Chapter 7
Hayes Merrick wears expensive suits to rodeos like he's slumming with the livestock, and I'm about to shove his face in the dirt where he belongs.
He's holding court in the VIP section at the Santa Fe event, a roped-off area with catered food and open bar that the sponsors and circuit officials use to pretend they're not profiting off men who risk their necks for prize money that's apparently being skimmed before it reaches their pockets.
Merrick stands at the center of a cluster of men in pressed shirts and clean boots, drink in hand, laughing at something one of them said.
I've never met him face to face. Known his name for years, the way you know the names of the people who run things without running them.
Hayes Merrick, commissioner of the Southwest Circuit, livestock investment group owner, the man behind Thornton Livestock and half a dozen shell companies Rainey traced through public records on Flint's kitchen table last night.
The man who paid to have Tyler Brennan killed.
Rainey's behind the chutes where I told her to stay, camera up, documenting everything.
Flint is somewhere in the stock pens, keeping an eye on Merrick's handlers.
Before we left the ranch this morning, we spent two hours at Flint's kitchen table copying everything onto three separate drives.
One stays with Flint. One goes in Rainey's camera bag.
One stays in my truck. Belt, suspenders, and a backup plan for the backup plan.
We have a plan. It's a terrible plan, but it's the only one we've got.
Step one: I ride. Make sure Merrick sees me. Remind him that I'm still here, still competing, still a problem.
Step two: I talk to him. Get him to say something, anything, that confirms what we already know. Rainey shoots photos of the conversation. Flint listens from behind the partition.
Step three: We take everything to the feds.
There is no step four, because step three is the part where everything either works or falls apart.
My ride is first. Deacon's Fury, a spinning bull with a habit of slamming riders into the chute gate on the dismount.
I settle onto his back in chute three, and the bull shifts beneath me, testing the weight.
Two thousand pounds of muscle and bad attitude compressed into a space barely wider than a bathtub.
I work my gloved hand into the bull rope, wrap it once, pound the wrap flat with my fist until the rosin grips tacky and sure.
The rope is my lifeline. Lose it and I'm a rag doll.
Deacon's Fury lunges against the chute panels, and the steel shrieks.
My teeth rattle. The bull's hide is hot against my inner thighs, his muscles bunching and rolling underneath me like something alive trying to crawl out of its own skin.
I can smell him. Sweat and dust and the sharp animal musk of fury that hasn't found an outlet yet.
I slide forward on my rope hand, get my seat right. Hips square. Chin down. Free arm up. The gate man catches my eye, and I nod.
The chute opens and the world detonates.
Deacon's Fury spins left out of the gate, a tight, vicious rotation that snaps my head sideways and turns the arena into a blur of lights and faces.
Centrifugal force drags at my body, tries to sling me off the outside of the spin like water off a wheel.
I counter with my hips, lean into the well of the spin, keep my core locked.
My free arm whips through the air for balance, and every muscle from my ankles to my jaw is firing at once.
One second. Two.
The bull reverses his spin. No warning, no tell, just a violent snap in the opposite direction that nearly tears my riding arm out of the socket. My hand screams inside the wrap, tendons straining against the force, but the rosin holds. I hold. Barely.
Three seconds. Four.
Deacon drops his head and kicks, back hooves clearing the dirt by four feet, and the impact when he lands jars through my spine like a car wreck.
My vision bounces. The crowd noise becomes a pressure in my ears, formless and huge.
He kicks again, higher, and my ass lifts off his back.
For a fraction of a second I'm weightless, connected to this animal by nothing but a gloved hand and stubbornness.
Then gravity slams me back down into the seat and the bull is already spinning again, tight and fast, the kind of spin that scores high because it destroys riders.
Five seconds. Six.
The world shrinks to the space between my hand and the bull's back. Nothing else exists. Not Merrick, not Rainey, not Tyler dead in the Fort Worth dirt. Just the rope and the spin and the eight-second clock that's the only thing standing between me and the ground.
Seven seconds.
Deacon throws a final kick that rattles my fillings and tries to pitch me over his head. I lean back, stay centered, ride it out.
Eight seconds. The buzzer sounds.
I free my hand from the wrap, kick my legs clear, and bail off the left side. Hit the dirt on my feet, stumble, find my balance. Deacon charges toward the exit gate, looking for the open pen, and the bullfighters wave him through.
The crowd roars. The scoreboard flashes a number I don't bother checking. I vault the fence, pull off my glove, and walk straight toward the VIP section without stopping at the medical station or the scoring desk.
A security guard puts a hand on my chest at the rope line. "Riders aren't allowed in the—"
"Tell Hayes Merrick that Grant Corbin wants to buy him a drink."
The guard hesitates. Behind him, Merrick looks up from his conversation, and our eyes meet for the first time.
He's older than I expected. Mid-fifties, silver at the temples, tanned skin that says ranch money even if his hands are too smooth for ranch work. His eyes are pale blue and flat, the color of ice on a cattle trough. When he smiles, it doesn't move past his mouth.
"Let him through," Merrick says.
The guard steps aside. I duck under the rope and walk up to the man who murdered my friend.
"Grant Corbin." He extends a hand. "Hell of a ride. Your father would be proud."
He knows my father. Of course he does. Men like Merrick make it their business to know everything about everyone, cataloging connections and leverage points the way Rainey catalogs photographs.
I don't shake his hand. "We need to talk."
"We're talking right now." That smile again. Practiced, polished, empty.
"Somewhere private."
A flicker behind the blue eyes. Calculation, not concern. He excuses himself from his group and leads me to a trailer behind the VIP area, one of the portable offices the circuit uses for administration. Air conditioned, carpeted, a desk covered in paperwork that looks legitimate on the surface.
He closes the door. The smile drops.
"You've been making noise," he says. "Asking questions. Talking to people who'd rather not be talked to."
"You keep tabs on what riders ask about?"
"I keep tabs on everything that affects this circuit. That's my job." He leans against the desk, crosses his arms. "What do you want, Corbin?"
"Tyler Brennan."
"Tragic accident. The whole circuit mourns."
"The whole circuit moved on inside a week. I didn't."
"Grief does things to people. Makes them see patterns that aren't there, conspiracies where there are only coincidences."
"Thornton Livestock. Shell companies. Prize purse money that doesn't add up. Bulls behaving in ways that aren't natural." I watch his face while I lay it out. "Tyler was asking questions about all of it in the days before he died."
Merrick's expression stays neutral. Not the blank of someone who doesn't understand. The blank of someone who's choosing very carefully what to show. A poker player's face. The kind you develop from years of sitting across tables from dangerous people.
"Tyler Brennan was a talented rider who drew a bad bull on a bad night," Merrick says. "That's not a conspiracy. That's rodeo."
"Then you won't mind if the FBI takes a look at Thornton Livestock's financials."
The neutrality cracks. Just a hairline fracture, there and gone, but I catch it. A tightening around his mouth, a shift in his weight. The reaction of a man who just heard something he wasn't expecting.
"You're threatening me with the FBI based on grief and a theory." His voice is still level, but the temperature in the room just dropped. "That's a dangerous game for a bull rider with no leverage and a lot to lose."
"Is that a threat?"
"It's advice. Free of charge." He pushes off the desk, straightens his jacket. "You're a talented rider, Grant. Top of the standings. You've got a career ahead of you. Don't throw it away chasing answers that aren't there."
"And if they are there?"
Merrick opens the door. Sunlight pours in, carrying the sounds of the rodeo, the crowd, the announcer calling the next rider's name.
"Be careful," he says. The words land flat and heavy, stripped of anything that could be called warmth. "The circuit's a dangerous place. Always has been. Men get hurt all the time, and not always on the back of a bull."
I step through the door into the sunlight and the noise and the smell of dirt and livestock. My hands are steady. My pulse is level. Everything inside me is cold and certain and calm.
Merrick knows. Whether he ordered it himself or he's covering for someone who did, he knows what happened to Tyler. I saw it in the fracture when I mentioned the FBI. I heard it in the careful, measured way he told me to back off without ever saying the words directly.
A man with nothing to hide doesn't warn you to stop looking.
I find Rainey behind the chutes, camera down, face tight. She saw me go into the trailer with Merrick.
"What happened?" she asks.
"He knows. Didn't admit anything outright, but he knows. Told me to stop looking, warned me the circuit's a dangerous place." I roll the tension out of my shoulders. "He's either running this thing or protecting whoever is."
"That's not the same as proof."
"No. But the way he reacted when I mentioned the FBI told me everything I needed to know."
She goes pale. I watch the fear move through her, the way her fingers tighten on her camera strap, the way her breathing changes. Then I watch her swallow it.
"Then we'd better move fast," she says.
I nod. "Find Flint. Tell him it's time."
She goes. I watch her walk across the grounds with her camera bag bouncing against her hip and her shoulders squared against everything that's coming, and I memorize the way she moves. The specific rhythm of her stride, the angle of her chin, the auburn hair catching late afternoon sun.
Just in case I don't get to see it again.
Vic Sutton appears from behind the stock pens. He's jumpy, eyes darting, sweat staining the collar of his shirt despite the evening cool.
"Corbin. I need to talk to you."
"About what."
"About when and where they're planning to move on you." He swallows hard. "They pulled me in for the Las Cruces setup. Needed someone who knows how to dose the animals. While they were going over the details, I heard the rest."
"What details?"
"They're going to make it look like a bull wreck, same as Tyler. Drug the bull you draw, make it go berserk. And this time they'll make sure the bullfighters are slow getting to you."
"When?"
"Las Cruces. Two days."
I look at Vic. He's terrified, and he should be. If Merrick finds out he's talking to me, he's dead.
"Why are you telling me this?"
"Because they're going to kill me next." His voice cracks.
"I'm a loose end, Grant. The only person outside the operation who can connect the drugs to the bulls.
Once they've dealt with you, I'm next on the list." He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand.
"Helping you is the only play I've got left. "
Self-preservation. Honesty in its ugliest form. I believe him more than I would have believed a speech about friendship from the man who drugged the bull that killed Tyler.
"Stay available," I say. "And stay alive."
He disappears into the crowd. I stand alone behind the chutes, listening to the sounds of a rodeo that's been rotting from the inside for years, and I start making plans for Las Cruces.
Plans that don't include walking away.