The new handler moves to the far pen where a brindle bull with a crooked horn is pawing the dirt. He checks the animal's flank, runs his hand along the hide, and pauses.
His other hand dips toward his back pocket.
From where I'm standing, I can't tell if he pulls anything out. A rider two pens over shouts for help moving a steer, and the handler's hand snaps back to his side. He finishes his check and moves on, head down, shoulders tight.
It could be nothing. It could also be Vic's replacement. I pull out my phone and take a few photos of the handler's face, the Thornton rig plates, and the brindle bull's ear tag number. None of it is evidence of anything yet. It's a thread to pull later.
The morning rounds take me through the rest of the pens, where the other stock contractors have their animals penned and ready. I know most of these people. I grew up alongside half of them and competed against the rest. The circuit is a small world, and since Grant died, most of it avoids me. I'm the man who said the word "murder" out loud, the man who accused Merrick at the Tucson event in front of sponsors and cameras, the man who got physically restrained by two stock contractors and a bullfighter and told to get his head straight. Nobody wants to be seen next to the guy with the conspiracy theories. That suits me fine.
And still, in the gaps between observations, she's there. The way Kenna's breath caught against my ear when I pinned her wrists. The way she said my name like it was a word she'd just invented. I catch myself looking for her in the press section, scanning for dark hair pulled back and a sharp expression behind a notebook, and I have to physically redirect my attention to the Thornton pens.
This is a problem.
I'm heading back from the water trough when the prickling sensation hits the back of my neck, that awareness of being studied by someone who's trying not to be noticed. I've been riding bulls long enough to trust instinct over logic, so I turnslowly and casually, scanning the chute area like I'm looking for someone specific.
Slade Carrick is leaning against the far end of the sorting chute with his arms crossed and his hat brim shading his face. The man is built like a brick wall and carries himself like someone who expects a fight and welcomes it. He's a steer wrestler, ranked sixth on the circuit, and the man who pulled Grant out of the Las Cruces arena while the medics were still climbing over the fence.
I've tried talking to Slade three times since Grant's funeral. Each time, he shut me down cold. He wouldn't make eye contact, wouldn't engage, and told me in as few words as possible that he didn't see anything, didn't know anything, and had nothing to say. The man has a manslaughter conviction in his past and a probation officer who checks in monthly. Talking to anyone about anything that might land him in a courtroom is a risk he's made clear he won't take.
But Slade's watching me. He has been for a while now, if the angle of his hat and the set of his shoulders are any indication. He's watching me watch the Thornton handlers.
I don't approach him yet. I let him stew in whatever's eating at him. If Slade wants to pretend he didn't see what he saw at Las Cruces, that's his prerogative. But he's a terrible actor, and the fact that he can't stop looking in my direction tells me the pretending is costing him.
My ride is a bull called Powder Keg, a fifteen-hundred-pound Charolais cross with a wicked left spin and a habit of dropping his head mid-buck to try to hook the rider's leg. He's a good bull, a clean bull, and he's not Thornton stock, so I can ride him without worrying about whether the animal's been juiced.
There's a difference today. In the chute, settling my rope, working the wrap, I feel it in the way my hands move. They are steady and deliberate. The last time I climbed on a bull, I wasriding to feel the impact, to let eighteen hundred pounds of fury do to my body what the grief was doing to my head. I wanted to hurt. I wanted the world narrowed down to eight seconds of violence that made everything else disappear.
The old discipline is back. The muscle memory of a man who learned to ride before he learned to drive, and the difference registers in the way my hips settle against the bull's back, the way my riding hand closes on the rope with calibration instead of white-knuckle fury. I'm riding because the circuit is the cover that keeps this investigation alive. If I stop competing, I lose my access, my credibility, the excuse to be in every stock pen and every back lot on the Southwest Circuit. If I start winning again, nobody can dismiss me as the washed-up rider with a vendetta.
Grant needed me to stay in the game. So I'm staying. And I'm staying sharp.
Powder Keg slams the chute walls twice before the gate opens, and when the latch drops, fifteen hundred pounds of muscle detonates into the arena. The left spin comes hard and immediate, whipping my body sideways while my riding hand takes the shock through the rope. I counter with my free arm, find the rhythm of the buck, and settle into the animal's cadence the way Grant taught me years ago in a practice pen outside Odessa.
'Ride the rhythm, not the chaos.'
The spin reverses at the three-second mark, and Powder Keg drops his head, trying for the leg hook. I shift my weight, lift my knees, and the horn cuts air instead of denim. The crowd noise surges, and I use the momentum of the reversal to reset my center of gravity. The last four seconds are clean and controlled, my body answering the bull's movement instead of fighting it, and when the buzzer sounds, I kick free and land on my feet in the dirt with my balance under me.
It's a decent score, high enough to keep me in the running. I tip my hat because that's what you do. But the real score is in my legs, in my spine, in the way my body absorbed the impact without the reckless looseness that's been getting me hurt for the last two months. I rode to win. I rode like I used to. And the difference is a woman with a sharp tongue who made me give a damn about staying alive.
I walk back toward the chutes, rolling the rope around my riding hand, and look up past the rail to the section above.
The VIP section is visible from the chute walkway, elevated behind tinted glass and bottle service. I don't usually look up there. Money and sponsors and people who've never sat on a bull telling each other how much they love the sport.
Tonight I look, because Hayes Merrick is standing at the rail with a bourbon in one hand and his phone in the other, watching the arena floor like a man reviewing inventory.
Circuit commissioner. Investment group owner. The face of the Southwest Circuit's public relations machine. He's got the silver hair and the tailored shirt and a tan that costs more than my entry fees. The smile he's wearing right now is the same one he wore in the promotional video they played before the event, the one where he talked about the circuit's "commitment to rider safety."
I watched that video from behind the chutes and tasted something metallic at the back of my throat.
Merrick spots me looking. He lifts his bourbon in my direction. The gesture is casual, friendly, the kind of thing a commissioner does when he sees his points leader after a good ride.
His eyes don't match the gesture. His eyes are flat and assessing, running calculations behind the smile, and I've seen the same look on stock contractors deciding which animal goes to slaughter.
I tip my hat back at him. It costs me more than the ride did.
He turns to the woman beside him, some sponsor rep in a blazer, and his hand finds the small of her back as he steers her toward the bar. The charm snaps on like a switch. He laughs at something she says, leans in close, and the woman's posture softens the way people's posture softens around men who know exactly how to make you feel like the most important person in the room.
Grant told me about that charm. Said Merrick could shake your hand and order your death in the same breath and you'd walk away thinking he was a hell of a guy.
