Chapter 21
Chapter twenty-one
The Cowboy Way
Jace
The arena feels different tonight.
Not bigger, not louder, not more or less anything I can put a precise word to. Just different in the way that places feel different when you understand what they mean. The weight of every decision that led you to this spot on this night with this thing riding on what happens next.
I've been in hundreds of arenas.
I have never been in this one before when it is like this.
I walk the perimeter first. I always do that before a ride. I let my body move through the familiar routine while my mind does the other work.
Scanning the grounds with the layered attention I've developed over these past weeks. Not just the rider's eye that reads a space for danger. The other eye, the one that has been trained by necessity to see the things people don't want seen.
The crowd is big tonight, bigger than the other two rodeos. The kind of turnout that happens when word gets out that someone will be crowned Champion tonight.
I spot my brothers without looking for them. The awareness of each other in a space so ingrained, it operates below conscious thought.
Brooks is near the south entrance, positioned where he can see the stock contractor area and the equipment shed at the same time, his phone in his hand and his expression carrying the focused calm of a man who has done his homework and is ready for the test.
Luke is on the far side of the grounds near the officials table, close enough to the record keepers to hear anything that needs to be heard.
Wade is near the chutes. Wade has never in his life positioned himself anywhere other than the place closest to whatever is about to go wrong so he can be the first one to meet it.
Their wives and families are in the stands looking nervous, knowing what is going on, with the exception of Quinn who is on duty tonight. Dressed in her police uniform and watching everyone and everything.
My brothers don’t look at me when I pass.
They don't need to.
We covered everything this morning. Every contingency, every angle, and every possible move Dusty might make when he understands that the net has been closing around him since before he took that evidence and felt safe about it. There is nothing left to communicate that hasn't already been said.
Tonight we execute.
I stop near the entry gate and look out at the arena floor, the dirt freshly raked, the lights cutting hard through the evening air, the chutes lined up along the far side with the particular contained violence of animals that know what's coming and are already responding to it.
I know what's coming too.
And for the first time since this started, I am not two steps behind it.
I am exactly where I need to be.
Wade finds me first.
That's not a surprise. Wade has always operated on the principle that standing still and waiting for something to come to you is a waste of time when you can close the distance.
He comes around the side of the chute area with the particular energy he carries when he's been patient longer than feels natural.
"Dusty's here," he says, low and without preamble, falling into step beside me the way he's been doing since we were kids. "Arrived about twenty minutes ago. He's working the stock contractor area, talking to handlers, doing exactly what he always does like nothing is different about tonight."
"Good," I say.
"Colt's here too," Wade continues. "Far side of the grounds near the sponsor tents.
He's been making the rounds, shaking hands, doing the champion thing.
" He pauses just long enough to make the next part land with the weight he intends it to.
"He looked right at me and smiled like we were old friends. "
"He doesn't know what we have," I answer.
"No," Wade says. "But he knows something is different. I can see it under the smile." He glances at me sideways. "You know what you're doing tonight?"
"I know exactly what I'm doing tonight."
He nods once, the kind of nod that means he believes me and is choosing to stand behind that belief completely.
Wade does not extend that kind of trust easily or automatically even to the people he loves most.
Brooks appears from the direction of the south entrance, sliding into our path with the smooth unhurried movement of a man who planned exactly where he was going to be and arrived there on schedule. That is the only way Brooks McCallister has ever done anything in his life.
"Financial records are with the investigator," he says, addressing both of us but looking at me.
"Everything I pulled from the circuit accounts over the past four years, the discrepancies, the transfers, the accounts that received money they can't legitimately account for.
All of it is documented and in the right hands.
" He holds my gaze. "Whatever happens tonight, the paper trail exists independently of anything else. The money tells the story."
Something in my chest loosens at that, not completely, not enough to drop my guard, but enough to confirm that the foundation we've been building under this is solid and doesn't depend entirely on tonight going perfectly.
"Luke?" I ask.
"Already at the officials table," Brooks says. "He found two of the draw sheets from the Caldwell run in the regional records archive, the actual physical copies that were never digitized and never cleaned up because nobody thought to look for them in a paper file from four years ago."
He pauses. "The draws weren't random, Jace. Luke ran the numbers this morning. The statistical probability of those particular bulls being paired with those particular riders by chance is essentially zero."
I absorb that, feeling the weight of it settle into the larger picture, another piece clicking into place with the particular solidity of something that has been true all along and is only now becoming visible.
"He's going to try something tonight," I say to them because a man who has spent twenty years building something and can feel it coming apart doesn't go quietly into a situation he can't control without attempting one last move.
"He's going to realize at some point that the net is closer than he thought and he's going to move."
"Let him," Wade says, the absolute unworried certainty in those two words, is so completely Wade.
I feel something shift in me that has nothing to do with the investigation and everything to do with the specific comfort of standing between two people who have known me my whole life and would do anything within their power to make sure I walk out of this arena the same way I walked in.
I look at both of them, Brooks with his strategy and his certainty.
The quiet formidable intelligence he brings to every problem he decides is worth solving.
Wade with his directness and his loyalty and the absolute immovability of a man who has decided where he stands and cannot be shifted from it.
"Where's Riley?" I ask.
"At the rail," Brooks says. "Lane Carter is with her." He pauses, something shifting in his expression toward something warmer than his usual operational mode. "She looks steady, Jace."
That's Riley, steady on the outside. The fact that she is standing at that rail tonight instead of somewhere safe and far from all of this tells me more about where we are than anything else that has happened between us.
She chose to be here.
Same as me.
I straighten and look out toward the chutes, toward the arena floor and the lights and the crowd that doesn't know what tonight actually is underneath the surface of what it looks like.
"Alright," I say.
My brothers fall in beside me without being asked, one on each side, and the three of us walk toward the chutes together, shoulder to shoulder, without ceremony and without hesitation.
The cowboy way.
My draw is a bull called Undertow.
I know the name, know the reputation, know the particular brand of violence this animal brings into the arena the way some bulls bring power or speed or unpredictability.
Undertow brings all three simultaneously and has the record to prove it, seventeen qualified rides in four years of competition and forty one riders who didn't make the buzzer.
That’s a ratio that would concern most people. I have been thinking about that since the draw sheet went up this morning.
He's the right bull for tonight.
Not because he's manageable, not because the odds favor me, because there is something fitting about the hardest ride of the season being the one that matters most. The one where everything I have learned is going to count. The choices I have made over these past weeks either hold up or they don’t.
I climb the rails of the chute and look down at him. The broad dark back and the coiled energy of an animal that has already decided what it's going to do the second that gate opens.
I feel the familiar compression of the world that happens in this moment. Everything outside the chute falls away until there is only this. The animal beneath me, the rope in my hand, and the eight seconds between where I am and where I need to be.
I settle over him and feel him respond, the shift, the tension and the sideways push of a bull that doesn't accept weight without registering his objection to it.
I adjust, finding my center, making the small corrections that can't be taught and can only be learned by sitting on enough animals that your body starts to understand what your mind is still processing.
I have been watching the gate handler since I climbed the rails.
That's not normally something I would have thought to do four months ago. I watched the gate stick at the second rodeo and I watched what it did to the rider who wasn't ready for it.
My brothers and I sat at a kitchen table and mapped out every move Dusty Rhodes has made and every move he is likely to make when he feels the net closing.