Hayes Merrick: The man behind Thornton, behind the shell companies, behind all of it.
The shooter tonight: Proof they're willing to kill to protect their secret.
And now Flint's FBI contact, an agent named Torres who's been waiting ten years for evidence that a pattern exists. We're about to give her that evidence.
I look at Rainey, asleep on the bed with her boots still on and her laptop clutched against her chest like armor.
Merrick's going to fall. I'll make sure of it. The only question left is whether I'll be standing when he does.
6
Three hours since someone put a bullet where our heads would have been, and Rainey's given up on sleep.
She lasted maybe forty minutes, curled on the bed with her boots still on and her laptop clutched against her chest, before the adrenaline dragged her back to the surface. Now she's cleaning her backup camera with a cloth she's run over the same lens three times, rearranging the few pieces of salvaged equipment she has left like organizing them will give her some control over a situation that's spiraling. I recognize the strategy because I use it myself.
Flint's ranch sits at the end of a dirt road that doesn't exist on any map worth a damn. Forty acres of scrubland, a barn that houses retired bucking stock, and a main house that smells like pipe tobacco and leather oil. Flint pointed us to the guest room after we told him what happened, locked the doors, checked the windows, and told us to get some rest while he figured out the next steps.
I'm sitting on the porch steps, nursing a bourbon I found in Flint's kitchen and watching the road. Nobody followed us. I'm almost sure of it. The sedan bottomed out in the scrublandwhen we went off-road, and Flint's ranch isn't on any map worth checking. If Merrick's people found us out here, they earned it.
The screen door creaks. Rainey comes out and sits on the step below mine, close enough that her shoulder brushes my knee. I hand her the bourbon. She takes a pull without looking at the label and hands it back.
"You should eat something," she says.
"You should take your own advice."
Fair point. My stomach is a fist, clenched tight around the knowledge that I almost got her killed tonight. A few inches closer and that bullet would have found one of us instead of empty air.
"Tell me you're okay," I say.
"I'm not okay." She pulls her knees up, wraps her arms around them. "Someone shot at us, Grant. That's not a spray-painted threat on a van. That's a bullet. Actual lead traveling at actual velocity toward our actual heads."
"I know."
"Do you? Because you're sitting here drinking bourbon like it's a Tuesday."
"It is Tuesday."
She turns to look at me. In the yellow porch light, her freckles stand out sharp against skin that's gone pale. "That's not funny."
"Wasn't trying to be." I set the bottle down. "Rainey, I've been thrown by two-thousand-pound bulls that wanted me dead. Got stomped on, hooked, dragged. Broke three ribs in Tucson, rode the next weekend with the bones held together by wire and stubbornness. Getting shot at is just another version of something trying to kill me."
"The difference is, a bull doesn't aim."
She's right. A bull is rage without direction, instinct without malice. What happened tonight was deliberate. Planned.Someone positioned themselves outside the arena, waited for the right moment, and pulled a trigger.
"I'm going to ask you something," I say. "And I need you to be honest."
"When have I been anything else?"
The question lands wrong. Three days I've known this woman, and there are still walls I can feel every time I get too close to the real her underneath the camera and the bravery and the defiance. I let it go. She'll tell me when she's ready, or she won't.
"Do you want out? Because I can call someone. My sister, Colt, anyone. Get you somewhere safe. Off the circuit, out of this whole mess. You didn't sign up for someone trying to put holes in you."
She's quiet for a long time. Cicadas fill the silence, their drone rising and falling like a pulse.
"Tyler Brennan is dead," she says. "Murdered. And the man who ordered it is walking around in expensive suits, shaking hands with circuit officials, making deals over steak dinners while Tyler's family tries to figure out how to live without him. If I leave now, I'm saying that's acceptable. I'm saying my safety matters more than his life."
"Your safety does matter more."
