Illustration by Idiots’Books
By the time the call came, Sammy was ready to explode. He got in a golf cart and headed to the Animal Kingdom Lodge, which backed onto the safari park portion of the Animal Kingdom. He snuck himself onto the roof of the ground hotel, which had a commanding view of the artificial savanna. He watched a family of giraffes graze, using the zoom on his phone to resolve the hypnotic patterns of the little calf. It calmed him. But the sound of his phone ringing startled him so much he nearly did a half-gainer off the roof. Heart hammering, he answered it.
“Is this Sammy?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Landon Kettlewell,” the voice on the other side said. Sammy knew the name, of course. But he hadn’t been expecting a call from him.
“Hello, Mr Kettlewell.”
“The boys have asked me to negotiate this deal for them. It makes sense—it’ll be hard to make this happen without my contributions. I hope you agree.”
“It does make sense,” Sammy said noncommittally. This wasn’t the best day of his life. The giraffes were moving off, but a flock of cranes was wheeling overhead in quiet splendor.
“I’ll tell you where we’re at. We’re going to do a deal with you, a fair one. But a condition of the deal is that we are going to destroy Freddy.”
“What?”
“We’re going to leak him bad intel on the deal. Lots of it. Give him a whole story. Wait until he publishes it, and then—”
Sammy sat down on the roof. This was going to be a long conversation.
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