Which, of course, leads McEvoy back to the middleman.
As if sensing my turn of thoughts, McEvoy locks eyes with me, then nods toward John. This time I make the knife appear in front of the man’s right shoulder, cut a swift gash across his pin-striped suit. Blood begins pouring out over the fabric. As John reaches to grasp his shoulder, the knife disappears, and I conjure it on the other side to slash his left.
“AHHHH, you crazy micks!” John roars, and without another word, McEvoy raises his gun and finishes him off with a loud, hungry POP.
The bookie crumples into a ball on the grass shoulder.
McEvoy puts the gun into his holster again, loosens his tie. “Racist.” He sighs, looks around at the puddle of blood now staining the grass. “Clean this up, will you?”
My hands are shaking, my pulse jumping, but I swallow, try to swallow it all down, remember why you’re doing this, remember the greater goal— “Of course, sir.”
I focus on the grass below the corpse, imagine parting it like hair, carving an indent right out of the ground. The dirt slowly divides, reveals a narrow valley, and the bookie’s body falls into the ground. The earth merges back to swallow him whole.
“Remind me to pay another visit to Sullivan,” McEvoy mutters, as we approach his car. He leans on the hood of his Duesenberg. “God, I need a hit.”
And this is also part of our routine, a routine with its own messed-up sort of rhythm. “Why don’t you get into the passenger’s seat, sir? It’s safer.”
So we switch places, so that I can cart McEvoy back into town, once he’s high as a kite on my shine. We settle in. McEvoy digs in the backseat, then hands me a bottle of water from the crate of them he keeps for just these occasions.
I take it into my hands, close my eyes, center myself, let my power flow through me, transfer it into the bottle—
The shine has barely cooled when McEvoy grabs the bottle. He gobbles down a large sip and sighs. He doesn’t say a word for a minute, until the magic has him, until all the gray fades from his skin and his eyes take on that pinpricked, otherworldly shimmer. “My God, Alex, this is a shot of heaven.” He leans his head against the leather passenger seat and closes his eyes. “I needed this.”
I wait for a break in traffic, and then I release my protective manipulations and pull the car out onto the highway leading back into town.
We’ve ended every day like this—every run, errand, meet—since I was vetted in that parking lot weeks ago. I had no idea that McEvoy was a shine junkie. His habit has only bound us further together, tied my fate to his with one more knot. It makes me hate him a little more—because it’s like he truly owns me, in every way. And as McEvoy sighs himself into a stupor each night, it truly drives home how dangerous this stuff is, how a habit can easily spiral into an obsession—and why the Unit needs to shut the shine racket down. The only silver lining of being McEvoy’s personal shine tap? It gives me a window each day when he’s vulnerable, a window I use to try and see more.
So as we cross over the Highway Bridge into the city, I ask softly, “Why do you think he did it?”
McEvoy shifts in his seat, keeps his eyes closed, says with a slight slur, “No clue. People do all kinds of shit that doesn’t make sense.” He smacks his lips, turns to face the window. “Swore it was the sorcerer’s fault . . . since John’s been with us for years . . . but Sullivan and Gunn insist his forecast record is flawless.”
Gunn . . . I’m not sure how Harrison Gunn, underboss of the Red Den, has his hand in this. But then I remember how McEvoy visited Gunn yesterday evening, and how he mentioned Sullivan’s name in the hall of the Den.
I steel myself, remember that for as dangerous as McEvoy is, right now he’s wrapped in a cocoon of my magic. And as much as I just want to keep my mouth shut and focus on something light and warm, like Joan, I need to use every window I get. “Sir, does Gunn have something to do with what happened at the racetrack?”
“No,” he says slowly. “But Gunn helped Sullivan choose his forecast sorcerer—Sullivan asked him for some names, since Gunn knows far more than any of us about magic. Half the time now he talks like a goddamned mystic—though I guess he always had a few screws loose, just like his old man Danny,” he mumbles. “Besides, I thought if anyone had ever heard of a top-notch forecaster picking a wrong horse like this, it’d be Gunn.” He waits a beat, breathes into the glass bottle. “Even still. Something’s wrong. Wasn’t the bookie.”
“Then whose fault do you think it was?”
But McEvoy’s faded. He starts to purr gently.
I turn off 14th Street, thinking it all through—a fixed race that somehow got botched, a winner forecast made by one of Sullivan’s sorcerers, a sorcerer suggested by Gunn . . . John the bookie took the fall for it. But it sounds like McEvoy doesn’t think John should have, even though McEvoy just put a hole through his head.