Bad Luck Read Free

voice now. He sounded like Grandma. “I’m getting tired of the crap, Nashe. I want to know what the hell you’re gonna do here.” Joseph was begging now. Bad, very bad.
    Nashe threw Joseph a patronizing smile as he moved a stool around the drafting table and sat down in front of Sal. He was through talking to the dummy—he wanted to deal directly with the ventriloquist now. “Sal, as I said, you’re going to get your money. With interest, of course.” Nashe toned down the snake-oil pitch, but he was still flashing the Bugs Bunny grin.
    Joseph’s eyebrows started twitching. “What the hell you talking to him for? Leave my brother alone. You don’t talk to him. You talk to me.”
    Nashe nodded to Joseph but kept talking to Sal. He knew who the boss was. “Sal, I know you understand what I’m talking about. A good opportunity cannot be overlooked. So you have to steal from Peter to pay Paul. So what? You make it up to Peter later and you do right by him. As God is my witness, I genuinely wish I didn’t have so much tied up with the Paradise and the fight right now, I really do. I want to pay you. Just ninety days. That’s all it’ll take. Ninety days at ten percent. Does that sound fair?”
    Sal looked out the window at the cement trucks and started to shake his head, laughing to himself. Ninety days? That must be a joke, right? Mr. Mistretta gets out of prison in a couple of weeks. He doesn’t want to know nothing about no ninety days. Mistretta wouldn’t give you nine minutes, you fucking clown. He won’t give me nine minutes. He wants that money waiting for him when he gets out. And if it’s not there . . . Sal started rocking again. He didn’t even want to think about it.
    Nashe leaned closer. “Talk to me, Sal. Say something. Everything is negotiable. What don’t you like? Tell me.”
    Sal almost spit out a bitter laugh. He didn’t like much ofanything lately. He stared at the rolling drums on the concrete trucks and squeezed the black rubber ball a few times. He’d been acting boss of the Mistretta family for almost four years now, and nothing had worked out the way he’d wanted it to. He had big plans when Mr. Mistretta left him in charge just before he went to prison. It wasn’t like Sal wanted to take over or anything. That wasn’t his intention.
    What Sal wanted to do was bring the family up-to-date a little, get more into legitimate businesses the way the other families were doing. Why reinvest gambling money back into gambling and whore money back into whores? Drugs aren’t even worth the risk anymore, not with the fucking Colombians controlling all the coke and the Chinks bringing in heroin. And crack—forget about that. You gotta be crazy to deal with those fucking nuts. Mistretta doesn’t like to hear it, but the smart thing to do is go legit with your profits. And that’s what Sal had wanted to do. He even had the businesses he wanted to buy all picked out and everything. Three concrete plants, one on Staten Island and two here in Jersey. They could’ve consolidated them and had a nice little monopoly for themselves in that area. Sal had it all planned out. He even promised Joseph he’d set him up as president of the company. You clean him up a little, shave off that stupid mustache, get him some nice conservative clothes, and he could almost be one of those Knights of Columbus types, very respectable. But things just didn’t work out that way.
    Sal shook his head, staring at one of the concrete trucks, the drum spinning round and round, red and yellow stripes spiraling. Mistretta, that clever bastard, left him in charge, yeah, but he squirreled away most of the family’s money where Sal couldn’t get at it. So any major purchases Sal wanted to make had to be made with money he made himself. In the beginning Sal still thought he could pull it off—they