Chapter 4
COLT
I'm at the stock pens before dawn, hours before the Saturday afternoon load-in, because Thornton Livestock runs its operation in the early morning when the arena is empty and the only eyes around belong to men on the payroll.
I park my truck at the far end of the competitor lot and walk the fence line, staying behind the livestock trailers where the shadows are deep.
The pens are half-full from last night's transport, loaded with bulls, broncs, and a handful of steers for the roping events.
The Thornton trucks are parked nose to tail against the back fence, engines off, cabs dark.
One handler is working the pens. He's stocky, somewhere in his forties, wearing a faded Thornton Livestock cap pulled low.
He moves through the animals with the mechanical efficiency of a man who's done this job a thousand times and stopped caring about it nine hundred and fifty times ago.
He checks water troughs, throws flakes of hay, runs his hand along flanks and shoulders.
Everything about the routine looks routine.
I watch him for a while.
He doesn't touch any syringes. He doesn't reach into his pockets for anything that doesn't belong. He doesn't do a single thing that would look wrong to anyone except a man who's been staring at Thornton employees long enough to know what wrong looks like.
Vic used to work these pens.
Grant told me about Vic in that last phone call, the night before Las Cruces.
Vic was the handler Grant turned into an informant, the one who recorded a confession on Grant's phone.
After Grant died, Vic vanished. I tracked down his apartment a few weeks ago.
The place was cleared out. The landlord said he left in the middle of the night with one bag and didn't leave a forwarding address.
People don't vanish, the journalist said last night.
On this circuit, they do.
I pull out my phone and call Flint. I've known the old man for years, long before any of this started.
Retired stock contractor, been around the circuit since before I was born.
If Grant was going to trust anyone with what he'd found, it would have been Flint, and the dying words confirmed it: 'Flint has copies.
' His number rings and goes to voicemail.
I've left message after message over the past two months, and he's answered twice.
I’ve been out to his place. The first time, he didn't open the door.
I stood on his porch knocking, calling his name, and the house stayed dark and silent. I could see the glow of a television through the back window. He was home. He just wasn't answering.
The second time, about a week later, I drove back to his ranch outside Ruidoso and sat in his driveway until he came to the screen door.
He didn't open it.
He just stood on the other side with the mesh between us and the look of a man who's too tired to be afraid and too afraid to be brave.
"I can't help you, son," he said. "I'm sorry. Poking around in this thing already got too many people killed. The smartest thing you can do is walk away before you end up like Grant and Tyler."
"Flint, if you have copies of what Grant collected, I need them."
"I can't."
The screen door stayed shut. The deadbolt turned behind it.
I haven't tried the drive again. There's a line between persistence and cruelty, and an old man sitting alone on a ranch with a dead man's secrets locked in his closet is standing right on top of it.
My phone buzzes. It's not Flint, and it's not Torres. It's a text from the circuit's media coordinator, reminding all riders that press availability begins before the afternoon event.
I shove the phone in my pocket and walk back to my truck.
The Saturday event goes the way Saturday events always go. Barrel racing, team roping, the bronc riders doing their thing while the crowd works through funnel cakes and overpriced beer.
I draw a bull named Rattlesnake for the evening round.
He's a good bull, honest, the kind that bucks straight and hard without the lateral spins that catch you off guard.
Whoever's running the stock draws this weekend isn't trying to kill me, which is either comforting or means Merrick doesn't see me as a threat anymore.
That second option is worse. If Merrick thinks I'm harmless, it means the cover-up worked. It means Grant died for nothing.
Wade Ashcroft is listed in the saddle bronc rotation but scratches at the last minute. I find out why when I walk past the competitor trailers and see him sitting on the running board of his truck with his rigging in his lap and his hands shaking too hard to buckle it.
He sees me and his face goes through three expressions in a second — shame, defiance, and the blank mask he pulls over both.
"Don't," he says.
"Didn't say anything."
"You were about to. I can see the speech forming behind your eyes."
"I don't make speeches."
"Good. Because I've got a perfectly good reason for scratching that has nothing to do with the bottle in my center console."
"What's the reason?"
"The bottle in my center console." He drops the rigging between his boots. "See? Honesty. They say it's the first step."
"That's admitting you have a problem."
"That's the second step. I'm working ahead." He leans his head back against the truck panel and closes his eyes. "Go ride your bull, Holloway. I'll be here when you get back."
He will be. That's the problem. Wade Ashcroft will be right here on this running board or one like it at the next event and the one after that, and the circuit will keep turning and nobody will say the thing that needs saying because that's not how this works.
I walk away and don't say it either, and I carry that cowardice through the rest of the evening. I ride Rattlesnake for a solid score and walk away clean. The crowd likes it. The other riders give me the nod.
After the event, I'm leaning against my truck in the competitor lot, packing my gear bag, when the journalist materializes out of the dark like she's been waiting.
She's carrying a laptop bag and a Styrofoam cup of coffee, and she has the look of someone who's been running on adrenaline and bad decisions for too long. She skips the small talk entirely, which I appreciate more than I should.
"I've got something," she says.
"Something worth my time?"
She opens the laptop bag and pulls out a manila folder, the kind you buy at an office supply store, and hands it to me. I open it and find printouts, spreadsheets, highlighted rows, annotated margins, and sticky notes in tight handwriting.
"Southwest Circuit financial records going back as far as the database lets me," she says. "Prize purse distributions, entry fees, stock contractor payments. All publicly available through the circuit's media portal, but nobody's ever cross-referenced them."
She points to a row highlighted in yellow.
"At every event where Thornton Livestock supplied stock, the prize purse payouts run consistently lower than events using other contractors.
The difference doesn't show up in the official financial reports because it's spread across multiple payout categories. "
I flip through the pages. The numbers are clean and organized, the kind of analysis that takes time and skill.
"Where's the money going?" I ask.
"That's the question." She taps another highlighted section.
"Rider registration fees at Thornton events are also inflated.
Ghost entries, basically. Riders listed who didn't compete.
I found the ghost entries in the press portal, then traced the registration fee payments through state corporate filings to a holding company called Mesquite Ridge Holdings. "
"Mesquite Ridge." I've heard that name. It came up in my own digging, one of Merrick's shell companies. "You dug this up from public records?"
"Press credentials give you access to the circuit's financial database. Nobody expects anyone to actually read it." She closes the folder. "That's what I have. Now tell me what you have."
I lean against the truck and study her.
She's standing a few feet away with her arms crossed and her chin up, and the moonlight catches the freckles across her nose and the stubborn set of her jaw.
She brought me data, real data, the kind that took hours to compile and cross-reference.
Either she's a legitimate journalist who stumbled onto the story of her career, or she's something else entirely and the data is bait.
Both options interest me. Neither makes me trust her.
"This is not a story," I say. "This is a criminal investigation. The difference is that stories get published and investigations can get people killed."
"So what, you just sit on what you know and let whoever did this walk?"
"Grant didn't sit on it. He's dead."
"And two months later, you're sitting in parking lots alone with nothing to show for it.
" She holds my gaze. "I have financial data you don't have.
I have press access you don't have. I can ask questions in rooms where your name is mud.
And I already know about Thornton, about Tyler Brennan, and about the pattern connecting them. "
"Who told you about Brennan?"
"You did. At the bar."
"I told you a name. You didn't know it then. You know it now, which means you've been digging. Who else have you been talking to?"
She doesn't step back.
"A rider who knew Grant. He's scared and doesn't want his name out there, so I'm not giving it to you."
"What did he tell you?"
"That Grant had a girlfriend named Rainey who disappeared after his death. That some retired stock contractor drove her out of Las Cruces. That the investigation Grant was running went deeper than anyone knew."
"Your source talks too much."
"My source is scared."
"Smart man."
"Scared and smart aren't the same thing." She uncrosses her arms. "You need what I have, Colt. I can see it on your face. Every lead you've chased has gone cold, and you're running out of time and options and patience. I'm offering you a partnership."
"I don't do partnerships."