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Dutch only smirks. "Won't matter by morning."

"I figured they used her for bait," I tell Hector. "Go on. Walk out of here on your own feet."

I look at the boy in the straw hat. "You follow him with that rifle pointed at the ground, and you don't touch him."

The boy looks at Dutch. Dutch jerks his chin, and the boy climbs down and trails a few steps behind Hector.

Halfway down the drive, the boy stops and presses a remote on his belt. The steel gate swings open on its motor, and Hector limps the rest of the way alone.

Audrey's gray car comes fast along the highway shoulder from where she's been waiting and stops between the limestone pillars. She jumps out, gets Hector into the passenger seat, and never once looks up the hill. Her car pulls away toward Fredericksburg.

The boy presses the remote again, and the gate swings shut with a clank. He walks back up to the cart.

Hector is off this hill. Yesterday, with my father's marker on the table between us, I told Knox I trusted him to get Hector out and not one thing more. Audrey waiting down the highway with her engine running was his idea. Whatever happens next is up to Torres and me.

Dutch drops his cigar in the caliche and grinds it out with his boot. "Now you walk."

"Aren't you going to search me?"

He laughs, low and ugly. "Not out here where the highway can see. I'm going to search you myself downstairs, and I'm going to take my time."

My skin crawls, and I let him see it. If he thinks scared is all I am, he won't go looking for anything else.

We walk up the drive with Dutch a step behind my right shoulder and his hand resting on his pistol.

Last night I knelt on Knox's porch while the copy of my father's marker sat folded in his shirt pocket. This morning he laid his green ledger by my coffee, open to Ozzie's entry for the sale with his initials beside it. I told him to give it to Torres, and before noon he did, knowing it puts his illegal fight ring in front of a judge.

I'm still angry enough to shake, and I still want him close enough to touch. Neither one helps me on this drive, so I keep my eyes on the barrel room's back door.

The tasting room is dark, with the tour-bus lot empty and the chairs turned up on the patio tables. The low sun turns the vines gold.

"Where's Coleman?" I ask. "Hiding in his barrel room?"

"Downstairs. Waiting on you."

I spit on his boot. "Coleman always was a coward. He sends you up to fetch me and waits for me in a hole in the ground."

Dutch looks down at the spit on his boot and back up at me. "Keep talking. You'll be doing it on your knees soon enough."

I go to my knees for Knox because I choose to, and I'd do it again tonight. I will never kneel for another man as long as I live.

"Never again," I tell Dutch.

He pushes the back door open, and I walk in ahead of him.

The place is exactly the way I left it. Steel racks hold oak casks stacked in long aisles, and Whitlock's brand is burned into each barrel head. It's the circle and crook I drew on the inside of Knox's forearm.

Near the loading door stands a cooper's workbench, where the barrels get built and patched. Wooden mallets hang in a row on the wall above it. Beside the bench, an iron brazier stands on three legs, full of glowing coals. A long iron rod lies across its rim with the brand end buried in them. Somebody lit that fire for tonight.

The heavy door at the far end stands open. Past it, stone stairs go down into the hill.

"You going to bolt me in down there again?" I ask.

"Somebody has to. Last time, you were the one who slammed that bolt, with me on the wrong side of it."

Dutch shoves me toward the cooper's bench instead. He pulls the branding iron out of the coals and holds the end close to my face. The circle and crook glows orange, and the heat off it stings my cheek.

"That fire's lit for you," he says. "When Mr. Whitlock's done with you, I'll put his mark on you myself for Royce. You'll go in the ground wearing it."