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 ball-squeezer.
There isn’t a man on this planet who isn’t scared by a Rottweiler coming at him with drool streaming out of his mouth.
I squat to rummage through the bag at my feet. First I pop a couple of earplugs from their plastic envelope, then I select a Steyer Bullpup assault rifle with a 40mm grenade launcher slung underneath the barrel. And to think I almost didn’t go for the launcher option, but the dealer sold me on it. Hey, don’t take the launcher model, what do I care, but for a hundred bucks I can throw in two grenades. A hundred bucks! You telling me, Irish, that you can’t think of a single situation where a couple of grenades wouldn’t come in handy?
I could think of a couple of situations. This wasn’t one of them. Flying dogs and grenades in the suburbs.
I stick my head over the fence and peer through the branches just in time to lip-read the doorman’s fuck this and see him hurry in the back door. He slams it half a second too late to stop the Rottweiler making it inside.
That is a lucky bonus. I was hoping for the dog outside at the door, causing a distraction, but inside the house itself. . Should be carnage. Hopefully.
Seconds later the consternation starts. Crashing, tinkling, shouts of surprise. A couple of gunshots.
They’re thinking, What the hell is going on? Where is this coming from?
Pack up the shit. Pack it up.
First rule of any factory: protect the product.
I pull the assault rifle into my shoulder and flick off the safety, and instantly I am a soldier again. It’s the click. Once the safety is off, it is no longer a drill.
I strafe the roof, knocking holes in the slates, leaving beams exposed and severing the power lines. If those guys don’t have a generator in there, surveillance is down. Even if they do, I have a minute.
Now they’re thinking, Gunfire. It’s a raid. We need to move out.
Gunfire is one thing, but explosions really light a fire under people. I feed a grenade into the launcher, close the slide and pull the secondary trigger, sending a silver 40mm egg of explosives through a hole in the roof. I hope no one was hiding their Christmas presents up there.
The explosion is not Hollywood big but it’s enough to reduce the attic space to so much firewood. The sound wave makes reality jump a frame or two, and a cloud of smoke and dust hang over the house, a marker for the fire brigade.
That’s all the destruction I need. I stuff the assault rifle back into my magic bag and drop over the fence into enemy territory. Maybe their cameras are out, maybe not. Either way, I have to act.
The pick-up crouches in the driveway like a wild beast. A brand-new Hilux with outsize wheels and probably a lot more than shop horsepower waiting under the hood. This is the getaway vehicle, no doubt about it. Any aggravation comes in the front door, and the steroids go out the back in this beauty.
A guy comes on to the patio, gun in one hand and keys in the other. There’s a stripe of blood across his arm and I’m thinking good boy, Bonzo. And also rest in peace, doggie. I twist the wing mirror so I can follow what’s happening, then squat behind the Hilux’s grille, and give the situation a few seconds to develop. Maybe this guy has the steroids on him.
Or maybe not. A second man wheels out two large sealed plastic barrels on a drum caddy. This guy is limping from a leg bite and I’m starting to feel sad for Bonzo.
The men load both barrels into the flatbed, grunting and cursing.
‘Get the last barrel,’ the first man shouts over the crackling flames billowing from the attic.
‘Fuck that,’ says junior guy. ‘I ain’t going back in there.’
Guy 1 brandishes his weapon in a way that tells me he doesn’t have a whole lot of gun-time.
‘Okay,’ says junior guy hurriedly. ‘Jesus, Bobby. We just split a tuna melt.’
‘It was a nice sandwich, man, and we’ll always have that. But I’m the supervisor and I gotta put the tuna aside. So just get the barrel, E Bomb. Shit.’
E Bomb tiptoes back into the house in a way that makes me think that Bonzo is still alive.
E Bomb? Christ, what have nicknames come to? The problem is that these guys are inventing their own names. No one christens themselves Four-eyes, or Shit-breath. One guy back in Dublin, did six months for peeping Tom offences, guys called him Windows 2000. Now that’s a nickname.