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"I won't go through his gate tonight."

She pulls back to look at me. "That's not what I asked you."

"It's what I'm giving you."

"Knox."

"You drew that mark on me so somebody besides you would know where that room is," I tell her. "Now somebody does. You don't get to put it on my arm and then tell me what to do with it."

She glares at me, and I hold her stare. After a while her shoulders come down, and she lets her head fall back against the headboard.

"You're impossible," she says.

"I'm a Hollister. You said so yourself."

One corner of her mouth lifts, the start of a smile she doesn't let finish.

I don't talk after that. Her breathing slows, and she tips sideways until her head rests against my chest. It gets heavier there a little at a time. When her hand slides off my forearm into her lap, she's asleep.

I stay a while anyway and watch the black window. All that's in the glass is the lamplit room, and me, with her asleep against me.

When I'm sure she won't wake, I ease out from under her and tuck a pillow against her where my chest was. She frowns in her sleep and turns her face into it.

I pull on socks, jeans, and a work shirt and button the cuffs down over the ink. I'm not washing it off. I take the pistol out of the dresser drawer, pick up my boots, and go to the kitchen in my sock feet.

I call Beckett. He answers before the phone finishes its first ring, which means he wasn't asleep either. "What?"

"Come sit in my kitchen. Bring your rifle."

He doesn't ask why. His truck comes up the drive from the main gate with the headlights off, and he lets himself in the back door with the code, rifle in one hand. He holds the arm on his grazed side tight against his body.

He takes one look at me at my own table with my boots on and a pistol in my waistband, and his jaw sets.

"Where are you going this time of night?"

"For a drive."

"Knox."

"She's asleep in my bed. If she wakes up, you tell her I kept my word." I stand and settle the pistol. "If she wants to go back to the guest house, you walk her over and sit on that porch till I'm home. Anybody comes up the drive, you're between them and her."

Beckett sits down with the rifle across his knees. He doesn't ask again. He already knows I won't tell him.

She asked me not to go out there. I promised her something smaller, and she knew it when I said it. When she finds out where I spent the night, she'll call it a lawyer's promise, and she'll be right. I'll stand there and take it.

I go out the back door, and the lock catches behind me without a sound.

Down at the main gate, Hector climbs out of his truck and swings the gate open for me. He doesn't ask where I'm going either.

The highway west of town is empty this late. The vineyards go by black on both sides, and every so often a winery sign glows in somebody's landscape lights with nobody on the road to read it.

Whitlock Cellars sits back off the north side of the highway, up a long caliche drive. Limestone pillars hold a steel gate across the bottom of it, with a sign beside it lettered for the tour buses: WHITLOCK CELLARS. Up the drive, the building stretches low and long against the hill, made of the same pale stone, with security lights burning along its walls. Partway up the drive, an equipment shed stands under a pole light, with a couple of tractors parked in front of it.

I pass the front gate without slowing. Farther west, my headlights catch a second gate closing off a gravel road that comes down out of the vines.

A little way past it, a ranch road cuts off to the north. I back my truck into the turnout with the lights off. The cedar growing in the ditch beside the road hides most of it from the highway. From here I can see the gate, the front of the building, and the hill behind it.

It's two in the morning. I kill the engine and roll both windows down. The pistol comes out of my waistband and goes on the seat.