Charlie

“Evil, evil man!”

Oh yeah? Stupid woman should've minded her own business and stayed the fuck out of his way. Now she knew – interfering old bats got what was coming to them.

Admittedly, the old country pub was not the best place for stair-dancing, it was only two storeys high, but the pickings were so rich! Who could resist?

There really is nothing better than a crowd of middle-class, middle-aged, post children and at the height of their earnings power. When they're together for a boozy weekend away, well – the possibilities are endless.

They tend to be busy having 'fun', besotted all weekend and someone with their wits about them can have a lovely old time. Very profitable it was too.

Sunday morning they were all back down in the public bar, having 'the hair of the dog that bit them' – the world's most effective hangover cure – a couple of drinks and they're drunk again. That suited him because drunks are not careful with their belongings.

The security in the pub was all-but non-existent. Well it used to be – they were probably having another look at their systems by now. As an example, the cleaner's key fitted every lock and opened every door on the second floor. How convenient was that?

It didn't take a minute to lift the keys and unlock some doors while she was down scrubbing the floor in a bathroom. He slipped into an empty room, closing the door quietly behind him.

Wearing gloves was a pain but it had to be done. His fingerprints were all too well-known by the wrong people – the ones in blue uniforms, that is. He took everything worth taking, including a nice fat wallett, and moved on to the next room.

Both he and the dozy cleaner were cleaning the rooms out in their own ways. There is no perfect crime, but this came fairly close. He had one more room to go when she clattered away down the stairs with her trolley. She hadn't seen him and didn't have a clue.

Then it went to crap. A stupid woman came back to the room early and saw him rummaging through her suitcase. He just knew that she was going to start yelling, so he shut her up before she did.

Contrary to popular belief, a good whack over the head does not always result in unconsciousness.
However, it does tend to shut stupid Bints up, especially when followed by a sharp knife brandished in the face.

It worked on this one. She really, really did not want her nostrils enlarged, so she shut up and just whimpered. He tied and gagged her with her own lingerie, stuffed her into the wardrobe and got the hell out of there.

She didn't know who he was or where he was from, but she'd had a good look at his face and the cops knew it, all too well. He'd had a good haul, but now he had to make himself scarce, asap.

He grabbed his bag from his own room, slipped down the fire-escape at the back, smashed a window and hot-wired a car and he was gone. As far as he could tell, no-one had seen him going, but there'd be an uproar before too long. They wouldn't all drink all day.

Last time he did a pub over like this he didn't run but stayed hidden, up above the ceiling until things settled down. Not a good idea and he was never doing that again – staying still and breathing dust and struggling not to sneeze for bloody hours on end!

He headed south, towards Christchurch, for a few minutes, then cut across to a back-road and turned north again. GPS was a great invention – so handy for a man in a hurry.

He ditched the car, literally in a ditch, north of Woodend and walked back to Pegasus. He stole a better car there, from the car-park at the golf course.

Back on the road, he was intending to head back up north, he knew his way around better there than here in the South Island. But, on reflection, he was too well-known up there and too many people had unfinished business with him.

North of Amberley, near Waipara, a secondary road headed west, so he veered off there. The wilds of Westland would be a good place to lie low for a while. He wasn't known over there – yet.

Today's haul wouldn't cause a major melt-down, rooms were robbed and cars were boosted, pretty much everyday, but there was the matter of the boy-whore back in Christchurch. If he was still alive, he'd be a mess and cops tended to get excited about things like that. The Silly Little Tart brought it on himself, but he'd rather not have to try to explain that to a judge. So, west he went.

He went in and had a quick look at Hanmer, but didn't stop there. The small town was full to bursting with tourists, holidaymakers and easy pickings, but it was still too close to where he'd started from. He decided to give it a miss and, maybe, check it out again when he was on his way back up north.

Today it was more important to get lost and stay lost. His pockets weren't exactly empty anyway.

At Springs Junction, the road branched, west to the West Coast and north to Nelson. He filled the car at the service station and made a point of askling the guy there the best way to get to Golden Bay, which was miles away from where he was going.

He left there, going north, stopped and waited for an hour, then followed behind a truck & trailer back to the Junction and turned-off, west. The dork at the garage didn't see him come back through, he thought. He hoped.

He stopped before Riverston and changed his clothes and hairstyle. Police reports describing a wanted person always concentrated on the clothes, so that was easily confused.

He spent a few minutes cruising around Riverston, but decided that the place was just too damm small. A stranger there stuck out like a sore thumb, people were already noticing him, so he bought some food and moved on again.

The cemetery just north of the town was as good a place as any to stop, so he did. He pulled in and parked under the trees there to eat, drink and rest a bit. There was no hurry, he preferred travelling at night anyway.

He scored a purse, a ladies' handbag, from a car left unlocked and unattended, (The Fools!), then left quietly before their loss was discovered. There was nothing much of value in the bag anyway, just a few dollars, which he kept. Everything else was stuffed back in and thrown off a bridge a few kilometers up the road.

He arrived in Westpoint late at night and did his good deed for the day. A drunk came out of one of the many pubs and staggered off up a dark alley to relieve himself. There was no-one else in sight, so he followed him in there and relieved him of his car keys – the man was far too drunk to drive.

He wasn't running a charity, so, as payment for that good deed, he also relieved him of his wallet and loose change. There wasn't a lot of money, the drunken sot had drunk most of it, so he kicked him in the head and left him lying there in his own filth.

He did some after-hours shopping in a bottle store – not too much because that'd get the Pigs too worked up. He just took a couple of whiskies and a pocketful of cigarettes.

He left the door open on the way out – someone else might come in and get blamed for the lot.

He syphoned petrol from a couple of cars and refilled his one, and then left town. It was always good to leave before the excretment hit the circulatory device.

He drove over 100k's and stopped in a rest area south of Brownsville. He finished the bottle of whisky that he'd been sucking on, then curled-up and went to sleep on the back seat.

He slept late in the morning, until the passing traffic woke him, then had a late breakfast, or brunch, in Hoki – fish of course because that's what Hoki is, a fish.

He paid for it in cash, which hurt a bit. It was against his principles to pay for anything. But it was only money and there was plenty more where that came from. He filled the car again, and paid for that too, then headed south again, into the wilds of South Westland.

He was planning on stopping in Franz Josef, a wealthy little tourist town, but there was a little incident and he never got there.

Going down a bush-clad hill, a few k's north of Franz, he was overtaken by another car and a couple of snot-nosed brats in the back of it were laughing and jeering at him. He shouldn't have let it get to him but it did, so he sped up, overtook them and cut them off and drove them off the road and into the scrub. That'd teach the little Shits!

That put paid to his plan for the day. They were sure to go to the cops in Franz Josef and his car was far too obvious now with the dents and scrapes along the side of it. So he turned around and headed back up the road.

He made a sudden decision at the turn-off and went west, down the road to Okarito. A couple of k's before there he went down a bush road to the riverbank and parked there out of sight. He smoked, drank and slept a bit while he waited until after dark.

Before he left to go into the town, he syphoned petrol from the tank, splashed it around and set fire to the car. He walked away, leaving it a raging inferno.

It was the only thing to do, he'd been in it for a couple of days and it'd be full of his fingerprints. The cops would probably be able to identify the ruins, if they tried hard enough, but that wasn't likely. They wouldn't be doing it with the number plates – he'd already removed them and thrown them out into the river. It paid to think ahead, always.

His bag over his shoulder, a bottle of whisky in his coat pocket and another in his hand, he walked off into the night and into Okarito.