. She can call up our protagonist and he’ll take care of business. Of course, he’s not partial to prostitutes, call girls, and escort services. He’ll take business even from good Christian college girls, and even though those are far and few between, it happens at a few points in the story.

I imagine Robin to be like a real Matrix bad ass character–like Neo or Morpheus–except there’s no sci fi jumping in and out of digital worlds–just a lot of action, bullets flying, gore, blood, sex and violence–but there is the black leather, double fisting guns, and wearing of shades at night. ← That kind of character.

While this would certainly be an action story, I also want it to be a character development story–the guy learns to have feelings–though he makes a living working in the service of rape victims (mostly women, but I want to have at least one male client as well)–I want to make it patently clear at the begin that he’s just doing this for the money and that’s it. BUT… he does learn to care about women, and it wouldn’t serve the purpose of a character development story unless he fell in love with at least one woman in particular… but he only learns to love, to know what love is, near the end.

This is a brand new idea and I haven’t even had a couple days to develop it. Usually, when I get ideas for stories, a collection of scenes slowly develop in my mind after a long period of simmering, and if that period has been especially long, a rough outline for a plot, stitching these scenes together, might even form. The only scene I have at this point, however, is one that would have to happen near the beginning. Robin’s on the phone with one girl–tremors in her voice betraying her nerves–and he’s setting the terms: $2,000 for a clean kill, an additional $2,000 for “creative torture” as he calls it, and again an additional $2,000 for her to watch. He makes it crystal clear that he doesn’t give a shit about her, that this is purely business, which means he doesn’t give a shit whether it’s a false accusation or not (he’s not interesting fair trials)–though it’s made clear throughout the story that he has a keen sense for when a girl is lying to him (and this happens at one point in the story and she pays the price). I also want, in this early scene, for him to explain to her that he needs all the information he can get on the rapist, and then a later scene in which he, like a private investigator, uses that information to research and spy on the guy.

Sometimes pimps and other gangsters will have Robin on a “pay roll”, sometimes they’re willing to split the cost with one or another rape victim because it’s “bad for business” to let rapists get away with their crimes in cases when the prostitute can’t afford Robin’s services.

Anyway, that’s all I got for now. Lot’s of sex and violence in a dark, dark world–should make tons of money–with the extra bonus of a heart-warming transformation of a character from cold unfeeling monster to a man who falls in love.