Chapter 2
COLT
Ishouldn't have told her about Thornton.
The thought circles while the medic stitches the cut above my eye in the trailer behind the chutes. I let him do it because the bleeding is getting in my way. But while he works, my mind is still standing in the dirt behind the stock pens, watching a journalist plant her boots and refuse to flinch.
I told her too much. Thornton Livestock. The juiced bulls. Grant's name and the word murder, all of it handed over to a woman I met two hours ago because she stood in my space and didn't back down and the anger in her eyes was real enough to make me stupid.
"You need to ice this," the medic says, taping a butterfly strip over his work. "And you need a concussion protocol. That bull caught you on the—"
"I'm good."
"Mr. Holloway—"
"I said I'm good." I push off the exam table and duck out of the trailer before he can finish the speech.
The stitches pull when I move, a tight hot sting above my eyebrow that's going to throb like hell once the adrenaline wears off completely.
My riding hand is swelling around the knuckles where the rope torqued during the direction change, and there's a deep ache in my lower back that means I landed harder than I thought.
None of it matters. Pain is just the body keeping score, and I stopped caring about the score a long time ago.
I've heard the medic's speech before. Every medic on the circuit has some version of it.
You're going to get yourself killed. You ride like you want to die. Maybe talk to somebody.
Maybe. When talking to somebody brings Grant back.
The stock pens are quiet now.
I check the bulls for needle marks along the neck and hindquarters, the injection sites Grant told me about from what Vic confessed.
A handler working alone, a quick jab, a bull that's already rank turned into something no rider can survive.
That's how it works. Not the whole herd.
One bull. The right bull. The one a specific rider is going to draw.
Nothing tonight. The animals look clean. The handlers kept their distance.
Most of the bulls have been loaded for transport, the Thornton Livestock haulers already rumbling toward the highway with their cargo and whatever else they're carrying that nobody's supposed to ask about.
I lean against the rail and watch the last handler guide a rangy red bull up the ramp.
The handler moves fast, nervous, keeps checking over his shoulder like he's expecting someone to be watching.
I'm watching. I'm always watching. Two months of watching and I've got nothing but suspicion and a reputation as the circuit's resident conspiracy theorist.
The handler spots me and freezes.
"Easy," I say. "Just enjoying the night air."
He doesn't believe me. He loads the bull, chains the gate, and gets in the cab without looking back.
The truck pulls out, taillights cutting through the dust, and I'm alone with the empty pens and the smell of manure and the ghost of my best friend.
I walk the pen line anyway, because the routine is all I've got.
I photograph the tire tracks the Thornton trucks left in the dirt, because maybe someday the tread pattern will matter to someone who can actually do something with it.
The other stock contractors have cleared out already. Barton Brothers, out of Amarillo, who run clean stock and want nothing to do with Thornton or anyone connected to the operation.
I've talked to old man Barton twice. He knows things. Won't say them. Told me he's got a wife and grandkids and he plans to live long enough to see them graduate.
I can't blame a man for choosing his family over somebody else's fight. Doesn't mean I understand how he closes his eyes at night knowing what he knows.
Grant would have loved tonight. Ninety-one point five on Tombstone's Revenge.
He'd have bought me a beer and spent an hour arguing that his best score was better, which it was, the bastard, and we both knew it.
We'd have sat at whatever dive bar was closest to the arena and traded insults until closing time, the way we'd been doing since we were kids too young and too broke to know what we had.
Then he'd have called that girl of his, the photographer.
Rainey. I never heard Grant say her name, not once in all the years I knew him.
I heard it from a kid in the Las Cruces dirt, relaying a dying man's last words.
'Tell him Rainey has everything.' Three words, and I knew.
You don't spend your last breath on someone's name unless they're the thing that matters most.
I never met her. Don't even know what she looks like. All I know is that she mattered enough to die for, and somewhere out there she's carrying evidence that could blow this whole circuit apart.
Might make finding her easier if I had anything to go on besides a name and a ghost.
I push off the rail and head for my truck.
The journalist is still circling in my head. Not the encounter itself, which I've already picked apart and regretted from six different angles. The part I can't let go of is the gap between what she says she is and what my gut tells me she is.
Kenna McEnroe. Freelance press. Dark hair pulled back tight and the kind of posture that says she's bracing for a fight even when she's standing still. Most people step back when I crowd them.
She dug in.
She's lying about something. I don't know what yet, and I don't have the bandwidth to care. I've got bigger problems than some reporter with bad credentials and an agenda I can't read.
I drive to the bar because the alternative is the motel room, and the motel room is four walls and a ceiling and the sound of my own thoughts, which have been bad company since Las Cruces.
Amarillo at night is neon and dust. The strip along the highway is a parade of truck stops and fast food joints and motels with vacancy signs that never turn off. Stock trailers line the shoulders, haulers grabbing a few hours of sleep before the morning load-in.
I pass two of them with the Thornton logo on the panels and my hands tighten on the wheel.
Everywhere I look, that name. That company. Those trucks hauling bulls that have killed two men I cared about, rolling down public highways like they've got nothing to hide.
The Broken Spur is the kind of honky-tonk that exists in every rodeo town: dark wood, neon beer signs, a jukebox playing Waylon Jennings too loud, and a floor sticky enough to pull your boots off. Half the riders are already here, which means the other half are either hurt, praying, or both.
The bartender is a woman named Jolene who's been pouring drinks at circuit bars since before I started riding. She takes one look at the stitches above my eye and sets a whiskey on the bar without being asked.
"On the house," she says. "You look like you earned it."
"Appreciate it, Jolene."
"You planning to let that medic finish his job, or are you just going to bleed on my bar all night?"
"I'll try to keep it off the wood."
She gives me the look every woman on this circuit has perfected, the one that says you're an idiot and I care about you and there's nothing I can do about either. Then she moves down the bar to pour shots for a group of team ropers celebrating a clean run.
Wade Ashcroft is a few stools down. Saddle bronc rider, top ten on the circuit, and a few months into a divorce that's turning him inside out.
He's already got the glazed look of a man who started drinking before the event ended.
The glass in front of him is his third or fourth, based on the wet rings on the bar, and his phone is face-down beside it.
He keeps reaching for it, turning it over, checking the screen, putting it back down.
Whoever he's waiting to hear from isn't calling.
"You look like hell, Holloway." He says it without turning his head.
"You look worse."
"I look exactly right for a man whose wife's lawyer sent him papers at a rodeo.
" He drains his glass and signals Jolene for another.
"You know what the worst part of getting served at an event is?
You can't even throw the papers on the ground and stomp on them because there's dirt everywhere and they just blend in. "
The joke lands flat and he knows it. He stares at the refill Jolene sets in front of him.
Two months ago, Wade and I would have been sitting together, arguing about bronc riding technique versus bull riding technique the way we always did, which is to say loudly and with no intention of changing our minds.
He'd have made that joke land. He'd have made it funny.
The man used to be the sharpest wit on the circuit, the one who could defuse any tension with a one-liner that hit so perfectly you forgot to be angry.
Now he sits alone and I sit alone and the man with the best timing in rodeo can't find it anymore.
Grief does that. Shrinks the world down to the size of what you can carry, and you stop reaching for anything else because your hands are already full.
The whiskey goes down too fast and I order another.
I pull out my phone. Scroll through the same dead-end contacts I've been scrolling through for two months.
Rainey's number, the one I pulled off her photography website before it went dark, goes straight to a disconnected recording. Flint's phone rings and rings and rings. Vic's number is dead. Torres, the FBI agent in Albuquerque, hasn't returned my messages.
Every trail Grant left behind leads to a wall.
"That seat taken?"
The journalist slides onto the stool next to mine before I can answer.
She's changed out of the press-box outfit. Instead of tailored slacks, a silk t-shirt and light weight blazer, she’s wearing jeans, boots, and a fitted flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled to her elbows.
The notebook is gone but the sharpness is still there, sitting behind those eyes like a blade she's deciding whether to draw.