Page 16 of Broken Ride

But tonight the flask wins, same as every other night. Colt told me to put it down. He's right. He's been right about everything since Grant died.

I take another drink and start the truck.

5

LANEY

I'm running out of coincidences. The motel room desk is buried under transport manifests, delivery receipts, and the lab data Amy walked me through at the A&M diagnostic lab.

I've spent three days cross-referencing hauling records with tox results while the rest of the circuit ate bad diner food and pretended everything on the Southwest stretch was running the way it should. My handwritten notes fill the margins of a road atlas I bought at a truck stop outside Roswell, red ink marking every pickup and delivery point I can confirm from the paperwork.

Amy's data added to what the field numbers already suggested. The barrel horse I flagged in Midland. Amy's two lab cases, both from different circuits but the same hauler. The dun bronc gelding from the last event. And a fifth case Amy pulled from her backlog during my visit, a team roping horse out of Tucson that showed the same low-level norfentanyl and the same lack of prescription history. Five horses across three events, all presenting with fentanyl metabolites, all penned near stock that traveled on Thornton Livestock rigs. The submitting veterinarians in Amy's files didn't follow up because the levels were low enough to dismiss as anomalous. A single case is anomalous. Five cases tied to the same hauling company is a pattern with teeth.

I pull the Thornton delivery records into a timeline and overlay them on the atlas. The pickup locations are legitimate: contractor facilities in Lubbock, Clovis, Las Cruces, Tucson. The delivery points are legitimate too, rodeo venues across New Mexico, Arizona, and West Texas. Every piece of paper looks clean if you only read the endpoints.

The transit times tell a different story. I've been tracking them since the records binder I started after the barrel horse flagged positive, and the math keeps failing in the same direction. Hauls that should take four hours take twelve. Hauls that should take six take eighteen. The trucks aren't breaking down. They aren't stopping for fuel on roads without stations. They're going somewhere between pickup and delivery, adding hours of drive time that the paperwork doesn't acknowledge.

I flatten the atlas and stare at the red marks until my eyes ache. The extra hours translate to hundreds of extra miles per haul. That distance means the trucks are detouring far off the direct routes between pickup and delivery, but the delivery records don't tell me where. Timestamps tell me when the trucks left and when they arrived. They don't tell me where the rigs went in between. For that, I'd need someone who knows every stock road, every back highway, every route a hauler might take between Lubbock and Las Vegas. Someone who's spent decades driving them.

What I can determine from the veterinary evidence is this: something in or on those Thornton trailers is exposing the horses to fentanyl. The contamination pattern is consistent with environmental exposure during transit, the same mechanism I identified in the barrel horse. Inhalation, mucous membrane absorption, contaminated water. If the product is being stored inside the trailers near the livestock, any failure in containment would produce exactly the inconsistent, low-level contamination I'm documenting. The variation between cases would depend on proximity, duration of exposure, and how well whatever is carrying the fentanyl is sealed.

I sit back in the desk chair and press both hands against the laminate surface until my fingers stop trembling. The tremor isn't fear. It's the aftershock of having looked for an answer and found one I can't unfind.

I can prove what's getting into the horses. I can prove which hauler is responsible. I can prove the transit times don't match the distances. What I can't prove, sitting alone in a motel room with delivery receipts and a road atlas, is where those trucks are going during the missing hours. That's the piece that turns a contamination complaint into a federal case, and it's the piece I don't have.

I photograph the atlas with my phone and file the image into the encrypted notes folder that looks like a feed inventory spreadsheet. Then I stack the manifests, slide them into a manila envelope, and sit on the edge of the bed.

The smart thing is to call the authorities. File a report with the state veterinary board. Contact the DEA field office in El Paso. Let the agencies with jurisdiction and manpower and the legal authority to execute search warrants do the work I'm not equipped to do.

The smart thing will also give whoever is running this operation exactly enough warning to relocate. Shut down the Thornton routes, switch to a different hauler, and resume in a couple of months with better containment and a new company name on the truck doors. Regulatory agencies move slowly. Criminal enterprises don't.

I need Wade.

The thought arrives without permission and sits in my chest like a swallowed stone. He's been working the same problem from the opposite direction, relationships where I have records, patterns where I have lab results. His two decades on Southwest roads fill the gap my data can't reach. I have the what. He might have the where.

He's also the only person on this circuit who noticed the same thing I did and started pulling on the thread without being asked.

I grab the manila envelope and my keys.

His room is at the far end of the motel, ground floor, last door before the building dead-ends at a cinder-block utility wall. I know the number because he wrote it on the back of a gas receipt. The parking space in front of his door holds his truck with the dented tailgate and the rodeo association sticker peeling off the rear window. A pair of boots sits drying on the concrete walkway beside the door.

I knock twice. The door opens before I can formulate the opening line I've been rehearsing on the walk over, and whatever I planned to say dissolves when I'm standing close enough to register that he's barefoot, wearing a t-shirt that's been washed past the point of opacity, and holding a coffee mug that smells more like bourbon than coffee.

"Brooks." He leans against the doorframe and takes a drink from the mug. His gaze drops to the envelope under my arm. "You look like a woman with bad news."

"I look like a woman with a map." I hold up the envelope. "You going to invite me in, or should I brief you from the parking lot?"

He steps aside. The room is laid out like mine, same thin carpet, same window unit rattling against the heat. He's turned it into something that looks less like a motel room and more like a field office. Road maps are tacked to the wall above the desk with pushpins, half a dozen states overlapping at the edges. His rigging bag sits on the floor beside the bed. A half-empty bottle of Maker's Mark stands on the nightstand with the cap off, no pretense of hiding it.

"Tell me you found the drivers," I say, spreading my manifests across the desk on top of his maps.

"Three regulars on the Southwest rotation. Two are contract drivers, hired per-haul. The third is a guy named Reyes who's been with Thornton since before Merrick went down." He drops into the desk chair while I stand over the spread, and pulls one of his road maps off the wall. "Reyes runs the routes that don't make sense. Every overlong haul I've tracked ties back to his rig."

"Then look at this." I flatten the atlas on top of his maps, red ink facing up, and tap the delivery receipt timestamps I've circled. "Every contaminated horse traveled a Thornton route with impossible transit times. Lubbock to Midland, twelve hours for a four-hour haul. Clovis to the Tucson event, eighteen hours for six hours of road. Hundreds of extra miles on every run. But I can't tell where the extra miles go from timestamps alone. I need someone who knows those roads."

Wade leans forward and studies the atlas. He traces the route between Clovis and Tucson with his index finger, then stops. Taps the map south of the Interstate 10 corridor. "A rig coming out of Clovis headed for Tucson takes I-10 through Deming. That's the straight shot. But if you drop south at Deming instead of staying on the interstate, you're in the boot heel. The roads down there run through Animas, Hachita, the back side of the Peloncillo range." He drags his finger west into Arizona. "Come back up to I-10 at Willcox or Benson, and you've added exactly the kind of hours you're seeing."

"What's down there?"