Free Killer Instinct by Joseph Finder

the morning and saw midday Caribbean sunlight.
    “You were Salesman of the Year three years ago, Steadman,” he said. “Club four years running.” He gave a low whistle. “You like Grand Cayman?”
    The Cayman Islands was one of the trips the company sent the Salesman of the Year on. “Great diving,” I said.
    “Diving for dollars.” He tipped his head back, opened his mouth, did a silent bray.
    “I’m impressed you were able to sell UPS those self-keystoning projectors. They wanted compression technology, and we don’t do compression technology.”
    “I sold them on future compatibility.”
    “Booya,” he said, nodding.
    That was Gordy’s way of congratulating people. He was being too nice, which made me nervous. I was expecting his usual frontal assault.
    “Morgan Stanley?” he said.
    “They’ve got an RFP on the street, but they won’t talk to me. Got to be an inside job. I’m just column fodder.”
    “Sounds right,” he said. “They’re just specking the competition. Send ’em back their lousy RFP.”
    “I’m not going to make it easy for them,” I said.
    His smile twisted up at one end, making him look appropriately Mephistophelian.
    “And it looks like FedEx hasn’t delivered yet, huh?”
    “FedEx wants a bunch of LCD projectors for their logistics center, to display the weather and all that, twenty-four/seven. I demo’d it for them in Memphis.”
    “And?”
    “They’re jerking me around. They’re looking at Sony and Fujitsu and NEC and us. Doing a side-by-side shoot-out.”
    “Deciding on price point, no doubt.”
    “I’m trying to sell them on quality and reliability. Better investment in the long run, all that. I’d say we’ve got a thirty percent chance of winning it.” That was a complete hallucination.
    “That high, huh?”
    “That’s my take. I wouldn’t forecast it, though.”
    “Albertson’s fell through,” he said, with a sad shake of the head. Albertson’s is the second-largest supermarket chain in the country. They own thousands of supermarkets, drugstores, and gas stations, and they wanted to put in digital signage in a bunch of their stores. That would have meant fifteen-inch flat-panel LCD screens at every checkout lane—I guess so you wouldn’t have to read the National Enquirer and then put it back in the rack—and forty-two-inch plasmas throughout the store. They were calling it a storewide “network” that would “provide our customers with relevant information and solutions during their visits to the stores.” Translation: ads. Brilliant idea—they wouldn’t even have to pay for the equipment. It was going to be installed by this middleman, a company called SignNetwork that bought and installed all this stuff in stores. The screens would run ads for Walt Disney videos and Kodak and Huggies diapers. I’d been dealing with both Albertson’s and SignNetwork, trying to sell them on the advantages of paying a bit more for quality and all that. No dice.
    “They went with NEC,” I said.
    “Why?”
    “You want to know the truth? Jim Letasky. He’s NEC’s top sales guy, and he basically owns the SignNetwork account. They don’t want to deal with any other company. They love the guy.”
    “I know Letasky.”
    “Nice guy,” I said. Unfortunately. I wished I could hate the guy, since he was stealing so much of our business, but I’d met him at the Consumer Electronics show a couple of years back, and he was great. They say people buy from people they like; after we had a drink, I was almost ready to buy a bunch of NEC plasmas from Jim Letasky.
    He fell silent again. “And Lockwood drags on like a case of the clap. You column fodder there too?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “You’re not giving up on this one, though, right?”
    “Give up? Me?”
    He smiled. “That’s not you, is it?”
    “Nope.”
    “Let me ask you something, Steadman. Hope you don’t mind if I get too personal. You got problems in your marriage?”
    “Me?” I shook