Blood Money (Joe Dillard Series No. 6) by Scott Pratt

beaters and Nike sweat pants and shoes. Their hair was black – Johnny’s had blonde highlights – short, and spiked. Their bodies were bronzed by tanning beds. Their legs, chests, and underarms were freshly shaved. Johnny wore an Italian horn on a gold chain around his neck. Carlo wore a large cross on a silver chain. There was no particular significance in the symbols to either of them; they just liked the bling. Johnny led the way down a short hall and pushed a button on the wall. A couple of minutes later two deadbolts slid and they were face to face with Bobby “Big Legs” Mucci.  
    “You’re late,” Mucci growled as he stepped back so they could enter.
    “You said three,” Johnny said.
    “It’s four minutes after. When I tell you three, it don’t mean four minutes after. It means three. You guys look like a couple of mopes, you know that? And you smell like French whores.”
    Johnny walked past Mucci without responding. He liked Mucci okay for an old-school guy, but the constant insults got on his nerves. Who was Mucci to judge his appearance, anyway? Mucci wore solid-colored golf shirts with logos and khaki slacks and loafers. He looked like bulldog dressed up as a golfer. He was in his late forties, shy of six feet tall with short, brown hair and a pock-marked face. His upper body was a little pudgy, but his butt and thighs were distinctly disproportionate – they were huge. “Big Legs” was a small-time sports bookie and controlled a dwindling numbers game that encompassed ten city blocks. He’d been a made member of the Pistone family for eighteen years and had done a six-year bit for aggravated assault. He talked the talk and tried to walk the walk, but like all of the other older wiseguys that Johnny knew, Mucci seemed defeated.
    Mucci walked behind a desk in the run-down office. The place smelled of rat piss and cigar smoke. There was a monitor on a table with a split screen that showed the hallway outside the dead-bolted door. Two computers that Mucci used to handicap ball games sat on another table next to the desk. There were no pictures on the beige walls, only jagged cracks in the ancient plaster. Johnny and Carlo sat down on a dusty, overstuffed couch. Mucci reached down and turned off the two cell phones that were on top of the desk.  
    “I got good news and bad news,” Mucci said. “The good news is you guys did okay. Clean hit. Nice work. Everybody thinks so. The bad news is the books are still closed and they’re gonna stay that way for now.”
    Johnny looked at Carlo, then back at Mucci. “I don’t think I heard you so good.”
    “Yeah, you did. The books are closed.”
    “That ain’t what you told me when we took this contract,” Johnny said. “You said—”
    “I said I’d talk to them about it, and that’s what I did.”
    “So we clipped a guy for nothing? No money, and now we don’t get made? This ain’t right.”
    Mucci shrugged his shoulders and lifted his hands, palms up. “What can I say? Business isn’t so good these days. It’s tight, capisci ? Not the way it used to be. The government is offering millions in the lottery and every schmuck with a buck is playing. It kills the numbers racket. The sports bettors go online now. It’s a crime, all that money going to offshore companies. The drug trade is risky – too much competition and cops everywhere. It’s tougher to make money, so they don’t let many people in anymore. They open up the books, next thing they know the money is spread so thin there isn’t enough to go around.”
    “We make money,” Johnny said. “They take it every week.”
    “You gotta pay your dues.”
    “When was the last time somebody got whacked?” Johnny asked. He felt betrayed, anger coursed through him. He and Carlo had taken a huge risk, and now…   “I mean here in Philly. Before we did our thing the other night. When was the last time the family ordered somebody gone?”
    “Been awhile,” Mucci said. “Since Sal