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Vine rows climb the hill behind the building in long dark lines until the security lights give out. On the west end, the lights along the back wall show a strip of caliche curling down behind the building and out of sight.

Delilah said the tunnel comes out on a service road below the building. If that strip of caliche runs down to the gravel road and the second gate I passed, the trucks never have to use the front drive.

From that hill to my back barn is a long way on foot through cedar and barbed wire. She walked every step of it with cracked ribs and a knife in her fist.

Somewhere inside that building, at the back of the barrel room, there's a door. Stone stairs go down into the hill behind it. I could be over that steel gate and through the barrel room before anybody up there knew I was coming.

My hand is on the handle of my truck door, and I don't remember reaching for it. I want to be down those stairs worse than I've wanted anything in my life.

If I go in, Delilah's right. Whitlock hears me coming, and by sunup there's nothing under that hill but bleach and empty cells.

Harlan's dead, but I don't know yet who's wearing his badge, or who's paying the man wearing it. Without that cellar, all she's got is a voice she heard through a rubber mask. Whitlock has a brass plaque in the church vestibule that says he paid for the roof, and every juror in this county has walked past it.

I take my hand off the door handle and put both palms flat on my thighs.

The rage is still there, steady. Most times my temper gets this far, somebody ends up on the ground. This time I hold it, because she drew that mark on my arm and trusted me with it.

Once a bull hung me up by my riding hand and dragged me the length of the arena before the bullfighters could get me loose. That was easier than this.

I sit with the engine off and watch the gate. Sometime after that, a spotlight comes on behind the building. A pickup rolls down the gravel road from the vines toward the service gate, slow, running the fence line. The beam swings across the vine rows and the ditches, then out over the highway.

I slide down in the seat with my hand on the pistol. The beam crosses the cedar in front of my truck, white through the branches, and slides over my hood. It doesn't stop.

The pickup turns at the service gate and crawls back up toward the building, and the spotlight goes dark.

Plenty of ranches run a light along their fences at night for thieves and drunks. A winery with tractors, equipment, and a barrel room full of wine has more to steal than most.

That truck never went near the equipment shed by the front drive. It ran the gravel road from the vines to the service gate and back, and nothing else. Whoever sent it out cares more about who comes up that service road than about anything else on the place. That isn't proof of anything. It's one more thing I'm going to watch.

Delilah said the cells emptied out and filled up again. If there are women under that hill tonight, waiting on a warrant does nothing for them. What they need is somebody who knows when the next truck backs into that tunnel. I'm coming back to watch for it, more nights than this one.

Not from this turnout, though, and not from a truck at all. That spotlight already slid over my hood once, and Whitlock's men know my truck. Next time I'll leave it out of sight down the ranch road and watch from the cedar on foot. Some nights it'll be Beckett or Hector out there instead of me.

Every couple of weeks, a Devil's Acre truck backs up to Whitlock's restaurant kitchen with a load of beef. If I cut him off now, he'll know Delilah talked before the week is out. The beef keeps going to that kitchen on schedule, and I'll keep cashing his checks. He'll have no reason to think anything changed. I'd rather swallow that than hand him a warning.

I've been pressing my thumb hard into my sleeve, right over the ink, without noticing. I take my thumb away.

I sit until the stars fade. The sky goes gray over the hills to the east, then pink, and the vine rows turn green and gold in the first light. The security lights along the building click off.

A crew truck pulls up at the front gate, and men in straw hats climb out and walk up into the rows. Nobody in that crew looks like he knows what's under the barrel room. Maybe none of them do.

I start the truck, pull out onto the highway, and take my phone out at the first stop sign.

Every marker that ever crossed my table is in Ozzie's old ledgers, and so is that page with the coffee stain on the corner. Ozzie wrote that line himself.

I haven't asked to see those ledgers since she disappeared. I type a text to Ozzie and send it.

Pull the old books. Two years back.

9

DELILAH

Knox comes in his back door with the sun just clearing the cedar behind him, still in last night's work shirt, unshaven, his cuffs buttoned down over the circle and crook I inked on the inside of his forearm. "You told Beckett to tell me you kept your word," I say.

I've been at his kitchen table since before the sky went gray. I woke alone in his bed, holding a pillow where his chest should have been, and found Beckett at this table with a rifle across his knees. Beckett walked out the minute he heard the truck. He didn't need to tell me where Knox had been. Knox wouldn't leave his brother guarding me all night with a rifle over an errand.

"I did keep it," Knox says. "I never went through his gate."