Chapter 4

Wiley Cybulski’s oceanfront law office. A dilapidated single wide mobile home squatting on a former superfund site at Big Bob’s Bayview Trailer Park. Manufactured circa nineteen hundred and eighty-two. Beach living at its finest. Cybulski bought the rundown shit pile for eight thousand cash and had it hauled there a few years back. Standing atop the corrugated rooftop, you could just make out blue water through a stand of scraggly loblolly pines.

“Qué pasa, hermano!” Cybulski shouted from the trailer’s rickety porch. He wore a pair of board shorts and nothing else. Eleven in the morning and already shitfaced. I embraced him in that weird bro, half-handshake, half-hug that ensured our junk remained at least a badger’s width apart, and let him lead me inside.

His place reeked of bong water and body soil. Behind the door, a pair of surfboards rested against the wall in a pile of sand and sex wax. Dirty dishes clogged a dripping sink, and I’m pretty sure my shoes stuck to the ancient, low-pile, industrial grade carpet, now matted into a dark gray solid mass of unknown composition.

“Can we turn on some lights or something?” I asked, dropping into a worn out futon covered by a Mexican blanket.

“Switch is kind of busted. Here,” he said, pulling back faded floral curtains to allow a few photons of sunlight to penetrate through grimy louvered windows. “Better?”

Cybulski had semi-retired from his one man law practice at the ripe old age of forty one. That was five years ago. Over a short, highly focused, fifteen year career, he’d sued every major bank and credit card company for violating state and federal consumer protection laws. Aggressive collections practices, reselling out of statute debts, late night phone harassment, strongarming, those kinds of things.

He’d made a pile doing it too, socking away almost half a million by living pretty much the way he did now. To call it frugal would be charitable. Squalor would be more accurate. Now he lived off his investments, which had done extraordinarily well in the last bull market, nearly doubling his initial buy in. He drove a beater mid-nineties Honda and had zero debt, which easily made him the wealthiest man in the trailer park, where net worths typically measured in negative dollars.

He’d hardly aged a day in the thirty years I’d known him. A little gray in the stubble, a slight recession of the hairline, and crow’s feet from squinting over glittering waves the only indicators that he’d reached middle age. He still wore his beach blond hair shoulder length, and his body fat percentage must have hovered near single digits. Never married. No kids.

I envied the motherfucker.

“Bud heavy?” he asked, leaning into a near empty fridge to fish around inside a red Budweiser case.

I waved him off. He took his beverage to a low slung beach chair with a few broken straps and cracked the can.

“So, what brings you to my casa?”

“Office,” I clarified. “I need your help with something.”

“I’m all ears.”

“I’m in the process of selling the company.”

“Sweet! About time. How’d you finally get the Irish twins to agree?” he asked between sips of his shit beer, then caught my change of expression. “Ah ha. You haven’t.”

“They won’t fucking budge. They still want to take it public.”

“How long do they think that’ll take?”

“Couple years. At least.”

“That’s not so bad. Why the rush to sell now?”

“Because, I need the money.”

Cybulski appraised me for a beat, then smiled. “Dude, I can lend you money if you need it.”

“I need more than you’ve got.”

He nodded in understanding. “You married way too expensive, homie. I fucking told you that. I love Wendy and all, but she’s got expensive tastes.”

That was an understatement. Brand new German cars. Our huge house in the suburbs. Private school for Alexis. The boat. Dinners out. High end, midcentury furniture. Designer clothes. Expensive vacations. It all added up.

It wasn’t just Wendy, though. I had my own money sinks too. Sports betting being the big one. I hadn’t done well. I almost never did. The occasional side piece also siphoned money out of my pocket for dinners and gifts and hotel rooms, not to mention apartment leases. My lifestyle had grown right along with my income, then rapidly outpaced it. Debt helped smooth some of the shortfalls, but I’d reached the limits of my creditworthiness. I’d leveraged it all and could borrow no more.

Selling Lexical solved all my problems. I’d clear twelve million after taxes. All debts paid in one fell swoop. Heaven.

“Why don’t you just ask them to buy you out?” Cybulski suggested.

“I did. They can’t. At least, that’s what Patrick claims. Not enough cash in the coffers, apparently, and they don’t want to take on any debt, though I think they’d love to get me out if they could. I’ve got a little over two years left before I fully vest, but even if we IPO’d tomorrow, I’d have a six month lock-up period before I could sell my stock. I’m stuck, man.”

“So, what are you going to do?”

“I have to force the sale. One of my early angel investors approached me about a private equity firm that’s interested in doing a roll up. They’ll offer us two hundred mil. All cash deal. Not an acqui-hire, either. They just want the tech and the customers. They plan to eighty-six most of the staff, except the engineers.”

“Your valuation would easily top a billion if you waited to go public,” Cybulski noted. “You’d be getting pennies on the dollar selling now.”

“I don’t care. I’ve been grinding this stone for eight fucking years, man. I’m ready to cash out.”

“What do you need me for?” he asked.

I pulled a one dollar bill from my pocket and handed it to him.

“What’s that?”

“Retainer.”

“You don’t have to pay me anything,” he said, waving the dollar away.

“Just fucking take it,” I insisted. He snatched it from my fingertips with a smirk and shoved it into his pocket. “I want you to represent me. Personally. I’m going to make a move to force a board vote. I need a two-thirds majority. That’s six votes. I’m one, so I need five more. I headed up the coast last week to talk to Silver Lake, one of our biggest early investors. They have two seats on the board and agreed to back a sale if I could find three more votes.”

“How’d you talk them into it?”

“I told them there’s another company out there who’s about to release competing tech that’s better than ours. Not only would it instantly make us less attractive to the private equity group, but it might also kill the IPO. They want to sell now, while we still have a window.”

“Wait a minute. Why aren’t Patrick and Sean freaked out about this new competitor?”

“They don’t know about it. No one does. Only I do.”

“Okay, how do you know about it, then?”

“Because, I gave them our tech to use as a blueprint.”

Cybulski paused mid sip. “You shouldn’t have done that.”

“That your legal opinion?”

He laughed. “Yeah. A dollar’s worth.”

A knock at the trailer’s rusted and tattered screen door got both our attention.

“Wiley!” called a tall, dark haired young woman of questionable hygiene. A chubby, busty blonde accompanied her.

Cybulski waved them inside. “Leslie! Entrez!”

The two girls crowded into the trailer. The tall one, Leslie, eyeballed me suspiciously. Her straight, shoulder length hair hanged limp and greasy on her forehead. A tight ponytail accentuated her severe, angular face, and dark eyes that had definitely seen some shit. She held a plain paper bag at her side.

“Leslie. Deandra. This is Ryan. My oldest friend in the world.”

“Hey,” Leslie said when I threw them a little wave. “He cool?”

“Super cool,” Cybulski assured her, then held out his hand. “That my shit?” Leslie handed over the bag. Cybulski unrolled the top to peek inside. He inhaled deeply and tapped his feet like a child. “How much did you get?”

Leslie side-eyed me and said, “Little over an ounce.”

Cybulski handed back the bag. “You rock. I’ve got a little business to handle with my man here. Why don’t you go ahead and take your cut now?”

The girls took the bag to his dinette and cleared a spot to work.

“You were saying,” Cybulski said, prompting me to continue.

“Shouldn’t we wait?” I indicated the two trailer tramps busily dividing up the gallon-sized zip lock full of weed they’d pulled from the bag.

“Hey, Les. Do you know what a breach of fiduciary duty is?” he asked her over his shoulder.

Leslie glanced up from her task. “I don’t know. When a banker shits his pants?”

Cybulski lifted one of his eyebrows and smiled at me. “I don’t hang out with them for their brains.”

Whatever. “I have meetings set with three of the other board members this week. If everything goes according to plan, I’ll have all the votes nailed down, and then we’ll call a board meeting and vote to sell.”

“Risky,” Cybulski said. “Besides breach of fiduciary duty, which would almost certainly carry punitives because of the fraud, you’re probably also looking at a tortious interference claim. As far as damages go, we’re not just talking about the IPO anymore. We’re talking lost revenues. They could come after you for hundreds of millions. Maybe billions. And that’s just on the civil side. You signed an IP assignment. Once they run you through the civil court ringer, they’ll toss you to the criminal courts.”

Cybulski started ticking off fingers. “We’re talking corporate espionage. We’re talking theft of trade secrets. I don’t imagine you hand carried those files to them, did you? So tack on wire fraud. More than a couple people involved? Let’s add conspiracy charges. Maybe even a RICO designation. Did you use your company laptop? Add hacking and illegally accessing a computer database. That’s Federal time, buddy. Ten years easy.”