A few months before my uncle had his misadventure in international waters, I’d helped out at his pawn shop. My parents had told me getting some real world work experience would be a good use of time before afternoons at the Grayfield Learning Center.

Though, I'd often wondered since then if my mom had a blindspot for her brother. Because while her and my dad’s reasoning at the time had made sense, in practice the decision to work at Uncle Allan’s shop had been… questionable.

It’d been a dingy hole in the wall with a reputation for being a bit sketchy because of how my uncle didn’t place much scrutiny on the potentially ill-gotten booty he bought and sold. Because of this, the people who came into the shop never batted an eye at a sixteen year old doing random busywork, such as cleaning the gun display.

Wiping down the case had been my favorite part of the day because most of the other stuff in my uncle’s shop was uninteresting junk ranging from gaudy watches to old blenders. All