Fourth Street was a rude, dirty street. A sleazy street lined with saloons, strip joints, flophouses, soup kitchens and abandoned tenements. A kind of place and type of street that is endemic to all cities, particularly port cities. A kind of place where transit-weary spacers could lose their wages on booze, gambling and sordid women, and the type of neighborhood that civic leaders pretend don't exist during the day, yet frequent during the night. It was a filthy stain of a place that stank of urine and old puke. It was exactly the kind of place that a businessman far from home might go and attract no notice. At least, thought Halverson, that was the theory. He was looking for a certain strip-joint and a certain stripper. All he knew about her was that she had a blue triangle tatto
