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. "
" I knew," Amos said quietly. They stood together at the rail for a moment, the two of them, in the red light. Down on the lot, the flags had begun to settle as the wind dropped with the sun. A meadowlark was singing somewhere in the field beyond the frontage road. " Craig tells me," Dale said, finally, "that you want twenty Escalades. " " That's right. " " Black. " " Black. " " May I ask what for? " Amos looked at him. Then he looked past Dale, down the length of the deck, at the young salesman standing beside the ESV Platinum with a key fob hanging from his finger and his papers scattered at his feet. He looked at him for a long time. Tyler felt it. He felt it like heat on the side of his face. " I'll tell you," Amos said. " I'll tell all of you. But let's go inside. My knees aren't what they were, and it's going to be dark soon, and there's something I want to show you. " He paused. " And bring the young fella from the parking lot. Luis. I want him to hear it. " " Luis? " Dale looked puzzled. " Our porter? " " He's the only man on this lot who looked at my face before he looked at my boots," Amos said. " I want him in the room. "
They went into Dale Harmon's office. It was a big corner room at the back of the showroom, paneled in pale wood, with a wall of windows that looked out over the deck and the plains, and a desk the size of a small boat, and on the wall behind the desk, among the plaques and the framed awards and the photographs of Dale shaking hands with men in suits, there was one small, faded, black-and-white snapshot in a cheap dime-store frame. It showed a heavyset man in a short-sleeved shirt with a toothpick in his mouth, standing on a gravel lot in front of a hand-painted sign that said HARMON'S — GOOD USED CARS — FAIR DEALS, with one hand resting on the fender of an old green International cattle truck. Amos stopped in front of it for a while when he came in. He did not say anything. Then he sat down in the leather chair across from Dale's desk with a small grunt, and took off his cap and put it on his knee, and took out the manila envelope and laid it on the desk. Dale sat behind the desk. Craig stood beside the door, smiling his anxious smile. Luis had come in last, very quietly, still holding the two glass bottles of water because he had forgotten he was holding them, and was standing against the wall by the windows as if he were trying to take up as little room as possible. And Tyler — Tyler had not been invited. Nobody had said a word to him. But nobody had told him to stay away, either, and when the others went inside, he had picked up his clipboard, and a few of his papers, and followed, and now he was standing in the open doorway behind Craig, half in the room and half out of it, holding the clipboard against his chest like a shield. Amos saw him. He did not say anything about it. He took the rubber bands off the envelope. He took out the white bank envelope with the cashier's check in it and laid it on the desk in front of Dale, unopened. He took out the typed list of names and laid it beside the check. Then he took out the old square photograph — twenty-one people in front of a metal building, green trucks behind them, The Twenty, Christmas 1986, God help