Page 15 of The Company We Keep

Leiby listened and Dust kept going until he had nothing left to say. When he was utterly emptied of words, they defaulted to an easy silence, both of them breathing steady, communicating only in those quick glances they caught sometimes, Leiby lofting her eyebrows as if to say "It's gonna happen, kid. Hold steady."

By 1 a.m., Leiby had produced a mostly full bottle of tequila from her office, pouring a shot for each of them into the now-empty coffee mugs.

Dust was warm and pleasantly buzzed when Leiby's phone chimed on the table. They shared one serious look as Leiby reached for it. Dust slowed his breathing. Leiby unlocked the phone and tapped through screens until she was reading the message from the crew on the ground.

"Tell me they got him," Dust breathed out when Leiby didn't react immediately.

"It looks good," Leiby said after a pause. "They don't have confirmation but... it looks good."

Dust hadn't allowed himself to celebrate — not yet. He’d just nodded.

"You should go home. It could be days before we verify."

Dust wanted to balk at that. Couldn't he stay just a few more hours, in case they got closure tonight? He was too wired to be sleepy and yet... Leiby was right, of course.

If they hadn't gotten a clean hit but had apparently hurt the guy bad enough for Leiby to say that the chances are good that he's dead, it probably would be days before they knew one way or another. There was always the chance that Carrow’s winning streak would hold up and someone somewhere would be stitching the pieces of Nick Short back together as he sat there, several states away.

He’d sighed and agreed and had another cup of coffee, just for good measure, to sober up before he drove home to his dark, empty apartment, where he didn't sleep and couldn't make himself eat and sat instead with the binder held against his chest like a bible.

There was moreconcrete evidence that the chances "looked good" the next day. He was in early and unsurprised to see Leiby there at her desk at seven. She'd probably been unable to sleep, too, but now they had more to go on. Leiby handed over a file of grainy, gruesome photos. There was Nick Short, looking incredibly corpse-like as Carrow and Herron Dent dragged him from a building's wreckage.

“This looks good for us,” Dust said.

“It looksverygood.”

4

April 2014 • AIIB Mission Month -2

Leta tried to talk Carrow out of the cross-country trip to bring Nick Short's remains back to his biological family in Philadelphia.

She failed.

When she couldn't get him to see how illogical he was being, she tried to convince him thatsheshould be the one to fly them.

Again, no dice.

In the end, he chartered a private flight — nonstop, just Carrow, Nick's body, and a case full of cash meant to help the family in a time so difficult that Carrow could barely imagine their grief. He made the round trip in one day: five and a half hours there, several hours with the family, five and a half hours home.

Short’s family was kind. They thanked him and treated him like a gentleman. He couldn’t have hated himself more.

He got back to the penthouse late. Wayles and Leta were together somewhere, according to the texts he'd gotten from his partner. Herron and Vashvi were unaccounted for — could be causing controlled mayhem somewhere or could bedoing something as innocuous as hitting up the arcade down the street. Never could tell with them.

With the weight of the day at his back, Carrow sagged.

With the closure of delivering Short's body complete, he allowed himself to mourn.

He had failed. His greatest fear had been realized: a loss to The Company. Another human life to add to the tally of human lives he was bound to protect and hadn't.

He found The Company's stockpile of sedatives meant for Wayles. He tapped a message to Leta that he'd be useless for the next several hours. He slept deeply and dreamlessly.

Carrow'sfuneral march to Philadelphia was the last confirmation Abe needed. Dust was in.

(They never gave Dust any intel about what Carrow had done, if anything, other than delivering what was left of his demolitions expert to the man's parents. Leiby gave him the official report, which only noted the company he'd used to charter the flight, the funeral home that had been hired to prepare Short's remains, and a series of photos of the transaction between Carrow and Short's mother.

The photos were like a slow-motion flipbook, shot through a window: Carrow in a black suit at a dining room table passing a hard-sided case to Short's crying mother, the mother opening the case and her expression going quizzical, the woman lifting out stacks of cash, crying hard again, falling against Carrow's chest.

Abe had calculated that the payout to Short's family had been eight figures. Dust wondered what the 10 million was supposed to accomplish.)

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