Chapter 21 #2
A man who has used gate interference twice doesn't suddenly develop a conscience the third time. Not when the stakes are this high tonight. The person in the chute is the one he's been trying to take down from the beginning.
I’m watching.
And what I saw in the thirty seconds before I nodded told me everything I needed to know. A handler who checked the latch twice with the particular hesitation of a man who knows what he did to it and is making sure it's still done.
Eyes that went to the crowd instead of the rider when they should have been focused on the chute. A body angled slightly away from the gate in the unconscious distancing of someone who doesn't want to be associated with what's about to happen.
I adjusted everything before I nodded, my grip, my weight distribution, and my anticipation of the opening. I knew the gate wasn't going to behave and I knew Undertow wasn't going to break straight. I was prepared for the first two seconds of this ride. It was not going to be a clean start.
The gate opens.
It sticks first, just enough, just that fraction of a second that changes everything.
Undertow doesn't break straight, he surges left and hard with the coiled energy of an animal that has been waiting in a confined space and is done waiting.
The force of it jerks through my whole body in a way that would have unseated a rider who wasn't ready for exactly this.
I was ready for exactly this.
But ready and easy are not the same thing. The next two seconds are the hardest two seconds I have spent on a bull in my entire career. My body fighting to find the rhythm of an animal that is moving with deliberate violence in directions that don't follow the pattern.
Spinning, kicking and changing direction with a speed that makes the crowd react in the way that means they understand they are watching something that could go very wrong very fast.
I stay with him.
Not as cleanly as I would have if the gate had opened right, but with everything I have, digging into every year of muscle memory, physical instinct and the specific stubbornness of a man who has decided that tonight is not the night he gets thrown.
That tonight the bull doesn't win and Dusty Rhodes doesn't win. Jace McCallister will not go down in front of a crowd that includes his brothers and the woman he loves. That's not the version that gets written tonight.
Undertow spins hard to the right and I feel my grip shift in a way that sends a bolt of cold through me. The rope sliding just enough to change the geometry of everything, and for one suspended moment that feels much longer than it is. In that second I am genuinely uncertain which way this goes.
My free hand finds its discipline.
My weight drops and centers.
And I find the rhythm.
Not smooth, not controlled the way I want it, but there. The connection between my body and the bull's movement clicking into place the way it does when instinct takes over from thought. The crowd noise rises around me like something physical, like I can feel it pressing in from all sides.
The seconds stretch.
And somewhere in the middle of them, between the chaos of the opening, the desperate recovery and the moment my body remembered what it knows, this becomes a ride.
The buzzer hits like a physical thing.
Not the relief I expected, not the release of tension that usually comes when the eight seconds are done and the ride is complete.
The only thing left is to get clear of the animal.
I clear Undertow clean. I hit the ground on my feet, moving out of the path of the bull with the automatic efficiency of a man whose body knows this part even when the rest of him is still catching up.
The pickup men do their job, the bull redirected, the arena floor opening up around me as the crowd does what crowds do at the end of a ride that had enough danger in it to make the outcome uncertain.
They come to their feet.
I barely hear it.
Because my eyes are already moving, scanning the spaces between things. Reading the edges of the arena where the lights don't reach as cleanly when the crowd thins out and a man who needs to move without being seen would choose to move.
I find Wade first. Wade is exactly where he said he would be and his posture tells me before he says a word that something has shifted in the last eight seconds while I was riding.
I cross the arena floor toward him, not running, not drawing attention, just moving with the deliberate unhurried purpose of a rider coming off a qualified ride. When I reach the rail he leans down close enough that his voice reaches only me.
"Dusty moved," he says. "The second you came out of the chute and it was clear you were going to make the buzzer he left the stock contractor area and headed toward the back of the grounds." He pauses. "Brooks is behind him."
I absorb that, feeling the pieces of tonight clicking into their final positions the way they've been clicking into place all season, slow at first and then faster, each one making the next one more inevitable.
"Luke?" I ask.
"Already made contact with the officials," Wade says. "The draw sheets are in hand.
Everything Brooks pulled from the financial records has been passed to the right people." He holds my gaze steadily. "It's moving, Jace. Everything we set up is moving right now while Dusty is focused on getting out."
That's the thing about a man who has spent twenty years controlling every variable. Who has built his entire operation on the principle that careful and patient is always safer than fast and reactive.
He doesn't know how to respond when careful stops being an option., When the net he didn't know was there closes fast enough that patience becomes a liability instead of a strength.
He's running.
And running is the one thing that confirms everything we've been building toward, because innocent men with clean consciences don't leave an arena the moment a ride they tampered with fails to produce the outcome they needed.
I take the scoring card from the official who approaches me with it.
My number written at the top and the score underneath it.
It's high enough to put me at the top of the leaderboard with two riders still to go.
I hold it for a moment feeling the particular satisfaction of a thing done right under conditions designed to make it impossible.
Then I look up and find Riley at the rail.
She is right there, both hands wrapped around the top rail the way she grips things when she needs something solid to hold onto. Her eyes find mine across the arena floor with an intensity that crosses the distance between us without any effort at all.
She is pale, steady, undone and composed all at the same time.
Every wall she has built, visible in her posture.
Every one of them in her expression. What I see on her face when she sees that I am fine and walking toward her under my own power is the most honest thing I have ever seen. She has tears in her eyes.
I cross to her and she reaches through the rail, Her hand finds my arm and grips it hard, not graceful or composed but real.
The grip of a woman who has been standing at a rail for eight seconds, that had to feel like eternity, and now she is making absolutely certain that what she's touching is solid.
"You're okay," she says, and it comes out somewhere between a statement and a question and something that isn't quite either.
"I'm okay," I answer.
Her grip doesn't loosen.
I put my hand over hers and let her hold on as long as she needs to, because she has earned every second of it and I am not going anywhere.
Around us the rodeo continues, the announcer moving on to the next rider, the crowd resettling into the rhythm of the evening. The rodeo continues.
But underneath all of that, something else is turning too.
Dusty Rhodes is moving through the back of these grounds with Brooks McCallister behind him. Twenty years of carefully constructed lies coming apart at the seams. The ride is over but the night is not.
Since the moment I found buried evidence on the land that was supposed to be my fresh start. It's all about to come to its conclusion one way or another.
I squeeze Riley's hand once.
And turn back toward the arena.
Brooks finds me behind the chutes ten minutes after the ride.
He doesn't waste time on pleasantries, which suits me fine. His expression tells me everything before he opens his mouth, something resolved sitting on top of something that hasn't settled yet.
"Dusty has been detained," Brooks says. "Quinn made the call twenty minutes ago. She had eyes on him from the moment he left the stock contractor area." He almost smiles. "He didn't get ten feet past the back gate."
Wade's expression carries the particular satisfaction of a man whose wife just did something impressive, which knowing Quinn, is not a rare occurrence.
"She had the investigator standing by. Everything was coordinated before we even got here tonight."
"Wade called her yesterday," Brooks adds, looking at me. "Figured having someone with a badge who is also family wasn't the worst resource to have in play."
I look at Wade.
He shrugs, but there's nothing casual about it. "Quinn doesn't miss," he says simply.
"The records?" I ask.
"Enough to hold him." He holds my gaze. "That part is done, Jace."
I nod, feeling the weight of it shift. Not disappear. Shift. The way a load changes when someone finally puts a hand under the other end.
Wade appears at Brooks' shoulder. Luke comes around the side of the chute a moment later, hands in his pockets, wearing the expression he gets when he's figured something out and is choosing his moment carefully.
"The draw sheets," Luke says. "I went back through all three rodeos tonight, not just Caldwell." He pauses. "Every ride that went wrong this season had the same handler on the gate."
"Dusty's man," I say.
"That's what I thought too." Luke looks at me steadily. "But Dusty didn't hire him. Colt did. The handler has been on Colt's payroll for two years."
The air between us goes still.
"Dusty ran the long game," Luke continues. "Colt ran the operation. The gates, the ropes, the person outside Riley's house. Colt Ramirez has had hands on every piece of this from the beginning."
I stand with that.
All season I watched Colt, then shifted focus to Dusty when the evidence pointed there, treating them as separate threats on parallel tracks. They weren't parallel. They were layered. Dusty's history providing the motive, Colt's precision providing the execution.
Two men. One plan.
Colt is still out there. Still free. Still standing in the clear with his reputation intact, nothing connecting him to any of it except a handler on his payroll and four years of careful misdirection.
Wade reads my face. "We'll get him."
"Tonight?" I ask.
"Not tonight," Brooks says. "But soon."
I look out across the grounds toward the sponsor tents where Colt was working the crowd earlier. Easy smile. Clean hands. The picture of a champion with nothing to hide.
He thinks he's safe.
He's wrong.
He just doesn't know it yet.
I feel Riley beside me before I see her, her hand finding my arm the way it does now, certain and without ceremony.
"It's not over," she says. Not a question.
"No," I answer. "But we're close."
She nods once, her jaw set, her eyes steady on mine. She doesn't ask me to promise her anything. She doesn't need to.
She already knows I'll finish it.
That's enough for tonight.