Chapter Text
Chapter One
I met Michael Jones for the first time in a casino in Las Vegas.
There are many reasons why I love Las Vegas- there’s something so needlessly inspiring about it; the drinks are sweeter and the women prettier and the money is grander and somehow, the bills feel crisper no matter where you go. Vegas is the kind of place that changes the way people think and the way that they feel. Games are never fair- not in Vegas, but we play them anyway because we like the illusion of thinking that we’ve won.
Really, in Vegas- the house always wins.
Michael Jones played blackjack against me and four other assholes, but by the third hand, a silent agreement had come over the both of us to work together against them, and even though at the end of the game that glorious palace of a house had won, we had a measly four grand in total to split between ourselves.
“Here,” Michael handed me an extra few hundreds as we strolled together out of the casino, close enough to talk but far enough from each other to remain inconspicuous. The security guards didn’t give us a second look- after all, we were just another two clueless idiots- robbed blind by the system we supported.
“You played the winning hand,” Michael Jones said to me. “-you get the extra cut.”
I smiled at him, and he smiled back- a beautiful curl of his cupid’s bow lips that captured my attention from the moment he gave it to me. After collecting our winnings, I decided that we simply had to stay together for the rest of the night, because I was utterly enchanted by his smile alone and I wasn’t ready to see the back of him.
Michael’s hotel room was nice, but the bedsheets were cheap cotton and scratchy and the pillows limp and lumpy. Still, we had our own ways of forgetting the quality of the metal framed bed and we both got our rewards when the other deemed it necessary, piles of winnings stacked on the bedside table.
When I awoke in the morning, Michael, along with his cut of the money was completely gone. No phone number, no last name, not a trace of him ever being there in the first place. At the time, I didn’t let it bother me- I sat up, stretched my aching back, collected my belongings and crept out in the early hours like a prostitute. The other prostitutes in the hotel doing the same thing gave me smirks and nods like we were in on the same joke, and I didn’t have the heard to tell them that the money peeking from my pockets was earned through a rigged card game rather than disappointing sex.
Before I could meet Michael Jones again, there were other game players that had to be introduced, moulding and shaping me into the person I was when he strolled through The Fake AH Crew penthouse doors.
Geoff Ramsey himself was more or less important- but I already knew him. Geoff had been the reason I was sent to Vegas, a little scouting at some of the shadier casinos in search for one of his ex-associates who owed him a few grand- or maybe a few grams? I was never sure when it came to Geoff.
The man I was supposed to be searching for found me, sat in my hotel room with a cigar and a cell phone as I arrived back from my night away with Michael Jones.
“Interesting evening?” Jack Pattillo asked me, fanning a banded stack of money in his hands. An open briefcase sat in front of him, but faced away from me. I didn’t care, I rarely did when it came to Geoff’s dirty work. Geoff Ramsey was a name for a reason, and the people who found themselves in the unfortunate position of people his target knew better than to try and avoid giving him precisely what he wanted.
Jack tossed the money in the case without a second thought and clicked it shut, sliding it across the ground to me, still stood still at the door with dollars fanning from my pockets.
“Right.” I cleared my throat, rubbing at the bitten side of my neck awkwardly. “How, uh- how did you find me exactly?”
Jack raised an eyebrow and stumped out his cigar. “Did Geoff not… tell you?”
“Tell me what?” I asked, fingers dancing over the gun tucked in the back of my waistband. Jack clocked onto my movements within seconds, and held open his jacket long enough for me to catch the shine of a silver pistol tucked away at the inside breast pocket.
“Please tell me I’m in the right hotel room? You’re Gavin- Geoff Ramsey’s kid, right?”
I swallowed. “Yeah. And you’re Jack Pattillo- Geoff’s latest target, right? I’ve been sent here to get what you owe him.”
It was then that Jack leant backwards, an enormous laugh exploding from his enormous pink mouth, bouncing off the walls and straight into my pounding skull. I was already feeling the burn of a hangover from too many drinks during games last night, and Jack’s harsh laughter was only making the throb intensify.
“No, kid- you’ve got it wrong. I’m Jack Pattillo… Geoff’s best friend?”
I frowned.
“Never even heard of you mate.”
“Seriously?” Jack sat up. “Jack Pattillo?” he repeated, gesturing to himself as he raised from the armchair. “I’ve been Geoff’s best friend for years. We grew up together- this,” he tapped the briefcase, “Is the money I’m giving him to help kick-start our new crew. He told me he was sending you to collect it so I could meet you before I join you guys out in LS in a couple of weeks.”
I don’t know what it was exactly, his flushed pale skin or his wide panicked eyes or even the softness of the leather briefcase and the crispness of his white shirt, but I trusted Jack Pattillo. Geoff, being a drinker and general asshole had never been good with explanations, so it was more than likely that one of us had confused the other in a drunken slur of business class tickets to Vegas. Jack Pattillo, after a quick cyber-sweep done remotely from my laptop, seemed like a fairly honest man with a squeaky clean record, and after I finally managed to get hold of Geoff (I didn’t say he was hostile, I said he was fucking hosting the crew in a new apartment in LS. I didn’t say fucking kill him- I said grill him, make sure you got to know each other. Fucking dumbass, honestly!”) I put my gun down and allowed him to take me out for a drink and a chat.
Jack Pattillo was a nice man, it seemed. He paid for my drinks and didn’t even try and get handsy with me- which was a quality that was in the severe minority when it came to the ‘associates’ Geoff sent me to mingle with. Jack, apparently, was actually Geoff’s friend, which was strange, because in all the years I’d been ‘Geoff’s kid’, I’d never met a single one of Geoff’s ‘friends’ before. Geoff didn’t have any friends. He only had me, and I only had him.
After Jack, a year of pre planning and plotting flew by. Although initially, it was strange to have a third-wheel support mine and Geoff’s rickety bicycle of ridiculousness, Jack provided stability (and more importantly, logic) to our insane ideas and ridiculous schemes and even a few shenanigans along the way.
It took him a while- nine or ten months at least, but soon enough, Jack Pattillo- true to his word, had turned Geoff and I into real-life, functioning adults. We lived in the same apartment, a spacious affair across the outskirts of the city. Living together, drinking together, working together- it didn’t leave much room for other relationships. I had a string of brief one-night-stands and unadvised liaisons but I never brought them home- that was a little too ‘Meet The Parents’ for my personal tastes.
Gavin Free didn’t fall in love, after all. I was the young carefree kid of the Ramsey name who flitted between jobs like a pretty song bird, flirting and stumbling my way through life and business. Infuriatingly likeable, Jack had described me as over the phone to his and Geoff’s latest side project.
‘The Crew’ didn’t yet exist, obviously at that time- but Jack and Geoff had spent the year between jobs quietly working their little plan. The AH Crew was the working title, something that Geoff had slurred one night under the hue of an Always Sunny re-run but Jack had been looking into some kind of copyright infringement that it carried. In addition to the name debacle, Jack had been in contact with a completely nefarious mass murdering mercenary who had been making a name for himself across the mid-west and surrounding areas for his ruthless and uncaring behaviour.
And I had to give it to the guy- his track record was glowing.
“Yeah- Vagabond. I’ve met him a few times along the years.” Geoff yawned as we patiently waited for the arrival of a psychopath nicknamed The Mad King. “He’s a nice guy. Total softie, despite the stories. Just don’t fuck with his Legos and do not bring up his Diet Coke addiction if you want to wake up with your skull still attached to your spine.”
Geoff seemed relaxed and carefree as ever, but then that wasn’t much to go on. Geoff was relaxed and carefree about everything from what he wanted at McDonald’s to his Tax Returns. I was fucking terrified for The Vagabonds entrance, and the moment I heard the door handle creek open despite the fact that it was locked, then double locked and triple locked (Geoff’s laziness and paranoia flipped and flopped as the days went by) my body stiffened.
His face was covered with a dark grey skull mask. A black and blue heavy leather jacket was zipped over his broad torso, heavy black boots thudding against Jack’s perfectly waxed wooden floors. Three pairs of eyes looked up to greet him, but he didn’t even flinch, just closing the door quietly behind him and walking over to the kitchen counter.
We all watched him in silence, as he rooted through his pockets and pulled out a more impressive array of weapons than the Royal Artillery probably owned. Where he kept it all hidden I couldn’t even fathom, but there was rustling sounds and clanking and grinding until- after around ten minutes the final tiny butterfly knife hit the top of the pile with a clink.
“Bloody hell.” I breathed, involuntarily. Geoff waggled his eyebrows and grinned at me as just past him, Jack watched the Vagabond with narrow, defensive eyes.
He turned, cool as ever and tugged his mask off, casting it aside on top of the pile of weapons. His hair was long and brown but his face was caked in black, red and white face paint, extra dark around his cold blue eyes which popped from the image like a 3D illusion.
He took my breath away with a single thin lipped smirk, and unzipped his jacket before leaning back against the counter comfortably. He’d been standing in our apartment, our space for merely minutes but he already looked as if he was part of the team. Neither me nor Jack dared to move, and I could sense that our resident ‘grown-up’ was scared by the way he sat, tensely. Geoff didn’t seem to notice, just stood up with the same old crass grin and strolled over, giving The Vagabond a quick, friendly hug which was surprisingly returned with gusto and a smile.
“Ryan. Stop scaring the kids.” Geoff laughed, walking towards the sink and running tap-water over a paper towel, which he then handed over to ‘Ryan’, who laughed jovially and dragged the wet cloth over his face slowly. What was an attempt to look less threatening only made him look somehow more terrifying, red and black beads of water dripping down his face as the paint melted away and he gave that giant, serial-killer grin- oddly enough, aimed directly at me.
“Enough!” Geoff laughed again, patting Ryan on the chest. “Gav, Jack- this is Ryan. I pinky-promise he will not murder you.”
Jack stood up before I did, all professional-like with a handshake and a Mr Vagabond and an awkward smile which Ryan easily returned, wiping the rest of the paint away from his face. There were still flakes of black clinging around his eyes and red around his lips, but aside from that he was well on his way to looking almost like a normal human being.
“Nice to meet you… mate.” I said, without moving from the chair I was sat in. “I’m Gav.”
“Geoff’s kid.” Ryan nodded. “I’ve heard about you.”
“Only good things, I hope.” Geoff smiled. Ryan looked back at me, eyes wild as he smirked.
“You could say that.”
It was only after I had met Jack and then, subsequently Ryan, that I was ready to meet with Michael Jones again. I hadn’t given our liaison much thought over the course of the eighteen or so months since I had seen him last, but it was a nice memory to wrap my head (and fist) around on nights when I was feeling horny or lonely. Aside from that, Michael Jones was an anecdotal footnote in a trip to Vegas where I met the mother hen of The Fake AH crew.
We were going by that officially by then. The AH Crew was completely off limits. Although he wasn’t the slightest bit afraid of copyright claims, Geoff simply wasn’t entertained by the thought that googling our name would take you to a web site selling automobile headrests. Why a group of mechanics in Indiana needed a whole website and business dedicated to headrests I wasn’t sure- but I wasn’t and still aren’t much of a driver, so it didn’t bother me much at all.
Jack was fixed in his role as the mother of the group by then. Jack packed our lunches and fixed our appointments and kept us all under his watchful eye. And then, if Jack was the mother- Geoff was certainly the belligerent father who argued with mummy when he’d had too much to drink and tried to take us to Disneyland during school term. Jack loved Geoff with a disapproving endearment (a common reaction) and kept him in line enough where they could still be friends and have fun.
If Jack and Geoff were the parents (which they certainly were) then Ryan was definitely the mysterious older brother who all my friends fancied. I was sure he did it on purpose, because every time I did get brave enough to drag a conquest back to the penthouse Ryan would always show up in the morning, either shirtless and sweaty with his nineties-style silky brown hair dripping beads of steamy water across the wooden floors and his damp chest or- leathered up with a tight ponytail, doing something as menial as spinning a butterfly knife with an edge that reeked of sexual tension and death.
Girls (and boys) loved it. I hated it.
I was the popular kid in school with my finger in every pie and then Ryan was my hot older brother who stole all my girlfriends and ruffled my hair in front of everyone until I begged him to stop. We had a strange relationship. I got on with people easily, it was one of my strong suits, but Ryan was a tough nut to crack. Ryan was a man who enjoyed playing the long game, whereas I liked things fast and cheap and easy.
Ryan was playing a game with me without even putting in effort to move the pieces. He slid into a half formed friendship easily and then never allowed me to break his wall down further. He let me know as much about him as I needed to make conversation and never a slither more. I had expressed my concern that Ryan was either a) trying to mess with me, b) trying to fuck me, or- more likely- c) trying to kill me to Geoff, but he had refuted the claims with a blasé wave and told me to stop being so sensitive.
I didn’t care. Ryan was a weirdo who I liked a lot and he really did drink a lot of Diet Coke. An unnerving amount really- but I didn’t mention it because although a total softie at times I had seen Ryan, by then, mow down cops with an AK-47 out of the window of Jack’s limo for no reason other than the fact that he was bored. He was unpredictable and I hated it because up until his arrival, I was the wildcard. Ryan was both the pretentiously perfect older brother and the annoyingly spoilt new baby. I had been there first but now the new kid had rolled his way out of Jack’s contact list with his big blue eyes and his pretty weapons and everyone else seemed taken with him.
It wasn’t fair- not in the slightest. But Geoff already treated me like a baby and if I wanted to be taken more seriously as an active member of a gang then I was going to have to learn to live with it. I had to bite the bullet and take whatever it was Ryan was willing to give me.
I had to learn to play the game.
I met Michael Jones again for the second time when he strolled through the door of the penthouse with a stony expression on his face. He was dressed in a beaten up brown leather jacket with his soft curls tucked away behind a dark green beanie. I recognised him instantly, despite the worn blue jeans and heavy black boots covered his pale body and hovering behind him with a giant backpack and a silver briefcase was another boy- younger than us for sure with tanned skin and big dark eyes behind bigger, darker rimmed glasses and jet black hair- paired with a soft looking hoodie in an alarming shade of purple.
I opened the door with heavy suspicion because as far as I knew- we weren’t expecting visitors. When I saw who it was on the other side, it took a lot of reflex not to let my mouth hang agape. Michael looked me up and down with his warm brown eyes and for a second I held my breath, wondering if he would have anything to say of the evening we had spent together under the lights of the casino.
He didn’t.
“I’m looking for uh, Geoff Ramsey?” He asked me. “This his place?”
“Uh- I-”
“-I told you this was the wrong building.” The other guy rolled his eyes. Michael turned to glare fiercely at him.
“Ray- I fucking followed the same directions you read. Maybe when you get a fucking drivers license you can complain about where we’re going and getting lost.”
“Maybe when you start wearing your fucking glasses so you can see the God-damn phone screen you can tell me shit about fucking directions!”
“I can see fine!”
“No, you can’t.”
I couldn’t take it anymore. “This is Geoff’s place.” I drew my gun, and pointed it steadily at them both. My body tingled at memories of Michael’s hands all over it, so in turn I hesitated when my gun was settled on him and moved it over to Ray with more confidence. “Who are you?” I looked between them.
Neither tensed, which could’ve been either a really good or really bad sign. It meant they’d seen a gun before. It meant they possibly knew what to do with a gun pointed at them.
“I’m Mogar,” Michael pointed at himself and then, after a minute, to Ray. “He’s BROWNMAN.” Then, with a smirk, he looked me up and down slowly. I knew from the dark glint to his eyes that he in fact remembered me very well. “You’re Gavin Free,” his tongue darted out from between his lips to wet them subconsciously and I shifted nervously on my foot, staring at him.
“We met in Vegas.” He extended a hand and slowly, I allowed him to captivate me. I withdrew my gun and shook his hand as Ray watched on with a bored expression until I heard Geoff approach from behind me.
“My two favourite street rats!”
Michael’s eyes lit up when he saw Geoff, and even Ray had a little spring in his step when I moved aside and they rushed in, both hugging Geoff tightly as he asked them how their flight was and what they drove and how they were feeling and if they were hungry like the pied fucking piper of the West Coast
“Gavin!” He called, as I closed the front door and tucked my gun back into my jeans. “Take your little scooter down to the Chinese joint on Malibu Drive and pick us up some dinner.”
I withheld the glare that threatened to shoot from my eyes into Michael Jones skull as he tucked himself under Geoff’s arm with a grin in my direction. “Right-o.” I nodded. “I’ll… get the bloody Chinese food.”
It was only the four of us, Jack being in San Diego on ‘business’ and Ryan being… wherever it was that Ryan went when he wasn’t staying in the penthouse. So, we ate Chinese food and watched the basketball game whilst Geoff blathered on about the heist and Ray cleaned his rifle before meticulously packing it away and Michael laughed, harshly and loudly with his mouth stuffed with dumplings and duck and noodles until I had to excuse myself to the kitchen with a glass of water.
“You fucked him- didn’t you?”
I dropped the glass, thankfully only a few centimetres into the sink so it made a loud clunk but did not smash. I fumbled to pick it up and turned to see Ray had followed me into the kitchen, and was rifling through our fridge.
“What, no capri-suns?”
“Uh…” I stuttered, shaking my wet hands dry. “…No?”
Ray shut the fridge, his lips curled around a can of Diet Coke. “No to the Capri Suns or no to you fucking Michael?”
My cheeks lit up like a Christmas tree. “The capri suns.” I blurted out, before my brain had a chance to intervene. Ray smirked at me and once the fridge clicked shut, he walked over the expanse of the kitchen until he was barely a few feet away from me.
“Just the capri suns?” he smirked. I nodded wordlessly and he laughed, once and harshly as I shifted from foot to foot and avoided his gaze.
“I knew it.” He tiptoed past me to reach up into the cabinet above the sink, rifling through it until he found a packet of cashew nuts, opened, which he stuffed his hand into and scooped a handful into his mouth. “He was giving you the eyes.”
“The… eyes?” I asked. Ray nodded.
“The eyes.” He confirmed through a mouthful. “Michael’s got these crazy bedroom eyes when he sees somebody he wants. Dude’s an open book and he totally wants to bang you... again.” Ray left my personal bubble and sauntered over to the kitchen door before I had a chance to reply with an embarrassed mumble.
“Later.” He nodded.