The wind came across the high plains on the last Friday of April the way it always came in that part of Oklahoma, from the southwest, steady and dry and full of red dust, and by six o'clock in the evening it had turned every flag on the lot of Ridgeline Cadillac into a cracking, snapping, living thing. There were a lot of flags. Tyler Brooks had counted them once, his first week on the job, back when he still counted things for fun. Forty-four. Tall white feather banners along the frontage road with the Cadillac crest printed on them in black and silver. A row of small triangular pennants strung on wire above the used inventory, red and white and blue, that flickered in the wind like a crowd waving. And at the corner of the lot, where Route 62 met the bypass, a single enormous American flag on an eighty-foot pole, so big that on days like this you could hear it from inside the showroom, a slow heavy whump, whump, whump like somebody beating a rug. Tyler did not count them anymore. He had been at Ridgeline for three years and four months, and he was twenty-nine years old, and he was, according to the whiteboard on the wall of the sales office, the third-best salesman in the building, and he had stopped counting anything except units. Today the number was two. He needed two more units by midnight Sunday to hit the monthly target, and if he hit the monthly target he would hit the quarterly bonus, and if he hit the quarterly bonus he would have enough, finally, to put down a real deposit on the house on Larkspur Drive that his girlfriend, Kayla, had been sending him listings for since Christmas. If he did not hit it, he would not. It was that simple. Two cars. Two signatures. Fifty-four hours. " Brooks. " Craig Pruett leaned out of the sales manager's office, a glass box at the back of the showroom that everybody called the Fishbowl. Craig was fifty, thick-necked and sunburned, with a gold watch he looked at constantly and a voice that carried across the showroom floor like a car alarm. " Where are we on Kessling? " " Six-thirty," Tyler said. " He confirmed this morning. " " He's coming here? Not a home delivery? " " He wants to drive the Platinum. He said he likes to feel a car before he buys it. " " He said that? " " His assistant said it. " Craig made a face that meant he did not think much of men who sent their assistants to say how they felt about things, but he also did not think it mattered. " That's a big fish, Tyler. That's an ESV Platinum fully loaded, that's a hundred and twenty out the door, maybe more with the package. You land that, you're one away. You land that and he brings his business partner like he talked about —" " I know. " " You're done. You're over the line. You're buying Kayla a house. " " I know, Craig. " " So don't screw around. Have the car washed. Have the car in front. Have it running with the AC on so it's cold when he gets in. Have a bottle of water in the cupholder, the good water, the fancy stuff in the glass bottles. And don't spend the afternoon on tire-kickers. You hear me? I see you out there talking to some guy who wants to know what the gas mileage is on a CT4, I'm going to come out there and drag you back by the ear. " " Nobody's asking about gas mileage. " " Somebody always asks about gas mileage," Craig said darkly, and went back into the Fishbowl.
Ridgeline Cadillac sat at the edge of town on a long strip of land that had been a wheat field thirty years ago. The building itself was all glass and brushed steel, the kind of showroom the manufacturer designed in Detroit and copied in a thousand towns, with a polished white floor you could see your face in and a coffee bar and a children's corner nobody's children ever used. But the thing people remembered about it, the thing that had gotten it written up in the regional paper when it opened, was the deck. The deck ran along the whole south side of the building. It was raised about three feet off the ground, built of wide planks of dark ipe wood that had been sanded and oiled until they were the color of strong coffee, and it was big enough to park eight vehicles on, nose to tail, in a long gleaming row. A broad flight of wooden steps led up to it from the lot. There were planters at the corners with ornamental grasses that bent and hissed in the wind. And at the far end there was a covered pavilion where the dealership held its customer events — a barbecue in July, a toy drive in December, a " Cadillac and Cowboys" evening in the fall that involved a country band and a great deal of beer.
The owner, Dale Harmon, had built the deck the year he took over the dealership from his father. He said it was because he wanted people to see the cars the way the cars were meant to be seen, out in the open, in the sun and the wind, instead of under fluorescent lights. The salesmen said it was because Dale liked to stand on it at sunset with a glass of bourbon and look out over his kingdom. Today there were seven SUVs on the deck. All of them were Escalades. All of them were black. Black Raven, the manufacturer called the paint, as if black needed a better name. They stood in a long row with their great chrome grilles facing the lot, enormous, square-shouldered, their windows tinted so dark you could not see into them, and in the evening light they looked less like cars than like something that had been carved out of a single block of obsidian and polished for a year. The wind ran over them and could not find anything to hold on to. At the end of the row, nearest the steps, was the one Tyler was saving for Kessling. An ESV