Chapter 366

“You have a minute, Rob?” Doug asked, sticking his head in my office.

“Sure,” I nodded, starting to get up from my desk to follow him, but he waved me to sit and came in, closing the door behind him. My awareness immediately shot up because, for all that Doug wasn’t exactly a forceful boss, he tended to try and do things in safe territory for him. The conference rooms, his office, or on the move from one location to another. We’d certainly had conversations in my office over the last couple of years but never anything long, or behind closed doors. “What’s up?” I asked with a frown, settling back into my chair but leaning forward with my elbows on my desk, trying to give him my obvious attention.

Doug unbuttoned his suit jacket and flopped down into the chair across from me, letting out a long, belaboured sigh.

“Right,” I said slowly. “So ... a lot of things, or one big thing?”

“See, Robbie, that’s why I like you,” he said, giving me a finger-gun point. “You pick up on things.”

“You’re not exactly being subtle here, Doug,” I pointed out.

“Yeah, well ... it’s been a day,” he said.

“It’s only two o’clock on a Tuesday,” I said. “And I haven’t heard about anything happening.”

“Well, you’re not hearing this from me,” Doug said. “But there’s a shakeup happening.” He pointed upwards, and I assumed he meant at the Board level rather than literally up in the hotel rooms towering above us. “And it’s making people nervous.”

I raised an eyebrow. “How does anything happening at that level land on us?” I asked. “It doesn’t matter who owns the building, does it? And how much shaking are we talking about?”

“Unsure so far, but there were disagreements going on last week while you were gone,” Doug said. “Not that you would have heard anything then. But now the people above me are getting restless, and when that happens it means...”

“Problems,” I nodded. The real issue, I realised, was trying to correctly guess where the problems would manifest. The most dramatic, wide-reaching effect could be tightening budgets and layoffs, where everyone got pinched hard on labour amounts. Or ‘consultants’ coming in. I’d never been through a run with consultants myself, but I’d heard stories from some of the longer-serving Vegas staffers and it was always chaos, a big waste of time, and caused way more low-level problems than the one or two mid-level non-issues that the expensive suits ‘fixed.’ “So what are we doing about it then?”