Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, Cory Doctorow [big ebook reader .txt] 📗

says that it's broken or recorded over or whatever --"

"So you need, what, the last couple months' worth of rentals?"

"Something like that. Maybe longer for the weirder tapes, they only get
checked out once a year or so --"

"So maybe you keep the last two names associated with each tape?"

"That'd work."

"You should do that."

She snorted and drank her coffee. "I don't have any say in it."

"Tell your boss," he said. "It's how good ideas happen in business --
people working at the cash register figure stuff out, and they tell
their bosses."

"So I should just tell my boss that I think we should change our whole
rental system because it's creepy?"

"Damned right. Tell him it's creepy. You're keeping information you
don't need to keep, and paying to store it. You're keeping information
that cops or snoops or other people could take advantage of. And you're
keeping information that your customers almost certainly assume you're
not keeping. All of those are good reasons *not* to keep that
information. Trust me on this one. Bosses love to hear suggestions from
people who work for them. It shows that you're engaged, paying attention
to their business."

"God, now I feel guilty for snooping."

"Well, maybe you don't mention to your boss that you've been spending a
lot of time looking through rental histories."

She laughed. God, he liked working with young people. "So, why I'm
here," he said.

"Yes?"

"I want to put an access point in the second-floor window and around
back of the shop. Your boss owns the building, right?"

"Yeah, but I really don't think I can explain all this stuff to him --"

"I don't need you to -- I just need you to introduce me to him. I'll do
all the explaining."

She blushed a little. "I don't know, Abe..." She trailed off.

"Is that a problem?"

"No. Yes. I don't know." She looked distressed.

Suddenly he was at sea. He'd felt like he was in charge of this
interaction, like he understood what was going on. He'd carefully
rehearsed what he was going to say and what Natalie was likely to say,
and now she was, what, afraid to introduce him to her boss? Because why?
Because the boss was an ogre? Then she would have pushed back harder
when he told her to talk to him about the rental records. Because she
was shy? Natalie wasn't shy. Because --

"I'll do it," she said. "Sorry. I was being stupid. It's just -- you
come on a little strong sometimes. My boss, I get the feeling that he
doesn't like it when people come on strong with him."

Ah, he thought. She was nervous because he was so goddamned weird. Well,
there you had it. He couldn't even get sad about it. Story of his life,
really.

"Thanks for the tip," he said. "What if I assure you that I'll come on
easy?"

She blushed. It had really been awkward for her, then. He felt
bad. "Okay," she said. "Sure. Sorry, man --"

He held up a hand. "It's nothing."

He followed her back to the store and he bought a tin robot made out of
a Pepsi can by some artisan in Vietnam who'd endowed it with huge tin
testicles. It made him laugh. When he got home, he scanned and filed the
receipt, took a picture, and entered it into The Inventory, and by the
time he was done, he was feeling much better.

#

They got into Kurt's car at five p.m., just as the sun was beginning to
set. The sun hung on the horizon, *right* at eye level, for an eternity,
slicing up their eyeballs and into their brains.

"Summer's coming on," Alan said.

"And we've barely got the Market covered," Kurt said. "At this rate,
it'll take ten years to cover the whole city."

Alan shrugged. "It's the journey, dude, not the destination -- the act
of organizing all these people, of putting up the APs, of advancing the
art. It's all worthwhile in and of itself."

Kurt shook his head. "You want to eat Vietnamese?"

"Sure," Alan said.

"I know a place," he said, and nudged the car through traffic and on to
the Don Valley Parkway.

"Where the hell 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. "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.

"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 sexist?"

"*C* stands for *cock*, 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
fucked-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.

"God," 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 crap -- 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
passed 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 ass.

"More of these, huh?" Kurt said. "I found about a thousand of these last
month. They're USB keychain drives,