Page 48 of Levi

Five minutes east and I’m at the other end of my own week.

The Rosemary Beach closing is a deal I could run in my sleep, and thank God, because half of me is still standing at a marble island watching water drip off Levi’s hair and down his shoulders.

I pull in behind the buyer’s Tahoe and put Levi away for the length of a showing. This is the job I’m good at.

“Mr. Caswell.” I’m across the courtyard with my hand out and the big smile on. “You beat me here. That’s a man who wants a house.”

“Wanted it three weeks ago.” He’s grinning, because Caswell likes to be handled and I’m very good at handling him. “My wife’s already measuring for drapes.”

“Then we close before she finds one she likes better.” I get the door, I get him moving, and my business works like it’s built to.

This is who I am. The hand on the shoulder, the right question at the right second, the deal closing because I made it feel inevitable. Not someone who throws a man into a refrigerator and then runs around buying pink boxes of donuts.

Caswell signs. His wife signs. The keys go across the table on a leather fob I had cut, because my clients deserve it.

“You’re the best on this coast, Reyes. Everyone said so and they were right.”

“Tell your friends in Birmingham.” I put a card in his hand. “I work the whole corridor.”

He laughs, the agent laughs, and for four minutes I’m only a businessman. It lasts until the car door shuts. The smile shuts off the second I’m alone.

I had the move. In that kitchen, an hour ago, I had the move that ends the entire problem with Levi. One call to Rebecca at the property management company. The house is listed, the renting party should be informed. The info climbs the line to whoever rented it for him, and he’s relocated by dinner. It’s the move. I didn’t take it.

The phone buzzes.

Benji: How’d Rosemary close?

Dante: Clean. Caswell cried about drapes.

Three dots.

Benji: And Levi?

I look at the dots a second. Benji’s the one person on earth I tell things to. I could tell him about the towel and the leverage I didn’t use. He’d know what every piece of it meant before I finished typing. That’s exactly why I don’t.

Dante: He’s fine. Saturday’s handled. Friday, I need you and a truck of flowers.

Benji: You didn’t answer me.

Dante: Closing wiped me out. Busy day. Talk tomorrow.

I put the phone face-down on the passenger seat before he can come back at me. I have never hidden my life from Benji. He’d call me out on it. It’s his best quality and the reason I’m not typing another word tonight.

I start the car and take the highway back, because 30A runs past Levi’s gate and I don’t trust myself not to turn in. I take the long way, past the dark donut shop, past the Walmart, past every cheap bright thing on this stretch that the people behind the gates will never lay eyes on.

Who is tracking him?

I keep coming back to it. Somebody who thinks he owns me. The tracked phone, the tracked cards, the he that fell out of his mouth.

The man the pieces all point to has money. You don’t track a person that thoroughly for that long on a budget. Age on him, too, and the kind of certainty that rents a twenty-million-dollar house for someone and calls it taking care of him. A husband, maybe? A keeper, and Levi is who he keeps.

I don’t like it.

Not at all.

I tell myself what I don’t like is the arrangement. A grown man being controlled. That’s the professional objection and it’s even true. But underneath it there’s a smaller, uglier thing that isn’t professional.

There’s a man out there who knows where Levi is every hour of the day, and this morning I stood across an island from him and had to fight my own eyes to stay off him.