So when the black Lincoln Town Car pulled up in the bus zone in front of the Sunflower at 7:14 that night, Danny's first thought, God help him, was that he should stand up straight, because that was Royce Hadley, and Royce Hadley might be his boss in a month.
* * *
Everyone in Merritt knew Royce Hadley the way everyone knows the weather. He was on the billboards out by the grain elevators, a big square-jawed man in a cowboy hat standing in front of a row of Cutlass Supremes under the words NOBODY OUTDEALS ROYCE. He was on Channel 12 out of Wichita at eleven o'clock, slapping the hood of a Silverado and promising to beat any price in the state of Kansas or he'd eat his hat, and once, in 1981, he had actually eaten a hat, a hat made of sheet cake, on the air, and people still talked about it. He owned the dealership and half of the car wash and the Hadley Arms apartments and the duplex on Ninth Street where Danny lived, although Danny's mother paid the rent to an office called Prairie Holdings and had never once seen him. He was president of the Downtown Development Authority. He was the reason, people said, that the new mall had been built at Westgate instead of on the empty rail yards by the river, because he'd owned the land at Westgate. Now he wanted the river, too. There had been an article in the Merritt Ledger in May with an architect's drawing of something called Riverside Square: a three-story bank building of mirrored glass, a drive-through with six lanes, and an enormous parking lot, all of it laid neatly over the block where the Sunflower now stood, the way you lay a sheet over furniture in a house nobody lives in anymore.
He got out of the Lincoln without waiting for the driver. There were three men with him and one woman. The men wore sport coats in July, and two of them had the pressed, faintly bored look of people from a bigger city who are being shown a small one. The woman was much younger than Royce and laughed at everything a half second before it was finished being said.
They did not go to the end of the line. They did not go to the ticket booth. Royce walked straight up the center of the lobby entrance, past the families and the teenagers and old Mr. and Mrs. Lindahl, who had been coming to the Saturday show since Truman, and through the outer doors, and across the lobby carpet with its pattern of interlocking sunflowers worn down to the weave in a path from the doors to the concession stand, and he stopped in front of Danny at the inner doors and said, "Five."
Danny looked at his hands. There were no tickets in them.
"Sir," Danny said, "the box office is out front. Mrs. Dunning can—"
"I know where the box office is, son." Royce smiled. It was the billboard smile, enormous and white, and up close it did not reach anywhere near his eyes. "These gentlemen are from Mid-Continent Partners in Wichita. We're having a look at the property. We're going to watch about twenty minutes of this picture so they can get a feel for the room, and then we're going to dinner. Five."
"It's—it's sold out, sir. The seven-thirty. There's people in line who—"
"Then it won't hurt anybody if five more stand in the back."
"Fire code," Danny said. He did not know where it came from. It was a thing Mrs. Dunning said. "We can't have people standing in the aisles. On account of the fire code."