Season 2, Episode 16: Midland

After Amber's triumphant blowout, I had to abandon her. That weekend, I was due to visit the folks in Dallas for Christmas.

Amber took it well. "It's fine," she said. "We'll exchange presents when you get back. And you already threw a big party!"

"You threw the party, babe," I said. "All I did was show up."

"And pay the bill!" she beamed.

When I got home from the airport, Amber threw a little party at the house for us. Two presents, a bottle of wine, not much in the way of clothing. It was exactly what I needed after the mess my brother Tyler made at my parents' house in Dallas on Christmas Day.

Amber bought me a sweater for Christmas. I got her a necklace. We'd agreed we weren't going to do a big thing.

Especially since the big thing was Amber getting to ride on the Stafford Oil Gulfstream jet the next Friday as we went to Midland for company business.

She knew she didn't really need to go. That's why she was so grateful that I took her. It's also why she was pretty maniacal about her packing for the trip.

"OK, so - I'm trying to decide if I should pack my heavy parka, or if a long coat is plenty. It's supposed to get down into the 30's on Friday night, so..."

"Amber," I said.

"What?"

"We're literally flying tomorrow and coming back on Saturday. You need one change of clothes. Why are you packing four?"

"Ummmm, really? Options! Hello?"

"Babe, the time to choose options is now - not after you pack the largest bag we have with stuff you don't need."

"Oh my God, I can't deal with you right now. Do you want me to pack your bag for you?"

"Nope. That I think I can handle."

She smiled at me and then added another pair of shoes she didn't need.

"Listen," I said, "I don't want to alarm you or anything, but I'm a little nervous about this trip. I guess I need to warn you; it could end up going really badly."

"Really? Why?"

"Here's the thing: Lester's audit is still ongoing, but the numbers he's already showing are just terrible. This company is in really awful shape and a lot of changes need to be made, and I'm not sure Michael quite understands the gravity of the situation."

"But I thought he was the one who wanted to make changes."

"He does. I don't think he gets just how urgent the problem is, though. Part of this trip is me trying to sell him on a full corporate restructuring of Stafford Oil."

"Wow. That much?"

"There is a not-small chance that when we go to Harlan Voss' ranch on Saturday, he's going to declare war."

"That's scary, Oscar."

"I'm going to try to sell him on giving us time to restructure the company. The board meets on January 16, so just more than two weeks, and I've got to get Voss not to try to take the place over."

"He can do that?"

"There are 19 seats on the board. Voss controls seven directly, plus another one that an ally of his controls. The Staffords have 11 of them, but some of those seats are shaky. Something goes wrong and Voss could get control. If he does, it sounds like he'd break the company up and sell it off piece by piece."

"Well, that's bad."

"It is. But honestly, it's probably what ought to happen, as badly as Stafford Oil is run. The problem is the gas leases."

"OK, I don't know what that means."

"All right, so a few years ago there was a big natural gas discovery up in northwest Louisiana and east Texas. They called it the Haynesville Shale, and it resulted in so much production of natural gas that there wasn't a place to put it all. It largely petered out because the price dropped through the floor."

"OK, and?"

"So the thing is, not all the mineral rights on the land up there, in places where it's expected there's a huge amount of natural gas, were leased up in that first big wave. When the price dropped off, there wasn't any point in doing it. But one of the biggest landowners in the whole area went and died, and his heirs got hit with some big estate taxes they couldn't pay, and so they auctioned off the mineral rights to a ton of land up there in a gigantic lease sale."

"I think I'm following you so far."

"The thing was, Jim Stafford convinced the board of Stafford Oil to take on debt in order to go big into that lease auction. They were getting access to a massive amount of natural gas really cheap, and there was the prospect of a number of big export terminals getting built on the Gulf - which would mean it was all of a sudden really easy to sell that gas to customers all over the world, and that would mean the price of the gas would stabilize and make a fresh round of production really profitable."

She gave me a double thumbs-up and tucked another scarf - this made either three, or maybe four - into her suitcase.

"But Stafford didn't put those leases in Stafford Oil's name. Instead, he put them in Erica's and the kids' names."

"That's not illegal?"

"It's really complicated. He got very cute about how he did it with the lawyers. But it's been a real issue between Voss and the Staffords ever since, and Voss has been demanding those leases be put back into the company's name so that they'd be included in the price of the company if it was sold."

"That seems fair," she said.

"It is. But if the company is sold right now, its value is really low due to its bad profitability. There's debt, and so if it's sold now you're getting very little for it. Erica and the kids need to keep those leases so they'd actually have something. Unless..."

"Unless what?"

"Unless we can get the company back to the point where it's profitable."

"Yeah, but Lester's audit says it's basically hopeless."

"Well, yes and no. My pitch is that the audit actually gives us an opportunity. Stafford Oil is at break-even, essentially, and they've got tens of millions of dollars running out the door, so if it simply hit the industry average from a management standpoint there's enough profit to keep everybody happy."

"And Michael agrees with you."

"Yes. But I don't think he gets how deep we'll need to go in shaking out the organization. So tomorrow on the plane I'm gonna be leaning on him. It might get contentious."

"OK, well, but don't be mean."

"Amber, come on."

------------------------------

"Oh my God I can't wait to send this to Katie. She's gonna be sooooo jealous."

"It's pretty awesome flying private, isn't it Amber?" said Michael, as he watched Amber snapping away at selfies just before the jet started rolling down the runway.

"OK," I said, "can we talk about what we're doing on this trip?" I asked. "It's not like we have much time to work with over there, and we're absolutely going to have to have a plan for when we drop in at Voss' ranch tomorrow."

Michael just shrugged.

"Look, Oscar," he said. "Voss is a cantankerous old sonofabitch, but at the end of the day he's basically toothless. All we need to do is press the flesh with him and make him feel important and it'll be fine."

I just looked at him like he had three eyes.

"What?" he said, after Amber stopped her selfie-ing and looked at me.

"That isn't, at all, where we are with Harlan Voss, Michael."

"Sure it is. He's been with us for 25 years. He's not going anywhere."

"Mike," I said, "Voss was ready to lead a revolt in October at the board meeting. When your dad passed, it got canceled. Now that he's gone? The only smart assumption at this point is that he's going to make another run."

"How do you know that, Oscar?" he scoffed.

"It's all there in your dad's email correspondence that I've been reading and you haven't," I said. "This is why I'm on your ass about going through all that stuff."

"Amber," Michael said, turning away from me, "so this plane is kinda new. We don't own it outright; we're part of a consortium and it's like three planes for five companies. But this is the nicest one. It's a Gulfstream G600. It's not the biggest one they make, that's the G800. I've been on one of those, though. Honestly, this is just as nice. And like Dad always said, if you're gonna fly, do it right!"

"It's amazing," she said.

"You look like you belong in one of these," he told her.

So she gave me a massive smile.

"Hey Oscar, do you think I belong in a Gulfstream?"

"The way things are right now," I said, "I'm not sure any of us belong on one. And if we don't get this company's shit together, starting like right now, we'll be lucky if they let us fly home on this thing."

Michael didn't like that.

"So can we actually make a plan here?" I said. "We're straight to the office after we get off this plane, and we'd better be prepared."

He grudgingly turned in my direction, and Amber gave me a worried look before gawking out the window for most of the rest of the flight to Midland.

--------------------

Amber had asked me if she had to be in the conference room at Stafford Oil's office in Midland when we were doing our meetings. I told her no.

"Good," she said, "because this all seems really tense. So I can just set up in a cubicle somewhere and do laptop things?"

"Yep. Perfect."

"OK. Good plan."

That was the first time those words had been used on the trip to that point.

A few minutes later, Michael and I were doing a Bob-and-Bob performance interview with Ray Lee Everett, who was the Field Operations Manager for Stafford Oil in the Permian Basin. Lester's audit had found item after item of poor management, waste and maybe worse. According to Lester there was at least $11 million in unproductive or problematic spending out of the Midland office Everett ran, and my plan was to go through it and give Everett a chance to defend it.

Not that I expected him to do a very effective job of that, of course, but the exercise could lead to information that we could use in planning our demands for his replacement.

But more than that, I wanted to give Ray Lee the rope he'd use to hang himself, so that when I then offered him a pretty half-assed early retirement package he'd consider it generous and go quietly.

Which was good, for a couple of reasons. First, Ray Lee's brother in law was, like him, one of Jim Stafford's "old bulls" - the cronies who'd been bleeding the company dry. But Steve London wasn't just an incompetent with an extra-padded expense account. He was Stafford's Executive Counsel and a member of the board. There might not have been a good way to get rid of Ray Lee, but I wanted a minimum of acrimony.

The other reason was that I wanted to do a national search for his replacement, and it would take a while. That meant having him stick around for a few weeks before getting his golden - or copper - parachute.

So I started with questions about the turnover in the Permian field operations.

"Y'all gotta understand, people here are real mobile. They'll work one company, then the next."

"You've lost six field supervisors in two years, though," I said, "and our research indicates Stafford's people get paid the industry average. It doesn't make a lot of sense."

Ray Lee just shrugged.

"What about the overages on the company AMEX, Ray Lee?" asked Mike.

I grimaced and looked at him. The credit card stuff was last on my list. I wanted to save that until Ray Lee was beaten and begging, and here he was working backwards. And it pissed me off because he was directly sidestepping the plan I'd just discussed with him on the plane.

But I kept quiet, mostly because Ray Lee looked like a volcano about to explode.

"Fuck you, Michael," he said. "You never spent a damn second in the field."

"No," said Mike. "Fuck you. You're fired."

Ray Lee scoffed. "You can't fire me. I got a contract."

"Well," I said, "we've prepared an early-retirement agreement that..."

"Eat shit," he said. "I don't know you. You think you're gonna negotiate with me?"

"You didn't listen," Mike said. "You're gone." And he pulled out his phone and sent a text. Two guys showed up in the conference room and escorted Ray Lee out of the office.

"What the hell was that?" I asked Mike when Ray Lee, cursing at the two of us like a sailor, had been yanked out of the conference room.

"What's the point of niceties?" he said. "Take out the trash."

"You just made an enemy of the company's executive counsel, that's why."

"It's not like he's any good, either."

"Yeah. I get that. Except he's on the freaking board, Mike. You don't have many board members to spare. Not to mention we now have a massive vacancy we need to fill with somebody competent, or else this actually gets worse."

He shrugged. Mike was already determined to hire Chad Beckstrom. And that wasn't my choice.

I hadn't met Beckstrom. I didn't totally hate the idea of hiring him, but you don't fix an unprofessional operation by making hires without lining up multiple qualified candidates.

Then I did meet Beckstrom. He was one of our next meetings. And when he sat down at the conference table he didn't exactly make a good impression.

"I know you. I saw you at Jim's funeral, didn't I?"

"I believe so, yes."

"Awwww, yeah. Now I remember. You were that guy makin' a move on my girl."

"That's not..."

"So Chad," Michael said, "it seems we've got an opening. Ray Lee's job has just become vacant. How's 225 grand and a company truck grab you?"

I looked at Michael like he was crazy, and Beckstrom caught that.

"Wait a minute," he said. "What exactly is your role here, Mr. Barr?"

"I'm the management consultant Stafford Oil has brought in to assist in the corporate restructuring the company's undergoing," I said.

"And you don't think I can do Ray Lee's job?"

"I certainly didn't say that."

"You didn't have to."

"Well, it doesn't matter, because Mr. Stafford here has extended you an offer and I'm behind him all the way."

"Yeah, all right," Beckstrom said, and then something which sounded like "silk socks pussy" came out under his breath.

I shook that off, and used the opportunity to grill Beckstrom on the questions we were going to hit Ray Lee with, essentially getting him to critique his old boss while at the same time letting Beckstrom know that we were very aware of the bullshit going on in that office.

It went better than I expected. Beckstrom volunteered that Stafford's Permian Basin operations were a "clusterfuck" and then hit Michael up for a $50,000 housing allowance.

Of course Michael said yes. He couldn't say no - otherwise he didn't have a Field Operations Manager.

Then Beckstrom got up and announced he had work to do, and just left.

"So you're a yes on the job, correct?" I asked him.

"Y'all draw up a contract and I'll have a look," he said.

I was less than enthused with that response. Michael thought it was just fine.

"You ever had TX bourbon?" he asked me.

"I take it that's the local stuff? It's not bourbon unless it comes from Kentucky, you know."

"Meh. TX is great. We ought to gather up your girl and grab a drink. Seems like we're done for the day."

We more or less were, though I'd phrase it more like "we'd done enough damage."

But I gathered up Amber, who'd found herself a secluded cubicle in the corner of the building, and we ran to the hotel to check in before we headed for a barbecue joint Michael said was the best in town.

And he wasted no time getting himself loaded. By eight o'clock, Michael was bragging about the shitshow at the office that afternoon.

"And they're all gonna know. From now on. You fuck with the Staffords, it'll come back on you in spades."

"Great," I groused. Amber just gave me an uncomfortable look.

"Hey, come on," he said. "This was a change we needed to make."

"I'm well aware. But there's a way to do things."

"But now they know. That's the way, Oscar! New sheriff in town!"

I just sipped my whiskey. At the end of the day all I could do was lead the horse to water. If he didn't want to drink, or if he insisted on drowning himself, it was beyond my control.

"Damn," Michael was saying to Amber. "You are just one incredible piece of art, aren't you?"

"Well, thank you," she said. "That's so nice of you to say."

"No, I mean it. You're drop-dead gorgeous. Like, you're ... if you were real, OK, you'd be..."

"Michael, really," she said. "That's sweet. But you don't need to..."

"I'm just saying. You'd be with some NFL quarterback or a rock star. Poor Oscar wouldn't have a chance with you."

I just shut my eyes, because I had a feeling what was coming next would be bad.

"Just what is THAT supposed to mean?" she snapped. "Oh, like Oscar isn't GOOD ENOUGH? What, and YOU ARE?"

"Oh, that came out wrong," Michael said. "That wasn't what I was trying to get across. Oscar, I'm sorry.

I just waved it away dismissively. I was pretty irritated, but what was the good in having a fight with this kid when we had bigger fish to fry?

Amber was looking at me with an "Oscar, defend yourself!" expression. I gave her an almost-imperceptible shake of the head.

But I did manage to get that little party broken up not much later, insisting that Michael down a gallon of water before he went to bed, because the last thing we could afford was for him to appear hung over the next morning when we made the trek to Voss' ranch.

So what did he do? Camped out at the hotel bar until it closed.

And the next morning, on the road...

"Man, look. I really want to apologize. I'm so off my game this whole trip and I've done nothing but make mistakes. And what I said last night, Oscar... I didn't mean that."

"Look," I said, "I don't care about any of that shit last night. It isn't important. What is important is that I told you to hydrate so you wouldn't look like we fished you out of the drunk tank, and look at you."

"I know. I'm sorry."

"I want your promise that you will let me do the talking when we get to Voss' place," I said. "If I don't get that, and have you stick to it, I'm out. Seriously. I will drive this thing to the airport and Amber and I will get on a plane home and you can see Voss all by yourself."

"OK, I get it. And yeah, you should. I'm resigned to the fact that I'm in over my head."

I smiled and nodded. You're damn right you are.

So we spent that drive, which took an hour, in silence - Michael because he was suffering, Amber because she was in terror, and me because I was playing out all the possible reactions Voss would drop on me once I got started making my pitch for peace.

It helped that this F-250 we were using more or less drove itself. My ancient Explorer's capacities ended at cruise control.

---------------------------

And it turned out that everything I'd rehearsed in my head was a miss.

Voss was alone at his house when we arrived. He came out to meet us.

"Consuela is usually here," he said as he walked us in, "but she's got a family emergency back in El Paso. So you're stuck with just me. Oh, and Barker was gonna be here as well, but he had a hold-up back in Dallas."

Barker was Voss' son and the current CEO of his company. He was about my age. I hadn't met him yet. I'd been warned that he was a lot meaner than his father, which was saying something.

So Michael made the introductions, and Voss invited us in. Amber immediately asked if he'd like her to make coffee, and Voss said yes.

"Looks like young Michael here could use some," he said.

Then he sat us down at his dining room table. I jumped in quickly to get things started, hoping to seize the narrative, so to speak.

"Mr. Voss," I said, "there's a lot going on at Stafford Oil that you, as a 36 percent shareholder in the company, should be made aware of. If you don't mind, I've taken the liberty of preparing a report that I'd like to go through with you."

"Just give me the short version," he said, looking at Michael. Michael looked at me.

"First, sir," I said, "when the company brought me in as a management consultant I immediately brought in an expert to do a forensic audit of Stafford Oil's books, and in that report are some preliminary results of the audit, identifying questionable spending, waste and other inefficiencies."

"Y'all got an independent audit of the books?" Voss asked, looking at me.

"I know it's an item you've been asking for for some time," I said. "We agree it needed to be done, so we're doing it."

He looked at Michael. Michael nodded.

"Well, then," he said, opening the report.

"This here number is preliminary, you say?" Voss asked me a couple of minutes later. "This is waste in the Permian field of operations?"

"The bottom number on Page 5 is inclusive of a bunch of things, not just waste," I said. "Some worse than waste, some not as bad. But yes. We think there's $11.3 million that could go toward the company's bottom line with a revamped Midland office, and we've already taken steps to implement the changes that'll get us there."

"Like what?"

"For starters, a new Field Operations Manager."

"You fired Ray Lee?"

"Michael did. Yesterday. Practically as soon as we got off the plane."

Voss gave him a squinty look.

"What'd you do for a replacement?"

"We have a field supervisor who's been working in both Midland and in our Tuscaloosa Marine Shale field in south Mississippi," Michael said. "His name is Chad Beckstrom. We think he's got the right temperament and fighting spirit to turn things around."

"Hmmph," was all Voss said to that.

Just then, Amber was depositing mugs of steaming black coffee in front of the three of us.

"I'm sure I can find some milk or cream and some sugar if anybody wants some," she said.

"Naw," said Voss. "Why don't you have a seat, honey?"

So Amber did.

"Your house is very cozy," she said. "It really does feel like a home. Like it's full of good memories!"

Voss chuckled.

"Funny you say that," he said. "After Daisy Mae - she was my wife, and this house was her place more 'n mine - after she died, Barker's wife Alicia all but demanded I let her redecorate this place. I told her hell no. I'm keepin' it just like this. When I drop dead they can do what they like, but I ain't changin' a thing."

"Good for you!" said Amber with a big smile.

And now she had Voss' full attention. Michael and I were mere spectators.

Voss told Amber his life story.

The ranch was Daisy Mae's family's place. It was where she grew up. She was Daisy Mae Richardson; that was her maiden name, and the Richardsons were ranchers with tons of land in West Texas. When she got the house, she insisted that was where she wanted to live.

"She told me, 'you go out and conquer the world,' but when you're ready to rest a while, I'll be here waitin,'" Voss said.

And he admitted that the house, which hadn't changed hardly at all in the six years since Daisy Mae's death, was his shrine to her.

"I met her on a bus," he told Amber. "Can you believe that? A Greyhound bus from Fort Worth to Midland. I was 24 years old, and I'd bounced around learnin' the oil business since I was 16. I was runnin' the roads tryin' to raise some money to start my own oil company, and my beat-up old truck broke down in Fort Worth. I'd driven there from Abilene to get a check from an investor, and the next stop was Midland.

"I didn't have hardly any money, so I figured if I couldn't drive there I'd scrimp and take the bus. How I'd get back to Abilene I didn't even know.

"But anyway, I get on that bus and I'm rehearsin' my pitch to Mr. Claude Travis, who's my intended victim down here, and then I look over and damned if I don't see an absolute angel in the seat next to mine. That was Daisy Mae. She was a sorority girl from TCU goin' home for Thanksgivin', and I was a broke high school dropout tryin' to be an oil man.

"And by the time that bus made it to Midland we was head over heels in love."

"Love that story," I said. Voss nodded to me.

"Hell, I stayed in this very house and ate dinner with her family in this very room that night," he said, "and Daisy Mae's father drove me to see Mr. Claude Travis the next day. Then he collected me, took me to lunch and asked to hear my investor pitch."

"He was a good contact for you to make," I said.

"The best. He asked me what I needed and how short I was, and I told him that Travis put me within 25 grand of my target but now I was probably another 10 short what with needin' a new truck. So he took me to the bank and co-signed a loan with me. On one condition."

"What was that?" Michael asked, rallying a little as he gulped down his coffee.

"That I take good care of his daughter."

"Oh my God," said Amber. "That's so sweet!"

"I drove back to Abilene in a new truck I bought right down the road, and the rest is history. And when those wells came in, Daisy Mae's daddy took the money and moved the whole brood down to Padre Island. The Richardsons' been in real estate down there ever since, and what used to be ranch land around here is mostly well pads now.

"But Daisy Mae insisted we keep the house she done grew up in, and so we did. Been livin' here 61 years, and while I got places in Wyoming, Houston, Baton Rouge and Myrtle Beach I reckon this is where I'm gonna breathe my last."

"That's just the sweetest story I ever heard," Amber said, tearing up a little.

"Well," said Voss, "I'm glad you enjoyed it. Anyway, this is why I'm out here. I have those other places, but mostly they're for the kids and grandkids now. I leave when I have to and that's about it."

Amber smiled at him.

And then he looked at me. "Let's you and me have a walk," Voss said, shooting out of his seat with a velocity I didn't expect from an 86-year-old.

"Certainly," I said.

The next thing I knew I was hustling to keep up with the old codger.

"I get a distinct impression that you're the man I talk to now," he said, turning to me after we'd made it a good bit out of earshot from the house. "Except I don't know you. I expect I'm gonna have to remedy that. Go ahead and tell me your story.

I hesitated, because this was a scenario I hadn't mapped out in my head. Also because it struck me that Voss had probably built a pretty good dossier on me and if he caught me massaging my resume or holding anything back, all my fears about this meeting would come true.

And then I started with the safe stuff: I was a management consultant and I knew the Stafford family, and I was brought in after Jim's death to give Michael a fresh set of eyes as he got started as the CEO.

"Oh, you're more than that," he said. Which proved the dossier theory.

"What, that I'm an old friend of Erica's? That we used to date before she got together with Jim? Sure. That's true."

"I hear there's more to it than that."

"There isn't. We've rekindled... something of late, but if you're referring to anything during their marriage, I'm here to tell you that Erica never cheated on Jim with me. Ever.

That was a little present Jim Stafford had left for me in his email archive. Apparently he'd spread it around that he'd suspected his wife was two-timing him with me, and this was now part of the lore at Stafford Oil.

Voss was looking at me, like he was trying to decide if I was lying to him.

"It never happened, sir," I said.

He nodded.

"It would be like Jim to do a thing like that, cookin' up such a story. I was friends with him for a lot of years, but that man had some evil in him. And he did that to Erica, not you. You understand?"

"She never mentioned a word of it to me," I said. "I guess she just put up with it."

Voss looked up at the sky.

"I'm not sick or anythin', but when you hit 86 years you can't escape the fact your time is growin' short on this earth," he said. "You begin thinkin' about your life, and the regrets you have - and I don't have many - they eat at you."

"I'm thirty-something years younger and I have that same problem," I said.

"You know what my biggest regret is? It's the $200 million I threw down a hole on Jim Stafford and his lies and empty promises."

"I've read his emails," I said. "I know all about it."

That surprised him.

"Tell me about your family," he said.

He knew I wasn't married and didn't have any kids, so he specifically asked about my folks.

So I told him.

I told him my father was a long-time corporate suit who worked his way up to just under the C-suite before retiring to a healthy nest egg, and for Dad, work was a means to the real end he cared about - golf, hunting, fishing and Cowboys season tickets on the 40 yard line.

Voss chuckled at that.

I said my father was a rock-solid, competent, no-drama, straight-laced man who barely needed to raise his voice for 77 years of his life. He took no risks and made no great leaps or risks and never had to - all he did was follow the plan. My brother Tyler, on the other hand, was good at everything but had a penchant for ruin - and every few years Tyler deliberately blew up his life. Jobs, marriages, relationships. Tyler dropped out of college after a semester to join the Marines, fought in the First Gulf War, then was a cop in Albuquerque, a professional bodyguard in L.A., a roadie for Widespread Panic, a firefighter in Wisconsin, a professional bass fisherman, owned a company that made fishing lures and finally he was the assistant police chief in Denton, Texas, and I suspected it was only a matter of time before Tyler blew up his life again.

Tyler was a mama's boy. Mom tolerated me; I was steady and boring like Dad. Mom doted on Tyler because his life was full of the drama she couldn't get from her husband.

So much so that when I dumped out of that corporate restaurant regional manager job to start my own thing, it was pretty much the first time Mom took much of an interest in my adult life. But Dad couldn't get his mind around the idea I started my own management consulting firm; going into business on his own never once occurred to him in his whole life. And when COVID destroyed my business and most of my savings and I had to start over, I told Voss, it was the thing which - painfully - set me free from his roots. I realized as I saw my professional life go down the tubes and Dad kept demanding I return to the safety of the corporate fold, taking some job I'd hate, that the safety Dad cultivated and depended on all his life was an illusion. And then I told Voss that I realized the little professional life I'd been satisfied with, consulting for a bunch of my restaurateur buddies, wasn't a floor - it was a ceiling.

I told him this was the first time in my life I was looking to do big things. To scale up. That I came from people who kept our heads down, nose to the grindstone, lived a manageably small, comfortable life. And recognizing that wasn't a protection from the risks of the world had changed me.

"Maybe it created a monster," I said. "But my eyes are open. And I'm making up for lost time."

"That little girl you've got with you will make up for a lot," said Voss.

"Who, Amber? Yeah. She's fun to have around."

I could tell he was sizing me up. And I hadn't closed the sale with him. But it also struck me that Voss had absolutely no idea Amber wasn't a real girl.

Voss looked at me for a long moment.

"You sound like a man who's finally figured out what he wants," he said. "That's more than most ever do."

"This is the part where I acknowledge the obvious," I said. "I'm not an oil man and I don't have any business running an oil company. I'm not trying to. But what I know is the fundamentals of management. Like I keep telling people, coming from the restaurant business where it's low-margin like oil is, those fundamentals - processes, logistics, cost and quality controls - are what keep you alive. I can bring that to Stafford Oil and, if I get enough time and some buy-in, I will produce what I think everybody wants. And then I'll ride off into the sunset and do it for somebody else."

"I'm gonna be honest with you, son. When y'all showed up, my plan was to tell you it's time to break up this company and sell it, and I was gonna demand those gas leases go into the bargain."

"I expected that, sir."

"But I'm not gonna do that. I will give you time. I won't push a revolt at that board meetin' in two weeks, and so long as I see progress toward makin' this a professional operation, I won't push one at the meetin' in April."

"I'm going to need your eight votes on the board to hold this thing together," I said. "The 11 Stafford controls are going to start to get pretty wobbly once the changes begin."

"They've already begun if you fired Ray Lee," he said.

"That was a hand grenade," I said. "Monday in Baton Rouge is an atom bomb. It has to be, because we're going to have an open revolt when that audit report starts circulating around the company."

"You aren't circulating it, are you?" he asked me.

"No. But bad news travels too fast to keep a lid on, and we went through those management failures in the Midland office with Beckstrom yesterday; he knows those are what we want changed. That's going to get around and phones will be ringing."

Voss nodded.

"Go fast, then. Is Michael up to it?"

"We'll find out," I said.

"He ain't ready for this. I don't even think he wants it."

"I'm... not going to touch that one," I said. "What I will say is that if what you're ultimately looking for is an exit strategy, I think an eventual sale when we have something worth selling is doable."

"Then we can all get what we want," said Voss. "Except you. You'll lose a client."

"It's consulting," I shrugged. "Like I said, I'll ride off into the sunset and do a job for somebody else."

"Well, all right then. Let's you and me keep in touch."

----------------------------------

A couple of hours later we were in the air, and I was availing myself of the bottle of TX Michael had presented me with as we'd checked out of the hotel.

"OK, you've been really quiet," said Amber, "and it's making me more and more nervous. So start talking. What happened?"

"I told you," I said. "It's fine for now."

"For now," said Michael. "I think maybe you ought to define that."

"Well, we have peace at least until the board meeting in April. So the axe won't fall in two weeks at the January board meeting."

"And this is a win?" asked Michael.

"Yes, it's a win. It was absolutely going to happen, and while he didn't say who else on the board he had, Voss made it sound like he thought he could get a majority for breaking up the company."

"That's a bluff," he said.

"Not only isn't it a bluff, we also managed to avert something even worse, which was that he was going into court on Monday and suing your family over those gas leases."

"No way."

"Oh, yeah. I talked him out of it."

"Don't you dare tell me you promised him we'd give them back," said Michael.

"I did not. And we'll just consider that issue open, for now. It's not resolved. We'll fix the company first, then we'll try to work out the lease issue. But Michael?"

He looked at me. So did Amber.

"Monday is the New Year's Day Massacre at Stafford Oil," I said. "There's no two ways about it. You're going to have to strike hard, because by the time you get to the office the word will be out about Ray Lee and those old bulls will be in full revolt."

"I'm taking back some of that bourbon," he said with a sigh, holding out a glass.

"It isn't bourbon," I said, pouring him a couple of fingers of TX. "Bourbon is from Kentucky. It's good whiskey, though."