I didn't even get to see him. By the time my truck limped into Las Cruces, the arena was empty and the ambulance was long gone. I will carry that for the rest of my life.
The medic catches up to me behind the chutes, and I let him press gauze to the cut because the blood is getting in my eye and I need to see.
I need to see everything, because seeing is all I've got. Just a dead man's last words, all of them, the parts about the case and the part I can't say out loud yet because it cuts too close to a promise I haven't figured out how to keep. And a name I can't say without getting called crazy.
'Tell Colt Holloway everything. Merrick. Thornton Livestock. Tell him Rainey has everything. Flint has copies. Tell him I wasn't wrong.'
I sit on an overturned bucket and let the medic work, and the adrenaline drains out of me like water from a cracked basin.
What's left underneath is the thing that's always underneath. The guilt. The rage. So much rage. The promise I made to a dead man's voicemail at two in the morning on a night I don't talk about.
I'm going to find the people who killed Grant. I'm going to take everything they built and burn it to the ground. And when the smoke clears, I'm going to stand in the ashes and make sure the whole goddamn circuit watches them fall.
1
KENNA
The Amarillo Tri-State Arena smells like every rodeo Grant ever dragged me to as a kid. Livestock and leather, fried food and cheap beer, red dirt kicked up from the warm-up pen and ground into everything.
It hits me the second I step through the press entrance, and for three full seconds I forget how to breathe.
I press my thumbnail into the pad of my index finger until the sting brings me back.
Focus. I'm not Kenna Corbin here. I'm Kenna McEnroe, freelance sports journalist with credentials from a regional outlet that barely checks its own voicemail. I'm here for a story. I'm curious, professional, and slightly green.
I am not the dead rider's sister with a fake name and his murder on my mind.
The press box sits above the chutes, and I take the metal stairs two at a time because standing still makes the grief louder. My badge gets a cursory glance from the gate attendant, a sunburned woman with a clipboard who waves me through without a second glance.
Weeks of preparation, and the hardest part of going undercover on the Southwest Circuit turns out to be walking into an arena without falling apart.
The sounds are the worst. The metallic clang of chute gates, the low bawl of livestock in the holding pens, the particular way a crowd murmurs before the action starts, rising and falling like a tide.
I know these sounds the way I know my own heartbeat. My parents had me at my first rodeo before I could walk, and Grant and Dax made sure I never forgot it. By the time I was ten, I could tell whether a bull was rank or honest just from the noise it made in the chute.
Grant leaving to ride professionally blew my family apart. Dax went with him, and my father never forgave either of them for walking away from the ranch. By the time I left for college a few years later, the silence between us had hardened into something permanent. He hasn't spoken to any of us in nearly three years. His last words to me were‘you and your brothers are dead to me.’
After that, Grant and Dax were all I had left. The circuit became the closest thing they had to home.
I find a seat near the end of the press row, away from the two reporters already settled in with their laptops and oversized sodas. A copy editor from Lubbock and a stringer for a livestock trade magazine, based on the logos on their lanyards.
Neither gives me more than a polite nod.
Good. I pull out my notebook because its sometimes easier to use than my laptop, the one with carefully pre-written questions designed to make me look like I know enough to be credible and not enough to be threatening. I studied the current roster for weeks. I watched footage of every rider on the circuit until my eyes burned.
My phone buzzes. Dax. I let it go to voicemail the way I have for the past three weeks, because my brother's messages have shifted from worried to angry to the particular cold silence that means he's done waiting for me to tell him what I'm doing and has started figuring it out on his own.
The last voicemail was four words: "I know you're lying."
He's right. I'm lying to everyone. The difference is Dax won't let me get away with it forever, and when he stops waiting and starts acting, he'll do it with the subtlety of a hand grenade thrown into a church service. Dax Corbin does nothing quietly. He got Grant's stubbornness without Grant's patience, and the combination makes him the most dangerous kind of ally — the kind who helps whether you want him to or not.
I'll call him back tomorrow. I've been saying that for a week.
I shove the phone in my pocket and pick up the laptop and notebook. Dax can wait. Grant is dead. Finding out what killed him can’t wait.
I read every article about the Southwest Circuit I could find, including the few paragraphs buried deep in the Las Cruces Sun-News that called my brother's death a tragic accident.
Tragic. Accident. Bullshit.
