Once a Thief (Gentleman Jack Burdette Book 3)

by Dale M. Nelson

  Jack pushed the case forward with his foot, the plastic scraping across the stone.

  Jack stepped back. “It’s all yours.”

  “It’s not too late. We can take this and split it. You, me, and Enzo.”

  Working with a fence they didn’t know, you’d lose sixty percent of the value. They’d be looking at a payout of only a couple million each and would double-cross a mafia don in the process.

  That was easy math.

  Nico was welcome to make his own play, but Jack wasn’t going to be part of it.

  “Five million and not running seems pretty good to me.”

  “Well, we’ll see.”

  Bartolo stepped forward and picked up the case. Then he reached into his jacket and pulled out the pistol.

  Every muscle in Jack’s body tensed.

  Then Bartolo flipped the pistol around and handed it to Jack.

  “What are you doing, Nico?”

  “Salvatore has two men at the bottom of the stairs. They’re either for you or for me.”

  Jack took the gun. He didn’t have a way of knowing if it was loaded or not, if Bartolo was bluffing him, if this was part of some kind of scam.

  Or if this man that tried to kill him once had just given him a way out.

  “Why,” Jack said, not a question.

  “You do fifteen, sixteen years in a prison…especially the kind they got in Belgium, you can do two things with your hate. You can burn the candle on it, but sooner or later that wick is gonna go out. If it burns out and you still have time to do, you don’t have too much to keep you going. Or you can let it go.”

  Jack half laughed. “You let it go? What was that in California?”

  “That?” Bartolo was close enough now that Jack could see him smirking. “That was for the cop. But we’re even now.”

  “He’s dead, you know,” Jack said. “Your cousin had him killed.”

  “Guess that’s a kind of irony.” Nico picked up the diamonds.

  Jack said, “Take care, Nico. That case is designed to fool any metal detector or X-ray machine.” Jack paused, waiting for Nico to say something else. When he didn’t, Jack said, “Don’t spend it all in one place.”

  “You either.”

  Nico Bartolo disappeared into the night with the diamonds he stole almost twenty years before.

  Nico faded from sight, and Jack didn’t know where he’d gone. He didn’t know of any other way out of the amphitheater, but perhaps Nico did. More and more, this was looking like something his old mentor had planned all along.

  Jack racked the slide on the pistol, chambering a round.

  This was the one thing he hadn’t planned on. He’d promised Danzig that he’d get the diamonds to Europe, but he’d never told her how. Jack didn’t know if she was going to hold up her end of the deal now; he suspected that she wouldn’t. That was fine. That wasn’t necessarily part of his plan.

  Jack slid through the gate and made the stairs.

  More clouds filled the sky, and the night seemed blacker than it was. Certainly more confusing. The burner in his pocket vibrated, it would be Enzo wanting to know what in the actual hell was happening.

  Jack wanted to know that too.

  He wondered if Bartolo had figured out that Enzo wasn’t actually in the hills above the fortress watching him through a night vision scope or if Bartolo bought it. Enzo was at home on the southern tip of Italy, safe. He’d bled enough for these diamonds.

  He took the stairs quickly but mindful that he was in dress shoes with less traction. The two shapes at the bottom stepped out of the shadows and started climbing. If Bartolo was to be believed (and Jack was having a hard time even reconciling that in his head), their instructions were to either kill the man without the case or kill them both. Jack closed the distance quickly. That is, if they were the mafia soldiers that Bartolo made them out to be. Anything was possible, really. Maybe he’d picked up a police escort and was trying to get Jack to do his dirty work.

  Jack told them in Italian to back off.

  The two men kept coming.

  In the stairway’s lights he could see they were dressed casually and both wore jackets. That was stupid and a great way to stand out.

  Jack told them again to back off.

  One of them put a hand inside his coat.

  Jack fired.

  He was about twenty feet away and Jack aimed low, hoping for a glancing shot on the steps in front of him. But instead the bullet must have hit him somewhere in the leg. The man cried out and fell backward, crashing into his partner. Jack heard a gun clatter to the ground. He moved in quickly. The one was groaning on the ground, his partner was a few steps below him and clearly in pain from having fallen. Jack couldn’t make out features in the darkness—they were below the light—but they were both male, dark hair, and in pain. Jack leaped over the first and moved toward the second. He was reaching for something.

  “You were warned,” he said and kicked the man in the jaw.

  It wouldn’t kill him, but it might knock him out, and he’d probably be talking through a straw for a few weeks.

  Jack had had enough of people trying to kill him lately.

  He’d never know if they were cops or Salvatore’s men. At this point, it probably didn’t matter. He was trusting the word of the last person on earth he ever thought he should.

  Funny how things worked out.

  Jack made the bottom of the stairs and took off at a dead run for the Porsche. Jack sprinted as fast as he could in dress shoes and a suit, jacket having come open and flapping like a poorly made cape. He dashed along the side of the mountain, passing a pair of nighttime strollers who no doubt wondered what in the hell a suited man was doing running. He made the parking garage and raced down the ramp, again not taking the time to look for stairs. He tried to keep his head down and away from the cameras. Before getting in, Jack looked behind him to see if he was followed. It didn’t look like it. He got in, fired up the Porsche, and backed out, accelerating up the exit tunnel. Jack assumed there was a camera on him, so he kept his head low, though he realized that the car was rented under the Southerland name. It wouldn’t take an ace detective to trace Southerland back to the United States using his travel records.

  Sloppy, Jack thought. And stupid.

  He accelerated up the ramp and into the tunnel.

  Then he saw a pair of lights appear on the far side, and another pair of lights pulled into his lane, blocking the exit.

  40

  Jack hit the brakes, screeching the Porsche to a halt.

  He threw the car into reverse and floored it. There wasn’t room to turn without doing a time-consuming three-pointer, so he accelerated backward, blasting out of the tunnel in the opposite direction. Jack hit the brakes again and cranked the wheel, bringing the nose around and flooring it just as the two cars were nearing the end of the tunnel. Jack was on the white-checkered bus lane indicator where the road split. He put the accelerator to the floor again, and the car jumped forward, aiming straight for the oncoming cars.

  The drivers reacted, instinct pushing them to self-preservation. One car broke right, crashing into the wall to its right, Jack’s left. The second car broke left, angling toward the parking garage’s exit ramp that Jack had just come up. That driver was luckier than his partner. He stopped before crashing into the lowered security bar. Jack hit the tunnel and continued to accelerate. The two cars behind him reversed, nearly hitting each other, and took precious moments trying to sort themselves out in order to turn around to continue the pursuit.

  Jack blasted down Avenue de la Quarantaine with the mountain rising to his left and a long building on the right. The Porsche nearly hit eighty before Jack hit the brakes to decelerate into a turn. He checked the rearview to see lights behind him, but they were distant. Jack whipped the car around a descending U-shaped turn and then immediately reversed direction at the bottom, turning a hard left to accelerate onto Boulevard Albert that ringed Port Hercule. It was different in
the dark, but after a moment, he recognized that this long building to his right was the Formula One paddock. Jack accelerated, but his velocity was limited by traffic. The boulevard was a single lane in each direction, and there looked to be a line of cars in front of him. Slowing down, he had more reaction time to spare and could hazard longer looks in the rearview.

  There was a line of cars behind him now merging from the opposite side of the corner he’d just whipped around, and it was impossible to tell if his pursuers saw him make the turn or made it themselves. That didn’t last long. He saw a large white Audi sedan with blacked-out windows rocket onto Boulevard Albert from the crazy S-turn chicane he’d corkscrewed around. It was now racing up the oncoming traffic lane. There was a line of cars in front of him. It wouldn’t take long for the Audi, an A8 or S8, by the look of it, to reach him. Jack put the accelerator nearly to the floor and cranked the wheel to the left, shooting across the street and through the gap between two cars in the oncoming lane. He hit the opposite corner at an angle and cranked the wheel further left, tires screaming.

  He flew up half a block, pumped the brakes and down shifted, engine revving in protest, and leapfrogged around the car in front of him, narrowly missing a Ferrari 488. The white Audi made the turn. Jack pulled back into his lane just in time, cutting off a Mercedes G wagon, and fishtailed into a right-hand turn, whipping around a corner. He was at the end of the block and turning right again by the time the Audi made the turn. Jack didn’t see any flashing lights, so maybe Bartolo hadn’t lied about that, at least.

  Jack was now facing the sea and heading back in the direction of Boulevard Albert. He’d been here before, but as a tourist and didn’t know the city that well. Because the principality was built on, around, and between the jagged sides of mountains that spilled into the Mediterranean, every available inch of land was used for roads and buildings. Streets ascended and descended, forked and converged, following the natural counters of the land and the contours forced by development. They disappeared into short tunnels that ran beneath buildings and larger ones that ran beneath the ground. A street map looked more like an Escher painting than an urban plan. Basically, he was driving blind.

  Jack was also mindful of the ubiquitous cameras. The police here could be bought, but not for the money he had. The cameras were a real problem because it meant that Jack couldn’t speed, a difficult thing to do if you were trying to win a car chase. Since he no longer had Rusty to procure things, like cars, Jack had rented the Porsche through the hotel using the credit card and passport he was traveling under—data points to link those things to him. Worse, the camera would connect him to being in Monaco on a forged passport. If the FBI discovered that, Jack would be in violation of his parole, not to mention breaking a slew of fresh laws.

  So, he just had to lose his two pursuers in a completely legal way. Or, near enough.

  While driving through a city that was mapped out like a surrealist’s interpretation of a cityscape.

  Jack rocketed through a large intersection where the road he was on connected back with Boulevard Albert. There was a statue in the center commemorating the Grand Prix. Jack whipped around the statue, racing around the traffic circle, and took a right-hand exit ramp, nearly clipping a van. He pulled hard left and took the second exit in the traffic circle. The first exit would have taken him on a descending ramp to a road that formed the northwestern edge of Port Hercule and was part of the Formula One course. The second exit kept him on the current “level,” heading in the direction of the famed Casino de Monte-Carlo. He accelerated onto Avenue d’Ostende, which took him gradually uphill, chancing a look in the rearview and seeing the Audi similarly blast through the traffic circle, but with much less grace. A thin ten-story apartment building was to Jack’s left, but the right side was open so the apartments would have an unobstructed view, and that meant Jack could be seen from the traffic circle below.

  Jack drove in the direction of the casino, the Monaco coastline and the port, far below, flowing by him on the right. If it had been daylight, he’d have been able to see the fort and the theater on the other side of the port. Traffic was starting to thicken now as he got closer to the city center. It would be harder to move. The road split here, with the right fork going directly in front of the casino and the left wrapping back in the other direction. Jack stayed left. He’d slowed to thirty miles an hour now, keeping with the flow of traffic, but the further he moved into the city, the more it became a convoluted maze of permutations. If he could stay a block or two ahead of his pursuers, he’d lose them. There was a small park, about half the size of a city block, to his left and to the right, a massive excavation site where they’d just demolished several large structures and were just getting the new building under way.

  He turned left at the park, looking up just in time to see the white Audi S8 shooting up the oncoming lane and forcing traffic to part like Moses at the Red Sea.

  Police Captain Cosseria was not happy.

  Cosseria was a short man with a stocky build, thick hair, and a mustache that could have found a home on any number of scrubbing implements. He wore an expensive tailored suit that was a little rumpled from the day. Danzig understood his frustration. The American FBI liaison in Paris, whom he’d never met, called earlier that day to ask for his assistance, saying there was a massive gem smuggling operation happening in his city. The FBI could offer very little in the way of details, had almost no idea where and when the sale would happen, and asked him for his help.

  “Help doing what?” he’d first said to Danzig when they’d met and she’d asked for his cooperation. She had to admit that she didn’t exactly know herself. He was right—they were working off the words of an informant who only knew that the sale was going to happen here. She’d pressed Mazza to find out where the exchange would be made and he was now on the edge of panic, having asked Cannizzaro and others one too many times for information that he didn’t need to have. Danzig explained the situation to Captain Cosseria and he was sympathetic, wanted to help, but reiterated: help doing what?

  Cosseria explained that they’d had no intelligence supporting the FBI’s theory and certainly, in the morning, he would make his officers available to her to discuss the matter, but there was little he could do tonight without more specific information. “This is Monaco,” he told her with a wan smile. “Something illegal will happen tonight.”

  Danzig and Choi were leaving his office and walking toward the entrance of the police headquarters, discussing what they would do next, if anything. They didn’t even have a place to stay. Captain Cosseria ran into the hallway, breathless, coat open. He said, “We’ve just gotten a report of shots fired.”

  Jack turned hard left at the park.

  He saw the S8 surging forward in the other lane, and he accelerated through the turn, narrowly avoiding being hit. The Audi bounced over a concrete chicane. Jack turned hard left again, looping the Porsche around the park and back onto Avenue Princess Alice. The Audi was forced to follow the same path; there were too many cars for them to be able to turn back. That gave Jack precious seconds. The street snaked around the construction site and then past another park on the right. Jack made a hard left, turning uphill and then finding the road narrowed to a single lane. Jack rounded a corner and found a line of cars parked in a single direction on either side of the street and knew he was in trouble.

  When he rounded the bend, he saw that the street dead-ended.

  In a geography that could only be Monaco, the street terminated at the end of the block in front of a pink townhouse. Jack hit the brakes and reversed. He’d never make it back to the main street in time, but he could ditch the car and possibly throw them off.

  What the hell was even happening?

  Cannizzaro had already paid him, why try to kill him too?

  There was an apartment building on the left that had a semicircular turnabout in front of it so drop-offs could be made on the one-way street. Jack pulled in there. That would let him
turn around. He was just coming out of it when he saw the white Audi ripping around the corner. He’d already beaten them in a game of chicken once, he didn’t think that would work twice, and this was already a narrow street. Instead, he parked in the half-circle and powered off the car. Maybe his pursuers would do the same thing that he had—narrowly focus on quickly navigating the tight street and not pay attention to the surroundings.

  Or maybe not.

  The Audi screeched to a stop, blocking his exit from the apartment.

  Jack had the Targa’s top open, so he just launched himself out of the car, leaping out the passenger side. He heard car doors opening behind him but didn’t bother to look. There was only one option. He spotted a set of descending stairs leading to the street level below next to the carport and bolted for those. Jack raced down the stairs as fast as he could, nearly slipping as he did. Descending, he saw there was a store on his right with a covered walkway and decorative pillars. Jack hit the bottom of the stairs and ducked behind a pillar just in time to hear the first gunshot.

  Jack swore in reaction. He heard shouts of panic behind him. It was getting late, ten maybe, but this was Monaco, and for most, the night was just getting started. The streets were full of both foot and motor traffic, diners in sidewalk cafes. Using the overhang as cover, Jack made the street. It was a single lane, with cars parked on both sides giving him ample cover. He ran in between two stopped cars and made the other side of the street. Jack hit the opposite sidewalk and tried to duck behind the cars. People on the street had heard the first shot but hadn’t seen it, had no idea what was happening. Some were crouched, some were looking around, trying to see what was happening. Ahead of him, he saw a few people leaning over a low wall beneath umbrellas that must have been a restaurant.

  Jack assumed everyone here would take him to be just another person fleeing the scene. He stayed crouched behind the line of parked cars and ran up the street. There was shouting behind him and a scream. Jack turned his head to see one of Cannizzaro’s goons running across the street, gun drawn. Jack turned his head and ran as fast as he could for the corner.