Chapter 6 Dante
The Roadhouse lot is half full at seven-thirty, which on a Saturday in early summer means Tex is having a good month. I smell the hickory smoke from my parking spot, and under it whatever the kitchen is doing to shrimp that has the lot smelling like a crab boil.
I push my way inside. The music is Allman Brothers, loud enough to feel through my shoes. The bar will be packed by midnight, locals and bikers mostly, with a few tourists who found the place on social media and are trying to decide what they walked into.
“There he is,” Tex calls out from behind the bar. “The sharpest-dressed man on the Gulf Coast. You look like you’ve been through a war.”
“I have.”
“Want a bourbon?”
“You bet.”
He pours and slides it across, and I take the stool at the near end, the one closest to the kitchen pass-through. The bourbon is good and I needed it five hours ago.
“Where’s Benji?” I ask.
“Upstairs with Mickey,” Tex says. “They’ll be down soon. Mickey’s in a mood because he wanted to help me grill tonight and Benji told him the grill is my department and Mickey is not allowed to ‘freelance with the brisket.’”
“Did Mickey accept that?”
“Mickey argued. Benji won because Mickey loves losing to Benji so much that losing is basically winning for him. They’re up there being engaged and annoying about it.”
I take a sip. Tex leans on the bar and watches me with that look, the one that means he already knows more than I’ve told him.
“Let me guess,” I say. “Benji talked.”
“Benji lives here and he came home this morning with an interesting story. He told Mickey. Mickey told Stormy. Stormy told Sheila. Sheila told me. So yes, by the time you walked through that door, every person in this bar knows that a man trashed your listing and you took him home.”
“That’s not what happened. I temporarily relocated him to my apartment for three hours during a showing.”
“You gave a stranger your apartment key,” Tex says.
“I gave a guy access to an alternate location while I conducted business.”
“Dante. You gave a stranger. Your apartment. Key.” Tex picks up a glass and starts polishing it.
“He didn’t have anywhere else to go.”
“Why is that your problem?”
“I couldn’t show the house with him sleeping on the couch.”
“You could’ve called me and I’d have sent Sheila straight over. She’d have had him off that couch in thirty seconds. Sheila has removed men the size of quarterbacks from barstools just by giving them the look. If you need a people exterminator, she’s the one to call. No job is too big for Sheila.”
“I handled it.”
“Yes, you sure did. By turning over your apartment to him. Which is not handling a problem. That’s adopting it. What name did you give him?”
“He already has a name. I’m not adopting him.”
Tex sets the glass down, and the smile is gone. Tex smiles for a living, same as I do, so I know what it means when one gets put away.
“Benji told Mickey about how he reacted when you woke him up,” Tex says. “Arms up. Covering his face. Before his eyes were open. That’s not a normal reaction.”
I don’t deny it. “I know.”
“What’s his name?”
“Levi. That’s all he told me. No last name, no explanation. He won’t talk and I didn’t push. His business is not my business.”
“Keep telling yourself that.” Tex refills my glass without asking.
“Stormy didn’t talk much when I found him.
Barely at all. Wouldn’t give me his name.
Wouldn’t tell me where he came from. Wouldn’t tell me anything.
I fed him, let him sleep in the spare room and didn’t ask questions, because the questions weren’t mine to ask. The answers came when he was ready.”
“This is not the same situation, Tex. At all.”
“No. It’s not. Stormy was soaking wet on the side of a road in a hurricane, and your guy was passed out drunk on a couch in a multi-million-dollar house. Very different real estate.”
“He’s not my guy. Don’t call him that.”
“He’s in your apartment.”
“He was in my apartment. Past tense. I took him back to the house.”
“How’s the house holding up?”
“The HVAC is compromised, the smell is embedded, and the broker from Atlanta wants to bring his client next Saturday. If the house smells like cannabis when she walks in, I lose the sale and probably the relationship.”
“All because one guy smoked some weed.”
“If it were just the weed, I’d be home asleep. He opened everything in that house and let the Gulf pour in all night, and the AC never had a chance. The humidity is working on it from the inside.”
“Why did he open everything up?”
“He didn’t say. I shut the terrace door once and he told me to open it back up. No explanation and no negotiation. Turned out to be a good idea, since sealing the house only marinated the smell.”
Sheila arrives with a plate of shrimp, blackened at the edges on a bed of rice with lemon wedges and cocktail sauce from a bottle. She sets it down without being asked.
“Eat, Dante,” she says.
“I didn’t order anything.”
“You didn’t need to. You walked in looking like you haven’t eaten since Thursday. Eat the shrimp.”
“How do you know I haven’t eaten since—”
“Don’t mess with me, Dante. Hush and eat.”
I eat the shrimp, and it’s perfect. The Roadhouse kitchen doesn’t know how to do it wrong.
Benji comes in off the deck. He’s changed shirts and fixed his hair. He takes the stool next to me. “Did you finally calm down enough to eat?” he asks.
“Sheila made me.”
“She’s good at that.” He reaches over and takes a sip of my bourbon. “Did you return him to the house?”
“Yeah, he’s back.”
“Did he say anything else?”
“He told me the terrace door stays open while he lives there and I should plan my life around it.”
“Oh, did he now?” Benji grins. “I’m warming up a little to this guy.”
“Why? I’m not.”
“I like anyone who tells you to plan your life around their terms. It’s good for you. Nobody pushes back on you.”
“That’s not true. You push back on me constantly.”
“I push back because you’re my best friend. He pushes back because he honestly doesn’t care what happens to you. You’ve spent your life making sure everyone cares. It has to be a relief, running into one person you don’t have to manage.”
“The word is obstruction.”
“Obstruction and indifference are very different things, Dante. Obstruction takes effort. It means he’s thought about you long enough to want you out of the way. He hasn’t. He’s not trying to block you. He just doesn’t care.”
“That’s worse.”
Mickey comes through the door from the deck in his wheelchair, a faint flush on his face from the heat, his arms tanned from the elbows down. He rolls up to the bar and Benji’s hand goes to his shoulder automatically.
“Hey,” Mickey says. “Benji told me about your morning.”
“Apparently Benji told everyone about my morning.”
“You put a stranger in your apartment. That’s not like you.”
“I temporarily relocated a—”
“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.