Stone Cold Read Free Page A

back where it needed to be and no one had thought to call the cops. In Annabelle’s world of high-stakes cons that was equal to perfection.
    Thirty minutes later, as Amtrak’s only bullet train service wound its way down the East Coast and pulled into a station, Annabelle glanced out the window and involuntarily shuddered when the conductor announced they were arriving in Newark, New Jersey. Jersey was Jerry Bagger land, although thankfully the Acela train didn’t stop at Atlantic City where the maniacal casino boss had his empire. If it did Annabelle wouldn’t have been on it.
    Yet she was smart enough to realize that Jerry Bagger had every motivation to leave Atlantic City and come looking for her wherever she might be. When you ripped a guy like that off for $40 million, assuming that Bagger would do his best to tear thousands of pieces of your flesh off one at a time was hardly irrational thinking.
    She glanced over at Milton, who looked about eighteen with his boyish face and longish hair. In reality the man was pushing fifty. He was on his computer, doing something that neither Annabelle nor anyone else below the level of genius would be able to understand.
    Bored, Annabelle rose, went to the café car and purchased a beer and a bag of chips. On the way back she spied a
New York Times
lying discarded on one of the café tables. She sat down on a stool, drank her beer and munched her chips as she idly turned the pages looking for that one bit of information that might spark her next adventure. Once she got back to Washington, D.C., she had some decisions to make, chiefly whether to stay put or flee the country. She knew what her answer
should
be. A no-name island in the South Pacific was the safest place for her right now, where she could just wait out the tsunami named Jerry. Bagger was in his mid-sixties and her long con against him had without a doubt considerably raised the man’s blood pressure. With a little luck he’d soon croak from a heart attack and she would be scot-free. However, she couldn’t count on that. With Jerry you just had to figure that all your luck would turn out to be bad.
    It shouldn’t have been a difficult decision and yet it was. She had grown close, or as close as someone like her could get, to an oddball collection of men who called themselves the Camel Club. She smiled to herself as she thought about the foursome, one of whom was named Caleb Shaw and worked at the Library of Congress. He reminded her remarkably of the cowardly lion from
The Wizard of Oz.
Then her smile faded. Oliver Stone, the head of this little band of miscreants, was something altogether more. He must’ve had one hell of a past, Annabelle thought—a history that might even surpass hers in the unusual and extraordinary department, and that was saying something. She didn’t know if she could say good-bye to Oliver Stone. She doubted she would ever run across another one like him.
    Her gaze flicked up at a young man passing by who did not attempt to hide his admiration for her tall, curvy figure, long blonde hair, and thirty-six-year-old face that, if it didn’t actually hit the “wow” level, came awfully close. This was so despite a small, fishhook-shaped scar under her eye; a present from her father, Paddy Conroy, the best short con artist of his generation, and the world’s worst father, at least in his only child’s estimation.
    “Hey,” the young man said. With his lean physique, tousled hair and expensive clothes that were designed to appear cheap and grungy, he looked like an Abercrombie & Fitch ad. She quickly sized him up as a privileged college kid with far more money than was healthy and the insufferably cocky attitude to match.
    “Hey back at you,” she said and returned to her newspaper.
    “Where you headed to?” he asked, sitting down next to her.
    “Not where you’re headed.”
    “But you don’t know where I’m going,” he said in a playful tone.
    “That’s sort of the point,