The End of an Asshole
Our Asshole is pretty drunk; he stumbles out of the pub and wanders down the road. He hasn’t noticed that there’s a group of very large men following him. It turns out that his stealing the money has pissed off a number of the kind of people who like to beat other people up of an evening. There’s a good crowd of them.
When our Asshole makes the wrong turn down an alleyway the crowd close ranks, the man who seemed so perturbed by our Asshole’s presence in the bar last night is at the front. The Asshole realises he’s in a dead end, but he never even sees the first punch. It’s not a pretty sight; the crowd work him over in a fairly routine manner. Except the one guy, who seems to be taking it personally.
By the time they’ve finished he’s a bloody mess on the floor, he vomited during the beating and he’s lying in a puddle of his own blood and sick. In his hand is a screwed up ball of paper.
The ringleader of the thugs put the paper there, and he’d been carrying it around for the last four years.
By the time the police find him in the morning his world has just got a serious amount worse.
It turns out he’s been a little ruthless on his books, and the accountants at the tax office have just become wise. The fines aren’t too much, but given that our ringleader went and burned down his house after leaving him on the street – the fines are just another problem that he may not be able to recover from.
By the time he’ll get out of hospital, rival companies will have picked up on all his work. It turns out the short contracts he’s been keeping all his staff on will mean that when they are offered positions doing the same thing with a little more security, they’ll all jumped ship in various directions. He’ll be left with no business to run, and no work to do.
But that’s all been arranged to happen in a few weeks. At this moment, our Asshole is only just about to come round.