Troubleshooter

Chapter 1 - Have You Any Dreams You'd Like to Sell?

Hi there. Alex here. After my first Wattpad publication "A Brilliant Plan" was such a great success, I decided to run the same ploy a second time. "Troubleshooter" is the first in my "Paul Trouble" series and is going to be published in its full glory over the next weeks on Wattpad. Hope you will like it.

If you find out that you can't bear the suspense and want to read the book in one session instead of piecemeal, run over to your favorite eBook seller and grab a copy for the price of a Starbucks drink. Troubleshooter is available in all major formats and at most online sellers.

If you can bear the suspense and go chapter-by-chapter on Wattpad but you find you like the series and my writing style, there is more: "Troubleshooter" has three siblings: "Troublemaker", "Troubleseeker" and "Pieces of Trouble". The first two are full length novels, just like "Troubleshooter", and "Pieces of Trouble" is a collection of short novellas, all set in the "Troubleshooter" universe.

Enough advertising, on with the story!

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IT WAS always the same dream: The hammer smashed his left hand and he felt Every! Single! Fucking! Blow! That was why Paul Trouble had no nightstand and no bedframe, just a bare mattress on the floor in the middle of his bedroom. He didn't want to hurt himself when his fighting, sleeping body was re-living the moments.

The event had been almost five years ago. Despite all the action he had witnessed and performed—first as a soldier and then as an employee of a certain three-letter agency that should not be named but that everybody knew anyway—this one event seemed to have reduced his previous life into a few nightmarish minutes. Minutes that seemed like hours to Paul as soon as he fell asleep. Shortly after he had recuperated from surgery, resigned from his agency job, and started his education in economics, the Dream had started wrecking his nights. He had sought treatment. Hypnosis therapy had helped against the worst, at first. His doctor had implemented techniques to enable Paul to wake himself up when he felt the dream emerging in his sleep. That had worked wonders for about a year, but then the depth of his consciousness had found ways around the barriers. Another doc had switched to medications of various kinds with mixed results. Either Paul's bodily functions had been severely compromised—talk about what that does to your love life—or he had felt constantly tired or dizzy. For now, Paul had conceded to the Dream. His dad, who always had a grounded, practical outlook on life, had summed up thousands of therapy dollars by muttering, "What needs to come out will come out. Eventually." Of course, that was also Dad's favorite line when one of his pregnant cows was overdue.

The event had ended Paul's career as a soldier and a spy. Man, was he missing that life. And his colleagues. And, while he was at it: man, was he missing Isabelle. But that was a different story from his new life, not connected to soldiers and spies, but connected to everything anyway somehow. It seemed that he was missing a lot. Paul wasn't sure at this point what was worse: the recurring nightmare or his self-pity.

When the Dream's final actions were unbearable, he usually woke up, entangled in sweat-soaked sheets or on the floor. It took the best of five minutes to slow his crazy heart rate. Paul then got up and drank a glass of warm tap-water in his living room. Even this act of holding a glass with his good right hand and moving it to his lips angered him, drawing attention to his missing left hand. He looked out of the windows of his Bayswater London apartment and waited for the Dream to slowly fade from his hyper-charged neurons. The workday was four hours away; time to join the battlefield of his mattress again.

Back into the merciless arms of the Dream.