"Because they're going to kill me next." His voice cracks. "I'm a loose end, Grant. The only person outside the operation who can connect the drugs to the bulls. Once they've dealt with you, I'm next on the list." He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. "Helping you is the only play I've got left."
Self-preservation. Honesty in its ugliest form. I believe him more than I would have believed a speech about friendship from the man who drugged the bull that killed Tyler.
"Stay available," I say. "And stay alive."
He disappears into the crowd. I stand alone behind the chutes, listening to the sounds of a rodeo that's been rotting from the inside for years, and I start making plans for Las Cruces.
Plans that don't include walking away.
8
Rainey's asleep in the passenger seat with her head against the window and her camera bag wedged between her knees like a security blanket. The highway unspools ahead of us, flat and straight and endless in the way that only New Mexico highways can be, and I drive with one hand on the wheel and the other resting on her thigh because I can't stop touching her.
Pathetic. Grant Corbin, ranked third on the Southwest Circuit, afraid of losing physical contact with a woman he's known for about a week like she might evaporate if he lets go.
About a week. That's all it's been. A handful of days since a photographer with good hands and dangerous eyes showed up behind the chutes and refused to leave when I told her to. A handful of days of running and violence and sex that takes me apart and puts me back together wrong, rebuilt around a person instead of a purpose.
I should be focused on Las Cruces. On the plan Flint helped us put together, the one that involves copies of every photo and record stashed in three separate locations, Flint's FBI contact at the Albuquerque field office standing by with the full evidencepackage, and a ride on whatever bull Merrick's people drug for me.
The plan is simple. Ride the bull. Survive the wreck they're engineering. Let the whole thing play out on camera, on Rainey's camera specifically, while Flint calls the feds with enough evidence to get Merrick arrested before he can try again.
The plan is more likely to kill me than save me.
I've taken worse odds on bulls.
We stop at a motel outside Socorro because Rainey needs to eat and I need to feel her against me one more time before we drive into whatever Las Cruces is going to be. The motel is called the Desert Rose, which sounds romantic and looks anything but. Pink stucco peeling off the walls, a pool that hasn't held water since the Clinton administration, and a clerk who hands us a key without looking up from his phone.
Room nine. Ground floor. Single bed with a mattress that sags in the middle and sheets that smell like industrial bleach.
Rainey sets her camera bag on the dresser and turns to look at me. She's been quiet since Santa Fe, processing, the way she does. Working through the variables, the risks, the probabilities. Turning the situation over in her mind like a problem she can solve if she finds the right angle.
"Tell me we're going to be okay," she says.
I should lie. Tell her it's handled, tell her the plan is solid, tell her Merrick doesn't stand a chance against a stubborn bull rider and a photographer with a grudge. That's what she needs to hear. That's what a better man would say.
"I don't know if we're going to be okay," I say instead. "I know I'm going to do everything I can to make sure you are."
"That's not the same thing."
"No. It's not."
She crosses the room. Stands in front of me, close enough to touch, not touching. Her eyes are amber in the lamplight,and the fear in them is the kind that comes from understanding exactly how bad things are.
"Grant." Her voice drops to something I haven't heard before. Stripped. No armor, no defiance, no sharp edges. Just her name for me and everything it carries. "If something happens in Las Cruces..."
"Don't."
"If something happens, I need you to know?—"
"Rainey. Don't say it like a goodbye."
"Then what should I say it like?"
I pull her to me. Wrap my arms around her, chin on the top of her head, her face pressed against my chest. She fits against me like she was designed for the space between my arms, and I hate that I'm noticing this now, cataloging the details of her the way she catalogs the world through her lens.
The freckles on her left shoulder that form something close to Orion's belt. The scar on her right knee from a fall off a fence when she was twelve, a story she told me in the truck with her boots on the dashboard and her voice soft with memory. The way she smells like sunscreen and darkroom chemicals and the particular desert dust of the Southwest Circuit.
"Say it like a promise," I tell her. "Say it like I'm coming back."
