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?