Page 19 of Levi

There’s a company credit card in the duffel that could fix this morning in about an hour. Groceries to the gate, tip in the app, done. Except I don’t own one single account on that phone. Janice set them up, the office pays for them, and anything I order arrives with a copy to Nashville.

The card stays in the duffel, and the errand gets done on foot.

I pull my boots on because they’re all I brought. Cap low, sunglasses, and the festival bandana from two summers ago tied around my neck in case I need to pull it up. Lee Streeter doesn’t get photographed stumbling down a Florida road looking like a hungover hitchhiker.

I let myself out the pedestrian gate. The phone stays back at the house. Freddie’s dashboard can spend the morning watching an empty house.

It takes ten minutes to walk out of the gated community, past the empty white buildings. Out on the road there’s no shade, not a single tree. I pass a locked restaurant with a chalkboard menu, and an art gallery selling paintings of the Gulf. In a boutique window there’s a white linen dress on a mannequin with an eight-hundred-dollar tag.

Nothing on this coast opens before noon on a Sunday, because everybody who’d shop here is still horizontal, sleeping off three bottles of white wine from one of these fancy patio cafés. I’m the only man on 30A who needs anything this morning, and I need it now.

A half-mile in, the morning quits pretending. The heat comes up off the asphalt through my soles. The jeans are glued to me from the knees down and the shirt from the shoulders down, and under this baseball cap I’m sweating. No sunscreen either, because sunscreen lives in a category of things I’ve never once bought for myself, and the back of my neck is already burning. The bandana starts earning its living a half hour early.

I’m a quarter mile past the last locked storefront when a vehicle slows down behind me. My heart starts beating faster. A vehicle slowing is a sound I don’t like. The bandana goes up over my face before I turn around. If it’s somebody with a phone out, they’re getting a bank robber, not a headline.

“Get in the car.”

I recognize the voice and pull the bandana back down. The white SUV idles on the shoulder, and Dante leans across the passenger seat, sunglasses on, white Sunday polo pressed and perfect.

“Morning, officer,” I say. “Was I speed walking?”

“Get in the car, Levi. You’re walking in black clothes in ninety-degree heat with no water, and you’re already sweated through.”

I sure am. Through the shirt, through the cap, through the disguise he doesn’t know is one.

“Is that your professional assessment, or did you just miss me? I’m walking to a convenience store.”

“Neither. Get in. There’s nothing in this direction. The nearest grocery is four miles inland, across a highway that kills pedestrians crossing it every year.”

Well, damn. I should’ve checked a map before I left the house. I just figured walking toward nothing was better than waiting for it to arrive.

“Get in, Levi,” he says again.

I open the door, and sigh in relief when the AC closes over me. I pull off the cap and my hair is soaked through. The car smells like his cologne with the volume turned way down. He’s traded the long-sleeved linen shirt for a polo, and it turns out the polo is worse for me. Now I can see his forearms, and a fancy watch. I take all of it in one quick glance, because a second glance is the kind of trouble the state of Tennessee builds churches against. I pretend there’s something fascinating along the side of the road.

“Cologne is turned down today,” I say. “That the Sunday setting?”

“It’s the same cologne every day.”

“Nah, it knows it’s Sunday. I can tell. Why are you driving around on a Sunday morning anyway?”

“Checking on the house,” he says.

“The outside of it?”

“Sure,” he says.

“It’s a Sunday.”

“I work every day. Sunday is no different.”

“You drove over here to stand in a driveway and look at a house you can’t go inside? Did you come by to make sure I hadn’t burned it down? Or maybe thrown a house party for a hundred close friends?”

He doesn’t answer. “When did you eat last?” he asks instead.

“Last night,” I say.

“What did you eat?”