Chapter 11 Levi #2
Outside, the lot’s gone silent. No white bus, no strobing purple lights. I stand at the edge of the pavement at the street and wait.
Ten minutes later it hits me. Tyler took two hundred for a Monday night and drove home, because two hundred’s a good night.
He’s not coming back for me. Nobody crosses the county at midnight in a gas-guzzling bus for one drunk in a bandana.
The hundred I promised him is still in my pocket.
It’s the only part of this that worked out, and it only worked because I got stiffed.
I start walking.
It’s fifteen miles back to the house if it’s a foot, and I start in on it at half past midnight. The only other thing to do is sit on a curb till the sun comes up, and the sun comes up with people in it, and people have phones. Walking’s the lesser evil. I take it.
The tequila’s got my legs moving at about seventy percent, and the boots are grinding into the blisters from Sunday’s walk, the ones that had just started to heal. I feel them open again, oozing wet inside my socks.
I keep going, because the only thing waiting for me if I stop is the very thing I left the house to get away from in the first place.
A car comes up behind me and the wind of it pulls at my shirt. I don’t step off the pavement. I should. Drunk and dressed in black on an unlit road, I should give the cars more room.
I don’t have it in me to care that much tonight. Not caring isn’t the same as wanting something to happen. It’s the part of me that’s run right down to empty.
The road up ahead is a stretch under construction, orange barrels and torn-up asphalt, no lane lines painted. I’m halfway through it when the blue lights come up behind me. One short whoop. A spotlight hits me from behind.
I stop and turn into the cop’s light.
“Where are you headed?” he asks me after stepping out.
“Home.”
“Where’s home?”
“Alys Beach. It’s on 30A.”
He’s not buying it. Can’t blame him. I certainly don’t fit the look of the Alys Beach clientele.
“That’s fifteen miles, sir,” he says anyway. “You been drinking tonight?”
I could lie. I’ve had experience lying to cops in multiple states. A good lie needs a steady voice and a straight back, and eight tequilas on a basket of fries didn’t leave me much of either.
“Yeah. A little.”
“Got an ID?”
“It’s in my back pocket.”
I reach for my license slow. Reaching fast at a cop at one in the morning is how a bad night turns into a worse one. He takes the license, reads it in the dome light, types it into the laptop on his dash.
“You’ve got some history.”
“Yes sir.”
“And here you are walking a construction zone in the dark, drunk, in black clothes.”
“That’s accurate.”
My license’s notable history makes the call for him. He isn’t nasty about it. He just steers me toward the car with a hand on my shoulder and asks, “Can you behave if I don’t cuff you?”
I tell him yes. I mean it. I’ve got no fight left in me tonight.
He lets me ride in the back with my hands loose in my lap, watching the town slide by through the window grate.
The police station is too bright, phones going and a radio crackling somewhere down a hall.
A tired woman behind a counter takes what’s in my pockets and drops it in a plastic tray — a few crumpled bills, Dante’s business card.
She doesn’t ask many questions. She’s done this a thousand times, and I’m just one more drunk who’ll be gone by morning.
“You got a phone on you?” she asks.
“No, ma’am.”
She looks at the tray, then at me. “Anyone you can call to come get you? We can hold you till you’re sober and cut you loose, or you can call someone now. Your choice.”
I look at the business card in the tray. “No, ma’am. There’s nobody.”
They walk me back to a holding cell and the door rolls shut behind me, metal into metal. Two men in it already. One asleep on the bench, one against the wall with his eyes shut, waiting like he’s done this before. Neither looks up.
I take the floor, back to the wall, knees up, where I can see the cell door and every foot of ground between it and me. The panic gives a little once the door is in my sight.
“Are you sure you don’t want that phone call?” the booking officer says through the window an hour later.
Every number I’ve got lives in a phone shoved in a couch cushion. I don’t know one of them by heart. Having people means somebody else keeps the numbers.
But there’s one number I’ve memorized because I’ve looked at that business card a hundred times since I stuck it in my back pocket.
DANTE REYES - Licensed Real Estate Agent, Florida
When I lifted it out of a box at his apartment, I told myself it was about having one number down here that doesn’t report to Freddie. Didn’t figure I’d need it this fast.
“Yeah,” I say. “I’ll take the call after all. Thanks.”
The phone’s bolted to the wall. I dial the number from memory. My hands are steady, the one thing tequila’s never taken from me, muscle memory from holding a guitar through every level of drunk there is.
Two rings before he answers. “Dante Reyes.”
Not hello. He answers his business line at two in the morning like there’s a million-dollar deal on the other end of it.
“I need you to come get me.” I’m trying hard not to slur my words.
“Who is this?”
He knows it’s me. I can hear that he knows.
“It’s Levi. I need you to come get me.”
“Where are you?”
“Bay County Jail.”
“For what?”
“Nothing that’ll stick. Drunk and walking.”
“Levi, why are you calling me? Don’t you have someone else you can call?”
“My phone’s at the house and I didn’t know anybody’s number. They’re all in the phone.”
“And yet you have mine?”
He has a valid point. I don’t tell him how I got it. He can figure it out on his own.
“Answer the question, Levi.”
“Are you coming or not?”
He sighs a long, tired sigh. “I’m on my way.”
The line goes dead. I go back to the cell, sit on the floor with the wall behind me and wait.
Dante’s coming.
He said he’s on his way and he’ll be here. No doubt in my mind about that.
By the time they walk me out to the lobby, Dante’s already done with the paperwork.
He’s at the front counter signing a page, and when the deputy slides another across and taps the line, he signs that one without reading it.
Not even hesitating to put his name on a line that says he takes full responsibility for me, at least for tonight.
While he’s signing, I sneak a peek at him.
For once, he’s not put together, wearing shorts and an old t-shirt.
Hair he hasn’t touched, sneakers worn soft at the heel.
Every other time I’ve seen him he was built to seal a deal.
This one rolled out of bed and drove straight to a jail because somebody who needed him called.
No idea Dante came in this version.
He’s mad, though. He can barely look at me. His jaw’s tight and he doesn’t say a word. The deputy gives him the envelope with everything from my pockets in it and Dante hands it straight over to me without checking what’s inside.
We walk out to the lot. He unlocks the SUV, gets in, starts it, and the cold air comes on hard. I slide in beside him.
He doesn’t drive. He sits with both hands on the wheel and looks straight ahead through the windshield at the jail.
“Where’s your phone, Levi?”
“I told you already. Back at the house.”
“You left it there on purpose.”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”