Someone sent shooters after us three hours ago, and now a polite warning with a deadline. Different parts of the operation. The muscle acts, and then the money tries to clean it up. Which means whoever sent this text doesn't know about the shooting that failed, or doesn't care, or is playing a different game than the man with the gun.
I show Rainey. She reads it twice, and I watch the fear cross her face, followed by something harder. Something that looks like the expression I see in the mirror every morning.
Resolve.
"Well," she says. "Guess that answers the question of whether or not they know what we’re up to."
"Guess it does."
"You going to walk away?"
I set the phone down. Look at her. Pull her against me, skin to skin, her heartbeat against mine.
"Not a chance in hell."
7
Hayes Merrick wears expensive suits to rodeos like he's slumming with the livestock, and I'm about to shove his face in the dirt where he belongs.
He's holding court in the VIP section at the Santa Fe event, a roped-off area with catered food and open bar that the sponsors and circuit officials use to pretend they're not profiting off men who risk their necks for prize money that's apparently being skimmed before it reaches their pockets. Merrick stands at the center of a cluster of men in pressed shirts and clean boots, drink in hand, laughing at something one of them said.
I've never met him face to face. Known his name for years, the way you know the names of the people who run things without running them. Hayes Merrick, commissioner of the Southwest Circuit, livestock investment group owner, the man behind Thornton Livestock and half a dozen shell companies Rainey traced through public records on Flint's kitchen table last night.
The man who paid to have Tyler Brennan killed.
Rainey's behind the chutes where I told her to stay, camera up, documenting everything. Flint is somewhere in the stock pens, keeping an eye on Merrick's handlers. Before we left theranch this morning, we spent two hours at Flint's kitchen table copying everything onto three separate drives. One stays with Flint. One goes in Rainey's camera bag. One stays in my truck. Belt, suspenders, and a backup plan for the backup plan.
We have a plan. It's a terrible plan, but it's the only one we've got.
Step one: I ride. Make sure Merrick sees me. Remind him that I'm still here, still competing, still a problem.
Step two: I talk to him. Get him to say something, anything, that confirms what we already know. Rainey shoots photos of the conversation. Flint listens from behind the partition.
Step three: We take everything to the feds.
There is no step four, because step three is the part where everything either works or falls apart.
My ride is first. Deacon's Fury, a spinning bull with a habit of slamming riders into the chute gate on the dismount.
I settle onto his back in chute three, and the bull shifts beneath me, testing the weight. Two thousand pounds of muscle and bad attitude compressed into a space barely wider than a bathtub. I work my gloved hand into the bull rope, wrap it once, pound the wrap flat with my fist until the rosin grips tacky and sure. The rope is my lifeline. Lose it and I'm a rag doll.
Deacon's Fury lunges against the chute panels, and the steel shrieks. My teeth rattle. The bull's hide is hot against my inner thighs, his muscles bunching and rolling underneath me like something alive trying to crawl out of its own skin. I can smell him. Sweat and dust and the sharp animal musk of fury that hasn't found an outlet yet.
I slide forward on my rope hand, get my seat right. Hips square. Chin down. Free arm up. The gate man catches my eye, and I nod.
The chute opens and the world detonates.
Deacon's Fury spins left out of the gate, a tight, vicious rotation that snaps my head sideways and turns the arena into a blur of lights and faces. Centrifugal force drags at my body, tries to sling me off the outside of the spin like water off a wheel. I counter with my hips, lean into the well of the spin, keep my core locked. My free arm whips through the air for balance, and every muscle from my ankles to my jaw is firing at once.
One second. Two.
The bull reverses his spin. No warning, no tell, just a violent snap in the opposite direction that nearly tears my riding arm out of the socket. My hand screams inside the wrap, tendons straining against the force, but the rosin holds. I hold. Barely.
Three seconds. Four.
Deacon drops his head and kicks, back hooves clearing the dirt by four feet, and the impact when he lands jars through my spine like a car wreck. My vision bounces. The crowd noise becomes a pressure in my ears, formless and huge. He kicks again, higher, and my ass lifts off his back. For a fraction of a second I'm weightless, connected to this animal by nothing but a gloved hand and stubbornness. Then gravity slams me back down into the seat and the bull is already spinning again, tight and fast, the kind of spin that scores high because it destroys riders.
Five seconds. Six.
