Chapter 6
COLT
The morning after is always the test.
The sex was easy, the way falling off a cliff is easy once gravity takes over. The hard part is the daylight, when two people who tore into each other repeatedly in the dark have to look across a motel room and figure out where that leaves them.
Kenna is already out of bed when I wake up.
Her side is cold, the pillow dented, the sheets pulled roughly into place like she tried to erase herself from the scene.
The bathroom door is open with steam still clinging to the mirror.
Her bag is on the chair by the window, and through the gap in the curtains I can see her sitting on the concrete bench outside our door with a coffee and her notebook, already working.
She didn't go far. She just put distance between us before I could get a read on her face.
She's a smart woman. Smarter than me, because I'm lying here with the taste of her still on my tongue and the scratch marks on my shoulders still stinging under the sheet, and the only coherent thought I can form is that I want to pull her back into this bed and keep her there until neither of us can walk.
I roll onto my back and stare at the ceiling.
My body hasn't caught up to the fact that she's gone.
The press of her thighs locked around my hips hasn't faded, the way her spine arched when I hit the right angle, the sound she made when she stopped fighting it and let go.
That sound is going to haunt me through every stock pen and every chute on this circuit.
I need to get my head straight. Grant is dead. Merrick is free. The investigation needs a bull rider who can think, not one who's replaying the way a woman's body fit against his in a motel bed outside Albuquerque.
I drag myself into the shower, and the hot water hits the scratches on my back. I grin at the sting. After I shower, I grab my clothes, get dressed, pull on my boots, and grab my hat.
I step outside, and Kenna glances up from her notebook. The morning light catches the freckles across her nose, and for a second neither of us says anything. The bench, the coffee, the notebook. She looks like a woman who's been awake for a while, building walls out of work.
"I'm heading to the pens," I say. "Early rounds before the event."
"Give me ten minutes. I want to get into the press office early and pull payout records from the last two seasons before the event starts." She taps her pen against the notebook. "You do your thing at the pens, I'll do mine in the press box. We compare notes after."
"You eat anything?"
"I had coffee."
"Coffee's not food."
"It is if you drink enough of it." She looks back down at her notebook, dismissing me with a precision that shouldn't be as attractive as it is. "Go start the truck, Holloway. I'll be ready in ten."
She's ready in eight. I notice because I'm watching, and because she walks to the passenger side of my truck like she belongs there, and the ease of that does something to my head I'm not going to examine right now.
The stock pens behind the Expo New Mexico arena are already loud with livestock.
Bulls are being separated into holding pens while handlers run through the sorting chutes, the whole organic machinery of rodeo operations humming along the same way it has for as long as anyone can remember.
Dust and manure and the sharp, musky bite of animal sweat hang in the air, and the morning sun turns everything gold and hazy.
I find a spot near the Thornton Livestock trailer and lean against the metal fencing like a man with nowhere particular to be. I pull my hat low, fold my arms, and watch.
Thornton runs six bulls on the Southwest Circuit right now, all hauled in a custom rig with the Thornton Livestock logo in faded red on the sides. Four handlers travel with the stock: two I've seen before, one who's been on the circuit for years, and a fourth I've never laid eyes on until today.
The new guy is young, early twenties at most. He's wiry and twitchy, with dark hair shoved under a ball cap that still has the sticker on the brim.
He works the pens well enough, but his head swivels every thirty seconds like he's waiting for someone to put a hand on his shoulder and tell him it's over.
He keeps glancing toward the Thornton trailer, toward the parking lot, toward any shadow that moves too fast.
I've seen that body language before, on Vic, Thornton's old bull handler.
I'd watched Vic work the pens at a dozen events without thinking twice about him.
After Grant told me Vic was the one drugging the animals, I looked back on every interaction and saw it: the same twitchy awareness of a man doing dirty work for people who scare him.
The new handler moves to the far pen where a brindle bull with a crooked horn is pawing the dirt. He checks the animal's flank, runs his hand along the hide, and pauses.
His other hand dips toward his back pocket.
From where I'm standing, I can't tell if he pulls anything out. A rider two pens over shouts for help moving a steer, and the handler's hand snaps back to his side. He finishes his check and moves on, head down, shoulders tight.
It could be nothing. It could also be Vic's replacement. I pull out my phone and take a few photos of the handler's face, the Thornton rig plates, and the brindle bull's ear tag number. None of it is evidence of anything yet. It's a thread to pull later.
The morning rounds take me through the rest of the pens, where the other stock contractors have their animals penned and ready.
I know most of these people. I grew up alongside half of them and competed against the rest. The circuit is a small world, and since Grant died, most of it avoids me.
I'm the man who said the word "murder" out loud, the man who accused Merrick at the Tucson event in front of sponsors and cameras, the man who got physically restrained by two stock contractors and a bullfighter and told to get his head straight.
Nobody wants to be seen next to the guy with the conspiracy theories. That suits me fine.
And still, in the gaps between observations, she's there.
The way Kenna's breath caught against my ear when I pinned her wrists.
The way she said my name like it was a word she'd just invented.
I catch myself looking for her in the press section, scanning for dark hair pulled back and a sharp expression behind a notebook, and I have to physically redirect my attention to the Thornton pens.
This is a problem.
I'm heading back from the water trough when the prickling sensation hits the back of my neck, that awareness of being studied by someone who's trying not to be noticed.
I've been riding bulls long enough to trust instinct over logic, so I turn slowly and casually, scanning the chute area like I'm looking for someone specific.
Slade Carrick is leaning against the far end of the sorting chute with his arms crossed and his hat brim shading his face.
The man is built like a brick wall and carries himself like someone who expects a fight and welcomes it.
He's a steer wrestler, ranked sixth on the circuit, and the man who pulled Grant out of the Las Cruces arena while the medics were still climbing over the fence.
I've tried talking to Slade three times since Grant's funeral.
Each time, he shut me down cold. He wouldn't make eye contact, wouldn't engage, and told me in as few words as possible that he didn't see anything, didn't know anything, and had nothing to say.
The man has a manslaughter conviction in his past and a probation officer who checks in monthly.
Talking to anyone about anything that might land him in a courtroom is a risk he's made clear he won't take.
But Slade's watching me. He has been for a while now, if the angle of his hat and the set of his shoulders are any indication. He's watching me watch the Thornton handlers.
I don't approach him yet. I let him stew in whatever's eating at him. If Slade wants to pretend he didn't see what he saw at Las Cruces, that's his prerogative. But he's a terrible actor, and the fact that he can't stop looking in my direction tells me the pretending is costing him.
My ride is a bull called Powder Keg, a fifteen-hundred-pound Charolais cross with a wicked left spin and a habit of dropping his head mid-buck to try to hook the rider's leg.
He's a good bull, a clean bull, and he's not Thornton stock, so I can ride him without worrying about whether the animal's been juiced.
There's a difference today. In the chute, settling my rope, working the wrap, I feel it in the way my hands move.
They are steady and deliberate. The last time I climbed on a bull, I was riding to feel the impact, to let eighteen hundred pounds of fury do to my body what the grief was doing to my head.
I wanted to hurt. I wanted the world narrowed down to eight seconds of violence that made everything else disappear.
The old discipline is back. The muscle memory of a man who learned to ride before he learned to drive, and the difference registers in the way my hips settle against the bull's back, the way my riding hand closes on the rope with calibration instead of white-knuckle fury.
I'm riding because the circuit is the cover that keeps this investigation alive.
If I stop competing, I lose my access, my credibility, the excuse to be in every stock pen and every back lot on the Southwest Circuit.
If I start winning again, nobody can dismiss me as the washed-up rider with a vendetta.
Grant needed me to stay in the game. So I'm staying. And I'm staying sharp.