The Collectors

using it. I try to do it as unobtrusively as possible so no one gets embarrassed. I’m sure you can understand.”

“Oh, I completely understand.” Annabelle reached by the clerk and slid out the device. “What this does, Tony, is read the name and account number, and the embedded verification code on the magnetic stripe so you can forge the card.”

“Or more likely sell the numbers to a card ring that’ll do it,” Leo added. “That way you don’t have to get your metrosexual hands really dirty.”

Tony looked at both of them. “How do you know my name? You cops?”

“Oh, much better than that,” Annabelle said, putting her arm around his slender shoulders. “We’re people just like you.”

Two hours later Annabelle and Leo were walking down the pier in Santa Monica. It was a bright cloudless day, and the ocean breeze delivered waves of deliciously warm air. Leo wiped his forehead with a handkerchief, took off his jacket and carried it over his arm.

“Damn, I’d forgotten how nice it was out here.”

“Beautiful weather and the best marks in the world,” Annabelle said. “That’s why we’re here. Because where the best marks are . . .”

“Are where the best cons are,” Leo finished for her.

She nodded. “Okay, that’s him, Freddy Driscoll, crown prince of bad paper.”

Leo stared ahead, squinting against the sun, and read the small sign over the outdoor kiosk. “Designer Heaven?”

“That’s right. Do it like I said.”

“What other way is there to do it but like you said?” Leo grumbled.

They reached the merchandise display where jeans, designer bags, watches and other accessories were neatly arranged. The older man next to the kiosk greeted them politely. He was small and plump with a pleasant face; tufts of white hair stuck out from underneath the straw hat he wore.

“Wow, these are great prices,” Leo commented as he looked over the items.

The man beamed proudly. “I don’t have the overhead of the fancy stores, just the sun, sand and ocean.”

They looked through the merchandise, selected a few items, and Annabelle handed the man a hundred-dollar bill in payment.

He took it from her, put on a pair of thick glasses, held the bill up at a certain angle and then quickly handed it back. “Sorry, ma’am, I’m afraid that’s a forgery.”

“You’re right, it is,” she said casually. “But I thought it was fair to pay for fake goods with fake money.”

The man didn’t even blink; he just smiled at her benignly.

Annabelle examined the bill in the same way the man had. “The problem is that not even the best forger can really duplicate Franklin’s hologram when you hold the bill at this angle, because you’d need a two-hundred- million-dollar printing mill to get it right. There’s only one of them in the States, and no forger has access to it.”

Leo piped in, “So you take a grease pen and do a nifty sketch of old Benny. That gives anyone smart enough to check the paper a little flash and the illusion that he saw the h-gram when he really didn’t.”

“But you knew the difference,” Annabelle pointed out. “Because you used to make this paper about as well as anyone.” She held up a pair of jeans. “But from now on, I’d tell your supplier to take the time to stamp the brand name on the zipper like the real manufacturers do.” She put the jeans down and picked up a handbag. “And double-stitch the strap. That’s a dead giveaway too.”

Leo held up a watch that was for sale. “And real Rolexes sweep smoothly, they don’t tick.”

The man said, “I’m really shocked that I’ve been the victim of counterfeit merchandise. I saw a police officer just a few minutes ago farther down on the pier. I’ll go and get him. Please don’t leave; he’ll want your full statements.”

Annabelle gripped his arm with her long, supple fingers. “Don’t waste your cover story on us,” she said. “Let’s talk.”

“What about?” he asked warily.

“Two shorts and then a long,” Leo answered, making the old man’s eyes light up.

CHAPTER 4

ROGER SEAGRAVES LOOKED across the conference table at the mouse of a man and his pitiful comb-over consisting of a dozen strands of greasy black hair that vainly attempted to cover a wide, flaky scalp. The man was skinny in the shoulders and legs and fat in the belly and butt. Though still in his forties, he probably would’ve been hard-pressed to jog more than twenty yards without collapsing. Lifting a grocery bag would no doubt have taxed the limits of his upper body strength. He could be a poster boy for the physical degradation of the entire male race in the twenty-first century, Seagraves thought. It irked him because physical fitness had always played paramount importance in his life.

He ran five miles every day, finishing before the sun was fully up. He could still do one-handed push-ups and bench-press twice his own weight. He could hold his breath underwater for four minutes and sometimes worked out with the high school football team near his home in western Fairfax County. No man in his forties could keep up with seventeen-year-old boys, but he was never that far behind them either. In his previous career these skills had all served one purpose: keeping him alive.

His attention turned back to the man across the table from him. Every time he saw the creature a part of him wanted to place a round in the man’s forehead and put him out of his lethargic misery. But no sane person killed his golden goose or, in this case, golden mouse. Seagraves may have found his partner physically lacking, but he needed the man nonetheless.

The creature’s name was Albert Trent. The man had a brain under the wretched body, Seagraves had to give