Chapter 2 #2
She smells like soap and coffee and something underneath that's clean and warm, and it cuts through the bar stink of spilled beer and leather like a knife through smoke.
I notice because noticing things is the only skill that's kept me alive on this circuit, and also because I'm a man and she's beautiful and pretending otherwise would be a different kind of lie than the ones I'm used to.
"You following me?" I ask.
"I asked the copy editor from Lubbock where riders drink after events." She signals the bartender. "He said any bar with a neon boot on the sign. This was the closest neon boot."
"Smart man." I study her over the rim of my glass. "What do you want?"
"Same thing I wanted an hour ago. To talk."
"I'm better at drinking."
"You can do both." She orders a Shiner Bock, and when it comes she wraps both hands around the bottle like she's cold, even though it's eighty degrees outside and the bar has no air conditioning worth mentioning.
"You said Grant Corbin was murdered. You said Thornton Livestock's bulls were drugged. That's a hell of a thing to say to a stranger."
"I say it to anyone who'll listen. Nobody listens."
"I'm listening."
I look at her. Really look. The freckles across her nose. The way she holds her body, coiled and ready. Her eyes, which in the low light of the bar look almost familiar, like I've seen them before in a face I can't place.
I lose the thought before it forms.
"Why?" I ask.
"Because two riders are dead and you're telling me someone killed them on purpose." She takes a pull from her beer. "If you're right, that's the biggest story in professional rodeo. If you're wrong, you're a grief-stricken cowboy with a grudge and a death wish, and that's a story too."
"Two riders." I set my glass down. "You caught that."
"You said Grant and you said Thornton Livestock's bulls have been juiced." She ticks off the points on her fingers. "Bulls, plural. And every stock contractor from here to El Paso knows about it. That's not a one-time thing with one animal. That's an operation. Which means Corbin wasn't the first."
She's smart. Smarter than her credentials suggest.
The way she connected the timeline tells me she's not just asking questions to fill column inches. She's building something. Mapping the shape of it the way I do when I'm studying a bull's footage, looking for the pattern in the chaos.
"Tyler Brennan," I say, and I watch her face when I say it.
Blank. No recognition. A journalist covering the circuit who's never heard of Tyler Brennan. That's either very careless or very suspicious.
"Few weeks before Grant. Fort Worth event. Different bull, same stock contractor. Thornton Livestock."
"Same cause of death?"
"Tyler got thrown and trampled. Same as Grant. Both ruled accidents. Both riding bulls supplied by Thornton. Both top-ranked riders who'd been asking questions they shouldn't have been asking."
"Questions about what?"
I take a drink. Consider how much to tell a woman I just met who may or may not be who she says she is.
"Prize money," I say. "Rider registrations. The way certain stock draws keep landing certain riders on certain bulls at certain events. There's a pattern, if you know where to look."
"And you know where to look."
"I know where to start. Starting and finishing are different animals." I rotate my glass on the bar, leaving wet rings on the scarred wood. "I've been at this for two months. Every lead goes cold. Every person who knows something either vanished or shut their mouth."
"People don't vanish," she says.
"On this circuit they do."
The words settle between us like a stone dropping into still water.
Down the bar, Jolene is wiping glasses with a rag, watching us with the careful attention of a woman who's seen enough cowboys self-destruct to recognize the signs.
I catch her eye and she looks away. Professional courtesy.
She won't ask, and I won't tell, and tomorrow she'll pour me another whiskey and we'll pretend tonight didn't happen.
Kenna goes quiet. She peels the label on her beer with her thumbnail in a methodical strip, top to bottom.
The gesture is precise, controlled, the kind of thing you do when your hands need something to hold onto. I file it away with everything else I've noticed about her, the clenched fists, the steady voice that costs her effort, the anger that runs deeper than curiosity.
"What if I could help?" she asks.
"You can't."
"You don't know that."
"I know that the last person who helped is dead." I say it flat, no inflection, because the truth doesn't need decoration. "And the person before him is dead too. So forgive me if I'm not recruiting."
She holds my gaze. Doesn't blink.
"Grant Corbin and Tyler Brennan tried to expose this from inside the circuit," she says. "They were riders. Known quantities. Easy to target. I'm a journalist. Nobody on this circuit knows me. Nobody's watching me. I can ask questions they couldn't."
"You think nobody's watching." I lean toward her, close enough that her shampoo overrides the spilled beer and old leather.
"The people running this operation have eyes everywhere. Stock contractors, handlers, officials. You don't know who's bought and who isn't. You walk into the wrong conversation with the wrong question, and you end up like Tyler and Grant."
"Then tell me who to avoid. Give me a map of the landmines. You've been walking this circuit for months—who's bought, who's scared, who's pretending they don't see it? I can't ask the right questions if I don't know which doors are locked and which ones are booby-trapped."
"I'll tell you this." I drain my whiskey. "Thornton Livestock doesn't operate alone. The stock draws, the prize money, the way investigations get shut down before they start. That takes pull. Influence. Someone higher up the food chain than a stock contractor."
"Who?"