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“I have never been more jealous of someone not in a penthouse,” Mark grumbled.
“Ditto,” Kevin echoed.
“Don’t hang up, Thomas,” Danny said quickly, dropping his voice again. “Please. Where are you? Did you go home?”
Seong gave him another nod, mouthing “Snake.”
“I’m at Snake’s place,” Thomas said, swallowing nervously. “He was at the club and caught the guy spiking my drink. I slept it off on his couch.”
“Wait,” Kevin’s voice was suddenly closer. “Snake as in THE Snake? The Italian Cat’s hacker?”
Thomas groaned, rubbing at his eyes. “That would be him. Yes.”
“You know Snake?” Kevin sounded just as awed as he had yesterday; like Thomas said he had a movie star let him sleep it off in a mansion instead of a member of the Italian Mafia’s modest apartment. “How do you know Snake? No one knows Snake!”
“Kev-” Mark said lightly.
“What do you mean he caught the guy who spiked your drink,” Andy demanded, suddenly much closer to the phone. “What happened to the guy?”
Thomas frowned, looking up at Seong who gave him a shrug. “I don’t know-”
“Liar,” Andy snarled viciously. “What the fuck did you do to Jerry?”
Thomas’s stomach dropped as he recognized the name of Andy’s cousin— the man Jake never liked and who didn’t like him. “I see,” he said slowly, glancing up to see Seong’s expression remaining unsurprised. The pieces were falling into place now. “You set me up.”
“I didn’t-” Andy started but Thomas cut over him.
“I gotta hand it to you, Andy. You did a great job playing the angler fish. I was terrible at it.” He heard himself laugh. “I was too twitchy. Drew the wrong attention. But you? You played us fucking perfectly.”
Next to him, Seong was staring with widening eyes, a hand covering his mouth.
“I wondered how you managed to get such a good fake ID for me in less than two days,” Thomas continued, a feeling a shiver running through him despite the warm blanket. “But I guess it was easy if I was payment for all of them.”
“He-he’s full of shit-” Andy stammered, his voice further away.
I’m full of something, Thomas thought, his fingers tightening on the phone as they went numb. “I wonder though,” he said before anyone else could speak. “If you only suggested the club because I was coming or if you had always planned on it and someone else was going to be payment? Four high quality fakes, five clubbing outfits, plus the open bar tab is a big bill to pay up.” He paused, thinking about what he knew about fakes and glancing down at the one in his hand. “No, the other three don’t have the same error as mine does. Whoever made this one forgot to change the year in the driver’s license number. You planned this before I came along. So who was going to be your payment before me?”
“Shut up,” Andy shouted.
“Kevin?” Thomas asked, dragging out the name as he heard movement on the other end. “Mark? …Danny?”
“NO!”
He laughed. “Not Danny, at least. Guess it’s good to know you wouldn’t set a guy up on his birthday. Though… I wonder what your intentions were with him? What do you gain from doing all of this? Snake mentioned Jerry having more powder on him and showed me how fucking easy it is to slip it in. Danny had already done one shot without hesitating. Were you going to use it on him too? For yourself?”
“Holy shit,” Danny breathed.
“He’s lying,” Andy’s voice cracked. “That’s what he does! He’s a liar! He lies about everything! You don’t know-”
“And you do,” Kevin’s voice roared through the phone, vibrating Thomas’s eardrums painfully. “You wouldn’t even fucking talk to him until Danny told you to be nice or fuck off! What he says makes sense! You blew smoke up our asses all night— trying to get us to think he ditched us when you thought fucking Jerry had him!”
“Y-you can’t prove that,” Andy hissed.
“But I can,” Seong said. Everything went deadly silent on the other end of the line. Gently, he took the phone out of Thomas’s numb fingers and handed him a red bowl from the ground. “Hello, boys. You can call me Snake. Kevin, was it? Do you know what I do for the Cat?”
There was a pause as Thomas hugged the bowl, not sure why Seong had given it to him but glad for something to clutch.
“You… You find people,” he said a bit uncertainly. “And after you find them… No one else ever does.”
