Short Story: Solitary Man by Paul D. Brazill.
Stray Bullets. Short Story. Hit man. Crime fiction. Next Chapter.
SOLITARY MAN
The morning that I killed Charlie Harris, the air tasted like lead and the sky was gunmetal grey. Suddenly exhausted, I slouched in a white leather armchair and gazed out of the grubby window of the East London flat, barely focusing on the rows of concrete blocks being smudged by the winter rain. I was starting to get used to these bouts of mental and physical fatigue, putting it down to my age, but they still draped me in a cloak of gloom. My brief moment of morbid self-attention soon melted into annoyance, however. Annoyance with Charlie, of course, but with myself, more than anything else. I’d been messy.
Eventually, I turned to look at Charlie’ corpse and sighed. He was flat on his back on the fluffy white rug, where he’d collapsed five minutes before. His was a big man, dressed in an off-white linen suit and a gaudy Hawaiian shirt. His Panama hat and sandals lay on the floor next to him. He gripped a string of rosary beads in his right hand. His attire was certainly…
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