Once a Thief (Gentleman Jack Burdette Book 3)

by Dale M. Nelson

  “And I suppose you get a nice finder’s fee on top of that.”

  “A nice, quiet one,” Carter LeMothe said.

  He was in.

  15

  Jack changed cabs twice and used a ride share service on his trip back downtown to make sure he wasn’t followed. There were many techniques he’d developed over the years of being a thief that helped him calm frayed nerves before a job and that odd combination of exhilaration and panic after one. He likened it to skydiving with an untrustworthy chute packer. You didn’t know if it worked until it did. But none of those things he used to calm his mind, steady his breath, and project calm and certainty to his crews was working right now.

  Niccoló Bartolo was in Los Angeles.

  Constantino Fiore was in Los Angeles.

  They knew the diamonds were here, somehow, and staked out Reginald’s place. Two possibilities came to mind. Either they’d followed Vito from Rome to LA or they’d followed Enzo. Both of those seemed like stretches to Jack. There was just no way that he could reason out that the Cannizzaros could pull that off. Sure, he believed Danzig and Castro before her, when he’d heard they were now a highly sophisticated smuggling operation, they’d had judges and politicians in their pocket. Whatever. They were still a mafia. Their soldiers were barely literate thugs, career criminals, and most of them heavies. This was not an organization capable of pulling off surveillance and sure as shit not capable of tracking someone across continents.

  Jack hit refresh again on the local news sites he’d opened on his phone for an update. But there was nothing substantive. One TV station was reporting that there was a shootout in Hermosa Beach but offered no other details. No one else had picked up the story yet. It wasn’t even a mass shooting, Jack noted sardonically. People shot guns in LA all the time. The car crawled up the 110 toward downtown, and Jack had to restrain himself from asking the driver if this was as fast as he could go. Eventually, gradually, Jack thought sourly, the car pulled off on the freeway and Jack’s view shifted from a green-and-brown ribbon of crumpled mountains in the distance to the concrete and glass canyons of downtown. The driver turned south on Figueroa and headed two blocks to the Ritz.

  Jack refrained from texting Enzo and Rusty during the trip, fighting the impulse to update his team immediately on these events because he couldn’t take their inevitable call while he was in the car with someone and also didn’t want to take their focus away from following Reginald. Though he wondered how much that mattered now. This job was compromised. He stepped into the hotel, feeling the sharp slap in temperature change from the raw and dirty heat of the streets to the cool comfort and traces of eucalyptus of the lobby.

  Jack gratefully accepted a bottle of water from an attendant in the lobby and went to his room.

  That Bartolo was here was unquestionably bad. It would actually have been the worst possible thing but for one small fact that was actually something much, much worse.

  Jack learned about Cannizzaro’s involvement in this from the FBI. The Italian antimafia police had someone, an informant or an undercover, in Cannizzaro’s organization. If Cannizzaro knew the diamonds were in Los Angeles, the FBI might now know that too.

  As soon as Bartolo reported back to his boss that Jack was here…the FBI would know that as well.

  “Fuck,” Enzo said.

  Jack called the other two and said they needed to get back to the hotel as soon as possible. Enzo told him they were already on their way back. Jack filled them in on what happened at Reginald’s place as soon as they walked in the door. He had the TV on to local news, desperate for coverage. It wasn’t just that he was worried about himself being identified, it was more that if Fiore or Bartolo were arrested, “Jack Burdette” would be the name they had. Jack’s nerves calmed slightly the farther he got from the events of that morning, moving to the adrenaline crash following fight or flight.

  Getting caught was a new experience for him.

  “We know the Cannizzaros figured out Vito had the diamonds, because they were in the house at the same time as Enzo,” Jack said, forcing a steadiness into his voice that he didn’t feel. He’d already chastised Enzo for that, and picking at old wounds wasn’t going to help their situation. The one part of that night that never sat well with Jack was the coincidence of it all. That Enzo would be in Vito’s house at the same time as Cannizzaro’s people. Jack had pushed those thoughts to the side before, but they sure seemed relevant now. “But that doesn’t explain how they figured out Vito brought them here.”

  “I was fucking careful, Jack,” Enzo said. He was pacing now. Enzo’s stress response mechanism was swearing. When he was under pressure, the floodgates lifted and Enzo spoke almost exclusively in expletives. “I fucking lost them in Stresa and made sure I wasn’t followed on the Autostrada.” Enzo had driven to Rome, where he hid out for a day, until he was able to get a flight to Los Angeles. Tailing someone at night was difficult, but spotting one was equally difficult. And to be fair to Enzo, this wasn’t something that he necessarily knew how to do. Enzo had never been a wheelman like Jack had and certainly didn’t have Rusty’s law enforcement training. The chances of him being able to spot a tail, particularly at night, were no better than the average person’s.

  “How they got here,” Rusty said, “makes some difference, but ultimately not that much. The thing is, they are here. That’s the part we have to contend with. The question is, what do we do about it?”

  “Well, we don’t know who they were tailing. Meaning, we don’t know if they were staking out Reginald’s place and happened to be there at the same time we were.” Jack paused his train of thought. Again with the coincidence. He knew that a stressed mind had a way of jumping at shadows, at believing wild conspiracies, but this was now two times. That was a pattern. “If they were following us, then they were trying to jump me when I was in Reginald’s place.”

  “But why would they do that?” Rusty asked. “That wouldn’t get them the diamonds.”

  “They could probably guess why I was breaking into an apartment,” Jack said dryly. “If they were following Vito, likely they were doing the same thing we were.”

  “Trying to figure out where they were hiding them,” Rusty said.

  Jack nodded. “Exactly. It bothers me that it happened at the same time. That both of us were there at the exact same time. That seems to me like they’re acting on information.”

  “Let’s not speculate, Jack,” Rusty said in an even tone. “Stick to the facts.” In that moment, he could see the glimpses of the man Rusty used to be coming out.

  Jack replayed the events in his mind, from the moment that he picked the lock on Reginald’s door. Jack snapped his fingers.

  “What?” Enzo said.

  “The first thing Bartolo said to me was, ‘What the fuck are you doing here?’ I mean, all it tells us is that they didn’t expect to find me in Reginald’s apartment, but that’s something in and of itself.”

  “Like they weren’t there to ambush you,” Enzo offered.

  “Or I wasn’t the one they were expecting to find there. Either way, we need to be more careful now,” Jack said. “Watch for tails and make sure that we don’t have any communication outside of the encryptor. So now we’ve got another group to contend with, and we’ll have lost anything we were going to have gained by planting a bug in Reginald’s place. It’ll be a few days before the police turn it back over to him.”

  “Okay, so we’ve got a shootout in Hermosa Beach,” Rusty said. “Jack was made by Bartolo and this Fiore guy, but not by the police. And as far as we know, they all escaped, so maybe we’re good there. To your point, Jack, knowing how they knew to find Reginald is important because that informs our decisions going forward.” Rusty paused a moment, and when no one said anything further on that situation, he continued. “We followed Reginald to a place called WorldSecure. It was in that diamond center building where we tailed him the first time.”

  “I know it,” Jack said. Every jewel thi
ef worth a shit should. “They’re a high-end storage and transportation company. They specialize in storing private collections of precious gems, metals, and art. They also have a global transportation service, armored cars, armed guards, the whole nine.”

  “Could we break into it?” Rusty asked.

  “No vault is impregnable, but this one is close, from what I hear. I’ve never been inside one. Without inside information, I think we consider that impossible.” The other two nodded, and Jack could tell they were thinking the same thing. “What we can do is flush Reginald out. We might be able to convince them that Reginald is a criminal.”

  “Wouldn’t they just turn the diamonds over to the police?” Enzo asked.

  Jack shrugged. “These have been in the wind so long, the only people that know they’re stolen is us. I mean, it’s possible that WorldSecure would contact the authorities, but they’d have no real evidence that those diamonds were stolen, only that Reginald opened the account fraudulently.”

  “That’d be enough,” Rusty said. “That’s all the FBI or LAPD would need to seize them.”

  “What if we seized them? We’ve got the badges.”

  “They’ll never give them up without a warrant,” Rusty said.

  “Could you forge one?”

  “Easily. They’re just a form letter with stamp and a signature. That’s not the point.” Rusty’s mouth broke into that smirking, half-cracked smile of his. “I mean, in light of all the other laws we’re breaking on this thing, forging a search warrant probably isn’t all that bad. The problem is we don’t have a way to hand it to them without getting our fingerprints on it. It’s not like we can roll into that place with gloves on. Eventually, they’ll figure out it’s bogus and call the actual police. Both our prints are in the system.” Rusty walked over to the suite’s mini fridge and got them all bottles of water. He opened his, drank, and then continued. “Enzo and I followed Reginald and a WorldSecure armored car to One California. It’s this huge plaza between two big buildings. The Angels Flight is there. This place is huge, and it would’ve been impossible to see exactly where Reginald and Vito went without being in the elevator with them, but I scanned the building’s directory and I’m pretty sure they went to a place called A.G. Barret. They’re a gem and metals broker.”

  “The kind of place that could do a bulk buy,” Jack said.

  “Exactly. So, they’ve been at this, two, three days, right? There’s no way that they’re making a sale for the whole load. But they might be setting that up. You’d know this better than I would, Jack, but I’d imagine that even in the legitimate world, they aren’t buying diamonds sight unseen. We’ve got no way of knowing, though.”

  “Sure we do.” Jack opened his phone, tapped through a few screens, and dialed a number. He set his phone to speaker and put it on the counter near where they were standing.

  “Good afternoon, WorldSecure Los Angeles, how can I help you today?”

  “Hi, my name is Kurt Garland, I’m the senior director of security for A.G. Barret. Could I speak to your operations manager, please?” It took a few bounces to get the right person, which had Jack repeating the line a few times. But on the second hop he landed at the dispatch supervisor. “Mr. Wakefield, was it? I’m just calling to follow up on a delivery from your location to ours earlier today. We’ve got to audit these things now.”

  “I understand, sir, how can I help?”

  “Could you just verify the declared value of the transport? I believe it was under a Mr. Reginald Burton’s account.”

  “Oh, of course.” They heard some typing on the other end of the line and a muffled conversation as Wakefield issued instructions to someone on his end. “I’ve got it right here. We’ve got a declared value of seven point five million.”

  “Perfect,” Jack said with a broad smile. “And what was the declared value on the return trip?”

  There was a pause. “Well, the car came back empty. I figured you’d know.”

  “I know, I know,” Jack said in a mock-weary voice, one wage slave to another. “We gotta ask now. It’s this new process.”

  “Yeah, I got that,” Wakefield said and chuckled.

  “You’ve been a great help.”

  Jack closed the call. “Well, looks like that son of a bitch has some walking-around money.”

  “Is your guess that he’s still going to sell these piecemeal?” Enzo asked.

  “That’s what I think he’s going to, yeah. He makes one significant deal, say ten to fifteen million, and now he’s set for a long time. That buys him stability, gets him out of a shit-box apartment over a convenience store. He and Vito can sell them over the period of a few years. Now, thanks to Bartolo, he knows that someone is onto him, so I suspect that’ll move their timeline up some.”

  “What’s our next move?” Enzo asked.

  “We might be able to pull a version of what I just did with WorldSecure to figure out when the next deal is going to go down. Now that we’ve lost our bug, I think that’s the only real option we have. We’re not really set up to do a long stakeout of WorldSecure. I’m open to ideas.” Jack popped open his water bottle and drank.

  He and Reginald LeGrande went back as far as it went. Jack was a dumb kid boosting cars when Reginald discovered him in the early nineties. Reginald got him driving on crews, mentored him, showed Jack how to hide money. After a few years, when Jack had established himself as one of the best wheelmen in the game, Reginald brought him on the inside as part of a crew. That job went south, and Jack fled to Europe for a few years to let things cool off. When he returned, Reginald took a risky job that he wanted Jack in on, and Jack refused. Reginald was busted and did five years. Jack didn’t know it at the time, but Reginald became an informant then as a way of reducing his prison sentence. Over the next decade, Reginald put jobs and crews together and set up rivals for the police to take down.

  Jack always believed they were tight, close to being family. Turned out, Reginald had other ideas. He was playing a very long con. Reginald figured out that Jack, under an alias, bought Kingfisher and was using the winery to legitimize his money. Reginald got an associate of his, the guy who laundered Reginald’s money, to apply for a job as the winery’s accountant. They were successful, and over time, Paul Sharpe skimmed millions. The idea was to keep Jack hungry and working for Reginald. Wineries bled money, so it wasn’t hard to pull off, and no one noticed. Jack discovered the deception after Reginald tried to force him into the Carlton job.

  Jack didn’t turn the tables on Reginald so much as he flipped the table over and spilled the contents all over the floor. He set Reginald up for passport fraud, which he was absolutely doing, and then burned his house to the ground. In hindsight, arson was probably unnecessary and dangerous, but Jack was rightly furious at the betrayal and needed to exact some measure of revenge. The police were never able to connect Jack with the crime, and Reginald’s claims that Frank Fischer, a respected Sonoma winemaker and legitimate businessman, was actually notorious jewel thief Gentleman Jack Burdette went unheeded.

  Jack made sure anything connecting the two of them burned up in the fire. Arson can be an effective tool when judiciously used.

  In the back of his mind, Jack always knew this day would come.

  The reckoning between him and Reginald.

  Admittedly, Jack hadn’t seen this coming, Reginald and Vito teaming back up. When Vito approached him about Bartolo’s diamonds, Jack believed that he was just an old thief that saw an opportunity. He didn’t see this, but he should have.

  Reginald blamed Jack for both of his stints in prison. The first one, because Jack wasn’t on the job, and the second, rightly, because Jack served him up to the police. Jack knew Reginald wasn’t going to stop this time until one of them was ruined, in jail for the rest of their lives or dead.

  Niccoló Bartolo was an equal problem and a very dangerous threat. Nico lived in a world without morals. He simply didn’t acknowledge that they existed. He would kill or steal
without compunction or equivocation; it was simply an “act,” a thing that he did. Murder wasn’t something Bartolo did wantonly but rather as a way of sidestepping an obstacle. In Jack’s mind, that coolness made it somehow worse.

  Reginald would ruin Jack to get what he wanted. Bartolo would burn down the entire world to get what he was after, and he wouldn’t waste a breath doing it.

  “You’re quiet,” Rusty said in a thoughtful tone. “What’s on your mind?”

  “Bartolo may know where I live,” Jack said slowly and quietly. This, on top of everything else. Not only was it highly likely that the FBI would find out Jack was involved as soon as Bartolo reported back home, he might also know where Jack’s home was. “When we were in Rome, Giulia Montalto also tried to get me to steal Nico’s diamonds.” Enzo and Rusty knew the story. Giulia had been Jack’s lover when they were together in Turin all those years ago, but her survival instinct outpaced any feelings she might have had for him. She told Nico that Jack’s friend Castro was actually an undercover cop. Nico tried to kill him, and Jack escaped. Then, when Nico pulled the Antwerp diamond heist, he used Giulia to hide the diamonds in the last place anyone would look, the Commerce Bank of Rome. Giulia was supposed to wait for Bartolo, and he likely promised her the stars—he certainly had the money to deliver it. But he ended up serving ten years longer than he planned, and Giulia got tired of waiting. By then, she was tied up with the Serbian gangster and Pink Panther, Aleksander Andelić. Andelić and Reginald were connected, and Andelić got much of the material he had on Jack from Reginald.