Once a Thief (Gentleman Jack Burdette Book 3)

by Dale M. Nelson

  “I’ve got to at least do something,” Jack said with a protest that he didn’t really feel. Rusty was right, of course. Jack’s judgment would be completely impaired by the fact that he wasn’t running away from Kingfisher, from Megan. What he wanted, truly wanted, was to become Frank Fischer in more than just a name. This situation with the diamonds, he didn’t see it for what it was at the time. Vito double-crossing them, Jack being outplayed wounded his ego on a level that he hadn’t expected because it had never happened before. He wanted to get these diamonds back as much because it was like some kind of final victory over Bartolo, a man who once tried to kill him, as it was proving to Vito that he was better. Once they learned Reginald was involved, the stakes for Jack were raised so high that he couldn’t see clearly.

  In Rome, Jack risked his life and his freedom in a daring scheme no one saw coming to steal these diamonds right out from under his enemies. In the same sweep, he delivered Aleksander Andelić to the FBI and brokered a deal that left him more or less a free man. For two years he’d quietly boiled over losing the diamonds because that plan, so audacious, so cunning, was just wiped away by an old man with a gun.

  Jack could walk away now, and if Rusty and Enzo got the diamonds, then Jack would broker the sales, which would have to be spread out over a number of years to hide the diamonds’ origin. That was how he would earn his share.

  “No, you don’t have to do anything,” Rusty said.

  “How about I plant the bug in Reginald’s apartment? It’ll be easier to tail them if you’ve got two eyes. I’ll do that and then head home. You call me when it’s over.”

  Rusty and Enzo exchanged glances, and Enzo nodded.

  The device looked like a phone or a handheld radio. They could track Reginald’s location using the GPS on the phone associated with that number as long as the device was on. Reginald wouldn’t communicate with Vito and anyone else he might be teamed up with outside of their secure messaging app, and that wouldn’t be available on a bare-bones disposable phone. Why he wasn’t using a disposable phone for the communications with the various gem dealers, Jack couldn’t say. It seemed out of character for Reginald, given the effort he usually put into maintaining his anonymity, but Jack wasn’t going to question the break they got. Could be Reginald was slipping, could also be that he didn’t think anyone would be onto him.

  They used the phone tracker to find Reginald living in a shit-shack apartment in a pea-green building above a beachfront grocery store in Hermosa Beach. They found him that first day; Reginald was obviously on the phone quite a bit. The place was on Hermosa Avenue, about a block from the water. Part of Reginald’s sentence, when he was finally convicted in 2014 of passport fraud and an embezzlement scheme involving Kingfisher’s onetime accountant, Paul Sharpe, Reginald had to pay millions in fines. That cleaned out most of the fortune he’d had stashed away, but Jack always assumed that he had extra money hidden offshore for when he finally did get out. This place seemed like an odd choice to Jack because, given the proximity to the beach, it still had to be an expensive rental, which Jack confirmed on a real estate website. Two grand a month for one of the other properties in that long, two-story building.

  But when he actually saw Reginald, Jack understood the logic of it.

  Reginald was deeply tanned and had grown his hair out—it was long and had that salt-stringy effect from being so close to the ocean. He’d also grown a beard. He looked every part the retired surfer, beach bum. Reginald would never emerge from the scenery with a look like that; he would never register with anyone. The black Range Rover looked entirely out of place, though, but this was LA, after all, and someone driving a vehicle beyond their means was as common as sunshine.

  The plan was to wait until Reginald and Vito left for the day, then Jack would break in and plant the listening device in his apartment. He didn’t know where Vito was staying, but they saw that he had a pair of heavies with him, and all four of them were not crashing in a one-bedroom. But it would make sense that they would plan their moves here, because this was where Reginald would feel safe.

  Jack cared less about the plan and more about learning where the diamonds were hidden, because there was no way they’d be here. He’d look, of course, but they were not going to hide their fortune here. Jack’s guess was there was a bank somewhere, which was all he needed. He didn’t want to pull that routine again. But knowing where that was meant they could plan to intercept them on the way to a meet. While Jack was planting the device, Rusty and Enzo would follow Reginald’s Range Rover and make sure that they were going to be gone long enough for Jack to get the work done. The listening device had a pretty limited range—about a mile and a half, so they planned to take turns staking out.

  They were half a block down from Reginald’s apartment, parked on the right side of the street. The ocean was behind them, meaning Rusty wouldn’t have to make a U-turn and attract attention when they started following the Range Rover. It was ten in the morning and already hot. They’d been in the car two hours, not wanting to miss anything. Vito and one of the goons walked outside around nine thirty and came back with breakfast. Thirty minutes later, all four of them descended the stairs, in suits and sunglasses, and climbed into the Range Rover. Reginald was driving. Seeing them walk down the apartment’s exterior stairs to the sidewalk, Jack exited the car. He was wearing sunglasses, a ball cap, and casual street clothes, but he still kept his head low. Enzo’s window was still down. He said, “Good luck.”

  The Malibu pulled away from the curb, about half a block behind the Range Rover. Jack walked in the opposite direction to where the road terminated at the beach. He stood beneath a couple of palm trees and watched the morning sunlight play off the water. There were still a handful of surfers riding out the last of that morning’s swell, but otherwise the beach was quiet. After about ten minutes, Jack’s phone vibrated in his pocket. It was Enzo. “It’s all clear,” he said. “Rusty says it looks like they’re heading for the four-oh-five, whatever that is.”

  Jack laughed. “It’s a road. See you when I see you.” He hung up. Jack traveled light. He had the listening device, which was about the length of his iPhone and half as wide, and his lock picks. Rusty had gotten them pistols the day before, but Jack left his in the car. He walked back along Hermosa Avenue, back toward the grocery store. The front door was open, and Jack had a line of sight to the person behind the counter. He could hear the radio from outside the store and saw the owner hunched over the counter, reading a newspaper. Jack turned to the staircase and took the steps two at a time until he was at Reginald’s door.

  This was the risky part. Because this was an outside unit, the doorway faced the street. There wasn’t much foot traffic, though it was starting to pick up. Jack remembered seeing a car across the street with about four people in it and all getting out. Standing in front of the door, Jack made a quick scan for surveillance equipment or alarms. There was an alley next to the building, and it followed that the grocery store owner might have cameras, but if he did, there weren’t any trained on Reginald’s door. He pulled a pair of latex gloves out of one pocket, put them on, and then slid the lock picks out of his pocket and selected the probe and the pick that looked right for the lock. He was rusty. Jack hadn’t touched his picks in two years. There were a lot of skills that he’d let slide. Why not? After all, Rome was supposed to be his last. Focus, Jack admonished. Luckily, this was a cheap lock and despite his fumbling, Jack was through it quickly enough. Time always seemed to pass slower when your nerves were up, but he did feel like he’d been standing out here just a touch longer than he could casually brush off if someone asked.

  Jack opened the door, slid through, and closed it behind him. Jack couldn’t tell how long Reginald had been living here, but it was clear that he was able to leave it at a moment’s notice. There was no decoration to speak of, just a raggedy couch and a TV in the living room. The walls were off-white, but that might have been from grime, Jack couldn’t tell. The fro
nt door opened to the living room, which overlooked the street. The kitchen was on the right. The living room and the kitchen both connected with a hallway that led to a bedroom at the back of the apartment. The bedroom had windows on two sides, which looked out over the alley that ran alongside the building.

  Jack made a fast search of the living room before moving to the kitchen. Like he’d thought, there was nowhere here to safely hide the diamonds. And if there were, there was no way Reginald was going to trust that to a hardware store lock. Jack quickly opened all cupboards, finding only the barest of essentials—plates, thrift shop cookware, plastic cups, a few boxes of food. He looked for false bottoms, panels, but found none. Similarly with the refrigerator and freezer. He looked in the oven and the pullout tray beneath it. Jack tilted the small stovetop forward so he could peer behind it. Since that was located next to the refrigerator, he was able to get a look behind it as well but found it was flush against the wall. Jack removed the listening device and set it on top of the stove before moving to examine the bathroom and bedroom.

  It took him perhaps an additional five minutes to determine that there was no possible way that Reginald was storing six pounds of smuggled diamonds in this apartment. Somehow, he knew they weren’t getting off that easily, but it did reinforce Rusty’s idea of planting the bug. There was a ventilation closet in the kitchen, and that would be the perfect spot. Jack opened it and removed the small package of adhesive putty that he’d brought. He fixed the listening device and then secured the microphone wire so that the tip was just below the vent. He placed a little more putty to make sure the wire stayed in place. This was a tiny apartment and the microphone should be able to pick up anything in the kitchen or the living room. Jack closed the thin metal cabinet door, which was painted the same off-white as the rest of the apartment. He picked up his things, placed them back in their respective pockets, and did a quick once-over to double-check that he hadn’t left anything behind or something out of place.

  Jack stepped back and made to leave. He was about four steps from the front door when he saw a shadow move across the window. Then another.

  The door handle turned.

  12

  Jack would never forget those eyes as long as he lived.

  Constantino Fiore was the first through the door, and Jack just stared at him, dumbstruck for a moment, but just as fast he landed on the question of what in the actual hell would he be doing here? There wasn’t a continuity of events that Jack’s mind could string together to make sense of this. Judging by the expression on his face, Fiore wasn’t expecting to see him either. Fiore cursed in Italian and his hand went for a gun. Jack’s hand went to the small of his back, where his holster should be, only to remember that he’d left the gun in the car.

  Fiore was a heavy working for Salvatore Cannizzaro. He was their man in the Commerce Bank of Rome. The man who Jack disarmed in a very dangerous game of bluff and who did not take that well. He was the man who murdered Giovanni Castro, no doubt a reprisal for Castro not handing Jack over to the Cannizzaros for his part in the bank break-in. But it was the man behind Fiore that stopped Jack’s heart cold.

  Niccoló Bartolo.

  “What the fuck are you doing here?” Bartolo asked.

  Fiore’s gun came up and a haphazard shot was off before Jack had a chance to react. It sounded like the loudest of thunders in the close confines. Luckily for him, it was effectively a hip shot and went wide, blasting the wall behind him. Jack had to move. He dropped back out of the kitchen and into the hallway, then darted down the hall to Reginald’s room. He slammed the door shut behind him and quickly moved out of the way. Using the wall as cover, Jack pushed the lock to engage it. Two more rounds followed, piercing the door easily. He heard shouting in Italian. Jack ran around to Reginald’s bed, which he grabbed the corner of and yanked. He pushed it across the wooden floor to the door, creating a makeshift barricade. It wouldn’t last long, but it would give him a second to figure out how to get out of here.

  Unfortunately, Constantino Fiore knew how to breach a door.

  He fired a shot high and another low, aimed at the door hinges. The door bucked hard, and it sounded like Fiore kicked it to try to force it open. The door, braced by the bed, didn’t open or fall off the hinges, but it wouldn’t be long. That bed wouldn’t hold. Jack’s only choice was to go out a window. He opened one of the bedroom windows and punched out the screen. Jack stood there for a moment, trying to puzzle out how to go through it. The bed scratched across the floor as someone on the other side kicked the door with force. There was another gunshot, this one exploding into the wall next to him.

  There was no more time to figure out a landing. Jack grasped the top part of the frame, put one leg through, and lifted his body up to make space for the second. Now he was sitting on the window with his legs dangling out. Jack kipped his body and pushed it through. He felt a shock of pain as his back scraped across the bottom part of the windowsill, then a free fall. Jack crashed down on top of a green and black dumpster that, thankfully, was closed. He collapsed into ball, bounced off the hot, heavy plastic lid, and rolled to the street. The sick, sweet reek of rotting garbage thick in his nose.

  Jack looked up and saw Fiore at the window staring back at him with that same darkly confident expression he witnessed during their showdown in the bank. Jack remembered thinking at the time that this was a man that would murder you and then grab a coffee. Fiore’s empty left hand rested on the sill for a moment, the pistol in the other as he calculated his odds, apparently.

  Jack wasted no time.

  He took off at a dead run down the alley. Another shot exploded out.

  Then a second, which landed right next to him. Jack chanced a look behind him and saw Bartolo on foot in the alley. He must have run back through the house, down the stairs, and around to the alley, hoping to cut Jack off.

  Jack broke left at the end of the alley, where it joined a small street. He was a block up from the beach and briefly thought about running that direction but rejected the idea almost as quickly. Neither Fiore nor Bartolo would think twice about murdering Jack in the middle of a crowd, if that was their objective. Jack dashed to the end of the block and across that street. Just as he was crossing it, a car screeched around the corner. This was a residential block, filled with long, two-story homes. Jack sprinted across the street and in between the gap between two of the houses. He heard a car screech to a halt, doors opening. He kept on running through the narrow, shadowed confine, jumping over a coil of garden hose. Jack emerged on the other side, sunlight blazing down. He ran across the next sunbaked street.

  Jack again ran through the gap between two buildings, one a house and the other a squat, two-story apartment building. The apartment only ran half the length of the block, however, butting up against the back of a restaurant on the adjacent lot. Jack darted in the space behind the restaurant, changing direction. He was heading back toward the main road now and away from the beach. Jack moved down this alley and saw that it connected with two single-story homes next door. The alley continued on to Hermosa Avenue. Jack ducked around the corner and stopped to catch his breath and listen. His chest heaved. Jack was standing next to an air-conditioning unit, and that made it impossible to hear anything else. He couldn’t tell if his pursuers were close.

  Questions flashed through his mind almost as quickly as he sucked breath into his lungs.

  How did they know about Reginald?

  And how on earth was Bartolo part of that?

  How was it they happened to be here at exactly the same moment?

  Jack saw a blur of motion out of the corner of his right eye. He side-kicked low with his right leg and struck home. Jack turned to face his target. The man grunted in pain and collapsed on the injured leg. Jack had connected right on the outside of the knee. Jack didn’t recognize him, but the gun told him he hadn’t accidentally hit a store employee on a smoke break. He kicked again, striking the hunched-over pursuer just below his chin. The
thug crumpled. Jack grabbed his pistol as it clattered to the ground, only then realizing he was still wearing the latex gloves from his break-in. He jammed the pistol in his front pocket and covered it with his shirt. Jack quickly checked the alley the guy had come down, and finding it empty, he kicked him one more time, sending the man back to the ground. He looked at him again to make sure it wasn’t Bartolo. This guy was a heavy and wouldn’t know anything worth forcing out of him. The risk wasn’t worth the time it would take.

  Jack turned his attention back to an escape route.

  The house in front of him was a single story, white walls and a green roof. The space between the two houses was fenced off, but it was a low one and Jack mounted it easily. He crouched and ran the length of that space. The wall at the end was about his height. He trotted and then ran to gain momentum, leaping to vault himself over. Jack swung his leg up over the wall and his body followed. He came down in a carport and the pistol crashed to the pavement. Jack grabbed it and put it back in his pocket. He was facing Hermosa Avenue now. Jack leaned against the white wall at his back, heaving and gasping for breath. He didn’t have long.

  Behind him, he heard an astonished male voice ask, “Hey—who the hell are you?” Then there was a crashing sound. The homeowner must have seen or heard Jack running through his backyard and came to investigate, then found Cannizzaro’s thug instead. Jack heard the sound of footsteps coming toward him. He also heard sirens piercing the air. Fiore’s indiscriminate firing had summoned the police. Jack went to the sidewalk and checked the traffic on Hermosa Avenue, which he now realized was on an incline. He’d been running downhill this entire time and hadn’t realized it. Jack sprinted across the two lanes to the median, where cars were parked on either side. He heard shouts behind him. Jack turned and saw Fiore’s man, the one he’d kicked and relieved of his weapon, vaulting over the wall just as he’d done moments before. Jack stood there in the median and stared the man down. He was dressed in a dark short-sleeve shirt, dark pants, and not suited as Fiore and Bartolo had been. Jack lifted the bottom of his shirt up, revealing the confiscated pistol. It didn’t register with him until Jack moved his hand to the grip. The goon froze, getting the message. Jack turned and looked back up the street from the direction he’d come. He saw Bartolo emerge around a street corner up the hill.