Once a Thief (Gentleman Jack Burdette Book 3)

by Dale M. Nelson

  The residential street ran perpendicular to the road he’d been on and quickly turned into a steep hill climb before curving right to run parallel with the lakefront road. Enzo accelerated but kept it around forty, as this was an entirely unlit residential street with large houses on either side. He checked the rearview and saw no sight of the Audi. Through breaks in the trees and gaps between houses, Enzo could see the lakefront road to his right. A connecting road appeared on his right but Enzo held course, taking this street to the end. It angled down again, and Enzo could see the dark expanse of the lake in front of him with the lakefront road running alongside.

  Now he had a choice to make. Did his pursuers take the bait and think he backtracked, or were they heading for Stresa? He didn’t see any headlights behind him. Enzo decided not to double back. His pursuers would most likely go back and collect the others from the car with the deflated tire. He pulled onto the lakefront road, now called Via Sempione Sud, and headed toward Stresa. Just as Enzo got into the northbound lane, a pair of Carabinieri vehicles blasted past him in the opposite direction, lights and sirens flashing. No doubt they were bound for Vito’s house, responding to the calls of shots fired. Enzo drove the last few miles to Stresa at a more lawful pace. Now bathed in yellow street light, Stresa’s white buildings and orange tiled rooftops stood out starkly against the darkness.

  Stresa was a thousand-year-old resort town, built on a low sloping hill that gradually climbed up from the lake. Looking out across Lago Maggiore from its many docks or shoreline, as Enzo had done earlier that day, one could gaze out over the widest part of the lake, their view encompassing the tree-covered Alps on either side and ribbons of mountains disappearing into the distance.

  Enzo’s hands shook with nerves shot through with adrenaline. He forced deep breaths but that didn’t help. What he wanted to do was to stop the car, get out, and try to calm down, but he didn’t dare. Instead, Enzo slowed his speed to match the street signs in town and checked the rearview obsessively for headlights, signs of pursuit. It was late on a weeknight and Stresa was quiet but not empty, and for that he was grateful. Ahead, just beyond town, Enzo saw the island Isola Bella blazing with light from its massive palazzo. Enzo missed the street he was looking for and had to pull a U-turn. He didn’t dare use the GPS on this car, which he would be cleaning and ditching as soon as he put enough miles between himself and Lago Maggiore. Enzo guided the Alfa up into the mountains and from there along the long, curving roads to Carpugnino, where he picked up the southbound Autostrada.

  Enzo accelerated beneath the long, tall streetlights that illuminated the highway. He had only questions.

  5

  Enzo didn’t know where to go, so he simply drove.

  He was in Milan by midnight and took one of the ring roads around the city to pick up the A1 Autostrada heading south. There were no further signs of his pursuers. As the lights of Milan faded behind him and the land flattened, Enzo pulled into an AutoGrill. He purchased a panino and a coffee and then found a booth. The restaurants, ubiquitous on Italy’s Autostrada, were roadside rest stops that served food, tourist items, books, wine, and God knew whatever else. The dining area was in the center of the building with a lime-green crescent-shaped booth that ran the length of the food court. There were a dozen square and circular tables in the center. Enzo set his tray down at an empty table in the middle part of the booth so that he could watch both doors. The rest stop was located in the center of the Autostrada so it could service travelers in either direction.

  Enzo sipped his coffee, his nerves having finally settled. He tried a bite of the sandwich, but the queasy feeling of adrenaline crash prevented him from taking another.

  He couldn’t have fucked this up any worse if he’d actually planned to fail.

  Already, he was dreading the phone call he was going to have to make to Jack and Rusty. It was going to be bad enough that he’d have to listen to Jack lecture him about not following the plan. Or about the twisted Schrödinger’s Cat logic that only thieves possessed of how if Enzo hadn’t opened the safe, the diamonds would still be there.

  Enzo’s mind started to calm and the adrenaline faded, allowing him to think straight. But that gave him no insight into who was in Vito’s house. Who he shot. He didn’t stick around long enough to check to see if that man was still alive; he’d have been shot himself or captured if he had. Self-defense.

  But self-defense was still cold blood.

  Whoever they were, they were in there looking for Vito Verrazano and the diamonds.

  But that didn’t answer the question of who they were. Enzo needed to get an idea of that before he spoke to Jack. If they knew about Vito and they knew about the stones, they probably knew where they came from. That meant they could very well know about Jack…and Enzo. He didn’t see any recognition in the man’s face before he shot him, but it wasn’t like he had the time to stare him down before he shot him either.

  Enzo looked up from his white-and-blue Lavazza cup, realizing it’d been too long since he’d checked the doors. He made a quick scan of the AutoGrill food court and didn’t see any groups of men, didn’t see groups of anyone for that matter. He counted four other people, and none of them looked like a threat. But it was too bright in here, and the two exits were on opposite sides of the building. Enzo had to keep an eye on both. Enzo wrapped up his sandwich in the wax paper it came in and went back to his car. As he exited the building and returned to the cool, damp night, Enzo’s hand went to his waistband and the pistol he had jammed in it. The parking lot was almost empty, only a few large trucks. Enzo scanned as he walked to his car and didn’t see a black Audi. He’d made sure to park his car away from others so he could easily tell if something was off.

  Enzo crossed the distance to his car quickly, checking left and right as he did. He had his hand close to his right hip, inches from the gun. Seeing no traffic in the parking lot, Enzo cast a surreptitious glance back over his left shoulder at the restaurant. No one had followed him out. He unlocked the car when he was about five steps from it, close enough that he could make it in a sprint but not so far away that someone could beat him to it. Enzo pulled the gun from his waistband, climbed into the car, and sat down. He placed the Beretta and the panini on the seat next to him, locked the doors, and then powered up the Giulia. Enzo wasted no time accelerating out of the rest stop.

  He put fast miles between himself and Milan.

  Enzo pulled off the A1 at a cloverleaf just before the city of Parma and connected with the A15, which would cut across the country and eventually take him south along the western coast. Once he was on the A15, he drove again in silence for a time, but fatigue and adrenaline crash started to weigh on him. Even with coffee, he wasn’t going to make it all night. He left the Autostrada and turned onto a smaller local road. Enzo pulled off, finding a place that looked like it had a wide enough shoulder. It was hard to tell in the dark. Enzo cracked his window for some fresh air and placed the Beretta at the small of his back. Then he reclined his seat as far as it would go and closed his eyes.

  A passing car woke him.

  Enzo was up with a jolt, right hand immediately going for the pistol behind his back.

  A jittery hand held the weapon in a shaking grip. Enzo exhaled and set the weapon down on the seat next him. The sky was lightening but dawn had yet to break over the horizon. Enzo shivered. Both he and most of the car’s surfaces were covered in dew. He got out and pissed in the dirt behind the car. He stood by the roadside for a time to get his bearings, moving to get blood and warmth back into his extremities. He’d parked on a low hill, and from here, Enzo could see a rolling pastoral valley with haphazard squares of farm tracts. Looked like a broken chess board. A line of low fog hung over the valley above dark green trees, lighter green grasses and the yellow-brown of harvested fields. In the middle distance, he could see the gray ribbon of the A15 cutting across the landscape.

  Enzo was cold and damp, and his muscles ached from sleeping in the car. Th
e full realization of what he’d done fell on him as he stood there looking out at that valley. Enzo had killed a man. It wasn’t his first. But the first man, a Serbian thief named Ozren Stolar, deserved it, cold retribution for murdering two of Enzo’s friends. A debt paid.

  He didn’t know who the man he shot in Vito’s house was.

  A criminal, probably. If he was a cop, there would have been lights and sirens on the chase. Just being a crook didn’t mean he deserved to get shot. He’d also be employed by the kind of people that wouldn’t stop looking.

  Enzo supposed that he should feel some kind of solace that there seemed to be no other options, but he didn’t.

  The diamonds were gone.

  Vito Verrazano was gone.

  And Enzo had no clue about where either might be. Worse, someone else knew about those diamonds and was there waiting. The second Enzo popped that safe, someone was on him. Who else knew that Vito had those diamonds? Who knew Enzo was going there to get them?

  Guilt and failure were overpowering and crushing feelings. Once the fury of the moment wears off, one is left with the knowledge that they did something wrong. The world becomes gray. The guilty can see colors, but it seems as though they are meant for someone else. The guilty can only observe.

  Enzo breathed deeply. It was time to make a phone call.

  Jack sat at his dining room table hunched over his laptop. He had a yellow legal pad with scribbled notes next to it. Jack had the sliding glass door open that connected the house’s central room with his patio. Night descended on Sonoma, what was left of the day was an echo of firelight on the horizon and a deepening ochre in the sky. There was an open bottle of wine on the table, left over from dinner. He drank intermittently throughout the night, something to keep him occupied, but Jack also needed to keep his mind sharp, so he was careful to pace himself. He was compiling a list of all the places he thought Reginald and Vito might be able to sell the diamonds in Los Angeles.

  What initially seemed like a flash of inspiration, the critical unraveling of a puzzle, now seemed farfetched and out of reach. Anyone that would attempt to vet Reginald too deeply would figure out that he was lying. No legitimate business was going to enter into an eighty-million-dollar deal with someone without digging deeply into their past and fully validating their credentials. Was Reginald really able to create a convincing background and a shell company that stood up to that kind of scrutiny? Jack wasn’t sure.

  Jack had been in this business for a long time. For years, he’d sold stolen gems to brokers in the legitimate trade who didn’t care about the provenance of the acquisitions. That was probably less common in the States, whereas it was practically rampant in Europe and Asia. Less common, but not impossible.

  Jack sighed in frustration and pushed himself back from the table. This kind of circular thinking had been plaguing him ever since Rusty told him about the flight Reginald chartered. Jack regularly vacillated from, “I’ve got you, you son of a bitch” to “There’s no way they do this.” He knew it was because they were trying to divine Reginald and Vito’s plan with only a single data point. For all Jack knew, Reginald had made a connection with the Mexican Mafia while he was in prison and was selling the diamonds to them. Los Angeles’s criminal underworld had about the same level of diversity as the UN General Assembly, so it was also possible that any of Reginald’s old connections in Eastern Europe had links there. The simple fact that they were smuggling the diamonds into the United States only meant that they had a buyer or buyers here. It said nothing about the legitimacy of them.

  Jack’s phone beeped.

  The call was coming on their encrypted calling app. Enzo. Jack picked up and said, “Where the hell have you been? Rusty and I have been—”

  “I know,” Enzo interrupted. “I know. I’m sorry, look, we…we gotta talk.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “I…I fucked up, Jack.” Enzo sounded tired. No, that wasn’t quite right. He was worn down, his voice stripped bare to just the ability to make intelligible sound.

  “What did you do?”

  “I was tired of waiting. Two years is a long time, man.”

  “What did you do, Enzo?”

  “I broke into Vito’s house. I was going to steal the diamonds back. I figured that I’d just get them to a safe place and then you and me and Rusty could figure out what to do about it. It’s just that—”

  “The diamonds aren’t there, and neither was Vito.”

  After a long pause, Enzo said, “How’d you know?”

  “The reason we’ve been trying to get you on the goddamn phone, Enzo. Rusty figured out that Reginald used one of our old shell corporations to charter a private plane from Rome to Los Angeles. We think that he and Vito are working together again. Probably always were. So, they’re going to smuggle the diamonds into the US somehow and try to sell them here.” Jack paused. He stood up from his chair and walked over to the sliding glass door, which he closed and locked. Then he drew the curtains. Walking back to the table, Jack said, “Enzo, you said you fucked up. If Vito is on his way to the States, he wasn’t there when you tried to break in, right?”

  “He wasn’t, but someone else was.”

  “Well, who?”

  “I don’t fucking know,” Enzo half shouted, his tone going from half-dead to anxiously agitated with explosive surprise. “But they knew I was there, man. I staked his place out. I saw Vito in town, followed him back to his place yesterday afternoon, and I didn’t see him leave. I waited until it was dark and went in the back. His house faces the lake. I crept along the shore and then up these stairs he has. The house is up off the water a bit on a kind of bluff. Broke in through a downstairs door, made my way upstairs, and found his office. The safe was in there. It was good but not great. I was through it in a couple minutes, but Jack, as soon as I was in there, and I mean as soon as the lights come on, there’s this guy just standing over me. Tells me not to fucking move.”

  Jack stayed silent and worked very hard to control his temper.

  Jack had known Enzo for a long, long time, and in some ways, Enzo was the only true friend Jack had. But they were talking about an amount of money that would push any bonds of friendship to the breaking point. Was Enzo telling him this just because he failed?

  Enzo continued. “He never told me who he was. I had a gun with me, he didn’t see it, and I shot him. He had a pistol in his hand, but I just got the drop on him. Him or me. I didn’t check to see if he was still alive or not, I just grabbed my shit and ran. But there were guys all over that house. Like I said, they waited until I had the safe open to flip the lights and come at me. I don’t know if they were following me or Vito. Maybe they picked me up in town that day, I don’t know, but it felt like a trap.”

  “So somebody else knows that Vito had the diamonds,” Jack said in a flat tone. He wasn’t asking questions.

  “Looks that way. My first guess was that he was trying to sell them to someone and they got tired of waiting too.”

  “We need to loop Rusty in.” Jack removed the phone from his ear and keyed the function in their secure app to add another party to the call. Rusty picked up right away.

  “Hey,” he said in a blank, distracted voice. It wasn’t quite six in the morning for either Rusty or Enzo.

  “You up already?” Jack asked.

  “Yeah,” Rusty said. “I’ve been up for a bit. I’m trying to find any of the accounts that Reginald might be using and seeing if there is anything else that he’s doing with this one. I see there’s a black card associated with this corporation now.”

  “Rusty, I’ve got Enzo on the line with me.”

  Rusty, far more even-tempered than Jack, said nothing. If he was irritated that they couldn’t get ahold of Enzo for a few days, he didn’t show it.

  “So, Enzo has some news,” Jack said in a loaded tone, trying to force some levity into his voice, to break the tension that he felt. Enzo spent a few awkward moments explaining what he’d done, but thi
s time it was a rambling, roundabout telling. Jack could sense the guilt Enzo was putting on himself for betraying their trust, ignoring the plan, and most likely tipping their hand to some yet-to-be identified party.

  “That wasn’t smart, Enzo,” Rusty said in an almost clinical tone. Rusty and Enzo had known each other since the Carlton job eight years before, but their association was limited and strictly professional until they went in with Vito to steal Bartolo’s diamonds from the Commerce Bank of Rome. With Jack in FBI custody, it was Enzo that secreted Rusty out of that Roman hospital where he was recovering from the pair of gunshot wounds Vito left him with. It was Enzo that got him out of the country and safely back to Switzerland, where he could hide out and recover. They’d developed a friendship then. Jack knew they’d seen each other a few times before the world went to hell in 2020. Rusty had flown down to Enzo’s place in Calabria, and they’d spent a few days drinking and looking at the Med.

  “Rusty,” Jack said in a cautious tone, “Enzo has been raking himself over the coals over this, and I’ve given him my share. What we need to do now is figure out what we’re going to do next.”

  “Yeah,” Rusty said, clearly focusing on something else. “What does everyone know?”

  Jack summarized it for them. “We think Reginald chartered a private plane from Rome to LA, and they’re going to use that to smuggle the diamonds into the US. Enzo confirmed that Vito and the diamonds are not at his house and someone else was there. We can speculate that whomever that was, they knew Vito had the diamonds and were there to get them. What we don’t know is whether they were following Enzo or not. If they were, that means someone else knows we’re involved.”

  Enzo said, “I’ve been racking my brain, and I can’t figure out who that would be. The guy who confronted me spoke Italian. My first thought was it could be Andelić or some of the other Pink Panthers, but the man was a native speaker.”