At the A&W, two men stopped their conversation to track my movement, faces barely visible under raised parka hoods. At the Kentucky Fried, I passed a kid in a red tracksuit, black fleece vest, and orange tuque carrying a yellow skateboard under one arm. Both times I smiled and said good morning. Both times I got only unfriendly stares.

All righty, then.

Somewhere beyond Forty-fourth Street, Fiftieth Avenue became Franklin. Charlotte-style all the way. Hustling along, I memorized street names and the turns I was making.

Several blocks past School Draw Avenue, Nellie hooked a right onto Hamilton, then another onto an unpaved lane. A sign on a rock said Ragged Ass Road. That’s one you’d never see on the Queen City map.

Nellie barreled up Ragged Ass, still oblivious to my presence. I held back at the turn, fearful that my footsteps on the gravel would give me away. Flicking glances left and right, I took in my surroundings. The sun was higher now, burning off the mist. Detail was clearer.

The neighborhood was residential, with browned-out grass hugging up to the road and utility wires hanging low overhead. I smelled fishy water and bracken mud and sensed a lake nearby.

The ’hood’s architectural theme was northern hodgepodge. The newer homes looked like they’d been assembled from mail-order kits. Aluminum siding. Prefab windows. Faux-colonial shutters and doors.

The older homes resembled cottages at a hippie summer camp. Unstained frame exteriors painted with murals or images taken from nature. Metal downspouts and smokestacks. Whirligigs, plastic animals, and ceramic gnomes in the yards or topping the fences.

Every house had at least one outbuilding, a rusted tank, and a mound of firewood. And, I suspected, occupants hostile to uninvited strangers.

Dogs? I put that alarming image aside.

As roads go, Ragged Ass wasn’t much. Just two blocks long. Never casting a backward glance, Nellie beelined toward the far end, up a dirt drive, and into a structure whose owners were firmly grounded in the summer-camp school.

Oblivious or indifferent to the early-morning intruder, Ragged Ass dozed on.

Skin tingling with cold and apprehension, I crept forward.

No Rottweiler barked. No pit bull lunged.

There you go. I was surveilling.

The house Nellie had entered was little more than a shack, wood-frame, maybe nine hundred square feet of interior. Reflective numbers nailed to the street-facing wall said 7243.

A jerry-rigged plastic and wood greenhouse clung to one side of the house, and a tattered brown awning jutted from the other. Beneath the awning sat a vinyl table-and-chair set and a rusted charcoal grill.

No vehicle was parked in the short dirt drive or under the carport.

Now what?

So far, waiting had served me well. I decided to do it some more.

Using a small shed for cover, I watched from the opposite side of the road.

As on Fiftieth, time moved at the pace of a glacier.

I thumbed on my phone.