Marissa tugs on the elastic holding her hair up in a messy bun and then shakes out her long, wavy dark hair. “Agreeable? Yeah, that’s absolutely not my fucking forte.” She stands up and starts out of the office, patting me on the head as she walks past. “This one is all you, little brother. Although if you need me to come out there and be disagreeable, send me an SOS. Hell, that way while I’m there, I can finally say I’ve trained at altitude.”
Of course. Leave it to my overly ambitious sister to figure out a way to get a Mile High workout in, even while she’s saving my ass and making some property owner’s life miserable.
“Duly noted,” I mutter.
There’s no point in delaying the inevitable, so I flip open the folder again. A triumphant little smirk crosses Mom’s face as she looks over my shoulder, locking eyes with Dad while sending him a wink. They’re still crazy in love and prone to the kind of PDA that made my teenage years a study in daily awkwardness.
They met going toe-to-toe on the purchase of a greenfield site, when Mom had just relocated to Texas and was working at a commercial development firm, trying to make a name for herself in a new country, doing a new job. When they crossed paths outside the seller’s offices, Dad jokingly questioned her ability to turn the site into anything other than a “very pretty parking lot.” She responded by peppering him with a few choice expletives he’d never heard before, and after that, Dad was smitten.
True love, basically. Either that or an episode of Dallas.
After another long look at Dad, she returns her attention to me. “Do you need more details on Tate’s transgressions, or can you fill in the blanks on that topic?”
“No,” I grumble. “He did one of three things: said too much, drank too much, or pushed too much. He’s not exactly innovative when it comes to being an asshole.”
“Well then, that saves us some time.” She reaches for a pair of reading glasses and slips them on while flipping through a file. “The other reason I’m sending you is because you speak cars. Race cars, to be specific.”
There’s clear distaste in her voice when she utters the words race cars, in the same way most people might say root canal.
I snort. “So do you.”
“True. Except I despise them. They’re noisy, flashy, and overpriced. The three things I hate most in life. Negotiating this deal requires discussing race cars with a smile on your face. Do I look like I’m smiling?” She points at her own face, where her mouth is pinched into a taut line.
I squint a little and peer at her, then shake my head slowly.
“Not unless you just left Dr. Hamilton’s office.”
My quip about Houston’s top plastic surgeon does what I hoped it would, forcing Mom to give up her scowl in favor of a small smile. In our social circle, Dr. Hamilton is more esteemed than Mother Teresa and Nelson Mandela combined. He also has a tendency to be a little heavy-handed with the Botox, and that means nearly all the women we know haven’t moved their foreheads in decades.
Mom shakes her head with a quiet chuckle and then sighs. All that really matters is that she isn’t thinking about racing for a moment.
While my dad’s story is a bootstrapping, come-from-nothing saga, Mom’s is far from it. Her great-grandparents built a textile dynasty in Milan, and her father used that fortune to indulge his passion for ludicrously expensive race cars, which he eventually parlayed into his own successful Formula One racing team. Unfortunately, that also made his daughter an afterthought in her father’s life. If she wanted the privilege of being ignored by him in person, that meant tagging along to every race, surrounded by the noisy, dirty mechanical beasts she came to hate. Being part of Italian racing royalty means Mom grudgingly knows her fair share about cars, yet she despises everything about that world.
With my curiosity piqued, I give the file my full attention. “Rocky Mile Raceway” is printed in large, bold letters on the cover sheet, along with an aerial photo of a racetrack. From what the photo shows, this track is nothing like the ones the Rossi family is accustomed to. It’s obviously run-down, and even worse, it’s a dirt track. Dirt tracks aren’t exactly the pinnacle of racing arenas. They’re simply what you find in small towns where there’s nothing better to do on Saturday nights than go drink beer and watch your buddies wreck their shitty race cars.
“As you can see,” Mom says, “this isn’t exactly a premier racing facility. It does, however, sit right off a major interstate just north of Denver, on a two-hundred-acre parcel of land. Thirty years ago, this location is in the middle of nowhere. Today the suburbs have exploded, and now there are thousands of new homes within a fifteen-mile radius, yet the area is still lacking a retail corridor. Unfortunately, the man that owns this land doesn’t want to sell.”
I glance at the track photo again. “Why? This place is a joke. If they sold, they could ride off into the sunset with a boatload of cash.”
“Because they’ve owned it for fifty years, because they want their grandchildren to have the same experience, et cetera, et cetera,” Mom says tiredly, waving one hand in the air dismissively. She tosses her reading glasses on top of the report. “All the typical things we hear from longtime landowners in this situation.”
I flip through a few more pages, pausing when I find the valuation numbers. The current land, combined with projected values after a fully developed retail corridor is in place, puts the estimated purchase price at nearly ten million dollars.
My brow furrows. Ten million dollars is a lot of money to most people. Even if we came in with a lowball offer, you’d think a family that owns some bedraggled dirt track would jump on it, regardless of how sentimental they are. It may be a crude cliché, but money does talk—and it usually talks pretty loudly.
I let out a low whistle. “Do they know what they’re sitting on?”
“Yes and no. Tate is actually the fourth person we’ve sent out to talk to them. The first three didn’t get past an introduction. But instead of making them an offer, Tate started off by insinuating that when push came to shove, they’d regret not doing business with us. That is when they sent him packing with instructions never to come back. At this point, we’re not sure what will sway them. These aren’t malleable people.”
Awesome. It sounds like not only has Tate left me with one hell of an act to follow, I’m also going up against a landowner who’s apparently averse to persuasion and unmoved by giant piles of money. The odds here are not in my favor.
I slap the folder shut. “Okay, fine. But let’s play devil’s advocate here and pretend I can’t finesse this. That no matter how much I talk cars with these people, no matter how much I smile or smooth them over, they still don’t bite. What then? This might be a sweet piece of property with huge potential, but at what point do we just walk away?”
Mom lets out a hollow laugh. “There is no walking away from this project.”
An almost bitter resolve colors her tone, prompting me to narrow my eyes on her. “And why is that?”
“Because Endeavor Sporting Goods wants in on this location. If we land this property for them, they’ve agreed to form a strategic partnership with Mason Enterprises in which we would be the lead developer on the one hundred stores they have slated to open in the next ten years.”