Free Outsourced by Dave Zeltserman Page B

lenses to change my eye color. I’ll also be wearing a ski mask and taking it off so I can be captured by a security camera.”
    “Well, that’s going to be a problem.”
    “Why?”
    “I can’t use putty. Otherwise, when you take the mask off it could bend your nose. That would give the police a good chuckle.” Gordon scratched his head as he thought. “I could use a rubber compound,” he said slowly. “That should work. When are we doing this?”
    “Six days.”
    “Not giving me much notice, are you? Well, if I can put together the makeup for Phantom of the Opera over a weekend, I can do this.”
    “You really like this theatre stuff, huh?”
    “I hate it. Absolutely can’t stand it.”
    “I don’t understand. You’ve been doing this for years.”
    Gordon gave a slight smile that could’ve been lifted directly from the Mona Lisa. “Since college, actually. That was when I started this simply to piss my father off, and you know, I don’t think I could’ve picked a better way. Joining the theatrical club was respectable enough that I had my mother bragging to all their friends about how I was involved in theatre, and my father just had to sit and listen and pretend he was fine with it. I keep doing this community theatre stuff so I can talk about it when I see them over Christmas.”
    “You’ve been doing this all these years just to get at your old man?”
    “As good a reason as any. You haven’t told me, do you want me just to do the makeup or am I going to be involved in the robbery? You know I did a tour in Vietnam.”
    “I need you for the robbery. We’re going to meet at Joel’s house tomorrow to go over the details. I’ll pick you up at ten.”
    “Will I have a gun?”
    “Yeah.”
    Gordon folded his arms, nodding. “Okay then.”
    Yuri Tolkov pulled the Mercedes into the driveway of a small cape-style house on a dead-end street in Melrose. Petrenko sat in the passenger seat and an older soft-looking man sat in the back. Yuri checked the address against a piece of paper he had, then indicated to Petrenko that they had the right house. All three men left the car, Yuri and Petrenko leading the way to the front door. The older man carried a leather bag as he trailed behind, walking as if he had pebbles in his shoes.
    “There will be three Arabs, right?” Petrenko asked.
    “That was the agreement.”
    After they knocked on the door, a window curtain was pushed aside and a man with an angry scowl opened up and signaled impatiently for them to step inside. He was in his early twenties, thin as a rail, and had a sub-compact Glock 9mm pistol shoved in his waistband. Sitting on a sofa were two other Arabs. One was a heavyset man with a thick beard trimmed close to his face, the other was also rail-thin, angry-looking and with features that looked sharp enough to cut paper. All three Arabs were wearing leisure suits.
    Yuri told Petrenko in Russian that the angry looking man on the sofa was the one on the FBI’s ten-most-wanted list and went by the name Abbas.
    Anger flushed Abbas’s face when he heard the Russian. “The agreement was we speak English only,” he said, his eyes simmering. “Another word in Russian and the hell with you!”
    Petrenko showed a humorless thin smile. “Relax,” he said, “my employee was just being polite. All he said was that it smells like the inside of a shoe in here. I have to agree with him. Not only that, it is like an oven. Could you open a window or turn on an air conditioner?”
    Abbas stared dumbly at Petrenko for a moment and then barked out a command in Arabic to the man who had escorted them in. With his scowl deepening, the man moved over to one of the windows and opened it a crack.
    “We have ten diamonds for you to appraise,” Abbas said, his face still mottled with anger. “Eighty others just like these are being held in a safe place.”
    Petrenko, unblinking, dropped his smile. “We can agree on a price, but later we will have to appraise