“Hey!” Gus said. “Did he do that to me, too?”

“What do you think?”

Gus tried to recreate the first moment he saw the man kneeling on the floor. Had he felt something brushing at his ankle? He couldn’t remember.

“But even if he could get a card inside my sock-”

“Which he did.”

“Okay, even after he got a card inside my sock, what if I had chosen the nine of clubs?” Gus said, trying to work out the trick. “He’d look pretty stupid.”

Shawn let out a heavy sigh. “Which is why he didn’t give you a choice of which card to choose. If you could get that deck away from him, I bet you’d find that every other card is the five of hearts. And he knows how to force the right one on you.”

Gus stared as the magician climbed to his feet and thrust the deck of cards into the young man’s face. “So it’s not that he made the card I chose end up in my shoe…”

“It’s that he made you choose a card identical to the one he’d already stuck down your sock,” Shawn said. “Feeling mad yet?”

“Yeah,” Gus said. “But I’m not exactly sure why.”

“It’s the one thing that all magicians share,” Shawn said. “No one ever figures out the secrets to their tricks, not because they’re so complex, but because they’re so obvious. And when people find out the truth, they get mad because the entire illusion depends on the audience behaving like idiots. When they figure it out-if they ever figure it out-they get mad.”

Gus thought that over. And then he got mad all over again. “Let’s go.”

“After we deliver the present.”