CHAPTER 15
The old man's laughter rolled down into a deep, satisfied chuckle. His eyes, under the white tufts of his hair, were bright and hard and amused.
"20. All black. And I'm paying in full."
He held the envelope there a moment longer. Then he tucked it back inside his vest, and put his cap back on, settling it with a little tug on the brim. And he stepped forward.
He walked past Tyler.
He did not walk around him, or wait for him to move. He just walked, straight down the deck along the row of black Escalades, at the same slow, unhurried, steady pace he had used crossing the lot, his boots knocking on the dark wood with every step, and Tyler, who was standing in his path, found that he had stepped aside without ever deciding to. The old man passed so close that the sleeve of his vest brushed the sleeve of Tyler's suit jacket. He did not look at him. He was looking at the cars.
The sun had come out from behind the clouds.
It had dropped low now, almost to the horizon, swollen and red-gold, and it poured its light straight across the plains and up over the edge of the deck and down the long row of Escalades, so that every one of them lit up along its whole length in a single unbroken line of fire. And it caught the old man from behind as he walked. It laid a blazing rim of light along his shoulders and the back of his neck and the edge of his cap, and it threw his shadow out ahead of him down the deck, long and thin and dark, stretching away across the planks almost to the far end of the row. From where Tyler stood, the old man was just a shape now, a dark figure walking into a blaze of light, with the black cars burning gold on one side of him and the whole wide red-gold sky on the other.
Somewhere at the bottom of the steps, Luis Ortega laughed — once, out loud, a short, astonished, helpless sound, as if it had been surprised out of him. Then he clapped a hand over his mouth.
At Tyler's feet, the last of his papers lifted off the deck, turned over once in the wind, and went sailing away across the lot toward the highway, white against the red sky, and was gone.
---
Craig Pruett came out of the showroom at a speed nobody at Ridgeline Cadillac had ever seen him move.
He had heard the bang. Everybody inside had heard the bang; it had rattled the glass wall of the showroom and made the receptionist drop her phone. Craig had looked up from his computer in the Fishbowl and seen, through two layers of glass, a crowd of technicians standing on the service apron staring at the deck, and Brent and Josh frozen by the door with their coffee, and a sheet of white paper go tumbling past the window like a bird. He had thought there had been an accident. He had thought somebody had backed a forty-thousand-dollar trade-in into a hundred-thousand-dollar Escalade. He had come out of his chair so fast it had spun all the way around.
He burst out through the side door onto the deck and stopped.
Tyler was standing beside the ESV Platinum with his hands hanging at his sides and a key fob dangling from one finger, and he looked like a man who had been hit on the head with a board. There were papers everywhere — on the deck, against the tires, in the planters. There was a large dusty handprint on the hood of Kessling's car. And walking away down the row of Escalades, slowly, in the red light of the sinking sun, was an old man in a feed-store cap and a canvas vest, looking into each car's tinted windows in turn with his hands cupped around his eyes, the way a child looks into a store window at Christmas.
"What the hell," Craig said, not loudly. "Brooks. What the hell happened? What's going on? Who's that?"
Tyler opened his mouth. Nothing came out.
"Brooks."
"He wants twenty," Tyler said.
"He wants twenty what?"
"Escalades." Tyler's voice was flat and odd, as if it belonged to somebody else. "Twenty Escalades. All black. Cash. He's got — he's got a check. In an envelope."
Craig looked at him. Then he looked down the deck at the old man, who had reached the far end of the row and was standing at the rail beside the last car, his cap pushed back, looking out across the plains at the sunset with his hands on his hips.
"That guy?"
"That guy."
"In the — with the —" Craig's hands made vague, baffled shapes in the air, sketching boots, a vest, a truck. "That guy?"
"Yes."
CHAPTER 16
Craig stood still for perhaps three full seconds, which for Craig was a very long time. Tyler watched his face. He watched the sales manager do the same arithmetic Tyler had done, and come to the same impossible number, and then he watched something else happen behind Craig's eyes — a kind of greedy, terrified lighting-up, like a pinball machine when somebody hits the jackpot.
"What did you say to him?"
Tyler did not answer.
"Tyler. What did you say to him?"
"I said he couldn't afford anything in here."
Craig closed his eyes.
"And then I told him to stop wasting my time."
Craig opened his eyes again. For a second he looked as if he might actually hit Tyler. Then he turned on his heel, smoothed his tie down flat against his stomach with both hands, rearranged his face into the broadest, warmest, most welcoming smile Tyler had ever seen on it, and set off down the deck toward the old man at a fast walk, his hand already out, already talking.
"Sir! Sir, good evening! Craig Pruett, sales manager, so glad to — I am so sorry about that, sir, there's been a misunderstanding, our young man here has had a very long day, I want to personally — what can I —"
The old man turned from the rail and looked at him. He looked at Craig's hand. He did not take it.
"Are you the one in charge?"
"I'm the sales manager, sir, I —"
"No," the old man said. "I mean the one in charge. Is Dale here?"
Craig's smile flickered. "Dale? You mean — Mr. Harmon?"
"Dale Harmon. Vernon's boy."
"Mr. Harmon's in his office, sir. He's — I can certainly let him know you're — may I ask your name, sir?"
"Whitcomb," the old man said. "Amos Whitcomb."
Craig had lived in western Oklahoma for twenty-two years. He did not have to look up the name. He went a shade paler under his sunburn and said, "Of — Whitcomb Freight?"
"Used to be."
"Yes, sir. Yes, sir, of course. I'll get him. I'll get him right now. Please — please, don't — could I get you anything? A coffee? A water? We have — we have some very nice bottled water —"
"Already had some," Amos said. "The young fella down there got it for me." He nodded toward the bottom of the steps, where Luis was still standing with his bottles. "Luis. He's the only one who's offered me anything since I got here. He gave me the cheap kind out of the cooler. It was very good."
Craig turned and stared at Luis as if he had never seen him before in his life. Then he turned back. "I'll get Mr. Harmon," he said, and went, almost running, back along the deck and in through the side door.
* * *
Dale Harmon came out three minutes later.
He was a big, soft-spoken man of about sixty, with a gray crew cut and reading glasses pushed up on his forehead and a pair of cowboy boots under his suit trousers that had cost more than most of the used inventory. He came through the side door onto the deck and stopped, and looked down the row of Escalades at the old man standing at the far end, and Tyler, who had still not moved from where he stood beside the Platinum, saw something extraordinary happen to the owner's face.
It went young.
That was the only way Tyler could ever describe it afterward. Dale Harmon was sixty years old and owned the largest Cadillac dealership between Oklahoma City and Amarillo, and for one moment, standing on his own deck in the sunset, he looked about twelve.
"Mr. Whitcomb?"
"Dale."
Dale walked down the deck. He did not hurry. He walked the way you walk toward something you are not sure is really there, and when he got to the end of the row, he stood in front of the old man and looked at him for a long time without saying anything. Then he held out his hand, and Amos took it, and they shook, and then Dale did something Tyler had never seen him do with anyone in three years: he put his other hand on top of the old man's hand, and held it.
"You carried my daddy," Dale said.
"I did."
"I was twenty-nine. I was at the front of the church, on the left. I remember you. You had on a green tie."
"June made me wear it. She said Vernon liked green."
"He did." Dale's voice was thick. "He did. He had that green truck. The International." He let go of Amos's hand at last and stepped back and wiped his eyes with the back of his wrist, unashamed. "I've thought about calling you a hundred times. After Mama died, I found a box of his papers. There was a ledger in there from the seventies. He'd written your name in it. Every payment. Every one. And at the bottom of the page, after the last payment, he'd written, Paid in full. Told you so." He laughed, shakily. "I never knew what he meant by that."