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The twenty Escalades did not arrive all at once.
Four of them were already on the lot at Prestige Cadillac, in black, in the right trim. Six more came from a dealership in Schaumburg, on two car transporters, on the Thursday after the sale. Five came from Milwaukee the following Monday. And the last five came directly from the factory in Texas, on a long flatbed train and then a truck, eighteen days later, still wrapped in their white protective film, smelling of new leather and glue and the inside of a shipping container.
Derek Lawson was there for every one of them.
He came in early. Earlier than he had come in for years. Six o'clock, six-thirty, before the sun was up over the West Side, while the showroom was still dark and the great round lights in the ceiling were still off and the only sound in the building was the hum of the refrigerator in the break room. He let himself in through the service entrance at the back, which he had not used in twelve years, because he had always thought of it as the door for mechanics and delivery drivers and the people who emptied the trash. He went out to the lot where the black Escalades were parked in a row, gleaming in the gray dawn, and he went over every one of them. Inch by inch. Every panel, every seam, every piece of chrome, under a work light he borrowed from the service department, with a clipboard and a pen and a checklist he had written himself, three pages long. He opened every door and sat in every seat. He tested every switch, every button, every screen, every speaker, every vent, every light. He found a scratch on the rear quarter panel of the eleventh car, two inches long, so faint you could only see it at a certain angle in a certain light, and he took it to the body shop himself and stood there while they buffed it out. He found a seat heater that did not work in the fourteenth. He found a loose piece of trim on the dashboard of the seventeenth. He found a tiny chip in the windshield of the nineteenth, the size of a grain of rice, and the dealership had to order a whole new windshield from Detroit, and Derek waited for it, and watched them put it in.
The mechanics in the service bay did not know what to make of him at first. The senior salesman, the one with the slicked-back hair and the red tie and the plaque on the general manager's wall, who had never once in twelve years said good morning to any of them, was suddenly in their bay at seven in the morning in his shirtsleeves, asking them questions. How do you check this. What does this light mean. Is this normal. They answered him warily at first, and then less warily, and by the second week, an older mechanic named Hector Ruiz, who had worked at Prestige since the day it opened and had a tattoo of the Virgin of Guadalupe on one forearm and a tattoo of the Chicago Cubs logo on the other, brought him a cup of coffee from the pot in the bay and said, you're doing the Booker cars, right? And Derek said yes. And Hector nodded slowly and said, my cousin drives for Booker. Eleven years. Best job he ever had. Old man paid for his daughter's braces. And then went back to the car he was working on.
Derek stood there in the service bay with the coffee in his hand and thought about that for a long time.
He did not sell very many cars in those weeks. He did not have much time. But he sold some. And he sold them differently.
He did not decide anymore. That was the first thing. He did not stand at his desk and look at the people coming in through the glass doors and read them in one second and a half. He went out to them. All of them. He went out on the lot in the rain, the way, apparently, a skinny young man in a cheap suit used to do twelve years ago, which he could not remember. He went out to a woman in a nurse's uniform who pulled up in a twelve-year-old minivan with a dented door, and asked her name, and her name was Bernadette, and she was looking for something safe for her son who had just gotten his license, and Derek sold her a used sedan off the back lot, a good one, with low miles, at a fair price, and she hugged him. He went out to two teenage boys in hoodies who had walked in off the street to look at