by Lee Kelly
He shuts his office door. And then he takes a step closer, rests his hand on his desk, and looks up at me with those searing eyes. “Do you know why I’m partnering with D Street, Joan?”
His question catches me by surprise, but he doesn’t wait for me to answer.
“My father, Danny Gunn, once ran the Shaws. His cousin was his right-hand man. This cousin was a hothead, a quick trigger, the antithesis of coolheaded Danny. They disagreed often, more often than not behind closed doors. Doors, of course, that as a small child, I was often behind as well.” Gunn uses a low, even, patient tone, like he’s telling me a story. “For example, McEvoy—he was my father’s right-hand man—never agreed with my father’s shaky peace with the Italian gang on the other side of town. McEvoy thought D Street constantly overstepped their bounds, and he started threatening violence when a group of Colletto’s thugs supposedly robbed a bank on the wrong side of gang lines,” he says. “Without consulting my father, McEvoy made an example out of a young D Street associate. Shot him down like a dog, right on 14th Street.” Gunn pauses. “Unfortunately, this young associate turned out to be the nephew of Boss Colletto.”
He shakes his head. “My father was livid, knew he had to punish McEvoy for acting out. But before he could, in retaliation for the Shaws’ murder of Colletto’s nephew, my father was killed in a street shootout orchestrated by D Street. McEvoy was unanimously voted in as boss, seeing as Danny’s son—yours truly—was a mere fifteen years old.”
Gunn turns to face me. “But instead of grooming me as a protégé, Boss McEvoy treated me like a threat. When I came of age, he gave me a figurehead title and a job running some half-rate shining room, which at the time was the lowest-earning operation the Shaws had a hand in,” he says. “And if things had gone just a bit differently, maybe I could have accepted my fate as low-level gofer, even been grateful for the chance McEvoy threw my way. Thing is, Joan, I knew all along that D Street hadn’t executed my father.”
This is the most Gunn has ever shared with me. And while I’ve got a clear sense of where the story’s going, I’m petrified over what it has to do with me.
“I was a young, slippery thing, never trusted McEvoy. I kept tabs on him—who he was meeting with, what he was scheming behind my father’s back. I tried to warn my father, but it was tough to get his ear.” Gunn looks at the floor. “Before his memorial service, I went to the morgue. I had to know for sure if my suspicions were right. The coroner confirmed my father’s head had been ripped open back to front. A near-range, personal kill. McEvoy’s kill, blamed on D Street, and he was left holding the keys to the Shaws.”
Gunn’s eyes get wider, brighter. “I acted like I knew nothing, of course. I put my head down, secretly planned my revenge. But do you know what that’s like, to live under the thumb of a man you despise? To live out each day in the shadow of someone who stole your life away?”
Immediately, I think of Mama and Uncle Jed. And I almost say, Of course I do. And maybe in another life, on another roll of fate’s dice, this story of Gunn’s would have bound us together, made us a formidable team.
But not in this one.
In this one, all I see is a shadow of a man. A ruthless, cunning killer.
“But I’ve won, Joan. I’ve taken it all back from McEvoy.” He laughs. “And you know how? Because I’m a survivor. Because I never. Miss. A trick.”
Something has shifted between us, something monumental, and Gunn no longer hesitates as he reaches out, touches me. He pushes my hair off my shoulder as I stay shocked still, then cups his fingers around my shoulder.
“How many times have I told you, subtly and not so subtly, to stay away from Alex, Joan?” He turns and gently presses me against the edge of the desk, until I have no choice but to back into it.
What’s he doing, why’s he mentioning Alex, what does he know—
“Don’t get mixed up with him, Joan,” Gunn mock-whispers into my ear. There’s no space left in between us, his chest presses into my own. “Don’t trust him. Stay focused. Keep that stalwart heart.” Our faces are inches apart from each other, and his white-blue eyes, expectant, hungry, blaze through mine. I can’t—I can’t think, I can’t look anywhere else—
“After a while, it almost felt like . . . jealousy. But do I seem like a man who accepts not getting what he wants?”
Before I can even think how to answer, Gunn grabs the back of my head in one swift motion, and I flinch. “Believe it or not, I was trying to protect you from getting hurt, since Alex was always part of my deal with D Street, from the beginning.”
He releases me, turns away, as my mind sputters, The deal, part of the deal—
But my thoughts stop cold when Gunn looks back at me. Because now there’s only rage, white fire burning behind his eyes.
“Then I find out that not only were you lying to my face about Alex, but that he was a mole for McEvoy. A mole you were confiding in, passing little secrets over the pillow to, secrets that little two-faced shit passed right on to my enemy. My target.”
I start stammering, “Wait, no, Mr. Gunn, you’ve got it wrong—”
“Could’ve been really disastrous, Joan, your decision to keep things from me,” he interrupts in that mocking tone. “Fortunately, I’ve always been one step ahead of McEvoy. Always one step ahead of you.”
Does Gunn know Alex is a cop? Does he know about me working with him? I can’t, I don’t know how to play this—
“Mr. Gunn, I swear, I’m not keeping things from you—”
Quick as a snake about to strike, Gunn whips his gun from his holster, thrusts it right against my temple. “Lie to me one more time and I promise you, I’ll go straight to where I’m keeping your sister and break her little neck.”
At that, I snap. Crack, and my hands fly up on their own, like they’re possessed, like my magic has circumvented my mind and taken control of my body. I barrel a wave of force and power toward Gunn. He flies backward and slaps against his door.
It’s quiet for a second. And then he actually laughs.
“Where’s my family?” I force out. “Answer me or I’ll rip you in half.”
Gunn stands up slowly, walks toward me like a wolf on the hunt, slow, assured, in control. He towers over me. “No, Joan. No more working together. I call the shots. You sit in here and wait, until I make sure everything goes exactly according to plan. After this deal goes off without a hitch, you’ll spend as long as it takes ensuring that the troupe can perform your caging spell. You do that, and maybe you’ll see Ben and Ruby again,” he says. “But you try anything at all—if you move from this room—my men will end your family. Are we clear?”
My heart is pounding, the magic inside me throbbing, near desperate to rip him apart. “No, you promised me things, you promised my family things—”
“And promises can be broken. I think you’ve been fooling yourself into thinking that you hold the power here,” Gunn says, then smiles, a big, bold one I rarely see. “Fortunately, there’s no Alex Danfrey around to trick you anymore.”
My eyes fly to his. “What are you talking about?”
“I told you, Danfrey was always part of my deal.” There’s a new glimmer to Gunn’s eyes. “Colletto considered him a traitor, thought the boy should have been working for him, only found out he was still running through a few low-level thugs who just got out of prison. So Danfrey was a gift, signed, sealed, and delivered, as another symbol of my good faith to D Street. A sign I want to start over and make amends.” My breath catches. “But you didn’t listen. You insisted on breaking that heart.” Gunn looks down, smooths his suit. “Then again, guess we both know you’re quite the masochist.”
Alex was always part of the deal. Now I understand, and the understanding guts me—
Alex. Alex is gone.
I collapse onto the chair, and a little sob escapes me before I can trap it inside.
“My boys took him out to the streets, shot him down.” Gunn takes a step back. “Cross me again, and Ben will be next. Win’s outside, guarding this door in case you get any crazy ideas like running.” He opens his door. “Stay, heel, Joan. As soon as this is all over, you and me, we’re done. And maybe you and your family get to walk out of here—final offer.”
The world’s spinning, crashing—
And then Gunn shuts his office door.
Lord, I think I’m hyperventilating.
Alex is gone.
Gunn has my family.
The Feds are moving in.
There’s no way out of this.
A tight pop of air winds its way up my throat and comes out again in a strangled sigh. I close my eyes and see Alex’s face. Alex, who trusted me, who believed in me, who made me better than I ever could have been alone.
I push out of my chair, spend the next minutes frantically pacing, anger, rage, my family . . . guilt . . . longing . . . Alex.
Something snaps inside me—no, breaks.
Like a gauntlet’s being thrown down.
Gunn will pay for this, for all of it.
A man like him deserves to lose everything.
I close my eyes, like I can literally snuff out the rage and the pain, and let cold, hard reason rise from the ashes. Gunn said Alex was working for McEvoy. He never mentioned the Feds.
Which means he still doesn’t know they’re coming.
I think about Alex’s sting, the plan we made in his cocoon of magic, perched on that fire escape like we were looking out on a whole new world. Get D Street and Gunn in the same room, he said. Lock them up until the Feds arrive and take them down. I think through it, carefully, calmly, and detached, surveying it for holes.
Because I don’t want the Feds taking Gunn and his gangsters down.
I want them gone.
I want it to be my hands that do it, that strangle the life out of Gunn.
The beginnings of an idea start to tease at the corners of my mind. And then it all comes together quickly, in images that I don’t seem to conjure but that conjure themselves, like a trick that’s sorcering on its own, in the dark folds of my nature.
The last time I let my magic take the wheel, steer me where it thought I needed to go, I ruined everything. But I’ve grown since that cursed night in our cabin’s clearing. I’m in control of my power. And I’d rather die than go down without a fight for my family, for Alex.
For me.
I straighten up and walk out of Gunn’s office with my head held high. Win Matthews is in a chair outside in the hall just like Gunn promised, watching Gunn’s office with a long, lean pistol in his hands. The gun’s now pointed right at me.
“What do you need?”
“Bathroom.”
He waits a minute before he starts to rise and says, “Afraid not.”
But as he stands, he drops his gun, just a sliver, and I thrust out my hand and command his weapon. The silver pistol flies out from his fingers, and I wrap both of my hands around it and call to the ends of the hall, “Surround.” Two thick sheets of glass erupt out of the floor, block both entrances to the hall.
Win quickly spins around, takes in his cage—the two long cinder-block walls of the hall and my two manipulations trapping us inside the corridor. He looks at me, slowly raises his hands. “What do you want?”
“Show me where my family is.”
“That’s not possible.”
I thrust the pistol toward him. “Now. I’m not playing.”
Win shakes his head but raises his hands a little higher in surrender. “Gunn would kill me.”
I take the safety off the pistol with a click. “At least you’ll be alive to worry about it.”
“They’re upstairs,” he finally concedes, “in Tommy’s room. The door is spellbound.”
“Take me.”
Win walks slowly in front of me toward the back stairs, as I train his gun at the back of his head. When we’re a few feet away from my manipulated wall, I release it, spiral it away into dust.
“Move,” I whisper. “It’s safe.”
We take quiet steps up the stairs, then follow the upstairs hallway. Win nods to a door on the left. “This is it.” But the door has no handle.
“Damn it, Tommy.” I keep one hand on the gun trained on Win’s forehead, and with the other, reach out to where a doorknob should be. Like a cat raising its back to be petted, the doorknob arches out of the wood and appears, and I grab it.
But as I begin to turn the knob, Win lunges for me in one hot rush, fumbles for the gun, brings us both crashing to the floor. The pistol goes flying between us, and Win dives on top of it, his hands fumbling with the trigger as I crawl away from him, scramble backward toward the door. He points the gun at me—
“Flip and fire!”
Win’s gun twists around in his hands, wrangles out of his grip like a wild animal, and shoots him in the face.
I collapse back on the ground, panting, turn away from the red gory mess in front of me. Lord, I think I actually might get sick.
I close my eyes, whisper my words of power, and slowly lower my hand. The floor planks below me answer my magic, curl up like pieces of ribbon, and slowly accept Win’s body into the floorboards.
I rush to open Tommy’s door, and find Ben and Ruby huddled on one of the beds along the wall.
“Joan!” Ruby leaps off the bed and runs to me. I kneel down, and she throws her arms around my neck. “Is everything okay? What was that noise?”
“Nothing, honey.” I swallow. “It’s all right.”
“I’ve been so scared,” Ruby stammers. “I kept asking Ben why we’re in here, but he just said everything was fine.”
I look at Ben, who’s sitting cross-legged on the bed. His face says he knows damn well that everything is not fine.
I grab Ruby’s hands in mine. “I need you to be brave, you understand?”
Ruby gulps. “I can be brave.”
“Then I need you to go with Ben to the train station and wait for me there,” I say slowly. “We’ll grab your things, sneak you out the fire escape. You go as fast as you can to Union Station. Take some of the pocket money I gave you when you arrived, all right? Jump in a taxi.”
“What happened?” Ben says softly.
“There’s no time,” I say. “Later.” I stand and move back to the entrance. “Not a word,” I tell them, as I open the door.
We move down the hall quickly, quietly, and I burst back into my bedroom, spellbind it behind me, start throwing all our things in the drawers into Ben’s suitcase.
“Where do you want to go?” I ask Ben and Ruby as I buckle the suitcase up. “Anywhere in the world.”
“Joan, please,” Ben says. “Tell me what’s going on.”
“This is all falling apart. The deal, my promise from Gunn—everything.”
Ben’s jaw drops. “What are you going to do?”
“What needs to be done.” I hand him the bag. “Pick any city.”
“Jesus, I don’t know, Joan. Baltimore, Philly—”
“Philly,” I repeat. It holds the sound of freedom in it. “By nine o’clock, be at the departure board waiting for me, all right? I’ll find you and we’ll go to Philadelphia.”
Ruby starts whimpering. “But Joan, I don’t want to leave you, we just got here—”
“I don’t want to leave you, either, but it’s not safe.” I bend down to meet her eye-to-eye. “Ben’s going to get you out of here, and then in a little over an hour I’m going to meet you and we’re going to start a new life. We’re going to make our own magic kingdom in Philadelphia.”
“Joan, no.” Ruby starts crying, and it nearly breaks me, “I can’t say good-bye again.”
I wrap my arms around h
er. “I’ll be with you soon. I just have a few things to take care of, and then it’ll all be over. Then we’ll never worry about anything again.”
I climb over the cot and open the window.
“Hurry,” I tell Ben, “there’s carloads of men pulling up any minute—you need to be out of here before they do.”
Ben’s eyes are wide, but he nods and says, “Be careful, Joan. Whatever you need to do, do it quickly. We’ll be at Union Station, waiting.”
I watch them both slip out the window, climb onto the fire escape, jump down onto the side awning, and sneak across to the alley. A few black cars roll up moments later. D Street.
It begins.
Harrison Gunn, we are going to battle.
And only one of us is going to survive the war.
END OF THE LINE
ALEX
I’m a bloody, sweaty mess as I ride the streetcar up 14th Street, trying to calm myself down despite the glares and disturbed whispers of the other patrons, who’ve left a ring of empty seats around mine. It’s nearly quarter to eight. I’m running out of time. The streetcar finally stops on K Street, and I dash off.
It takes about three painful blocks, but I limp as fast as I can to find a pay phone and duck inside the booth. When the Bureau of Internal Revenue operator comes on, I ask for Agent Frain.
“Alex?” Frain says in under a minute. “I’ve been waiting all day—”
“I’m sorry, they chased me through the whole goddamned city. They nearly had me, but I managed to escape.”
“What? Who chased you? Are you all right?”
“Win Matthews, on Gunn’s order,” I sputter. “McEvoy’s dead, and they found out he planted me.” I catch my breath. “But this score still needs to happen. I can get you into the Red Den—we’ll need a team of twenty, at least. The deal goes down around eight p.m. And there’re the hostages we need to consider—”
“Alex, where are you?”
“K and Seventeenth Streets, in a phone booth right off the intersection.” I close my eyes, very conscious that every minute Frain dallies is an extra minute where Joan is alone in that magic haven, dealing with Gunn. “How soon can you be here?”