Chapter 23
Chapter twenty-three
This Ends Now
Jace
The clock on the nightstand reads four seventeen when I'm dressed and out the door.
Riley doesn't try to stop me. Which tells me she understands what this is and has made her peace with it. She's right behind me in the kitchen when I come through pulling my jacket on. Her arms crossed and her jaw set. Her eyes carrying everything she's decided not to say out loud.
The ranch is dead quiet at this hour, that pre-dawn stillness where the dark hasn't fully decided to become morning yet and everything sits suspended between the two.
My boots on the porch steps sound too loud in it. The air is cold enough to see my breath.
I stop in front of her.
"Stay here," I say. "Lock the door behind me."
"I know the drill," she answers.
"I know you're aware of it." I put my hands on her face the way I do, tilting it up. "I need to hear you say it."
She holds my gaze for a moment, something moving behind her eyes that she lets me see instead of tucking away. "I'll lock the door," she says. "You come back in one piece."
"That's the plan."
I kiss her once, firm and brief, and then I go.
Brooks is already on the phone when I step outside.
He is pacing the length of the porch in the pre-dawn dark with the focused energy of a man who has been awake for longer than he wanted to.
The phone woke him and he has been working the problem since before I knew there was a problem to work. He holds up a finger when he sees me, finishing the call, and when he lowers the phone his expression tells me he has more than he did twenty minutes ago.
"Quinn has eyes on Colt," he says. "He's still on the rodeo grounds, back lot, near the stock contractor area. He hasn't left yet."
"He's looking for something," I say.
"Or someone," Brooks answers. "Quinn thinks he made contact with the gate handler before we could get to him. The handler is gone, Jace. Cleared out sometime in the last two hours."
I absorb that. "Colt's cleaning up loose ends."
"Trying to." Brooks looks at me steadily. "Quinn can detain him but she needs something solid to hold him on. Right now all we have connecting Colt directly is the handler, and the handler is in the wind."
Wade's truck comes up the drive fast, Luke right behind him, and they're both out before the engines are fully off. They are moving with the particular economy of men who got a phone call and didn't waste time between receiving it and acting on it.
"Handler's name is Garret Cole," Wade says, not bothering with preamble. "I had Quinn run him.
He's got a record, two counts of fraud in Louisiana, both tied to a livestock operation that got shut down." He pauses. "Same timeline as the Caldwell circuit."
"He's been with Colt since the beginning," Luke says quietly.
The picture sharpens.
Not just an operational hire. A partner. Someone with his own reasons to keep the Caldwell operation buried and his own skin in the game if it surfaced.
Which means Colt isn't just cleaning up a loose end.
He's protecting the one person who can put him in a cell right alongside Dusty.
I look at my brothers in the pre-dawn dark, the four of us standing in the drive of my house. I feel the same thing I always feel when we're standing together at the edge of something hard.
Ready.
"We need to move," I say. "Before Colt finds him first."
The rodeo grounds look different at four thirty in the morning.
Stripped of the crowd, the lights and the noise, there is just dirt and metal and the smell of animals. The skeleton of something that only comes alive when people fill it.
Quinn's truck sits at the far end of the back lot with its lights off. She's out and moving toward us before Brooks has the engine fully cut.
"He's still there," she says, keeping her voice low. "Back corner of the stock contractor area, near the equipment shed. He's been on his phone for the last forty minutes."
"Calling the handler?" I ask.
"Calling everyone," Quinn says. "I've been watching him work through his contacts one by one. He's looking for Garret Cole and not finding him, which is making him less careful than he should be."
Good.
"Careful, Colt is dangerous. And with Colt being rattled, he’ll make mistakes."
We move through the grounds in the dark, Quinn leading, the four of us spread out behind her in the loose formation of people who have talked through the approach and know their positions without needing to be reminded of them.
The stock contractor area comes into view around the side of the main arena, and there he is.
Colt Ramirez.
Champion bull rider. Golden boy of the circuit. The man who smiled at Wade across a crowded rodeo ground twelve hours ago like he had nothing in the world to worry about.
He looks different now.
The easy confidence is gone, replaced by something tight and reactive.
He's pacing a short line near the equipment shed, phone in one hand, the other running through his hair in a gesture that tells me the composure he's built his entire public life on is starting to cost him more than he has left to spend on it.
He sees us at the same moment I step into the reach of the security light.
He goes very still.
I keep walking toward him, steady and unhurried, the way you walk toward something when you're done being two steps behind it. I watch the calculations moving behind his eyes, the assessment of the situation, the angles, the options, the exits.
There aren't any.
Not tonight.
"Jace," he says. His voice carries the last remnant of the easy charm, worn thin now.
"It's done, Colt," I tell him, stopping ten feet away. "Dusty's in custody.
The financial records are with the commission. Luke's draw sheets from the Caldwell circuit go to the investigators in the morning." I hold his gaze. "Every piece of it is in the right hands. All of it."
Something moves through his expression, a crack in the surface, there and gone.
"You don't have anything on me," he says.
"Garret Cole is on your payroll," I answer. "Has been for two years. Every gate that stuck this season, every rope that slipped, every move that was made on my family's property. It all runs through him and back to you."
The crack widens.
"That's circumstantial," he says, but the certainty behind it is thin.
"The phone records aren't," Quinn says from beside me, her voice carrying the particular authority of a woman in uniform who has been patient long enough.
"Forty seven calls between you and Cole in the past three weeks alone. Fourteen of them on the nights something went wrong at this rodeo." She steps forward. "That's not circumstantial, Colt. That's a pattern."
He looks between us, something shifting in his posture that tells me he's running out of road and feeling the edge of it under his feet.
"I want a lawyer," he says.
"That's your right," Quinn answers. "But first you're going to stand right there while I make a call."
He doesn't move.
Neither do we.
Quinn makes her call on the radio. Sheriff Adams answers her.
It's short and precise, the kind of communication that happens between people who have already done the preparation and are now just executing the final step.
She tells Chief Adams 10-4 and she lowers the radio. She looks at Colt with the steady professional calm of a woman who has seen every version of this moment and isn't moved by any of them.
"Investigator is ten minutes out," she says.
Colt hasn't moved from his spot near the equipment shed. He's pulled himself back together somewhat. The visible rattling of ten minutes ago, replaced by something more controlled, more deliberate, the composure reasserting itself.
I've been watching him do it my whole career.
I just didn't know that's what I was watching.
"You want to know what I can't figure out," I say, and my voice comes out even, conversational almost, because this isn't anger anymore, it moved past anger somewhere around the time I understood the full scope of what he'd been building.
"I can't figure out why you kept going after the rodeos ended. You had the operation buried. You had the evidence on land nobody was watching. You had a clean reputation and a career that was going to carry you for another five years at least."
I look at him steadily. "Why come after me at all? Why not leave it alone and let the land sit?"
Something shifts in his expression.
Not the crack from before. Something different. Something that looks almost like he's been waiting for someone to ask that question and hasn't decided yet whether to answer it.
"Because you saw," he says finally.
"At Caldwell," I say.
"You saw the exchange with the stock contractor." His jaw tightens slightly. "I was there. I watched you watch it.
Dusty said you were too green to understand what you were looking at and I told him he was wrong." quick silence. "Dusty didn't listen."
"So when the Miller land came up," Brooks says from behind me, working it through out loud the way he does. "You realized it was going to Jace specifically, you didn't see a problem. You saw an opportunity."
Colt looks at Brooks, something measuring in it.
"Frame the witness," he says, like it's the most logical thing in the world.
"Bury the evidence on his land, tie the operation to his return to the circuit, make him the story instead of us.
" He pauses. "It almost worked, and when you showed up with Riley, my old girlfriend on your arm, I was determined to take you down. "
"Almost," Wade says, and the single word from Wade carries a weight that fills the entire back lot.
"Dusty got greedy," Colt continues, something shifting in his tone, and I realize he's doing what cornered men do, redirecting, putting distance between himself and the parts that cost the most.
"The planted evidence, coming after your family, that wasn't my call. That was Dusty protecting himself."
"The gate handler was yours," I say.
He doesn't answer.
He doesn't have to.
"The handler was yours," I repeat, steady and certain. "Every gate that stuck. Every rope that slipped. That rider at the second rodeo who went down hard and ended up in the hospital, that was on you. Your doing.
I take one step toward him. "Don't stand here and separate yourself from Dusty's choices when your choices put riders on the ground."
The composure cracks again, deeper this time.
Because that's the part he can't reframe. Not the money or the fixed draws or the twenty years of carefully constructed lies, but the riders.
The men who got hurt on gates his man tampered with while he stood in the crowd with his champion smile. His spotless reputation and his easy way of making everyone around him feel like they were looking at something worth trusting.
That's what it costs him.
I can see it.
The investigator's vehicle pulls into the back lot, headlights cutting through the dark, and Colt watches it come with the expression of a man watching the last door close.
He looks back at me.
"For what it's worth," he says quietly, "you were always the best rider on that circuit."
I look at him for a long moment.
"That's not worth much right now," I answer.
The investigator is a woman named Carver.
Late forties, compact, the kind of still that comes from years of reading rooms and deciding how much of herself to put into them.
She shakes Quinn's hand first, then Brooks, then looks at Colt with the particular quality of attention that makes it clear she already knows everything about him that matters and is here for the formalities.
Colt knows it too.
I watch him recalibrate in real time, the lawyer request already made, the composure back in place, the champion persona reasserting itself with the practiced ease of a man who has been performing under pressure his entire adult life.
He straightens his shoulders. Evens out his breathing. Puts the easy back into his expression the way you put on a coat.
It doesn't fit the same way anymore.
Carver asks him to step away from the equipment shed and he does. Moving with her toward the far side of the lot. Quinn flanking him on the other side, and I watch them go with the particular feeling of something winding down that has been running too long and at too high a cost.
Brooks comes to stand beside me. Luke on the other side. Wade just behind, which is where Wade always is, close enough to move fast if fast becomes necessary.
"It's enough," Brooks says quietly, watching Carver work. "What we have is enough to hold him. The phone records, the handler's employment history, the financial connection between Colt's accounts and the betting operation. It builds."
"Cole Garrett is still out there," I say.
"Quinn has two deputies looking," Luke answers. "Man with a record and no loyalty to anyone. His paycheck won't let him run far or smart. They'll find him."
I nod, accepting that, because the part I can control is done and the part I can't, belongs to Quinn and Carver and the process that moves slower than any of us would like but moves in the right direction when the foundation is solid.
The foundation is solid.
I feel it the way you feel something when you've been building it piece by piece for weeks and can finally stand back and see the whole of it. Not perfect. Not clean. But solid.
Carver says something to Colt that I can't hear from here. Whatever it is makes the composure slip one final time, a flash of something raw and unguarded crossing his face before the mask comes back down.
He says something in return.
Carver doesn't react.
She reaches into her jacket and produces a document, holding it out to him with the steady patience of a woman who has done this enough times to find drama unnecessary.
Colt takes it.
Reads it.
And then he looks up, past Carver, past Quinn, directly at me across the width of the back lot. What's in his expression in that unguarded moment is not anger or defeat or the remnants of the charm he's been running on.
It's calculation.
Cold, fast, and entirely focused.
My stomach tightens.
Because that's not the look of a man accepting what's happening.
That's the look of a man who just decided on his final move.
He takes one step back from Carver.
Then everything happens fast.
He drops the document and turns and runs, not toward the exit. not toward the parking lot. Toward the arena, toward the one place on these grounds where the dark is the deepest.
There are numerous exits and this man knows this layout as well as he knows his own name might be able to find enough space to disappear into.
Wade is moving before I am. Before I even finish my thought.
And somewhere ahead of us in the dark, Colt Ramirez is making the last desperate play of a twenty year game that just ran out of road.