Chapter 16 #2
"Because the last time you told me you weren't going to do anything stupid, your definition of stupid had more flexibility than a yoga instructor."
"I'll be flexible about a lot of things tonight. Stupid isn't one of them."
I lean against the truck and call Wade. He answers on the sixth ring, his voice thick with sleep or bourbon.
"Holloway. It's barely morning."
"I need a favor."
"I'm hungover."
"You're always hungover. Pima County fairgrounds, nine o'clock tonight. Thornton wants to talk. Says he wants to flip."
The line goes quiet. When Wade comes back, his voice is clearer. "You believe him?"
"I believe he's scared. Whether that makes him honest or dangerous is what I need to find out."
"What do you need from me?"
"Watch the entrance. If I come out walking, we're good. If I come out running, follow my lead. If I don't come out, call the number I'm texting you. She's FBI."
"FBI." Wade lets that sit for a second. "This is bigger than I thought."
"It's bigger than any of us thought."
"Done." A pause. "Any one of us could have been next, Holloway. Every time I drew a Thornton bronc, I was rolling dice I didn't know were loaded. Tell me where to be and I'll be there."
"South side. Eight forty-five. Stay in your truck until I need you."
He hangs up, and I pocket the phone and let the adrenaline settle.
Across the lot, Kenna is carrying the camera around my truck for a second pass. She crouches by the driver's door, angling for the depth of the scratches, and the focused intensity on her face is the same expression she wears when she's building a case from financial documents.
Her mouth is set in a line that I want to kiss until it softens.
I push off the truck and walk to her. She straightens, and we're standing close enough that I can count the freckles across the bridge of her nose, which I've done before, which I'll do again, because counting Kenna's freckles has become the thing I do when I need to remind myself that some things in this world are still worth protecting.
"Done?" I ask.
"Documented. Every angle." She tucks her phone in her back pocket and looks at the damage on the door. "The cuts are deep. Whoever did this came prepared and took their time."
"That's comforting."
"I wasn't aiming for comfort. I was aiming for accurate."
"We're going to get through this," I say. "And then I'm going to find whoever did this."
"One crisis at a time, Holloway." She looks up at me, and the morning light catches her face, and even with a death threat on my truck and a meeting with a potential killer in thirteen hours, the pull toward her is constant and undeniable.
"Now go buy me coffee from that sad excuse for a vending machine. "
"You're bossy in the morning."
"I'm bossy all the time. You just notice it more before caffeine."
The day burns down in preparation. We drive the fairground perimeter twice, mapping entrances, exits, and sight lines.
The storage yard is a fenced lot behind the main exhibition hall, chain-link on three sides, open on the fourth where it meets a gravel access road. One overhead light mounted on a pole near the gate. Livestock trailers parked along the fence line.
I study the layout through the windshield. One exit unless you go over the fence. Cover on three sides. Livestock trailers parked along the fence line giving anyone with bad intentions plenty of places to hide.
"This is a terrible place to meet someone you don't trust," Kenna says.
"It's a great place if Thornton's telling the truth. Isolated, no cameras, no witnesses. A scared man picks a place where nobody's watching."
"And if he's not telling the truth?"
"Then it's a great place for the other thing too." I turn to her. "If something goes wrong, I'll text you one word. You see it, you call Torres and you drive."
"What word?"
"Grant."
The name sits between us, heavy with everything it carries. She holds my gaze for a beat that lasts longer than it should.
"Grant," she repeats softly. "Okay."
At nine o'clock, the desert dark has settled thick and warm.
I've parked my truck inside the fence with the nose pointed at the gate, key fob in my pocket with the remote start ready, and I'm standing just outside the yellow circle of the overhead light where I can see the gate without making myself a target, waiting for a man who might be trying to save himself or trying to get me killed.
Nine twelve. Headlights bounce down the access road. A white dually pulls through the gate, and Dale Thornton steps out looking like a man who hasn't slept in a week. His shirt is wrinkled. His hands are shaking. His eyes sweep the yard in quick, furtive arcs before they find me.
"Holloway."
"Thornton."
He glances past me, scanning the yard. "Anyone else here?"
"Just us. Talk."
"That's what I need to talk about." His voice is low and fast. "Merrick is going to cut me loose. His lawyers have been calling my lawyers, and the questions they're asking are the kind you ask when you're building a defense that involves blaming someone else."
"So you want to flip."
"I want to survive." He wipes his palms on his jeans. "I'll give the FBI everything. Dates, accounts, the communication chain. But I need someone to make the introduction. Someone the FBI trusts."
I study him the way I study a bull in the chute—looking for the tell, the indicator, the thing that signals which direction he's going to break.
Thornton's tell is in his feet. He keeps shifting his weight, ready to bolt, and a man planning an ambush doesn't position himself for escape.
"Talk," I say.
"Merrick didn't just skim prize money and drug bulls. That was the surface operation."
Thornton glances at the gate, at the fence line, at the dark shapes of the trailers. The yard is quiet. Too quiet. I can hear the gravel shift under his boots.
"The circuit moves livestock across four states every season. Trucks, trailers, stock pens at every venue. Inspections are cursory. Nobody checks what's in a livestock trailer besides livestock."
"Smuggling."
"The livestock transports have been carrying product for years. I don't know what. Merrick kept me on the money side. The cargo was handled by a different crew, people who showed up at loading docks after the stock was loaded and added containers to the trailers."
My hands curl at my sides. I force them open. "Tyler Brennan."
"Brennan saw something at the Fort Worth loading dock. A transfer at two in the morning. He started asking questions. Merrick ordered him handled."
"And Grant."
Thornton's face goes grey under the yellow light.
I can hear my own pulse in my ears, and the yard feels smaller, the trailers closer, the shadows deeper.
Every instinct I have is screaming that we're exposed, that the overhead light makes us targets, that two men standing in an open lot having this conversation are exactly the kind of opportunity that Merrick's people don't waste.
"Grant found Brennan's notes," Thornton says. "He started digging into the same things Tyler had been asking about. But Grant was smarter—he didn't ask questions. He watched. He figured out they were drugging the bulls at specific events, and he went to Las Cruces to catch it on camera."
Thornton's voice drops to barely a whisper. "The bull was supposed to throw him hard enough to put him in the hospital. That was the order. Enough to scare him, sideline him, buy time. The handler went too far."
The words land in my chest like rounds from a rifle, and the rage that's been sitting behind my ribs all day breaks loose from whatever cage I built for it.
My vision narrows. Every instinct I have says grab this man by the collar and shake the rest of the truth out of him. I keep my hands at my sides and let him talk.
"Went too far," I repeat. My voice sounds like something being dragged across gravel.
"The dose was higher than Merrick specified. I don't know if the handler panicked or if someone in the chain changed the order, but the death wasn't planned. It attracted attention. It was supposed to be an injury."
"My best friend died in the dirt because someone miscalculated a drug dose. And you stood there and watched it happen."
"I wasn't at Las Cruces."
"You were in the room when they planned it."
He doesn't deny it. Can't. The silence between us fills with the sound of the desert wind and the distant hum of the interstate and the specific, grinding weight of a confession that can't be taken back.
His phone rings.
Thornton pulls it out, glances at the screen, and whatever color was left in his face drains so fast I can see it happen in real time, like watching water run out of a glass.
He answers. Listens for three seconds. Hangs up.
"We need to go. Now." The nervous energy is gone. What's left is raw, animal terror, the kind that strips everything else away. "I was followed."
I'm already moving. My thumb finds the text screen.
Grant.
Send.
Headlights appear on the access road. Two sets, moving fast, coming from the direction opposite Kenna's position.
Thornton scrambles toward his truck. I hear Wade's engine turn over on the south side.
The first shot is a sound my brain processes before my ears do—the flat, contained crack of a suppressed round punching through the desert air.
Thornton makes a sound that isn't a word. He drops to his knees in the gravel with one hand pressed to his chest and the other reaching for a truck door that's three feet too far away.
The second shot drops him flat.
I'm in my cab with the engine screaming before the third round spiderwebs my rear window.
Wade's headlights sweep across the yard as he tears out, and I follow the path of his taillights through the gate and onto the access road, driving with one hand and calling Kenna with the other.
"I'm here." Her voice is tight, controlled, every word precise. "I heard the shots. I'm pulling out. Dialing Torres."
"Thornton is down."
Silence. Then: "How down?"
"Down."
Her breath catches—one sharp intake—and then the journalist takes over. "Highway junction. Don't stop. Don't go back."
"I know."