Wild Ride (Southwest Sinners: Prequel)

Prologue

Fort Worth, Texas

Three Weeks Ago

I know a setup when I see one, and Tyler Brennan's draw stinks like week-old roadkill.

The chutes at the Fort Worth event are loud as hell, bulls slamming metal and riders checking rope, but I catch the look on Tyler's face when they announce his ride.

Hellfire's Revenge. Nasty bull, sure, but Tyler's ridden worse.

He's one of the best bull riders on the Southwest Circuit, right up there with me and Colt Holloway in the standings.

He should be focused, locked in, getting his head right.

Instead, he's scanning the crowd. Looking for someone.

"You good?" I ask, leaning over the rail between our chutes.

Tyler jerks his attention back to me. "Yeah. Fine."

He's lying. I've known Tyler since we were seventeen, breaking our asses on practice bulls in dusty arenas across Texas. He's never been a good liar.

"Tyler."

"I said I'm fine, Grant." He adjusts his bull rope, movements too quick, too jerky. "Just got a lot on my mind."

I let it go. Wade Ashcroft walks past behind us, hauling his saddle bronc rigging toward the other end of the chutes, and catches my eye long enough to give me a nod.

Slade Carrick's leaning against the fence near the steer wrestling box, arms crossed, watching the scene with the flat expression he wears like a mask.

The Southwest Circuit is a small world. We all compete at the same events, drink at the same bars, sleep in the same cheap motels.

You learn to read the people around you because your life depends on knowing who's steady and who's about to crack.

The announcer's voice booms across the arena, introducing Tyler's ride.

The crowd roars. Tyler settles onto Hellfire's Revenge, working his hand into the rope.

From where I stand, I can see his jaw clenched too tight, his shoulders tense.

Whatever's got him distracted, he needs to shake it off or this ride's going to get ugly.

The gateman looks at Tyler. "Ready?"

Tyler nods.

The chute opens.

Hellfire's Revenge explodes out of the gate with standard aggression, nothing Tyler can't handle. The bull spins left, kicks high, and Tyler adjusts his weight like he's done a thousand times. One second. Two. Three. The ride looks clean.

Then at four seconds, something changes.

The bull's movements go from aggressive to berserk.

Hellfire twists midair in a way bulls don't naturally move, comes down hard, and throws Tyler forward over his hand.

Tyler loses his seat, tries to recover, but the bull's already spinning back the other direction with speed that's all wrong. Too fast. Too targeted.

Tyler gets launched. Hits the dirt on his back, hard enough I hear the impact over the crowd noise.

The bullfighters move in, trying to pull the bull's attention away so Tyler can get up and run. Standard procedure. I've seen it a hundred times.

But Hellfire doesn't go for the bullfighters. The bull turns, finds Tyler on the ground, and charges straight back at him with intent that makes my blood go cold. Not random aggression. Targeted.

I'm moving before I think about it, vaulting the rail and hitting the arena dirt at a dead run. The bullfighters are shouting, waving, but Hellfire's locked on Tyler like he's got a score to settle. Tyler's trying to get up, dazed from the fall, and the bull's closing fast.

I'm ten feet away when Hellfire reaches him.

The horn catches Tyler in the ribs, drives him back down into the dirt.

The bull follows through, hooves coming down on Tyler's chest and his shoulder.

I grab the bull rope still hanging from Hellfire's back and pull, using my weight to drag the animal's attention off Tyler.

It works. The bull spins toward me, and the bullfighters finally get between us and Tyler.

Stock contractors flood the arena. Someone gets a hand on Hellfire's halter, starts pulling him toward the exit chute. I drop to my knees next to Tyler.

Blood. Too much blood. His chest is caved wrong, ribs clearly broken, and when he breathes it sounds wet and horrible.

"Tyler." I get my hands on his shoulders, trying to keep him still. "Don't move, man. Medics are coming."

His eyes find mine. He tries to say something, lips moving, but nothing comes out except blood.

"Don't talk. Just hang on."

The crowd's gone quiet, that terrible hush that means everyone knows they just watched something bad happen. Medics rush into the arena with a stretcher and gear rattling. They try to get me to move, but I don't until Tyler's hand closes around my wrist. Weak grip, barely there, but desperate.

He pulls me closer. Tries again to speak.

"Grant." It comes out as barely a whisper, his voice destroyed. "They... said..."

"Who said what? Tyler, who?"

His eyes are losing focus. Blood trickles from the corner of his mouth. He's trying so hard to get the words out, and I can see the fight in him, the need to tell me something.

"They... paid..." His grip loosens. "Grant, they..."

And then nothing. His hand falls away. His eyes go empty.

The medics push me aside, start working on him, but I already know. I've seen that look before. Tyler Brennan is gone.

I stand there in the arena dirt, covered in my friend's blood, while the medics confirm what I already know. Dead on arrival. Massive internal injuries. Catastrophic trauma. All the words that mean Tyler took a ride that killed him.

Except it wasn't just a bad ride.

I look up at the stock contractor, a guy named Vic Sutton who manages Hellfire's Revenge along with a dozen other bulls on the circuit. He's standing by the exit chute, pale and sweating, hands shaking as he fumbles with the latch. When he catches me looking, he jerks his gaze away too fast.

Something's wrong. Not just Tyler-dying wrong. Something else.

The circuit officials are already swarming, radios crackling, moving into damage control mode.

I recognize Dale Thornton, the Southwest Circuit's head of operations, talking to the announcer in low urgent tones.

Within five minutes, they're making an announcement.

Tragic accident. Wrong bull on a bad night.

These things happen in rodeo. Tyler Brennan was a skilled rider who knew the risks.

I watch them clean up the scene with efficiency that feels too practiced, too smooth. They get Tyler's body onto the stretcher, covered with a tarp, and moved out of the arena. They reset the chutes. They get Hellfire's Revenge back into the stock pens like nothing happened.

By the time they're done, it looks like just another ride gone wrong.

But I saw Tyler's eyes in those last seconds. I heard him trying to warn me about something. And I saw Vic Sutton's face when he realized I was watching.

This wasn't an accident.

Someone killed Tyler Brennan and made it look like rodeo bad luck.

Colt finds me behind the chutes, still covered in blood, staring at the pens where they took Hellfire's Revenge.

Zane Crowe, the veteran stock contractor who supplies half the bulls on the circuit, is standing at the far end of the pen row with his arms folded and his jaw tight, watching his handlers work with an expression I can't read from this distance.

He's been around rodeo longer than most of us have been alive.

If something was wrong with that bull, Zane would know.

Colt Holloway is six-two of controlled violence in a sport full of men who can't control anything, least of all themselves.

He's the top-ranked bull rider on the Southwest Circuit, and he carries that ranking the way some men carry weapons: quietly, with the understanding that everyone around him already knows what he's capable of.

Dark hair, darker eyes, a jaw that looks like it was designed to take a punch and a mouth that rarely wastes words.

He's been my biggest rival and closest friend for eight years, and I've never once seen him rattled.

Not when he shattered his collarbone in Tucson.

Not when his ex-wife cleaned out their joint account and disappeared to Denver. Not once.

Tonight, his hands aren’t steady. Colt’s hands are always steady… always. The man doesn’t rattle.

He hides it fast. Shoves them in his pockets, locks his jaw, does the thing Colt does where he buries whatever he's feeling so deep you'd need a backhoe to find it.

But I saw. And the fact that Tyler's death cracked something in a man who doesn't crack tells me more about how bad this is than anything the officials have said.

Colt doesn't say anything, just stands next to me. We've been friends and rivals long enough that he knows when I need words and when I need silence.

Right now, I need silence.

But after a minute, he speaks anyway. "You okay?"

"No."

"Fair." He's quiet for another beat. "Officials are calling it an accident."

"I know."

"You don't sound convinced."

I turn to look at him. Colt Holloway's got the same thousand-yard stare every bull rider gets after watching one of us die, but underneath it I can see the question. He knows me well enough to know when I'm chewing on something.

"Tyler tried to tell me something before he died," I say. "Couldn't get the words out, but he was trying. Said 'they paid.' That's all I got."

Colt's jaw tightens. "They paid what? For what?"

"I don't know." I look back at the stock pens. "But I'm going to find out."

"Grant." Colt's voice carries a warning I know well. "Don't go looking for conspiracies where there's just bad luck and worse timing."

"You see that bull's movements? That wasn't normal aggression."

"Bulls do unpredictable things. That's why we ride them."

"Not like that." I meet his eyes. "Something was wrong with Hellfire. The way he moved, the way he came back for Tyler after the throw. That bull was juiced or drugged or something."

Colt studies me for a long moment. "Even if you're right, what are you going to do? The officials already made their ruling. Tyler's dead. Going after ghosts won't bring him back."

"No." I look down at my hands, still red with Tyler's blood. "But maybe it'll keep the next guy from dying the same way."

Colt doesn't argue. He knows me well enough to know I've already made up my mind.

"Be careful," he says finally. "If there's something dirty happening, the people behind it won't want you digging."

"I know."

He leaves me there, goes to get ready for his own ride. The circuit doesn't stop for the dead. We've got events to compete, points to earn, bulls to ride. Life goes on, same as it always does.

But I make a promise standing in that blood-stained dirt behind the Fort Worth chutes. Tyler was trying to warn me about something. Tried to tell me who paid, and for what, and couldn't get the words out before he died.

I'll find out what he was trying to say.

And when I do, whoever's responsible for putting my friend in the ground is going to pay for it in ways they can't imagine.

Three weeks later, the blood is gone from my hands but not from my head. I still hear Tyler trying to get the words out, still see his eyes losing focus, still feel his grip going slack around my wrist.

The circuit keeps moving. So do I.