Stone Cold (Camel Club 3)

CHAPTER 4

ANNABELLE CONROY stretched out her long legs and watched the landscape drift by outside the window of the Amtrak Acela train car. She almost never took the train anywhere; her ride was typically at 39,000 feet where she popped peanuts, sipped watered-down seven-dollar cocktails, and dreamt up the next con. Today she was on the train because her companion, Milton Farb, would not set foot on anything that had the capacity and intent to leave the ground.

“Flying is the safest way to travel, Milton,” she’d informed him.

“Not if you’re on a plane that’s in a death spiral. Then your chances of dying are roughly one hundred percent. And I don’t like those odds.”

It was hard to argue with geniuses, Annabelle had discovered. Still, Milton, the man with the photographic memory and a budding talent for brilliantly lying to people, had done good work. They had left Boston after a successful job. The item was 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, right?”

He either didn’t get her point or didn’t care. “I go to Harvard.”

“Wow, I never would’ve guessed that.”

“But I’m from Philly. The Main Line. My parents have an estate there.”

“Wow again. It’s nice to have parents who have estates,” she said in a clearly uninterested tone.

“It’s also nice to have parents who are out of the country half the time. I’m having a little party there tonight. It’s going to be a wild ride. You interested?”

Annabelle could feel the guy’s gaze running down her. Okay, here we go again. She knew she shouldn’t, but with guys like this she just couldn’t seem to help herself.

She closed the newspaper. “I don’t know. When you say wild, how wild do you mean?”

“How wild do you want it to be?” She could see him forming the word “baby,” but he apparently thought better of using it, at least so soon in the conversation.

“I hate being disappointed.”

He touched her arm. “I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.”

She smiled and patted his hand. “So what are we talking about here? Booze and sex?”

“A given.” He squeezed her arm. “Hey, I’m up in first class, why don’t you join me?”

“You have anything other than booze and sex going on?”

“You like to get into the details?”

“It’s all in the details, uh . . .”

“Steve. Steve Brinkman.” He gave a practiced little chuckle. “You know, one of those Brinkmans. My father’s the vice chairman of one of the biggest banks in the country.”

“FYI, Steve, if you’ve just got coke at this party, and I’m not talking the soft drink, that would definitely disappoint me.”

“What are you looking for? I’m sure I can get it. I’ve got connections.”

“Goofballs, Dollies, Hog, with artillery to do it right, and no lemonade, lemonade always pisses me off,” she added, referring to crap-quality drugs.

“Wow, you know your stuff,” Steve said, nervously looking around at the other people in the café car.

“You ever chased the dragon, Steve?” she asked.

“Uh, no.”

“It’s a funky way to inhale heroin. It’ll give you the greatest pop in the world, if it doesn’t kill you.”

He removed his hand from her arm. “Doesn’t sound very smart.”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty. Why?”

“I like my men a little younger than that. I find that when a guy reaches eighteen he’s left his best ball-banging behind. So you gonna have any minors at this party?”