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"It’s Rawls. Open up."
As soon as the man opened the door, Black shot him in the head. They entered in time to see a man come out of the living room. He fired two shots at Black and Bobby then ran up the stairs.
"I got him," Black said. "You go find Ebony."
Black followed the man up the steps just as he ran into a room. When Black entered the room, the man came out from behind the door and knocked the gun out of Black’s hand.
Black turned around and kicked the gun out of the man’s hand before he got a shot off, and punched him in the face. Then he grabbed him by his belt and his collar, and threw him through the glass and out the window.
When Black got back downstairs, he saw Bobby coming out of the basement with Ebony. "What happened?"
"When I got down there, one of them was holding her with a gun to her head," Bobby said as they walked out the door.
"What’d you do?"
"I shot him," Bobby said.
"Who are you guys?" Ebony asked.
"It’s all right, honey. We’re friends of Martin Marshall. He sent us to find you," Bobby said as they passed the man Black threw out the window. His body was draped over a metal fence with a spike coming out of his back. "What happened to him?"
"What does it look like? I threw him out the window."
"Just askin’."
CHAPTER FIVE
Mike Black sat in his office at Cuisine and waited for Bobby and Nick to get there. When he got the call from Cynt that Kenny and three of his men had been murdered in the street, he was shocked, then he got mad, and then he became reflective. Black thought about those he’d lost over the years; and two inparticular.
Losing his wife Cassandra was probably the hardest thing he ever had to deal with in his life. There were times when no matter what he did or how hard he tried, he could not stop thinking about her. Although the time he recently spent in the Bahamas with CeCe allowed him to have some closure about her death, Cassandra and the great love he felt for her was still never far from his thoughts.
But as hard as that was to deal with, at times like this, it was Freeze that he missed. As much as he hated to admit it, he had made a mistake putting Nick in charge. It wasn’t that things had gone all that wrong. It was more that Nick didn’t have the same feel for the job that Freeze brought to the work.
Nick never wanted the job, Black pushed it on him. For his part, Nick would have been perfectly content to takeover the high-stakes poker game that Jackie Washington now ran for him. Maybe that’s what he should have done, and made Jackie continue to work with Travis and Monika on the very-lucrative projects they brought to the table.
Recently, changes in the global economy forced Black to rethink their push to go completely legitimate. They had lost a lot of money on some of the investments that they made with Meka Brazil. Meka’s understanding of the business climate in this country led her to believe that the best opportunity for long-term investment existed offshore. "China, India and even Russia are where the growth markets are at this point," Meka told them at their last meeting.
Black liked Meka; thought she was smart. He hadn’t even mentioned his new Chinese-backed investment group to Meka, and she was already looking in that direction. Black didn’t blame her for the major losses they took. There was no way she could have anticipated the changes in the market. At least she hadn’t invested in credit default swaps or mortgage backed securities, which played a factor in bringing the markets down.
For the time being, Black had decided that he would have to put plans for business expansion to the side. Now was the time to focus his attention on the real money maker. From his point of view, the recession had improved rather than hurt his business. Hard times make people more likely to gamble and men more likely to buy more pussy tryin’ to escape from reality, he thought as Bobby and Nick came in.
"I guess you’ve heard?" Black asked.
"Any idea who did it?" Bobby asked.
"No," Black said. "I just heard about it."
"I got everybody out askin’ questions," Nick said. "But so far, nobody’s heard anything."
"Somebody knows something," Black said. "You need to find them and make them tell you what you want to know."
"I’m on it, Black." Nick assured Black.
"Ain’t that Detective Harmon over there in the corner?" Bobby noticed.
"Looks like him," Black said. "What’s he doin’ here?" he asked.
"He’s here to see me," Nick said. "The detective is doing some work for me."
