“Absolutely, I can. I can find a job and start next week. I’ll go build nuclear war machines. Probably not at Electric Boat in Connecticut, though. Maybe I’ll go to Virginia.”
“Of all the top talent we need to retain,youare at the top of the list,” Kingston said.
“Hire someone else.”
“Nicole, you designed those clubs. No one else knows them like you do.”
“So you need me,” she said, verifying.
“Yes,” Kingston said. “I need you.”
“Sidewinderneeds me,” she said.
“—Yes.”
“Then that’s my price. No layoffs, and I won’t quit for thirty days.”
“A year,” Kingston said.
Morrissey said under his breath to Kingston, “Final tallies are December twenty-eighth.”
That was weird. “Two and half months,” she said. “Thanksgiving.”
“Six months,” Kingston said. “No layoffs, andno onequits until the end of the year. Full staff.”
“First, you want to get rid of a bunch of people. Now, you want to lock everyone into their jobs.”
“You will personally stay for six months,” Kingston said, “which is March of next year, and this whole company goes on wartime footing until New Year’s. We make sure the Rattler line inventory is delivered to the big-box retail golf stores by Halloween.”
What on God’s green—“The what? We can’t manufacture big-box retail quantities of the Rattler line in a monthanddeliver it. That’s crazy-talk.”
Morrissey asked him, “How much of an investment will Last Chance have to put up for that?”
“That’s the deal,” Kingston said to Nicole. “If we can’t cut the denominator, we have to increase the numerator bya lot.Everyemployee has to pull their weight and then some. I’m not talking about going to China and working on the assembly line?—”
A chill passed over her spine. “It’s Dali Manufacturing, isn’t it? You retainedDali.”
He pressed his lips, then said, “They have the capacity. No one else does.”
“They’re going to swipe our intellectual property.YourIP, as you insist, because it’s not mine, it’syours.”
“It’s ouronlyshot at the company surviving. That’s what it’s going to take to save Sidewinder Golf. The Rattler line goes to retail, and the Legendary line becomes our high-end, and I meanveryhigh-end, line that goes on orderrightnowwith delivery by Thanksgiving.”
Jericho looked across to Morrissey, who wore a shocked scowl like he’d seen a zombie company shamble across the table, and he asked, “A new elite-level line going into production,too?How much isthatgoing to cost Last Chance?”
Nicole stopped short, the wordLegendaryechoing in her head. “You want to call it the Legendary line.”
Kingston sighed. “It’s a great name. If Sidewinder’s marketing department doesn’t love it, they don’t know what they’re doing.”
“And the prototype names, the Excalibur, the Vorpal irons?”
“And the Khanda putter. We’re keeping your names. We can make great golf clubs to live up to them, but it will takework.To avoid layoffs, we have to makeboththose things happen at the same time.”
“I’m telling you right now, that timeline is insane,” she said. “The only reason we got the Scimitar Edge out so quickly was because everything wentperfectly.There were no snafus, which never happens.”
“We need it to happen again.”
“You’re delusional.”
