"Where the h.e.l.l are we *going*?" Alan said, once they'd left the city limits and entered the curved, identical cookie-cutter streets of the industrial suburbs in the north end.

"Place I know," Kurt said. "It's really cheap and really good. All the Peel Region cops eat there." He snapped his fingers. "Oh, yeah, I was going to tell you about the cop," he said.

"You were," Alan said.

"So, one night I'd been diving there." Kurt pointed to an anonymous low-slung, sprawling brown building. "They print hockey cards, baseball cards, monster cards -- you name it."

He sipped at his donut-store coffee and then rolled down the window and spat it out. "s.h.i.t, that was last night's coffee," he said. "So, one night I was diving there, and I found, I dunno, fifty, a hundred boxes of hockey cards. Slightly dented at the corners, in the trash. I mean, hockey cards are just *paper*, right? The only thing that makes them valuable is the companies infusing them with marketing juju and glossy pictures of mullet-head, no-tooth jocks."

"Tell me how you really feel," Alan said.

"Sorry," Kurt said. "The hockey players in junior high were real jerks. I'm mentally scarred.

"So I'm driving away and the law pulls me over. The local cops, they know me, mostly, 'cause I phone in B&Es when I spot them, but these guys had never met me before. So they get me out of the car and I explain what I was doing, and I quote the part of the Trespa.s.s to Property Act that says that I'm allowed to do what I'm doing, and then I open the trunk and I show him, and he busts a *nut*: 'You mean you found these in the *garbage?* My kid spends a fortune on these things! In the *garbage*?' He keeps saying, 'In the garbage?' and his partner leads him away and I put it behind me.

"But then a couple nights later, I go back and there's someone in the dumpster, up to his nipples in hockey cards."

"The cop," Alan said.

"The cop," Kurt said. "Right."

"That's the story about the cop in the dumpster, huh?" Alan said.

"That's the story. The moral is: We're all only a c-hair away from jumping in the dumpster and getting down in it."

"C-hair? I thought you were trying not to be s.e.xist?"

"*C* stands for *c.o.c.k*, okay?"

Alan grinned. He and Kurt hadn't had an evening chatting together in some time. When Kurt suggested that they go for a ride, Alan had been reluctant: too much on his mind those days, too much *Danny* on his mind. But this was just what he needed. What they both needed.

"Okay," Alan said. "We going to eat?"

"We're going to eat," Kurt said. "The Vietnamese place is just up ahead. I once heard a guy there trying to speak Thai to the waiters. It was amazing -- it was like he was a tourist even at home, an ugly f.u.c.ked-up tourist. People suck."

"Do they?" Alan said. "I quite like them. You know, there's pretty good Vietnamese in Chinatown."

"This is good Vietnamese."

"Better than Chinatown?"

"Better situated," Kurt said. "If you're going dumpster diving afterward. I'm gonna take your cherry, buddy." He clapped a hand on Alan's shoulder. Real people didn't touch Alan much. He didn't know if he liked it.

"G.o.d," Alan said. "This is so sudden." But he was happy about it. He'd tried to picture what Kurt actually *did* any number of times, but he was never very successful. Now he was going to actually go out and jump in and out of the garbage. He wondered if he was dressed for it, picturing bags of stinky kitchen waste, and decided that he was willing to sacrifice his jeans and the old Gap shirt he'd bought one day after the shirt he'd worn to the store -- the wind-up toy store? -- got soaked in a cloudburst.

The Vietnamese food was really good, and the family who ran the restaurant greeted Kurt like an old friend. The place was crawling with cops, a new two or three every couple minutes, stopping by to grab a salad roll or a sandwich or a go-cup of pho. "Cops always know where to eat fast and cheap and good," Kurt mumbled around a mouthful of pork chop and fried rice. "That's how I found this place, all the cop cars in the parking lot."

Alan slurped up the last of his pho and chased down the remaining hunks of rare beef with his chopsticks and dipped them in chili sauce before popping them in his mouth. "Where are we going?" he asked.

Kurt jerked his head in the direction of the great outdoors. "Wherever the fates take us. I just drive until I get an itch and then I pull into a parking lot and hit the dumpsters. There's enough dumpsters out this way, I could spend fifty or sixty hours going through them all, so I've got to be selective. I know how each company's trash has been running -- lots of good stuff or mostly c.r.a.p -- lately, and I trust my intuition to take me to the right places. I'd love to go to the Sega or Nintendo dumpsters, but they're like Stalag Thirteen -- razorwire and motion-sensors and armed guards. They're the only companies that take secrecy seriously." Suddenly he changed lanes and pulled up the driveway of an industrial complex.

"Spidey-sense is tingling," he said, as he killed his lights and crept forward to the dumpster. "Ready to lose your virginity?" he said, lighting a cigarette.

"I wish you'd stop using that metaphor," Alan said. "Ick."

But Kurt was already out of the Buick, around the other side of the car, pulling open Alan's door.

"That dumpster is full of cardboard," he said, gesturing. "It's recycling. That one is full of plastic bottles. More recycling. This one," he said, *oof*ing as he levered himself over it, talking around the maglight he'd clenched between his teeth, "is where they put the good stuff. Looky here."

Alan tried to climb the dumpster's sticky walls, but couldn't get a purchase. Kurt, standing on something in the dumpster that crackled, reached down and grabbed him by the wrist and hoisted him up. He scrambled over the dumpster's transom and fell into it, expecting a wash of sour kitchen waste to break over him, and finding himself, instead, amid hundreds of five-inch cardboard boxes.

"What's this?" he asked.

Kurt was picking up the boxes and shaking them, listening for the rattle. "This place is an import/export wholesaler. They throw out a lot of defective product, since it's cheaper than shipping it all back to Taiwan for service. But my kids will fix it and sell it on eBay. Here,"

he said, opening a box and shaking something out, handing it to him. He pa.s.sed his light over to Alan, who took it, unmindful of the drool on the handle.

It was a rubber duckie. Alan turned it over and saw it had a hard chunk of metal growing out of its a.s.s.

"More of these, huh?" Kurt said. "I found about a thousand of these last month. They're USB keychain drives, low-capacity, like 32MB. Plug them in and they show up on your desktop like a little hard drive. They light up in all kinds of different colors. The problem is, they've all got a manufacturing defect that makes them glow in just one color -- whatever shade the little gel carousel gets stuck on.

"I've got a couple thousand of these back home, but they're selling briskly. Go get me a couple cardboard boxes from that dumpster there and we'll snag a couple hundred more."

Alan gawped. The dumpster was seven feet cubed, the duckies a few inches on a side. There were thousands and thousands of duckies in the dumpster: more than they could ever fit into the Buick. In a daze, he went off and pulled some likely flattened boxes out of the trash and a.s.sembled them, packing them with the duckies that Kurt pa.s.sed down to him from atop his crunching, cracking mound of doomed duckies that he was grinding underfoot.

Once they'd finished, Kurt fussed with moving the boxes around so that everything with a bootprint was shuffled to the bottom. "We don't want them to know that we've been here or they'll start hitting the duckies with a hammer before they pitch 'em out."

He climbed into the car and pulled out a bottle of window cleaner and some paper towels and wiped off the steering wheel and the dash and the handle of his flashlight, then worked a blob of hand sanitizer into his palms, pa.s.sing it to Alan when he was done.

Alan didn't bother to point out that as Kurt had worked, he'd transferred the flashlight from his mouth to his hands and back again a dozen times -- he thought he understood that this ritual was about Kurt a.s.suring himself that he was not sinking down to the level of rummies and other garbage pickers.

As if reading his mind, Kurt said, "You see those old rum-dums pushing a shopping cart filled with empty cans down Spadina? f.u.c.king *morons* -- they could be out here pulling LCDs that they could turn around for ten bucks a pop, but instead they're rooting around like racc.o.o.ns in the trash, chasing after nickel deposits."

"But then what would you pick?"

Kurt stared at him. "You kidding me? Didn't you *see*? There's a hundred times more stuff than I could ever pull. Christ, if even one of them had a squint of ambition, we could *double* the amount we save from the trash."

"You're an extraordinary person," Alan said. He wasn't sure he meant it as a compliment. After all, wasn't *he* an extraordinary person, too?

Alan was stunned when they found a dozen hard drives that spun up and revealed themselves to be of generous capacity and moreover stuffed with confidential looking information when he plugged them into the laptop that Kurt kept under the pa.s.senger seat.

He was floored when they turned up three slightly elderly Toshiba laptops, each of which booted into a crufty old flavor of Windows, and only one of which had any obvious material defects: a starred corner in its LCD.

He was delighted by the dumpsters full of plush toys, by the lightly used office furniture, by the technical books and the CDs of last year's software. The smells were largely inoffensive -- Kurt mentioned that the picking was better in winter when the outdoors was one big fridge, but Alan could hardly smell anything except the sour smell of an old dumpster and occasionally a whiff of coffee grounds.

They took a break at the Vietnamese place for coconut ice and gla.s.ses of sweet iced coffee, and Kurt nodded at the cops in the restaurant. Alan wondered why Kurt was so pleasant with these cops out in the boonies but so hostile to the law in Kensington Market.

"How are we going to get connectivity out of the Market?" Kurt said. "I mean, all this work, and we've hardly gotten four or five square blocks covered."