COLT
Ishouldn't have told her about Thornton.
The thought circles while the medic stitches the cut above my eye in the trailer behind the chutes. I let him do it because the bleeding is getting in my way. But while he works, my mind is still standing in the dirt behind the stock pens, watching a journalist plant her boots and refuse to flinch.
I told her too much. Thornton Livestock. The juiced bulls. Grant's name and the word murder, all of it handed over to a woman I met two hours ago because she stood in my space and didn't back down and the anger in her eyes was real enough to make me stupid.
"You need to ice this," the medic says, taping a butterfly strip over his work. "And you need a concussion protocol. That bull caught you on the?—"
"I'm good."
"Mr. Holloway?—"
"I said I'm good." I push off the exam table and duck out of the trailer before he can finish the speech.
The stitches pull when I move, a tight hot sting above my eyebrow that's going to throb like hell once the adrenaline wears off completely. My riding hand is swelling around the knuckleswhere the rope torqued during the direction change, and there's a deep ache in my lower back that means I landed harder than I thought.
None of it matters. Pain is just the body keeping score, and I stopped caring about the score a long time ago.
I've heard the medic's speech before. Every medic on the circuit has some version of it.
You're going to get yourself killed. You ride like you want to die. Maybe talk to somebody.
Maybe. When talking to somebody brings Grant back.
The stock pens are quiet now.
I check the bulls for needle marks along the neck and hindquarters, the injection sites Grant told me about from what Vic confessed. A handler working alone, a quick jab, a bull that's already rank turned into something no rider can survive. That's how it works. Not the whole herd. One bull. The right bull. The one a specific rider is going to draw.
Nothing tonight. The animals look clean. The handlers kept their distance.
Most of the bulls have been loaded for transport, the Thornton Livestock haulers already rumbling toward the highway with their cargo and whatever else they're carrying that nobody's supposed to ask about.
I lean against the rail and watch the last handler guide a rangy red bull up the ramp.
The handler moves fast, nervous, keeps checking over his shoulder like he's expecting someone to be watching.
I'm watching. I'm always watching. Two months of watching and I've got nothing but suspicion and a reputation as the circuit's resident conspiracy theorist.
The handler spots me and freezes.
"Easy," I say. "Just enjoying the night air."
He doesn't believe me. He loads the bull, chains the gate, and gets in the cab without looking back.
The truck pulls out, taillights cutting through the dust, and I'm alone with the empty pens and the smell of manure and the ghost of my best friend.
I walk the pen line anyway, because the routine is all I've got.
I photograph the tire tracks the Thornton trucks left in the dirt, because maybe someday the tread pattern will matter to someone who can actually do something with it.
The other stock contractors have cleared out already. Barton Brothers, out of Amarillo, who run clean stock and want nothing to do with Thornton or anyone connected to the operation.
I've talked to old man Barton twice. He knows things. Won't say them. Told me he's got a wife and grandkids and he plans to live long enough to see them graduate.
I can't blame a man for choosing his family over somebody else's fight. Doesn't mean I understand how he closes his eyes at night knowing what he knows.
Grant would have loved tonight. Ninety-one point five on Tombstone's Revenge.
