The Alternative Detective (Hob Draconian) Read Online Free PDF

There’s this and there’s that, and never enough for everything.
    But I remembered a time once, long ago, when I had lived without money, or without the anxiety of it, on a magic island where no one starved and you couldn’t bomb out because you were Home, in the great good place where everyone looked out for everyone else.
    That is fantasy, of course, or rather, delusion; but what can I do; that’s how I feel about it, and a man needs a dream even if it’s chimaerical.
    I had, of course, some residual feeling for Mylar, whom I had found myself married to after an unsuccessful attempt on state-of-the-art drugs to find The Supreme Unity that unifies Apparent Diversity. You can wind up in some surprising places on these new hallucinogenics. Like standing before a justice of the peace in Leesville, North Carolina. You say you’ve had your own experiences along that line? Yes, but you didn’t wake up and find yourself married to a woman who called herself Mylar and had a streak of purple dyed in her hair, and who was zanily and cheerfully impossible, especially for one whose favorite pastime is feeling sorry for himself.
    That was six months ago. Now here we were, in a pleasant little trap of our own devising. Sheldon had moved out of his apartment in Hoboken and rented our attic bedroom when it became available. It was a little tough on Sheldon’s conscience that Sheldon and Mylar simply stay apart any longer. But they also couldn’t sleep with each other, at least in Sheldon’s view, because that would have turned a nicely ripening tragedy into a domestic farce, and you get no points for idiot roles in the reviews which self-appreciation publishes daily. No, you gets no bread with one meatball and so Sheldon and Mylar lived sexlessly, with the attendant augmentation of desire so often noted in circumstances of enforced chastity, until the very walls steamed with their contained and pressurized lust, and I took to spending a lot of time in my office or at the movies because, despite my best attempts, I was not entirely a removed observer.
     
    “Now listen to me,” Sheldon said. “You must resolve this thing. You must get some money together and pay the government, so I can close this case and take Mylar away from here to my new position.”
    “What new position?”
    “Didn’t I tell you? I’m next in line to become Senior Auditor at our Morristown facility.”
    “Congratulations,” I said. “You’ll make a great auditor. And Mylar will make a great Mrs. Auditor. I assume your intentions toward her are still honorable?”
    “Of course they’re honorable,” Sheldon said. “I want Mylar to divorce you so I can marry her and take her to Morristown with me. But I can’t do anything until I close your case.”
    “I don’t see why not,” I said. “The Home Office won’t hold one unclosed case against you.”
    “I’m not worried about the Home Office,” Sheldon said. “The fact is my own conscience won’t permit me to take the promotion and your wife until I’ve closed your file. I guess I’m just an old-fashioned, inner-directed sort of guy, and there’s nothing I can do about it.” He laughed with the false self-deprecation of a man well pleased with himself. I could have kicked him.
    Still, on the bright side, Sheldon’s character gave me an avenue of escape from the constrictions of my life with Mylar. Pay the money, Draconian, and so win freedom. But where to find the money?
    “Maybe I’ll make something on this case,” I told him. “I’ll be leaving for Paris in a couple of days.”
    “You’re going to Paris?” Sheldon said.
    “Yes, of course,” I said. “That’s where this case is taking me. You and Mylar have a good time while I’m gone, hear?” I gave him a suggestive leer. It’s not that I get off on that sort of thing, but I wanted to encourage him because I knew that when Mylar deigned to sleep with a dude, he didn’t get away. I