Page 52 of Skins Game

“No, I extorted dinner from you for a lab tour. There’s a difference.”

“Then let me pay off my debt. Most blackmailers are particular about being paid promptly.”

“I—um—how about tomorrow night?” Nicole asked him. She could think and cancel if she needed to. “Tomorrow’s Friday.”

That she didn’t want to stay out all night on a work night is what shedidn’twant to say.

Kingston nodded solemnly. “Ah, yes. Tomorrow works better with my schedule, too.”

A quiver raced along her nerves. “Great.”

17

Hypothetically

KINGSTON MOORE

Kingston’s phone had been ringing off the hook since five o’clock in the morning because that was eight in the morning and the start of working hours in Connecticut.

A few hours earlier, he’d delicately extricated himself from Nicole’s limbs tangled around him while they slept and moved to the other couch for propriety’s sake, but he hadn’t wanted to answer the phone and wake her up.

It was just those guys from Last Chance, Inc., anyway. He’d missed the Thursday morning standing meeting and hadn’t called in, so they’d assumed he was dead.

He called Jericho Parr back from his rental car as he drove back to his hotel through the desert xeriscapes and emerald-velvet golf courses and talked at the windscreen. “Sorry, I missed the meeting.”

“You run off and disappear like we’re not even going to notice. Of course, we notice when you’re missing,” Jericho’s voice said. “It was concerning that you turned the plane around and headed right back to California like there was an emergency, and then there was no word from you. Everything okay?”

The other three guys were the only people in the world who might check in on Kingston to make sure he hadn’t fallen off a cliff or dropped dead in the middle of a round of golf. “Yeah, I’m working on my golf company for the wager, so I’m not supposed to say too much.”

“Oh, sure. You know that The Shark is probably asking for advice from everybody he knows, right?”

“We could ask other people, in theory, just not each other.”

“It doesn’t seem fair that Gabriel Fish can ask any of his close friends for advice, and we can’t ask each other.”

“Assuming Gabriel Fish has close friends, as opposed to contacts or assets.”

“Or marks. Anyway, in general terms, do you have any hypothetical questions?”

Right, because what was The Shark going to do, tap their phones? “Let’s say I have a high-end golf club manufacturer that I bought for pennies on the dollar because the owner snorted all available cash reserves and leveraged customer deposits on this year’s deliveries for the same.”

Jericho’s reaction was pained.“Oh.So you need to let people go, at least half of the staff, to start with. Maybe seventy-five percent. But the first thing you’ll need to do is slash your costs down to the bedrock.”

Kingston sighed. “Yeah, I know.”

“How do the balance sheets look?”

Yes, Jericho was the king of Microsoft Excel. Nothing existed unless it was on a spreadsheet. “Cash flow is negligible. For the next year, all deliveries of any current hypothetical inventory will fulfill pre-paid orders, not count as revenue.”

“You need to deliver those orders that people already put money down on because you’ve got to strike the red off the balance sheet, but you need to put a new product out there.”

“Yeah,” Kingston said.

“Yeah, you need a new product,” Jericho mused. “And the problem is, it’s got to be a blockbuster. I mean, it’s got to be a product that everyone and their dog is clamoring forright now.You need a hundred thousand people, maybe twice that, to pre-pay for it by the end of the year.Pre-pay,so the money is in the books forthisyear.”

“That’s what I thought, too.”

“Do they have a product like that in development, theoretically?”