Page 49 of The Company We Keep

And he did. Dust wanted it all.

“Does this mean I’m hired?”

II

“The possibility of a rainbow gang could prove to be a formidable challenge. For as will be seen in the chapter on organized crime, there is a real limiting effect when the gang is homogeneous with respect to race or ethnicity.”

— George W. Knox, An Introduction to Gangs (1994)

10

In Carrow’s worst nightmares, he was omniscient and powerless — the memories both real and imagined playing before him like scenes of a movie.

The executions started sometime after 7 p.m. He’d been able to piece that much together after the fact. And so the dreams always started off with the same timing.

Once he’d put together the timeline of that day, Carrow realized that Johns and Jackie had been the first to go. In reality, the cops would find the two gang members slumped in a gory mess in the back room of the pool hall that The Kettle Syndicate managed at the time. They’d been offed execution style, on their knees. In Carrow’s dreams, the two of them were always being made to kneel there for a span of time that felt infinite, begging for their lives as the gunmen aimed.

On the other side of the wall, similar mayhem took place: a gun at Emilio’s temple, another pressed into Mendoza’s back, a third aimed at Frankie. More lives begged for and lost.

Carrow’s dreaming mind forced him to watch every syrup-slow moment of the men’s lives before they were snuffed out.

The murders played out again and again and again. Thepool hall, the warehouse, the transport truck, the little office on the bay, the safehouse on the westside. The only ones he’d seen firsthand had been the executions at Carrow’s own compound, but his dreaming mind was all too happy to fill in the details from the other scenes.

It had been a carefully timedoperation, the systematic murders pulled off seamlessly to exterminate Carrow’s entire gang network in one evening.

It was the kind of thing Carrow told himself that the other gangs of Las Abras would never be capable of pulling off. It had required real teamwork and months of planning, observation.

Apart, the gangs surrounding The Kettle Syndicate were weak. TKS had risen to power so steadily in the Southern California landscape that stopping them never even felt like an option.

At least, that’s what Carrow had assumed.

The little gangs at their feet seemed too disparate to unite. Would Aryan bikers really be able to join forces andwork withthe ex-cartel gangs that patrolled south Las Abras? Would the gang of young black women who’d become famous for their high-stakes carjackings actually cooperate with another gang long enough to accomplish anything if the other gang was made up of the sexist bikers who raced through the city’s streets at 3 a.m.?

But in the end, against all odds, they had.

His dreams didn’tbother to embellish upon the details of the murders at Carrow’s compound. There was nothing thatcould be added to the scene to make them grislier than they already were in Carrow’s real memory.

Ten of his best men had died at the compound that day. His soldiers. His friends.

They died at the hands of the rival gangs’ leaders, who descended on the compound, needing to send a message to Carrow. They made him watch.

And then, the worst injury to him that day: they left him alive.

The men and women who gathered there in the one spot where he felt safe didn’t lay a hand on him other than to restrain him. He remembered every detail in his dreams.

They tied him in a way that they knew he could escape and left him on the floor of his office.

The dreams always shot forward from the point at which they left him there, skimming past the way that he’d gotten loose before racing from point to point to confirm his worst fears.

The pool hall, the warehouse, the transport truck, the little office on the bay, the safehouse on the westside.

It was the same scene inside each building.

The Kettle Syndicate was dead. Carrow was the only survivor.

A monthafter their first night together, Dust was in Carrow’s bed during one of the nightmares.

It was rare for them to spend a night apart after that first night in the safehouse, and there was no point in sleeping in Dust’s bed. Carrow’s suite was predictably the nicest in the penthouse with ridiculously fine trappings and a sprawling bed.

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