Page 47 of The Company We Keep

In some deep pit of himself, Dust Wrenshall shed the last vestiges of Charlie Judge.

He was not and had never truly been the quiet boy from the Georgia coast, bookish and capable and too afraid to be interested, to enjoy the rich life around him. He had always been Dust — before he knew Dust existed — had been simply biding his time and putting together the pieces that would someday become his reality.

AIIB was beyond an afterthought.

His world was full up with A.R. Carrow, with the family that called themselves The Company.

9

When Carrow woke just a few hours later, he felt as if he’d slept for days.

It was rare for him to sleep peacefully, dreamlessly, and he never felt rested immediately upon rising. Getting up was a slow ritual that involved ludicrous amounts of coffee and usually didn’t get started until midday if he didn’t have an appointment in the morning.

But hehadslept well. And hedidhave an appointment.

Dust hada strange moment of feeling unmoored as he came back to consciousness. He could hear the ocean, and for one abrupt minute of panic, he thought that the night at his back — maybe even the years before it — had been some sort of especially vivid, extended dream... That he was back on the coast in the bedroom where he had grown up. When he left the window open overnight in his childhood home, he would wake up to the thick humidity that pervaded the bedroom now, could hear the waves lap at the shore.

But no. It took just one look around the room to become reoriented, to acknowledge that the vast ocean he was hearing in that moment was the Pacific, not the Atlantic. No part of it had been a dream. Evidence of Carrow was all over the room, from the neatly folded clothes that had been so hastily discarded the night before to the newspaper placed on the bed where Carrow had slept.

Dust reached for it, smiling.

They’d made the front page.

Hell:he’dmade the front page.

Not his face, thankfully, but Dust’s handiwork was getting top billing.

“Museum burns in massive blaze”— and then the subheadline, “LAPD points to organized crime.”

Dust snorted. They didn’t know the half of it.

He dug into the article, hoping to find more details about the aftermath of the destruction he’d wrought at the museum.

Carrow’s message had been received loud and clear.

Dust had set up the charges in such a way that the facade of the museum had crumbled, barring all entry and exit from the building. He’d picked out the weakest points and calculated the trajectories of the tools at his disposal, strategically plotting each blast to cause the maximum damage to the exterior of the building while minimizing any disturbance to the artifacts that the museum housed.

The anthropologists and archeologists and curators would be forced to excavate their own goddamn museum before they could gain access to the treasures within.

The article reported that there had been no fatalities, that police were seeking someone of indeterminate gender and race who had traded fire with the responding units and then fled on an imported motorcycle.

They were also seeking Dust and Wayles.

The grad students had gone on to recount breathlessly to the police the entire story of why they’d been in the hall so late, of the two strangers, “Pete” and “Joel,” posing as museum employees who had bullied them out of the hall.

They didn’t have much to go on beside the fact that it was two white guys, young, brown hair, one with a Jersey accent and the other with a British accent.

That would be an interesting detail for the cops to try and figure out, then. Wayles and Herron were known entities — and despite what few details the LAPD may be releasing to the media, it was impossible to imagine that they hadn’t immediately identified the two members of the notorious Company.

But Dust would be a wildcard. Did the LAPD even know for sure that Short was dead?

God, he bet Carrow was pleased.

The safehouse was silent around him except for the sounds of the shore. He stood, pulling on his boxers as he went to look for his boss.

Carrow, as it turned out, was entertaining company in the sunshine. He sat at a folding table on the back deck, overlooking the Pacific, across from an elderly woman. She was squat but surprisingly fit, her lined skin a deep tan, white hair falling in a thick braid down her back, dressed like she was out for a morning of gardening — not a meeting with Las Abras’ reigning king of crime.

Carrow looked incongruous with his surroundings, dressed already in a fresh suit. They made an odd pair. The woman laughed hard at something Carrow said, laying a hand over his for a moment and then producing a thin envelope. Carrow said something else, frowning and holding up a hand —but it was clear that she was insisting he take it. Reluctantly, he accepted the envelope and slid it into the front of his jacket.

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