"Already at the officials table," Brooks says. "He found two of the draw sheets from the Caldwell run in the regional records archive, the actual physical copies that were never digitized and never cleaned up because nobody thought to look for them in a paper file from four years ago."
He pauses. "The draws weren't random, Jace. Luke ran the numbers this morning. The statistical probability of those particular bulls being paired with those particular riders by chance is essentially zero."
I absorb that, feeling the weight of it settle into the larger picture, another piece clicking into place with the particular solidity of something that has been true all along and is only now becoming visible.
"He's going to try something tonight," I say to them because a man who has spent twenty years building something and can feel it coming apart doesn't go quietly into a situation he can't control without attempting one last move.
"He's going to realize at some point that the net is closer than he thought and he's going to move."
"Let him," Wade says, the absolute unworried certainty in those two words, is so completely Wade.
I feel something shift in me that has nothing to do with the investigation and everything to do with the specific comfort of standing between two people who have known me my whole lifeand would do anything within their power to make sure I walk out of this arena the same way I walked in.
I look at both of them, Brooks with his strategy and his certainty. The quiet formidable intelligence he brings to every problem he decides is worth solving. Wade with his directness and his loyalty and the absolute immovability of a man who has decided where he stands and cannot be shifted from it.
"Where's Riley?" I ask.
"At the rail," Brooks says. "Lane Carter is with her." He pauses, something shifting in his expression toward something warmer than his usual operational mode. "She looks steady, Jace."
That's Riley, steady on the outside. The fact that she is standing at that rail tonight instead of somewhere safe and far from all of this tells me more about where we are than anything else that has happened between us.
She chose to be here.
Same as me.
I straighten and look out toward the chutes, toward the arena floor and the lights and the crowd that doesn't know what tonight actually is underneath the surface of what it looks like.
"Alright," I say.
My brothers fall in beside me without being asked, one on each side, and the three of us walk toward the chutes together, shoulder to shoulder, without ceremony and without hesitation.
The cowboy way.
My draw is a bull called Undertow.
I know the name, know the reputation, know the particular brand of violence this animal brings into the arena the way some bulls bring power or speed or unpredictability.
Undertow brings all three simultaneously and has the record to prove it, seventeen qualified rides in four years of competition and forty one riders who didn't make the buzzer.
That’s a ratio that would concern most people. I have been thinking about that since the draw sheet went up this morning.
He's the right bull for tonight.
Not because he's manageable, not because the odds favor me, because there is something fitting about the hardest ride of the season being the one that matters most. The one where everything I have learned is going to count. The choices I have made over these past weeks either hold up or they don’t.
I climb the rails of the chute and look down at him. The broad dark back and the coiled energy of an animal that has already decided what it's going to do the second that gate opens.
I feel the familiar compression of the world that happens in this moment. Everything outside the chute falls away until there is only this. The animal beneath me, the rope in my hand, and the eight seconds between where I am and where I need to be.
I settle over him and feel him respond, the shift, the tension and the sideways push of a bull that doesn't accept weight without registering his objection to it. I adjust, finding my center, making the small corrections that can't be taught and can only be learned by sitting on enough animals that your body starts to understand what your mind is still processing.
I have been watching the gate handler since I climbed the rails.
That's not normally something I would have thought to do four months ago. I watched the gate stick at the second rodeo and I watched what it did to the rider who wasn't ready for it.
My brothers and I sat at a kitchen table and mapped out every move Dusty Rhodes has made and every move he is likely to make when he feels the net closing.
A man who has used gate interference twice doesn't suddenly develop a conscience the third time. Not when the stakes are this high tonight. The person in the chute is the one he's been trying to take down from the beginning.
