Chapter 157

It took several hours to fill everyone in on my day at the Ghetto, it was the only name I could think of for the place they took me. That is what it had looked and smelled like, and reminded me of.

I paid much closer attention to Marcy's financial report, along with the projected expenditures for the new cars we had ordered; we were in great shape. In fact Marcy wanted to move faster on adding several new car rental sites.

I was thinking about the closed shopping center across the street and put it out there for discussion. If the building was in good shape and could be purchased for the right price it could be a good investment. We could do a little clean up and possibly lease out the shops - there were 15 of them - at a rate more competitive to the eastern shore for a long term investment.

The current owner had run the shopping center into the ground by trying to charge Washington DC rates in an area that was economically depressed with a shrinking economy.

The thing I had in mind was to use it as part of our expanding business base. We could fence in the parking lot to store new cars and the ones removed for service. The parking lot could easily hold more than 150 cars. Two of the stores in there were big open grocery stores. We could just clean them out and park the new cars inside while they were set up for our rental sites. MAAR used an independent GPS system that was installed on all its cars that had to be installed after purchase and removed at disposal.

The next possibility was to convert some of the store fronts to office space for ourselves and also to lease out to others. We had done the last expansion here without closing the gym or moving it. We could move the gym over there or the offices over there. I really liked both where they were together at one location.

The center was to be open for inspection on the day before the sale. We decided to have a commercial inspector look at it that day. Marcy was going to talk with Jenna to see what the best route to finance the property would be.

The next discussion was about the graduation festivities. Marcy, Lorrie, Ching Lee and Vicky as well as our four Administrators were all graduating a week from Friday. All of them had a couple final exams to take on Friday and Monday. Rebecca and Randy were coming back tomorrow, a day later than the initial plan.

Randy had been busy while he was Naples. All the rental houses were now completely furnished and were rented most of the time. Jeanna or one of her personal secretaries had made regular trips to oversee the furnishings. I suspected that Randy was getting plenty of pussy when they were there. On our video conferences they all looked very tired and Randy looked pussy whipped.

The final exams were just a technicality. They had all the credits locked in to graduate and the college work program was going to be expanded next year, it had been so successful. Of all of the students, a full 100% that had joined the program had permanent jobs in their field after graduation while the employment rate for the others was 30%.

Marcy had rented the large dining hall at the Inn for a graduation dinner for all my mates, our administrators and all their families that were making the trip to the shore. She had even invited the clerks, temp secretaries and staff from our office that we worked with.

Thursday morning when I logged into the computer at the college there was a message that I had an important meeting with the board at 10. "Here is the bad news," I thought. They had a day to digest all the events of Tuesday, from the sideways turn at the demo to the over-appreciative speech by Dean Skaggs. On top of that I wondered what kind of investigation was still in the works with the FBI and HLS. Patti had not said anything about any communication or rumors coming out of HR.