Gately's hospital visitors (p. 826)
Thrust says that in his legal view the Item’s the thing that makes the difference between a señorio of ironshod self-defense and one of just maybe a huge fucking beef in which Gately got mysteriously plugged at some indefinite point while rearranging a couple Canadian maps with his huge bare hands.
Context
Thrust's legal analysis of the missing .44: without the gun in evidence, the story reads as Gately "rearranging a couple Canadian maps with his huge bare hands" — the idiom flexing into black comedy, faces as furniture to be rearranged. ("Señorio" is Thrust's recurring malaprop for scenario, as written.)