“Whenever you’re ready.”
“Let me think about it and get back to you.”
“Thanks for calling me, Sarah.”
“Thanks for talking to me, Marnie.”
After the call, I stare into the dark sky, spotted with a plethora of stars.
I will tell Marnie my story, I decide, and she’ll tell the world.
I want justice and this may be the only way to get it.
CHAPTER 23
cade
The sun’s sharp as a branding iron, warming the dirt pens and throwing long shadows from the pipe rails. The cattle shift restless in the chute, bawls echoing, metal clanging.
Sarah has been diligent about taking care of my cattle now that Bodie is out of commission. She looks good—glossy magazine cover good.
Dark jeans tucked into scuffed boots, sleeves rolled up, a braid swinging forward like a lariat.
“Well?” I ask as she crouches by the old feed we set aside as per her instruction in the storage room, sifting through the pellets with her fingers.
She lifts a handful, crumbles some between her gloved thumb and forefinger. “This is how the poison entered their bloodstream.” She straightens, her lips pressing into a tight line. “Like I said, Cade. The lab confirmed monensin. At toxic levels. We’re lucky you caught it early.”
Dodge leans against a wall in the room, chewing his damn toothpick like this is just another Tuesday, but his eyes flash with anger.
“And I’m confident that it was deliberate,” Sarah adds. “Monensin doesn’t just wander into feed. Someone added it.”
A storm of anger breaks inside me. “You think someone is trying to hurt my cattle?”
She looks at me, her expression cold and unreadable. “Yes.”
“Fuck!”
She hands me her phone. “Here’s the data I received.”
I squint at the numbers on the screen. They don’t mean much to me at first—just rows and decimals, but as I go through them, it starts to make sense.
Normal feed contamination, if it ever happens, might show trace levels. One, maybe two parts per million.
“Thunder’s ration tested at over forty ppm,” I read out aloud. “The herd sat around eight to ten ppm.”
Dodge ambles up to us, and I hand him the phone. He looks at the data, and the blood drains from his face. “That’s off the fuckin’ charts.”
Sarah dusts her hands on her jeans. “That amount could’ve killed him outright if he’d eaten more. The rest of the herd, as you noted, got enough monensin to make them sick, but not enough to drop them. Whoever did this knew exactly what they were doing, Cade.”
Bile claws up my throat. Someone was aiming to wipe out the best bull I’ve ever bought—my future.
“So”—I hesitate for a moment—“what do we do?”
“What we’ve been doing. You can start with a new batch of feed, but make sure it’snew, comes from a source you trust.”
“I bought my old feed from someone I trust as well,” I clip.
She strides out of the storage room. I trail her across the meadow to Thunder. His dark hide ripples in the sun, and damn if he doesn’t already look stronger than he did a day ago.
