A Criminal Magic (22 page)

“But even some other punishment,” I press, “something to mark his turf, show the Shaws that he rules them with an iron fist, that these kinds of mistakes won't be tolerated.” Then I think back to what McEvoy mumbled in the car, about something being wrong, as I feel Frain's eyes on me.

And then a possibility slowly starts to crystallize. “Unless McEvoy's losing his iron fist,” I finish.

Agent Frain gives a slight nod, shifts in his seat, and looks up at me. His face says everything.

“You really think there could be some . . . shake-up, some kind of shift in the natural Shaw order?” I almost can't believe it. Boss McEvoy—a man cut from nightmares, a man who bathes in blood—
someone would dare to challenge him?

“I've been coming around to the same thing,” Frain breathes out. “I've got a man on the outskirts of the Shaws' racketeering operation. Older brute of a fellow, a Unit informant, never really had the desire to work his way to the top. And he says that the misunderstanding with Baltimore you heard about? Apparently the mistake was intentional, at least that's what he swears to us. That Kerrigan promised twenty men, but after meeting with some of the underbosses at the Red Den, sent only half to the sting.”

So one of McEvoy's underbosses purposely sabotaged a deal with Baltimore?
“But . . . why?”

“That's what I need you to find out.” Frain turns around, stares out his window, thinking to himself. “How much time do you spend around this Red Den?”

Images of Joan flood my mind, my flower manipulation in her hair in the hallway, in her performance circle tossing feathers around her, close enough to kiss under my magic gazebo—“Not as much as I'd like, sir.”

“Place has been transformed, from what I hear. Not just the magic show that happens every night, but apparently it's become a Shaw meeting place. That there's a room where a lot of business gets done during the performance, behind closed doors.”

I shrug. “I'm almost always on the road, Agent Frain. The game is playing McEvoy.”

“I know,” Frain says. “But the game might have changed.” He looks back at me. “Did McEvoy tell you what happened at the Den a couple nights ago, Alex?”

A strange numbness begins settling over me at his cryptic, leading question. “He didn't, sir.”

“One of the sorcerers who puts on the immersive magic show died pulling a trick.” My heart seizes, whispers,
Please, not Joan
— “Apparently he got split right open by a lightning bolt.”
He, thank God.
“Shook the crowd up good. Place has shut down for a few nights, I guess until they figure out where to go from here.”

“What was the sorcerer's name?”

“Stockard Harding. Some kid they brought in from Appalachian country back in October, when the club was revamped.” Frain pauses. “Alex, this could be a real opening, a chance to shift the focus of our little operation.”

My eyes float up to meet his. “What do you mean, ‘shift the focus'?”

“You said it yourself. There's something going on within the Shaws, some kind of shake-up. If we're right—if it somehow affects the Shaws' racketeering operation, and their gambling empire—it has to be driven by something big, the kind of score we've been waiting for. One that blows the underworld open, allows us to step in and take the lot of these thugs down. I need you where you can keep your eyes and ears on multiple players, not bound to the side of the man who's purposely being kept in the dark.”

I finally piece together what he's suggesting, and I stutter a laugh. “Are you . . . are you implying that I take Stockard's place somehow? Because that's a joke. McEvoy owns me. I'm practically by his side from morning until night—”

“And I think it's time to fix that.”

A small window of hope cracks open inside me at those words, despite how insane Frain's suggestion is. It'd be a way out from McEvoy's dark shadow. A way to escape the violence.
A chance to spend more time with Joan.
And she'd be an easy
source, no question. Someone I don't have to fake caring about, someone who's clearly got a pulse on the place, works closely with the managing underboss, Harrison Gunn, and could keep me posted on who's meeting who behind the concealed doors of that Den.

Of course, the only problem is, McEvoy would likely kill me before I ever stepped foot in the door.

“And how would you suggest I ‘fix that,' hmm?” I give a sharp exhale and lean back in my seat. “Walk up to McEvoy, tell him thanks for the opportunity, but I want to perform at his magic haven—a place he considers a circus sideshow, by the way—instead?”

“I know you're tired, Alex”—Frain keeps his tone infuriatingly even, careful—“frustrated, I get that. But you need to stop for a second and think about everything you've already managed to achieve—”

“This is different,” I interrupt, my heart now pounding inside my chest. “Everything before, there was an opportunity—there was a chance within the Shaws, and I seized that chance.” I hear my voice shaking. “Howie needed a buddy, I was that buddy. Win needed a runner, I was that runner. McEvoy needed a right-hand sorcerer for the street, and poof, there I was, seasoned and vetted. What you're asking me to do? Go up to my boss, the most dangerous man in the city—a man who acts like I'm his own personal shine tap, no less—and ask him to let me go? Sir, it
can't
happen.”

Frain attempts to speak, but I keep going. “Now, I've done everything,
everything
you've asked of me,” I say as I close my eyes. “Things I'm not proud of. Things I'd pay to take back. But I've kept my head down and stayed focused. I've done what I needed to do for our greater goal. This move is too dangerous. I deserve to say no, I've earned the right—this is over the line.”

“Alex, this
is
like the other times. You need to see that.” Frain
rests his hand on my shoulder. “You need to get somewhere, and McEvoy needs you there more than he knows right now. You just need to convince him that he needs it.”

I falter. “I don't understand.”

“You said it yourself, that deep down, McEvoy suspects that something isn't right. That something has him paralyzed, otherwise he would have fully taken care of these mistakes, with no hesitation, no mercy.” He adds softly, “So you play to his insecurities. You take his seed of doubt, and you grow the seed into a weed, then show McEvoy you're the only one who can pull the weed out for him.”

And now I think I
do
understand. But the understanding numbs me. “So . . . so you want me to be a mole for
McEvoy
, too.”

“Don't you see?” Frain says slowly. “It's perfect. You'd be able to keep tabs for him, as well as for us. But you only let him know what we want him to know.”

I stay silent, but my heart—it's pounding, thrashing, beating a resounding
NO
.

“This is too good of an opportunity to waste, Alex, and it sounds from everything you're gathering that whatever's cooking could be coming to a boil soon.”

“Let's say I can convince him,” I say slowly, softly. “McEvoy is a
junkie
, you understand that, right? Let's pretend that in theory, he agrees to plant me as a sorcerer in the Den. Even if he saw the sense of it, he'd still come calling for the shine, day in and out, and risk jeopardizing the operation.”

At that, Frain turns to face the windshield. “Leave that part to me,” he says quietly. “I've got plenty of fae dust in evidence, from a local raid a week back. It's a different high, I understand, more of a racing, paranoid trip. Hallucinations, jitters, confusion, that sort of thing. But highly addictive. I'll get a bag to you, through safe channels, of course. Expect someone this afternoon.
Get McEvoy to take it a few times, so that he's hooked. The dust should work its own magic from there.”

I stare at Frain, but he keeps his gaze ahead.

And it's at this moment when I finally understand that there are no limits to this game anymore. That I'm in as deep with him as I am with McEvoy. That even if I wanted to, I'm not walking away until this is done.

Frain finally looks at me, my silence the only affirmation I can manage to give, and the only one he needs. “Our contact should be kept to a minimum from now on. If you manage this, there will be eyes on you from all sides. You ever need me, you call my home number—but only in case of an absolute emergency.”

When I still don't answer, because fear has me hostage, holds me by the throat, Frain starts his engine and pulls back onto the road. “It makes sense for Boss McEvoy to put someone he trusts inside that place. You'll make it work, Alex, you always do. Just do it soon.”

*    *    *

I'm paralyzed with fear for most of the afternoon, turning my thoughts around and inside out, trying to analyze how to play this from every angle.
Should tonight be the night I convince McEvoy that he needs me inside the Den, working for him in another way?
I'm so deep in my own world that I barely mumble a hello to the street runner who delivers Agent Frain's promised bag of fae dust to my door. By the time McEvoy's car pulls up around seven p.m., I'm practically jumping out of my skin.

I slide into the new, almost sweet-smelling leather of his Duesenberg. I wonder if McEvoy can sense what I'm about to try and pull. If he can see anxiety pulsing its way through me like poison.

“Relax, Danfrey,” he says. “We've got a bit of a drive.”

McEvoy turns left around Iowa Circle.

“Where are we going, sir?”

“A meeting with the Voodoo Queens.”

The Voodoo Queens—one of the most powerful gangs in the Bahamas, led by Satra James, quite likely the richest and most dangerous female smuggler in the world. The Queens run their own type of magic contraband called obi up the coast to the highest bidder, a syrupy elixir that renders the user almost catatonic, floating in a strange, haunting world between dreams and nightmares. I've never touched the stuff, but more adventurous Shaw boys say obi lets you see ghosts. That the product only survives the trip across the sea because Satra's gang has made a deal with death and has trapped damned souls inside their bottles. There was a day I'd laugh that off, but now my job is believing there's truth inside every rumor. McEvoy has had a corner on their US market for years, from what I learned through the Unit. I also know that the Queens won't hesitate to use dark magic in their dealings too—when the situation calls for it.

“Are some of the other Shaws joining us?” I ask quietly.

“No,” McEvoy says, throwing me a glance. “It's just me and you.”

Just me and you
echoes through the silence of McEvoy's car on the Highway Bridge, follows me like a warning bell right out of town.
Why don't we have backup?

Maybe McEvoy wants to flirt with death.

Or maybe that's not really where we're going.

Maybe he saw me meeting with Agent Frain.

Maybe he plans to get rid of me, nice and discreet.

The silence becomes suffocating as we take the highway past Annapolis, get off a few exits later, and the exit curves us onto a two-lane road. We follow the road until it becomes stones and dirt, and then pull down a dark drive labeled
DONOVAN
SHIPPING YARD
. The drive soon brings us alongside
shallow water. A graveyard of boats, cloaked in the shadows of their storm-beaten sails, rest like long-forgotten tombstones on the edges of the docks.

“This is where we're meeting the Queens?” I gulp the panic down, keep my eyes trained on my window.

“We all thought somewhere private was best . . . away from prying eyes.”

McEvoy parks the car in one of the spaces in front of the boat shack. The place looks closed, maybe even abandoned—just a battered door and covered windows. He shuts off the engine, gets out, and I follow suit. We wait in silence in the frigid air on the nearest empty dock, which juts out a few feet into the dark water.

Finally a faint humming in the distance starts to tease at my ears.

“Must be them.” McEvoy walks to the dock's edge. He pulls his coat collar around his neck, waves his other arm back and forth above his head, and then a motorized boat, maybe twenty feet long, emerges out of the gray, ropy mist like a mirage.

As the boat gets closer to the shore, its engine cuts and it begins floating toward us. Inside the boat sit three women, all long-limbed, straight-backed, poised as statues. The one in front—Satra, I'm guessing—turns the engine back on and carefully guides the boat alongside our dock. McEvoy and I lean down to tie it off. And then the two of us extend a hand to help the Queens onto the dock.

“A pleasure as always, Satra.” McEvoy smiles and kisses the woman's hand.

“Likewise, Erwin.” Satra is tall and thin, younger, prettier, than I imagined. She wears loose-fitting trousers, a salt-laced blouse, clothes that carry the wear and tear of a smuggler's life.

Two slight young things, her magic protection, I'm guessing, get off the boat behind her. They wear their hair in small braids,
arranged and tied into complicated knots that rest like sculptures above their heads.

I've got talent, but I'm outnumbered. And island sorcerers are a different breed. Island sorcerers can call ghosts and spirits into their rituals. Rumors are that they can climb into your soul, turn you inside out, with magic.

If things go south, can I protect McEvoy?

Hell, can I protect myself?

“Apologies for picking a place in the middle of nowhere, but I'm sure you understand my desire to keep things”—McEvoy struggles to find the right word—“unassuming. You have trouble finding it?”