Chapter 15

I woke with a start very early on the morning following our unexpected meeting with Jim and Millie. If they were in the current timeline, might Angela and all those bank accounts I hid away also exist?

Thinking about that got me thinking about the people who came to kill me at the Castle. Did they travel with me as the universe moved my mind into Mark’s body? Were they somewhere where I could take revenge on them?

Having considered how to end the lives of the people who arranged to kill me in my last life, my mind started to drift from the possible to the ridiculous. Was Jennifer in this timeline? Was she healthy and living near Knoxville? The questions came fast and furious, without answers, or much in the way of suppositions.

Abby slept quietly beside me but her dream about the place of the dead meant that she was in the sights of death. When Mark got hit by the bus and the universe smacked me into his body, I ruined Death’s apparent intent to take her soul when the weather finally killed her.

Could Death be trying for a double-header? Could Death thwart the universe and take us both, and balance the scales somehow?

How does one fight Death?

With no apparent answers I fell back on what I knew.

First things first.

After carefully sliding out of bed without disturbing Abby, I hopped on my laptop and began to check for my old emergency accounts. Wonder of wonders ... I found several of them right where I’d left them. Instead of one-hundred and fifty million dollars, I now had a lot more. Access was guaranteed once I updated information and changed passwords reactivating a couple that had fallen dormant. It took a little while but I ordered a set of debit cards and set up some other perks for Abby and me. Then I managed to move a lot of money into high return investments that should produce about ten-million a month, some of which I could use to hurt those cretins that didn’t think killing Daniel was enough and spent a fortune hurting Abby.

Abby was up by the time I finished and we hurried through our morning routine so that we could head over to the studio and get cracking. The cast was due in for voiceovers and introductions to the script in two days, so time was of the essence. Abby was excited to be in the movie making process from start to finish and I was looking forward to putting an end to the problems that George’s ex was causing. Sometimes you just have to take the hard road, and that was my choice as far as Mary Contryer was concerned.

George and I went straight into a budget meeting, which meant that everything else had to wait until we settled money issues. George seemed distracted as we worked through the process, and I finally had to brace him about it. “What’s going on, George? Is this a bad day to tackle budgets?”

He looked sad for a little while and then started to give me the truth. “When I bought my first ownership share in Southern Sky, things here were pretty bad. The economy was in the tank, people were losing their jobs, homes and careers, banks were refusing to lend money, and everything was just hard. We fought back and got things out of the red, but that’s apparently not good enough for the other partners.

“They want their stake back, and they want out. It’s doable but it means opening things up to investment banks, or vulture capital as we refer to it in the movie business. Lots of movie companies end up losing their market share because of the demands made by the lenders. That’s what will happen to Southern Sky if I have to go it alone with a bunch of bloodless accountants for partners, and it has me depressed.”

There is often no problem that money can’t solve, and this was an excellent example. “The solution to this is easy. Infuse the studio with forty million dollars and the problem disappears. And it would, except that I don’t have forty million dollars to buy them all out. The bank won’t lend that kind of money, and now they’re starting to wonder about blowing it all up and selling the pieces.” He looked defeated.

“OK. I get the problem. Now let’s look at the thing in steps. How much for everything? How much does Southern Sky owe to Banks? What is the total that it would take to buy out the other partners? Exactly how many partners are there, and how much is each partners’ stake going to cost?

“Once we know precisely what we’re facing, I can start to think about solutions. Everything will be easier once we establish what each problem is, and what it will cost to turn it around.” I waited for him to pull out of his funk and start to work with me. George looked at me like I had just arrived from Mars. I could tell that he thought all was going to be lost without a miracle, but he thought enough of me to at least give me an answer.

“There are five partners. We are each in for twenty-five million dollars. Those stakes are not worth what they were when we bought in, so the other four want twelve million each for their share, as long as they take no hit on the outstanding debt. The bank is on the hood for seventeen million but we are current and there’s no real urgency to pay them off, unless the partnership dissolves. If that happens, the entire debt is due within thirty days.

“You see the problem?”

“Nope,” I said, with a smile, “but I do see the opportunity.

“I’ll buy out the four partners for a total of fifty million, AND I will retire the bank notes, in cash, as fast as the lawyers can make it all righteous. Your share will be twenty-five percent, not twenty, and I will hold the other seventy-five percent.

“If I am going to drop sixty-seven million dollars on this studio, then we own one-hundred percent of EVERYTHING. The partners get bought out and that is it. No rights continue with any of them, and the bank goes away forever.”