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April 2014 · AIIB Mission Month -2

L eta 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 that she should 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 be doing 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's funeral 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.)

Tying up his affairs had been easy. He'd been waiting on this gig for so long that the closure felt good. Telling the lies to his parents back in Georgia about where he was going and what he'd be doing there felt good.

Preparing for the move into the Las Abras apartment Abe had rented him under the name Dustin Wrenshall, switching over to the ID with the same name — these things felt natural.

Dustin buried Charlie Judge — the soft-spoken kid with good grades and a high drive to succeed from the South — the same week that Nick Short's family buried their son. But Charlie got no ceremony, no tears. His parents said goodbye to him on the phone and did not get compensated for the fact that their son was about to disappear.

And then it was haircuts and paperwork and new wardrobes and travel plans.

By the end of that week, Dust barely recognized himself.

"So , here's your new shit. You won't need any of it for long if you impress Carrow."

Neil Emerson was so nonchalant about the entire thing. The undercover Abe agent had been in the field for years — was his in with the Las Abras underworld — and there no longer seemed to be an agent underneath his layers. He’s a criminal now who just happens to help Abe, Dust thought.

He talked Dust through his next few days while he rifled through his new kitchen, looking at what Abe had put in his pantry.

"Think of it as your severance package," he said, deciding on a box of cereal and then moving on to look for a bowl. "Since the agency won't be helping you out from here on in."

"No shit," Dust said.

He'd been doing his best not to get irritated with Emerson, but he'd already begun thinking of this apartment as his before he even arrived — and he hadn't invited the man to rifle through his things.

( Charlie would've been on his feet, being a good host, offering Emerson a glass of orange juice to go with his cereal. Dust , however, was just irritated.)

He found a bowl, milk, a spoon, and sat heavily down across the small kitchen table from Dust.

"I guess you'll have a new boss to buy your groceries soon enough," he said.

"I'm not joining The Company for the free fucking Cheerios. When's my meeting?"

"Vashvi Dhillon and Herron Dent are my only in right now, and Vi's still skittish from losing Short."

"Then put me in touch with Dent."

He shook his head, mouth full.

"Vi and Herron are a package deal. They won't go for it until she's chill."

"They being the two of them or the whole crew?"

Emerson cut his eyes at him.

" They being Herron Dent. God help you if you fuck up any of their pronouns. I saw what they did to the last guy who slipped a 'she' into a conversation with Carrow about Wayles. Abe needs you intact, right kid?"

"Got it."

"Wait for my word. I'll keep feeling them out and when the time is right, I'll reach out."

Hurry up and wait, as usual.

It was the last news Dust wanted to get after spending so long just getting there.

He let Emerson finish his cereal as he talked through more details that Dust already knew — when Abe would be contacting him and why, the fact that he was on his own now. He could tell Emerson was resentful of the way he lived life on the other side, without a paycheck, without protection for years. He wondered why Emerson didn't have Abe pull him out, then. He could get out of the field, maybe. Go back to having a normal, real life.

Something was keeping him in. It made Dust edgy.

He went silent halfway through the bowl of cereal and Dust didn’t push him to make more conversation. All he had done was give Dust bad news and tell him things he already knew. He was relieved when Emerson got up to go.

"You're welcome for the breakfast," he said down the hall, watching him hip out the front door and stalk away from his dingy apartment.

He flipped Dust the bird and kept walking.

The weeks that 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 simple badness unfold 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 felt wrong .)

In the end, though, it was the simple fact that he was being 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 hemmed and 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 person who 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.

“Do you have 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.”

He recognized the name immediately and scanned through the catalog of his memory. Carrow had heard the name on Nick’s mouth and then several times afterwards, always in connection with high profile targets and clean scores.

“He’s an East Coast man, yeah?” Carrow asked.

Vashvi shrugged.

“I don’t know much about him,” she admitted. “But he’s in town now and he’s looking for a crew.”

Carrow thought this over. At least it was a place to start .

“And if we consider him, that’ll settle up the favor you owe?”

Vashvi frowned but nodded. He didn’t appreciate it when members of The Company owed favors and he’d made that clear time and time again. A favor to someone outside the crew meant a weakness and indicated an allegiance to someone who wasn’t on the inside. He couldn’t protect them from the type of dangers that exposed them to.

But he knew from experience that people got in binds — and favors from members of Carrow’s crew were about as good as it got in terms of underworld currency.

He could forgive her for it.

And hell, who knew? Maybe Dust would fit.

“Then we’ll consider him,” he said.