But sometimes - not often - when the light was right and she wasn't organizing anything, he'd look at KiKasandra and wonder if there weren't two kinds of stupidity: the basic El Thicko kind that he had, and a highly specialized sort that you only got when you were stuffed too full of intelligence.

He'd better tell Grandad where he was going, he thought, just in case the power went off or the TV broke down and he wondered where Johnny had gone.

"I'm just off to-" he began, and then said, "I'm just off out."

"Right," said Grandad, without taking his eyes off the set. "Hah! Look, there he goes! Right in the gunge tank!"

Nothing much was going on in the garage.

After a while, Guilty crawled out from his nest among the black plastic sacks and took up his usual position in the front of the cart, where he was wont to travel on the off chance that he could claw somebody.

A fly banged on the window pane for a while and then went back to sleep.

And the bags moved.

They moved like frogs in oil, slithering very slowly around each other. They made a rubbery, squeaky noise, like a clever conjurer trying to twist an animal out of balloons.

There were other noises, too. Guilty didn't pay them much attention because you couldn't attack noises and, besides, he was pretty well used to them by now.

They weren't very clear. They might have been snatches of music. They might have been voices. They might have been a radio left on, but slightly off station and two rooms away, or the distant roar of a crowd.

Johnny met Kasandra outside the police station.

"You're lucky I've got some spare time," she said. "Come on."

Sergeant Comely was on the desk. He looked up as Johnny and Kasandra came in, then looked back at the book he was writing in, and then looked up again slowly.