Chapter 3
KENNA
Holloway walks out of the Broken Spur and takes the oxygen with him.
I sit at the bar for another ten minutes, nursing the rest of my Shiner and letting my pulse settle.
Jolene, the bartender, gives me a look that says she's seen plenty of women watch that man leave, and I'm not about to give her the satisfaction of being one of them.
I finish my beer, leave cash on the bar, and drive back to the motel with the windows down and the night air pushing the smell of smoke and whiskey out of my hair.
I don't sleep.
I sit cross-legged on the motel bed with my laptop balanced on a stack of pillows and a cold cup of gas-station coffee on the nightstand and I dig.
Tyler Brennan. Bull rider out of Abilene, around Grant's age. He died at the Fort Worth Stockyards Rodeo a few weeks before Grant, caught by a horn in the ribs and trampled before anyone could get between him and the bull.
The Fort Worth Star-Telegram gave it a handful of paragraphs. Tragic accident. Promising career cut short.
The same language they used for Grant. The same empty, careful phrasing that tells the reader nothing except that someone died and nobody wants to say why.
I pull up the Southwest Circuit's public records database, the one my press credentials gave me access to on day one. Stock draw sheets for every event this season.
Tyler Brennan drew Hellfire's Revenge at Fort Worth. Hellfire's Revenge was supplied by Thornton Livestock.
A few weeks later, Grant drew Tombstone's Revenge at Las Cruces. Tombstone's Revenge was also Thornton Livestock.
Two riders. Two Thornton bulls. Two deaths.
I push the laptop off my legs and press my palms flat against the bedspread to stop the trembling.
The motel room is quiet in the particular way cheap rooms are quiet after midnight, the AC cycling on and off, the ice machine humming through the wall, a television murmuring in the room next door.
I can hear my own breathing, and it sounds too loud, too fast, the breathing of a woman who just watched a pattern emerge from data that everyone else has been looking at for months without seeing.
Nobody saw it because nobody was looking. The circuit ruled both deaths as accidents, closed the files, moved on. The stock draw sheets are public record, available to anyone with press credentials, and not one person thought to cross-reference the contractor names with the fatalities.
Nobody except Grant. And Colt. And now me.
I go deeper. Pull up Thornton Livestock's event history.
They've supplied stock at every major Southwest Circuit venue for the past three years, which is unusual.
Most circuits rotate contractors to keep the stock fresh and the competition fair.
Thornton's almost exclusive lock on the Southwest Circuit events means someone at the top is signing those contracts repeatedly, overriding the kind of rotation I grew up seeing on this circuit.
I screenshot everything. Save it to the encrypted folder on my desktop labeled "Feature Research" in case anyone ever looks at my laptop.
Then I follow Holloway's advice from the bar and pull up the financial records.
Prize purse distributions, entry fees, stock contractor payments.
The circuit's media portal has all of it, organized by event, and nobody's bothered to lock it down because nobody expects anyone to actually read it.
I start cross-referencing the numbers at Thornton events against the rest of the circuit, and by the time the sky begins to change, I've got a pattern that makes my stomach turn.
In our last phone call, the one where he sounded like he was standing on the edge of something enormous, he said he was onto something big. He said he was close to proving it. He said he loved me and to stop worrying and he'd call me when it was done.
He never called.
And now I'm sitting in an Amarillo motel room learning that my brother's murder wasn't the first.
There was a pattern. Someone on this circuit has been killing riders and getting away with it, and Grant walked straight into the machinery because that's who he was. That's who he'd always been.
The one who ran toward the fire while everyone else ran away.
The tears dried up weeks ago. What replaced them is harder and meaner and a hell of a lot more useful.
I save the research files, close the laptop, and lie down on top of the covers with my eyes open, staring at the water stain on the ceiling until the sky outside the window changes.
The Saturday event doesn't start until four, which gives me the morning to work.
I shower, dress, and drive to the rodeo grounds by eight.
The arena is a different animal in daylight: smaller, scruffier, the glamour of last night's lights replaced by sun-bleached metal and trampled dirt.
A handful of crew members are setting up for the afternoon, hauling equipment and testing the sound system. Stock contractors are unloading animals from transport trucks parked in a long row behind the arena.
I spot the Thornton Livestock logo on two of the trucks. Dark red cabs with the company name painted in gold lettering across the trailer panels.
I photograph the plates from a distance and keep walking.
The handlers working the Thornton trucks move differently from the other crews.
Faster. Heads down. Nobody joking, nobody talking louder than necessary.
The other stock contractors have their guys standing around with coffee cups, shooting the breeze while the animals unload.
The Thornton crew works like men on a clock they can't see, and the silence around their operation has a weight to it.
I file that away and keep walking.
My target this morning is Quinn Gallagher. A team roper Grant was tight with on the circuit, placed third at last night's event.
I found his entry information in the program and tracked down his rig in the competitor parking area: a blue dually with a stock trailer hooked to the back and a pair of roping horses tied to the side.
He's sitting in a camp chair with a mug of coffee while his horses work through their hay nets. His phone plays country music from a tinny speaker propped against the trailer wheel.
"Quinn Gallagher?" I hold up my badge. "Kenna McEnroe. I'm writing a freelance article for one of the publications that follow rodeo. Mind if I ask you a few questions about the circuit?"
He looks up. Mid-twenties, sandy hair, the kind of open face that belongs on a recruiting poster for 4-H.
The friendliness shuts down the instant he sees my press credentials.
"Not really doing interviews," he says.
"It's not an interview. More of a background conversation.
" I keep my voice light, approachable, wearing the version of myself I built for this cover: curious, non-threatening, interested in rodeo culture rather than rodeo crime.
"I'm writing a feature on the Southwest Circuit lifestyle.
Travel, competition, the grind of the road. You knew Grant Corbin, right?"
The name lands on him like a physical weight. He sets his coffee down.
"Yeah," he says. "I did."
"I'm sorry for your loss." I mean it. Grant considered Quinn a friend, and the grief on his face is genuine. "He was a talented rider."
"He was the best." Quinn says it quietly, to his hands.
Then he shakes his head, and something like a laugh comes out, short and bitter.
"You know what kills me? Last time I saw him, I owed him forty bucks from a roping bet.
He kept texting me this picture of a sad empty wallet.
Every morning. Same picture. For two weeks straight.
" Quinn's throat works. "I'd give anything to get one more of those stupid texts. "
He picks at the seam of his camp chair.
"Look, I'm not sure what you want me to say. Grant was my buddy. He was a good man and the funniest son of a bitch on the circuit, and what happened to him was—" He stops.
"An accident?" I supply.
His eyes snap to mine. The friendliness is gone. What's left is fear.
"That's what they said."
"Is that what you say?"
Silence. One of the horses noses Quinn's shoulder, looking for attention. He pushes it away gently. Behind us, the arena sound system crackles to life and dies again, someone testing the speakers for the afternoon event. The normalcy of it feels obscene.
"You talked to Holloway," Quinn says. Not a question.
"Last night."
"Then you've already heard more than you should." He stands, and the camp chair scrapes against the gravel. "Look, lady, I don't know who you are or what you're really after, but I'll tell you the same thing I told the last person who came around asking about Grant. Drop it."
"The last person?"
"Some insurance adjuster. Showed up about a month after the funeral, asked some questions, went away.
" Quinn glances over his shoulder like he's checking for witnesses.
"The official line is that Grant drew a tough bull and got unlucky.
If you want to keep working this story, that's the line you toe. "
"And if I don't?"
He looks at me for a long moment. The fear in his face wars with something else.
Guilt, maybe. The particular kind that comes from knowing the truth and choosing silence.
"Grant was looking into the prize money," Quinn says, low and fast, like the words will burn his mouth if he holds them too long.
"He found discrepancies. Payouts that didn't match official purses.
Rider registrations that were faked, entry fees going somewhere they shouldn't.
He thought the money was being siphoned through a company called—"
"Thornton Livestock."
Quinn goes still. "How do you know that name?"
"I read stock draw sheets." It's the truth, just not all of it. "Thornton supplied bulls at every event where a rider died this season."