" " It costs time," Tyler said, before he could stop himself. Amos laughed. It was the same laugh from the deck — big, rough, rolling. " Son," he said, " I'm seventy-six years old. I'll tell you what costs time. What costs time is spending thirty-eight years meaning to pay a debt and not paying it, and then going to a funeral and having a dead woman's daughter hand you an IOU on a piece of cardboard. That costs time. " He stopped at the barn door and looked at Tyler. " Giving an old man a bottle of water costs about four minutes. You can spare four minutes. " They stood together in the shade of the barn door. Inside, it smelled of hay and oil and old wood. Somewhere in the dark at the back, a cat was watching them with green eyes. " Dale says you're helping find the cars," Amos said. " Yes, sir. I made thirty-one calls yesterday. I've got nine located. I'll have the rest by Wednesday. " " There's no commission in it for you. You know that. " " I know. " " Then why? " Tyler thought about it. He thought about it honestly, the way the old man had thought about Craig's question on the deck before he answered it. It was a strange feeling. He was not used to it. " Because I'd like to be there," he said. " When you give them out. I'd like to see it. And I'd like to — I guess I'd like to have done something for it. Besides almost send you away. " Amos looked at him a while longer. Then he nodded once, and went into the barn, and came back with a pair of old leather work gloves, cracked and darkened with use, and held them out. " Fence runs another half mile along the north side," he said. " There's a spool of wire on the tailgate. You can do that while I make us some coffee. " Tyler took the gloves. They were too big for him. He put them on anyway.
Luis Ortega passed the Oklahoma Motor Vehicle Commission salesperson examination on the morning of May nineteenth with a score of ninety-four percent. He found out at eleven-forty, sitting in his car in the parking lot of the state office building in Oklahoma City, refreshing the results page on his phone over and over with his thumb. When the number came up, he sat very still for a long moment. Then he called his mother, who cried. Then he called Dale Harmon, who said, " Well, hell, son, I knew you would," and then, after a pause, in a slightly different voice, " Hold on, somebody wants to talk to you. " There was a rustling, and then a low, rough, deep voice said, " Ninety-four. " " Yes, sir. " " What'd you miss? " Luis laughed out loud in the empty car. " Financing disclosure stuff, mostly. Some of the title rules. " " Well," said Amos Whitcomb, "you can learn that. The rest of it you already had. " A pause. " Next Saturday. Nine o'clock. Wear something you don't mind getting dusty. "
They left Ridgeline at seven in the morning on the last Saturday in May. There were twenty of them, in a line, on the frontage road. Twenty black Escalades, washed and waxed and gleaming, nose to tail, with their headlights on in the early sun. Eleven had come off the Ridgeline lot. The other nine had come, over three weeks, from Tulsa and Oklahoma City and Wichita and Lubbock and Amarillo and one, improbably, from a dealership in Joplin, Missouri, which had driven it down on a flatbed for nothing after Tyler explained on the phone what it was for. Every one of them was the full-size model. Every one was the color the manufacturer called Black Raven. Each one had a small white card taped to the inside of the windshield, typed on Dale Harmon's office printer, with a name on it. It had taken Dale most of a week to find twenty people to drive them. In the end, it was nearly the whole dealership. Dale himself, in the lead car. Craig Pruett, who had been very quiet for a month and who had volunteered before anyone asked. The three technicians from the service bay, still in their gray coveralls. Marcus the detailer. The receptionist, Darlene, who had never driven anything bigger than a Camry and was visibly terrified. Brent and Josh, who had been told, not asked. Luis, in a new white shirt with a tie he kept touching to make sure it was still there. Nora Whitcomb, Amos's granddaughter, a brisk dark-haired woman of thirty-one with June's sigh and Amos's eyes, who had driven down from Enid the night before and spent the evening walking the line of cars with a clipboard, checking every name card twice. And Tyler Brooks, in the eighteenth car, in a pair of jeans and boots and a plain blue work shirt, with a pair of old leather gloves on the seat beside him. Amos rode in the very first car, with Dale. He sat in the passenger seat with his cap on and the manila envelope on his knees, and he did not say much on the drive. They went north and east through the wheat, which was tall now and going gold at the tips, rolling in long waves under the wind on both sides of the highway. The sky was enormous and clear. Twenty black cars in a line, their windows tinted, their chrome flashing in the sun one after another as they came over each rise, so that from a distance they looked like a single long black thing, a train, a river, moving across the open plains. People pulled off onto the shoulder to watch them go by. A farmer on a tractor in a field near Okeene stopped in the middle of a row and stood up in his seat and took his hat off. In Fairview, a gas-station attendant came out from behind the counter and stood on the curb with her phone held up, filming, as the whole line rolled slowly through the town's one stoplight, and a little boy beside her waved, and somewhere in the middle of the line somebody — Tyler always suspected it was Darlene — waved back.