Chapter 1
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.
Chapter 2
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.
He checked his phone. Five-nineteen.
Two units. Fifty-four hours and forty-one minutes.
* * *
The rest of the dealership went on around him.
Inside the service bay at the north end of the building, three technicians in gray coveralls were working on a customer's CT5 that had come in with a transmission warning, and the sound of an impact wrench came in short bursts through the open bay door, brrrrap, brrrrap, and then a radio playing old country, Merle Haggard, half-drowned by the wind. A detailer named Marcus was on his knees at the edge of the deck with a rag and a spray bottle, working on the chrome of a wheel that already shone like a mirror. Two salesmen Tyler did not like very much — Brent and Josh, who sat at the desks on either side of his and talked about fantasy football all day — were standing in the shade by the showroom door, drinking coffee and watching a young couple with a baby stroller walk the used lot.
"Lookers," Brent said, as Tyler came past.
"Could be buyers."
"Stroller's from Walmart," Josh said. "Diaper bag's from Walmart. Shoes are Skechers. They're looking at the 2019 XT5 with ninety thousand miles. They're gonna ask what the monthly is, you're gonna tell 'em, they're gonna say they need to think about it, and you're never gonna see them again." He sipped his coffee. "You want 'em, they're yours."
Tyler looked at the young couple. The man was in a sweat-stained ball cap and work boots. The woman was holding the baby on her hip and pointing at the car's back seat, measuring something with her hand. Josh was right. Tyler could see it from here. You learned to see it. It was the first thing you learned. You learned to read the shoes and the watch and the phone and the keys and the way they walked onto the lot — whether they walked like they had a right to be there or like they were afraid somebody was going to tell them to leave — and you learned it so well that after a while you did not even know you were doing it. It was like reading. You could not look at a word and not read it. You could not look at a customer and not price them.
"Pass," Tyler said.
"Smart man." Brent raised his cup. "Kessling at six-thirty?"
"How do you know about Kessling?"
"Craig's been talking about Kessling since Tuesday. Craig thinks Kessling is the second coming. Craig's going to be very disappointed if Kessling turns out to be some guy who drives a Prius and wants to know about the gas mileage."
"Nobody's asking about gas mileage," Tyler said, and went inside to check his email again.
* * *
At six forty-four, he came back out onto the deck.
The wind had picked up. It was blowing harder now, in long gusts that made the feather banners along the frontage road bend almost double and come snapping back. The great flag on its pole was standing straight out from the halyard, rippling end to end, whump, whump, whump. Dust ran across the lot in low red streamers. The sun had moved around to the west and was lower now, coming in hard and bright and slanting across the deck, so that when Tyler looked toward the steps he had to narrow his eyes against it. The light made every edge of every car glow. It made the planks of the deck look like they were on fire.
He went down the row of Escalades with a microfiber cloth, touching up the hoods. He was halfway down when he heard the sound of an engine he did not recognize.
It was not a sound you heard often on the lot at Ridgeline. It was a rough, deep, old-fashioned sound, a big V8 with a lifter ticking somewhere inside it and a muffler that was not quite doing its job, and it came up the frontage road and turned in at the entrance and rolled slowly across the lot, and when Tyler looked up, shading his eyes against the sun, he saw a pickup truck.
It was a Ford. An F-250, he thought, from somewhere back in the nineties, two-tone, tan over brown, though it was hard to tell where the paint ended and the dust began. The bed had a dented toolbox bolted across it and a coil of baling wire and what looked like a saddle blanket. There was a gun rack in the back window with no gun in it, just an umbrella and a fly swatter. The tailgate was held shut with a bungee cord. And the whole thing was coated, every inch of it, in the fine red dust of the plains, so thickly that it looked less like a truck than like something that had been sculpted out of the ground.
It came across the lot at about five miles an hour and parked, crookedly, across two spaces in the customer section near the foot of the deck steps.
Tyler watched it the way you watch a cloud coming. He did not decide anything yet. Not consciously. He just watched.
The engine shut off. It ran on for a second after the key was turned, coughing, and then died. The driver's door creaked open. And an old man got out.
---
He had been up since four.
That was not unusual. Amos Whitcomb had been up at four o'clock in the morning for most of the seventy-six years he had been alive, first because cows do not care what time you went to bed, then because trucks do not care either, and finally, in the last few years, because his body had simply forgotten how to do anything else. He lay in the dark for a while in the big bed in the house on the ridge above the Cimarron, listening to the wind start up in the cottonwoods, and then he got up and made coffee in the percolator June had bought in 1971 and drank it standing at the kitchen window, watching the sky go from black to gray to the color of a peach.
On the kitchen table, under the salt shaker, there was a manila envelope. It was thick. It was so thick, in fact, that the clasp would not quite close, and he had wrapped a rubber band around it twice to keep it shut.
He did not open it. He did not need to. He had been over what was inside it so many times in the last three weeks that he could have recited it with his eyes closed. But he looked at it for a long time while he drank his coffee, and once, when the wind banged a shutter somewhere on the side of the house, he reached out without thinking and put his hand flat on top of it, the way you put a hand on a dog that has startled in its sleep.
* * *
At five-thirty, he was in the truck.
The truck was a 1996 Ford F-250 that he had bought new and had driven, by the odometer, just under six hundred thousand miles, though the odometer had broken twice and he privately suspected the true number was closer to seven. It had been tan and brown once. Now it was mostly the color of Oklahoma. His granddaughter, Nora, had been after him for years to replace it, and had once, memorably, left a stack of brochures for new trucks on the passenger seat with sticky notes on the pages that said things like GRANDPA. AIR CONDITIONING THAT WORKS. and THIS ONE HAS A SEAT THAT DOESN'T HAVE A SPRING STICKING OUT OF IT. He had read them all, carefully, and then put them in the glove compartment, where they still were.
He drove to Woodward in the dawn with the window down and the radio off. The cattle auction opened at seven. He had forty-one head in the pens there, the last of the Whitcomb herd, black baldies and a few red ones, and he intended to watch them sell.