CHAPTER 13
"Then stop wasting my time."
It came out harder than he meant. Much harder. He heard the edge in his own voice, and he saw, from the corner of his eye, Marcus the detailer at the far end of the deck stop rubbing the wheel and look up. Down on the lot, Luis was standing perfectly still with the bottles in his hands. Tyler did not care. He was angry now — not really at the old man, though he did not know that yet, but at the afternoon, at the wind, at Kessling's delayed flight, at Craig and his gold watch, at Brent and Josh grinning by the door, at the whole fifty-four hours and the whole three years and four months and every lonely old man who had ever walked onto this lot to look at things he would never buy and eat up a salesman's time with questions. All of it went into that finger. All of it went into those five words.
The old man looked at the finger. He looked at it for what seemed to Tyler a very long time, though it was probably no more than a second or two. His face did not change.
Then he turned away from Tyler, toward the car. He lifted his right hand from his belt. It was a big hand, square and heavy, the knuckles swollen and the fingers bent a little at the joints, the back of it spotted brown with age and sun and crossed with old white scars — the hand of a man who had spent his life with ropes and chains and steering wheels and the iron rails of cattle pens. He held it above the gleaming black hood of the ESV Platinum for a moment, the way you hold a hand above a stove to feel the heat.
And then he brought it down, flat, on the hood.
Bang.
The sound was enormous. It rang out across the deck like a gunshot, a deep, hollow, metallic slap that went through the planks under Tyler's feet and bounced off the glass wall of the showroom and seemed to come back from the far side of the lot. A pair of grackles burst up out of the ornamental grass in the nearest planter and went wheeling away into the wind, shrieking. Tyler flinched. He actually flinched — his shoulders jerked, and he took a half-step back, and his pointing finger dropped. Behind the old man's hand, a print had appeared on the black paint, five fingers and a palm, outlined in red dust, perfect, as if somebody had pressed a stamp into wax.
The old man left his hand there.
He did not lean on it. He did not slap it again. He just left it there, flat on the hood of the most expensive vehicle on the lot, the way a man rests his hand on the neck of a horse he already knows is his. And he turned his head and looked back at Tyler from under the brim of his cap, and when he spoke, his voice was perfectly level and perfectly calm. Calmer than before. Almost gentle.
"I came to buy 20 Escalades."
* * *
There is a kind of silence that does not come from the absence of sound. Tyler had never known that until then.
The wind was still blowing. The flags were still snapping. The big flag on the corner pole was still beating, whump, whump, against the reddening sky, and the radio was still playing in the service bay, and somewhere out on Route 62 a semi was downshifting with a long bellowing groan. None of it had stopped. But for Tyler Brooks, standing on the deck of Ridgeline Cadillac beside a black ESV Platinum with a dusty handprint on its hood, all of it was suddenly very far away, as if somebody had shut a thick glass door between him and the rest of the world.
He heard the number. He heard it perfectly clearly. He simply could not make it mean anything.
Twenty.
His mind did what it always did. It ran the arithmetic. Automatically, instantly, the way it had run the arithmetic on the old man's boots and vest and cap and truck. Twenty Escalades. Call it a hundred and five each, average, depending on trim. Two million one. Two million two, with tax and tag. Twenty units. Twenty units in a single deal. Tyler had sold forty-one cars in the whole of the last year. Craig had once told a story, at a Christmas party, drunk, about a dealer in Dallas who had sold a fleet of twelve Escalades to a Saudi prince in a single afternoon, and the whole sales office had treated it like a legend, like a story about a man who had caught a fish the size of a canoe. Twelve. This was twenty. Twenty was not a deal. Twenty was a month. Twenty was a quarter. Twenty was the whole board.
CHAPTER 14
And it was coming out of the mouth of a man in a feed-store cap with red dirt on his knees.
Tyler's face did something he could not control. His jaw came loose. His mouth opened — not much, but open, hanging — and his eyebrows went up and stayed there, and his eyes went wide and fixed on the old man's face as if he were seeing it for the very first time. Which, in a sense, he was.
His left arm went slack.
He did not feel it happen. He just felt, suddenly, that the clipboard was no longer clamped against his ribs. It slid. It tipped out from under his arm and went down, turning over once in the air, and hit the dark wooden planks of the deck with a flat clatter. The metal clip sprang open on impact. And the papers that had been held in it — the inventory sheet, the Kessling worksheet with its carefully penciled numbers, a credit application, a trade-in appraisal form, three blank buyer's orders — burst out from under the clip all at once, and the wind took them.
They went skittering across the deck in a white rush, sliding over the planks with a dry hissing whisper, flipping end over end. One plastered itself flat against the front tire of the Escalade. One went sailing off the edge of the deck and down onto the lot, tumbling away across the asphalt toward the frontage road. One caught against the toe of the old man's dusty boot and lay there, fluttering, pinned. Tyler watched them go. He did not move to stop them. He could not, for the moment, make his body do anything at all. His hands hung at his sides. The two key fobs were still looped over the fingers of his left hand, swinging gently, back and forth, back and forth, catching the light.
All along the deck, everything had stopped.
Marcus the detailer was on his feet now, with the polishing rag hanging forgotten from one hand. At the open door of the service bay, three technicians in gray coveralls had come out to see what the bang had been, and they were standing in a little cluster on the concrete apron, one of them still holding an impact wrench, staring. In the shade by the showroom doors, Brent had lowered his coffee cup halfway to his mouth and stopped there, and Josh was saying something to him out of the side of his mouth, and Brent was not answering. Down on the lot, Luis Ortega stood with a glass bottle of water in each hand and an empty plastic one under his arm, and his face had gone completely blank, the way a face goes when it has seen something it is going to need a long time to understand.
Tyler's voice came out of him in a croak. One word. It was not even really a question. It was more like the sound a man makes when he is checking whether the ground is still there.
"20?"
And the old man laughed.
He reached up and took off his cap. He did it in one long easy sweep of his arm, the way men of his generation took off their hats when they went into a church or met a woman on the street, and he held it against his chest. Without it, his hair was white and thin and cut very short, standing up in tufts where the cap had pressed it, and his whole face was suddenly visible in the full late light: the high forehead with its pale band of skin where the brim had always shaded it, the deep-set washed-blue eyes, the hundred lines and creases. And the old man tipped his head back, and laughed, out loud, from the belly, a big, rough, rolling, delighted laugh that went out across the deck and down onto the lot and seemed to roll on across the open plains toward the piled-up clouds. It was the laugh of a man who had been waiting a very long time for something, and had just, unexpectedly, been handed it.
Still laughing, he reached into the inside of his old canvas vest — into the deep pocket on the left side, the one June had mended with green thread — and brought out a manila envelope.
It was thick. So thick that the clasp did not close. There were two rubber bands wrapped around it, crossways, and its corners were soft and dog-eared, and there was a smear of red dust across the front of it where his thumb had been. He held it out, at arm's length, in front of Tyler's face. Not handing it over. Just holding it there, steady, in the wind, so that Tyler could see it — the weight of it, the bulk of it, the bank's name stamped in the corner of the white envelope inside, just visible where the manila had torn.