When Omari and Nelson stood up. Rain shook her head. “It just won’t be the same.”
On the way out of J.R.’s, Rain saw Fantasy at the bar. It made Rain wonder if Jada West was in the city. She thought for a second about going over there and asking her, but decided that it wasn’t that important and kept making her way toward the door.
Once they got outside of the club and walking toward her car; a car came speeding down the street with its bright lights on.
“Get down!” Rain yelled as she reached for her gun and ran for cover, but it was too late.
When the shooting stopped and the car had driven off, her bodyguards were dead. Rain was hit several times and her vest didn’t catch them all.
Chapter Two
“Self-made men are the men who owe little or nothing to birth, relationship, friendly surroundings; to wealth inherited or to early approved means of education; who are what they are, without the aid of any of the favoring conditions by which other men usually rise in the world and achieve great results …”
Those elegant words were taken from Self-Made Men, a famous lecture Frederick Douglass first delivered in 1859. They were also words that influenced a young Milton Petty over a century later. He was a self-made man.
Although he grew up dirt poor in Coldwater, Mississippi, Milton Petty had developed himself into a legitimate businessman with widely varying interests, which included Abbate Construction, a general contractor specializing in public, commercial and private works. Essco Construction Materials, an equipment supplier, and Milton Real Estate. But it didn’t stop there.
In the early days of the tech bubble in the mid-nineties, Milton bought a startup IT product and services company called Castor Technology and rode the wave to millions of dollars. He had invested in Truckload Freight Transportation and Recycling, Ingram International, a paper product distributor, and a chain of Fish and Chicken fast-food restaurants, with locations throughout the tristate area. He had an ownership interest in an automotive parts company in Detroit that sold to the auto industry.
Once he gained influence in the construction industry, he was able to impact the union that controlled the building materials so members would buy from him. Petty joined the Towne Services Credit Union where he had so much money on deposit that it wasn’t long before Petty was asked to become a member of the board of directors.
By every measure, Milton Petty was the definition of a self-made, legitimate businessman; but sometimes things aren’t always as they appear.
Milton never married, but
he did have one son, David ‘DP’ Petty, and when his mother died of cancer when the boy was sixteen, he came to live with his father. As soon as he arrived, Milton enrolled his son at the best private school he could find. When DP graduated high school, he went on to earn his Bachelor of Finance degree from Fordham’s Gabelli School of Business.
So, there they were, father and son, who really didn’t know the other, who lived in the same house together for eight years before they were truly introduced to one another.
It happened early one morning before the sun came up. Milton was in Detroit on a business trip, when his cell phone rang; it was DP calling from jail. Milton caught the first flight out in the morning and arrived at court in time to see his son arraigned on drug charges.
Once bail was set and paid, father and son left the courthouse together. The ride was understandably quiet until Milton broke the ice.
“So, you wanna tell me about it?”
“About what?”
“What you been doing.”
“It’s nothing,” DP said and went back to staring out the window of the moving car.
“Nothing, huh?” Milton nodded his head. “Okay,” he said and pulled the car over and parked his car on the street. Once he was parked, he looked at DP and punched him in the face so hard that his head hit the window.
“Nothing my ass. I just paid a million fuckin’ dollars for you to be looking out that window instead of bars. So you need to tell me - right now - what the fuck you’re into.”
DP laid out his drug operation for his father, but that wasn’t all that he had going on. He had a small gambling spot, he did a little loan sharking, and he ran a crew that specialized in high-end car theft.
“Anything else?” Milton asked and put the car in drive.
“No, Pop, that’s it,” DP told his father.
“You sure?”
“Why, you gonna hit me again if there’s anything else?”
Milton laughed. “No. But it’s time I told you a few things about me and what I do.”
For the rest of the trip to their house, DP listened in awe as his father revealed his criminal organization to him. Like his son, Milton had a few gambling spots, but he worked white-collar crimes involving embezzlement and construction schemes and wire fraud businesses.