Megan cradled it carefully in her arms.
Jack one-armed a bag of groceries and held his car and house keys in the other hand. For a moment, he almost felt like life was normal.
They didn’t see the form detach itself from the shadows and approach them from behind, but they certainly heard the voice.
“That’s far enough.”
There was no mistaking its owner.
28
Reginald LeGrande stepped out of the shadows with a gun in his hand.
Reginald’s silhouette was framed by the shadowy black oak that dominated Jack’s lawn and the fiery sky of sunset behind him.
“Go ahead and open up that door, old buddy,” Reginald said with a dangerous nonchalance. “Careful not to drop those heavy things, now.”
Jack interposed himself between Reginald and Megan and handed Megan the keys. “It’s okay, Megs,” Jack said softly. “Open the door. It’s going to be okay,” he said in a low voice. Reginald, hearing him, laughed.
Jack quickly thought through the situation.
The diamonds were in a concealed safe in his bedroom. As soon as Reginald learned that, he would use Megan as leverage to get Jack to open the safe, which he knew Jack would do. Then he’d kill them both.
Jack had a nine millimeter SIG Sauer P365 in a concealed holster underneath his shirt. It was a legally purchased gun, and he was licensed to carry it. Well, Frank Fischer was licensed to carry it, and that license was based on an ultimately bogus identity, but this wasn’t the time to split hairs. He’d ditched the one he’d gotten from Rusty. Their only chance was for Jack to get a shot off before Reginald forced him to open the safe.
Megan opened Jack’s front door and Reginald ushered them in with his gun, muttering with fake humor that it wouldn’t do for the neighbors to see them. Megan walked into Jack’s entryway and stopped, unsure of what to do next. Jack followed, flipping the light on as he went. He had an open floor plan. The living room was to the right of the entryway. The dining room was straight back with a wall separating it from the kitchen. The kitchen was spacious and open, connecting with the wall-length windows that ran along the house’s western side, which faced the valley.
Jack stepped back toward the living room, giving Reginald room to enter. He made a mental map. There was a large Eames chair and ottoman about two feet behind him. Reginald stepped in and closed the door behind him, locking the deadbolt by awkwardly extending his left hand behind him. He never took his eyes off Jack.
Jack realized that he hadn’t seen his onetime friend and mentor since his trial seven years before. Jack wasn’t sure that he’d have recognized him if it wasn’t for the voice. Reginald’s once-blond hair was now mostly shot with gray and was longer than he’d typically worn it. Reginald had sported a mullet for years longer than it’d been fashionable (if that had ever been true), but it was now long and salt-water stringy, like a surfer gone out to pasture. He had a thick but well-trimmed beard, also gray. Reginald wore a brown jacket with a blue window-pane pattern, blue shirt, and tan pants.
“Back up, now. Can’t be too close. Social distancing and all that.”
Jack took a step back, and Megan, who was farther in the house, stayed where she was. Jack was now about three steps from Reginald. Too far to close the distance in time without a solid distraction.
“Mind if I set these down?” Jack said.
“Yes, I do,” Reginald told him. “You know what I’m here for, so we can save the wasted time of you asking me. I have to say, I’m impressed that you pulled it off.” Jack knew what he was doing. Reginald was going to make a point of describing everything that happened in Los Angeles because Megan was in the room. “Breaking into my house was uncalled for,” he said, pretending to look around Jack’s place. “But I guess this makes us even, huh.”
“Do I have to listen to you talk, or are you going to get on with it?”
Reginald gave a forced half-laugh. “You have to listen.” He smiled. It looked like someone pushing back the lips on a corpse. “It took me a while to figure out that you took the diamonds.”
“You’re a real dime detective, Reg.”
“When they didn’t mention anything about it on the news, I knew the FBI didn’t have anything to brag about. Plus, none of the Italians got away, so I put it together that it could only have been you.”
“You did that all by yourself?”
Reginald wasn’t taking the bait. Instead, he was reveling in this. There was a smug, self-assured look that was smeared all over his face. “How’d you do it?”
“I walked up and took it,” Jack said. “You didn’t seem to need them anymore.” He could deny it. There was nothing connecting him but conjecture, but Jack’s assumption that Reginald would just use Megan to force him to do what he wanted was still correct. Jack wasn’t going to take that chance, so he just admitted it. He also didn’t think the extra few minutes of arguing would buy him anything.
“How’d you get past the police, is what I want to know.”
Jack shrugged. He wasn’t going to give Reginald the satisfaction of having Jack reveal how he’d stolen those diamonds in front of Megan.
Reginald laughed. “Always the ballsy one, eh?”
“Reginald, I’m not interested in bantering with you. I want to know what you’re doing here, other than the obvious. If you’re going to take the diamonds and fuck off into the night, fine. You can have them as long as I have your word that you’ll leave us alone. But if you’re going to just kill us anyway, I’d just as soon tell you to go to hell now and you can get on with it. I’ll make you have to kill me.”
“Jack,” Megan said. “I get a say in this.”
“Listen to the lady, Jack.”
“Don’t fucking talk to her, Reginald. Not ever.” Jack knew that was a slip, even as he said the words, but his nerves were frayed, his control ground down to powder.
“Why don’t you have her go fetch my things, and you and I can catch up?”
“They’re in a safe,” Jack said.
“Huh.” And Reginald let his eyes slide over to Megan. “Too bad.” Then he said, “You still didn’t tell me how you pulled it off. How’d you just walk up to all those cops?”
“Speaking of cops, you sure sound like one. Asking all these whodunit-type questions. You wearing a wire, Reg? I mean, wouldn’t be the first time, right?”
That got a laugh too, and if Jack didn’t know better, he’d think it was genuine.
In 2000, Reginald was arrested for robbing a Beverly Hills diamond wholesaler. He didn’t even get as far as the city limit. Reginald had tried to get Jack to go in on the job with him, but fresh off his narrow escape of the School of Turin bust, Jack passed. Reginald, Jack later learned, always blamed him for the failure of that score, believing that if Jack had been with him, they’d have gotten away with it. Seeing Reginald go up is what prompted Jack to develop the rules that guided his career.
Reginald got ten years for that job but only served a fraction of it. He turned snitch in prison, practically volunteering information to anyone who’d listen. Reginald got about seven years shaved off his sentence and spent the next decade as an informant to the California Highway Patrol, who also acted as the state police. Reginald helped them close dozens of cold-case robberies across the state. But mostly, he used his informant gig to set up rival thievery rings and take out the competition. The whole time he was working as Jack’s fixer, Reginald was double-dealing with the state police.
It didn’t seem plausible that Reginald could have escaped from that building with police closing in and the FBI already inside. Unless, of course, he was informing on them and they let him go so that he could lead them here. They wouldn’t have let him have a gun, though.
“You’ve never been to prison, Jack,” Reginald said softly. Though, sotto voce for him still sounded like a rock through a window. “So don’t be too quick to judge what a man would do to get out. You’ve also earned a snitch jacket, if I’m not mis
taken.”
That was true, to a point. Jack used the FBI and the Italian police to set up Aleksander Andelić in Rome. He felt no remorse over that.
“This is all fascinating,” Megan said in a bone-dry voice. “But can you please get on with it.”
“You heard the lady,” Reginald said.
“No,” Jack said.
“Excuse me?”
“You heard what I said. You never answered my question. If you’re going to take the diamonds and kill us anyway, then fuck off. I’m not giving you anything. If you’re going to take them and leave, we can talk.”
“I guess you won’t know until it happens.”
“Not good enough.”
Reginald shrugged and kind of smirked, though Jack thought it looked more like a pout.
“You have my word,” Reginald said.
“That’s definitely not good enough. Put your gun away, then I’ll do it.”
A short laugh issued from Reginald’s mouth, and he growled a “no.”
“You never told me why,” Jack said, changing the subject.
“Why what?”
“Why you sold me out. I know you blamed me for getting caught in Beverly Hills, even though I had nothing to do with it. But why?” Jack had been holding that bag of groceries for a long time, and it was getting heavy. There was also the numbing sensation of whatever cold thing they’d purchased resting on the bottom part of the bag. He was starting to worry about his reaction time, if he needed it.
“You’re stalling, but okay, I’ll play along.” Reginald wagged his gun in the direction of the table. “Honey, why don’t you open up that bottle of wine in your hand, and we’ll all have a chat.”
Jack watched his eyes and could see that he was thinking things out. Reginald wanted to be clever, but he wasn’t a stick-up guy and he wasn’t used to having to control a crowd. Having Megan open the bottle of wine, an arrogant gesture intended to show how fully in command of the situation Reginald was, would do the opposite, and Reginald was now starting to realize that. Megan went into the kitchen for a bottle opener, and now Reginald had to cover both of them in two different parts of the house. Yes, she’d be in his line of sight, but her hands wouldn’t be, and Reginald wouldn’t know for certain what those hands were doing the whole time. Did Jack have a gun in the kitchen? He didn’t know. It was a little far for a knife, but that would still force him to think about her as a threat, at least long enough for him to take his eyes off Jack.
“I’m setting this bag down,” Jack said. Give Reginald something else to think about.
“You’re fine where you are.”
“No,” Jack said. “You’re not going to shoot me now or you won’t get the diamonds. If you shoot her, I won’t cooperate. That’s the only leverage you’ve got.” Jack slowly lowered himself to a squat while Reginald grumbled a “fine.” Jack set down the bag and resisted the urged to flex his hand to get some feeling back into it. He didn’t want Reginald realizing that it was numb. Jack stood.
Megan was to Jack’s right, just out of arm’s reach to him, and about five, maybe six, steps to the dining room table. Jack still had his back to the living room, and there was a large chair behind him. Reginald was near the front door but out of reach. Jack had turned on the entryway light when he’d stepped into the house. He pretended to do this out of habit, but he also wanted to put doubt in Reginald’s mind about whether he could be seen from the street. Jack had a large front window, though the curtains were drawn. He had vertical blinds that ran the length of the wall that faced the valley, and those were open and filled the room with the fiery, if ash-hazed, sunset. That would be in Reginald’s eyes if Jack could get him to take a few steps forward.
The entire house was filled with burnt-orange sunlight and would be, Jack knew, for the next thirty minutes.
“Can we get on with whatever the hell this is,” Megan said, still cradling the bottle of wine in her hands. “Jack and I have dinner plans.” Even in the face of a gun and an uncertain fate, though one that Jack couldn’t possibly see as anything but bad, Megan still had her fire. Nothing, it seemed, would tamp that. You didn’t really know a person until you saw how they reacted to stress. Most people folded when faced with possible death. That’s why stick-ups worked. Seeing her stand up to Reginald like that, to not back down, just made him love her more.
And made him feel so much worse for what he knew was going to happen.
Reginald laughed again. It was that wet, throaty half-cackle. “Jack? So, she knows, huh?”
“You forced my hand on that.”
“That right.”
“You never answered my question, Reg. Why’d you sell me out? You set up Paul Sharpe to embezzle money from my winery because you wanted me to keep working. If my escape plan was slowly bleeding money, I’d still need you, need to keep working for you. But that doesn’t explain why you sold me out to the police.”
Reginald was quiet for a time before he answered. If Jack didn’t know better, he might accuse Reginald of being almost thoughtful. “There wasn’t some grand plan, if that’s what you’re wondering. Cops, they’re like junkies, man. Always chasing that dragon. You give them information, they want more. What was general info about a landscape turns into needing specifics on jobs, on crews. You give them a robber, now they want a crew. You give ’em a crew, now they want the guy who set it up. You give them that, now it’s a goddamn network, the logistics, where’d the information about the job come from. Every time you bump up a tier, you think that’ll be enough, but they got you and they know it. They always hold that deal over your head, ‘Gimme this or you go back to the joint.’ They know that they got you and that you’d rather take your chances on the street for selling people out than go back to prison. Because anything is fucking better than that.” Reginald didn’t take his eyes off Jack, but they became unfocused and Jack knew he was looking at the past and not at him. “You were just the biggest fish at the time. They said I had to give them something worth their while. It’d been a bit since I gave them anything good, and it was time to jerk the line, make sure the hook was still set, you know?”
“So the Carlton job was always a setup? You promised the police a huge collar so you could get out?”
“No, not originally,” Reginald said, his voice slightly wistful. “I was serious about that job. If you’d have taken it when I’d offered it to you, we’d have split that money and I’d have disappeared after that.”
That event, in many ways, set Jack up to be exactly where he was now. He’d turned Reginald down because he thought the job was impossible when Reginald pitched it. He didn’t know until he’d actually done it (albeit with a tremendous amount of inside help) that the security surrounding that collection actually was a joke. Jack often wondered whether it was actually Ari Hassar, the owner, who put the word out about the job. The Israeli diamond mogul was close to broke when he hired Jack to steal those jewels. Hassar claimed the insurance money and then quietly sold the stolen gems on the gray market after Jack handed them over. It would make sense that Hassar would’ve used a veil of incompetence and the very real seams in French law as it related to private security to make them a fairly soft target. Of course, Jack didn’t know any of that until he told Hassar someone was coming for him.
When Jack turned Reginald down, Reginald had Paul Sharpe steal ten million from the winery’s accounts. It was money that was supposed to be used for a tract of legendary Napa Cabernet vines. Jack transferred the money from his personal holdings to the winery, as Reginald knew he would, and Sharpe took it. But even after that was resolved, Jack had to keep working. They never got back what Sharpe embezzled from them, and Jack never made back the money that he loaned the winery for the purchase. That’s what led him to Rome, into Aleksander Andelić’s plot, to Vito Verrazano and the diamonds. It’s what led him, ultimately, on a collision course with this moment. All he’d have had to do was take a job that broke his three rules, which Jack absolutely would have gotten
away with, and he could have retired. Ari Hassar wouldn’t have dispatched his ex-Mossad security team to hunt down the perpetrators, and Megan would never have known he was a thief.
Gaston Broussard and Gabrielle Eberspach would still be alive.
Shows what principles get you.
“Sorry, pal. It got to the point where I had to give them something…and only you would do.”
“But why now?” Megan said, the anger in her voice boiling over. “I get that you tried to get Jack to steal things for you before, but why now? Why not leave us alone? Look outside, can’t you see what’s going on?”
This wouldn’t help them. Losing their cool with Reginald was only going to show that he was getting to them, and that reduced their bargaining position even further. Desperate people didn’t bargain.
“Lady, that looks like a whole lot of ‘not my problem.’”
“Meg,” Jack said softly, but if she heard him, she was past caring.
“Half of this county is on fire, and our place is right in the goddamn middle of it. Why can’t you just let us be? What have you ever built? What have you ever done that wasn’t taking something that you didn’t earn from somebody else?”
He laughed again, and the sound was hollow and dry and horrible. “You’re saying all that about me and you don’t even realize you’re in the presence of greatness. Honey, your boyfriend is the greatest thief of all time and you’re yelling at me about taking things? So, yes, I am. But I’m not stealing anything that Jack here hasn’t taken himself already. I’ve just let him do the heavy lifting.”
“There’s a special place in hell for thieves who steal from other thieves,” Jack said.
“I’ll let ’em know when I get there,” he said, voice desert dry. “So, this was all fun, but I do have places to be. Also, the moralizing from you rings a little hollow, don’t you think? How many people did you steal these things from, Jack?”
Once a Thief (Gentleman Jack Burdette Book 3) Page 30