Plugged

my package.’

In Ireland, going after a guy’s package means grabbing him by the balls. I think Faber is talking about his drugs again.

‘You read my file?’

‘No. Any good bits?’

‘I have a special skill set.’

‘Any of those skills relevant?’

‘Shit, Faber, if your package was in Fallujah I could extract it.’

Faber licked his lips. Extract. He liked that bit of military.

‘It begins with an F, but it ain’t Fallujah.’

Ten minutes later, Faber had Deacon’s computer on his knee and was scrolling my file.

‘Kee-rist almighty, Daniel. This reads good. You kill anyone over there?’

‘Only the ones that died. What’s in this for me, Faber? If I’m gonna be a criminal, I might as well get paid.’

I figured if anyone could understand greed, it would be a lawyer.

‘You get my package and I’ll give you fifty grand plus your life back.’

He was lying and we both knew it; what we didn’t know was if the other person knew we knew it.

What are you, six?

‘Okay, Faber. You got a deal. Cut me loose and give me the details.’

Faber called one of his boys over, gave him a set of keys and a few whispered instructions.

‘Not just yet, Daniel. I need to make an impression on you first. Show you what a dead serious kinda guy I am. One more taste of electromuscular disruption should do it.’

The house I’m watching is straight out of the opening credits of a suburban sitcom. According to what TV tells us, there should be an overweight dad, a foxy mom, couple of smartarse kids and maybe an in-law down the basement. Work in a couple of catchphrases, like sheesh, Ma or none of you people get me and next thing you know it’s season nine and DVD box sets are topping the charts.

This is the last place you’d expect to find a steroid lab. Nevertheless, according to Faber, this is exactly where I will find one.

‘And a lotta security,’ he said. ‘State of the art. These guys don’t skimp.’

Faber is not risking any of his guys on this run, so I’m on my own. No fake police backup. A pity, as according to Faber, Goran had put together quite the strike force. Pro-bars, oneman battering rams, the whole kit and caboodle.

‘Think of it as a test, Daniel. You bring home the goods and maybe next time I let you take out some of the boys.’

I should call the FBI, that’s what I should do. But once the Feds become involved, the best-case scenario is I live out my days in witness protection; the worst-case is Deacon freezes and I get life without parole. So maybe I put Newark on speed dial, but I don’t push the button just yet.

Newark on speed dial? Your thoughts are beginning to sound American.

Zeb is right. I’ve been here too long. I need a pint of Guinness that’s taken five minutes to pour, and a date with a freckled redhead.

The house looks normal, but I squint into the shadows and see camera domes suckered to the eaves. Laser eyes too, on stalks in the garden. The windows are small, with decorative cast-iron bars, and the door is painted to look wooden, but I’m betting on steel. Spotlights on the lawn and roof complete the package. This place is a subtle fortress. There’s no chance I’m fighting my way inside.

I circle around back, which is not as easy as it sounds. In modern America’s paranoid suburbia, the tendency is to shoot strangers first and ask questions later, if at all. There are stories on the news every day about garbage men getting plugged by panicked housewives just because they were speaking in some language that was not English. Sometimes that’s their actual court defence.

He was round back of my house, messing with my trash, speaking terrorist talk. What does he ’spect?

But I politicise.

Luckily, shadows are lengthening, I’m wearing black and I have done this kind of thing before. I nip through the adjoining yard, all ready to lay someone out if I have to. I’m hoping for a male. I could live with socking some stocky gardener, but a slip of a girl might be more than my beleaguered psyche will allow.

Pull yourself together or you’ll start making mistakes.

Yeah. That’s rich coming from a guy who once tossed back three shots of furniture polish after the club one night. Three shots before he noticed something wrong.

First decent crap I took in months, says Ghost Zeb.

I make it around back through a bricked alley without having to relieve anyone of their senses, and conceal myself in a cluster of evergreens. I peep through branches to the bay window and see the empty lounge of an affluent suburban home with regulation Eames recliner that is too expensive for the kids to ever sit in. Nice garden, though, I gotta say. Plenty of green, nice wild feel to it without being neglected. Reminds me of. .

Oh, please. Shut the hell up.

Okay, then.

I hear a sudden growling and I realise that there’s a dog in the trees with me. Big bastard too, I’m guessing, by the way his breath is in my ear. These are his trees and he’s pissed. I have maybe two seconds before he clamps his teeth around my face. Faber will notice a hell of a spike in my vitals then.

Please not a Rottweiler. Please not a Rottweiler.

I look and there’s a Rottweiler two feet away from me, his sharp head comically bewigged by soft green ferns. He’s got his lips pulled back over his incisors and his black eyeballs are on me like target lasers, which kinda takes the comic out of it.

Christ. This is not right. How much more shit can be piled on one person in a day?

The dog lunges and I roll back into the tree roots and shrubs with him, clamping his snout with one hand. I get a fistful of dog snot, but at least those teeth are contained for the moment. I reach down with the other hand and grab the dog’s crotch.

Congratulations. It’s a boy.

Screw squeamishness. In the words of David Byrne: I ain’t got time for that now.

The dog is in my arms and he’s wriggling like a sea creature out of water. I can feel the animal’s fury testing my muscles to their limits. Branches snap around our heads, and with the dusk falling it’s like a scene from a horror movie. I half expect some masked creep to emerge from the alley with a mommy fixation and a carving knife.

I give the Rottweiler’s balls a squeeze to get him good and angry, then use every pound of strength I can muster to flip him over the garden fence. I hear the thump and scrabble as he lands awkwardly next door then finds his paws. This is not a move I had ever planned or run through in any of my justin-case scenarios; it’s kind of a spur-of-the-moment thing and could even work to my advantage.

Go, Bonzo, I broadcast at the dog. Give ’em hell.

Next door the commotion is immediate. Bonzo rampages through the drug den’s back garden looking for some throats to tear out. I’m betting this particular dog is not used to being manhandled over a fence. They say that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, but I would argue that a scorned woman would pale and back out of the room faced with a Rottweiler who just got his scrotum twisted.

I peep over the fence. Next door’s garden has roughly the same dimensions: a rectangular lawn maybe twenty by thirty, with various immature trees clustered at the end. It also has a freshly laid rear driveway with a pick-up reversed up to a back door, which is obviously reinforced.

There’s a guy on the door who doesn’t know whether to give Bonzo his tough-guy face or shit his pants.

I may not be able to get myself into this house, but maybe I can make whoever is in there come out to me.

The dog shakes his sleek head like he’s disembowelling an imaginary rabbit, then spots the guy at the door and decides to transfer my crimes to him. His growl says, I am going to eat you alive, motherfucking