Excerpt 5 from "Red Hot Sinner Man"

Excerpt 5 from Red Hot Sinner Man
By Stephen B. Bagley

Richard Gallant had owned the world until now. Always been that way. In school, he made all the teams, made the good grades, got the hot girls, drove the best cars, attended the right parties, he was cool. College was the same. Oh, the parties were wilder, the classes harder, the girls more numerous, the cars more expensive, but the Gallant's little heir deserved the best and he got it. He couldn't remember his life as being any other way.

Now, Gallant and Sons -- the investment firm that had been in his family since the 1800's and that had paid for all that college, all those cars, all those girls -- was going down with him at the helm.

His grandfather and his father had made mistakes. They bought high and sold low too many times. They waited too long to modernize and then made changes frantically, but they didn't wait long enough to see if changes would help before they changed priorities again.

Oh, success hadn't passed by Gallant and Sons completely; otherwise, it wouldn't have survived, but too much red ink stained its pages over the years. And even though the mistakes of his predecessors caused the decline, he would be the one who would be blamed. The Gallant would go down on his watch.

The choices on his desk: Close Gallant and Sons or sell it to Van de Meter and Horn. Either selection would make his father spin in his grave and his mother spit in his face.

He was beginning to think he didn't drink enough.

(Copyright 2017 by Stephen B. Bagley. All rights reserved. Thank you for reading.)