"Those two? Fifty-fifty chance. Tell you what, though: there's always enough kids and enough junk to go around." "But you need to make arrangements to get your access points mounted and powered. You've got to sort it out with people who own stores and houses." "You want to knock on doors?" Kurt said. "I think I would," Alan said. "I suspect it's a possibility. We can start with the shopkeepers, though." "I haven't had much luck with merchants," Kurt said, shrugging his shoulders. His chains jingled and a whiff of armpit wafted across the claustrophobic hollow. "Capitalist pigs." "I can't imagine why," Alan said. # "Wales Avenue, huh?" Kurt said. They were walking down Oxford Street, and Alan was seeing it with fresh eyes, casting his gaze upward, looking at the lines of sight from one building to another, mentally painting in radio-frequency shadows cast by the transformers on the light poles. "Just moved in on July first," Alan said. "Still getting settled in." "Which house?" "The blue one, with the big porch, on the corner." "Sure, I know it. I scored some great plumbing fixtures out of the dumpster there last winter." "You're welcome," Alan said. They turned at Spadina and picked their way around the tourist crowds shopping the Chinese importers' sidewalk displays of bamboo parasols and Hello Kitty slippers, past the fogged-up windows of the dim-sum restaurants and the smell of fresh pork buns. Alan bought a condensed milk and kiwi snow-cone from a sidewalk vendor and offered to treat Kurt, but he declined. "You never know about those places," Kurt said. "How clean is their ice, anyway? Where do they wash their utensils?" "You dig around in dumpsters for a living," Alan said. "Aren't you immune to germs?" Kurt turned at Baldwin, and Alan followed. "I don't eat garbage, I pick it," he said. He sounded angry. "Hey, sorry," Alan said. "Sorry. I didn't mean to imply --" "I know you didn't," Kurt said, stopping in front of a dry-goods store and spooning candied ginger into a baggie. He handed it to the age-hunched matron of the shop, who dropped it on her scale and dusted her hands on her black dress. Kurt handed her a two-dollar coin and took the bag back. "I'm just touchy, okay? My last girlfriend split because she couldn't get past it. No matter how much I showered, I was never clean enough for her." "Sorry," Alan said again. "I heard something weird about that blue house on the corner," Kurt said. "One of my kids told me this morning, he saw something last night when he was in the park." Alan pulled up short, nearly colliding with a trio of cute university girls in wife-beaters pushing bundle-buggies full of newspaper-wrapped fish and bags of soft, steaming bagels. They stepped around him, lugging their groceries over the curb and back onto the sidewalk, not breaking from their discussion. "What was it?"