Stone Cold by David Baldacci Read Free Book Online Page B

looked around, quickly gained his bearings and swam hard toward the cliffs.

CHAPTER 12
    J ERRY B AGGER NEVER VENTURED much out of Atlantic City anymore. He had his own Learjet but seldom used it. The last trip on it had been the deadly visit to the unfortunate Tony Wallace in Portugal. He once had a yacht but sold it when he discovered he easily became seasick, an embarrassment for a man who prided himself on toughness. Indeed, he rarely left his casino anymore. It was really the only place he felt comfortable these days.
    Ironically, Bagger hadn’t been born in Vegas or Jersey. The ballsy, streetwise urban boy had seen his first light in, of all places, Wyoming, on a ranch where his father labored for something less than minimum wage. His mother had lost her life on Bagger’s first day from pregnancy complications, complications any hospital could have easily taken care of. But there had been no hospital within three hundred miles, so she’d died. Bagger’s father had joined her eighteen months later after an accident involving whiskey and a cantankerous horse.
    The Wyoming ranch owner had no interest in raising a bastard child—Bagger’s mother and father had not bothered to marry—and he was shipped off to his mother’s family in Brooklyn. It was in the close confines of this New York melting pot, not in the wide-open spaces of Wyoming, that Bagger was meant to be and had thrived.
    He had eventually gone back west. After fifteen years of twenty-hour workdays, nonstop hustling and risking and then nearly losing everything he had about a dozen times, he had his own casino. And soon business was so good he started printing money. Then his temper got the best of him and he was eventually run out of Vegas and ordered never to return. He had honored that request, although every time he flew over it he looked out the plane window and ceremoniously flipped off the entire state of Nevada.
    Bagger left his penthouse and took the private elevator down to the casino floor. There he walked through a sea of slots, gaming tables and sport betting rooms where gamblers from the novice to the experienced dropped far more money than they would ever get back. Whenever he spotted a kid sitting bored on the floor, with their parents hovering nearby feeding buckets of nickels into the slots—their hands blackened from the process—Bagger would order that food, books and video games be brought to the child, and he would slip a twenty-dollar bill in the kid’s hand. Then he would make a call and someone from the Pompeii would immediately confront the parents and remind them that while children were allowed in the casino, they could not be in the playing areas.
    Bagger would crush any adult who crossed him, but kids were not to be screwed with. That would change when they hit eighteen—then everyone was fair game—but until then kids were off-limits. It was shitty enough being adults, was his opinion, so let the little punks enjoy the time they had not being grown up. Underlying this philosophy might have been the fact that Jerry Bagger had never had a childhood. Dirt poor, he had run his first racket out of a Brooklyn tenement house at age nine and never looked back. That hard life was a major reason for his success, but the scars ran deep. So deep he didn’t even think about them anymore. They were simply what made him what he was.
    On his walk Bagger made three such calls for kids left in the playing area by their parents, shaking his head each time. “Losers,” he muttered. Jerry Bagger had never bet one dime on anything. That was for suckers. He was many things, but a fool wasn’t one of them. These idiots would scream and jump around after winning a hundred bucks, forgetting that they’d thrown away
two
hundred bucks for the privilege. And yet this weird psychological quirk humans possessed had made Bagger rich, so he wasn’t complaining.
    He stopped at one of the bars and raised an eyebrow at a waitress, who rushed to