Stone Cold

Fi

He checked his watch, tightened the strap on the waterproof bag he carried over his shoulder and prepared himself for the next step. This was the tricky part, letting go of his ride at speed and avoiding the screws at the stern. Because when he let go, there was a distinct possibility that if he didn’t kick hard enough away from the direction the boat was going and didn’t go down deep enough in the water his last memory would be the props savagely cleaving his torso in two.

He coiled his legs and positioned them against the side of the boat. Counting to three, he kicked as hard as he could against the boat’s hull and plunged out and then downward even as he felt the force of the screws pulling him toward the stern. He came up to the surface and watched the ru

CHAPTER 12

JERRY BAGGER NEVER VENTURED much out of Atlantic City anymore. He had his own Learjet but seldom used it. The last trip on it had been the deadly visit to the unfortunate Tony Wallace in Portugal. He once had a yacht but sold it when he discovered he easily became seasick, an embarrassment for a man who prided himself on toughness. Indeed, he rarely left his casino anymore. It was really the only place he felt comfortable these days.

Ironically, Bagger hadn’t been born in Vegas or Jersey. The ballsy, streetwise urban boy had seen his first light in, of all places, Wyoming, on a ranch where his father labored for something less than minimum wage. His mother had lost her life on Bagger’s first day from pregnancy complications, complications any hospital could have easily taken care of. But there had been no hospital within three hundred miles, so she’d died. Bagger’s father had joined her eighteen months later after an accident involving whiskey and a cantankerous horse.

The Wyoming ranch owner had no interest in raising a bastard child-Bagger’s mother and father had not bothered to marry-and he was shipped off to his mother’s family in Brooklyn. It was in the close confines of this New York melting pot, not in the wide-open spaces of Wyoming, that Bagger was meant to be and had thrived.

He had eventually gone back west. After fifteen years of twenty-hour workdays, nonstop hustling and risking and then nearly losing everything he had about a dozen times, he had his own casino. And soon business was so good he started printing money. Then his temper got the best of him and he was eventually run out of Vegas and ordered never to return. He had honored that request, although every time he flew over it he looked out the plane window and ceremoniously flipped off the entire state of Nevada.

Bagger left his penthouse and took the private elevator down to the casino floor. There he walked through a sea of slots, gaming tables and sport betting rooms where gamblers from the novice to the experienced dropped far more money than they would ever get back. Whenever he spotted a kid sitting bored on the floor, with their parents hovering nearby feeding buckets of nickels into the slots-their hands blackened from the process-Bagger would order that food, books and video games be brought to the child, and he would slip a twenty-dollar bill in the kid’s hand. Then he would make a call and someone from the Pompeii would immediately confront the parents and remind them that while children were allowed in the casino, they could not be in the playing areas.

Bagger would crush any adult who crossed him, but kids were not to be screwed with. That would change when they hit eighteen-then everyone was fair game-but until then kids were off-limits. It was shitty enough being adults, was his opinion, so let the little punks enjoy the time they had not being grown up. Underlying this philosophy might have been the fact that Jerry Bagger had never had a childhood. Dirt poor, he had run his first racket out of a Brooklyn tenement house at age nine and never looked back. That hard life was a major reason for his success, but the scars ran deep. So deep he didn’t even think about them anymore. They were simply what made him what he was.

On his walk Bagger made three such calls for kids left in the playing area by their parents, shaking his head each time. “Losers,” he muttered. Jerry Bagger had never bet one dime on anything. That was for suckers. He was many things, but a fool wasn’t one of them. These idiots would scream and jump around after wi

He stopped at one of the bars and raised an eyebrow at a waitress, who rushed to bring him his usual club soda with a lime. He never drank alcohol on the casino floor, nor did any of his employees. He perched on a bar stool and watched the Pompeii operate at maximum efficiency. All age ranges were represented here. And the whack jobs were aplenty, he knew from decades of experience. There wasn’t a single category of nutcase that hadn’t at one point strolled into his casino. Truth was, Bagger related to them better than he did the “normal” folks.

He eyed a newlywed couple still in their wedding clothes. The Pompeii offered a cut-rate, tips-not-included deal for those wanting to get hitched, which provided a standard room with a sturdy new mattress, a cheap bouquet of flowers, the services of a properly licensed minister, di

The couple he was watching seemed to be trying their best to swallow each other’s tongues. Bagger grimaced at this public display. “Get a room,” he muttered. “It’s the cheapest thing you’ll find in this town other than the booze. And the sex.”

Bagger had never married, chiefly because he had never met a woman who could hold his interest. A

And then, as was often the case, Jerry Bagger had a brilliant idea while he wasn’t even trying to.

He finished his club soda and headed back to his office to make some phone calls to find out one thing. When she’d been co