Troubleshooter

Chapter 12 - Home Alone

Hi, Alex here. Sorry for the long wait, but I sort of stepped back from promotional activities to write my next book AND a novella-length sequel. The book to sell. And the novella to promote. Anyway, I hope to have both on the market in a few weeks. No Troubleshooter content.

Speaking of Troubleshooter: Check out the other Troubleshooter novels, available almost everywhere! Troubleseeker, Troublemaker, and Pieces of Trouble

THE STREETS had been deserted all the way from Docklands to Bayswater, so the taxi had taken less than twenty minutes. Paul got home around midnight. A long day at the office, he thought. One Monday in a very long time where he had missed his karate lesson and the shooting range.

He put down his briefcase, hung up the jacket, kicked off his shoes, and took off his tie and shirt. Eighteen hours with his prosthesis was almost six hours over the endurable limit. The stump would have few hours to regenerate, but the next days would probably be similarly straining. He loosened the straps that attached the prosthesis and carefully worked the suction cup from his lower arm. As always, his brain needed to process the fact that part of his left arm was missing. It was as if his brain projected an overlay of the way his body should have been for a few seconds, before the eyes transmitted the facts of emptiness and the brain processed the absence of flesh and bones. Maybe, if the thing got too difficult to wear due to the long working hours, he might simply leave it off and go 'cripple style'.

"Don't forget a tin cup, Trouble," he muttered to himself.

After he had tended to the stump and had freshened up, he fixed himself a nightcap whiskey. His favorite spot was the right side of the expansive bay windows where Paul had positioned a bar chair with a high bistro table. He sat there comfortably, leaning against the wall behind him and at the same time watching life on the street below and in the houses opposite. At one o'clock in the morning, Queensborough Terrace was deserted, sometimes a taxi shortcutting between Bayswater Road and Paddington Station. One of the apartments opposite was still lit, the windows showing a colorful couch and a coffee table overflowing with big photo books. He knew the tenant Suzie from greeting and passing, a young, pretty, blonde writer who was living with her parents, and currently burning the midnight oil. She had been published once, but the romance vampire novel had bombed. Now she was writing a historical crime fiction piece. All according to her Facebook page. Whenever inspiration strikes, Paul thought. He envied Suzie for her creative determination. Paul felt like a man without qualities, someone who hadn't found the groove of his own life yet. After his military career he had started reading different books, among them modern classics that described people either lost or not found. Musil had been one of those authors, describing the Man without Qualities, an in-between state of professions, skills and private life. Max Frisch and Kafka were his other favorites. He found himself in those characters, as his own life had the touch of the unfinished and unfound. The interrupted spy career and the accounting job that paid well gave him a solid foundation for every other of life's possibilities; he just hadn't found his possibility, yet.

The whiskey was empty, bedtime. He brushed his teeth, prepared a 5:30 alarm for an early morning Hyde Park run, and went next door for another night of fight and fright.