Once a Thief (Gentleman Jack Burdette Book 3)

by Dale M. Nelson

  Jack turned and ran across Hermosa, not even bothering to check for traffic.

  Tires screeched and horns blared, someone in an open-topped Wrangler called him a stupid motherfucker. Jack ran to the sidewalk, again slipping into the gap between buildings. There was a single-story house to his right and a two-story house on the left. Because the houses were so close together, at least the curtains were drawn on ground-floor windows of both homes. Jack walked through to the other street. He just needed to run another couple of blocks, and then he should be safe enough to call Rusty and Enzo. Then he’d—

  The sharp crack of a gunshot split the air, and Jack fell backward to the ground.

  He landed on his ass and immediately went for the pistol. It took him a second to realize he hadn’t been shot, it was just a reflex.

  “I’ve been waiting a long time for this, Jack,” Niccoló Bartolo shouted from up the street.

  Police sirens were getting louder.

  Jack was downhill from Bartolo, but since he’d fallen back, he was at least blocked by a building that extended out slightly farther than the one he was next to. Jack pulled the pistol out and then drew his legs in so that he was in a kind of runner’s stance. Just keep moving, he told himself. For his safety and the innocent people all around them. Jack scanned the houses across the street. Several had fences blocking the narrow gap between them, but he saw one that was two downhill from him, a white mission style, that did not. Jack didn’t bother looking; he just sprinted across the street for the opposite yard, and another shot pierced the air.

  The house in front of him had a long, narrow stairway leading up to the front door, which was a bit off street level. Jack bounded up the steps. The house next to it had some privacy landscaping, making the most of the little land they had to work with, and a tall, bushy tree obstructed the view from the street. When he reached the top, next to the front door, he saw that a concrete path continued straight to the backyard. Jack looked back over his shoulder as he mounted the steps and saw Bartolo running for him at full speed. Jack thought about evading by jumping from the stairs down to the neighboring yard, but Bartolo was too close. He’d also have the high ground by the time Jack recovered from the fall. Looking at it, Jack realized he’d be boxed in.

  But Bartolo was a clean shot.

  Bartolo was running up the stairs, and Jack was at the top of them. Bartolo had no cover but to dive for the yard next door, quite a distance down and dangerous.

  A thousand images flashed through his mind, but the one that froze, as if it were burned into the back of his retinas, was Bartolo holding a gun on him that night in Turin, 1997. The night he learned Giovanni Castro was an undercover cop and was going to bust the School of Turin. The night he mistakenly told Giulia and the night he learned she’d been two-timing him with his “friend” and “mentor,” Niccoló Bartolo. Nico almost killed him then, and there were a lot of long, dark nights when a young Jack Burdette wished he had.

  Jack’s hand went to his pistol and, in the next motion, drew it and leveled it at Bartolo.

  Nico froze, and Jack could see in Bartolo’s eyes everything that had passed between the two of them.

  No one moved.

  Jack couldn’t pull the trigger.

  “Shit,” Jack growled, and he turned and ran down the concrete path, hoping to reach the backyard and the cross street beyond.

  He couldn’t bring himself to do it. Jack knew that there were a lot of long nights ahead of him dealing with what happened in Rome, but he wasn’t going to compound that grief by adding another body to the tally. There was another, more practical reason, which was if Bartolo died here, it would be obvious who did it. Fiore could just call the Hermosa police on an anonymous tip, and then the manhunt would begin.

  Footsteps behind him.

  “You always were a fucking coward,” Bartolo shouted, not far behind him.

  Jack accelerated as fast as he could down the flagstone pathway between the houses. Jack reached the end and realized that this was actually the front of the house. The path ended abruptly, hooking in to the front porch. Jack had too much momentum to stop, so he let it carry him over the low ledge and he leapt into the air. He crashed down on the lawn in the middle of a bunch of what looked like waist-high palm trees. Jack stood and was about to run when a crushing weight slammed into him.

  Jack and Bartolo landed in a tangled heap on the lawn, in the middle of that cluster of palms. Fists were flying before either of them slid to a stop. Jack landed one good hit on the side of Bartolo’s face. Jack realized instantly that his gun had come out of his pocket when he landed. He grabbed Bartolo’s right hand with his left and tried to keep the gun at arm’s length and aimed somewhere else. The two struggled with each other, grunting and thrashing.

  Bartolo had always been a large man, muscular, and sixteen years in a Belgian prison did little to diminish that. Jack used all his strength to slam Bartolo’s hand repeatedly against the trunk of one of those low palm trees. On the third or fourth hit, Bartolo’s gun knocked loose and fell into the thick underbrush. Jack brought his leg in and kicked, driving it into Bartolo’s abdomen. The old thief grunted and crumpled. Jack pulled both legs in and kicked out, driving Bartolo off him. Jack reached for his gun and Bartolo’s fist connected with his face, hard. Jack’s head bounced off the ground. But Bartolo was no longer on top of him. Jack rolled over onto his hands and knees, grabbed his gun, and staggered to his feet. The fronds of those stubby palms scratched him. Bartolo was getting to his feet too, and he’d found his gun.

  Jack took off again at a run, pushing through that last cluster of fronds like it was a green turnstile. He ran to the edge of the lawn, which was above street level, so he easily vaulted the low wall that ran along the sidewalk. Jack ran across the street. His chest heaved and his limbs felt like rubber. He looked back and saw Bartolo had gotten to his feet. Jack held his pistol up. “Back off, Nico,” Jack said, huffing.

  Something caught Jack’s attention out of the corner of his eye, and Jack turned his head to the left, looking downhill. About a block down, maybe a little more, he saw a police car race by, heading in the direction of the beach. Jack turned his attention back to Bartolo, but he was running back up the stairs the way they’d come.

  Jack lowered his pistol and then jammed it in the small of his back.

  Jack turned and ran in the opposite direction, cutting through another three or four blocks of residential neighborhoods and dashing between homes before he came to a commercial district. The dividing line between the two was a long strip of trees with a dirt running path in the center. It looked like it might be a municipal park. Jack saw several people jogging, walking pets. His clothes were dirty from the scuffle on the ground, and he had a myriad of small cuts on his forearms. He felt like his face was probably the same. But he stepped beneath the leafy trees for some shade, and when no one was looking, Jack dumped the pistol into a city garbage can. He continued walking and finally removed the remnants of the latex gloves, now ripped and dirty. He balled them up, carrying them in a clenched fist for another block before he found a trash can to get rid of them as well.

  Jack needed to get out of here and fast. Rusty and Enzo had the car. He couldn’t use a ride share service, though, because they tracked riders and that was the last thing Jack needed. The police would probably contact the services and see if there were pickups around the time of the shooting within a certain radius. To say nothing of the fact that Jack looked like he’d gotten in a fight. Jack turned north, walking along a main road. He pulled his phone out and dialed Enzo, checking around to see if there was any police activity near him.

  “How’d it go?” Enzo asked when he answered. “We’re sitting in this fucking traffic. This place—”

  “Enzo,” Jack broke in, “Bartolo is here.”

  “What? How do you know? Are you sure?”

  “Pretty sure. We just mixed it up in somebody’s lawn. And he took a couple shots at me.”

  �
��Shots, like gunshots?”

  “Yes. He’s here with people too. Cannizzaro’s people. I recognize one of them from the bank. Constantino Fiore. He was the one who killed Gio,” Jack said, using their nickname for Giovanni Castro.

  “Holy fuck,” Enzo said in a vacant voice, and Jack knew that meant he was thinking. When Enzo wasn’t sure what to do, he just peppered the landscape with curses. “Okay, we’re turning around. Tell us where you are.”

  “Do not do that,” Jack said. “You guys have to keep following Reginald and see if you can find out where they’re hiding the diamonds. I don’t know if Fiore would have found the bug or not, but that place is a fucking crime scene now. Reginald and Vito aren’t going back there anytime soon. I’m trying to find a cab. I’ll call you when I get somewhere safe.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah. This is our only chance to figure out what’s going on. But, Enzo, we’ve got to figure out how Cannizzaro knew about Vito and where he would be. They obviously followed him here.”

  “I don’t know, Jack,” Enzo said in a defensive tone.

  “I know, but we have to figure that out fast.” Jack saw what looked like a white Prius with “Beach Taxi” stenciled on its side on the other side of the street. Jack flagged him. The driver caught his eye and began to make a U-turn. Jack had lived in Los Angeles when he and Reginald were running together in the early nineties, so he was familiar with the area, though he didn’t spend much time down here anymore. Occasionally, Jack would fly down if Frank Fischer had a meeting with a wine distributor or a maybe a restaurant that was going to carry Kingfisher. So, when the cab picked him up, Jack just told the guy to take him to El Segundo. It was two towns north of Hermosa Beach and was far enough away that it would be outside of any dragnet the police would throw.

  The cab driver was mercifully silent. The entire trip, Jack was scrolling local news sites, looking for updates on the reports of “shots fired” in Hermosa Beach. As the cab took him away, Jack was confronted with the thoughts of how an Italian mafia boss knew about these diamonds and could dispatch his people to come get them. Had they followed Vito here? Or worse, had they followed Enzo?

  13

  Rusty hid his nerves well, but he hadn’t been on this sharp of an edge in fifteen years.

  Not since Berlin.

  Rusty also never intended to get involved with the scores his clients planned. The scores, the schemes, the revenge-for-hire bits, the industrial espionage and yes, occasionally working with intelligence agencies. Even his own. On the street, he was known as a fixer. If you had a problem, Rusty made it go away. Maybe that problem was needing dirt on a public official, access to an untraceable weapon, or maybe that problem was a dead body and bloodstains. From his time as a counterintelligence officer, he knew how to craft fake identities, travel documents, even passports. He knew where to find weapons of all calibers without serial numbers, clean cash, and clean cars. By the time he first started working with a young jewel thief named Gentleman Jack Burdette, Rusty had established himself as one of the premier illicit logisticians in Europe. He only took clients that were vouched for by people he trusted. Jack came recommended to him, and he immediately liked his style.

  The fact that he had any at all.

  Rusty also liked that Jack wasn’t trying to hurt anyone. For as much as he hated the United States government for what they did to him, Rusty wasn’t a sociopath and didn’t want anything bad to happen to civilians. So, he appreciated that Jack only took small scores, worked mostly at night and never with a gun. They’d been working together two or three years before Jack even asked him for one. Then there were the cars. That proved a unique challenge that he truly enjoyed. A Ferrari or a Maserati, as fast as they were, weren’t ideal for a car chase, but Jack would tell you that if you’d gotten into a chase, your plan had failed. No, he requested those cars because the police never looked twice at guy in a Maserati GTO or an Aston Martin DB-9, except maybe in envy. It never occurred to them there might be two million in stolen jewels in the trunk.

  Rusty had a home in Switzerland and another in Mallorca.

  Rusty lived a good life.

  At least, as good of a life as he could come to expect.

  He made it a habit, a survival mechanism, to stay out of his clients’ business. It wasn’t so much the deniability with law enforcement, should he ever be caught. If he ever found himself explaining to a cop how and why he came to be in possession of a stolen car, stolen plates from a different car, ten thousand in cash, and a Beretta with no serial number, the intents wouldn’t much matter.

  No, Rusty didn’t want to know what his clients did because he didn’t want any part of it. He could put enough together from the news. Rusty first edged over his red line eight years previous when Jack, having just pulled one of the largest, most daring, and certainly most out-of-type scores in history, the Carlton InterContinental job in Cannes, was in a bind and needed help evading a particularly violent crew of the international thievery syndicate known as the Pink Panthers. Rusty took the job and made several million for it. After that, he continued to work as Jack’s fixer, but they’d developed a friendship.

  But Rome changed all that for good.

  After Cannes, FBI Special Agent Katrina Danzig figured out who he was, and Rusty never really learned how. He still had Bureau contracts, people that fed him information, people that knew he got a raw deal. It was possible one of them flipped. It was also possible that one of his Agency contacts dimed him out. He’d created a nearly flawless series of false identities that he lived under, but the people in the CIA who knew he’d been burned (probably by them) knew how to find him once he’d set up his new occupation. They used his services constantly, but that didn’t mean they were loyal.

  But Danzig had a hard-on for him because he was one of their own and was now playing for the other side. She went after Rusty hard when Jack was exposed on the Paris job that went south two years ago. The job that landed him in Aleksander Andelić’s web. Danzig engaged the State Department’s law enforcement agency, the Diplomatic Security Service, to go after Rusty for his passport forgery. That got him on the run. That also made him a player in Jack’s scheme to liberate a hundred million in stolen diamonds from a mob-controlled bank in Rome.

  Sounded kind of crazy when you said it aloud.

  Rusty became a member of a crew then, something he said he would never do.

  Instead of making him twenty-five mil and the ability to disappear forever, he got a .22-caliber round in the leg and another in the lung.

  He limped for six months and couldn’t move without a cane.

  Physical therapy wasn’t the easiest thing to get for a thief on the lam.

  He recovered and was, more or less, back to full health.

  So now he was a member of a crew. If he was going to break that rule, if he was really going to work with someone, it would only have been Jack. But crossing that line wasn’t the thing that set him on edge. It was just the fact of being back in the United States as a former FBI counterintelligence officer, framed by his own government because that was the easy way out, the deniable way out. Rusty, whose real name was Scott Donners, was on every watchlist there was—FBI Most Wanted, INTERPOL Red Notice, and a score of others. You could hide in Europe and do it easily. There were former KGB officers in Austria, Rusty knew three of them, he had drinks with one of them on occasion.

  Rusty knew the FBI hung him out because it was the expedient thing to do and would avoid an international incident. He learned from one of his friends inside that they were basically letting him run, that it was their fucked-up way of paying him back for ruining his name and wrecking his life. So long as he didn’t ply his trade helping out terrorists or Russians or any other of America’s bêtes noires at the time, they were fine to let bygones. All of that was fine so long as he stayed outside the United States. Because once he reentered the US, they’d believe he was forcing someone’s hand to reckon with what happened, and Americ
a’s leadership was not particularly well disposed to affirming publicly the nasty things they did in the interest of “national security.”

  So, Rusty was giving a command performance in hiding his nerves.

  Having something to concentrate on helped. He followed Reginald’s Range Rover from Hermosa Beach to Hawthorne, where he picked up the 105 just outside LAX. You could practically trip over a black Range Rover walking into any parking lot north of downtown, but so far he’d been able to keep them sighted. A Malibu wasn’t the ideal chase vehicle, but it did blend in. From there, they picked up the 110 northbound and rode that, gradually, to downtown.

  Running a tail with one car was incredibly hard. Normally, it required two or three cars, all coordinated by radio, with the lead chase cars swapping out periodically so that the target never got wind of the pursuit. Or, more importantly, you had backup if the chase car was stuck in traffic, was sideswiped by some asshole looking at his phone, or the chase got made. They could have done it with Jack driving a second car, but they’d all agreed that it was best for Jack to stay as far from Reginald and Vito as he could, as they could both make him. Enzo had never been to Los Angeles before and didn’t know the roads. It would be hard enough for him to navigate, paying attention to the sludgy sluice of LA traffic, without having to run a tail. So they decided to take their chances with one car. Rusty focused on the road and was careful to stay several cars back from the Range Rover while Enzo kept eyes solely on the target.