Stone Cold

CHAPTER 7

“DO YOU THINK I’M STUPID?” screamed Jerry Bagger. The casino chief wedged his arm against the other man’s windpipe as he mashed him against the wall in Bagger’s luxurious office on the twenty-third floor of the Pompeii Casino. The drapes were closed. Bagger always closed the drapes when he was either going to bang a willing lady on his couch or kick the shit out of somebody who deserved it. These matters should always be kept private, he felt. It was a point of honor with him.

The man didn’t answer Bagger’s question chiefly because he couldn’t breathe. However, Bagger wasn’t waiting for a reply. His first blow caught the guy flush on the nose and broke it. The second one knocked a front tooth out. The man fell to the floor weeping. For good measure Bagger kicked him in the gut. That made the beaten fellow vomit on the carpet. As the puke spread across the expensive inlaid wool Bagger’s own security force had to pull their furious boss off the fallen man before real damage was done.

The guy was carted away, crying and bleeding and mumbling that he was sorry. Bagger sat down behind his desk and rubbed his cracked knuckles. Glaring at his security chief, he growled, “Bobby, you bring me any more pissants like that one who say they know something about Annabelle Conroy and end up trying to shake me down while feeding me a sack of shit, I swear to God I will kill your mother. And I like your mother but I will kill her. Do you hear me!”

The burly black security chief took a step back and swallowed nervously. “Never again, Mr. Bagger. I’m sorry, sir. Really, really sorry.”

“Everybody’s sorry but nobody’s doing a damn thing to get me the bitch, are they?” Bagger roared.

“We thought we had a lead on her. A good one.”

“You thought? You thought? Well, maybe you should stop thinking, then.”

Bagger hit a button on his desk and the drapes opened. He jumped up and looked out the window. “Forty million bucks she took from me. This could screw up my whole business, you know that? I don’t have enough reserves to meet the state regs. You get a government bean counter in here right now looking at my books he could shut me down. Me! You used to be able to pay those assholes off, but now with all this anticorruption and ethical bullshit going around, you can’t do that no more. You mark my word, that full disclosure crap is gonna destroy a great country.”

“We’ll find her, boss, and get the money back,” his security chief assured him.

Bagger didn’t appear to be listening. Staring down at the street far below, he said, “I see the bitch everywhere. In my dreams, in my food, when I’m shaving there she is in my mirror. Hell, even when I’m taking a leak, her face is in the toilet bowl staring at me. It’s driving me nuts!”

He sat on the couch and calmed down. “What’s the latest on our boy Tony Wallace?”

“We got somebody on the inside at the hospital in Portugal. Jerk’s still in a coma. But even if he comes out of it, there’s nothing there. Our source says the guy’s a permanent retard.”

“If you ask me he was a retard long before we got to him.”

“You know, boss, we probably should’ve just killed him like we did everybody else.”

“I gave him my word. He told me what he knew, he got to live; that was the deal. But in my book brain dead means you’re still alive. Lots of people live forty, fifty years like that. It’s like being a baby until you’re eighty. Get fed through a tube, get your ass wiped every day and you play with blocks. Granted, it’s not much of a life, but I didn’t go back on my word. People can say I’m violent and I got a bad temper and all that crap but they can never point to one time where I ever went back on my word. You know why?”

The security chief shook his head warily, obviously unsure whether his boss wanted an answer or not.

“Because I got standards, that’s why. Now get outta here.”

Alone, Bagger sat down behind his desk and put his head in his hands. He would never admit this to anyone, but mixed in with all the hatred he had for Annabelle Conroy was a sincere, if grudging, admiration. “Annabelle,” he said aloud. “You are without a doubt the greatest con artist in the world. It would’ve been a pleasure working with you. And you were probably the best piece of ass I’ve ever put my hand on. So it’s too bad you were so stupid as to take me on because now I gotta kill you. I gotta make an example of you. And it’s a waste, but that’s just the way it’s gotta be.”

It wasn’t just the loss of the forty million that had enraged Bagger. Ever since word of the successful con had leaked out, cheaters had become far more brazen in his casino. Losses had quickly risen. And his competitors and business associates were also not quite as respectful as they had once been, sensing that Bagger was no longer at the top of his game, that he was vulnerable. Calls weren’t immediately returned. Action that he could always count on getting didn’t always come through now.

“An example,” Bagger said again. “To show these assholes that not only am I still at the top, I’m getting stronger every day. And I will find you, lady. I will find you.”