Derek's finger came down first. It came down slowly, as if it belonged to someone else, and hung at his side. Then the rest of him straightened, by degrees, the way a man straightens after a blow to the stomach, until he was standing upright beside the leather armchair, very tall and very still, with his mouth still slightly open and his face draining, in a long slow tide, from red to white.
His mind was racing. It was racing so fast that it was not really thinking at all, only spinning, like a wheel in mud. Twenty Escalades. Twenty. The top-trim Escalade on the floor started at a hundred and eight thousand dollars before options. The fully loaded Platinum, the Black Raven on the key tag in his tray, was a hundred and twenty-nine. Twenty of them. Two million dollars. More. Two and a half, with options and tax. Paid in full. Derek did not even know what the commission on a deal like that would be. Nobody at Prestige Cadillac had ever written a deal like that. Nobody at any dealership he had ever worked at had ever written a deal like that. It was not a sale. It was a fleet contract. It was the kind of thing that happened at corporate headquarters, in boardrooms, between people in very expensive suits with lawyers.
It was not the kind of thing that happened on a Tuesday morning with an old man in a beret and loafers with no socks.
And yet some part of him, the part that had sold two thousand cars, the small cold voice far at the back of his head that he had stopped listening to three months ago, was saying, very quietly and very clearly, that the old man was telling the truth. It was in the voice. It was in the eyes. It was in the way he had said paying in full, like a man who had said it many times before and had never once failed to do it.
Derek opened his mouth. What came out was not words. It was a kind of dry click at the back of his throat. He closed his mouth, swallowed, opened it again.
"Sir," he said. His voice came out high and strange, not his own. "Sir, I. I apologize. I didn't. I had no idea. I've had a very difficult morning and I. If you'll give me just one moment. I'd be more than happy to. We can absolutely. Let me just." He did not know what he was saying. He reached for the keys in the wooden tray, the black Escalade Platinum, as if they were a life preserver. "Let me show you the Platinum. It's right here on the floor. Black Raven. It's our top trim. Every option. We can go through the specs together, and I can call our fleet department, and we can talk about—"
"Mr. Lawson," said the old man.
Derek stopped.
The old man had not raised his voice. He had not changed his expression. He was sitting back in the leather armchair with his hands on his knees and his head tilted slightly, the way a man listens to a radio playing a song he is not sure he likes. He looked at the keys in Derek's hand. Then he looked at Derek.
"I've seen the Platinum," he said. "I've been sitting next to it for fifty minutes. It's a very nice car." He paused. "I'll be buying it from that young man over there."
He lifted one thin dark hand from his knee and pointed, with two fingers, past Derek's shoulder, across the showroom floor, to the back wall, beneath the framed photographs. To the three young salesmen standing in a frozen row. To the one on the right. The skinny one in the black suit with the sleeves too long and the round wire-rimmed glasses slipping down his nose, whose mouth was still open.
"Eli," said the old man. "Would you come here, please?"
Eli Brooks did not move. He did not seem able to. He stood against the back wall with his hands hanging at his sides and stared at the old man with an expression of total, uncomprehending terror, as if he had been called to the front of a classroom to solve an equation in a language he did not speak. Beside him, Tanner Voss turned his head very slowly and looked at Eli, and then at Josh Kim, and then back at the old man, his own mouth still hanging open.
"Eli," the old man said again, more gently. "It's all right. Come here, son."