by Dale Nelson
Jack walked over and poured the rest of the Peregrine into a glass. They sold this for close to two hundred a bottle. He sure as hell wasn’t wasting any.
When Hugh spoke again, the earlier fury was gone from his voice. Now the old lawyer just sounded sad. “You can justify it anyway you want, but you still know it’s wrong.” Hugh stood. “Or maybe you don’t. Maybe you don’t care.” Jack started to say something, but Hugh held up a hand and stayed him. “I could look past a lot of this when I thought it was behind you. Even that business with the FBI. I defended you and stuck by you because they were wasting their time with you instead of going after Paul and that LeGrande fellow.
“I also thought you were done with that life and were trying to make a fresh start with this one. I didn’t care that you’d changed your name, and I didn’t care how you did it. Certainly not after you told me why, but goddammit, Jack—” Hugh’s eyes were wet. He never called Jack by his real name. He’d always known him as Frank Fischer. It was strange and discordant to hear Hugh say his real name. Jack knew he did it to make a point. “You had a way out, and you pissed it away. Now, you’re on the run again.” Coughlin walked over to Jack, who was half-sitting on the side of his desk and half-standing.
“Hugh, I’m quitting. These guys, they’re the ones who came here and shot the FBI agent. They’re the ones who killed my friends. Their boss wants me to do a job for him, and he’s holding this thing over my head to do it.” Now it was Jack’s turn to hold up a hand. “No, don’t tell me that I should go to the authorities, turn myself in, and seek protection. You know I don’t trust them, and they’d just fuck me over anyway. I just need to do this thing, and then I’m out.”
“I don’t think you can get out,” Hugh said somberly. “And I don’t think you want to. It’s a compulsion with you. You ever know a junkie? A gambler? Hell, even an alcoholic? Well, my son was one.”
“Which one of those was he?”
“All three. Every time he got in trouble, he’d tell me that was the last time he’d fuck up. He was going to get straight. It was the wake-up call he needed. Then he’d go and fuck up again until it was one time too many.”
“What happened to him?”
“He’s buried back east. I go there sometimes.” Hugh put a hand on Jack’s shoulder. “So, you’ll understand when I tell you that I can’t do this twice.” He squeezed Jack’s shoulder once, turned, and headed toward the door. Hugh turned his head, but he didn’t turn around. “And it doesn’t matter if these guys are trying to force you to do steal something for them because you were doing it already before you got mixed up with them.” Hugh held a watery, glazed look for a long moment. “Take care, Jack.”
“Hugh,” Jack said, calling after his friend.
Hugh stopped at the door. He turned his head halfway around. “I couldn’t save my son. Maybe I thought that I could save you.” Hugh looked down at the ground. “Guess I was wrong on both counts.”
Hugh left.
Jack drank his wine and stewed.
He was furious because he knew that Hugh was right.
Hugh stood by him and forgave his trespasses, and Jack repaid him with deception, if not outright lies.
This was entirely his fault, all of it. Jack didn’t need to work. Not truly. He had three million in the bank, which was likely more than most Americans had in savings. Though, he’d burn almost half of it in legitimizing it. Plus, he had the winery. That, too, was part of the problem. The winery wasn’t a liquid asset either. If something happened and Jack found himself on the run, none of it would do him any good.
There was also the matter of being a thief was the only thing he was ever good at.
It wasn’t that it gave him purpose—that was ridiculous, and the older he got, the more he hated it—but he was one of the best in the world. Few people could say that about any endeavor. He loved wine making, though he made a lot of mistakes with the winery, some costly ones, due to his inexperience with, well, any legitimate enterprise. However, when he was walking the grape lines with his vineyard manager, a Mexican farmer named Lincoln, or debating mixing composition with his winemaker or interacting with customers in the tasting room, Jack was truly happy. Still, it was a joy tarnished by melancholy because he always felt like an imposter, someone who didn’t belong.
Maybe that’s why he was still a thief. He knew it was the one thing he could always do.
And in his darker moments, the fear started to creep in, and he began looking for the exits. He worried at how long this life would last.
The FBI almost caught him once. They knew about this place but couldn’t prove anything—yet.
Reginald LeGrande was just about halfway through a ten-year stint at Corcoran, which meant that he’d be eligible for parole soon, especially with the pressure to clear out nonviolent offenders. Too bad the Bureau of Prisons didn’t understand that “nonviolent” didn’t necessarily mean “not dangerous.”
Jack tried to live his professional life as aboveboard as a thief could, and it’s why people called him Gentleman Jack, as much as for his taste for expensive clothes and cars. It wasn’t just to minimize the risk of being double-crossed on a job, it was also about not making enemies. Enemies that might try to come for him later.
Jack was walking out when his head winemaker, Tim Waterhouse, all but demanded time. Jack wanted to brush him off, but Waterhouse reminded Jack, with a tightly controlled temper, that Jack had not attended the daily production meeting in two weeks, nor had he attended the weekly blending session. This was where Jack, Tim, and a consultant they’d brought on, would take a small sample from the various barrels and blend it with smaller amounts of other grapes to create the ideal expression of the vintage. Jack missed two of these, and Tim was, rightly, not happy about it. Tim was very good, but he and Jack didn’t have the kind of chemistry that Jack had with Megan. However volatile that relationship was, if nothing else it certainly heightened the creativity and seemed to pull out the best in their work. That was not to say that what Jack and Tim were doing now wasn’t as good. In some ways, the wine now was technically superior to what Jack and Megan had made, but in a way, Jack felt like the artistry was gone.
Tim was growing increasingly frustrated and impatient with Jack’s absences. He had no idea what his boss was doing, and Jack’s excuses—handling businesses, meeting with other wine makers, and attending conferences—were starting to wear thin. Tim never indicated he didn’t believe Jack was doing any of those things, but he was becoming more and more vocal about what he thought of Jack’s priorities. Jack knew Tim was frustrated, and he didn’t blame him. He just needed the man to hold on a little while until this was sorted out, so telling Tim him that he had to turn around and leave right away did not land softly.
“I have to wrap some things up. Unfortunately, it can’t wait or be pushed off.”
“What about all of the things around here that can’t wait or be pushed off? What about all of that?”
This was the second time this trip that someone had yelled at him in his own office.
“Tim,” Jack began calmly, “I understand this is frustrating, and I apologize for that, but there are things that can’t be avoided. I have some businesses that I’ve been trying to divest so that I can focus on the winery, and all of that is coming due now. It shouldn’t be more than a week.” It occurred to Jack that he once fed Megan this exact line.
“Why can’t you just manage it from here?”
“Because I can’t. I need to see it through personally. I’ll be back in a week, hopefully no more, and then I’m done. We’re going to finish up our blending and have plenty of time before release. I’m sorry that I missed the blending meeting with Thomas. How’d that go?” Tim seemed slightly mollified. Switching the conversation back to the wine helped bring the temperature down, but Jack knew that his time was short. This guy wasn’t going to stick around long if this kept happening.
Jack just needed to get back to Spain, end this thing wi
th Aleksander, and then he could be done for good this time.
Jesus, he said to himself, I really do sound like a junkie.
That night, he was back at his place on Dry Creek Lane, high on a ridge overlooking the valley, absently drinking a bottle a 2015 Cliff Lede cabernet. Jack didn’t feel like drinking his own stuff right now. He was flying out tomorrow to return to Spain. Jack was fried. He hadn’t slept much since returning, was still on European time, and the cognitive dissonance of going from the Paris job to whatever was going on at Aleksander’s place in Spain to being here and trying to integrate into this life was taking its toll on him.
Frankly, Jack was surprised he hadn’t tried to talk to John Able about diamonds.
Jack knew that should be preparing himself for this job in Venice. He needed to call Enzo and somehow convince him to come out of retirement, start his recon of the place, and get a sense for how he was going to do the job. He’d done some very cursory research online but found it nearly impossible to focus. Instead, he sat at his kitchen counter with a bottle of wine and stared into space with the disparate items on his mental to-do list floating disconnected in his mind. Jack couldn’t even seem to figure out how to summon the motivation to move out onto the deck.
Still, he had windows on all sides of the kitchen, and the entire back wall was either sliding glass door or picture window that looked west out onto the valley. Now, it was on fire with the last embers of daylight as the sun dropped below the horizon.
Jack heard the front door open, and his hand immediately went to the small of his back, and the weapon that wasn’t there. He kept a pistol in the house, but it was locked in a small gun safe in his bedroom. Jack looked around the kitchen. He slid off the bar stool and walked over to the block where he’d kept his knives.
“Hello?” came the voice from the front room. It took him a second.
Megan.
She emerged from around the corner, auburn hair in a high ponytail, eyes bright. Megan wore jeans and a light sweater but had clearly changed after work because these were both form fitting and free of dirt. She walked across the room to the counter, picked up the bottle of wine, and studied the label. Megan gingerly reached up to the rack of wine glasses suspended over the island, selected a cabernet glass, and poured. She tasted it as a professional would, and Jack could almost see her making notes in her head. She set the glass down and gave Jack a short hug. He hugged back and found himself wanting to hold on to it.
“Sorry, the door was open. I knocked a couple times, but you didn’t answer.”
“You did? I didn’t even hear it.”
“Are you okay, Frank?” Like Hugh, Megan referred to him by the name she knew, though she acknowledged that took some adjustment once she learned his real name was Jack Burdette.
“No,” he said, both hands on the counter. Jack looked at her, and his heart ached. It had been a fast four years since they’d split, but he still loved her. Worse, he’d never been able to express it properly at the time, and then he’d missed his chance. It was stupid to still be attached to her after all this time, but he couldn’t help it. Most of the time, Jack didn’t think about how much he missed her, how he still felt guilt over the choice he’d made, but he also avoided seeing her so that he could keep those feelings in check. Megan did come by the winery every few months, though. She was close to the people who worked there. For as many wineries as there were, the community was tightly knit, and Jack and Megan frequently saw each other at events. They were friendly to each other, but it ripped his heart each time to see her walk away.
If she felt the same, she never showed it.
“Do you want to talk?”
“Hugh ask you to come over?” Jack said, and he could hear the defensiveness in his voice. Anger flashed over Megan’s face, and the look of genuine concern melted into something else.
“He’s worried about you,” she said, now defensive on her own, “and it sounds like with good reason. And you look like shit.”
“Thanks,” he said in an offhand way and walked back to his wine glass. Jack didn’t have the mental energy to have the same argument with her that he’d already had with Hugh. Then he said, “I haven’t been sleeping much.”
“I won’t ask you to tell me what you’re doing, Frank, but I at least hope you know.”
Jack shrugged. “I don’t even know that I do anymore,” he said. “I just … I’m—” and then he stopped, unable to form a thought or complete the sentence. “Hugh is right to be angry with me. I’m still working as a thief. I never really quit. Now, some people want me to steal something for them and are threatening to expose me if I don’t.”
“What happened if you just walked away? What if you stayed here, didn’t go back?”
“Megs, it doesn’t work that way.”
“Why can’t it?”
A response of how she couldn’t possibly understand formed on his lips, but this time, Jack had the presence of mind not to say anything.
The consequences of not following through with Venice were clear.
“Do you remember a few years ago when that man showed up at the tasting room and tried to kill me?” Jack was too tired, too worn to come up with a fresh line of reasoning, and so he just recycled the argument he’d attempted to make with Hugh, hoping only that this time he could do it better.
“Yes,” she said. That happened right after she’d told him that he had to choose between being Jack Burdette or being Frank Fischer and that she was only staying if it was unequivocally the latter. Even now, he could tell that it was a painful memory for her.
“The people behind that are forcing me to do something for them. Once that’s done, I should be able to walk away for good.”
“Should be?” she said, setting down her glass on the marble countertop a little roughly. It rang out with a sharp clang. Jack winced at the sound, initially afraid that she’d broken the glass. “These don’t sound like the kind of people that just let things go. I’m confused. Last time, one of them tried to kill you, and now they want you to work for them? That seems backward.”
“That’s a way to describe it.”
“This isn’t fucking funny, Frank. This isn’t just your life you’re playing with. What about Lincoln or Corky? Hugh or me? You know how to disappear. The rest of us don’t. What if these people come after one of us to get to you?”
Now it was Jack’s turn to be angry, especially because Megan invoked herself. There wasn’t a way to explain any of this, not in a way that she’d understand. The additional guilt of her and the ruins of their relationship didn’t help him process this at all. “You? I don’t see how you’re impacted by this,” Jack said in a low voice. “You made your position pretty clear, and you’ve got more than enough distance,”
“God, you don’t get it. Even now, you don’t goddamn get it,” she said loudly, her voice bouncing off the walls. And then he did. Jack closed his eyes and immediately regretted everything, realizing his mistake for what it was. The root of the problem between the two of them was that they both had experiences in life that made them guarded. When conversations became heated and emotional, they both retreated behind their walls. With Megan, it was not explicitly saying what was in her heart, trusting that Jack was going to pick that up. In his exhausted state, he missed that entirely. “I thought maybe I could talk some sense into you,” she said, after a long, hard stare with fury rimming her eyes.
“These people are dangerous, yes. Part of the reason I’m doing this is so that they don’t threaten Hugh or Corky or Lincoln. Or you.”
“What if you get caught, Frank?” she half-shouted.
“I won’t,” he said flatly.
“But what if you do?”
Jack shrugged. “I’ll tell them I was coerced, blackmailed.”
“You think that’ll help?”
“What are you even doing here, Megan? You made your position clear to me years ago. I couldn’t quit then because I had to try and make back the money that P
aul stole from us. Now, I’m stuck in this thing, and I don’t have a choice. I don’t have another way out, at least not one that any of us would consider acceptable. You want me to run? Is that it?” Jack stopped and forced himself to breathe, to try and calm down. His temper, exhaustion, and Megan pushing him had all gotten the better of him, pushed him beyond the limits of self-control. He needed to reign it back in.
“You asked me what I was doing here,” she said, and her voice was hushed. “Hugh is worried about you. So much so that he knows he can’t talk you out of it. Even if he walked away from you. He thinks you’re on some path. I told him that he was overreacting, but now I’ve seen it for myself.” She put her hands on the base of her wine glass, still mostly full, and pushed it a few inches closer to Jack. “I don’t know what you’ve become, but it’s not the man I thought I loved. I told you once that I’d come back if you’d ever choose this life over the other one. I see now that you can’t.”
“Meg,” Jack said.
“You know what I think? I think you could walk away from this any time you want. Could have any time in the last six years. I don’t think you want to because you’re addicted to it. Maybe it’s a rush for you, maybe it’s because you think you need to prove you’re still the best. I don’t know. I do know that it’s cost you two people who love you and if don’t turn yourself around, it’s going to cost you a lot more than that.” Megan turned. She didn’t turn to face him, instead, just turned her head to the side. “Goodbye, Frank. I’d say … well, anything, but I know that you won’t listen.”
She left, and Jack let her go.
What other choice did he have?
Knowing that sleep would be fleeting, Jack packed a light travel bag. Instead of his usual stylish attire, Jack chose more rugged clothes from a brand that marketed to travelers, explorers, people in dangerous professions, and those that wanted to dress like people in dangerous professions. The pants had concealed, anti-theft pockets that wouldn’t stand up to a frisking but might make it harder for someone to remove his passport. Jack also packed a black nylon/twill Harrington jacket from the same company, which also sported the same hidden storage features. This time, he decided to keep his lockpicks on his person. He also selected one of his other passports.