Page 65 of The Company We Keep

“It was good?”

“Better than the Bolshoi Ballet.”

Dust snorted and let his head rest against Carrow’s chest. He moved his wrist to lay across Carrow’s belly, and they both enjoyed the way the gaudy watch caught the light.

“What can I say, boss? I guess you bring out the best in me.”

Dust didn’t contactAIIB after that.

He missed his call in January. 2015 was looking up.

In February, he turned 31. Maybe Emerson had tried calling to wish him a happy birthday. He’d never know, since he’d started deleting each one of the man’s voicemail’s.

13

March 2015 • AIIB Mission Month 10

The bank robbery resulted — as so many outlandish things did in the first year that Dust lived with The Company — from a night of drunken conversation.

The entire crew had agreed to watch a movie that night. They let Vashvi choose the flick, and ofcourseshe’d chosen some stupid crime thing set on an ivy league campus with math students going to Vegas to count cards. They tried to give her a hard time about it — none of them had reallyevergotten over the fact that Vashvi had once gone to a school like that, working complicated theoretical math before discovering her love of mayhem and how neatly a vast understanding of physics and a quick-calculating mind translated into sniper work.

Wayles had fallen asleep across Herron’s lap (who was also snoring softly by the end). Vashvi had made it through the entire two hours, enthralled by a movie she’d probably seen ten times over. Dust had managed to talk Leta and Carrow into a drinking game involving taking sips, gulps, and shots based on the name dropping and first-world problems mentioned throughout the movie.

But when the credits rolled, Vashvi, Herron, and Wayles had all retired, leaving Dust with the oldest members of The Company.

“Have you ever ripped off a casino before?” Dust asked, rolling a bottle cap idly across his knuckles.

“Hell no,” Leta said quickly.

“We don’t touch Vegas,” Carrow added. “Way too much security. You’d never get out of the desert, no matterhowgood the score was.”

“Fair enough,” Dust said. “How about a good old fashioned bank robbery?”

A smile and a knowing look pulsed between Carrow and Leta.

“Yeah,” Carrow said, looking affectionately between the two of them. “We’ve done a few.”

“What he means to say is that before The Company, me and Ansel did bank work almost exclusively.”

“What, seriously?”

“Leta convinced me,” Carrow said. “And it wasn’t here. We were on a different continent at the time. But yeah — it was like a shot in the arm. She got me back on my feet doing banks.”

“Wow. Bank robbery as a restorative activity,” Dust said, laughing. “Not something I’d have imagined but, in retrospect, I can’t say it surprises me.”

“What about you? Ever knocked one over?”

“No,” Dust said. He took a long draw off the beer he’d been using to chase shots, his stomach turning a little at the half-flat taste. “But I can’t say I don’t think about it.”

Leta grinned wide at him and twisted a curl around her fingertip.

“So? You can’t leave us hanging,” she said. “How would you do it?”

They’d liked it. Both of them had laughed hard at Dust’s dream plan — Carrow so much so that he was slapping his knee and wiping away tears by the end.

The conversation had continued after that, touching on other topics, everyone gradually growing drowsy enough that they wanted to retire.

Dust thought it was a moot point until, just as he was drifting to sleep, Carrow buried his face in the skin behind his ear and murmured, “I think we should do it. The bank job.”

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