Page 17 of The Company We Keep

He flipped Dust the bird and kept walking.

The weeksthat followed were some of the worst of Dust’s entire life.

It wasn’t the loneliness or the squalor of the apartment building, though those together would’ve been enough to make it a bad time. The apartment complex had revealed itself slowly and then all at once — like an insect infestation. You saw one or two bugs before you peeled back the wallpaper to reveal a whole colony right where you lived.

(It was hell to sit and camp there and watch all of the petty crime and simplebadnessunfold around Dust. Drug deals and theft, sure — that was to be expected out of Las Abras. But the kids being neglected, old people who didn’t leave their apartments for days at a time, an elevator that was habitually out of order that forced the young man with a cane from the neighboring apartment to make his painful way up stairs that were in need of repair, too… Wanting to fix these things started to get in the way of the bigger picture, and ignoring them feltwrong.)

In the end, though, it was the simple fact that he wasbeing forced to wait that drove Dust half out of his mind in the weeks that followed his first meeting with Neil Emerson.

He started to act like a prisoner: working out in his living room to pass time and do something with his pent-up energies. He took long runs out of the neighborhood, letting the southern California heat sweat him as if it could rid him of impurity and compromise and make the day when he got the call to meet someone from The Company come faster.

Carrow had hemmedand hawed about replacing Nick Short.

Running gigs with five people left them perpetually shorthanded. It meant there was always a hole in their plan — and more often than not, that led them to patch up the work that needed to be done with someone who hung on the periphery of the crew: Maxine, Guru, Coffee… The list of non-crew members they could trust was short, and even then, their skills were limited. Maxine and Guru were good faces, did good when they had to smooth things over after a job gone wrong or when someone needed an intercessory party. Coffee was a good driver and a decent thug.

But none of them could set up the type of demo work they needed for big jobs.

Wayles could teach them — was just as good at demolitions as Nick Short had ever been — but even then, none of them wanted any of the three of them to move into the penthouse, to become a part of the flow of daily life for The Company.

So that left outsiders. And outsiders were, as a rule, trouble.

Run shorthanded, Carrow thought,or invite trouble into our home?

He found himself dreaming, sometimes, of the personwho could come in and heal the rifts that Short had left in his wake. There would be someone out there who would be right: who had a level head and could run demo for them, who could be trusted to love the crew as much as Carrow did, and whose presence would soothe Wayles and Vashvi — whose emotions about losing Short were still sore and raw — like a salve.

This imagined he or she or they would be a patch, both for their business and their family.

Wayles had retreated into himself and into Leta, spending the night in her room more often than not. Carrow had to bite back a pang of jealousy at that realization.

(Many years ago, before The Company, before they were in the same crew, they’d given it a try. It had only taken a week for Carrow to fall in love — and the minute she noticed this, Leta ended it. It was for their own safety, she said. He was sloppy when he was in love, and they needed him sharp. She’d been right, of course, but it was hard not to fall in love with her every day since, not to find his way to her room at night and try to capture that sweet week again.)

Vashvi, to her credit, did try to work through her grief. It would’ve been easy for her to collapse into Herron and not come up for air until she had crunched down every sad feeling. Instead, she cried openly, excusing herself from dinner sometimes and making no effort to hide her tears.

She stood on roofs in the industrial district and took potshots into the windows of abandoned buildings.

She rode their motorcycles too fast and screamed into the air.

But she was working through it, in her own way, and not just folding it back inside of herself as Carrow had done with so many deaths in the past, with the deaths of The Kettle Syndicate before The Company had even been a thought. She would make it through and be better for it on the other side.

So Carrow wasn’t that shocked when, almost two months after his funeral march to Philadelphia to deliver Short’s remains and the first of several large payments to help his family, Vashvi approached him one night on the roof.

He’d been swimming laps on the roof pool, under the stars, whiling away the last hours of the early morning and waiting for sleep or exhaustion to take him. When he came up for air, Vashvi was sitting cross-legged with a towel and an unopened beer.

“Can we talk?”

The air was too warm and syrupy to chill his skin, but Carrow accepted the towel and wrapped it around his shoulders anyway.

“Are you going to replace Nick?” she asked the minute they’d taken a seat near the pool.

“Yes, I think so.”

“Do you have someone in mind?” she asked.

“Doyouhave someone in mind?”

She pulled a face at him, always hating when he answered a question with a question.

“I owe a favor to someone. And he thinks he’s got someone who would be a good fit. Demo guy named Dust Wrenshall.”

---