Page 177 of One Good Crash
I shook my head. "You're going in the wrong direction."
"Sorry, what?"
"The last person – or who knows, maybe a few persons ago – they paid more."
Allie paused. "How much more?"
"A lot."
"How much is a lot?"
"Eighteen hundred."
Her surprise was obvious. "Wait a minute, so they paid eighteen hundred for this place?"
"No, it's worse. They paid three thousand. I meant thedifferencewas eighteen-hundred."
Now Allie was staring. "No."
"Yes."
Silently, she took a slow look around. As she did, I could practically read her thoughts, because they were same as mine just a couple of hours earlier. The place was nice and only a block from the beach.
From the first moment we'd seen it, we couldn’t believe our good luck. Now, it was beyond obvious that luck had nothing to do with it.
Allie murmured, "But I write the checks. They go to that realtor."
"Yeah," I said. "A realtor who manages the property – ontheirbehalf."
"Are you sure?"
"Oh yeah."
"And you learned all of this, how?"
In reply, I told her about my conversation with Kimmie and then went on to say, "So it got me thinking. And I made some calls, did a little digging on the internet, too. But trust me, the information's good."
Allie blew out a long breath. "Wow." And then, like someone in a dream, she walked to the nearest chair and fell back into it. "Shit."
I sank down in the chair opposite her. "Is that good or bad?"
"I don't know."
"Should I say something? To Jax, I mean?"
"I don't know," she repeated.
I sighed. "I can't just pretend to not know."
I'd already done the math. Allie and I had been living here for over four months. During that timeframe, we'd underpaid our rent by more than seven thousand dollars.
And counting.
That was a lot of money.
I thought back to the last few months, when I'd been living the high life on someone else's dime. Slowly, I sat back in the chair. "Oh, my God."
"What?"
