41. Saving Sidewinder

41

Saving Sidewinder

KINGSTON MOORE

Nicole was asleep in the bed beside Kingston, her breath light on her pillow.

But Kingston couldn’t sleep.

Above the bed, the Baccarat chandelier caught the twinkles from the city outside the glass wall, and he watched sparkles play through the hanging crystals.

He’d been a success as a man that day, squiring his little engineer around New York, showing her the Rockefeller Center in a private tour and then taking in Wicked that night, which she’d loved. His lady was happy and happily exhausted, unconscious beside him, her skin as velvet as rose petals under his fingers that night.

The air conditioner turned on, whispering cool air across his face and into his hair.

His mind replayed the conversation between Nicole and Morrissey, which he’d observed nearly in silence.

Morrissey hadn’t exactly lied to Nicole, but he’d skirted the truth as only a lawyer could and then misdirected her into a conversation about Kingston’s few relationships. The absolute truth was that Kingston didn’t bring women home to meet his friends.

None of them did, particularly.

But Morrissey’s most pointed comments had been directed straight at Kingston, even though he’d supposedly said them to Nicole.

We’re all on the hook if Sidewinder fails.

Yes, they were. The end of the bet with Gabriel Fish was just over three months away, when the value of the companies would be tallied and the winner determined.

Kingston carefully rolled over, the sheets cool under his hip and legs again.

Nicole didn’t stir, her sighing breath unchanged.

Morrissey had said, We’re overly reliant on our friends, and none of us had proper parental figures.

A double-edged comment the size of a two-handed broadsword.

—My childhood friend who I trust to go into companies that are highly at risk ? —

Yes, Kingston was the hero who saved companies by jousting with the dragons of insolvency and inefficiency. He raised them from the dead like a mage.

Kingston’s good opinion is the only thing standing between Sidewinder and immediate closure.

It was.

And Kingston’s opinion was the only thing saving them, not logic or business sense, because?—

The math doesn’t math.

Morrissey was telling Kingston he was fucking it up.

If he’d said that during the meeting with Jericho and Mitchell, they’d have known what a fuck-up Kingston was. Morrissey had let him save face, but he was telling him his real opinion of Sidewinder Golf.

The math doesn’t math.

Morrissey was right. It didn’t.

Sidewinder was a failing company circling the drain if you calculated the math using only the scheduled products and employees Sidewinder had.

Last Chance was shoveling good money after bad into the company.

For any other business deal, Kingston would have insisted they terminate Sidewinder immediately. It was a money pit.

A gaping, sucking chest wound of a money pit.

Morrissey, Jericho, and Mitchell were relying on Kingston to win the damn bet.

Jericho was the spreadsheet king of fundamentals who could lay down a solid ROI for decades.

Mitchell found hidden value in companies and utilized it with creativity that was unseen in usual business dealings.

Morrissey and his legal skills could rip apart a business plan or a contract and analyze it like an equation, understanding exactly where the most minor loopholes could be exploited.

But Kingston was the sharpshooter business guy, the assassin, the one who could spy long-range business deals like he had a sniper’s scope, the one who made the thousand-fold deals on the regular, the one everyone thought had the chance to win the bet.

And he was fucking it up.

Kingston knew it. He’d admitted it to Nicole the night before.

I am all too aware that I am teetering on the brink of destroying everything I have because I would rather lay it at your feet than do what must be done.

But he didn’t think Morrissey and the guys knew it.

In his stupor, in his romantic detachment from reality, he’d lost track of time.

And time was running out.

Kingston had delayed as long as he could, longer than he should have, waiting for Sidewinder’s bottom line to change.

It hadn’t.

Liquidating Sidewinder would result in a loss, which meant there was no way he could win the Shark’s bet.

Kingston rolled off the bed, landing on the floor with his toes, and pulled on his pants and the fluffy hotel robe wadded up on the floor.

Pressing the bedroom door closed so he didn’t wake Nicole up was simple.

Pulling her laptop computer out of her backpack on the coffee table and logging in with his all-access administrator account and password was easier still.

He stood, paced.

Kingston splashed thirty-year-old Macallen into a cut-crystal highball glass, sharp against his fingers and palm, from one of the standing wet bars and sat in the living room on one of the velvet couches, warm in his robe.

The smoky scotch burned his tongue and throat like his soul was on fire.

Kingston had every right to do this. He owned Sidewinder Golf and every scrap of its intellectual property. Nicole’s standardized contract specifically said that all golf-associated products, prototypes, ideas, schematics, or knowledge were treated as work-for-hire. Thus Sidewinder Golf owned everything she came up with.

He settled her laptop on his legs and his fingertips on the keys.

His teeth grated in his jaws, molars clenched against molars, straining.

Her filing system was organized and straightforward, an engineering schema, not a businessman’s schemes.

The folder labeled Experimental Designs was obvious, and the subfolders Excalibur Driver, Vorpal Irons, and Khanda Putter held specs, CAD drawings, spreadsheets, and metallurgy data.

He uploaded all of them to his owner’s private vault in Sidewinder’s cloud storage service and texted Morrissey.

No more delays. Get the Dali Manufacturing plant on the line. I reserved space with them in April. We’re cranking out a whole new line in time for the Vegas PGA Show in December with deliveries before Christmas.

We’ll call it the Legendary line.

And we’re expanding. The Rattler line will go into retail big box stores. Dali should be able to start making them this week. And fuck the slow boats. We need them for October when people start buying Christmas presents. Put them on planes.

We’re going to destroy Titleist and TaylorMade’s market share.

Even though it was after two in the morning, Morrissey’s text came back immediately.

Atta boy.

The first part of winning the bet was in motion.

Kingston just needed to draft a memo for Sidewinder to go out next Monday on his own company laptop, which he had also brought on the week-long trip to New York.

Nicole’s whispered voice behind him asked, “Kingston, what are you doing with my computer?”