Page 132 of Levi

While he stands there, it suddenly hits me. He doesn’t hate Levi. Or love him. There’s no emotion in him at all. He manages him. Levi is an asset with a maintenance history, and he feels about as much for him as I feel about a compressor cycling on in July.

There’s nothing to push against with Freddie. He only calculates. The cage Levi’s living in is nothing but a spreadsheet with his name in one of the cells.

It’s all business.

Freddie laid three traps, and I stepped in none of them. I didn’t defend, didn’t flinch. All clean, and I’m realizing that’s the problem. An ordinary agent would’ve leaked a little. A little starstruck, chatty about the famous renter.

Freddie came in suspecting. He leaves certain, and what makes him certain is how perfectly I gave him no reason to be. I knew that going in. The defense would’ve been worse.

He checks his watch. “We may move him,” he says, and now he’s watching me again. The last item on his list. “Sooner than we planned. This hasn’t been the right environment for him. Too much temptation, too many new friends. Would that throw off your weekend at all?”

He wants the catch in me at we’re taking him away. I give him a realtor’s shrug, built from the floor up, same as the nod.

“The house sells with a tenant or without one,” I say. “Showing’s Saturday either way. The rental calendar’s the management company’s business, not mine. I work directly with the owner. You’ll need to discuss it with them.”

He gets nothing. The nothing tells him everything, and we both know it.

He moves for the door. Stops with his hand on the frame, and turns just his head. “You’ve had a visible week yourself, Mr. Reyes.” His voice almost kind. “All that attention. Can’t be easy, in a business that runs on discretion with high-end clientele.” He lets it sit exactly long enough. “I’d hate to see it cost you anything. You seem to have a good thing going here.”

Then he’s gone.

I spent ten minutes alone with him, matching him move for move. I won every exchange, and it doesn’t matter.

He came hunting a man’s hand on his asset.

He’s leaving sure he found it.

Chapter 51: Levi

The crew’s house in Panama City Beach has a great room big enough to set up in. By midnight we’ve run the Saturday set so many times we’re all exhausted.

The committee songs, the tailgate songs, the chart-topping girl in a sundress song. The band’s tight. The kid on pedal steel is better than the set deserves.

But there’s a stretch, late, after we’ve called it, the others out killing the last of a case on the back deck. I’m alone with the guitar and my hands find it. Three chords. The one I wrote before any of this. Before the hat, the name. Back when I was a kid who thought a true thing only had to be simple. I play it once, for the empty end of the room. Then I put it away.

The crew’s loud out back. I take the burner to the side yard where the music’s just a thud through the wall. I sit on the steps and call Dante.

He picks up on the second ring. “Hey.”

“Hey.” I close my eyes. His is the first voice all day that just wants Levi on the other end of it.

“Freddie came by the house today,” he says. “Let himself in looking for you. Found me instead. He didn’t get anything off me. I want you to hear that part first, before you build something out of it. He’ll bring me back to you next. When he does, you keep doing exactly what you’re doing. Don’t change a thing on my account. Don’t blink. We’ve got this.”

Dante doesn’t say it outright, but I hear it anyway in how careful he’s being.

Freddie is hunting him now.

I sit there with the phone hot against my ear and feel the wrong of it settle low. Dante’s the one who’s getting watched, who takes the hit with whatever Freddie does next. And he called to warn me, calm about it, so I wouldn’t worry. Nobody in my life hands me the truth like that. He just lays it out, and trusts me to carry my end.

“Dante I’m—” I start, and I don’t know which apology it’s going to be this time since there’s a line of them.

“Don’t,” he says. “This part’s mine.”

I give him a warning of my own back. “Tomorrow they’re putting the circus on a boat,” I say. “A place called Crab Island up in Destin. Me and the crew, all day on the water. Freddie’s calling it PR.”

“What does that mean?”

“Freddie never spends a dime on fun. If he’s renting a boat to point me at a thousand phones for a day, it’s a play. I don’t know what kind yet. But it’s a setup, same as everything, and whatever it ends up looking like online tomorrow, that’s manufactured. It’s not me, Dante. I swear. You know me.”