Free The Consultant by Bentley Little

consultant seemed to be rigging the game in such a way that he would later be able to point to Craig’s choices and actions as justification for letting him go. This Tyler situation could be used against him either way, and though he had no idea why Patoff would want to set him up like this, why the consultant should have any animosity toward him, he had the sneaking suspicion that he was on the man’s hit list.  
    He chose to take the high road. “Tyler’s a good worker.”  
    Patoff pressed a key on his laptop and the recording started up again. “Craig Horne’s a douche.” The frame froze on Tyler Lang’s expression of contempt.  
    “We need him,” Craig said, unfazed.  
    The consultant shrugged. “It’s your call. But we’re going to have to trim the workforce somewhere, and if you want to keep Mr. Lang on, we’re going to have to find somewhere else to cut.” He brightened. “I think what we need to do is conduct a work management study.”  
    Craig had no idea what that was, but he wasn’t going to give the consultant the satisfaction of admitting as much. “Fine,” he said.  
    Matthews and the other members of his management team nodded.  
    Patoff smiled. “Very well, then.”  
    Matthews stood. “Thank you for coming,” the CEO said formally. “And thank you for your input, Craig. We all appreciate it.”  
    He was being dismissed, and it was like something out of a movie. Matthews had always been precise and punctual, well-organized to a fault, but this sort of theater, with the single chair facing the row of executives and the high-handed dismissal, was not like him at all. Patoff had staged this, and as Craig stood and walked out, hearing the consultant talk about Bob Tanner, the next person to be summoned, he wondered if the other division heads would be faced with choices similar to the one he had been urged to make.  
    “Isn’t it going to be awkward working with him now?” Lupe wondered once he had told her what happened in the meeting. “I mean, you’re still his boss. Isn’t that going to make things…weird?”  
    “A little,” Craig admitted. “It’ll definitely be harder for me to be objective now. But maybe it was hard for me to be objective before, since we were friends.” He shook his head. “I don’t know.”  
    “I just think it’s going to be tough for you two to work together. It’s going to be tough for me when I see him. I used to like Tyler. Now he seems like a two-faced rat.”  
    “He doesn’t know that I know. That we know. We keep acting the way we always have, pretend like nothing’s changed, and things should be fine.”  
    “Do you think you made the right decision?”  
    “He’s a good programmer. And it’s my job to fight for my team.”  
    Lupe smiled. “That’s what I like to hear.”  
    “I told you,” he reassured her. “As long as I’m here, you’re here.”  
    “I like to hear that even more. Oh, by the way, I need to take an early lunch today. Rebecca’s setting up a Biggest Loser thing and we all need to weigh in and chip in ten bucks. The person who loses the most weight gets the cash.”  
    He looked at her. “Rebecca I can understand. But why are you doing this? You’re thin.”  
    “I’m starting to get a belly. I want to nip it in the bud.”  
    “You’re not going to win, you know. And those other women are going to hate you. Some of them need to lose as much as you weigh .”  
    She laughed. “I know. But it’s an incentive. I need the pressure or I won’t do it.”  
    “Take whatever time you need,” he told her.  
    “Thanks, Boss.”  
    Craig spent the rest of the morning doing very little work, mostly staring out the window and thinking about the changes coming to CompWare. Always before, he had viewed corporate downsizings and restructurings from the outside, but it was quite another thing to be in the middle of it, and even if he didn’t have such severe reservations about the