"Long enough to make somebody very comfortable," Dusty says. "And then it stopped. Clean. Like it never happened."
"Because someone shut it down?"
He looks at me for the first time since he started talking. "Because someone got smart enough to bury it before it could surface."
The Miller land.
The thought hits before I can stop it.
Buried evidence. Old gear.
Records that don't belong on a working ranch. Someone who needed a place to put things that couldn't be found, things that tied back to money and fixed rides and a circuit that went quiet four years ago without explanation.
Someone who knew that land wasn't being watched.
"Colt was part of it," I say. It isn't a question.
Dusty doesn't confirm it directly. He doesn't have to. The way he looks back out at the lot instead of at me says enough.
"There were a few names attached to it," he says carefully. "Most of them moved on. Stayed quiet. Built clean reputations on top of whatever they'd done." He pauses. "One of them built a very clean reputation."
Colt Ramirez.
Champion bull rider. Golden boy of the circuit. The kind of man people pointed to as an example. Respected, trusted, given the benefit of every doubt because his record was spotless and his smile was easy.
Because he'd made sure of it.
Because he'd buried everything that said otherwise.
On land that I just broke ground on.
Land that I've been digging into.
I push off the fence slowly, the pieces locked in now, solid and undeniable.
"Dusty," I say. "Why didn't you ever say anything?"
He looks into his coffee cup.
"Because the last man who tried to," he says quietly, "didn't ride again."
Riley is right where I left her.
Relief hits first, quick and sharp, followed just as fast by something tighter that doesn’t let me relax all the way.
I half expected her to be gone when I got back to her. The kind of woman Riley is, the kind who keeps her head when everything else is moving, who makes decisions based on logic instead of fear.
She's standing by the vendor where I left her. Her jacket back on, her hands wrapped around a water bottle she bought somewhere, and she looks up the second I come closer like she's been tracking the sound of my boots on the ground.
"Well?" she says.
No preamble. No, are you okay or what took so long? Just straight to it, because that's Riley. Right now I don't have the space to find that anything other than exactly what I need.
I stand across from her in the narrow space, and tell her.
Not pieces of it. Not the edited version I'd give someone I was trying to protect from the weight of it. All of it. Lane's confirmation about the equipment.
Dusty's accounting of the Caldwell circuit, the fixed rides, the money, the way it stopped clean four years ago because someone buried it instead of letting it surface.
