Wade's truck comes up the drive fast, Luke right behind him, and they're both out before the engines are fully off. They are moving with the particular economy of men who got a phone call and didn't waste time between receiving it and acting on it.
"Handler's name is Garret Cole," Wade says, not bothering with preamble. "I had Quinn run him.
He's got a record, two counts of fraud in Louisiana, both tied to a livestock operation that got shut down." He pauses. "Same timeline as the Caldwell circuit."
"He's been with Colt since the beginning," Luke says quietly.
The picture sharpens.
Not just an operational hire. A partner. Someone with his own reasons to keep the Caldwell operation buried and his own skin in the game if it surfaced.
Which means Colt isn't just cleaning up a loose end.
He's protecting the one person who can put him in a cell right alongside Dusty.
I look at my brothers in the pre-dawn dark, the four of us standing in the drive of my house. I feel the same thing I always feel when we're standing together at the edge of something hard.
Ready.
"We need to move," I say. "Before Colt finds him first."
The rodeo grounds look different at four thirty in the morning.
Stripped of the crowd, the lights and the noise, there is just dirt and metal and the smell of animals. The skeleton of something that only comes alive when people fill it.
Quinn's truck sits at the far end of the back lot with its lights off. She's out and moving toward us before Brooks has the engine fully cut.
"He's still there," she says, keeping her voice low. "Back corner of the stock contractor area, near the equipment shed. He's been on his phone for the last forty minutes."
"Calling the handler?" I ask.
"Calling everyone," Quinn says. "I've been watching him work through his contacts one by one. He's looking for Garret Cole and not finding him, which is making him less careful than he should be."
Good.
"Careful, Colt is dangerous. And with Colt being rattled, he’ll make mistakes."
We move through the grounds in the dark, Quinn leading, the four of us spread out behind her in the loose formation of people who have talked through the approach and know their positions without needing to be reminded of them.
The stock contractor area comes into view around the side of the main arena, and there he is.
Colt Ramirez.
Champion bull rider. Golden boy of the circuit. The man who smiled at Wade across a crowded rodeo ground twelve hours ago like he had nothing in the world to worry about.
He looks different now.
The easy confidence is gone, replaced by something tight and reactive.
He's pacing a short line near the equipment shed, phone in one hand, the other running through his hair in a gesture that tells me the composure he's built his entire public life on is starting to cost him more than he has left to spend on it.
He sees us at the same moment I step into the reach of the security light.
He goes very still.
I keep walking toward him, steady and unhurried, the way you walk toward something when you're done being two steps behind it. I watch the calculations moving behind his eyes, the assessment of the situation, the angles, the options, the exits.
There aren't any.
