43. Oops

43

Oops

KINGSTON MOORE

Monday was set-up day at the Javits Center golf show, and Kingston had been working the cavernous main expo room for three hours with the movers, ensuring the booth was perfect.

This show was Sidewinder’s first mega booth, an enormous tent at the end of a row like an English king’s battlefield palace. Tables, couches, pamphlets, and three walk-in closet-sized golf simulators had to be perfectly placed.

At lunch, he’d left the Javits to work in his suite for a few hours, catching up on emails about his other three Last Chance project companies he was working on, too, because there was no rest for the wicked. His [email protected] email inbox was burgeoning with questions, notes, data spreadsheets, and bad news.

He spent hours dealing with the accumulated problems.

As he plowed through those, the sun finally reached the West Coast, where Nicole and the others would doubtlessly, hopefully, be rolling into the lab by nine in the morning.

The chandeliers above dripping knife-edge crystals, glassware-laden glass shelves lining the walls, and cut-crystal candy dishes standing on the coffee table at his knees sparkled rainbows in the LED lights like Kingston was sitting inside a massive, shattered glass heart.

At his direction, the hotel staff had packed the dresses and things she’d left and shipped them to her address in Carlsbad.

With them gone, the last of her sweet jasmine and vanilla perfume had dissipated, and the suite smelled like liquor and New York City car exhaust.

Finally, he was done with his Last Chance business after neglecting it all weekend.

Time to do what must be done at Sidewinder.

The first email memo was easy.

He logged into Outlook and clicked into his special anonymous email for managing Sidewinder that he now thought of as his “silent partner” account, [email protected], and typed out the email announcing the next round of layoffs two weeks hence.

The tone was terse, but it didn’t need to be flowery. The best way to give someone bad news was to be clear and quick about it. Drawing out the suspense or giving people false hope was cruel.

Kingston was many things—a liar, a traitor, a thief, unworthy of trust—but not cruel.

He sent it and then logged into his Sidewinder email account, checking to make sure it had gone through to the company’s emails because sending out the layoff notices without a warning shot was a dick move.

Yes, his October Layoffs email had hit his Sidewinder inbox.

Good.

He switched back into Outlook and his Last Chance email account, copied and pasted the April employment termination email from a Word docx in the Last Chance server’s cloud, changed the dates that people were going to be fired, copied and pasted the email addresses of the people he’d analyzed to be redundant, and sent it.

There.

Done.

Sidewinder Golf was thoroughly on track now, what with Morrissey having done him a solid yesterday by contacting Dali Manufacturing in China and starting the tech transfer process.

The mass production of the Rattler line had already begun, and the sets would be available in giant golf retail stores like Cox Sports and Golf Universe by Halloween.

The prototypes of the Legendary line would be crafted and shipped by plane within two weeks. With a simultaneous submission to the PGA for compliance certification, they’d be taking orders for Excalibur drivers, Vorpal iron sets, and Khanda putters at trade shows for delivery starting at Thanksgiving.

The price was going to be legendary, too. He wasn’t holding back on the zeroes.

The Legendary line wasn’t going to be just a luxury item. It would be a status symbol, the must-have for every golfing billionaire. No gaudy diamonds or gold on them, either. Nope, the Legendary line would be sleek titanium and steel, understated and tasteful, quiet old-money rich like no-logo baseball caps that cost five grand or outdoorsy coats that cost twenty thousand dollars.

If you knew, you knew.

He’d market them to royals and Vanderbilts, not insecure nouveau riche slobs that flaunted their gauche froufrou so disdained by those who had taste.

Indeed, an email from Dali confirming receipt of the designs and specs was in his inbox. His gaze swept over it, noting that the delivery dates were correct.

And then he slammed his email shut, slammed the door behind him, and slammed the car door of the hotel’s courtesy vehicle to take him back to the Javits for the afternoon.

He might have to move hotels to the Four Seasons or the Intercontinental. Something about the Baccarat was making Kingston’s chest feel heavy and giving him a sinus headache.