5
KENNA
The morning after the Amarillo event wraps, I drive to the rental car agency and turn in my car. Colt follows and once I’m done, I head to his truck, toss my bag into the back seat and climb into the cab with my laptop and the growing certainty that I've made a tactical error.
The tactical error becomes apparent within the first ten minutes on the road.
His truck is a cage. A small, enclosed, inescapable cage that smells like leather and dust and something underneath that's justhim, warm skin and cedar and clean sweat. The cab holds it all in, recirculates it, presses it against my skin like a second atmosphere.
He drives the way he rides bulls. Fast and controlled and with a focus that makes you feel like a passenger in more ways than one. Radio off. Window cracked an inch. One hand on the wheel, the other resting on his thigh, neither of us speaks, and the quiet in the cab presses against my skin.
In the competitor parking lot, we made a deal. My financial data for his intelligence. My fresh eyes for his circuit connections. A partnership built on mutual need andasymmetric information and the unspoken understanding that we are both keeping things from each other.
What I didn't factor into the math was hours of forced proximity with a man whose presence takes up more than his share of a truck cab.
He stops for gas outside Clines Corners. I go inside for coffee because coffee is the only meal that counts anymore. I pass the refrigerated sandwiches and the protein bars and the beef jerky and register none of it. My body stopped sending hunger signals weeks ago, right around the time grief moved in and occupied the space where appetite used to live. Grant would have something to say about that. He always did.You eat like a feral cat, Kenna.He'd shove a plate in front of me and stand there with his arms crossed until I finished it, and I'd eat just to get him to stop hovering. Nobody hovers anymore.
I bring two coffees back to the truck. Colt takes his without comment.
By Tucumcari, we've started comparing notes, and the picture we're assembling is ugly.
"Merrick bought into Thornton Livestock through a shell company eight years ago," I say, reading from the notes on my phone. "Mesquite Ridge Holdings acquired a controlling stake, which gave Merrick effective control of the stock operation without his name on any public filings. Three years later, Thornton starts getting the majority of the contracts for every major Southwest Circuit event."
"Because Merrick is the circuit commissioner," Colt says. "He controls the contracts. So he steers them to his own company. Nobody asks questions because the bulls are good stock and the events run smooth."
"Until they don't."
"Until Tyler Brennan starts asking questions about why the prize money doesn't add up." Colt's jaw tightens. "A few weekslater, Tyler draws a Thornton bull at Fort Worth and doesn't walk out of the arena."
"Then Grant picks up where Tyler left off."
"Grant already had his own suspicions. The financial data, the altered registrations, all that. Tyler's death lit a fire under him." Colt's voice goes flat when he talks about Grant, stripped down to bare facts like emotion is a luxury he can't afford at highway speed. "The night before Las Cruces, he told me everything. Vic, the confession. He'd been building the case for weeks." A pause. "After he was killed, some kid in the arena called me with Grant's last words.'Rainey has everything. Flint has copies.'"
"And Merrick found out."
"Merrick found out."
Neither of us fills the dead air.
I watch the landscape slide past. Dry grassland giving way to red earth and scrub cedar as we cross into New Mexico.
The sky is so wide out here it feels like it's pressing down, an inverted bowl of blue that makes everything underneath it seem small and exposed.
"Tell me about Grant," I say. Not a question I need the answer to. Grant mentioned Colt enough times for me to know the shape of their friendship.
But the journalist I'm pretending to be wouldn't know any of that, and the woman I actually am needs to hear someone else say his name like it matters.
Colt doesn't answer right away. His hands shift on the steering wheel, and the tendons in his forearms stand out beneath the old rope scars.
"We came up together," he says. "Started on the circuit the same year. Traveled together for a while. Competed against each other, got drunk together, got in fights together."
A pause.
"He was the best friend I ever had, and I didn't get there in time to save him."
"That's not your fault."
"Didn't ask your opinion on it."
