Fellow put his hands in his pockets. He wasn’t bad-looking, but he carried himself with the menacing posture of a thug. Pete gave him credit for persistence. He himself wouldn’t be able to tolerate a life of begging on off-ramps, or anywhere else for that matter.

“My dad had a gun looked like that.”

“Lot of semiautomatics look similar.”

“What’s yours?”

“Glock 17.”

“Is it new?”

“New to me. The 17 came out in 1982. I didn’t acquire this one until recently.”

“How much does a gun like that cost?”

It crossed Pete’s mind that the fellow’s interest might be more than idle. With a gun in his possession, other methods of picking up pay would certainly be available.

Pete said, “More money than I got now, I can tell you that for a fact. Important thing is to handle a weapon like this with the respect it deserves. Safety comes first.”

“You ever kill anyone?”

“I have not. How about yourself?”

“Not me, but my dad was in the army and he killed a bunch. Messed with his head.”

“I’d imagine so.”

Pete let the conversation lapse. After a minute, he looked up. “Anything else on your mind?”

He met the panhandler’s gaze and the fellow shook his head in the negative, saying, “Take care.”

“You, too.”

The bum backed up a few steps and then moved off, heading toward the scrub. Pete had heard there was a hobo camp up there somewhere, but he’d never seen it himself.

When he finished cleaning and reassembling the Glock, he tidied up his rags and brushes, crumpling the newsprint into a wad that he tossed into the public trash container. He holstered his pocket pistol and returned his cleaning kit to the trunk. He pulled out a bag of birdseed and took a seat on the wooden bench. He wasn’t crazy about the ducks. Ducks were stupid and the geese could turn hostile if you didn’t watch your step, not that he begrudged any of them their place in the greater scheme of things. To his way of thinking, pigeons were the perfect birds; each intricately marked, gray and white with touches of iridescence.