Page 96 of The Killing Plains

Pete grimaced. “Some of the new crew’s the laziest SOBs I ever seen—but I been ridin’ herd on ’em. We’ll be ready.”

Balancing the box on the edge of the snake pit, Pete flipped it over, and a hatch dropped open. A knot of rattlesnakes slid out onto the writhing heap, setting off loud rattles of protest.

“How many this year?” Russ asked.

“Over two thousand. Gonna be a good Rodeo.” Pete shook the box to make sure it was empty, glancing curiously at Russ and Colly as he did so. Colly realized that Russ was still clasping her hand. She pulled it away.

“This is my sister-in-law, Colly,” Russ said belatedly.

Pete nodded and tipped his hat. “Y’all have a good one.” He left the tent with the snake box balanced on his shoulder.

“Pete’s Felix’s nephew,” Russ said. “He’s taken over most of the ranch-foreman work since Felix’s arthritis got bad.”

“You trust him?”

“Pete grew up here. He’s one of us.”

Whoever murdered Denny is probably one of us, too, Colly thought. “What’s in the other rings?”

“The next one’s the show pit, where the snake handlers do demonstrations.” Russ pointed down the row. “After that’s the slaughter pit, and the last one’s the skinning pit. The meat gets cooked and served at the food-prep stations, and the skins go to make wallets and belts and things.”

Colly’s stomach heaved. “This is barbaric.”

“You’d feel different if you lived around here. Every year someone reaches into a woodpile or steps in the wrong spot and ends up maimed or dead. This makes a lot of money for charity. Serves a scientific purpose, too. C’mon, I’ll show you.”

He led Colly across the tent and past the “Staff Only” partition she’d noticed earlier. They went through an opening into a long, narrow side-chamber that, in the tent’s circus days, had been used as a staging area and informal greenroom. Five or six people, all in their mid-twenties, sat on upturned five-gallon buckets around a card table at the far end of the room, chatting and eating what looked like carnitas wrapped in soft taco shells. When they saw Russ, they looked up briefly to wave hello.

“More ranch hands?” Colly asked.

“Grad students from A&M. This room’s the research station.”

Worktables laden with stainless-steel scales and other scientific instruments lined the walls. Not far from where the students were eating stood another round plywood pit, like the ones in the big tent, but smaller, with slightly shorter sides.

“Every rattler’s weighed, measured, and sexed before it goes into the holding pit,” Russ said. “And they’re milked for antivenom. The data’s sent to Texas Parks and Wildlife, and the antivenom’s shipped to hospitals all around. The Rodeo’s a win-win for everyone.”

“Except the snakes.”

Russ laughed. “Don’t talk like that around Lowell. Last year, some animal-rights folks showed up with signs and a bullhorn. I had to stop him running them off with a shotgun.”

For an hour, Colly tagged along as Russ made the rounds, inspecting the progress of the setup and chatting with the crew. It was after one o’clock when they mounted their horses for the ride back.

“You said there’s someplace we can talk?”

Russ turned in the saddle. “Up ahead.”

They reached the foot of the bluff and picked their way slowly up the switchback trail.

Halfway to the top, Russ stopped. “There’s a good spot along here, but it’s safer on foot.”

They dismounted at a wide place in the trail and tethered the horses to a scrubby cedar growing out of the cliff face. Colly followed Russ down a path that ran along one of the natural shelves of rock, hugging the crumbling wall on her left and trying not to think about the dizzying drop on her right. After a while, they rounded the shoulder of a stony outcrop. There, the shelf widened out to a platform a dozen feet wide, north-facing and shaded by the cliff behind it.

“Randy and me used to come here when we were kids. It was our hideout.” Russ picked up a chunk of flat sandstone the size of a dinner plate, turned it over, and handed it to Colly. It was covered in faded but still legible characters scratched in a child’s hand. The characters were unfamiliar to Colly. She looked questioningly at Russ.

“Our secret outlaw-code. Randy made it up. He was the smart one.” Russ sighed. “I don’t come here much anymore.” Throwing himself on the ground, he leaned against the cliff wall and stretched out his legs. “What’d you want to talk about?”

Holding the stone covered in her husband’s childish scrawl, Colly felt suddenly depressed. She sat down facing Russ and gathered her thoughts.

Finally, she laid the stone aside. “I know everything, Russ. I know about the money Lowell took, and about Hoyer cooking the books for him—and why a random bird strike was enough to make that blade come apart and kill that woman.”

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