One of the older handlers answers this time, quicker than before. “Crew and overflow hands. We had a couple extras moving between chutes.”
“Names?”
He gives me two.
I don’t recognize them.
That doesn’t mean anything on its own. But paired with everything else…
It starts to.
Wade comes back to my side, wiping his hands on his jeans. “We’ve got three chutes that needed adjustment,” he says. “Two ropes swapped.”
“Same kind of wear?” I ask.
“Similar enough to make me think it’s not coincidence.”
Luke joins us, nodding once. “Spacing’s consistent too. Not every chute. Just enough to spread it out.”
Brooks looks between us, the conclusion already there. “So whoever did this wasn’t trying to stop the rodeo,” he says. “They were trying to control it.”
I glance down the line of chutes, then out toward the arena where the announcer is buying time, voice steady even as the delay stretches a little longer than planned.
“Control the outcome,” I say.
Wade’s expression hardens. “Or who gets caught in it, this could have hurt or killed someone.”
That sits between us, heavy and real.
Because if this was placed…then it wasn’t just about causing damage.
It was about deciding where that damage landed.
“Walk me through the timing again,” he says finally, voice low, controlled, like he’s already halfway to an answer and just needs the last piece to lock it in.
I nod toward the chute. “Latch delays the release. Bull doesn’t break clean. Rider’s late getting set. Rope slips because the tension hits wrong.”
“And the damage stays just under the line,” Luke adds, picking up on it. “Not enough to shut things down. Just enough to make it look like a bad ride.”
Brooks nods once. “Exactly. Which means whoever’s doing this isn’t guessing. They’re calibrating it.”
Wade crosses his arms, jaw still tight. “Calibrating it toward what?”
“That’s the part we’re narrowing,” Brooks says, his eyes shifting down the line of chutes again. “Because if this was randomsabotage, we’d see inconsistency. Bigger failures. Missed timing. This…” He gestures toward the setup. “This is controlled. Repeated. Measured. Aimed at certain people.”
As he says it, my attention drifts past the chutes toward the outer edge of the grounds, past the lights where the parking lot starts to thin out into darker stretches. That’s when I see it again. That truck. Does that mysterious truck have something to do with all of this.
It’s not part of the crowd.
It’s watching it.
I file it without reacting, letting my gaze move on like it didn’t land, but the timing of it locks in with everything else we’re seeing.
I feel that settle in deeper, because he’s right. It’s not just what’s happening. It’s how consistent it is.
Luke leans in slightly. “So it’s not about shutting down the rodeo.”
“No,” Brooks says. “It’s about influencing it.”
