Chapter 6 #2
Powder Keg slams the chute walls twice before the gate opens, and when the latch drops, fifteen hundred pounds of muscle detonates into the arena.
The left spin comes hard and immediate, whipping my body sideways while my riding hand takes the shock through the rope.
I counter with my free arm, find the rhythm of the buck, and settle into the animal's cadence the way Grant taught me years ago in a practice pen outside Odessa.
'Ride the rhythm, not the chaos.'
The spin reverses at the three-second mark, and Powder Keg drops his head, trying for the leg hook.
I shift my weight, lift my knees, and the horn cuts air instead of denim.
The crowd noise surges, and I use the momentum of the reversal to reset my center of gravity.
The last four seconds are clean and controlled, my body answering the bull's movement instead of fighting it, and when the buzzer sounds, I kick free and land on my feet in the dirt with my balance under me.
It's a decent score, high enough to keep me in the running.
I tip my hat because that's what you do.
But the real score is in my legs, in my spine, in the way my body absorbed the impact without the reckless looseness that's been getting me hurt for the last two months.
I rode to win. I rode like I used to. And the difference is a woman with a sharp tongue who made me give a damn about staying alive.
I walk back toward the chutes, rolling the rope around my riding hand, and look up past the rail to the section above.
The VIP section is visible from the chute walkway, elevated behind tinted glass and bottle service. I don't usually look up there. Money and sponsors and people who've never sat on a bull telling each other how much they love the sport.
Tonight I look, because Hayes Merrick is standing at the rail with a bourbon in one hand and his phone in the other, watching the arena floor like a man reviewing inventory.
Circuit commissioner. Investment group owner.
The face of the Southwest Circuit's public relations machine.
He's got the silver hair and the tailored shirt and a tan that costs more than my entry fees.
The smile he's wearing right now is the same one he wore in the promotional video they played before the event, the one where he talked about the circuit's "commitment to rider safety. "
I watched that video from behind the chutes and tasted something metallic at the back of my throat.
Merrick spots me looking. He lifts his bourbon in my direction. The gesture is casual, friendly, the kind of thing a commissioner does when he sees his points leader after a good ride.
His eyes don't match the gesture. His eyes are flat and assessing, running calculations behind the smile, and I've seen the same look on stock contractors deciding which animal goes to slaughter.
I tip my hat back at him. It costs me more than the ride did.
He turns to the woman beside him, some sponsor rep in a blazer, and his hand finds the small of her back as he steers her toward the bar.
The charm snaps on like a switch. He laughs at something she says, leans in close, and the woman's posture softens the way people's posture softens around men who know exactly how to make you feel like the most important person in the room.
Grant told me about that charm. Said Merrick could shake your hand and order your death in the same breath and you'd walk away thinking he was a hell of a guy.
I turn back toward the chutes. Merrick's bourbon salute and his dead-eyed smile go in the file with everything else I'm saving for later.
I catch Kenna's eyes in the press section as I pass.
She's watching with that intensity she brings to everything, the same focus she brought to arguing strategy last night before the argument turned into something else entirely.
Our eyes lock for maybe two seconds, and the heat in that look is enough to undo every rational thought I've built since getting out of bed this morning.
She breaks first, dropping her gaze to her notebook, and the small victory of that shouldn't feel as good as it does.
Slade is still at the chutes.
I don't give him the option to walk away this time.
I cut straight toward him, pulling off my riding glove as I go.
Slade sees me coming and his weight shifts to his back foot, the instinctive rebalancing of a man whose body is deciding between standing ground and leaving.
I close the distance before he can choose, planting myself inside his personal space with the casual territorial aggression I've used on every bull rider who ever tried to crowd me at a chute gate.
He doesn't step back. I'll give him that.
Most men take a half-step when I get this close, an unconscious concession to the reality that I've got three inches and twenty pounds on them and a reputation for using both.
Slade holds his ground, but his shoulders pull back, opening his chest, and the vein in his neck is beating a tempo that's faster than a man at rest.
We stand there for a beat, two big men in a narrow alley behind the chutes, neither willing to yield the space. The air smells like dirt and rosin and the sweat drying on my shirt from the ride, and the sounds of the arena are muffled behind the metal walls.
"Carrick."
"Holloway." His voice is flat and careful.
"You've been watching me all morning. Want to tell me why?"
"I watch a lot of people. Don't read into it."
"Sure." I tuck the glove into my back pocket and study his face. Slade's got hard features that sit close to the bone, with deep-set eyes and a crooked bridge to his nose that says it's been broken more than once. He's built for absorbing impact, and he's using that skill right now.
"I saw you looking at the Thornton pens," he says, his voice quiet and reluctant.
"I look at a lot of pens. Don't read into it."
His mouth thins. The point is taken.
"The new handler," he says. "The kid in the blue cap."
"What about him?"
"He's been working Thornton's stock for about three weeks.
Showed up right after the Tucson event." Slade pauses, and the pause costs him visibly.
He doesn't want to be having this conversation.
Everything about his body says run. "Before that, nobody was doing Vic's old job.
Thornton was shorthanded. Now suddenly he's not. "
"You keep pretty close tabs on Thornton's staffing for a man who doesn't know anything."
Slade's eyes go flinty. "You want to bust my balls, or you want to listen?"
"I'm listening."
He glances both directions down the alley. Nobody is within earshot. His voice drops lower anyway. "That bull at Las Cruces. The one Grant drew."
Every muscle in my body locks tight.
"What about it."
"That animal didn't move like any bull I've ever seen.
And I've been around livestock my whole life.
" Slade's hands curl into fists at his sides, then deliberately uncurl.
"The spin was wrong. It was too fast and too sustained.
A normal bull bucks and spins because it's trying to shed the rider.
That bull spun to track, like it was targeting.
And when Grant came off, the bull didn't disengage.
A normal animal moves on once the rider's down. That bull came back."
My teeth are clenched so hard my jaw aches.
"I've wrestled a thousand steers," Slade says.
"I know what livestock looks like on stimulants.
I know what adrenaline does to an animal and what pharmaceuticals do.
That bull was on something. The targeting behavior, the sustained aggression after the dismount, the way it kept circling back. That's chemical."
I take a breath that feels like swallowing sand.
"You pulled him out."
"I pulled him out." Slade's voice goes rough.
"I was closest to the fence when Grant went down.
I got over the rail before the bullfighters reached him.
The bull caught me in the shoulder on the first pass, and then two other guys got in with flags and pushed the animal off.
" His throat works. "He was already gone by the time the medics got there. "
"And you didn't tell anyone what you saw."
Slade meets my eyes for the first time. "Who was I going to tell?
I've got a manslaughter conviction and a parole situation that means any involvement in a legal investigation puts me back in a cell.
I tell the cops, and I'm a convicted felon saying a bull looked wrong.
You know how that plays. You tried the direct approach yourself, and they wrote you off as unstable. "
He's right. I hate that he's right.
"You can't sit on this, Slade."
"I'm not sitting on it. I'm standing here telling you, and that's all I've got.
" He pushes off the fence, and the conversation is over in his body language before his mouth catches up.
"I'm not putting any of this on record. I can't. But you should know the truth, because somebody other than me should. "
He walks away. I let him go.
I stand in the alley behind the chutes and let it sink in.
For months, I've been the only person on this circuit who believed Grant was murdered.
I've been the man with the conspiracy theories, the grief-addled bull rider who can't accept that his best friend died in an accident, the cautionary tale other riders use to remind themselves that the sport breaks people in more ways than the body.
And now Slade Carrick, a man with every reason in the world to stay silent, just confirmed what I've been saying since the night I drove to Las Cruces and arrived too late.
The bull was drugged. The death was engineered. Grant's murder was real, and somebody besides me is willing to say it, even if he'll only say it in an alley where nobody can hear.