It is a sad day—I should say night, in this instance—when the senior partner of a firm is forced to follow the druthers of the junior partner.

That is exactly how I find myself on the hard concrete of a flash-floodwater-control channel, sneaking up on a tangle of ungoverned desert scrub with Miss Midnight Louise leading the slo-mo “charge,” so to speak.

I voice my objections again.

“We will have more stickers in our soft underbellies than a porcupine’s back has spines if we crawl over all that unfriendly terrain to the house.”

“Obviously, your night-assault skills have suffered sadly from La Vida Lazy at the Circle Ritz condo of your currently conflicted roommate,” Louise says. “I know when to zig and zag to find the soft sandy aisles between this Inquisition of cactus plants.”

“Cleverly put, my would-be flake off the paternal monument, but you forget—yowl!—one thing.”

“Keep down the noise! And what is that one thing?”

“Mine! My underbelly is a lot more complicated than yours, and I am a tad broader of beam. If I had wanted to be curry-combed I would have come back as a horse.”

“That is you, all right, the old gray nag,” she hisses over her shoulder. “There may be persons of evil intent lurking about, so keep the objections to yourself.”

Just then I spy an incandescent glow to my left, behind a tall scrawny mesquite tree. Enough with being a lowly grunt! I spring toward the slender trunk and ratchet up it with my built-in pitons.

Mesquite trees may make twenty or thirty feet in height. They are more an ambitious shrub than a real tree and thus not built for taking much weight. You do not want to mess with the young shoots, not only because of the weight problem. New growth has nasty protection—three-inch thorns that could deflate the tire on an SUV.

So I am up the tree, out on a limb, and leaping toward the light like a would-be saved soul before you can sneeze “Midnight Louise.” As I suspected, I spy a window and am soon perching claws-out on a sill.

These old adobe-style houses have thick walls and wide sills. I can relax and stare right into the living room. I love being on a high perch in a power position.

I know as I contemplate my next move that nothing bad is going down in my little corner of Vegas now that I am on the job.

As for the rest of the city, that is up to the two-foots on the official force.

The smart money is on me.