It was a prewar bungalow, brick, maybe prefab from Sears, Roebuck. Really, just a single story, with a few windows, probably a couple of small bedrooms off a hall, a living room, a dining room. There was a bit of an upstairs, under the eaves of the mansard roof. It looked like every other house in what had been an autoworkers’ neighborhood in the salad days before the Japanese attack—on Detroit, not Pearl Harbor. The house was old and sad and broken. It wanted to die.

“On your belly,” said Juba.

He crawled to the window, went still under its amber glow, waited for Jared to join him. Then he squirmed out and very slowly stood, surveyed, and ducked down.

“Three men, laughing. Lots of money. Lots of weapons—shotguns, mostly, and pistols. The windows are barred. A TV.”

“Must be the rec room,” said Jared.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“If it’s only three, we’re fine. Come.”

They repeated the drill at the next window, then slid around back. At each window, Juba took his recon, and in none did he find more men. Upstairs might be another matter, but he didn’t think so. He also stopped at the rear door. Leaving Jared behind, he squirmed around to the front, slid under the windows, showing nothing, and examined the door.

When he returned, he drew Jared back to the bushes and into the alley.

“Only the three. Maybe upstairs some women, but they’ll be no problem.”

“Maybe you underestimate women in the drug trade.”

“Okay, we kill them too.”

“No, I didn’t mean that. Let’s not kill any women. Actually, I’d prefer if—”

“We follow Allah, little boy. We do what must be done.”

“I can’t kill a woman,” said Jared.

Juba looked at him squarely. “Are you jihadi?”

“I guess,” said Jared.

“Okay.”

He abandoned the boy and went into the bushes. After some effort, grunting and tugging, he emerged with a straight ten inches of branch, from which he was busily trimming smaller limbs and twigs. He turned to a patch of unruptured asphalt in the alley and set to sharpening one end by aggressively turning and grinding it at an angle and, in a bit of time, had manufactured a pointed tip that looked like the business end of a bayonet.

He turned to the boy.

“We go to front and—”

“Whoa! Wouldn’t it be better to go back? Nobody to see. Suppose a cop happens to drive by?”

“The back door swings outward on hinges. You can’t get through it. The front swings inward. Also, it’s a new hollow-core door and it doesn’t look very strong. Locks come out of the wood easily. Understand?”

“Yeah,” said Jared without enthusiasm.