Page 6 of Skins Game

Morrissey said, “Jericho’s right. This is what we’re going to do. We’ve been practicing for five years while running Last Chance. If anybody can beat The Shark atthisgame, it’s one of us. And onlyoneof us has to beat him. We can sign a side contract between the four of us that if one of us wins, the holdings stay within Last Chance, Inc.And,if one of us wins, Last Chance gets an infusion of a hundred million dollars of capital from Gabriel Fish. That way, we can save the company we’ve been pouring our blood and sweat into. We can do this.”

Thatwas an attitude Kingston liked.

He slapped his knees and stood. “Deal. I’ll call Last Chance’s contract attorney and have them draw up a side contract for the four of us. We can keep working on Last Chance as usual, and then we’ll each have our side project to make sure that at least one of us beats The Shark.”

Kingston would beat The Shark.

He had to save Last Chance, Inc. and keep his friends from splitting up.

Their friendship wouldn’t survive the bankruptcy of their company and mountains of personal debt, he knew.

His whole life had been cut away from him before, and he’d be damned if he’d let it happen again.

Everything was shit.

2

Sidewinder Golf

NICOLE LAMB

Nicole Lamb waited outside the glass doors of Sidewinder Golf in the cool California April breeze, watching the skinny palm trees sway in the parking lot’s xeriscaped islands, her computer backpack heavy on her shoulders.

Any minute now.

7:29 AM.

You’d think that Sidewinder’s chief engineer would have a key to the dang building or at least the code to deactivate the alarm system that locked the place down precisely at six o’clock every weekday.

You’d think a company whose motto was “Nobody engineers golf clubs the way we do. Period.” would trust the person doingthe actual engineering.

But maybe the motto was right.

To Sidewinder Golf and its owner, she was just Nobody, an interchangeable and untrustable cog in the Sidewinder machine who did the club engineering, and that’s why she was standing outside the front doors, waiting until exactly seven-thirty when the cubic building’s impregnable security system wouldfinally?—

Whirr, click.

The door came loose in her hand, swinging outward.

—open the dang door.

Nicole walked inside, passed the empty receptionist desk in the front office, and headed straight into the hallway to the elevator and then up to the top floor to her lab.

Herlab.

Her gleaming white and steel lab had a main room for simple proof-of-concept experiments, a clean room, and a manufacturing mock-up for production testing. The tech’s break room was in the back so they didn’t have to scrub out whenever they needed a cup of coffee or a bio break.

Tall windows surveyed her domain, or at least the parking lots and surrounding beige office buildings of the industrial park around her domain.

Nicole’s materials science lab was tiny compared to those at the big golf companies like TaylorMade or Karsten Ping. Still, she could have designed and tested a rocket ship in her research facility if she’d needed to.

But she didn’t need to.

Nicole imagined and designed golf clubs, not rocket ships.

Far more people’s lives would be improved with a better golf club than the launch of yet another billionaire’s vanity rocket ship.

As always when she got to her lab, she left her backpack in her office off the main room, dumping it in her office chair behind the desk with a giant curved screen for CAD, and shoulder-brushed one of the swords hanging on the walls and steadied it before heading to the break room to make a pot of coffee for everybody when they rolled in.