I stared at it for a moment and then backed up a step so I could pull myself upright. I left the car door open. I glanced at Miguel and said, “Hang on.”

I hadn’t put the gun under the seat. That much I knew. The only .45-caliber semiautomatic I’d heard mentioned of late was one of two guns missing in Pete Wolinsky’s shooting death two months before. Cheney had mentioned it Monday night when he showed up at Rosie’s. I had no way to calculate how many thousands of semiautomatics were floating around in the world. The number must have been astronomical, so what were the chances of that particular gun having been used in the robbery that ended Pete’s life?

I hadn’t parked the Mustang anywhere near the bird refuge in months. The closest I’d come was the night I’d trundled along at two miles an hour, negotiating the access road along the property line at the back of the zoo. That was the unfortunate occasion when, having suffered a psychotic break, I’d agreed to run interference for Felix and Pearl in their mission to retrieve Dace’s stolen backpack from the Boggarts’ campsite. Those two locations, the strip of parking spaces near the lagoon and the hobo camp up the hill, were perhaps a quarter of a mile apart. Handguns, as a rule, don’t hump from place to place of their own accord. Handgun migration is almost entirely the result of human intervention. But no one had been in the backseat of my Mustang except for Felix that same night.

Miguel said, “You okay?”

“I’m fine. Just give me a minute.”

I remembered stumbling onto the scene, having waded through the shrubs to warn them that the big Boggart’s arrival was imminent. While Pearl was stomping the makeshift incinerator, Felix had overturned a metal footlocker and the contents were strewn across the ground at his feet. At the moment I caught sight of him, he picked up an item and shoved it into the waistband of his jeans at the small of his back. From that distance and as quickly as he moved, I hadn’t identified the object, but later, when he blasted the Boggart with a can of pepper spray, I assumed that’s what it was. He’d even admitted stealing the can of pepper spray from them.