Chapter 7
KENNA
The rental car is waiting at the arena lot when I get back to ground level, a forgettable silver sedan dropped off by the delivery driver right where I told him to leave it. I find the keys in the lockbox on the rear tire, text Colt that I'll meet him at the room, and drive back to the motel.
His truck is already there when I pull in. The light in our room is on.
He doesn't ask about the car when I come through the door. He's sitting on the edge of the bed with his boots still on and the Flint file spread across the comforter, and the look he gives me when I walk in is the same look he gave me the first night in Amarillo: assessing, deliberate, hungry.
We spend the next hour planning the approach and the hour after that doing things that have nothing to do with planning.
In the morning, we take his truck. Flint's ranch is four hours into the kind of backcountry where a sedan would bottom out on the first cattle guard, and Colt knows the route. I leave the rental in the motel lot. It'll be there when we get back.
The drive takes every one of those four hours on roads that get progressively worse, and Colt drives all of it in a silence that's somehow louder than any argument we've had.
The truck cab smells like leather and dust and the cedar soap he uses, and my body still carries the evidence of last night. I feel the soreness in my hips, the tender spot on my collarbone where his teeth found skin, the way my pulse kicks every time his forearm flexes on the steering wheel.
We've been sleeping together since the first night, and we haven't discussed it or named it or done anything except fall into each other like it's inevitable and then pretend in the daylight that it didn't happen.
That's exactly how I want it, because naming it means feeling it, and feeling it means confronting the lie I'm wrapped in like a second skin.
"You tried Flint twice," I say, breaking the quiet because the alternative is staring at his hands on the wheel for another sixty miles and thinking about what those hands did last night. "What happened?"
"First time, he didn't answer the door. Second time, he told me through the screen to walk away."
"That's it? That's your approach? You bang on the door and hope for the best?"
"I'm a bull rider, not a diplomat."
"That much is clear." I pull my notebook from my bag and flip through the pages where I've been building the approach.
"Here's the plan. I go to the door alone, with my press credentials and a professional demeanor.
I tell him I'm writing a feature on the circuit's stock contractors for a regional outlet.
I ask about the industry, about changes in the business, about retirement.
I get inside. I build rapport. Then I steer the conversation. "
Colt glances at me. "You think an old rancher who's been hiding from the world for two months is going to open his door for a journalist?"
"I think an old rancher who's been hiding from the world for two months is lonely and scared and tired of having nobody to talk to. Isolation does that. People want to be heard, Colt. Even the ones who say they don't."
He's quiet for a beat. "And if he recognizes you?"
"As who? Nobody on this circuit knows me outside of my press credentials.
" The words taste like rust. I wasn't able to get to Grant's funeral in time.
I was on assignment overseas when I got the call, and by the time I landed stateside, they'd already put my brother in the ground.
I drove to the cemetery three days later and stood at a fresh grave with a borrowed bouquet and nobody to grieve with.
"He'll see a journalist. That's all anyone sees. "
"That's not all I see."
The words are quiet, almost offhand, and I don't think he meant to say them.
His grip shifts on the steering wheel, and the muscle in his jaw tightens the way it does when he's said something that got past his own defenses.
I let the silence absorb it because calling attention to it would make us both uncomfortable, and because the warmth it sends through me is a complication I can't afford right now.
The landscape shifts as we leave the highway. High desert gives way to scrubland, then to the pinon-studded foothills of the Jemez Mountains. Flint's ranch sits at the end of a dirt road that's more suggestion than infrastructure, and the mailbox at the turnoff is so faded the name is unreadable.
The property comes into view around a bend: a low adobe house with a metal roof, a stock barn that's seen better decades, and a round pen with weeds growing through the rails. A truck sits in the drive, mud-caked and dented, next to a horse trailer that hasn't been hitched in a while.
What catches my eye are the things that don't belong. A security camera is mounted over the front door, its wiring fresh and the bracket still silver. Another camera is angled toward the driveway. The curtains are drawn on every window and not only because of the midday sun.
A shotgun leans against the wall inside the screen door, visible through the mesh.
This is a man who lives in fear.
"Stay in the truck," I tell Colt.
"The hell I will."
"You tried twice and got nothing. An angry bull rider on his porch is exactly what made him shut down before. Let me work."
His knuckles whiten on the steering wheel, and his whole body goes taut with the effort of not arguing. The man doesn't take orders. Not from stock contractors, not from circuit officials, and certainly not from a woman half his size who's been sleeping in his bed.
The fact that he's considering it tells me he knows I'm right.
"If you're not out in thirty minutes, I'm coming in," he says.
"If I'm not out in thirty minutes, you should."
That surprises him. The set of his shoulders loosens by a fraction. His expression shifts — reluctant respect or the particular brand of frustration he reserves for me. Could be either. With Colt, they look the same.
I grab my press bag, check my credentials, and walk up the gravel path to the front door. I feel Colt's eyes on my back the whole way, a steady weight between my shoulder blades that I've started recognizing as easily as a hand on my skin.
He'll be watching the house, the windows, the road. Running scenarios. Calculating how fast he can cover the distance between the truck and the door if something goes wrong.
The screen is closed but the inner door is open, which means Flint saw us pull in. He's already decided to answer. Whether he's decided to talk is a different question.
I knock three times, keeping it professional and not aggressive.
Silence follows. Then the slow creak of boots on a wood floor.
Flint fills the doorway like a man who used to fill arenas.
He's in his late sixties, I'd guess, with the kind of face that's been carved by sun and wind into something beyond aging.
He has white hair cropped short under a stained Resistol, broad shoulders that are still solid as fence posts, and eyes that are sharp and suspicious and tired in equal measure.
He's also the kind of man who was probably devastating in his prime, all hard angles and rough authority, and I file that observation under the heading of things I notice now that Colt has rewired whatever part of my brain processes dangerous men.
He looks at me through the screen and doesn't open it.
"Help you?"
"Mr. Flint? I'm Kenna McEnroe, freelance press. I'm working on a piece about the circuit's stock contractors for Southwest Sports Monthly. The retirement wave, the new generation coming in, how the business is changing. I'd love to get your perspective as someone who's lived it."
He studies me the way a man studies fence line for weak spots, taking his time and looking for where the lie might thin.
I hold the look. I've been in this exact standoff with sources who've had more to lose and less reason to trust. The trick is patience and the willingness to be measured without flinching.
"I'm retired," he says. "Don't have much to say about the business anymore."
"That's actually what makes your perspective valuable.
You've got the long view. You've seen the changes from the inside without being beholden to anyone currently in the game.
" I keep my voice warm and my posture open.
This is journalist mode, the version of me that gets people talking before they realize they've said anything worth hearing.
"I won't take more than twenty minutes."
He doesn't answer right away. His eyes drop to my press badge, then to my face, then back to the badge. The shotgun by the door tells me everything about his state of mind.
"You come alone?"
"I've got a driver waiting in the truck." It's not a lie, and it's not the full truth.
He unlatches the screen door and holds it open just wide enough for me to pass.
The inside of Flint's house is dark and close, with curtains blocking every window. The living room smells like coffee left on the burner too long and the dry cedar of a fire that's been out for hours.
Photographs line the walls: rodeo shots from decades past, prize bulls, and competition banners. Newer photos hang among them, including one of a younger man who shares Flint's jaw and the same hard-angled features, wearing a riding vest and a championship buckle.
I don't ask about the photographs. I don't know enough about Flint's personal history to bring it up without revealing how much I've already pieced together from other sources.
We sit at the kitchen table. Flint pours coffee without asking if I want any and slides a chipped mug across the surface. I take it. The coffee is burned and bitter, and I drink it without flinching because that's what you do when a source is measuring whether you're worth their time.
Colt drinks worse coffee than this on the road, and the thought arrives uninvited and I push it aside.