“You’re drooling,” I said, making sure I got all their attention. In their anger and anticipation, they completely ignored Laura.

Dickie put a restraining hand on Francis’s shoulder. “Me first.” He took two steps toward Mighty Chair, then stopped beyond the extendable arm’s reach. He stepped to the right before coming any closer. Then tentatively ran his hand over Chair’s right arm to see if it contained any other surprises. Chair sat impassively. Dickie moved closer and ran his hand down the seatback with more apprehension than I’d seen on the faces of bomb disposal techs in the desert. He was treating Mighty Chair as if it were a dangerous sleeping animal, capable of striking when aroused. “Show me your hands,” he ordered.

I held them out; he tied them together with a plastic twist. When he was certain I wasn’t capable of triggering any defenses, he began a thorough search. As Gunn had done, he opened my backpack and lifted out the black plastic tank. “That’s my urinal tank,” I told him. “Help yourself.”

He held it gingerly in both hands, away from his body, and shook it. When he felt the liquid swishing around, he put it down and continued digging through my backpack. He pulled out a shirt, which he patted down; a battery-operated toothbrush, which he shook in case it was hollow; and my passport. He put the passport in his jacket pocket—“no need for this anymore”—and replaced everything else. Then he methodically went through each of Mighty Chair’s pockets, receptacles, and bags.

He reached into a deep side pocket and Cher suddenly started giggling. “Stop. It tickles.”

Corbin leaped back, ripping his hand out of the pocket as if he’d dipped it in lava.

Thank you, Y, I thought. But what I said was “Hey, don’t blame me. I’m just sitting here.”

“Fuck you, Stone.” After completing his search of visible storage, Corbin hesitated and thought about it. “Gimme a hand,” he told Russell. They struggled to move me onto the bed. I didn’t resist, but I didn’t help, either. “You stay right there,” he said sarcastically, chuckling at his own humor. Then he continued his search. After going through the visible storage places, he warily lifted Chair’s foam seat cushion. And discovered the manila envelope. “Well, now what might this be?”

I took a guess: “Inca treasure?” Apparently no one but me thought that was funny. Corbin lifted the clasp and pulled out two graphs. He stared at them, having no idea what he was looking at; he turned them sideways, but they still made no sense to him. He folded them in half, then again into quarters, slipping them in his pocket with my passport.

Dickie tossed the cushion on the floor. “Now isn’t this something,” he said. The plastic seat beneath the cushion had been divided into five shallow storage boxes. He slipped his index finger into a flush mount ring and lifted the lid. He moved the contents around, found nothing of interest, and replaced the lid. He grasped the second ring and pulled open the second box—and took a step backward. “Whoa.” He looked at me with an I-didn’t-know-you-were-that-kind-of-guy surprise. He took out my revolver, raising it triumphantly into the air. “Well, lookee here,” he said with appreciation for his own professionalism. “Look what I found.”