“Everything is riding on this deal—your future, my future, the future of the Shaws. So give me everything you have.” Gunn lets his gaze fall on each of us again, those ice-blue eyes never wavering, blinking, or doubting that we—that he—could fail. “Take your places.”
Without another word, the troupe whispers and divides. The energy pulsing through the show space is anxious, electric.
Alex comes up to me without a word. I feel his tension, his desire to speak, to compare notes with me.
But there’s no time. Because as soon as we’re settled, like a stage cue, the double doors to the show space open.
PERFORMANCE
ALEX
And there he is. The man who brought my father to his knees with his constant threats and promises. The man who took my future into his hands and gutted it. The man who, in another time, another place, I’d take my magic to and break apart.
I’ll never forget his face. I wonder if he recognizes mine.
“Mr. Colletto!” Gunn booms across the hall, with more warmth in his voice than all the times I’ve heard him speak put together. He crosses the performance space and takes the hand of the man who haunted my father’s nightmares, who served as a compass for why I first agreed to help bring the underworld down. Why D Street? Why on earth would Gunn go after D Street, especially considering what they did to Gunn’s father, and the ensuing decade of bad blood?
The only silver lining in all this: if we’re taking the Shaws down, we’re taking D Street down with them.
“Big place you’ve got here,” Colletto muses as he looks around. “Would never know it from the outside.”
“That’s the point, of course.” Gunn smiles as Colletto’s small army—gangsters, young and old, a crowd of about ten—filters into the performance space from the double doors. I recognize several of the faces from my days working by my father’s side. Moments later more Shaw men arrive—faces I can’t all necessarily connect with names, but they’re important, familiar faces. Powerful faces.
“You know my underbosses, Val Appicello and Chris Moretti.” Colletto nods to two middle-aged goons on his left side.
Gunn nods. “My colleagues, Win Matthews, Sam Sullivan, George Kerrigan, Calvin O’Donnell.” Underbosses, all of them. McEvoy’s right hands, now pledged to Gunn.
The handshaking and name swapping continue as the seven of us watch and stare, like the hired hands we are, around the perimeter of the performance space.
“I want to show you everything we can give you, everything you’ll be a part of if we decide to move forward.” Gunn ushers his audience forward, toward the benches that the stagehands have arranged in front of the back stage like a makeshift theater. “Based on years of study, a dedication to finding and culling the best talent, and a strict regimen of training, I’ve taken seven sorcerers and elevated them into something extraordinary. There’s no one across either of our organizations who knows what I know. There’s no one in this city—hell, this country—who’s managed to do what I’ve done,” Gunn says, as Colletto’s men make their way to seats. “And I can do it again, and again.”
Again and again . . . so is this demonstration about Gunn opening up more magic havens . . . or transforming some of the other half-rate shining rooms in the city, like he did with the Red Den?
Is Gunn going to ask for a monopoly on the city’s performance business, in exchange for flipping some of the profits to D Street?
What’s Gunn’s play here? What’s the angle? And what does shine have to do with it?
Colletto sits, unbuttons his vest, and takes out a cigarette. “I’m looking forward to every aspect of this demonstration.” And then, it might be my imagination, but I swear his eyes find and rest on me. It churns something thick and poisonous around inside.
“Without further delay.” Gunn gestures to the aisles around the audience, to us, his troupe of sorcerers.
My heart starts hammering inside my chest, the nerves and expectation pounding like a pulse. Whatever lies on the other side of this performance is what I’ve been trying to uncover for the Feds, what all the lying and sneaking around and sleepless nights have been for. In our pocket off the right-side aisle, I watch Joan, studying her. How much does she know about what’s happening today? What’s her real role in all of this? Does she have any clue that her mob bosses are going to be taken down?
I take a deep breath.
Just get through this performance.
One step at a time.
BREW
JOAN
Grace begins by turning off the lights, one by one, and then Billy and Ral step in, fade the dark of the show space into a textured gray. Then it’s Tommy and Rose’s turn: the pair paints a burst of color onto the canvas above Colletto’s crowd and sends thick clouds, gray and purple, lined and scaly like floating fish, over the heads of the mobsters, teasing the space from early dawn into sunrise.