Chapter 5
KENNA
The morning after the Amarillo event wraps, I drive to the rental car agency and turn in my car. Colt follows and once I’m done, I head to his truck, toss my bag into the back seat and climb into the cab with my laptop and the growing certainty that I've made a tactical error.
The tactical error becomes apparent within the first ten minutes on the road.
His truck is a cage. A small, enclosed, inescapable cage that smells like leather and dust and something underneath that's just him, warm skin and cedar and clean sweat. The cab holds it all in, recirculates it, presses it against my skin like a second atmosphere.
He drives the way he rides bulls. Fast and controlled and with a focus that makes you feel like a passenger in more ways than one. Radio off. Window cracked an inch. One hand on the wheel, the other resting on his thigh, neither of us speaks, and the quiet in the cab presses against my skin.
In the competitor parking lot, we made a deal. My financial data for his intelligence. My fresh eyes for his circuit connections. A partnership built on mutual need and asymmetric information and the unspoken understanding that we are both keeping things from each other.
What I didn't factor into the math was hours of forced proximity with a man whose presence takes up more than his share of a truck cab.
He stops for gas outside Clines Corners.
I go inside for coffee because coffee is the only meal that counts anymore.
I pass the refrigerated sandwiches and the protein bars and the beef jerky and register none of it.
My body stopped sending hunger signals weeks ago, right around the time grief moved in and occupied the space where appetite used to live.
Grant would have something to say about that.
He always did. You eat like a feral cat, Kenna.
He'd shove a plate in front of me and stand there with his arms crossed until I finished it, and I'd eat just to get him to stop hovering. Nobody hovers anymore.
I bring two coffees back to the truck. Colt takes his without comment.
By Tucumcari, we've started comparing notes, and the picture we're assembling is ugly.
"Merrick bought into Thornton Livestock through a shell company eight years ago," I say, reading from the notes on my phone.
"Mesquite Ridge Holdings acquired a controlling stake, which gave Merrick effective control of the stock operation without his name on any public filings.
Three years later, Thornton starts getting the majority of the contracts for every major Southwest Circuit event. "
"Because Merrick is the circuit commissioner," Colt says. "He controls the contracts. So he steers them to his own company. Nobody asks questions because the bulls are good stock and the events run smooth."
"Until they don't."
"Until Tyler Brennan starts asking questions about why the prize money doesn't add up." Colt's jaw tightens. "A few weeks later, Tyler draws a Thornton bull at Fort Worth and doesn't walk out of the arena."
"Then Grant picks up where Tyler left off."
"Grant already had his own suspicions. The financial data, the altered registrations, all that.
Tyler's death lit a fire under him." Colt's voice goes flat when he talks about Grant, stripped down to bare facts like emotion is a luxury he can't afford at highway speed.
"The night before Las Cruces, he told me everything.
Vic, the confession. He'd been building the case for weeks.
" A pause. "After he was killed, some kid in the arena called me with Grant's last words.
'Rainey has everything. Flint has copies. '"
"And Merrick found out."
"Merrick found out."
Neither of us fills the dead air.
I watch the landscape slide past. Dry grassland giving way to red earth and scrub cedar as we cross into New Mexico.
The sky is so wide out here it feels like it's pressing down, an inverted bowl of blue that makes everything underneath it seem small and exposed.
"Tell me about Grant," I say. Not a question I need the answer to. Grant mentioned Colt enough times for me to know the shape of their friendship.
But the journalist I'm pretending to be wouldn't know any of that, and the woman I actually am needs to hear someone else say his name like it matters.
Colt doesn't answer right away. His hands shift on the steering wheel, and the tendons in his forearms stand out beneath the old rope scars.
"We came up together," he says. "Started on the circuit the same year. Traveled together for a while. Competed against each other, got drunk together, got in fights together."
A pause.
"He was the best friend I ever had, and I didn't get there in time to save him."
"That's not your fault."
"Didn't ask your opinion on it."
I turn back to the window.
We stop for gas outside Santa Rosa. Colt fills the tank while I buy coffee and a bag of beef jerky from the station attached to a diner with a broken neon cactus sign.
When I come back, he's on his phone, his back to me, his voice low.
"Torres. Call me back." He hangs up. Sees me watching. "FBI," he says. "She's still not answering."
"She will."
"Your overconfidence is going to get you killed."
"It's not overconfidence. It's stubbornness. There's a difference."
His mouth does something that might be the ghost of a smile before he catches it. We get back on the road, and by the time we reach the outskirts of Albuquerque, the sun is sitting on the Sandia Mountains like a coin balanced on a shelf, turning the whole valley gold and orange.
The circuit event doesn't start until tomorrow, which means tonight is logistics: hotel, food, a plan for the morning.
Colt pulls into a motel on the outskirts of town, the kind with outdoor corridors and a neon sign missing half its letters.
He goes inside to the front desk while I wait by the truck, stretching out the stiffness from hours of sitting too close to a man who generates heat like a wood-burning stove.
He comes back with one key card.
"I got us a room," he says.
I look at the key card. Look at him.
"Us. One room."
"We're investigating a man who's killed two people." His voice is flat, matter of fact. "You're not sleeping down the hall where I can't put myself between you and whatever comes through the door trying to get you."
"I didn't realize personal security was part of our arrangement."
"It is now." He holds out the key card. "You can have the bed. I'll take the floor."
"You've been driving for four hours."
"I've done worse."
I take the key card because arguing about sleeping arrangements with Colt is a fight I'm not going to win, and the logic underneath the possessiveness isn't wrong.
We are investigating a man who's killed at least two people—one of whom was my brother.
Splitting up in a town we don't know is stupid, and I'm not about to let him watch me be stupid.
The room is exactly what you'd expect from a motel off a New Mexico interstate: brown carpet, floral bedspread, a window unit AC that sounds like it's powered by hamsters. One king bed. One bathroom. A desk with a Bible in the drawer and a chair that's seen better decades.
Colt drops his gear bag by the door and goes straight to the desk, spreading out the printed financial records I gave him alongside his own notes, a battered spiral notebook filled with names, dates, license plates, and sketches of stock pen layouts.
"We need to find Rainey," he says, not looking up. "Grant said she has everything. Without whatever she's holding, the financial data is circumstantial."
"Agreed. But we also need Flint. Even if he won't come forward publicly, he might know where Rainey went. If he's the one who got her out of Las Cruces, he's our best lead to finding her."
"I told you. I've been to his ranch twice. He won't talk."
"Maybe we try a different approach."
"Like what?"
"Like not showing up at his door looking like a man with nothing to lose."
I pull the desk chair out and sit across from him.
"From what I've heard, Flint drove Rainey out of Las Cruces after Grant died," I say. "He didn't have to do that. If it's true, he chose to protect her, which means some part of him might still care about what Grant was trying to do. We give him a reason to believe the risk is worth it again."
"And what reason is that?"
"Progress. We show him the financial data. We show him we have more than Grant had at this point, that what Grant was doing isn't dead, that Grant's death can still mean something."
"I don't want to build a case," he says. "I want to put my fist through Merrick's face at the next circuit event and let the whole arena watch."
"And then what? Merrick's lawyers file assault charges, you get banned from the circuit, and the investigation dies with your credibility." I hold his gaze. "Satisfying? Absolutely. Effective? You'd be doing Merrick a favor."
"Don't tell me what's effective." He's on his feet now, and the motel room shrinks by half.
The lamplight catches the stitches above his eyebrow, and his jaw is set in a way that should make me step back... I don't.
"Someone has to, because your guilt is making you sloppy and stupid, and I'm neither.
" I keep my voice level even as his expression hardens.
"You're not wrong about Merrick. You're not wrong about any of it.
But being right isn't enough. Grant was right, and he's dead.
Tyler was right, and he's dead. Being right without a plan just makes you the next name on the list."
"And you've got a plan." He says it like a challenge, not a question, and he's closer now.
Close enough that the heat pours off his skin through his shirt.