Once a Thief (Gentleman Jack Burdette Book 3)

by Dale M. Nelson

  “That’s what those were?” Enzo said. “Honestly, I just assumed that was your luggage. You have so many fucking clothes, even for a heist.”

  “Rusty, what does a charter plane run us from here to Rome?”

  “If we have the whole plane to ourselves? Hundred k.”

  “How much is left in our budget?”

  “We’ve burned through almost everything. I can book the plane on a dummy corporate card. But assuming that we’ll want a clean car in Italy, place to stay, and weapons, we’ll need cash for that. Call it twenty to be safe.”

  “Make it happen,” he said.

  When that was done, they went back over day-of plans and their backups, should something go off. Jack studied the drawing he’d made of the building’s interior where the Pan Pacific offices were located and committed it to memory.

  Jack smiled. He was feeling a lot better about their chances.

  21

  Reginald paced in the front room of their rented house, unable to sleep.

  He hadn’t been on a job in over twenty years, and that one ended with him getting five years at San Quentin. This wasn’t exactly a “job,” but his nerves were still up. There were any number of ways this thing could fall apart on them today. In the past, he would never have done business with a fence he didn’t know and certainly wouldn’t do it with a take like this. But Pan Pacific wasn’t a fence, they were a real business, they were just looking to undercut their competition in a highly competitive industry and probably the government too. Reginald wouldn’t fault them for that. He had to play this carefully and make sure that he and Vito had their backstory rehearsed, their roles down. They probably knew that Reginald Burton and Vito De Angeles had done some undercutting of their own to get this many diamonds, which they’d be fine with, but if these guys found out they were really thieves, this thing was over.

  Business like this was like being in a relationship with an unfaithful woman. People needed just enough to convince themselves that it was on the level.

  Reginald looked into Pan Pacific and everything checked out. Website looked good, had sales figures and everything, had all the numbers and codes that the government requires and whatnot. He even called around, checked with the building owner, couple of other places. No one at WorldSecure had heard of them, but Reginald actually would have been surprised if they had. WorldSecure’s clients were private investors; there wasn’t anyone there that was doing institutional-level investing in diamonds.

  Reginald pulled the curtain back on the front window. The sky was pre-dawn gray. Santa Anas had been bad last night. He hadn’t slept well to begin with but had dreams about the skin being stripped from his bones by that wind. Must’ve been able to hear it in his sleep. Reginald decided that he needed to get out and move, calm his nerves, so he decided to walk a couple of blocks and get some breakfast. When he’d rented this place two days before, he chose Westlake because of its proximity to downtown, just a couple of miles as the crow flies on the other side of the 110. Reginald had lived most of his adult life down in Long Beach, but he knew LA pretty well still. Before he’d gone up, Westlake was a hellhole. El Salvadoran immigrants took the place over in the nineties and brought MS-13 with them. Lots of drugs, lots of gangs. Sure as shit not the kind of place he’d park a hundred-thousand-dollar Range Rover on the street (stolen or not), but the rental place assured him that Westlake had solidly gentrified.

  He found a place a few blocks away where he could get breakfast burritos and a coffee. He bought half a dozen and one coffee. He didn’t want to listen to Vito bitch any more about how Americans didn’t know how to make it, so he could do without.

  On the way back to the house, walking under the yellow-orange streetlights, now with his blood flowing and the caffeine hitting his system, Reginald could feel the cogs starting to move. Looked like the day would be overcast. He thought through their risks and their backup plans. Vito said he had Jack and his crew handled. They believed that Vito was switching sides, not an injudicious conclusion, he noted, and that Vito would be teeing the diamonds up for them to take. He’d be calling them in a few hours to let them know he and Reginald would be leaving out of Van Nuys at noon. They’d also have spent the entire time from when Vito talked to them figuring out how they’d get into the Van Nuys airport under the guise of being ground crew and not following Reginald and Vito around. Reginald would have been disappointed in Jack if he hadn’t been able to pull off something like impersonating a customs officer. Yeah, he’d thought it was legit when it first happened and two of their earlier meetings got cancelled. Those were mostly backups, anyway. So, Gentleman Jack Burdette was handled, but they didn’t have a solid plan for the Italians.

  Fucking Vito.

  He couldn’t just have been patient. That was the problem with the guy and why Reginald had stopped working with him in the first place. He was a good enough thief, but his nerves didn’t hold. He wasn’t the kind of guy that could sit on a take for a long time. Reginald always thought it was Knightsbridge that broke him, made him paranoid. Guy was steel threaded before then. Admittedly, Vito had been sitting on this knowledge of where Niccoló Bartolo hid the take from the Antwerp Diamond Centre for some time, but he didn’t have the ability to go get it. Or a crew he trusted enough to pull it off. Reginald told him a hard “oh, hell no,” when Vito came up with the idea of letting Jack do it, but he eventually came around to the idea. Especially when he heard about how Vito would pull off the rest of it. That worked out okay. Reginald would have preferred that it was Jack in the car and he be the one Vito shot twice, left for dead, but you can’t always control these things. No, it was the crumbling of nerves over the last year where Vito panicked and went to his old friend the mafia don and casually said, “Hey, I have six pounds of diamonds that were stolen out of a bank you own and would you like to buy them?”

  Whenever Reginald thought about that, he couldn’t believe that even Vito would be that stupid.

  You can’t even have that conversation in your head and have it make any logical sense.

  About the only helpful lesson Reginald picked up in prison was this bit he got from a lifer who told him that everybody in here goes crazy their first year as they get used to the bars. But you can learn to accept the world as it is or only as you’d like it to be.

  Reginald found that philosophy exceedingly helpful in dealing with Vito Verrazano.

  So, this angry mafia don sends his cousin all the way here to LA after Vito and the diamonds and because God likes fucking with Reginald LeGrande, and it’s the same guy who stole the goddamn diamonds in the first place all those years ago. Jack was handled. But this Niccoló Bartolo was an unknown. Of course, Reginald knew all about him by reputation. For the first couple of months after Jack returned from Italy in ’97, Bartolo was all he talked about. Whined was more like it. Kid was jumping at shadows for months. Bartolo also spent sixteen years in a Belgian prison, so he’d be angry, impatient, and rusty. That made him both unpredictable and much more prone to a smash-and-grab type operation than a solid con.

  Reginald figured that much from the O.K. Corral shit Bartolo started outside his apartment.

  Reginald didn’t know how Bartolo and his crew determined where Reginald lived or that they’d piece together that he and Vito were working on this in the first place. The only thing Reginald could gather was that they’d somehow tailed Vito here to the US and from there followed them both to Reginald’s apartment. But he couldn’t fathom what would possess them to open fire multiple times in a quiet beach town.

  It was hard to predict the moves of a desperate man. Reginald had to assume that Bartolo somehow had insight into their moves and would try something today. Whatever he did would likely be fast and violent. Smash and grab.

  However things went down, it wouldn’t be over today.

  Now, Reginald had the police to deal with.

  The Hermosa cops were kind of understanding. But they wanted to know why someone would try to break in
to an ex-con’s apartment in broad daylight, shoot at someone, then start a foot chase with him and shoot at him some more. What was in your apartment that someone would want to steal, Mr. LeGrande? Why would armed men be looking for you, Mr. LeGrande? There are a lot of expensive properties in Hermosa Beach, Mr. LeGrande, why would someone break into yours? His parole officer started in on him shortly after that. You, having been arrested previously for armed burglary, forgery, identity theft, and fraud, and now someone is breaking into your house looking for something, what could that be?

  Reginald deflected and told both his PO and the police that he had no idea why someone would want to break into his apartment and that he didn’t have anything worth stealing. He was just looking for a quiet life where he could start over, stay out of trouble. PO actually had the nerve to say, “Well, it looks like trouble found you.” Like he’s in a fucking movie. And a bad one at that.

  The police said they’d be in touch, that the investigation was ongoing. His apartment wasn’t a crime scene anymore and he could return whenever he liked. His PO was less understanding. He said that obviously he needed to keep a closer eye on Reginald to make sure that he wasn’t slipping back into his old habits and increased their monthly check-ins to every other week. Probably some unannounced visits to Reginald’s residence, too, chats with his landlord, his employer. And it wasn’t going to be that over-the-phone shit either.

  This would complicate his life for a while. Reginald had another five years of parole. The original plan was that he’d pull the same scam he’d used the first time he was on parole, which was to maintain a shit-box apartment to show his PO that he could hold down a place. He still knew guys that would vouch that he worked for them for a fee. Meanwhile, Reginald would live in accommodations that were a little more fitting of his accomplishment. He needed this Bartolo break-in thing to go away quickly so that he could slide into a new life once he had the money. Reginald thought about just running, leaving the country. The US government wasn’t going to send a marshal halfway across the world chasing someone like him for skipping parole. But if the dots were ever connected and some enterprising son of a bitch figured out that the diamonds he was going to sell today were stolen, that changed things some. It was better to play the game, serve out his time, and maybe petition the court to end his parole early. The risk, of course, was that as long as there was someone around who could tip Reginald and this job to the police, he was in danger.

  Reginald took another long drag of coffee, the cup much cooler and lighter than when he’d started. He didn’t know how long he’d been standing out in front of the house, thinking things through. The sky was brighter now, and there were more lights on in the houses on the street. The place was waking up. Westlake was one of LA’s older neighborhoods, most of the houses dating back to the twenties and thirties. Reginald walked up to the house’s front porch and grabbed one of the metal chairs, pulling it around to where he could view the street. He unwrapped one of the burritos from the foil and started eating.

  Jack and his crew would be sidelined today, but not forever. Reginald couldn’t just slide into a new life and alias while keeping his front with his PO, not while Jack was still out there with knowledge. Before this would be over, Reginald had to tie up the loose ends. And the way you did that was by taking a match to them, burning the frayed ends so that they could never unravel again.

  Reginald shook his head at the shame of it all. He and Jack could have been fucking legends.

  But his protégé had made his choice, unfortunately. At every conceivable turn, Jack seemed not to take the logical, sensible path. Reginald truly thought he’d taught him better than this. He had, actually. He’d brought Jack up in this life. Showed him the way. Reginald knew that it was impossible to pinpoint the exact moment it happened, because this was more like erosion than a crash. Over time, Jack lost his nerve, he became a civilian and still wanted to have his life. He wanted a foot in both worlds and pretended there were no consequences to that.

  We can choose to accept life as we want it to be, or as life is.

  It should make Reginald sad that it would come to this, but these choices had been made long ago. In fact, if Jack hadn’t gotten involved now, Reginald would have let the past be the past. Reginald would’ve gotten his share of the eighty mil, and that was more than enough to make a man content. But Jack couldn’t leave it well enough alone, couldn’t accept defeat. Now, the only way out of this was that Gentleman Jack Burdette was going to have to fill a hole in the desert.

  Reginald balled up the foil wrapper and dropped it in the bag.

  Reginald learned a long time ago that when planning and executing a job, you had to separate your problems into the things you could solve today and the things you couldn’t. A thief who worried too much about how they were going to move the goods, for example, before they even stole them usually didn’t have the focus they needed to carry the job out.

  Jack Burdette was a “tomorrow” problem. By the time Jack realized that he’d been had, it would be too late to do anything about it.

  Bartolo was the variable. Reginald didn’t know how he knew how to find them, and that meant he couldn’t predict what the man would do today. Bartolo had help, that much was clear. The question was, from where and by whom? Without even thinking about it, Reginald turned his head to look back over his shoulder, back into the house.

  Where indeed.

  22

  Jack got little sleep.

  By four, he realized that he was up for good and walked out to the main part of the suite and fixed a coffee. Enzo had the other room, and Rusty was in a different one on that floor. The suites only had two bedrooms. Jack took his coffee and padded softly across to the window. The city was dark and even thirty-eight floors removed from the streets, he could tell, hauntingly quiet. There was a low layer of clouds hanging in the sky. Some of that, Jack knew, was ash. But hopefully it also meant that the Santa Anas were over and rains would be coming soon. He’d tried to stay off the news, but he couldn’t help it. He’d watched until the low hours when he finally dropped into a fitful sleep. Then Jack dreamed of fire.

  After the coffee and a shower, he dressed in a conservative light gray suit that he’d had made in London once. He wore a white shirt with the slightest light gray pencil stripes that one had to be close enough to see and a dark blue tie. While this con required him to convince people that he was a US Customs agent, Gentleman Jack Burdette was going to be damned if he was stealing eighty million in diamonds wearing the kind of suit a fed could afford.

  Seventy-three million, he corrected himself.

  Rusty arrived at seven thirty, and they had a quiet breakfast in the room. No one spoke much. Day of, you didn’t rehearse, you didn’t go back over it “one last time” to see if there was anything you missed. That’s when the details of the plan started getting crowded in your mind. Maybe you practiced it slightly different that time because your nerves were up, misremembered a move or a line. If it was a night job, you might, but on a daylight score like this one, by now the plan was set and practice done.

  Jack stepped into his room and called Megan to tell her he planned to be home sometime tomorrow.

  Enzo took the Malibu at eight that morning. He’d park down the block from WorldSecure and watch. While they believed that Reginald would move the diamonds during the hours of ten and two, because that was offset from rush hour, they couldn’t know for certain. Enzo posted early, making sure that they didn’t miss the departure. He called them to say that he was in position.

  They were both armed with their weapons in shoulder holsters. Rusty would be reprising his role as an FBI agent. He dressed in a black suit, white shirt, dark red sateen tie that Jack knew he recently bought off a department store rack, and an American flag lapel.

  Jack looked over at Rusty and said, “Let’s roll.”

  A bellman brought their bags down and loaded them into the X6’s hatch, including the two hardshell Pelican cases. Jac
k tipped him and then the valet. Rusty emerged from the hotel, wearing sunglasses and buttoning his jacket as he walked. “We’re all set,” he said as he climbed in. Jack pulled away from the InterContinental. The hotel was so close to the 110, it seemed to lord over it. Jack grabbed the 110 south and picked up the 10 westbound in order to cut over to the 405 south. He hoped he’d be able to avoid most of the traffic, but it was LA in the morning and there was no concept of counter-commuting. It took them forty-five minutes to get to the vicinity of the airport. They agreed the day before that they’d post at a Denny’s about a mile south of Pan Pacific’s office so that they didn’t arouse suspicion by camping out in the parking lot for a few hours.

  They both ordered coffees with low expectations and were summarily disappointed.

  “How are you feeling?” Jack asked after the server, a kid named Brad, brought their coffees and they told him they wouldn’t need anything else for a bit. Maybe it was an unwritten rule, a tradition, or a courtesy, Jack didn’t exactly know, but you never asked someone how they were doing before a job. You worked with a professional and you knew how they were doing. If they showed up, they were ready. If they didn’t show, they weren’t.

  However, this was Rusty’s first time on a job, and Jack could tell he was off.

  “How are you supposed to feel?” Rusty said. He ran a hand through his wavy, dark blond hair. He was still getting used to it.

  “Lot like going on stage, I suppose. You’ve always got nerves. The difference is whether you’re nervous.”

  “I’m probably nervous.”

  They passed the time in silence for a while. Brad came by to refill their coffees once and asked if they were ready to order. Jack said they were good for now. Brad sucked his teeth loudly as he stalked off, probably thinking about the tip he wasn’t getting. Brad was sloppy, but not in a trendy way, skinny and probably wanted to be an actor or a rock star. Jack checked his phone; there was nothing from Enzo.