Once a Thief (Gentleman Jack Burdette Book 3)

by Dale M. Nelson

  Or Jack had to kill them both.

  He’d shot a man once in self-defense, and it was a true him-or-me situation, but that didn’t stop the nightmares. Jack still saw that man’s face in his dreams. Radas was a Serbian war criminal, a member of the Pink Panthers thievery syndicate, and a murderer himself. He’d have shot Jack dead and not given it a second’s thought. He was evil throughout, but that didn’t make killing him easier to live with.

  What if there wasn’t any other way to get Reginald and Vito out of the picture?

  And what happened when Reginald LeGrande and Vito Verrazano, two former associates of Gentleman Jack Burdette’s, turned up dead in Los Angeles and Jack didn’t have an airtight alibi?

  Jack had told Rusty that this was a game he couldn’t play from the sidelines. The same was true for Jack. He couldn’t have a foot in both worlds and expect to pull this off. Or, at least, to do a job without consequences.

  Jack checked the time. Rusty was due to have landed at LAX at noon. Jack called. They needed to talk, and Jack needed to think.

  How far was he willing to go?

  9

  “I’m sure this is all just a misunderstanding,” Reginald said in a voice that sounded like his words were dragged over gravel first. He was white-knuckling the phone with one hand and balling his fist with the other. “No, I absolutely understand and appreciate your concerns, but this is clearly a mistake. My firm is…I understand. Thank you for your time.” Reginald wasn’t sure if the woman on the other end even heard that last part. He lowered the phone and let out a thunderous, “Fuck!”

  Vito and his two walking body bags were staring at him as Reginald emerged from the kitchen.

  This place was far too small for all of them to be using as a base of operations. He had a four-hundred-square-foot apartment in Hermosa Beach. The rent was eye-gouging for an ex-con but was just affordable enough for someone trying to make an honest go of it. Reginald had money stashed away that the government hadn’t touched when he went to prison in 2014, but he wasn’t burning that on accommodations. Not just yet. Since getting out, he’d tried getting back into the underground scene in Long Beach, but he’d found that the game had changed and he no longer knew the players. Most of the people he’d worked with ten years ago as a fixer were out of his life, in jail, or dead. A decade is a generation in crime. Of the ones that were left, Reginald just didn’t trust them enough to wade back in. He no longer had a pulse on who had been caught, who might be an informant. None of the cops that he used for information could be trusted now either.

  Reginald had been an informant for California Highway Patrol for years, after his first stint in state prison for a botched jewelry store job in Beverly Hills in 2000. The CHP had become the state police in the nineties and were doing this big crackdown on robbery rings. So, Reginald played the part of the chastened ex-con and made his vast knowledge of the criminal underworld available to the police. What Reginald was actually doing over that period of eight or so years was tipping the CHP’s robbery squad to his rivals. Reginald quickly became known in the thievery circuit as the guy who put these perfect jobs together. You followed his lead, did what you were told, and you weren’t going to get busted. After all, he’d made Gentleman Jack Burdette.

  Reginald dropped the phone on the counter and grabbed a beer from his fridge. He popped the can and walked into the living room, saying nothing for a time. Vito was sitting in a fold-out chair from a card table, and the two hired mooks he’d brought with him were sitting on Reginald’s couch and stealing oxygen. According to Vito, they used to look after some mafia boss, but that guy was either dead or in jail, so maybe they weren’t that fucking good at it. One of them didn’t speak any English, and Reginald couldn’t figure out which one that was. Reginald had tried to put them up in a motel down the street, nice old place that was a couple of blocks from the beach, but Vito wasn’t having it. Reginald knew that he was pushing it, storing the diamonds in a place that Vito couldn’t get access to, and he’d pushed it further doing that without telling Vito in advance. Vito told him that he understood those moves, but there was a cold front behind his voice, and Reginald knew not to press it any further. So, now he had someone sleeping on his couch and two others on fold-up camping cots that he’d bought at a sporting goods store. That was a fun conversation. Thankfully, that argument happened on the way from Van Nuys to his place in Hermosa Beach, and they were able to stop along the way.

  “What happened?” Vito asked.

  Reginald answered from behind his beer. “Cancelled the appointment. Just said they were no longer interested in talking with us.”

  “You said something about a misunderstanding on the phone.”

  “The other guy that cancelled on us said that the time wasn’t right for the sale right now but he would keep us in mind for future acquisitions. I asked him why, and he just said their priorities had changed. Really vague. This lady told me that a US Customs agent was there and that she wasn’t supposed to talk about it, was doing us a favor in letting us know. I told her it was a misunderstanding, and she said that it may well be, but they couldn’t talk to us if there was a problem with Customs. She cut the call off before I could say anything else.” Reginald took a deep pull from the beer.

  “You don’t think it had anything to do with our paperwork or that, what’d you call him, broker at the airport, do you?”

  Reginald shook his head. “No. That’s perfectly wired.” Reginald’s tone was flat, matter-of-fact. He’d planned this out to the last detail. The customs broker was someone he could trust. If there was a problem here, it wasn’t on this end. “What’d you tell the people in Rome when you left?”

  Vito shrugged his shoulders. “I didn’t tell ’em anything. Nobody asked. We went to the private terminal, put our guns in the case, and got on the plane. That was it.”

  “Well, somebody fucking knows,” Reginald shouted. One of Vito’s bodyguards shifted in his seat like he was going to get up. Reginald caught Vito shooting the kid a glance, and he settled back in his seat. Reginald stepped back into the kitchen, set his beer on the counter, and got three fresh Sierra Nevada cans from the fridge. He passed them out in a kind of awkward showing of detente and then retrieved his own beer. “It just doesn’t make any sense,” Reginald said after they’d all had a quiet sip. “I have a lot of confidence in the broker. I mean, I guess it’s possible that someone at Customs decided to look into it because of how much we brought over, but Mr. Walker, he assured me that wouldn’t happen. They wouldn’t ask any questions if the paperwork was legit. He said he handled a whole airplane the other day.”

  “Well, that’s two down,” Vito said. “What’s left?”

  “Day after tomorrow, that’s the one we’re waiting for. Word is, the prospective buyer is overextended in a big way. He’s driving around in an Aston Martin, has a house in Palos Verdes that he can’t afford and a wife he can’t afford either. Has a side piece who knows how much money he makes. Certainly can’t afford that.” Vito’s guy on the right laughed at that, so Reginald knew that was the one who spoke English. “Anyway, he’s leveraged up to his forehead, and he’s not making his numbers. I think he’s desperate to make a big sale, because he needs the commission. He’s agreed to meet with us and sounds excited about it.”

  “Great, so why are we meeting with all these other people?”

  “Because very few people can stroke an eighty-million-dollar check, that’s why. We want to move these diamonds in one go, we need to spread it around. But if we can sell a big chunk of them, say thirty mil or so, that buys us a hell of a lot of breathing room.” Reginald looked around his apartment, taking in all four hundred square feet of it as he did. “This customs thing is definitely a problem, though,” Reginald said, mostly to himself.

  “How’d you find out about this buyer with the house and the expensive wife?”

  “I was in prison with an old business associate of his. He went up on a tax evasion hit.”

&n
bsp; “We sure this is safe?”

  “Vito, none of this is fucking safe,” Reginald snapped and raised the beer can to his lips to hide the glower.

  “Fine. So, this customs problem. You gonna call your guy? The broker? See if he knows anything about it?”

  “Not yet,” Reginald said, drawing an incredulous look from Vito. “We don’t want anybody official looking into this, asking too many questions.”

  “I get that, but we also gotta know if your government thinks something is up. Customs can seize all of those diamonds while they investigate our made-up company. You yourself said that it wouldn’t take a government investigator long to figure out that this is all bullshit.”

  “I know what I said,” Reginald said, his lips curling around his teeth. But Vito wasn’t entirely incorrect.

  Reginald always knew this was a possibility. The odds were never in their favor. But Reginald planned this right, and their smuggling the diamonds into the country was as flawless an operation as he could hope for. Especially given what he had to work with.

  Reginald wasn’t surprised that Customs might start asking some questions. It was a huge amount of stones; that was bound to raise an eyebrow or two. Well, Reginald hadn’t managed to stay alive in this game this long without having a contingency plan or two in his hip pocket. He’d considered this as a possibility. WorldSecure, the company that was storing the diamonds, had a worldwide transportation service. If they could make this first sale, the thirty-million-dollar one, Reginald would just move the operation overseas. He would pay WorldSecure to safely and legally transport his—their, he corrected himself—diamonds to one of their other locations. London was an option, and that brought them to the gray markets in Europe. But Singapore was another. And the underground gem trade was thriving in Asia right now.

  “Listen,” Reginald said and held up a calming hand. “I think this is all, probably, explainable. We’re just fucking nervous. I think a customs agent is just trying to do his due diligence and call around, check up on us since we brought in such a large amount. These import houses and brokerages, they all do millions of dollars a week in business, sometimes more. Not all of that is over the table, if you know what I mean. What I’m saying is, these two that cancelled meetings on us, they probably just got spooked.” Reginald was entirely bluffing, but it didn’t appear that Vito had picked up on it. He actually had no idea how the legitimate gem trade worked or how any of these wholesale operations functioned. Vito didn’t need to know that, however.

  Reginald was burning through his cash reserves, his flight money, faster than he expected. Vito wasn’t kicking anything in, said he’d done enough. They had to have this first sale go through, because they needed the operating capital and, most importantly, to continue to be able to afford the services of WorldSecure.

  10

  Salvatore Cannizzaro was a man unused to being upset. Today, he was furious. Salvatore was a reasonable man. He was a businessman, after all. He’d made a generous deal with Vito Verrazano and had expected Vito to honor it. Salvatore was going to purchase those diamonds for a reasonable price and all at once, which was impossible on the black market these days. Vito would become a rich man, and Salvatore would impress an important new business associate with his thoroughness and resourcefulness. And then Vito went silent. So Salvatore was forced to find him, because who were we if we did not honor our word?

  Animals.

  It took them a long time, far too long, to track down Vito Verrazano. Vito had never shared his location with Salvatore, which the don understood. If he were sitting on six pounds of diamonds, he wouldn’t give out his address either. So, Salvatore engaged his network of informants and sent his soldiers looking. It took them months, and eventually they found him in a house in the lake district. He sent his men to Lago Maggiore to Vito’s home, where they would force their way in and then make Vito give them the diamonds. Such was the price for going back on one’s word.

  When Constantino Fiore and his men arrived, he found that Vito was not there and he phoned Salvatore for instructions. Salvatore told him to enter quietly and wait. Vito would return home and they would be able to proceed with the operation as intended. Only, a thief arrived instead. They watched him sneak in from the back stairs. Constantino had a man on the window because Vito had a dock and though it was late, they didn’t know if he owned a boat. The thief entered the home and found Vito’s safe. In the retelling, Salvatore didn’t have the opportunity to feel the same elation that Constantino must have felt at this development because he already knew the outcome. They waited until the thief opened Vito’s safe and sprang their trap on him. If they didn’t have Vito to force him to open the safe, this thief would serendipitously do it for them.

  But this thief outsmarted them. He escaped the lure and then outdrove Constantino and his men. Salvatore’s men were blunt instruments. He knew this. They were not professionals. This thief, he was a professional.

  Constantino failed him, and the don was furious.

  They never saw what exactly was in Vito’s safe before it was opened. The thief shot their man and escaped, but he also didn’t have much time to take anything.

  Don Salvatore Cannizzaro reclined in his chair, and there was no sound other than ice melting, which caused the wine bottle to shift slightly, and the soft gurgle of the pool. He sat on his expansive back lawn, in a small circular patio that was a few feet from his pool, beneath an orange-and-white umbrella. A fifteen-foot hedge ringed the backyard, with large coniferous trees interspersed. Though it was probably unnecessary at this point, because who would have the audacity, but one of his soldiers patrolled the back line. His villa was a walled compound on the outskirts of Rome, a small village surrounded by forest and agricultural land. Salvatore kept to himself, and the locals assumed he was another rich man in a big house.

  Moving from Sicily to Rome in the nineties had been a bold choice at the time. The Cannizzaros were members of La Cosa Nostra, the Sicilian mafia. No criminal organization could claim Rome, the city having been purged of its mafia influences after Il Mattanza. They were still close to the Camorra of Naples, and that required care, but the Camorra’s influence did not extend that far. Salvatore’s father was a visionary. He knew his country well and knew that the power vacuum that existed in Rome after Il Mattanza would eventually be filled. Nothing in Italy stayed free of corruption for long. But the elder Cannizzaro also avoided the perils of his Sicilian brethren. He didn’t murder judges, for one thing. Instead, they bought them. But as businessmen, not as mafiosi. They used their fortunes to gain control of a small bank in Rome, and from there, they gained legitimacy. Then they had a vehicle to not only launder money but to quietly pay the politicians, judges, and officials they needed to stay in business.

  Salvatore’s father died with his dream largely realized. The one thing he wanted was for Salvatore to take the organization to the furthest heights, push them so far into the stratosphere that no one would ever question their origins, just that the Cannizzaros were great men.

  Salvatore reclined and waited, occasionally sipping on the glass of wine at his side. Angelo appeared every so often and asked his don if he would enjoy some food as well. They had an exceptional chef. Salvatore calmly declined. He never ate on anger; it was bad for the digestion. Besides, he was waiting for his guest, who was late. This tension added to Salvatore’s nerves. The wine calmed him to a degree, but too much and his fury would be exposed. He needed to find those diamonds and do it quickly. This deal would solidify the end of the Cannizzaros as a mafia organization and their beginning as a global smuggling empire.

  Logistics, he corrected himself. They were now into logistics.

  Getting control of Feretti and therefore Feretti’s shipping business had been quite fortuitous, and for that, Salvatore was proud, despite his current troubles.

  But if Salvatore was an impatient man, his buyer and new business partner (if such a term was even accurate) was far less forgiving than he. Sal
vatore’s clock was ticking. His guest was, perhaps, the last chance to find them.

  Constantino was a good soldier, but he was not a hunter. He was not a thief.

  Salvatore needed a thief, and he needed the best.

  But he was late.

  If he didn’t show, Salvatore would have expended the good options. There was also no guarantee that his guest would agree to the terms. There was much water under many bridges between them.

  Angelo appeared at his side just as Salvatore lowered the glass of slightly effervescent lambrusco from his lips. The words of rebuke were forming on Salvatore’s lips that he didn’t want any goddamn antipasti, when Angelo said that his guest had arrived. Salvatore took several calming breaths and waited until two shadows appeared at the edge of his vision.

  Salvatore stood and greeted his cousin.

  For sixteen years in prison, he looked pretty good.

  “Nico, it’s very good to see you,” the don said genuinely. Salvatore clapped Niccoló Bartolo on the shoulders.

  “It’s good to see you too, cousin,” Nico said, and stepped forward to embrace his estranged relative.

  Salvatore nodded to Angelo, who disappeared back into the house. Then he indicated a chair. “Please, you must sit and have some wine.”

  Salvatore knew how this must look to some of his men, most of whom had been with him since his father ran the organization. Since his father declared vendetta.

  Nico looked like anything but a jewel thief.

  Nico was taller than Salvatore and naturally muscled, even at what must now be sixty-three, sixty-four? Nico’s face was slightly round with age, where he once looked years younger than he was, prison had closed that distance considerably. His eyes were dark and luminous and had lost none of their fire. When those eyes grew dark with anger, they were fathomless, and it was like looking into the depths of hell.