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.
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