Once they’d finished, Kurt fussed with moving the boxes around so that everything with a bootprint was shuffled to the bottom. “We don’t want them to know that we’ve been here or they’ll start hitting the duckies with a hammer before they pitch ’em out.”
He climbed into the car and pulled out a bottle of window cleaner and some paper towels and wiped off the steering wheel and the dash and the handle of his flashlight, then worked a blob of hand sanitizer into his palms, passing it to Alan when he was done.
Alan didn’t bother to point out that as Kurt had worked, he’d transferred the flashlight from his mouth to his hands and back again a dozen times—he thought he understood that this ritual was about Kurt assuring himself that he was not sinking down to the level of rummies and other garbage pickers.
As if reading his mind, Kurt said, “You see those old rum-dums pushing a shopping cart filled with empty cans down Spadina? Fucking morons—they could be out here pulling LCDs that they could turn around for ten bucks a pop, but instead they’re rooting around like raccoons in the trash, chasing after nickel deposits.”
“But then what would you pick?”
Kurt stared at him. “You kidding me? Didn’t you see? There’s a hundred times more stuff than I could ever pull. Christ, if even one of them had a squint of ambition, we could double the amount we save from the trash.”
“You’re an extraordinary person,” Alan said. He wasn’t sure he meant it as a compliment. After all, wasn’t he an extraordinary person, too?
Alan was stunned when they found a dozen hard drives that spun up and revealed themselves to be of generous capacity and moreover stuffed with confidential looking information when he plugged them into the laptop that Kurt kept under the passenger seat.
He was floored when they turned up three slightly elderly Toshiba laptops, each of which booted into a crufty old flavor of Windows, and only one of which had any obvious material defects: a starred corner in its LCD.