"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. "Shit, 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 Trespass 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.
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