I stop on the street outside number 33. All the windows are closed, and it looks deserted. As I approach the door, the honk of a car horn startles me. I turn round and see a short, wizened-looking white guy in the driver's seat of the ancient Sierra. He beckons me over with a bony arm.
I walk up and crouch down by the open car window.
'Who are you?' he asks in a voice that somehow manages to be high-pitched and gravelly at the same time, as if it belongs to a chain-smoking twelve-year-old. To add to the mix, the accent is pure 'cor blimey' cockney, making the end result a very strange sound.
'I'm Bone,' I answer, remembering that this is what I've been instructed to call myself. 'I'm here to pick up a briefcase.'
He looks me up and down carefully yet dispassionately through pale, bloodshot eyes. I stare back at him, thinking he is one of the strangest-looking guys I've seen for a while. His face, partially obscured by long, lank, mousey hair that exposes blotches of pink scalp, is thin and deeply lined, yet somehow the end result gives the impression of agelessness. This guy could be anything between forty and sixty, although nothing about him looks well kept. He is dressed in a cheap brown suit that smells of mothballs, underneath which is a faded Iron Maiden T-shirt that was once black but has now turned the same off-grey pallor as his skin.
'You've come to the wrong place,' he tells me.
I notice then that he isn't sweating, even though a steady wave of cloying heat is emanating from the interior of the car.
'Are you going to tell me where the right one is, then?'
His eyes dart down. 'What's in the case?'
'Have you got the one I'm here to collect?' I ask him.
His face contorts into an unpleasant smile, revealing a plaque-stained jumble of teeth that come straight out of the 'before' posters on a dentist's wall. 'Is it the money?'
'Have you got the case I'm here to collect or not?'
He shakes his head ever so slowly. 'No,' he says at last, 'someone else has. I'll take you to him.'
I step out of the way as he opens the door and slowly climbs out.
'You got a name?' I ask him.
'You can call me Sellman,' he says, turning and beckoning for me to follow him.
At full height, he stands no more than five five, and when he starts walking I see that his right foot drags. All in all, he's not the finest figure of a man you're ever likely to see, but I spot the telltale bulge in the back of his suit that tells me he's armed, and I guess he's the kind of guy who enjoys being underestimated.
We walk up the street in silence while his eyes move back and forth, taking in everything. It is obvious that he trusts me as much as I trust him. Two Asian kids in Islamic clothes and prayer caps are coming down the pavement in our direction. They talk animatedly and ignore us as they pass, but Sellman's eyes still drift back to them, just to make sure they are nothing more than bona fide passers-by. 'You can't be too careful,' he says, more to himself than me. I don't bother to reply.
After we've gone about fifty yards, we stop at a corner house that's in an even greater state of disrepair than the others. The paintwork is peeling away, and the ancient windows are hanging loose in their wooden frames. A dusty skip filled with household junk and bags of foul-smelling rubbish sits in the middle of the carport, while the area around it is unkempt and overgrown with weeds and stinging nettles.
'Here we are,' says Sellman, pulling a phone from his pocket and motioning me towards the house's decrepit front door. I watch as he speed-dials a number and starts speaking into the phone. He tells whoever is on the other end that we've arrived and that I've come alone, but as the door buzzes and he pushes it open, ushering me through, he checks the street one last time.
'This way,' he says, leading me through a dingy hallway with a huge burn mark splashed against one wall, and up two flights of uneven, carpetless stairs.
'Nice place you've got here,' I say as my boot catches a nail sticking out of the bare wood.
'It does the job we need it for,' he answers in that strange high-pitched voice of his.
The building has been split into separate apartments, both of which appear to be empty. At the top of the stairs, a narrow walkway leads to a single door. Sellman steps up to it, knocks on it three times, pauses, then knocks three more times. A second later comes the sound of two locks being released and the door slowly opens about six inches. An immense shaven head belonging to what appears to be a similarly immense body glowers at me over Sellman's shoulder from behind a thick metal chain, then the chain is released and the door opens just far enough for us to walk in.
Sellman steps to one side and I find myself in a large, cluttered living room. The blinds are pulled down on all the windows, and the only light is provided by a TV in the corner which is showing one of those daytime property programmes with the volume turned down so low it's almost mute. Three desk fans whirr away at different points round the room, but they do little to banish the stuffiness.
To my right stands the shaven-headed man who's just let us in. He must be six feet five and isn't far off being of similar width. He's dressed in jeans and a tight-fitting T-shirt and is carrying a gun in a shoulder holster, American cop-style. He glares at me. I ignore him.
To my immediate left stands Sellman, and then beyond him, in front of a partially open door that leads through to the rest of the apartment, is a third man. Intimidating without being particularly big, he watches me with a professional malevolence. He has shoulder-length brown hair, cut in a style I remember being popular with soccer hooligans circa 1985, and unpopular ever since then with pretty much anyone who cares about fashion, and is wearing a baggy purple suit and white shirt unbuttoned at least two buttons too far. A thick gold chain round his neck and thick tufts of chest hair poking out of the gap in the shirt top off his retro appearance, making him look like a gangster straight off the set of Miami Vice.
There's a fourth man at the end of the room. He's sitting behind a table facing the door, next to one of the fans, his face a silhouette in the near darkness. Straight off, I can tell that he's the boss, and he confirms this by snapping an order for Sellman and his shaven-headed colleague to search me.
Sellman produces a sawn-off single-barrelled shotgun from the back of his cheap suit and points it at my midriff. I clutch the briefcase but don't resist as Shaven Head comes forward and gives me a rough search, quickly locating the Glock. I let him remove it, and he holds it up in the air for his boss to see.
'Pass it over here,' says the fourth man.
Shaven Head checks the internal safety mechanism and chucks the gun over to his boss, who catches it one-handed by the barrel, his hand shooting out like a snake's. 'Ah,' he says admiringly, 'a Glock Nineteen. Very nice.' He turns it over in his hands, giving it a once-over, then places it on the coffee table.