Page 8 of Broken Ride

She pulls out of the lot and onto the highway, taillights disappearing into the West Texas dark. I should get in my own truck. I should drive to the motel, take a shower, close my eyes, pretend tomorrow is different.

Instead I stand there with Bowen's routes and the vet's fear and a half-empty flask competing for space in a head that suddenly has room for one more thing it doesn't need.

I know what fear looks like when it's been lived in long enough to become routine. I see it in the mirror often enough.

Hers is older than mine. And I don't think it's pointed at anything on this circuit.

3

LANEY

I'm at the livestock pens before dawn, same as every morning on the circuit, truck parked facing out with a clear line to the highway. The lab results come in while I'm stitching a roping horse's shoulder laceration behind the warm-up pens.

My phone buzzes against my hip. I ignore it because I'm three sutures deep in a sedated quarter horse who doesn't appreciate being sedated, and the cowboy holding his halter rope looks like he'd rather be anywhere else on the planet. The horse shifts his weight, and the cowboy takes a half-step backward.

"Hold him," I say. "He's not going anywhere. He just doesn't like standing still."

"That makes two of us."

I tie off the last interrupted suture, clip the excess, and press a sterile pad against the wound. The laceration ran along the point of the shoulder where he caught himself on a gate latch coming out of the box. Clean edges, good blood supply. He'll heal fine if his owner can keep him from rubbing it raw on every fence post between here and Amarillo.

"Keep this dry for three days," I tell the cowboy. "If he swells past the margin I've marked, call me. If you decide to run him before the sutures come out, don't call me, because I'll have nothing helpful to say."

He grins at that. Tips his hat. Leads the horse away.

Gloves come off, go into the biohazard bag mounted inside the truck's compartment. I check my phone.

The notification is from the diagnostic lab in Lubbock, an email with an attachment. I tap it open and read the subject line twice before the words register. The barrel horse's toxicology panel came back positive for fentanyl metabolites.

I lean against the side of my truck and read the full report. The numbers make my stomach clench.

Norfentanyl at levels low enough to rule out direct administration but high enough to confirm exposure. The horse was never prescribed opioids. The owner's records show anti-inflammatories and a course of antibiotics for a hoof abscess last fall. The issuing vet's notes list a standard deworming schedule. Nothing that puts synthetic opioid metabolites in her blood.

The symptoms I flagged make sense now: the sluggish pupils, the mild ataxia, the depressed mentation. I wrote them off as potentially neurological, possibly metabolic. I ran the tox panel as a precaution because the presentation was ambiguous and the horse's travel history put her in contact with unfamiliar environments.

I expected maybe an NSAID overdose from a well-meaning owner. Maybe an accidental organophosphate exposure from a poorly cleaned trailer. Fentanyl wasn't on my list.

I shut the email and stand in the shade for a full minute, staring at the dust settling over the livestock pens.

The afternoon competition won't start for a few hours. Most of the cowboys are eating or napping or pretending they aren't nervous. The pens are quiet enough that I can hear the Thornton Livestock haulers idling rows over, their diesel engines ticking in the heat.

Thornton didn't haul the barrel horse. Her owner trailered her in, same as most competitors do with their own animals. But I checked the pen assignments when I flagged the mare, and she was stabled in the temporary pens directly beside where Thornton Livestock unloaded their bronc string for the saddle bronc and bareback events. Same water troughs. Same drainage. Same air. If something in a Thornton trailer was leaching into the environment, the mare was close enough to absorb it.

I grab my records binder from the passenger seat. It holds health certificates and transport documents for every animal I've treated this season. I started keeping copies early in my career, when a dispute over a horse's vaccination status taught me that the only records worth trusting are the ones I've verified myself.

I flip past the barrel horse's paperwork to the Thornton Livestock delivery records filed with the event committee. Their bronc string for this event came from a contractor's facility outside Lubbock. The CVI was signed early that morning. The delivery receipt at this end wasn't stamped until late afternoon. Most of a day for a haul that should take four hours, maybe five with a fuel stop.

I pull Thornton's delivery records from the previous event on the circuit. That load of steers came from a facility near Clovis, New Mexico. Different stock, different origin state, but the same hauler: Thornton. The CVI was signed at dawn. Delivery receipt: close to midnight. Clovis to that fairground is roughly a four-hour drive.

The timestamps swim on the page. I do the math again.

Nearly a full day of transit for a four-hour haul. The truck went somewhere else first. Somewhere that added hours and hours of travel time, and nobody on either end thought to ask why their stock arrived half a day late.

I compare the two Thornton deliveries side by side. Different stock, different origin facilities, different dates.

Same hauler. Same impossible transit times.

I shut the binder and lean back in the cab. The air conditioning pushes against the West Texas heat and loses. I crack the windows and let the cross-breeze carry in the smell of livestock and sunbaked metal.