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.