"Okay," Derek said quietly. "I understand."
"No, you don't." Rick turned in the seat and looked at him. "Because I didn't call. Because about five minutes after I went in there, Calvin Booker knocked on my door and came in and shut it behind him and sat down in my chair, the one in front of my desk, and asked me, very politely, not to."
Derek turned his head and stared at him.
"He asked me not to fire you," said Rick Halloran. "He said, I know what you're thinking, Mr. Halloran, and I'd ask you not to. He said, that young man is in some kind of trouble, I could see it on him, and firing him today won't fix whatever it is, it'll only make it worse. He said, I'd consider it a personal favor." Rick shook his head slowly. "A personal favor. From Calvin Booker. After you did that to him. In front of everybody." He was quiet for a moment. "So you're not fired. Not today. That's his doing, not mine. The thirtieth is still the thirtieth. I still need you on the fairway. But you're not fired today." He reached for the door handle. "He's leaving at three. Parked out front. The gray sedan with the dent in the bumper. I'd go talk to him if I were you. I don't know what you'd say. But I'd go."
He got out of the car, and opened his umbrella, and went back across the lot through the rain, and the door of the service bay banged shut behind him.
Derek sat there. He looked at the sign on the wall. EMPLOYEES MUST WASH HANDS BEFORE RETURNING TO WORK.
He thought: a personal favor.
He did not understand it. He could not make it make sense. He had spent twelve years reading people, deciding what they were worth in one second and a half, and he could not read this. An old man he had insulted, humiliated, pointed at, dismissed, in front of everyone, had walked into Rick Halloran's office and asked Rick not to fire him. Why? What did the old man want? What was the angle? There was always an angle. In twelve years, Derek had never met a person who did not have an angle.
He thought about it for a long time. And then, sitting in his car in the rain behind the service bay, it occurred to him, slowly and with a kind of dawning horror, that perhaps there was no angle. Perhaps the old man had simply looked at him, and seen a man who was frightened, and decided to be kind.
It was the most frightening thing he had ever thought.
* * *
At five minutes to three the rain stopped, and the clouds over the West Side began to pull apart, and a long low slant of afternoon sunlight came through the gap and lit up the wet parking lot in front of Prestige Cadillac so that every puddle on the asphalt blazed white and gold.
The gray sedan was parked at the far end of the customer lot, near the street, beside a lamppost. It was eight years old and the paint on its hood had faded in the sun and there was, as Rick Halloran had said, a dent in its rear bumper the size of a dinner plate. It looked like the kind of car a retired schoolteacher would drive. Derek had walked past it that morning on his way in from the employee lot and not even noticed it was there.
He was standing beside it when the old man came out.
He had been standing there for twenty minutes. He had thought about going inside, about walking across the showroom floor to Eli Brooks's desk at the far end, where he could see through the big glass windows the old man and his granddaughter and Eli and Josh and Tanner and, for a while, a man in a gray suit with a camera, all gathered around in a little cluster, laughing at something. He had thought about it and he had not been able to make himself do it. So instead he had walked around the side of the building and across the lot and come to stand beside the gray sedan with the dent in its bumper and waited, the way he had seen the old man wait in the leather chair that morning, with his hands folded in front of him.
He was not very good at waiting. He had never had to be.