Once a Thief (Gentleman Jack Burdette Book 3)

by Dale M. Nelson

  ONCE A THIEF

  DALE M. NELSON

  ONCE A THIEF

  Copyright © 2021 by Dale M. Nelson.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Severn River Publishing

  www.SevernRiverPublishing.com

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  ISBN: 978-1-64875-185-1 (Paperback)

  ISBN: 978-1-64875-186-8 (Hardback)

  CONTENTS

  Also by Dale M. Nelson

  Prologue

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Part II

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Part III

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Epilogue

  Join the Reader List

  Thanks for Reading

  Agent of Influence

  Read Agent of Influence

  New from Dale M. Nelson

  PROPER VILLAINS: Chapter 1

  PROPER VILLAINS: Chapter 2

  PROPER VILLAINS: Chapter 3

  Read Proper Villains

  You Might Also Enjoy…

  About the Author

  ALSO BY DALE M. NELSON

  The Gentleman Jack Burdette Series

  A Legitimate Businessman

  The School of Turin

  Once a Thief

  Proper Villains

  The Bad Shepherd

  With Andrew Watts

  Agent of Influence

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  Thanks to my wife for giving me the push.

  Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.

  —Honoré de Balzac

  PROLOGUE

  Rome, 2019

  A sleek black Maserati moved quickly through the darkened streets of nighttime Rome. Inside were two men, two pistols, and six pounds of diamonds that no one believed were missing.

  Every thief has a story about a perfect crime.

  For once, it was actually true.

  But Vito Verrazano was nervous.

  His palms were wet, and lines of sweat moved down the side of his face. He prayed the other man in the car, the man driving, didn’t see it. Vito rubbed his hands on his pants. If Rusty noticed his discomfort, he didn’t say anything. Rusty was focused on the road.

  The Maserati Quattroporte GTS slid through the dark streets of Rome like a black lozenge, slippery and elusive. It was approaching one in the morning, and the streets were not quite empty. Vito was still trying to process the day, wrap his mind around the sheer absurdity of it all. The illogic, the unbelievability of it, stretched the fabric of his mind to its limits.

  At eleven that morning, Vito had walked into the Commerce Bank of Rome wearing a business suit and carrying forged papers identifying him as Aldo Grassi, an old alias of Niccoló Bartolo, his onetime boss in the notorious School of Turin thievery ring. Vito asked for the bank manager and told him he’d like to access his safe-deposit box. The man took his identification, looked him up in a computer, and said that they hadn’t seen him in some time. Sixteen years, Vito told him with a practiced smile. He was taken down to the vault and given a private room they had for their preferred guests, and the box was brought in. When the curtain was pulled aside, Vito opened the box.

  Inside, there were over six pounds of finished diamonds worth approximately one hundred million dollars.

  Vito greedily scooped most of the diamonds up and placed them in a velvet sack, which he then secured and placed in the briefcase he carried. Vito left about a fifth of the stones in the box. He had to eyeball it, but it needed to equal about twenty million. That was how much the Antwerp Diamond Centre claimed Bartolo actually got away with when he originally stole these in 2003. Leaving an actual fortune behind was insane to him. He had to fight himself not to pocket a fistful—Christ, what would that be? Five million in rocks?

  But that twenty million he left behind would be their escape plan. That’s what would make the police believe they got everything back.

  Vito handcuffed the briefcase to his wrist, closed the box, and gave it back to the manager, who was waiting in the vault. Vito thanked him for his time and walked out of the bank with eighty million dollars in his right hand.

  Then the day got weird.

  Rusty, Jack’s man, who seemed to be able to conjure up handguns, passports, and high-end sports cars with a magician’s flourish, picked him up in a black Maserati, and they drove to a hotel where they waited for Jack’s call.

  They watched it happen on TV.

  Four men—ex-Serbian special forces and Jack Burdette—attempted to rob the Commerce Bank just hours after Vito was there, and it went sideways in every way possible. Of course, Jack was on the inside making sure that it did. He got out without getting killed and ended up in a shootout on a Roman street, him and a bent Italian cop against Aleksander Andelić and what was left of his Serbian goon squad. Jack escaped that too, and Vito began to wonder if Burdette was part cat and what the count of nine lives was up to.

  They picked Burdette up in the Maserati, the same car he and Rusty sat in now, and they fled to Rome-Fiumicino, where they boarded a chartered plane, Vito didn’t know what kind, and flew two and a half hours to Alicante, Spain. He and Rusty remained on the aircraft with the diamonds for about an hour. Jack returned with Enzo Bachetti, a safecracker and alumnus of the School of Turin. Enzo was worse for wear. He was bloody, and he’d been tortured.

  They didn’t talk for a time.

  Jack drank.

  They’d watched a man die. Vito still didn’t know who pulled the trigger, but he knew Jack hadn’t stopped it. Nothing else was said.

  Something else died there too, in that hot Spanish night, but Jack wouldn’t speak of it.

  He only drank and rifled through a thick collection of files they’d brought back with them from Aleksander Andelić’s house.

 
They split up at Rome-Fiumicino airport, Vito and Rusty in the Maserati and Jack and Enzo in another car. Jack said they were going to meet Giovanni Castro.

  Castro. He was the cop who busted up the School of Turin in 1997. Jack and Enzo had gotten away. Bartolo had gotten away. Vito didn’t. Vito only did five years, but when he got out, he looked up Bartolo, asked him what he had going, and Bartolo said they couldn’t work together anymore. Vito was an ex-con. The police knew where to find ex-cons.

  Then Bartolo robbed the Antwerp Diamond Centre.

  If it weren’t for Castro, the original School would have been in on that job, including Vito. Instead of grabbing the diamonds now, sixteen years after the fact, he would’ve been living high on the fat. He’d never have stolen anything again.

  If it weren’t for Castro.

  If it weren’t for Castro, the School of Turin would have pulled that job, not the practice squad, and they would have gotten away with it.

  And there wouldn’t have been a Castro if it weren’t for Jack.

  Vito told him there were no hard feelings. That he’d forgiven.

  But that wasn’t true.

  There were only hard feelings.

  The time you spend in a concrete box, you never get that back.

  Vito was nervous, exposed wires in the rain.

  Vito pointed to the left side of the car and said nonchalantly, “Vatican. Always looks pretty at night.”

  Rusty looked over at the illuminated circular columns that enveloped St. Peter’s Square like the arms of God.

  Vito had never believed in God, but he was Italian, and that made him a Catholic.

  “We haven’t heard from Jack,” Rusty said, “so I’d like to stop by the hotel first before we find our place. Just want to make sure everything is okay.”

  “That’s fine,” Vito said. He pointed straight ahead. “This road will take us right by there.”

  Rusty drove through a traffic circle and continued down the street, which eventually split into lanes falling on either side of a tunnel entrance. The road was slightly elevated, and as they descended to merge with the tunnel traffic, they could see the Tiber, a black ribbon across the glowing city. It was too dark to make out the water, but Vito saw the illuminated bridge stretching across it. Rusty slowed to a stop, the third car in a line at a red light. The other two appeared to be taxis in front of them.

  Now. Now was the time.

  Vito pulled the .22-caliber Beretta Bobcat from his pocket and held it against his chest. Rusty, focused on the road and his mind apparently elsewhere, still hadn’t noticed.

  “Sorry, kid.”

  That got his attention.

  Vito fired twice.

  Not believing in God doesn’t mean you don’t believe in remorse, it just means you don’t have any place to put your guilt.

  But he was also seventy years old, an ex-con, and not living off the promised fortune of a job he should have been on sixteen years before. That left little room in his heart for anything else.

  Vito liked the kid. Rusty was damn good at what he did, and he was crafty. In another life, perhaps.

  Vito reached into the back seat and grabbed the diamonds, now in a bag he could sling cross-body. He got out of the car and closed the door, never looking back. Vito slung the bag across his chest. A .22 was a small-caliber weapon, and when fired from inside a car, the sound wouldn’t carry far. Vito doubted that the shots would even register as anything more than a backfire or blown tire to the cab drivers, especially if they had their radios on. To anyone on the street, if there was anyone at this time of night, it’d just look like a guy got out at a stoplight.

  Vito moved quickly down the Piazza della Rovere, the dark waters of the Tiber on his left and a wall of seventy-year-old, five-story stucco to his right. He disappeared quickly into the inky half-light of the Roman night. Vito turned down the first street he came to and snaked deeper into the outer edges of the city, away from Rusty. He still didn’t hear any sirens.

  When he’d walked for about ten minutes and was certain that he wasn’t followed, Vito pulled out his phone and dialed a number.

  When the person on the other end picked up, Vito said, “It’s done.”

  “Good,” the voice on the other end said.

  Then Vito Verrazano went to ground.

  PART I

  THREE CAN KEEP A SECRET…

  1

  October 2021

  Jack stepped from the cool, dark interior of the low barn into the hot afternoon sun. The yeasty smell of fermenting grapes abated some when he left the tank building, but it still hung heavy in the air. He loved this time of year. It was always a gamble with growers trying to push the harvest as long as possible to soak up the dry, late summer sunshine and cool mornings. The trick was to time it so that you completed the harvest before the October rains, which would destroy whatever crop was left on the vine. It was incredibly stressful. If the rains came early, entire crops could be lost.

  There was little danger of that, it seemed.

  It was early October, and there was no sign of rain in the forecast. It had been another dangerously dry year, and wildfires burned throughout the state. They’d had several near misses with fires and the last time could see flames from the property.

  The unfortunate irony was that as the climate had warmed, the harvest was starting earlier and earlier. A dry growing season was ideal, but if it was too hot and too dry, the veraison, or the process of ripening, started in early August now in some parts. This meant that the vines would cease growing and starting to push sugars into the grapes. That began a clock of approximately six weeks for when harvest needed to begin. For the estate fruit here in Alexander Valley, which was at the northern end of Sonoma County and enjoyed a cooler microclimate, they hadn’t had to harvest much earlier than previous years. But Jack also owned a tract of vineyard in Napa Valley that supplied the fruit for their signature Cabernet, “the Kingfisher,” and that harvest started in August. They would have a much smaller yield this year, but hopefully they’d be rewarded with more intense flavor from the smaller grapes. That fruit, from the legendary Sine Metu vineyard in Napa, was one of the most storied plots of land in California wine country and produced some of the state’s highest-quality grapes. What fruit he didn’t use for the Kingfisher Cabernet, he sold to other vineyards and turned a significant profit from it.

  Megan handled the crush. She oversaw all of the winemaking operations, managed the day laborer harvesters, all of which had to be done by hand, and she was ultimately responsible for the bottling. That was several full-time jobs in itself. Jack handled everything else. Most of his grapes were here at Kingfisher, at the very northern end of Sonoma’s Alexander Valley, among the black oak and with a gentler climate that favored more European-style wines.

  They’d survived the last two years, but it had been lean.

  Most of the money he’d made on his last job was gone, funneled into the winery to keep it going during the bleakness of 2020. Of course, there hadn’t been that much money to begin with. Jack, Enzo, and Rusty all walked away with about a million three, and that was what they’d been able to steal from the Serbian gangster Aleksander Andelić. It was supposed to be much, much more.

  Jack thought about Vito’s betrayal often.

  When it first happened, it was a raw and festering wound. It felt like a hot poker behind the eyes. Jack felt such a primal fury, such uncontrollable anger, that for a while he even scared himself. He didn’t know where to put his rage; it just seemed to batter against the sides of his consciousness, trying to be let out. He slept little in those early, dark days.

  Megan McKinney had met him in New York when Jack cemented his deal with the Justice Department to plea to several counts of passport fraud in exchange for avoiding prison and agreeing to help the FBI with several ongoing trafficking investigations. She wasn’t fully back in his life in those first months but saw the change in him, saw the darkness taking over. She told Jack that she lo
ved him, but he had to banish whatever those demons were if they were to be together. She didn’t ask to know what was troubling him but promised that he could tell her if he wanted. She would listen and she wouldn’t judge.

  Jack told her.

  He and his crew targeted one hundred million in finished diamonds that no one was looking for. They made the painful decision to leave about twenty percent of those diamonds in the safe because they knew the police needed something they could believe.

  The plan was perfect. Jack had made his deal with the government. He would help them capture the Serbian war criminal-turned-thief Aleksander Andelić, and in exchange, the government wouldn’t press charges on a litany of damnable offenses. Jack would be a free man and would have twenty million in untraceable diamonds.