"And you guys? How's tonight's haul treating you?"
The air seemed to solidify.
The lead thief and the hydraulic cutter guy had their eyes glued to that blinding chunk of Gold in Lin Li's hand, their Adam's apples bobbing with difficulty.
Then they lowered their heads to look at the few pitch‑black e‑bike batteries in their own canvas bag…
The huge, suffocating "wealth gap" instantly drowned them both.
After a brief silence, the lead thief finally seemed to find his voice again. He let out two dry laughs, the sound raspy like a broken bellows:
"Ha… haha… we… also got, got quite a, quite a bit…"
He subconsciously hitched up the canvas bag full of batteries, trying to add some sense of weight, but his voice only got smaller and smaller, laced with barely concealed embarrassment and total lack of confidence:
"You guys have six, seventy pieces, we also have six, six, seventy, seve—six, seven hundred bucks, yeah."
Six, seven hundred is more than six, seventy, WIN!
Win my ass.
