Under Parr

by Blair Babylon

  They all thought about that for a minute, wondering how The Shark was going to rig this game to win.

  Match shook his head again. “If we work together, we lose. If we don’t work together, he’ll beat us. He’s as ruthless and relentless as a tiger shark, and he just suckered us all.”

  Morrissey stood up and clenched his fist. “We are going to lose if we just roll over and take it. We may not be able to work together, but we can at least consult on each other’s ventures and make sure we maximize each one of them. Surely, one of us can beat him.”

  Match shook his head. “You didn’t see him in that macro class. He made us all think that we were the smart ones, loaning him money at a guaranteed interest rate because we all thought it was the 1930s stock market crash like it had been the year before.”

  “So that means he’s a con man,” Jericho said, ignoring the headache swelling in his skull. “Swindlers make you think you are stealing from them. If you play the game with ethics and morals, they can’t hustle you. You can’t trick an honest person. So that’s how we’ll play it. Each of us will go out and buy a ‘golf venture,’ and we’re going to run it to the best of our abilities. We’re going to invest and create value, and we’re going to be the best damn businessmen we can be. We’ve got a great track record with Last Chance, Inc. We’ve taken five companies from deep red balance sheets to profitability in the five years we’ve been running it. There’s no reason why one of us can’t win.”

  Match grumbled, “Golf. Why does it always have to be golf?” He struggled with the game more than the rest of them. They’d all become quite good golfers in high school. Many deals are made on golf courses and ski slopes, and Le Rosey boarding school prepares its students, the heirs of billionaires, to be ready to make a deal anywhere.

  Morrissey said, “Jericho’s right. This is what we’re going to do. We’ve been practicing for five years while we’ve been running Last Chance. If anybody can beat The Shark at this game, it’s one of us. And only one of 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. That way, we can save the company we’ve been pouring our blood and sweat into. We can do this.”

  Kingston slapped his knees and stood up. “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 each of us will have the side project to make sure that at least one of us beats The Shark.”

  They all shook hands, but as Jericho clasped each one of his friends’ hands in turn, the hangover sweat on his skin turned icy. The Shark would stop at nothing to win, and the four of them had little chance of defeating him.

  If Jericho Parr lost a hundred million dollars in a stupid bet, especially to Gabriel Fish, his father would take it as the final nail in Jericho’s coffin that he was a royal fuck-up.

  Even though Jericho held an MBA from an Ivy League school, even though he’d run a successful venture capital firm for five years, his father had worked his way up the social ladder from nothing. His father never let Jericho forget that he’d had every opportunity that his father hadn’t.

  Nothing was ever good enough to satisfy Jericho’s father, but losing this bet and putting himself millions of dollars in debt, maybe having to declare bankruptcy, would be bad enough to make it the sarcastic topic of his father’s every conversation for the rest of their lives.

  Newcastle Golf Club

  Jericho

  Jericho Parr coasted his Jaguar F-Type convertible into the parking lot of the middle-class golf club in Newcastle, Connecticut, a month behind schedule.

  The wooden sign at the club’s entrance read Newcastle Golf Club, which lacked imagination. The trees were a little skinny, maybe malnourished from being ill-kept, and the golf holes he’d seen while driving down the road had bald patches. The greens appeared yellowed in some places and overgrown in others. The clubhouse looked large, but its white paint was rough and peeling in places.

  Jericho wasn’t looking for perfection, however. He was looking for potential.

  Match, Morrissey, and Kingston had been skulking around the office, hinting they’d made “offers” and were “making progress.”

  Jericho felt behind. He didn’t like feeling behind.

  Not that they were helping each other or communicating. That would cause them to forfeit the bet.

  Granted, Gabriel The Shark wouldn’t know if they talked about it. He lived in California, and he wasn’t psychic. He probably didn’t have listening devices hidden in the corporate offices of Last Chance, Inc. in Stamford, Connecticut.

  Probably.

  But they’d all agreed it was unchivalrous to collude on bet specifics, that it bordered on the unethical, especially since it was four against one. For venture capitalists, the four guys at Last Chance, Inc. were strangely concerned about ethics. It had kept them out of trouble with the US Securities and Exchange Commission at least a few times, maybe a lot.

  But Newcastle Golf Club? Newcastle was a working-class town in England known for its shipbuilding industry. Maybe Jericho would rename it Knightsbridge Golf Club after the tony neighborhood of London.

  No, the name should be Knightsbridge Country Club, not merely golf club. He could raise the membership dues thirty percent with that name change alone, increasing the club’s value by the same amount immediately.

  Yes, this place might have promise.

  Jericho grabbed the warm, oversized cup of his matcha chai latte out of the cup holder and unfolded himself from his sportscar.

  Gravel skidded under the soles of his leather shoes. Black stripes of tar painted black lightning bolts over the asphalt.

  Tires would throw those loose stones, and they’d hit other cars. Jericho didn’t like the liability. The parking lot would need repaving, which would be an expense with very little return on his investment. He needed to buy a place where cosmetic improvements and advertising would increase its membership rolls and thus its value.

  Essentially, Jericho needed to flip a golf course like real estate investors flipped houses.

  And after this stupid bet with Gabriel Fish was over, Jericho was absolutely going to divest himself of the golf course in question with all possible haste. There was no reason to have even one golf course, let alone four freakin’ golf courses, on the books at Last Chance, Inc., dragging down their return on investment.

  Jericho walked around to the back of his Jag carrying his super-large matcha chai, and he was seething about being conned into this stupid bet in the first place. As he turned the corner around the rear of his car and thumbed his key fob to release the trunk, a blond kid high on testosterone and driving a golf cart zoomed past him.

  The kid’s elbow knocked Jericho’s hand that was clutching the cup.

  When his arm was slammed, Jericho’s hand involuntarily squeezed the flimsy barrel of hot, creamy tea.

  Over-sweetened bright green sludge erupted from the collapsing cup, blasting the lid aside and fountaining over Jericho’s golf shirt and trousers. “Hey!”

  As the kid careened away in the golf cart with its tires crunching on the pavement, he yelled, “Sorry about that!”

  Thick, sticky matcha tea saturated Jericho’s shirt and pants. Green milk froth slid down his shirt. He looked like an alien who had been gored and was gushing chartreuse tree sap.

  He’d worn his golf clothes to the course, so he didn’t have an extra set of clothes to change into. At least he had an extra set of socks in his golf shoe bag because the hot latte was seeping into his shoes and squishing around his toes like warm vomit.

  His house in Stamford was three hours away, and his tee time was scheduled for an hour from then. He’d called the club the week before pretending to be interested in a membership. The head pro had arranged a preview round with some of the club’s members.

&nbs
p; If Jericho were interested in buying the club, he couldn’t meet his potential members smelling like sour milk.

  Jericho grabbed the small bag with the socks and his golf shoes, slammed the trunk of his car, and stalked into the pro shop, where a confused blond teenybopper tried to insist that the shop was not open to the general public and only members were allowed to purchase clothes from the club.

  After trying to explain to the ditsy young thing that he was a guest and potential member, Jericho finally called the club pro from his cell phone and asked him to intervene.

  The head pro of the Newcastle Golf Club appeared to be in his late sixties but could have been anywhere north of forty. His rough, ruddy complexion testified to the damage that decades of sunshine wreaked on Caucasian skin. Maroon freckles sprayed over his tanned nose and cheeks right up to a distinct line in the middle of his forehead. Above his hat line, his pristinely white scalp shone under the flickering tube lights—those horrid lights would have to go—like a pile of road salt under a blanket of the winter’s first snow. The pro wore a light blue shirt with the club’s logo, a stout tree sprouting white flowers and the words Newcastle GC in unreadable cursive on the left side of his chest.

  That logo was going to need work.

  Mr. Kowalski said to the blonde, “Now, Zoe, Mr. Parr is a prospective member. We’d just love it if he went back to Stamford wearing one of our shirts. Can you see how that works now?”

  Zoe frowned as if the concept was difficult for her. “I guess so, Mr. Kowalski. So, it’s okay to sell him a shirt? Even though he’s not a member?”

  “I just told you it was.”

  Jericho tried not to judge how incredibly daft the poor young thing must be if Kowalski was explaining word-of-mouth advertising and influencer effects that slowly to her. “I’ll take a large red shirt with the club logo and a pair of the khaki Nike golf pants. Thirty-two, thirty-eight, if you have them.”

  Zoe dragged her gaze from Jericho’s shoes to his shoulders with enough intensity that he thought she might have wrung the sticky-sweet matcha out of the fabric. “That’s quite an inseam, thirty-eight inches.”

  Somehow, even still standing there with warm sugary milk sloshing in his shoes, Jericho felt even more gross. “Just the clothes, please.”

  Kowalski showed Jericho to the men’s locker room where, thank the golf gods, there were two shower stalls with dispensers of liquid soap and cans of spray deodorant in a basket on the sink.

  Jericho scrubbed the green milk and sugar concoction off his skin. The syrupy liquid had soaked through his clothes to his underwear, so he balled his boxer-briefs up with the rest of his clothes and threw them in the trash.

  At the wide mirror above the sinks in the men’s locker room, Jericho finger-combed his dark blond hair back and out of his eyes. The damp strands were beginning to curl over the top of his forehead. He needed a haircut.

  Venture capitalists were not allowed to look disreputable nor too young. The four of them had started Last Chance, Inc. when they’d been twenty-five. The dark-haired guys had frosted some gray hair at their temples to look more mature and responsible. Looking back, none of them had still looked a day over twenty-five, and their investors had probably been laughing behind their backs as they ponied up the money.

  Jericho meandered through the club, glancing in any door that was not labeled Women’s Locker Room to begin to get a feel for the club he was considering buying. Reconnaissance missions into the seedy underbelly of clubs or other businesses told Jericho far more than balance sheets or merchandising materials.

  Only a few people wandered the hallways for a club that supposedly had as many members as Newcastle Golf Club was purported to have. The lack of people wandering around sounded warning bells in Jericho’s head. The Narragansett Country Club in Rhode Island where he’d spent New Year’s Eve had half as many members, mainly because the waiting list for membership was three generations long. However, the hallways were more crowded, and the recreational areas of the clubhouse were always bustling with members and waitstaff.

  Only two older ladies sat in the lounge area at Newcastle, sipping iced tea.

  Tea. Nobody made money off the profit margin of iced tea.

  The bar area in a back room off the main lounge was cramped, dark, and unoccupied.

  Alcohol was where the money was in a restaurant operation. Unfortunately, the dust on the half-empty bottles on the back shelf did not inspire confidence in the club’s profitability.

  When Jericho stuck his head into the kitchen, the shining steel shelves and workspaces appeared clean, but a woman wearing white clothes and an apron tied tightly around her waist shook a knife at him and told him that members were not allowed back there and to get out of her kitchen.

  Oh, that was unfriendly.

  Jericho dodged back. It wasn’t just that he didn’t want to make a scene. He didn’t want to be caught snooping and then have to evade questions from the manager or Head Pro Kowalski about why he was so interested in the club’s infrastructure.

  Another door led to the general manager’s office space, but the lights and the computer were turned off.

  He shook his head. On a Wednesday afternoon, the general manager should be in their office to field concerns from club members. Everything about this club provoked a cringe.

  As Jericho wandered through the hallway, a young guy with a sunburned nose who was dressed identically to him in a red club shirt and khaki trousers frowned quizzically at Jericho as he passed. Jericho shrugged at him and walked on.

  When he thought about it, the kid in the golf cart who’d nearly run Jericho over in the parking lot had been wearing a red shirt with the club’s logo and khaki pants.

  Great, Jericho had unwittingly outfitted himself in the club’s staff uniform.

  Maybe that was why it was so easy for him to wander the hallways unchallenged.

  Huh. He’d have to try that little trick more often when scoping out possible business purchases. It might come in handy.

  When Jericho reached the lower level, one door led into the pro shop where he’d already been, so he turned left instead and found himself in the bag room, a staff-only area where members’ golf clubs were stored for them between rounds. Most clubs employed bag boys, the modern equivalent of the caddie, except that bag boys ferried members and clubs to the fleet of electric carts instead of carrying the heavy bags and clubs around the golf course while the members played.

  The bag room smelled musty like the carpet was overdue for shampooing. The members’ clubs and bags were tucked into cubbies labeled with each member’s name and alphabetized. The clubs themselves were generally mid-range sets, adequate for a recreational golfer but certainly not a caliber designed to impress their playing partners with status or prestige. Many of the clubs’ blades were worn and scratched as if the golfers did not replace their clubs regularly.

  That didn’t bode well. These members were playing golf but not spending money on it. For Jericho to increase the club’s value, he needed members who opened their wallets, not golfers who squeezed their nickels until they screamed.

  “Hey!” A woman’s voice rang through the bag room. “Is anybody in here?”

  Jericho continued to inspect the bags and shelves.

  “Hey, you!”

  He peered through the rows of shelves at a feminine figure pointing at him. “Who, me?”

  “Yeah, you! Mrs. Lombardi said she has been waiting for twenty minutes for her clubs!”

  Jericho ducked and looked around the room, intending to helpfully poke one of the club’s employees to alert them to the problem with Mrs. Lombardi and her clubs, but no one else was in the bag room.

  So staffing was another problem at NGC.

  The problems were piling up.

  Jericho stepped out from between the shelves, intending to inform the unseen woman who’d called out to him that none of the staff members were available at that time, but the sight of her shapely silhouette backlit b
y the spring sunshine caught him off guard.

  She was tall for a woman, and her form was a series of languorous curves as she braced herself with one raised arm and her hip against the doorframe. Her pinched waist balanced her hourglass figure, and her long legs that extended to the lower corners of the door made him think that she might’ve been a dancer at some point in her life.

  He stopped as he came around the corner, distracted by the sinuous flow of her body as she strolled into the bag room and demanded, “Are you the new bag boy?”

  As the overhead lights illuminated her, the breath left Jericho’s body, and his skin prickled from the buzz of the fluorescent lights above. Her dark eyes were lively, sharp with intelligence, and directed right at him. The room’s blue light flowed over her ebony skin as if it were too awed by her beauty to touch her, and her black hair was braided into perky cords that fell to her shoulders and bounced when she walked.

  She advanced on Jericho, her heels striking the carpet in irritation, and he forgot how to speak.

  “I asked you,” she indeed did ask him, “are you the new bag boy? Mrs. Lombardi wants her clubs, and she shouldn’t be kept waiting all day. With her osteoporosis, she can’t muscle her clubs in and out of the trunk of her car. So she needs to be able to store them here and to have them retrieved in a timely manner.”