So he lifted his hands from his knees.
It was a small movement. His two thin dark hands, which had been resting folded on the gray-beige fabric of his trousers, rose a few inches, palms down, and then turned slightly, opening, the way a man opens his hands when he is about to lay something on a table. And at the same time he leaned forward, just a little, his stooped shoulders coming away from the soft leather back of the chair, so that his face came up out of the young man's shadow and back into the clean white light from the ceiling. The finger was still there in front of his eyes. He leaned toward it as if it were not there at all.
And he said, calmly, plainly, in a voice that did not rise and did not hurry and did not leave one inch of room for argument, the way you might tell someone the time, or the weather, or the name of a street:
"I came to buy twenty Escalades."
There was a silence.
It was not a long silence. Half a second. Perhaps less. But it was the kind of silence that seems, to everyone inside it, to go on for a very long time. The kind of silence that comes after a glass is dropped on a stone floor, in the instant before it shatters.
Derek Lawson's finger was still pointing at the old man's face. It did not move. Nothing about him moved. He was still bent at the waist, still leaning over the leather chair, his shoulders still hunched, his face still flushed. But his face had stopped. All of it. Every muscle. As if someone had pressed pause.
And then his eyes went wide.
They went wide all at once, the brows shooting up toward his slicked-back hairline, the whites showing all the way around the irises, the pupils seeming to shrink to points. His jaw dropped. His mouth fell open, round and slack, and a sound came out of it, a sound that started somewhere down in his chest and came out high and cracked and incredulous, rising at the end like a question shouted down a well.
"Twenty?!"
Behind him, at the back of the showroom, three mouths fell open at exactly the same moment.
Tanner Voss, in his tight gray suit, the paperwork for the middle-aged woman's lease sliding forgotten out of his hand and fanning across the polished floor at his feet. Josh Kim, in his charcoal suit and dark green tie, his careful, quiet face gone completely blank, his lips parted, his eyes enormous behind his eyelashes. And Eli Brooks, in his black graduation suit with the sleeves too long, his round wire-rimmed glasses slipping down his nose, his clasped hands coming apart and hanging at his sides, his mouth a perfect astonished O.
The three of them stood there in a row against the back wall of the showroom, beneath the framed photographs of Cadillacs through the decades, like three figures in a painting, frozen, and stared.
And the old man in the leather chair looked up at Derek Lawson's stunned and gaping face, and smiled again. A real smile, this time. Warm, and wide, and just a little bit wicked, deepening every line in his dark weathered face, crinkling the corners of his eyes. And he nodded. Once. Slowly. A small, firm, unhurried nod, the beret dipping slightly on his silver hair.
"Twenty."
He said just the one word. Quiet. Certain. As if confirming an order of coffee.
And then, before Derek could say anything else, before Derek could even close his mouth, the old man went on, settling back a little into the leather armchair, his hands coming to rest again on his knees, his eyes never leaving Derek's face. He spoke slowly, clearly, laying each word down like a card on a table, and the last two words, he gave a weight that seemed to press the whole bright showroom flat.
"All black, and I'm paying in full."
Nobody moved. Nobody spoke.
Somewhere in the walls, the air conditioning hummed. The great round lights in the ceiling burned down on the gleaming floor, on the long row of Escalades and the black sports car at the end, on the three young men frozen against the back wall, on the tall salesman in the navy suit and the red tie, still bent at the waist, still pointing, his finger still hanging in the air in front of the old man's face, though it no longer seemed to be pointing at anything, his mouth still open, his eyes still wide.
On the walnut desk, in the little wooden tray beside the keyboard, two sets of car keys lay side by side, perfectly parallel, exactly where he had left them. One of them said ESCALADE PLATINUM — BLACK RAVEN.
The old man glanced down at them. Then he looked back up at Derek, and raised his eyebrows, very slightly, as if to say: well?