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you’ve covered your tracks well. No trails leading here, names, travel arrangements, phones, friends?”
    She shook her head. “Coming here was pretty much a spur-of-the-moment thing. And all under an alias.”
    “The smart thing to do would be to find out, as quietly as possible, what Bagger knows.”
    “Oliver, you can’t possibly get anywhere near that guy. It would be suicide.”
    “I know how to look, so let me start looking.”
    “I’ve never asked anyone to help me before.”
    “It took me decades before I could ask anyone to help me.”
    She looked puzzled. “But you’re glad you did?”
    “It’s the only reason I’m alive right now. Move out of your hotel and into another one. I’m assuming you have money.”
    “Cash is not a problem.” She rose and started to the door but turned back. “Oliver, I appreciate this.”
    “Let’s hope you can say that when it’s all over.”

CHAPTER 7
    “ D O 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