Chapter 4
WADE
I've been asking questions about Thornton Livestock since the last event, and the answers are starting to bother me more than the silence did. The circuit is a small world. People talk. The trick isn't getting them to open their mouths. It's knowing which stories to believe when they do.
Bowen told me the routes didn't add up. I filed that and started pulling on the thread during the lull between events, leaning against trailer fenders and buying coffee for stock contractors who've been running livestock longer than I've been alive.
Nobody thinks twice about Wade Ashcroft making conversation. I've been doing it for years. The public version of me is generous with his time, interested in everyone's operation, happy to listen. It's a useful reputation when you need people to talk without realizing they're being interviewed.
After the mess with Merrick, Thornton picked up the hauling contract for the Southwest Circuit's stock. Before that, three regional haulers split the work: short runs, competitive bids, nobody driving farther than they had to.
Thornton underbid all of them and took the entire circuit. Nobody could figure out how they were making money at those rates.
A contractor named Echols out of Las Cruces told me his steers arrived at the Tucson event looking dehydrated and stressed. Las Cruces to Tucson should take four hours. His animals looked like they'd been standing in a rig for the better part of a day.
Thornton blamed a mechanical delay, but the steers didn't look like they'd been parked. They looked like they'd been moving.
A bronc contractor named Villanueva said the same thing. His string arrived late to an event in Amarillo, animals agitated, hay bags empty, water troughs dry.
The paperwork showed pickup at dawn and delivery in the afternoon, but the horses had been in that trailer long enough to drink the troughs dry and eat through their hay. The math didn't work.
Two contractors at two different events, but the same hauler and the same story: animals arriving later and more stressed than the distance should account for.
I haven't told either of them what the other said. I don't plan to. Right now, the fact that I'm the only person connecting these conversations is the only advantage I have.
The morning event runs clean. I draw a solid bronc named Firecracker and ride him for a decent score, nothing spectacular, the kind of workmanlike ride that keeps sponsors from asking questions and keeps the younger riders from smelling weakness.
Firecracker is honest. He bucks straight, no tricks, and I match his rhythm the way I've been matching horses for longer than some of these kids have been alive.
The eight seconds feel like forty. They always do when your body is running on stubbornness and not much else.
The crowd likes it. A couple of the TV guys want an interview by the chutes, and I give them the version they expect: the grin, the easy answers, the thank-you-for-having-me that makes everyone feel like they've spent time with a champion instead of a man who can barely lift his arms above his shoulders.
The smile is load bearing at this point.
Take it away and the whole structure comes down.
The vet is at the livestock pens again, and my attention locks on her before I've decided to look.
She's crouched beside one of the broncs from the afternoon string, a big dun gelding who's standing with his head low and his weight shifted wrong.
Even from a distance the tremor running through his hindquarters is visible.
Fine, rhythmic, the kind of thing most people would miss if they weren't looking for it.
She's looking for it.
I watch her work. She runs her hands along the gelding's barrel, checks his gums, pulls his lower eyelid and studies whatever she sees there. Her movements are precise and unhurried, each one flowing into the next like a good rider in the saddle. No wasted motion, no hesitation.
When she leans into the horse I catch the line of muscle in her forearm, the pull of her shirt across her back.
I shouldn't be cataloging her body while she's treating a sick animal.
My brain knows that. The rest of me doesn't. She speaks to the animal before she speaks to the handler. That hasn't changed.
The gelding's tremor worsens while she's examining him. His hind legs lose coordination for a beat, a stumble that has nothing to do with the ground underneath him. The gelding tries to catch himself and overcorrects, swinging his hindquarters wide enough that the handler jumps backward.
She doesn't jump. She stabilizes him with her shoulder against his flank and calls for a lead rope without raising her voice.
Calm. Specific. The handler scrambles to comply while she runs her hand down the gelding's hind leg, checking for heat or swelling that might explain the coordination loss.
She won't find any. Whatever's wrong with this animal isn't in his legs.
I've spent my life around horses. I know what injury looks like, what exhaustion looks like, what a horse coming off a bad haul looks like.
This doesn't look like any of those things.
This looks like something got into this animal's system that doesn't belong there, and the gelding's body is trying to process it and failing.
This is the second symptomatic animal she's dealt with since the circuit started, and this one is worse. I don't know what the barrel horse's bloodwork showed—she wasn't inclined to share—but whatever she found, this gelding is telling the same story louder.
I buy two cups of coffee from the concession trailer and walk to the livestock pens. She's writing notes on a clipboard when I set the first cup on the tailgate of her truck. She looks at it. Looks at me. The assessment is quick, and I feel her deciding whether accepting obligates her to something.
"It's coffee," I say. "Not a blood oath."
She picks it up. Drinks. She doesn't thank me. The refusal to perform gratitude hits me lower than it should, a pull in my gut that has nothing to do with coffee and everything to do with her throat moving when she swallows.
"The dun bronc," I say. "The one you were just working on. He looked rough."
"He looked symptomatic." She sets the clipboard face-down on the tailgate, casual enough that someone who wasn't paying attention might miss the move. She doesn't want me reading her notes.
"Same as the barrel horse?"
Her eyes come up. Sharper than anything in that cup. "Why do you keep asking about animals that have nothing to do with your event?"
"Because Thornton's stock keeps showing up symptomatic at every event I've worked this season, and I don't think that's a coincidence." I take a drink and let the words sit. "You don't either, or you wouldn't be spending your evenings going through delivery records by yourself."
She doesn't answer right away. The angles are working, how much I'm worth against how much I could cost her.
It's the same guarded assessment I've seen on her face every time someone gets within striking distance: measure, weigh, choose whether to engage or walk.
"What do you know about Thornton?" she asks.
"I know that company called it ‘reorganization’ and ‘new management’ after Merrick went down.
I know they underbid every regional hauler to lock up the stock contract, and I know their animals are arriving stressed and dehydrated from hauls that should take half the time they're taking.
I know two separate contractors have complained about it, and neither one knows the other has the same story.
" I pause. "And I know you've been pulling their transport records, which means you found something in the paperwork that matches what I'm hearing from people. "
She studies me like she'd study a horse she hasn't decided whether to trust. "How do you know what I've been pulling?"
"Because I watched you do it. For hours. In an empty lot. While you told me you were just doing your job."
The corner of her mouth twitches, not a smile but a concession that she walked into that one. "I was doing my job."
"Your job involves hauling company delivery records?"
"My job involves knowing why animals are getting contaminated."
Contaminated. Not sick. Not symptomatic. Contaminated. That word changes everything.
She's also standing close enough that antiseptic hits me first, and then something warm and clean underneath it. I have to drag my attention back to the conversation.
"Contaminated how?"
"That's not something I'm ready to discuss in a parking lot with a man I've spoken to once."
"Twice. But who's counting."
Her jaw loosens for a fraction of a beat, the closest she gets to letting her guard slip. I catch it the way I've started catching everything about her, without meaning to and too late to stop.
"You're pushy."
"I'm interested."
"In the investigation or in me?"
The question comes fast, and it's sharp enough to cut. She's testing whether I'll dodge it or walk into it.
I look at her across the tailgate, the coffee steam rising between us. She seems like a woman who can smell a lie from a county away, so I give her the truth.
"Both."
The word sits in the air between us. Neither of us moves to take it back. The coffee steam has thinned to nothing, and the concession trailer behind me is shutting its windows, the clatter of metal latches carrying across the emptying lot. Somewhere a diesel engine turns over, coughs, catches.
She holds my gaze for a beat that lasts longer than either of us planned. Then she looks away, and the absence hits like a door swinging shut.
I don't like it. I don't like that I felt it. I don't like that my body is keeping score of every second this woman faces me and every second she doesn't.