Jude's first instinct, upon registering that there was a meta sitting twenty feet away eating bar peanuts, was to get up and go talk to her.
He was already half out of his seat when he caught himself. Snart was still speaking, and this was clearly not a man who repeated himself. There would be no second pass, no clarifying question period, no "let me circle back to that point." The intelligence was being delivered once, at Snart's own pace, on Snart's own terms — standard operating procedure for every supervillain Jude had ever dealt with. Self-centered, marginally inconsiderate, completely consistent.
He sat back down.
The girl isn't going anywhere. The intelligence might.
"Quite composed," Snart observed.
"I'm full of surprises. Keep going."
"Three more items. I can't vouch for all of them — my own investigation is incomplete." Snart leaned back. "Third: a number of bars around the city have been vandalized recently, this one included. Here are the addresses." He slid a folded paper across the table. "If you're as capable as you seem, pull the surveillance footage and find something useful yourself."
"Fourth: I've found an ally. I have no further comment on that."
"And fifth — there's someone in the city who can breathe fire. He's been appearing near S.T.A.R. Labs. I'm not recruiting him. That's all I have."
Jude frowned. "Why not recruit him? Did he do something to offend you?"
"We've never met." Snart wiped his hands on a napkin with the deliberate care of a man who considered table manners non-negotiable. "There's another reason. I won't be getting into it."
He stood, straightened his coat, and looked at Jude with something approaching genuine goodwill.
"Think it over. The offer stands ], I'll cover the shop acquisition and renovations, whatever's left is your starting capital. Consider it a career pivot."
Jude ran the math automatically. It wasn't a bad offer on paper. On paper.
The problem was that fixed real estate didn't generate asset points. The system didn't care about property values. And a permanent address in Central City was essentially an engraved invitation for the Reverse Flash to set up surveillance — which, given that Jude's current rented room was small enough to be fully covered by a single hidden camera, was the last thing he needed.
"Still not interested," he said.
Snart accepted this without visible disappointment, turned, and walked out of the bar with the unhurried confidence of a man who had never once moved faster than he intended to. The crowd absorbed him in seconds.
Jude glanced back at the corner of the bar. The girl was still there.
Good.
He returned to the booth, where Barry, Cisco, and Caitlin had achieved varying degrees of recovery from the liquor. Barry, metabolizing at approximately seventeen times the normal human rate, was essentially sober. The other two were getting there.
"Twenty minutes," Barry said. "Where did you go?"
"I ran into someone useful." Jude pulled out the sobering stone and passed it under Cisco and Caitlin's noses in one smooth motion.
Both of them sneezed.
"—What time is it?"
"I had one glass. I'm certain it was one glass."
"Don't worry about the glass," Jude said. "We have a situation. I just spoke with an informant — not a respectable person, but rarely wrong."
Barry's cop instincts surfaced immediately. "You mean a criminal contact."
"I mean an informant. Joe's been doing this for thirty years — he has his own intelligence channels. It's a normal part of working in a city with organized crime."
"Where did you even meet someone like that?" Cisco asked. "You sell food."
"I sell food all over this city and I once accidentally acquired a metahuman in the process." Jude gave him a look. "Also, I spent several months doing business adjacent to a crime family. It would be weirder if I didn't know people like this."
"Fair," Cisco admitted.
"Five pieces of intelligence. One relates to Snart's operation — timing and target confirmed for the day after tomorrow. One is a list of vandalized bars, possibly connected to our Enderman situation. One is a substation employee whose home address just got sold on the underworld market — he's off shift in about twenty-five minutes, someone should be watching him. One is a fire-breather operating near S.T.A.R. Labs." He set his phone on the table, the camera app open, showing a clear shot of the girl in the corner. "And the fifth is currently sitting at my five o'clock."
All three of them looked.
Jude didn't stop them — a flinch response and a hasty cover-up would just make things worse, and he wanted to see how the girl reacted to being observed. If her abilities were what he thought they were, she'd make a move. Better to know now than mid-chase.
The girl noticed.
She was good — her posture barely changed, no visible alarm — but her eyes swept the room in the particular way of someone updating their exit calculation, and she put down whatever she was holding.
"Oh no," Cisco said under his breath. "She's made us. Barry, why didn't you play it cool—"
"Me? You looked directly at her—"
"Everybody looked, that's the whole problem—"
"If she walks out that door," Caitlin said, at a volume suggesting she was trying very hard to be the adult in the room, "we lose her. Jude, is the intelligence solid?"
"He doesn't get things wrong."
A beat of silence.
"I'll go," Barry said, and stood up before anyone could workshop a better plan.
"Wait—" Cisco grabbed Jude's arm. "Get two glasses of something. Quickly."
Jude, operating on instinct and a vague sense that this was about to go sideways, flagged down a server and ordered two drinks.
Why am I doing this? Why does this feel like a trap?
Across the bar, Barry had already reached the girl. Jude watched him say something. Watched her expression cycle through wariness, assessment, and then something that might charitably be called cautious openness. And then, improbably, Barry was walking back toward the table with her in tow.
"Everyone — this is Shawna Baez." Barry gestured around the group with easy confidence. "Shawna, this is Cisco, this is Caitlin — and this one—" his eyes landed on Jude with an expression of entirely unconvincing innocence, "—he was actually the one who wanted to buy you a drink. He's just a little reserved. His name's Jude."
Jude's mouth opened.
"That's exactly what he was thinking," Cisco said, with the speed of a man who had been waiting for precisely this moment. He pointed at the two glasses on the table. "See? He already ordered."
"He was definitely thinking it," Caitlin agreed, pressing her lips together very hard.
Shawna looked at Jude with mild interest.
Jude looked at the two drinks he had, for reasons he still couldn't fully reconstruct, ordered.
Somewhere in the vicinity of his right hand, his fist was hardening all on its own.
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