"Hold it right there! San Francisco Police! Put your hands over your head!"

Instead, thinking it was either Juhle or some friends that he'd talked into hassling him for fun, Hunt spread his hands and started to take a step back toward them. "What are you…?"

"I said over your head!"

"He's reaching…!"

Now suddenly in a rush they came at him, one of the guys hitting him high and hard, manhandling him backward, stunning him before he could even react.

"Jesus! Hey! What the…!"

Then they were both on him, complete professionals who knew how to take a man down in a hurry and had obviously done it many times before. One of them, getting Hunt's hands behind him as they rolled him over into the wet grass; the other, with a knee in his kidneys, one hand squeezing on the back of his neck while the other hand patted him down, found the gun tucked into his belt, freed it from its holster.

"Well, well, well," he heard. He looked up into Shiu's slightly puzzled features. Hunt's arms got jerked back nearly out of their sockets, and as the handcuffs snicked on one wrist, then the other, Shiu bound him from behind.

Hunt still had a knee on his spine, a hand at the back of his neck. Still struggling, he managed a few words. "Shiu, it's me, Wyatt Hunt. Knock it off. You're making a mistake!"

"You made the mistake," the other voice said, "when you didn't put your hands up."

Grunting against the pressure on his neck, Hunt spit out the words. "I've got a license for the gun,". "Check my wallet, back right."

"I know who you are," Shiu said. "Just calm down and we'll sort this out." But the pressure on his back and neck never let up. Hands plucked the wallet from his pocket, the flashlight's beam danced over the manicured lawn. For a few seconds, a chorus of heavy breathing framed the night, but no one spoke.

Shiu finally said, "What are you doing here, Hunt?"

The knee came off his back, the hand off his neck. His assailant straightened up quickly and backed away. The flashlight beam shined in Hunt's face.

He rolled onto his side, blinked against the light. "You want to undo these cuffs?"

"Not just yet," the voice said. "I asked you a question. What are you doing here?"

Hunt gave them an answer he thought they'd like. "I'm helping out Devin," he said.

It didn't go the way Hunt planned.

For whatever reason, most probably because Juhle had decided to get some uninterrupted sleep before he went in early on a Saturday morning, he had his phone unplugged when Shiu called to give him the news.

Shiu and Al Poggio, the other cop in on the bust, were part of a group of about a dozen homicide inspectors who put in serious off-duty time for the Manions. In a city where policemen augmented their salaries by serving as rent-a-cops for everything from sports events to business conventions, from fashion shows to grand openings, the best job going was this kind of private security work. And hence, it was reserved for the elite such as homicide and select other senior inspectors. Paying fifty dollars per hour, the duties were laughably light and typically included nothing more than several hours per shift of television viewing-closed circuit, cable, and network.

When Juhle didn't answer his telephone, neither Shiu nor Poggio were tempted to free Hunt from the cuffs. It was greatly to their advantage to show that they had responded to an actual threat to the client's security from time to time, and if that threat were exacerbated by the inherent danger of a concealed weapon, so much the better. The Manions were paying top dollar to keep their home safe, and if there was never a legitimate threat to that safety, they might be tempted to consider cutting back on their preparedness-and their security forces.

Under no circumstances were Shiu and Poggio going to let this incident end without an official report of some kind. Hunt's new Sig Sauer P232 was not the weapon listed on his concealed weapons permit, and that was all they needed. So they called for a squad car to pick up their suspect and take him back to the local station for questioning.

Shiu, of course, knew all about Hunt's involvement with Juhle, but he'd been very much on edge and chafing all day-in fact for the past several days-under Juhle's not-so-subtle ridicule. Telling him to exert his authority at the lab. Joking about the San Quentin hamburger stand. Not funny. Well, Shiu would see how funny Devin would think this was-Wyatt Hunt behind bars overnight. Trespassing. In possession of an unregistered weapon.

Shiu closed his phone and walked back to where Poggio stood with Hunt. "What we do is, if we're looking for something," Poggio was saying, "we get a warrant based on probable cause, signed by a judge. Maybe you've heard something about this? So given that, maybe you could tell us what you were doing?"

"I've been working on the Palmer/Rosalier case and I had some questions I wanted to ask the Manions," Hunt said. "I was out here in the area, anyway, and I figured I would see if they were home." He turned to Shiu. "You know I'm on this. Tell him."

Shiu shook his head. "I know you've been working with Dev, sure, but I don't know anything about what you're doing here, and Dev's not answering his phone, so it doesn't look like your lucky night. What are you doing here, since we're talking?"

"I wanted to have a word with the Manions."

Poggio chuckled. "That's good. Except, you notice, they don't seem to be home. So you just happened to be passing by and were going to knock on the door? This time of night?"

Hunt lifted his shoulders. "I wanted to see if any lights were on, maybe look in the garages."

Shiu said, "That's funny. We've got you on videotape an hour ago ringing the doorbell that time, too. And you've been parked here in the street since before that. You think they showed up while you were sitting out in front and maybe you just missed them?"

To which Hunt could make no response that wouldn't dig him in deeper.

In another minute or two, the squad car pulled up. As they finally unlocked the handcuffs, each man took one of Hunt's arms and together they stuffed him into the backseat, slamming the door locked behind him. Shiu pulled the driver aside. "You can write it up as a twelve-oh-twenty-five"-concealed weapon violation-"but don't send him downtown or he'll just bail out. Keep him at the station until the next shift shows up in another hour, then we'll be down to talk to him."

Mickey Dade was a serious food-and-wine guy. When Hunt had called him earlier in the night asking him to drive up to wine country, if he'd realized that this was the weekend of the Napa Wine Auction or, as they were calling it this year, Auction Napa Valley-the Holy Grail of American haute everything-he'd have told his boss he wouldn't have missed it for the world.

In celebration of the day, all of the great local restaurants were going to have special tasting menus, some available at prices affordable to the hoi polloi. There'd be grills set up in parking lots, world-class chefs roasting spring lamb and quail and asparagus, oysters and sausages and eggplant, the air redolent with herbs and mustard and smoke from vine cuttings.

So Mickey had made his three hundred and fourteen dollars, plus fifty-one in tips on his regular shift, which ended at two in the morning. Dropping his cab off at the dispatch house, he picked up his own used Camaro, and then, sick of fog and not remotely interested in sleep, he pointed the car north on 101 and took it over the Golden Gate Bridge, by JV's Salon in Mill Valley, then past Vanessa Waverly's home in Novato. Turning east on 37, he averaged eighty-two miles per hour until he got to the Napa/Sonoma turnoff at 121, then jammed it up over the Carneros grade and onto Highway 29 in just a little over twenty minutes. Forty-eight minutes, all told, a new personal best.