"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 onadrenaline 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."
