CHAPTER 9
Amos took it. It was very cold. He had not realized how thirsty he was. He cracked the cap and drank half of it in one long pull, standing there in the wind, and the young man waited, not hurrying him.
"Thank you, son."
"No problem."
"What's your name?"
"Luis, sir. Luis Ortega."
"Amos." He held out his hand, and Luis shook it. Amos noticed the young man's grip — firm, a little damp from the cold bottles, the palm already callused across the top from steering wheels and buffers. He noticed, too, the battered paperback book sticking out of Luis's back pocket, folded open on itself, the cover half torn off. Oklahoma Motor Vehicle Commission — Salesperson License Examination Guide. "You sell cars, Luis?"
Luis glanced down at the book and laughed a little, embarrassed. "Not yet. I'm a porter. I wash 'em and move 'em. I'm studying for the license. Test's in three weeks."
"You going to pass?"
"I'm going to try."
"That's not what I asked."
Luis looked at him. Something in the old man's voice had changed, become sharper, and for a second Luis did not know how to answer. Then he straightened a little and said, "Yes, sir. I'm going to pass."
"Good." Amos took another long drink of water. "Those black ones up there. The big ones. Who sells those?"
"The Escalades? Mr. Brooks." Luis tipped his head toward the deck. "Tyler Brooks. He's up there right now. He's got a big appointment at six-thirty, so he's kind of — he's kind of busy this afternoon. But I can let him know you want to look, if you want."
"I'll let him know myself."
"Okay." Luis looked like he wanted to say something else. He glanced up at the deck, where a man in a gray suit was standing beside the last Escalade in the row, wiping its hood with a cloth. He glanced back at Amos. "Sir. He's — Mr. Brooks is a good salesman. He's real good. He just — he's got a lot going on today. So if he's kind of short with you, it's not personal. It's just the end of the month."
Amos looked at him for a moment. The young man's face was open and anxious and entirely without guile, the face of a person who is trying, without quite knowing how, to warn you about something.
"I appreciate that, Luis," he said. "I've been around the end of a lot of months."
He handed back the empty bottle — "You mind? I don't see a trash can" — and Luis took it. Then the old man turned and walked on across the lot toward the deck steps, slowly, a little stiffly, his boots crunching on the scattered grit the wind had blown across the asphalt.
Luis stood holding the empty plastic bottle in one hand and watched him go. Then he remembered the two glass bottles on the hood of the used Escalade, and picked them up, and looked at them, and looked at the deck. He did not like what he thought was about to happen. He did not know why he thought it. He only knew that he had seen Tyler Brooks's face when the old Ford pulled in, from where he had been standing by the wash bay, and he had seen that face before.
* * *
Up on the deck, Tyler was not looking at the old man. He was looking at his phone.
The text had come in thirty seconds earlier, from a number with a Dallas area code, signed Brianna, EA to Mr. Kessling.
Hi Tyler, so sorry. Mr. K's flight delayed out of DFW, now landing Will Rogers 6:40. He'll come straight to you but realistically 8:00-8:15. He still wants to see the Platinum. Please hold it. Thx!
Eight. Eight-fifteen. In this wind, on a Friday, with the traffic out of the city, that meant eight-thirty at the earliest, and full dark. That meant Tyler would be standing on this deck for nearly two more hours with nothing to do but wait and wipe dust off a hood, and Craig would be coming out of the Fishbowl every fifteen minutes to ask where Kessling was, and Brent and Josh would be standing in the shade by the door, drinking coffee and grinning.
He typed back: No problem at all! Car's ready and waiting. Safe travels to Mr. Kessling. He added a thumbs-up. He deleted the thumbs-up. He put it back. He sent it.
Then he looked up, and saw the old man coming toward the steps.
CHAPTER 10
He had not decided anything about the old man yet. He would have said that, if you had asked him. He would have said he had barely noticed him. But that was not true. He had noticed everything. He had noticed the truck, and the bungee cord on the tailgate, and the gun rack with a fly swatter in it. He had noticed the way the old man got out — slow, careful, one hand on the door frame — and the way he had stood looking at the flags as if he had never seen a flag before. He had noticed, from forty yards away, the work boots, and the red dirt on the jeans, and the vest with the torn pocket, and the cap with a faded logo of some kind of feed or seed company on it. He had noticed that the old man did not have a phone in his hand. He had noticed that he did not have a key fob on his belt or a watch on his wrist. He had noticed him talking to Luis for five minutes, and Luis giving him a bottle of water, and the two of them shaking hands, and he had thought, with a small, familiar, contemptuous flicker: Of course. Of course the porter found him.
And he had priced him.
He had not meant to. He never meant to. It just happened, the way reading happens. The old man came across the lot in the slanting light, and Tyler's mind ran its quick, practiced, invisible arithmetic — boots, jeans, vest, cap, truck, no phone, no watch, no keys, walking alone, walking slow, stopping to look at the flags like a tourist — and came up with an answer before Tyler even knew there had been a question.
Nothing.
Retired rancher, maybe. Or a farmhand. Somebody's granddad who had driven in from the county to kill an afternoon, the way some old men did, to walk around the lot and look at cars he would never buy and ask a salesman a lot of questions about horsepower and towing capacity and what the darn things cost these days, and then shake his head and say Lord, when I was a boy you could buy a whole house for that, and go home. Tyler had met a hundred of them. Every salesman had. They came on slow afternoons, mostly, and they were lonely, mostly, and they were harmless. But they ate your time. They ate it the way the wind ate the shine on a black hood — slowly, invisibly, a little at a time, until you looked up and the whole afternoon was gone.
And today, he did not have time to give.
The old man reached the bottom of the steps. He put one hand on the wooden rail. He looked up at the long row of black Escalades on the deck above him, and the wind tugged at the brim of his cap, and the low sun came in behind him from the west, so that for a second, from where Tyler stood, he was only a dark shape, a silhouette with light pouring around its edges.
Then he started up the steps.
Tyler put his phone in his pocket. He tucked the clipboard under his left arm and took the two key fobs in his left hand, and he walked toward the head of the steps — not fast, not slow — and he felt his face settle into the expression he wore for people like this, which was polite, and friendly, and completely closed. It was a door with a smile painted on it.
Behind him, at the far end of the deck, the detailer Marcus looked up from the wheel he was polishing. In the open service bay, the radio was playing Merle Haggard. Down on the lot, Luis Ortega had stopped walking, with a glass bottle in each hand and an empty plastic one tucked under his arm, and was standing perfectly still, watching.
The wind came across the deck in a long gust. Every flag on the lot cracked at once.
And the old man's boot came down on the first plank of the deck, solid, with a hollow wooden knock, and he stood there at the top of the steps for a moment, catching his breath, in the full force of the wind and the light. He brushed a little more dust off the front of his vest with the back of his hand. Then he looked up and saw the salesman coming.
---
"Afternoon," the old man said. Then he looked at the sky, at the long gold slant of the light, and corrected himself. "Evening, I guess."
"Evening, sir."
Tyler had stopped about six feet from the top of the steps. It was a distance he had arrived at over three years without ever quite deciding on it: close enough to be polite, far enough that the customer would have to come to him, and squarely in the middle of the deck, so that the long row of black Escalades stood behind him like a wall he was guarding. The wind came across the planks between them and flattened the cuffs of the old man's jeans against his boots and tugged at the hem of Tyler's suit jacket.