I elbowed my way in the door and headed for the janitorial corner, where a spigot was set up over a floor drain for filling mop buckets. I kicked the handle up, turning on the water so I could wash the blood off my hands before it dried.
Muffled music and laughter echoed through the walls as I dipped into the bathroom and washed properly with soap and hot water.
I made a point not to get blood and other unfortunate bodily fluids where the cleaners would have to deal with the mess.
It wasn’t fair to them.
“Jude,” Valentine said as he moseyed down the hall. “Did you take care of that errand?”
Errand. As if beating a man until he pissed himself was a trip to the corner store.
“Yes, sir,” I said, though it was mostly a grunt.
John Valentine wasn’t the type of mobster to have a sprawling organization full of cells and networks. He had learned the art of consolidating power from his predecessors—or what was left of them.
He was the only one to give orders, and everyone answered directly to him. There were no vice presidents clawing their way to the top, only a dictator and his subjects. Frankly, it wasn’t a bad way to protect himself. There were no ladder-climbing backstabbers itching to take over, and he had rather creative ways of striking the fear of God into those who did his bidding.
Some of us, like me, came willingly. Others were working off debts that would never be cleared, no matter how close they got.
“Good man,” John said with a friendly chuckle as he slapped my shoulder.
The smell of fryer grease wafted from the kitchen. Usually, I would have dipped in and pilfered some leftovers. I was hungry, but the tactile reminder I had been ordered to administer had erased my appetite.
John turned to head back to the casino floor, and I caught a whiff of something distinctly different from the fryer grease. Different from the rancid sewer smell that floated up from the floor drain. Different from the cigarette odor that lingered on the floor because John smoked at the table he was parked at night in and night out. For a man who was wealthy beyond my wildest dreams, he had shit taste in smokes.
I guess the old saying about money being unable to buy class was true.
But his poor taste in cigarettes wasn’t the fragrance that gave me pause. It was light. Something sweet. Delicate.
Amelia’s back.
After not seeing her anywhere near the casino yesterday, I had—stupidly—thought she’d gotten the hint and cut her losses. I didn’t know what that meant for her brother, but he knew what he was getting into when he took a loan from the boss.
If I was a betting man, I’d put money on Valentine keeping Joel alive. Having another inside man in the finance world was too good an opportunity to pass up.
Joel was computer savvy enough to be useful to someone who had realized that the old methods of extortion and blackmail were out of date. On top of that, Joel had more financial know-how than most people.
John Valentine was the last of a dying breed and he knew it. Gone were the days of physical gunrunning, going door-to-door to collect protection fees, black market deals, and backroom drug operations.
He was a traditionalist when it came to running his criminal enterprise. One would think he would have aged out of the game by now, but he was adept at keeping up with the times.
The streets might have fewer bloodstains now than they did under the heyday of his regime twenty years ago, but that didn’t mean things had settled down. He was nothing if not innovative and had no problem reinventing himself to stay on top.
Maybe that’s what made him even more terrifying now than when I’d first started with the organization. Things weremuchquieter, and that was unsettling.
There’s a certain adrenaline rush on the battlefield. The sound of gunshots and ordnance explosions kept you on your toes. But when everything goes silent? That’s when fear really sets in.
Valentine would probably get Joel a new job at a firm that was friendly with Valentine’s criminal interests and have Joel laundering money before the end of the summer, all while dangling Amelia in front of him from the end of a stick like a carrot.
A really pretty, really smart, really annoying carrot.
But apparently, she wasn’t that smart if she was back here, trying to win money off the very man her brother owed it to.
That, or Joel Hawthorne hadn’t told herwhohe owed money to.
I had a feeling it was the latter.
Instead of heading out to the floor, I dipped into the security room. Technically, I wasn’t on the schedule for the casino tonight. I could have gone home.
