Page 20 of Rope Burn
"Circuit keeps me busy."
"Tell me about it." She holds up a pair of silver drops with turquoise cabochons. "I remembered you said plain studs. These are smaller, closer to the ear. Less dangly."
Her grin is open and unguarded, too bright and too trusting for a woman working a circuit full of strangers.
"Those are nice."
"They're perfect, and you know it." She tilts the display card until the morning light catches the silver. "Come back when you've run out of excuses. I'm heading out right after teardown tomorrow night. Saves me paying for another motel."
"You drive alone?"
Penny laughs. "Always. Me and a hundred miles of highway and whatever podcast keeps me awake."
She says it like it's a punchline. Sandy Canutson must have said something like it to someone, once. Penny appears to work without staff, and she drives the circuit alone. I don't know whether anyone expects a call when she reaches the next stop, or how long it would take someone to notice if she never arrived.
From Penny's booth, the stock pens and back lot are visible past the vendor row. A trailer that used to haul under Thornton's name sits at the far end, the company name sanded off the door but still legible under the primer, ramp up and doors closed, no handlers working around it.
I walk the vendor row to its end and cut behind the pens toward the competitor area. A group of bull riders are taping their wrists against a fence panel while a country station plays from a phone propped on a cooler lid. The spaces between official activity are where the circuit does its real work.
At the team-roping pens, Quinn backs his bay gelding out of the trailer while Clint lifts a saddle from the rack, talking loudly enough to reach half the vendor row. They move through the routine with the efficiency of partners who've loaded horses at more events than either can count.
Quinn is quiet, methodical, his hands steady on the lead rope. Clint is talking, his voice carrying over the pen rails with the cheerful volume that makes him a fixture at each stop.
Clint is furniture. He's present at every event, in every crowd, friendly with anyone who'll talk back. His face appears in the background of photographs because a team roper with a full-season schedule has access to every venue and back lot where the circuit does its real socializing.
He's also the last person photographed with Sandy Canutson before she disappeared. That information hasn't changed his behavior by a single degree, which could be the ease of an innocent man or the discipline of someone very good at being furniture.
He catches my eye across the lot, lifts a hand in a wave, and goes back to his horse. Quinn glances at me, looks away, and tightens the gelding's halter with the expression of a man who's decided that the less he engages with the insurance adjuster, the better.
By early afternoon the event is running. The arena fills, the announcer working the crowd with the relentless cadence of a man who's never met a silence he couldn't fill. Barrel racers fly through the pattern in bursts of speed that throw dirt against the fencing. A saddle bronc rider goes eight seconds on a horse that bucks in hard lateral kicks, and the crowd noise rises into the metal rafters.
Roping teams cycle through the chutes, and the smell of horse sweat and warm leather drifts across the holding area.
I walk the perimeter of the livestock pens with my clipboard and my cover questions, checking transport tags and intake records at the stock office window. Nobody looks twice at the woman in the Western Range Mutual lanyard who keeps asking about carrier documentation.
Carrick's truck has been at the loading area since before the vendors opened. Whatever he was watching from that vantage point, he wasn't watching the sunrise.
I spotted him later in the competitor area, leaning against a panel while another contestant's bulldogging horse stood saddled beside him. He'd arranged to ride again, borrowing the mount the way he did at the last event.
When the steer wrestling ran, I watched from the holding pens. He came out of the box at a full sprint, closing the gap on the steer in three strides, and left the saddle with the committed precision of a man who has thrown his body at running livestock more times than he can count. His hands caught the horns. His boots hit dirt. The steer's momentum carried them both forward, and then his weight shifted, his hip dropped, and the animal went over with its legs in the air.
He stood, brushed the dirt off his arms, and walked back toward the chutes without acknowledging the crowd. The efficiency of it reminded me that this man is built to bring things down.
Carrick finds me near the pens after the bulldogging. He's changed his shirt, and his hair is damp from the hose behind the chutes. The only evidence of the run is the careful way he rolls his left shoulder between conversations, a concession to injury he doesn't bother hiding from me.
"Pen six," he says. "Bay roan, freeze brand on the hip."
"What about it?"
"I watched the morning load-in. That horse came off a rig with Sandoval Hauling on the door. New Mexico plate on the trailer, last four digits eight-three-one-five. The camera over the east gate should have the full number if they haven't recycled the footage."
He leans against the fence rail, settling with the deliberate ease of someone who's learned to make surveillance look like rest. His gaze moves across the holding pens without lingering on anything, scanning the way he'd scan an arena before a run.
"Sandoval is the second phantom I told you to look for," he says. "Pull the intake records from the stock office and check which company is listed on the bill of lading. It won't say Sandoval."
"You're sure."
"I moved enough sealed packets through this corridor to know how the names work. The company on the rig and the company on the paper are never the same when livestock isn't the only thing being moved." He meets my eyes, and the steadiness holds. He's been thinking about how to give me information without stepping into a federal building, and he's decided this is how.
