Page 18 of Levi

“You gave a stranger your key to the place where you sleep.” Mickey’s face is his cop face. Even out of uniform, even in the chair, the cop doesn’t switch off. “Did you run a background check?”

“Of course not. I’m not a cop and I only have a first name.”

“Tell me what you know about him.”

“Mickey, stop,” I say. “He’s a renter with a paid booking. A very expensive paid booking. He has a valid reason to be there and I’m not going to the police.”

“I’m not suggesting a report. I’m saying if a man showed up in a property I was responsible for and I couldn’t identify him, I’d want to know who he was.”

“Technically the property manager who rented the house is responsible. I’m only responsible for selling it.”

“If you want, I can cross-reference recent incident reports in both Walton and Bay County,” Mickey says. “See what I can find out about him.”

“No. Absolutely not.”

“Dante—”

“We’re not running his name. I’m not checking his background or treating him like a suspect. He has a valid code and a rental confirmation. He’s entitled to be in that house whether I like it or not, and I’ll work the sale around him.”

“You’re protective of a man you met this morning,” Mickey says.

“It’s not about him. I don’t want a police report anywhere near that house. It’ll kill the sale.”

Benji squeezes Mickey’s shoulder. “Come on, leave Dante alone. He’ll figure it out.”

“Figure what out?”

“Whatever you need to figure out.” He spins his stool toward me and claps his hands together. “Now. On to more important things. Wedding business. I need a ruling, and Mickey has recused himself.”

“I said they’re grown women,” Mickey says.

“He said that out loud, like it was helpful,” Benji says. “My mother and my aunt. My mother has announced she’s wearing beige because she doesn’t want to be a distraction, and my aunt has countered with a red number she calls her funerals-and-courtrooms dress. I cannot have beige despair standing next to a felony in my wedding photos. You dress rich people for a living—”

“I dress myself. I sell houses.”

“You read buyers by their shoes, Dante. Read my mother. Give me a color.”

I give it the same three seconds I’d give a pricing question, because it is one. “Blue. Not navy. Navy is what people wear when they’re afraid of blue. And your aunt keeps the red.”

Benji points at me, then at Mickey. “See Mickey? This is what someone genuinely trying to help sounds like.”

“I still say they’re grown women,” Mickey says.

“I still say it should be beach casual,” Tex says from the other end of the bar. “Nobody wants to get dressed up for a beach wedding, Benji. Especially not me.”

“You don’t get a vote about the dress code, Tex,” Benji says.

“It’s my bar,” Tex says. “My bar, my rules.”

“It’s my wedding,” Benji says.

The phone behind the bar rings, and inside a minute Tex is arguing with a distributor about kegs and a delivery window. There’s always a festival or fishing tournament backing up the highway. I stopped listening to that traffic report a long time ago. My summer has one date in it that matters.

Jonathan’s client walks through my listing on Saturday, and between now and then the house has to forget anyone ever lived in it.

Chapter 7: Levi

I wake up Sunday morning with no food and no plan. The kitchen has been eaten down to the staging. The cheese and bread are gone. What’s left is tap water and a bowl of lemons. I guess I could eat a staging lemon, but I’m not there yet.