Page 110

In his left hand, he holds the partners' account book open over the brazier.

Torn pages curl black on the coals around the head of his branding iron. The brand on its end, a circle with a shepherd's crook standing up through it, glows red in the fire. The iron's handle sticks out over the rim, wrapped in a rag.

Beside the brazier stands the cooper's bench, the scarred oak workbench where the barrels get repaired, with a row of wooden mallets lying along its back edge.

"Four men sat in my cigar room the night you ran," he says. "You listened to everything down there, so I imagine you noticed who stayed home tonight. His name is on a page I haven't fed to this fire yet. And the marker your daddy signed is tucked in here with it."

"Set the book on the bench, Mr. Whitlock," Torres says, her pistol leveled at his chest. "Step back from the fire."

He doesn't look at her. He pinches another page between his right thumb and finger and rips it loose. It flutters down into the brazier and goes up in a yellow flare.

"Your people can shoot me, Agent," he says. "They can't pull a page back out of the coals."

Whitlock has backed into the corner by the loading door, with the brazier in front of him and the cooper's bench along his right side.

Torres and her agents stand beyond the bench and the brazier. To reach him, they'd have to go over the bench or knock the brazier aside, and the book would be burning before they got there. Nobody moves.

The only open way to him is the end of the last rack, where I wait with Dutch's keys in my right fist. Knox has shifted to my left and half a step ahead of me, between me and Whitlock's right hand, the one nearest the iron.

"Walk away, Delilah," Whitlock says. "Go home to Devil's Acre with your Hollister, and these pages stay in my hands. Nobody in Fredericksburg ever has to read your daddy's name next to mine."

On my knees on the cigar room floor, I learned to listen for what those men left out, because that told me what was coming next. I listen to Whitlock the same way.

He's offered to hide my daddy's name. He hasn't asked Torres for one thing for himself, not a deal and not a way out of this room. All he's done is talk while he tears pages out of the back of that book and feeds them to the fire.

He isn't bargaining with me. He's buying time to burn it, and every second I stand here listening, another page of evidence turns to ash.

His right hand leaves the pages and slides down toward the rag on the iron's handle.

Earlier tonight, Dutch pulled that same iron out of this fire and held the glowing brand close enough to my face that I felt the heat on my cheek.

Ahead of me on my left, Knox's weight shifts onto the balls of his feet. That's how he stands in his ring when a man across from him dips his shoulder to throw. He's watching the same hand.

Whitlock has held that book over the coals this whole time so he can drop it the second he goes for the iron. When his fingers touch the rag, I go for the book.

"Delilah, hold!" Torres shouts.

I don't hold. Knox moves when I move and stays ahead of me. I come in on Knox's right, for the brazier.

Whitlock lets the book fall onto the coals and yanks the iron out of the fire. He swings the glowing end at my face.

Knox catches Whitlock's forearm halfway through the swing. He clamps both hands around it and slams the arm down across the cooper's bench.

Whitlock's arm hits the oak with a thud I feel through my sneakers. The iron jumps out of his fingers and clangs onto the floor in a spray of sparks.

The book lies on the coals, and its leather cover is starting to smoke. I shove my left hand into the brazier and grab it by the spine.

The heat sears my fingertips. I yank the book out with flames running along the edges of the pages and pull it against my chest.

Whitlock's free hand, his left, catches the cover. He hauls the book off my chest, and he nearly tears it out of my burned fingers.

I let Dutch's keys fall, snatch a mallet off the bench with my right hand, and bring it down on Whitlock's knuckles where they grip the cover.

Bone cracks under the wood. Whitlock screams, high and thin, and his hand springs open.

I drop the mallet. I step back with the book against my chest and slap its burning edges against my hip until the flames go out.

All of it happens before the nearest agent gets one knee up on the cooper's bench.