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"He was down here with them," she says. "When Dutch got a text that headlights were coming, Whitlock sent his partners upstairs to leave by the front. Then he picked the account book up off the table and followed them."

"What's in it?"

"I don't know. It lay open in front of all three of them with a pen across the page. Whatever's in it, he couldn't leave it for Torres to find."

"He's going to burn it," I tell her. "That brazier by the cooper's bench is burning. Nobody was near it when we came in."

Delilah's mouth goes flat. "He hid in the racks and let Torres's people walk right past him," she says. "I'd bet he's waiting for all of you to come down here before he goes near that fire."

Torres walks over from her lead agent. Her eyes go to my hands first and then to my holster, where the pistol is still snapped in.

"We'll talk about your hands," she says. "And that pistol."

"It never came out of the holster."

"I noticed. You beat a man bloody in front of half my team, and that goes in a report I can't bury."

"Whitlock has the partners' account book," I tell her. "Delilah figures he's hiding in the racks till you're all down here. Then it goes in that brazier by the loading door."

Torres heads back up the stairs and gets on her radio at the top. "Everybody to the loading door."

Delilah goes past me toward the stairs with Dutch's keys in her fist. My hand comes up to catch her arm, and I put it back down.

At my kitchen table yesterday, she told me what she trusts me with. 'I trust you to get Hector off that hill. That's all I trust you with right now.'

Deciding where she goes was never on that list. Keeping her alive on the way is my job, whether she handed it to me or not.

"Delilah."

She turns on the bottom step and looks back at me.

"You face him," I tell her. "I stand between you and his hands while you do it."

She doesn't argue. She takes the stairs.

I take them right beside her. At the top, I can see every aisle she has to cross and every door he could run for. Agents hold the front door. Torres put more on the back door, outside it.

Down at the loading door, gray smoke is rising off the brazier, out of sight of anybody holding the back door from outside.

Torres is already moving down the main aisle with her pistol up, and her people come out of the far racks behind her with their rifles leveled.

Delilah heads straight for the smoke. I walk half a step ahead of her on her right. Anything he throws hits me first, and I keep us wide of the agents coming down that aisle.

"Hold there, both of you," Torres says. "My people take him."

Delilah stops at the end of the last rack, where she can see the brazier, and I stop with her. She stands at my shoulder and watches Torres's people close on him from both sides.

Through the smoke, Whitlock straightens up with the account book open in his hands. Torn pages curl into flame on the coals, and the end of his branding iron still sits in them, glowing red.

He looks past the rifles, straight at Delilah, and he doesn't run.

19

DELILAH

"The fourth chair sat empty tonight," Coleman Whitlock says.

He ignores every rifle pointed at him. He says it to me, across the barrel room, in the same quiet voice that came out of the dark corner of the cigar room on transfer nights.