“Tommy, you’re it,” Chester said, and turned to face us. “Let’s talk in back.”

We followed him over to a door that looked like a storage closet, which he unlocked with a key from around his neck, but didn’t open yet.

“She knows we met in third grade, right?” Chester said, his eyes moving from Remy to me.

“No one’s here to go through your secret stash, buddy,” I said.

He pushed the door open then, and we stepped into a room that was about fifteen by ten. A work space, with shallow tables around the perimeter and stools pulled up here and there. Each area of table was marked with a white towel, covered in gun parts, as if four simultaneous projects were under way.

All along the walls were pegboard, strung with a mix of two types of weapons: old or valuable—and most of them were both. An eighty-year-old Parker shotgun was hung on the far wall. Beside it was a Winchester 1873 and a Colt 1911 that had been used in Vietnam. The place smelled like Hoppe’s No. 9 bore cleaner.

Chester locked the door behind us. He set an alarm, and flicked on a series of screens so he could monitor the store. A half-dozen grenades hung on loops near the TVs.

He moved over to one of the tables then, and we followed him.

There, laid out on a towel, was the first part we’d found inside the black Mr. Coffee machine at the Garden Palms. The piece that I thought looked like part of a pair of eyeglasses.

“Okay,” Chester said. “Let’s start with the simple stuff. This part here is a trigger guard, like you figured.”

“All right,” I said. “Except it’s not part of a handgun, and it’s light, man. We couldn’t tell—”

“Just bear with me,” he said.

Chester crossed the room and came back carrying a massive gun. An M24 sniper rifle. Because of his chest and girth, it almost looked small in his hands.

He proceeded to take it apart, piece by piece, while we waited.

The M24 is a bolt-action rifle preferred by many of the world’s best snipers. I’d shot one last year, at a gun exhibition that Chester had dragged me to. In an expert’s hands, an M24 had a range of twenty-five hundred feet. In mine, a pretty decent shot, maybe eight hundred.

“The trigger guard,” Chester said, removing it from the massive weapon he’d brought over, “is the bottom-most part of a gun like this. The hole in your piece is where you thread your finger through in order to shoot.”

“So that attaches up under the body?” Remy confirmed.

Chester nodded, and I pointed at the two small holes on the underside of the piece we had found. “Except the holes in our piece aren’t even threaded,” I said.

“Yeah,” Chester said, holding out the two matching pieces: the one that we’d found and the heavier piece that he had just removed from the giant rifle.