Page 12 of The Company We Keep
11
June 2014 · AIIB Mission Month 1
D ust’s first contact with Abe after the museum job had gone… poorly.
“Charlie, sweet Christ,” Leiby said when she had him on the phone. “That goddamn anthropology museum! I’m just happy nobody can trace you back to us yet.”
Dust bristled immediately at the name. Charlie . He punched down the little voice in the back of his mind that insisted it wasn’t him — had never been him.
The conversation felt like an uncomfortable visit home.
Leiby was elated that he’d been accepted into The Company — but for all of the wrong reasons, it seemed. She wasn’t happy that he was liked or that he now had a beautiful place to live, that he had the guidance of someone who was a successful billionaire and the backing of some of the most powerful people in the country. She was only happy because now he could provide her with information about The Company.
( Information she hasn’t earned, Dust thought to himself, illogically. This was his mission, after all. Of course she wanted the goddamned information. She had put her own reputation on the line to get him the assignment — had bent countless rules to help equip him to go into the field.
Or. At least… to help equip Charlie. )
She quizzed him, trying to fill in the holes in AIIB’s knowledge of The Company.
She wasn’t interested in any of the parts that really were worthy of interest though. She didn’t care that A.R. Carrow was in the midst of being bullied into being vegan by a group of criminals that were closer to him than family. She wasn’t delighted to learn that Herron Dent didn’t identify as male or female, that they preferred the pronoun “they” and that the entire crew honored this happily and never lapsed. She had no personal investment in swimming pools or dish duty or how much respect he’d gained through the improvised act at the museum, managing to get civilians out of harm’s way.
Leiby wanted to know who was funding The Company. She wanted to know if Carrow was in bed with any cartels across the border. She wanted to know where he kept his money — offshore accounts, complicated investments, or something more sinister? Were there associates that AIIB had never identified? Where were the weak spots in their security?
Dust found himself holding back.
It wasn’t even conscious at first.
He didn’t know Carrow’s business because he hadn’t asked. He hadn’t even attempted to overstep his boundaries with the man because he hadn’t wanted to do anything to get in his bad graces.
He was able to give Leiby some of what she wanted. He told her some of the security flaws he noticed at the penthouse — but at the same time he was silently cataloging the same information, telling himself that he needed to give Wayles the same list so that he could close the gaps .
She asked for more. She pressed for more. Dust told her that he needed more time.
In the end, Leiby was as she always had been: a hardass, but invested in Charlie. She said he could take more time, as long as he kept himself safe. He assured her that he was safe. They got off the phone, and Dust couldn’t get away from his old apartment fast enough.
Dust had run an errand back to his old apartment in the week after the museum job. Carrow didn’t begrudge him that. It would be a strange transition to go from paying his own bills and managing a place to… well, to everything being a part of The Company afforded him now.
It was easy for Carrow to remember the depth of shock he’d felt when he’d joined up with Riley’s crew. Since he was old enough to walk, Carrow had been stealing things. Fencing stolen goods had always been a way to get by — not a hobby, not a sport, but a way for him to contribute to the pot of money his mother used to make their rent every month, to keep them fed. When she was too sick to work, Carrow worked harder, took bigger risks. She hated it — but she wasn’t a stupid woman. She knew the value in what he was doing. The necessity of it.
Even so, some weeks they didn’t have as much to eat as they wanted. Sometimes, the bills were late enough, even with his help, that the electricity got cut off in the middle of a hot Nevada day. It wasn’t just uncomfortable — it was goddamn dangerous.
At 17, he’d left to find something better. At 17, he’d arrived in Las Abras. He’d met Riley.
Carrow went from worrying about filling his belly to having more money than he knew what to do with. He sent everything he could straight to his mother. He changed his name to eliminate any threat to her. When she was able to track him down — which was rare — she begged him to come back, if only for a weekend. The money was helping. She bought her own place before he turned 21 with the money he sent back home. He insisted to himself, though, that it was too dangerous to go home, too dangerous to get very far from the protection of Riley’s reach.
Those years had been jarring. Before Riley, he’d been forced to scrap and fight for every piece of what he earned. There had been the ever-looming threat that someone would trace his crimes back to him, that they’d come for him, that they’d take everything he’d ever worked for, jailing him and leaving his mother destitute.
It wasn’t like that after he joined TKS. Even if Carrow got pinched, Riley explained, they would always take care of his family. That was just a fact of life when you joined the Syndicate, when you proved your loyalty.
He was a good soldier. Everything he did, Carrow told himself, he did for his mother.
A year before he lost Riley to the pen, he’d gotten a strange call from a lawyer with a Reno area code. Warily, he called the woman back.
His mother had died.
It shouldn’t have come as a shock. She’d had him late and had been ill for so long. She left him an inheritance — had, in fact, been saving as much of the money that he funneled to her as possible.
He didn’t want it. He went home to Nevada. He buried his mother. He tried not to dwell.
From then on, Carrow worked for himself. He worked for Riley and TKS.
After all: he had no family beyond the syndicate.
Carrow had never stopped to consider what he might do with money that he earned, if not sending it back to his mother. Riley and his gang provided everything that Carrow could possibly need, from the clothes on his back to the roof over his head. With his needs met, he didn’t find the money compelling — and without the need for money to send back to his mother, he felt unmoored.
What, then, was his purpose?
It had taken Carrow a long time and a lot of soul-searching to understand that the gang life was his calling. He was a soldier through and through, and it was up to him to protect the interests of TKS, of Riley.
And so, Carrow mused, maybe Dust was going through a similar crisis of purpose. It was easy to spend one’s time building an identity that was anchored in a single aspect of life. Before he’d had The Company to think about, maybe Dust had been preoccupied with money, or maybe with the prestige of the jobs he took on.
He could ask. It wouldn’t be out of line. Carrow was his boss and his lover. But unless Dust volunteered the information, Carrow didn’t want it. He was more than happy to let Dust define his own boundaries.
The summer season passed easier than any other ever had for Carrow.
Dust made the days move easy. It was undeniable.
The man’s enthusiasm for him never seemed to wane — and unlike the casual relationships Carrow had indulged in when he was younger, this one was private. Solitary. There was no jealousy, no doubts. Dust wanted him. Every minute of every day, Dust was dedicated to him.
The Company welcomed it.
Predictably, Leta was the first to notice. She knew from that first morning-after, when they both strode in, when Carrow smiled wide as the rest of The Company gave Dust a standing ovation for his work at the museum, his quick thinking with the students. She hadn’t missed the way that Carrow beamed at the younger man. She hadn’t missed Carrow’s hand steady at his back.
She hadn’t confronted him about it or even made an issue out of it. She’d simply caught Carrow by the sleeve as they passed each other in the kitchen, pressed a kiss into his cheek, and said, “I’m very happy, Ansel. He’s perfect.”
It spread from there.
By July, everyone was in the know about them. It didn’t take long for anything to make the rounds once Vashvi noticed.
The fact that Dust no longer slept in his own suite was, after all, impossible to miss.
Before he left the bureau , Leiby had given Dust loose instructions on how to stay in contact. Dust was supposed to check in with someone from AIIB every two weeks. He could, of course, reach out proactively if he learned something that the agency needed to know. But limiting it to twice a month would — at least theoretically — limit the chances of The Company catching him.
By his second check in with Leiby in July, Dust was bristling under the requirement.
“You don’t understand how hard it is to come up with an excuse to go out alone now,” Dust lied.
(In reality, no one from The Company questioned where he went when he wasn’t in the penthouse. Most of them had their own pursuits outside of The Company — and as long as it didn’t attract attention back to the gang, no one was barred from doing whatever they wanted. Carrow was, in fact, the only one out of the five of them who spent almost all of his time in the 45th-floor fortress.)
The apartment was hot and stank and he hated looking at its nondescript walls while he made the call back to his mentor.
“The more I leave the penthouse alone, the more suspicion I’m drawing. I mean, I really shouldn’t even keep this apartment.”
“We can move it to Emerson’s name, if it would help you,” Leiby said. “But we need a meeting place that isn’t under their control.”
“That’s fine. We need to talk about the frequency of these calls, though.”
“What are you thinking?”
“Six weeks would be better.”
“We can cut it down to once a month, but no less than that.”
Dust sighed.
“Charlie, we don’t have a great way of verifying that you’re even alive unless you touch base with us,” Leiby protested. “Unless you’d, what, recommend we just read the newspapers like everyone else? You and The Company have been busy.”
It was true. They’d been in the news almost every week since he’d joined up. The Company was making up for lost time now that they had a demolitions man back in the gang. It had been a thrilling three weeks of settling old scores and ripping off drug shipments. It was the most fun he could remember having in any month of his life, and that didn’t even take into account the four-day vacation that Carrow had sprung on him the week before, secreting him away to the presidential suite of the nicest hotel Dust had ever seen.
“Once a month is fine,” he conceded, sensing Leiby’s growing irritation .
“Good. What do you have for me?”
Dust had turned his attention to gathering intel on other gangs, learning whatever he could about what was happening in Las Abras through his access to The Company. This, at least, he could give to Leiby while he decided how he could continue to walk the razor edge of balance.
He told her about the large drug shipments they were intercepting, where they were coming from, whose hands they were intended to pass through, and who within The Company was gaining access to the information.
He gave her some insights into the monitoring equipment that Russell Wayles had created, allowing them to intercept information from other crews. He also gave her a rough idea of the comms technology that Wayles had created, the private communications units that allowed them to communicate seamlessly during heists.
She wanted to know more about Carrow’s finances. Dust insisted once again that he didn’t know (a truth) but that he was working on finding out (a lie).
They set a date to talk again in August.
Dust got out of the apartment as fast as he could, anxiety growing and blossoming in the pit of his stomach on the motorcycle ride back to the penthouse.
He wasn’t afraid of being discovered. He was afraid of giving AIIB too much .
It was so much to hold in his head all at once.
He went straight to the shower in his suite, speaking to no one on his way, feeling as if he needed to get the smell of the AIIB apartment out of his pores, the grime of the doorknob off of his hands.
Hot water pounded the knots in his neck and all at once Dust felt as if he couldn’t catch his breath. This was how he’d expected to feel when he first faced The Company — not when he was actually doing the job he’d been sent here to do. So why did he want to vomit and shake and cry, now that he was beginning to do what he’d spent years of his life preparing for?
His internal monologue seemed to change every hour.
He was all at once Dust Wrenshall — always had been, always would be. Half a day later, he was an impostor, a fool, a dangerous wreck of a human being, a disappointment to both his agency and to his new friends. Then he would wake the next morning and everything would seem different yet again: he was Dust Wrenshall and he could make this work. He could escape into Carrow’s arms for as long as The Company would have him.
But in that moment in the shower, he felt all of it at once. A wreck. A tangle.
If he’d have had the opportunity to join The Company before he’d ever heard of AIIB, would he have done it?
No, he answered himself quickly. Charlie Judge didn’t have the balls to do something like that. Charlie wouldn’t have even been able to sit in that back booth with Carrow, let alone ask him for the job, let him know how badly he wanted it.
Had his fascination with crime, then, only flourished because he saw the elements of these criminals in himself from the beginning? Maybe his obsession with justice mirrored the experience of the stereotypes like the man who is homophobic because he himself is closeted.
Had Charlie Judge, then, been the criminal closet for Dust Wrenshall?
Dust wanted to collapse under the weight of suspending the two realities in his mind. He wanted to drink himself silly or dip into the sedatives that Carrow kept around for the nights when old memories came to haunt them — but he knew even in seeking this release, he would be risking himself. Anything could loosen his lips, could make him slip up.
In the end, he sought out the only relief that seemed to be able to eclipse everything he was holding in his head: Carrow.
Carrow hadn’t heard Dust return from his errand, but he smiled when the man padded barefoot into his office. Dust was bare-chested and his hair was still wet — from a shower or a dip in the pool, Carrow didn’t know.
“Are you busy?” he asked, crossing the office and standing to one side behind Carrow’s desk.
“Always,” he joked. “What’s up?”
He hoped Carrow wouldn’t question it. He didn’t want to have a conversation. He just wanted to feel something real and concrete about his life.
Dust pushed one arm of Carrow’s chair, spinning the man to face him and sinking to his knees.
“Can I?” he asked, spreading the man’s knees and tracing a hand across his groin.
Carrow sucked a surprised breath but didn’t protest. He hummed deep in his chest.
Carrow cupped his cheek, wiping a droplet leftover from his shower off of his face. The movement was undeniably affectionate. Yes, this is what he needed. He just needed someone who knew Dust , who could appreciate him for what he’d become and what he wanted to be in the present.
He undid Carrow’s fine belt, helped him shift until the beautiful suit pants billowed to the floor to sit around his ankles. The quality of Carrow’s breathing had already changed, and by the time he was undressed, his cock was rock hard and straining.
Dust went slowly and his boss responded with everything he needed: praise, a hand stroking through his hair, fingertips at the back of his neck, a confident voice saying his name like it was the best compliment that existed in this world. He swallowed around Carrow, taking him deep, working the man with his lips, his tongue, his throat.
Every noise Carrow made took Dust further away from the mental ditch he’d dug himself into in the shower. This was his reality. He could have Carrow whenever he wanted and they were good together, a feedback loop of desire and respect that grew stronger every day, even when Dust got to his knees for the man. He loved every minute of it, the power he had over Carrow, the certainty that he was wanted and worshipped.
He stroked up Carrow’s thick shaft while he lavished attention with his mouth, indulging in a moment of obscene enjoyment at the taste of precum.
Dust didn’t need to tease the man today, to prove anything or draw things out for very long. This was more about Dust’s needs, anyway. The orgasm he was about to give Carrow was just a bonus as he escaped his own fears.
Carrow pulled him forward for the last few strokes, warning in a gravelly voice that he was close. Dust sucked a muffled breath through his nose before swallowing around his boss’ cock, taking him as deep as he could even as he felt the first throbs of orgasm rocking through Carrow. He gulped around him, fighting the reflex to gag and willing his muscles to relax as Carrow hipped forward, helplessly fucking Dust’s throat as he came. He was so deep, Dust couldn’t even taste him.
Breathless , Dust pulled back. He sat back on his heels for a moment, looking up at Carrow. The sight was beyond sexy, Dust’s hair mussed, his mouth spit-slicked and lips flushed a deep red. Carrow caught his breath and worked a hand through Dust’s hair, smoothing it.
“What did I do to deserve that?”
Dust smiled and shrugged before dragging the back of one hand across his mouth. The kid was so effortlessly handsome, it was surreal.
“You’re just you, I guess.”
It took everything Carrow had in him not to moan openly at the sound of Dust’s cock-wrecked voice.
Dust returned to his suite to get dressed with a renewed sense of purpose.
Continuing to live and work in this world meant that he’d always be walking a tightrope.
Of course there would be bad days. He would be forced to give up more information that he wanted to hold on to. He would return to the penthouse confused and hating himself. But Carrow would be there. The Company would be there, waiting for him.
Dust would have to learn to live in the moment — to abandon the life at his back and not worry about the dangers that lay in front of him if he continued to play this game.
The time he spent with The Company was reward enough.
Something about Dust’s presence bridged the gap that had been forced between Carrow and his crew. He had been so afraid of losing them, of hurting them, of becoming so attached to them that he could no longer function as an effective leader, that even without knowing it, he had come to hold them all at arm’s length even as he treasured them.
But Dust’s fast bond with Vashvi and Wayles drew him in.
Suddenly, in August, it seemed that the youngest members of The Company were ganging up on him — insisting that he get out of the penthouse sometimes to indulge in a harmless bar hop with them, causing mischief after hours in between jobs, or begging him to join them in the pool on hot afternoons.
It had become a golden summer.
Carrow had always thought of The Company as his family — but over that season, he began to allow himself to be a member of that family in addition to its protector.
August slipped into September in the Las Abras heat — not so much a season’s turning point but more just another page in the calendar. Dust, who insisted he’d grown up with seasons, complained enough about endless hot weather and sunshine that Carrow took to turning the thermostat down.
In Dust, Wayles had found someone who would support him in any whim — which was a boon for the other young man. Wayles had always complained that no one in The Company cared enough about holidays. Together, they set out to make the seasons mean something, even if the Southern California weather never seemed to change much.
By October, it may have still felt like summer outside, but a fabricated autumn was in full swing within the penthouse. They forced the thermostat cooler. Wayles plied them all with vegan Halloween candy and marathoned horror movies at night. (Carrow quietly excused himself from the horror movies. After four years of living with the man, The Company only learned that season that he couldn’t stand scary movies. Dust tried to find the incongruity about the man anything but endearing; he failed.)
After a job where they’d intercepted a shipment of Russian furs, Carrow had the idea to take The Company shopping for fall clothes. Leta made private appointments at a row of boutiques for them — something for everyone. Luxurious cashmere scarves and gloves for Wayles, hilariously expensive t-shirts for Vashvi that had been stylishly aged, new leather jackets for Herron and Dust. Leta stole the show at their last stop, trying on gown after gown. By the end, she complained of uncomfortable fabrics and impossible zippers and chose a floor-length velvet dressing gown instead.
They enjoyed their new gear in simulated fall weather up in the penthouse. November was the best of both worlds: swimming in the sunshine by day and wooly sweaters and hot chocolate by night. In the week before Thanksgiving, Wayles hacked into the city’s power and light company and, after several days of programming, figured out how to apply a forgiveness credit to every account that was behind on payments. He’d hoped it was untraceable — and indeed, the company never did figure out how to tell real payments from Wayles’ forgiveness payments. They all delighted in the chaos and news stories that followed, and the outpouring of thanks that came to the anonymous hacker from the individuals and families who got to have power for the holiday when they thought they’d have none.
Everyone stayed in Las Abras for Thanksgiving. It was the oddest and best holiday that Dust had ever taken part in.
Back in Georgia, in his old life, holidays had always felt as if they lacked something. His family wasn’t large and they’d never had elaborate Thanksgiving traditions to begin with. The years passed. Grandparents died and aunts and uncles moved away. When Dust left home for good, heading to college and then the bureau, it was as if the last glue holding their holidays together had disintegrated.
Returning to his childhood home felt vaguely empty. His parents felt a bit like strangers. It only got worse after he started his real work with Abe — because not only could they no longer relate to what he was doing with his life, he could no longer even discuss what he was working on with them.
Maybe another person would’ve loosened up around the holidays, had a glass of wine with mom and dad and spilled some of the less important classified details of what he’d been working on. But his parents didn’t seem that interested. They talked about how his mom’s real estate business had really picked up, and how his dad was thinking of running for the tiny city council in their coastal town. They talked about the roadwork that was supposed to start in the spring, or the repairs they’d made to the deck in the fall.
Maybe they were scared about the things Dust faced in his day to day life. Maybe they didn’t want to know the details.
So the scene in the penthouse on Thanksgiving in that first year with The Company couldn’t have possibly differed more from the quiet Thanksgivings of Dust’s past.
Carrow and Herron spent the day preparing five courses — a process that truly began a full 48 hours before that, with preparations being made for projects like sourdough, side dishes, turkey and tempeh brining.
When Dust padded into the kitchen on Thanksgiving morning, he couldn’t help but smile at the sight of them, already smudged in flour and still in the clothes they’d slept in.
Wayles and Vashvi had gotten up early to watch the parade on the opposite coast, and Leta joined them sometime after Dust, mixing bloody marys for The Company members who drank.
It was a day that transpired very much like Dust had always imagined other families must spend Thanksgiving: with games of cards and marathon movie watching and warm conversation — with smells wafting out of the kitchen, both familiar and exotic.
When they gathered as they so often did at the dining room table, Dust was struck by the fact that they really did function as a family. In a world where media so often decried the death of the American family unit, Dust had found himself one that was thriving.
And he’d only had to be inducted into a group of the United States’ most wanted criminals to do it.
His contact with AIIB slowed down. With each postponed call, Leiby became more adversarial.
She wanted to know more about the heists they were planning — insisted she was sick of having to read about Charlie’s work in the papers rather than hearing about it weeks before it happened, as she’d expected.
(He’d considered that. He almost let AIIB foil one. It had been a minor job: just some light arson at the request of someone trying to get even with a politician. Dust had given Leiby the date, time, target, and method, insisting that he couldn’t tell her anything more specific about the plan to get the job done because The Company was keeping him in the dark.
But even with the low-stakes job, Dust had ended up with cold feet.
He’d found one of Las Abras’ only existing pay phones and anonymously tipped off the politician to the job. The guy had immediately upped his security measures: guard dogs, new security system, reinforced fence.
It was an odd position to be in, then: fucking over both his mission with Abe and his job with The Company.
Of course, The Company was only slowed down by the dogs, the software, the fence. They still got the job done — just not on the day they’d promised their client. And not on the day Dust had promised Leiby.
The man’s house still burned. Leiby was at least slightly placated.)
At first, it wasn’t a conscious choice. He’d find reasons to push back the calls or to skip them. He’d delete voicemails from Emerson — trying to set up calls — without opening them, telling himself that he didn’t have time to listen and that leaving them on his phone was too dangerous.
But eventually he always made it up. He rescheduled, took a motorcycle to the shitty old apartment, made his call and did his best to put Leiby off some more.
After Thanksgiving, Dust decided to skip December’s meeting entirely.
On Black Friday, he drove to the apartment. He stepped inside to make a call.
But this time it was to Emerson, and not during a scheduled time. He cheered silently when it went to the man’s voicemail. It would be easier to deliver the message without questions and interruption.
“Emerson, it’s Wrenshall. I need you to tell my debtors that the payment system in place isn’t working for me. Instead of installments, from now on, I’ll be reaching out to them whenever I have a payment ready. If you don’t hear from me, you can assume I don’t have anything for them. But, uh… tell them Merry Christmas, from Dust.”