Plugged - Eoin Colfer [52]
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