The Collectors

by David Baldacci

  toes. “Annabelle, you were always smart about your money, a lot smarter than me. After all the cons you’ve pulled, I know you don’t need the cash.”

  “Who ever has enough money?” she said, still watching the boat drift by.

  He picked up another shell and hurled it. “You really want to do this, don’t you?”

  “Part of me doesn’t. The part of me I listen to knows I have to.”

  “The kid says nothing?”

  “The kid says nothing.”

  “If this goes bad, I don’t even want to think about what’ll happen to us.”

  “Then don’t let it go bad.”

  “Do you have a single nerve in your body?”

  “Not that I’ve noticed.” She picked up a shell and chucked it into the face of a crashing wall of water, then let the ocean race across her feet and ankles. “Are we good?”

  He slowly nodded. “Yeah, we’re good.”

  “No more going ballistic on me?”

  He cracked a smile. “That I can promise to no woman.”

  As they walked back to the hotel, he said, “I haven’t heard anything about your mom in a long time. How’s Tammy doing?”

  “Not great.”

  “Is your old man even alive?”

  “I wouldn’t be the one to know that, would I?” Annabelle answered.

  CHAPTER 17

  IT TOOK A FULL WEEK TO MAKE the preparations. As part of that work Annabelle gave a list of the documents and IDs she needed to Freddy. When he came to the end of the sheet, he did a double take.

  “Four U.S. passports?”

  Tony looked up from his computer. “Passports? What for?”

  Leo stared at him contemptuously. “What? You think you cross nutcase Jerry Bagger and stay in the country? Give me a break. Yours truly is going to Mongolia and becoming a monk for a few years. I’d rather wear a robe and ride a yak around than let Bagger cut little pieces of my body off while he’s screaming about wanting his dough back.” He returned to working on his disguise.

  Annabelle said, “We need the passports to get out of the country for a while until things cool down.”

  “Out of the country?” Tony exclaimed, half rising out of his chair.

  “Jerry’s not infallible, but there’s no sense in being stupid. You can see the world, Tony. Learn Italian,” she advised.

  “What about my parents?” Tony said.

  “Send ’em postcards,” Leo growled over his shoulder as he struggled to fit a toupee to his head. “Talk about your freaking amateur hour.”

  “U.S. passports are difficult to make, Annabelle,” Freddy said. “They go for ten grand each on the street.”

  Annabelle gave him a hard stare. “Well, you’re being paid six point five million to do these, Freddy.”

  The man swallowed nervously. “I see your point. You’ll have them.” Freddy went off with the list.

  “I’ve never even been out of the country,” Tony said.

  “Best time to go is when you’re young,” Annabelle said, sitting down across from him at the table.

  “Have you ever been out of the country?” he asked her.

  Leo piped in. “Are you kidding? You think the States are the only place to run a con? Ha!”

  “I’ve been around,” Annabelle admitted.

  Tony looked at her nervously. “Well, maybe we could travel together. You could show me around. You and Leo,” he added quickly. “And I bet Freddy would want to come too.”

  Annabelle was already shaking her head. “We split up. Four apart is much harder to catch than four together.”

  “Right, okay, sure,” Tony said.

  “You’ll have plenty of money to live on,” she added.

  Tony brightened. “A villa somewhere in Europe, with my own staff.”

  “Don’t start throwing the cash around. That’s a red flag. Start small and keep your head down. I’ll get you out of the country, and then you take it from there.” She sat forward. “And now here’s exactly what I need from you.” Annabelle explained Tony’s task in great detail. “Can you do it?”

  “No problem,” he said immediately. She eyed him questioningly. “Look, I dropped out of MIT after two years because I was bored!”

  “I know. That was the other reason I picked you.”

  Tony looked down at his laptop and started typing. “I’ve actually done it before and fooled the place with the best security in the world.”

  “Who’s that, the Pentagon?” Leo asked.

  “No. Wal-Mart.”

  Leo shot him a glance. “You’re kidding me? Wal-Mart?”

  “Hey, Wal-Mart doesn’t mess around.”

  “How quickly can you do it?” Annabelle asked.

  “Give me a couple days.”

  “No more than two. I want to test it.”

  “I’ve got no problem with that,” he said confidently.

  Leo rolled his eyes, said a silent prayer, made the sign of the cross and went back to his toupee.

  While Freddy and Tony were working on their assignments, Leo and Annabelle donned disguises and headed to the Pompeii Casino. The largest casino on the Boardwalk and one of the newest, having risen from the ruins of an older gambling den, the Pompeii, true to its name, also sported a working volcano that “erupted” twice a day, at noon and six in the evening. What came out of the volcano wasn’t lava, but certificates that one could use to get drinks and food. Since casinos practically gave food and alcohol away to keep people gambling, it was not much of a sacrifice on Bagger’s part. However, people loved thinking they were getting something for nothing. Thus, the twice-daily eruptions were a surefire draw, the crowds lining up early and then proceeding to dump far more money in the casino than they would ever get back in food and liquor from the belches of the fake volcano.

  “Leave it to Bagger to get morons to line up for that crap and then drop their paychecks in his casinos while they’re getting fat and drunk,” Leo snarled.

  “Jerry collects chumps; that’s the lifeblood of the casino business.”

  “I remember when the first casino opened here in ’78,” Leo said.

  Annabelle nodded. “Resorts International, bigger than any Vegas casino at the time except the MGM. Paddy ran some crews here for a while at the beginning.”

  “Well, your old man never should have come back with you and me!” Leo lit a cigarette and pointed down the line of casinos. “I started out here. The casino crews back then were mostly locals. You had nurses, garbage truck drivers and gas jockeys all of a sudden dealing cards and running craps and roulette tables. They were so bad you could run any scam you wanted. Hell, you didn’t even have to cheat. You could make money just off their mistakes. That lasted about four years. I sent both my kids through college on the money I made back then.”

  She looked at him. “You never talked to me about your family before.”

  “Yeah, like you’re a real blabbermouth when it comes to that stuff.”

  “You knew my parents. What could I add to that?”

  “I had kids early. They’re grown and gone and so’s my old lady.”

  “Did she know what you did for a living?”

  “Hard to hide it after a while. She liked the money, just not the way I earned it. We never told the kids. I wasn’t going to let them get near the business.”

  “Smart man.”

  “Yeah, they still ditched me.”

  “Don’t look back, Leo, too many regrets start popping out.”

  He shrugged and then grinned. “We had a helluva roulette thing going here, didn’t we? Any con can past-post craps and blackjack, but only real pros can do it long-term at roulette. It’s as close as you can get to a long con at a casino table.” He looked at her admiringly. “You were the best claimer I’d ever seen, Annabelle. You could bring the heat or the cool. The pit bosses melted every damn time. And you saw the steam coming before any of us,” he added, referring to suspicious casino employees.

  “And you
were the best mechanic I ever worked with, Leo. Even when some rook cut into your move, you still nailed it before the dealer turned back around.”

  “Yeah, I was good, but the fact is you were just as good a mechanic as me. I think sometimes your old man kept me on because you said to.”

  “You give me way too much credit. Paddy Conroy only did what Paddy Conroy wanted to do. And what he ultimately did was screw us both.”

  “Yeah, and leave us for Bagger to feed on. And if you hadn’t been cat-quick about it and made him miss by a couple inches?” He looked out toward the ocean. “Maybe we’d be out there somewhere.”

  She plucked the cigarette out of his mouth. “And now that we’re done patting each other on the back down memory lane, let’s get to work.”

  They started toward the casino entrance and then abruptly stopped. “Let the cattle drive get by,” Leo warned.

  Each casino had a bus drive where the charters would start lining up at eleven o’clock in the morning. They’d disgorge their usually elderly passengers who’d spend all day in the casino running through their Social Security money and eating junk food. Then they’d hop back on the bus and head home with little to live on for the rest of the month, but certain that they would be back when their next government check rolled in.

  Leo and Annabelle watched the senior citizen brigades charge into the Pompeii in time for the first eruption of the day and then wandered in after them. They spent several hours walking the place and even played a few games of chance along the way. Leo had a nice ride at craps, while Annabelle stuck to blackjack, winning more than she lost.

  They hooked up a little later and had a drink at one of the bars. As Leo watched a curvy thong-wearing waitress carry a load of drinks to a hot craps table three deep with bettors looking to ride some action to riches, Annabelle said in a low voice, “Well?”

  He munched on some pecans and sipped his Jack and Coke. “Blackjack table number five. Looks like we got a little monkey business coming out of the shoe,” he said, referring to the device that held the packs of cards.

  “Dealer in on it?”

  “Oh, yeah. How about you?”

  Annabelle took a swallow of her wine before answering. “Roulette table next to the spinning car, we got a four-person past-posting team dragging and doing an okay job of it.”

  “I thought they taught the dealers to really case their bets now. And how about all the sophisticated eyes-in-the-sky and microcameras they got these days?”

  “You know how crazy the roulette table is, that’s why it’s past-posting Mecca. And if you’re good, anything’s possible despite all the high-tech stuff.”

  He touched his drink against hers. “Don’t we know that?”

  “How’s security look?”

  “Nothing out of the ordinary. I’m assuming the vault’s under a thousand tons of concrete surrounded by a million guys armed with machine guns.”

  “Good thing we’re not going that route,” she replied dryly.

  “Yeah, you don’t want to mess up your manicure.” He put his drink down. “How old would Jerry be now?”

  “Sixty-six,” she answered promptly.

  “I bet he hasn’t mellowed with age,” Leo said grumpily.

  “He hasn’t.”

  She sounded so sure, he looked at her suspiciously.

  “You check out the mark, Leo, remember? Con Man 101.”

  “Damn, there’s the asshole himself,” Leo hissed, and immediately turned away.

  As Annabelle watched, six men, all of them young, big and burly, walked by. They were surrounding another man, shorter but very fit, with broad shoulders and thick white hair. He was dressed in an expensive blue suit with a yellow tie. Jerry Bagger’s face was heavily tanned. Down one cheek ran a scar, and it looked like the man’s nose had been broken at least a couple times. Underneath his thick white eyebrows was a pair of canny eyes. His gaze darted across his casino, seemingly absorbing all sorts of interesting data from his empire of slots, cards and crushed hopes.

  As soon as they passed by, Leo turned back around and struggled to regain his breath. A ticked-off Annabelle said, “Your hyperventilating when the guy is all the way across the casino didn’t really figure into my plan, Leo.”

  He held up a hand. “Not to worry, I’m over it.” He drew one last deep breath.

  “We’ve never even met the guy face-to-face. It was his goons who tried to kill us back then. It’s not like he’s going to recognize you.”

  “I know, I know.” He finished his drink. “What now?”

  “When it’s time to go, we go. Until then, we work our script and practice our cues and look for any edge we can get, because Jerry’s so damn unpredictable that even if we’re perfect, it may not be enough.”

  “You know, I forgot what a cheerleader you are.”

  “Nothing wrong with stating the obvious. If he throws us a curve, we have to be ready to hit it out, or else.”

  “Yeah, we know all about or else, don’t we?”

  He and Annabelle both stared silently across the casino at Jerry Bagger and his army as they exited the casino, climbed into a mini-motorcade and headed off, perhaps to break somebody’s kneecaps for cheating the casino king out of thirty bucks, much less 30 million.

  CHAPTER 18

  AT THE END OF A WEEK THEY were ready. Annabelle was dressed in a dark black skirt and high heels, and she wore minimal jewelry. Her hair was now blond and spiky. She looked nothing like her enhanced casino photo. Leo’s appearance had been altered even more radically. His toupee was gray and thin, with a hard widow’s peak. He sported a small goatee, slender glasses and a three-piece suit.

  He said, “You know the only thing that bugs me about this is ratting out other cons.”

  “Like they wouldn’t do it to us if they had the chance to walk away with millions? Besides, the ones we pegged aren’t all that good. Sooner or later they’ll get caught anyway. And it’s not like the old days. No more bodies buried in the desert or chucked into the Atlantic. Past-posting’s a conspiracy to commit theft by deception crime, something like a third-degree misdemeanor. They’ll pay their fine or do their bit of time and go hit the casino boats in the Midwest or pester the Indians in New England until enough time passes and then they change their appearance, come back here to start all over again.”

  “Yeah, but it’s still a raw deal.”

  She shrugged. “If it’ll make you feel better, I’ll get their names and send them twenty grand each for their troubles.”

  Leo brightened but then said, “Okay, just don’t take it out of my share.”

  They had left Freddy and Tony and checked into one of the best hotels on the Boardwalk. They would have no further direct contact with either of the men from now on. Before leaving them she had admonished both, particularly Tony, to keep in mind that spies were everywhere in this town. “You don’t flash cash, you don’t joke, you don’t say anything that might tip someone that a con is going down, because they’ll go running to somebody to tell and collect some scratch. One slip and it could be over, for all of us.”

  She had looked directly at Tony when she added, “This is the real deal, Tony. No screwups.”

  “I’m covered. I swear,” he’d declared.

  Leo and Annabelle rode in a cab to the Pompeii and immediately took up their vigils. Annabelle watched a crew that she’d been observing running a past-posting scam at the roulette tables in casinos up and down the Boardwalk. There were various incarnations of past-posting, which had taken its name from a horse-racing scam where bets were laid down after the results of the race were known by the bettor. With roulette it involved surreptitiously sliding big dollar chips on winning numbers after the ball had dropped and then collecting. Some teams used a different technique. The bettor would hide the big chips under the cheaper ones before the ball dropped. Then the bettor would either “drag” or pull the big chips off the table if the number lost or do nothing except scream for joy if the number won, all
right under the dealer’s nose. The latter technique had the distinct advantage of taking the powerful eye-in-the-sky out of the equation because it would only be called into play if the bet won. Then the tape would show that the bettor had done nothing with the chips, since he would only pull the chip if the bet lost. Past-posting at the roulette table involved enormous amounts of practice, timing, teamwork, patience, natural skill and, most of all, nerve.

  Annabelle and Leo had once been masters at this game. However, the surveillance technology in use today by the casinos drastically reduced the chances of anyone except the very best cheats being able to conduct the scam successfully over time. And the nature of the con meant that you could only work it a limited number of times at a casino before you were taken down, so the bet and the odds had better be large enough to justify