She smiled and her friend came back with three beers. "You've got a
great house," she said.
Her friend said, "Yeah, it's amazing."
"Well, thank you," he said.
"Bye," they said.
Link's gaze bored into the spot between his shoulder blades the whole
way to the end of the block.
#
The back-alleys of Kensington were a maze of coach houses, fences, dead
ends and narrow doorways. Kids who knew their secrets played ball-hockey
nearly undisturbed by cars, junkies turned them into reeking pissoirs,
homeless people dossed down in the lees of their low, crazy-angled
buildings, teenagers came and necked around corners.
But Alan knew their secrets. He'd seen the aerial maps, and he'd
clambered their length and breadth and height with Kurt, checking sight
lines for his network, sticking virtual pushpins into the map on his
screen where he thought he could get some real benefit out of an access
point.
So once he reached Kensington Avenue, he slipped behind a Guyanese patty
stand and stepped through a wooden gate and began to make his way to the
back of Kurt's place. Cautiously.
From behind, the riot of colors and the ramshackle signs and subculture
of Kensington was revealed as a superfice, a skin stretched over
slightly daggy brick two-stories with tiny yards and tumbledown
garages. From behind, he could be walking the back ways of any anonymous
housing development, a no-personality greyzone of nothing and no one.
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