he kicked off his shoes and stretched out full-length upon the bed.

Richard Baron did not look like a criminal. His clothes were expensive without being flashy—his shoes were black Italian loafers that had cost him thirty dollars a pair and the gray flannel suit cut in the latest continental style had set him back a little over two hundred. His shirts were all white-on-white and had been made to his measurements.

The average Joe would have pegged him for a successful young businessman from the West Coast. Somebody with a little more on the ball might have made him for a hustler in the Organization—not a muscle boy, but somebody with an angle.

Baron was a con man.

It was, he reflected, a good life. For the moment he had nothing to do but relax, and it wasn’t hard to relax with a full wallet and $15,000 in his suitcase, fifteen grand in tens and twenties that he could spend whenever he got around to it. The oil man in Dallas hadn’t stopped payment on his check and wouldn’t even think of it.

The oil man now thought he was the owner of several hundred acres in Canada loaded with uranium. As it happened, the oil man now owned a few hundred totally worthless stock certificates. By the time he found out he had been taken, he wouldn’t even remember what Baron looked like.

The oil man had put up a little over $75,000. Baron’s end of the deal was twenty grand, and it would take awhile to spend it. Not as long as it might take most people, because Baron liked to live somewhat better than most people did. The better restaurants, the better nightclubs, and the better women all helped lift his life to a higher plane. He drank nothing but Jack Daniels and ate nothing but blood-rare steak.

Actually, expensive living was essential in his occupation. It seems as though marks would only permit themselves to be swindled by men who appeared to be rich. A threadbare pinstripe might do for a sneak thief, but a confidence man had to come on strong if he wanted to score.

Now he could bide his time. Tulsa wasn’t exactly the place he would choose for a vacation, but the telegram from Lou Farmer had indicated that Lou had a mark hanging fire in Denver that might be ripe any day. A trip to Miami or New York was out until the mark fell one way or the other.

Baron hauled himself up from the bed and stripped for a shower. He was thirty-five but in better physical shape than when he’d been twenty and working the short con in railway stations, grifting hard for ten bucks here and twenty bucks there.

He’d come a long way in fifteen years. A grifter’s money went quickly, but Baron had a growing bank account in New York and a healthy stack of dough in the stock market. Not in the kind of wild moose pasture that he sold to the marks, but a solid mutual fund that grew steadily and paid a nice dividend. A few more heavy scores and he’d be able to lay off for the rest of his life.

He toweled himself dry after the shower and shaved with a straight razor, applying a few drops of aftershave lotion and a few more of an expensive cologne that he liked. He dressed again, changing to a pair of charcoal slacks and a light brown cashmere sport jacket.

He locked the suitcase and left it in the closet, not really worried that the lock would be broken. It didn’t matter if it was; the money was snug in the case’s false bottom.

It was too early for dinner and he walked leisurely through downtown Tulsa. It was amazing, he thought to himself, the way the average guy never noticed what was happening. He spotted a cannon mob grifting the other side of the street, working their way through the pockets of passing shoppers. Baron picked out the hook easily and watched him work, dipping easily into a mark’s back pocket and passing the wallet to one of the other members of the mob in a second. Smooth.

Just for the hell of it he crossed the street at the end of the block and doubled back the other way. The cannons were moving toward him and he let one of the prat men bump him gently while he pretended to study the display in a shoe store. Only because he was concentrating was

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