"The woman I'm calling doesn't sleep like a normal person."
He watches me from the bed, and the way he looks at me is different from yesterday. Heavier. More settled.
Like something that was in question has been answered, and the answer is standing barefoot in his motel room holding a phone and wearing his shirt because hers is somewhere under the dresser.
"You're wearing my shirt," he says.
"I'm aware."
"Looks better on you."
"Everything looks better on me. That's not the compliment you think it is." I sit on the edge of the bed and pull my legs up, cross-legged, the phone in my lap. "The call I need to make is to Sylvia Baker. She's a journalist I went to school with. National outlet. She's the right person to run this story."
He sits up straighter. The sheet slides lower. I keep my eyes on his face through an act of will that deserves some kind of award.
"How much are you giving her?"
"Only what I can source independently. Financial analysis and public records. Nothing from Torres, nothing from Rainey, nothing from the safety deposit box."
"Smart."
"I know." I dial before I can talk myself out of it.
Sylvia picks up on the second ring. "Kenna Corbin." Her voice is alert despite the hour. Investigative journalists don'tsleep like normal people. "You dropped off the map months ago. Your editor told me you quit."
"I did."
"You never quit anything. You once drove four hours in a tropical storm to fact-check a city council member's property records."
"This is bigger than property records."
"How big?"
"Murder. Fraud. Criminal conspiracy. Professional rodeo."
Silence. Then the click of a lamp, the rustle of sheets, a notepad being pulled from a nightstand. Sylvia is awake now.
I lay it out for her while Colt gets up and pulls on his jeans and starts making coffee with the motel room's sad excuse for a machine.
He moves around the room while I talk, and I track him in my peripheral vision the way I've been tracking him since the first day on this circuit, except now the tracking comes with sense memory.
The shoulders I'm watching are the shoulders my nails carved into last night. The hands pouring coffee are the hands that fisted in my hair and tilted my head back. The body crossing between the window and the bed is the body that pinned me to the mattress and took me apart with a patience I didn't know he possessed.
I lose my train of thought mid-sentence and have to restart. Sylvia doesn't comment. Colt glances over from the coffee maker with a look that suggests he knows exactly why I stumbled.
I give Sylvia only what I can independently source: the financial irregularities in prize money payouts across the Southwest Circuit, the pattern of suspicious injuries at events supplied by Thornton Livestock, the deaths of Tyler Brennan and Grant Corbin, the shell company structure, the circuit's own published records. Everything I tell her comes frompublic records, my own financial analysis, and interviews I can attribute to named sources.
"I need on-the-record interviews," Sylvia says. "Background sourcing and financial documents get me an editor meeting. Named sources get me published."
"I have a source I'm working on. Quinn Gallagher. Team roper, Grant's former traveling partner. He's been carrying information about the financial fraud since before Grant died. He's scared, but he's close to agreeing to go on record."
"You're sure he'll come through?"
"He told me the guilt is eating him alive. His exact words were,'Grant and Tyler are dead because nobody spoke up.'He's not there yet, but he will be. I'll get him there."
Colt sets a mug of coffee on the nightstand beside me. Black, no sugar. He doesn't interrupt, doesn't hover, doesn't try to insert himself into the conversation.
He sits in the chair by the window and cleans his bull rope with the same quiet focus he brings to everything. But the focus isn't on the rope. His hands move through the familiar routine without looking, and his eyes are on me. Steady. Unhurried. The same way he watches me from across the chutes, cataloging every shift in my expression, every tell I don't know I'm giving.
