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"Agreed," Torres says.
"Gil Strackbein's stock truck may be what took Hector," I tell Torres. "If Gil's hauling for Whitlock tomorrow night, the short way from Kerrville runs across the low-water crossing on the county road south of Kuhlmann's goat pens."
"My Ranger sits on that crossing," Torres says. "If Gil's truck comes through, she follows it at a distance and calls it in. Nobody stops it."
I unfold the county map, pick up the red pencil, and set my other hand on Whitlock's hill.
"Friday I stood on the loading dock behind Whitlock's kitchen," I tell them. "From there I looked down at the roll-up door at the foot of the hill, where the service road curls in below the west end of the building. Something lights that cellar. It might be the winery's power, and it might be something of its own. I want Beckett outside the fence at that end this afternoon, finding the meter and any generator before tomorrow."
"From the public side of the fence," Torres says. "Nobody touches any of it unless I say. If we cut their power, the dark might help us, or it might help them. They know that cellar with the lights off, and we don't."
"Delilah does," I say.
"She tells me what's down there, and I decide."
"I'll take the west end," Beckett says. "I've been wanting a look at it anyway."
Delilah takes the red pencil out of my hand without asking. She draws a box at the west end of the building.
"There's a door at the back of the barrel room," she says. "The bolt's on the barrel room side. The stairs go down into the hill, and one step near the bottom groans. The cells are along one side of the hall. The hall runs into the tunnel, and the tunnel comes out at that roll-up door. That's where the trailer sat waiting the night I ran." Her pencil stops. "When you come down those stairs, come fast. Anybody at the bottom will hear that step."
I let her draw it. She knows which step groans because she lay on that concrete for weeks listening to men's boots.
"I'd put Jesse on the pipe gate over the cattle guard on the ridge road," I tell Torres. "If anybody runs out the top of that hill, he comes out that way."
"Approved. He watches, and he calls my people. He doesn't stop anybody."
I'm texting Jesse his post when Torres goes on. "Raven rides with me," she says. "My San Antonio agent takes Raven's place watching the front gate."
"Audrey drives her to the front gate, lets her out, and keeps going," I say. "Nobody up there sees her car waiting. She parks on the shoulder farther down the highway with her engine running. When they bring Hector out, she goes back for him and drives him straight to the hospital in Fredericksburg."
"Approved," Torres says.
"And you?" Delilah asks me.
"I'll be on foot in the cedar at the turnout west of his service gate," I say. "It's public road, and from there I can see his front gate, the building, and the hill behind it. His men ran a spotlight over my hood at that turnout once, so this time your van parks down the ranch road out of sight. Give me binoculars and an earpiece on her wire."
"No rifle," Torres says. "And you don't go past that turnout until I say we go."
"The rifle stays home," I tell her.
Delilah looks up from the map. "If you come over that fence before Torres moves, Hector's dead, and so am I."
"I know," I say, and every muscle in my back goes tight.
Bo Hollister would have loaded a rifle and driven up that hill because somebody had taken a man off his place. He'd never have given one thought to whether Hector came out alive. More than once since I read that text, I've wanted to do exactly that.
"What's her word?" Torres asks. "If she wants out, she says one word, and we come in. Make it something she won't say by accident."
Delilah looks at me across the map.
"Bandera," she says.
It's the rodeo town where she sat on the arena fence at seventeen and watched me tape my riding hand. I gave her that word to stop anything I do to her. Now it's the word that brings Torres through Whitlock's gate.
"Bandera," Torres repeats. "Everybody hear it?"
Every voice in my kitchen says yes.
