Dennis Lee had to say, the Boethe Street Community Center had a good turnout tonight. His constituents were the kind who took things to heart. Good people for the most part, just not a lot of middle-class ones in the bunch. Blue-collar all the way.
Dennis Lee didn’t consider himself a classist, by any means. He’d started off hauling trash each night from three restaurants near the center of Boethe Street more than four decades ago. It had always been Boethe Street for Dennis Lee.
He’d been born there, lived there, married there, worked there, and beaten there. When he’d left, he’d always returned there, until he’d just accepted that Boethe Street was where he was meant to be.
He’d made his first million dollars building there twenty-five years ago.
And he would make his one hundredth million now.
Dennis Lee was the kind who counted that type of thing.
He had fourteen of his men in the crowd. They were to take notes of any talk they heard around them. Make notes of who was going to be problematic.
And then they were to report back to Dennis Lee. The mayor, that damned Barratt asshole, was going to be there tonight. Dennis Lee wanted to hear what he had to say. See if he could do his own version of crowd control somehow.
Officer Eugent was at the back of the room. He had an apartment—subsidized by Dennis Lee—near the center of Boethe Street’s residential area. It was a small complex, no more than twenty units, but it was profitable. Dennis Lee had been born in the corner bottom unit. It held a special place in his heart.
It was one of the businesses he was going to rip down himself. With relish.
Maybe even man the controls to the machinery as a symbol of progress for his section of Finley Creek.
He hadn’t meant to enter politics. That had been a biproduct of protecting his assets. But Dennis Lee had found he enjoyed it. Who cared if he was as crooked as they came? He always had been.
Jenny came in, dressed in a sedate blue suit perfectly appropriate for a lower-class community meeting. It had taken him a while to help her with her image. Make her see she had to be relatable to her constituents.
He ran the north section of Boethe Street as part of his district. Jenny ran the south. That stick Buchanan bordered them both to the east. It was time for Carl Buchanan to retire to play chess in the damned park. Get someone younger—and more malleable—in his position. Dennis Lee had a nice little candidate in mind already.
It was one reason he’d cultivated the relationship with Jenny a few years back. Things ran more smoothly when he had Jenny’s cooperation.
It hadn’t hurt that she was a little fireball in the sack. The woman loved to be touched and touch in return. She craved it. No wonder dickless Wallace hadn’t been enough for her.
A man liked a woman who knew what she wanted and went for it.
Turner was at the front of the podium now, looking at the crowd. Dennis Lee couldn’t miss the bruises. He smiled.
Hopefully, the boy hadn’t gotten the message and taken it to heart. He’d best just stay out of Dennis Lee’s way.
Dennis Lee just sat back, greeting people every chance he could—he couldn’t get re-elected if no one knew his name—and watched.