Greed (The Deadly Sins)

“Everybody’s a client to you, or a potential one,” he laughed as he went into the living room with Patterson following behind him.

“You could say that,” Patterson laughed nervously and looked him in the eye. “So, what’s a high roller like you doing coming to see lowlife scum like me? Especially at a time like this?”

“Like I said, I just came to see my old partner,” he said, and now Patterson was worried.

Everybody’s a client to you, he thought.

It forced him to think about their so-called partnership, what he had on Dutch, what happened in Caracas and how that influenced his decision to get out of the DEA. “Can I get you a drink?”

“Whatever you’re drinking is fine.”

“Bourbon?”

“If it’s Woodford Reserve Baccarat Edition, you were expecting me,” he chuckled.

“Yes, it is and no, I wasn’t expecting you.”

“That’s right, you were expecting somebody softer and wetter.”

When Patterson turned to go pour the drinks, Dutch took a silencer clad Beretta M9A3 from under his jacket and shot Patterson in the back of his head.

Chapter Five

Valencia DeVerão drove her midnight blue Ferrari up the steep hill, nodding her head to the music, feeling good about where she was, and the way things were going.

“There’s always room for improvement,” she said aloud as she rounded the curve. But for the time being, things were good.

She was born Valencia Delores Porter, the second of three children that grew up in a lower middle-class neighborhood in the Bronx, a graduate of Syracuse University with dual degrees in Information Technology and Finance. During senior year at Syracuse, Valencia began working on a dating website for black people at a time when there weren’t too many out there. She ran into some issues early on in the project, but after Valencia brought in Sherwin Blake and Darnel Wilkes to work out the coding issues, the site launched, and Valencia was on her way to being a self-made millionaire at the age of twenty-two.

Her fifteen minutes of fame began when Valencia landed her first magazine cover. It wasn’t a major publication, but it was big enough to get her model good looks noticed. Television interviews followed, followed by more magazine articles and photo shoots for covers about the twenty-two-year-old self-made millionaire.

Then came the opportunities to model, and Valencia was all into it. Her involvement in the fashion industry, even on the small scale, led to an ill-advised clothing line. The company failed miserably, and that signaled the end of her fifteen minutes of fame. After a brief, but tragic marriage to Gustavo DeVerão and a move to his hometown in Brazil, Valencia returned to New York determined to rebuild; not only her life, but her company as well. She opened a consulting firm and went back to school and earned a Master of Information Services degree from New York University and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Columbia.

Now Valencia was the head of Porter Technologies, one of the top technology firms in the industry that specialized in cloud-based services such as Business Management, Storage, Marketing, Communication Media, Productivity Enrichment, Application Development, Testing and Deployment, and Big Data Analysis. So, things were good; and if the next day went as she hoped it would, and there was no reason to think that it wouldn’t, there would be one more thing off her plate and that would be absolutely fabulous.

“Other than the fact that I’m being blackmailed, you mean,” she said aloud, and laughed as she arrived at the home of Coleman Patterson and put the car in park.

As strange as it may seem, she’d come to look forward to, even enjoy these little encounters, for lack of a better definition. At first, she thought that he was trying to seduce her, and maybe he was. But after two years of conversation and cocktails once a month, Valencia had come to believe that Coleman just liked to talk about politics, global finance, social media, and their impact on the environment. Besides, Coleman had the absolute best taste in wine.

As requested, and as she always did, Valencia parked the car down the street from the house, turned off the music, got out of the car and headed for the house. Her black and multi-color Versace puff-sleeve mini dress hugged her curves as she walked. She never really understood why Coleman always insisted that she never park in front of the house and definitely not in the driveway, but it was his house, his rules, and he was the one who was blackmailing her.

“So, whatever,” she said aloud as she got to the door and rang the bell. When he didn’t come to the door right away as he usually did, she tried the doorknob and was a little surprised that she found it unlocked. Since she was expected, Valencia went inside.

“Coleman!” she said, when she stuck her head in the door and got no answer. She could hear Miles Davis’s All Blue playing as she continued into the house.

“Coleman!” she said louder, as she walked toward the living room. Valencia saw the glasses on the table and the wine chilling in ice, as it always was. What was strange was that Coleman hadn’t rushed excitedly to greet her, as he always did. It was his excitement about her arrival, the way he gushed over what she was wearing and telling her how beautiful she was, that made Valencia think that he was trying to get her in bed. The front door being opened and Coleman being nowhere to be found, made her feel apprehensive and a little scared as she moved farther into the room.

“Are you here?” Valencia questioned, and that was when she saw Coleman’s body lying face down in a pool of his own blood.

“Hu—” she gasped and covered her mout

h.

The sight of all the blood took her breath away, and Valencia began backing up slowly out of the living room. Her breaths were short and choppy, her head was hurting, and her heart was pounding in her chest. The second that she was out of the room, Valencia turned and ran out of the house. She ran down the stairs and up the street to her car as quickly as she could in the Christian Louboutin Iriza multi-color pumps she was wearing, digging frantically for her keys along the way.

Once she found them, Valencia pointed it the car as she ran. She got into her car, started it up, and drove away from there as fast as she could. So fast that she didn’t notice the man that was sitting in a car at the end of the street; nor did she notice that he pulled out and followed her.

As she sped away from the house, Valencia was scared; so scared that she was shaking. But despite that, she had no intention of slowing down. She had just seen Coleman Patterson’s body dead, lying on the floor of his living room, shot to death. She gripped the steering wheel tighter and stepped on the gas. It seemed to calm her nerves enough for her to think clearly.