Page 7 of Broken Ride

She finishes with the gelding. Pats the horse on the neck. Picks up her kit, slings it over her shoulder and walks to the next pen without making eye contact with anyone she passes.

Hair pulled back in a braid that catches the late-afternoon light. She rolls her sleeves to the elbow as she walks.

The shift of muscle in her forearms, the way she carries the kit bag low and easy at her side, does something to the base of my spine that has nothing to do with Sidewinder's lateral kicks. The response is immediate, physical, and completely unwelcome. My mouth goes dry. My pulse, which just spent eight seconds at redline on the back of a bronc, picks up for a woman carrying a veterinary bag across a dusty lot.

That's inconvenient. I don't need inconvenient. I've got a body held together with tape and ibuprofen and a temper that nearly snapped a sponsor's wrist a few minutes ago. Adding attraction to that list is like throwing a match at a gas leak.

After the last event, Bowen finds me. Cal Bowen has been contracting stock for the Southwest Circuit since before I started riding. He's a short, thick-bodied man with a gray mustache and hands that look like they were carved from mesquite.

He's also one of the few people left on this circuit whose opinion I trust without qualification, because Cal Bowen has never once said a thing he didn't mean or failed to do a thing he said he would.

He falls into step beside me as I'm walking toward the competitor lot, and for a couple of minutes he doesn't say anything. That's how Bowen operates. He walks with you until the silence gets comfortable, and then he talks.

"You see the Thornton rigs?" he asks.

"I see them at every event. They’re still around."

"You notice the routes?"

I stop walking. Bowen stops with me. His face has the particular expression of a man who's been chewing on something for a while and has decided, against his better judgment, to spit it out.

"I've been running stock on this circuit for a long time," he says. "I know every hauling route between Lubbock and Las Vegas. I know which ones make sense and which ones are the long way around, and I know why a contractor might take the long way around if the weigh stations on the short route are running inspections." He pauses. Adjusts his hat. "Thornton's trucks aren't taking the long way around the weigh stations. They're taking routes that don't go anywhere near a rodeo."

"Where do they go?"

"That's what I can't figure. I watched a Thornton rig pull out of the Midland event headed south on the highway. Next event was in Lubbock. Lubbock is north. Two days later, the same rig shows up in Lubbock with stock that looks like they've been on the road for a week. Horses road-sore, dehydrated, filthy. That doesn't happen on a six-hour haul."

"You talk to anybody else about this?"

"I'm talking to you." His tone makes clear I'm the first and possibly the last. "After what happened with Merrick, after what happened to that Corbin kid, I'm not looking to draw attention to myself. I'm too old to start looking over my shoulder."

I let that settle. Bowen isn't a man who exaggerates. The fact that he's framing this as a personal safety issue tells me he's thought about it longer and harder than the casual tone suggests.

"What do you want me to do with this?" I ask.

"Nothing." He starts walking again. "I just want somebody besides me to know. In case knowing starts to matter." He tips his hat and peels off toward the stock pens.

I pull the flask from my rigging bag and take a long drink. The Maker's Mark burns on the way down and lands in my empty stomach with the familiar weight of the only solution I've got left.

The sponsor rep's wrist. Bowen's routes. The vet's eyes scanning every exit. All of it sits in my chest alongside the bourbon, and none of it is going away tonight.

I think about Colt. What he and Kenna uncovered, the corridor Merrick was supposedly running, Thornton's operation getting exposed and then, somehow, continuing. The voicemail sitting on my phone from a man who already walked into this fire once and came out the other side carrying burns I can see every time I look at him.

Arresting one man doesn't kill an operation. It just teaches the survivors to be smarter.

Bowen knows this. That's why he told me instead of telling anyone with a badge.

The competitor lot is emptying out. Trailers pulling away, trucks rolling toward the highway, the post-event exodus that happens at every rodeo in every town on every circuit in the country. In a couple of hours this fairground will be dark and quiet, the dust settled. Tomorrow the whole thing starts over somewhere else. I'm heading for my truck when I see the vet.

She's walking toward the far end of the lot where a white vet truck is parked under the last working light pole. Her kit bag is over one shoulder, her phone in her hand. She's not looking at the screen. Her eyes are working the lot with the same steady attention she used all afternoon, inventorying every vehicle, every shadow, every space between the trailers where a person could stand without being seen.

She reaches her truck. Stops. Sets the kit bag on the ground.

Then she crouches down and looks underneath it.

Not a casual glance. She drops to one knee, leans forward, and checks the undercarriage from bumper to bumper, her head turning slowly, her phone light sweeping the ground beneath the chassis. She checks the wheel wells. She stands up, opens the driver's door, and looks inside the cab for a long moment before she gets in.

I've seen people check under their trucks before. For rattlesnakes, loose dogs, leaks after a long haul. That isn't what she's checking for.