Lexie Champion pulled off her sunglasses, wiped the lenses on the hem of her rumpled denim shirt, and slipped them into her pocket. Her eyes were gritty from the dusty desert wind that swept across the rodeo grounds, picking up the odors of manure, barbecue, popcorn, tobacco smoke, and diesel fumes—a mélange that, to Lexie, was as familiar as any air she’d ever breathed.

From the midway beyond the bleachers, her ears caught the music of a carousel. It blended with the bawl of cattle and the blare of the rodeo announcer’s voice as the rodeo’s opening ceremony began.

They’d driven most of the night to get here—she and the foreman, Ruben Diego, with four bucking bulls in the long gooseneck trailer. They’d arrived at the Mojave County Fairgrounds late last night and loosed the bulls down the chute into one of the holding pens. After giving their charges water and grain in rubber feed tubs, the two of them had crashed across the front and back seats of the heavy duty pickup for a few hours of sleep.

Now it was late in the day. The strains of the National Anthem from the arena told her that the rodeo, the centerpiece of Kingman’s Andy Devine Days celebration, was about to get underway. The bull riding event would be last on the two-hour program. Before then, there should be time to relax, get some barbecue, maybe even change the clothes she’d driven and slept in. But Lexie was too wired to rest. All she wanted was to be right here, with her bulls. After the threatening message she’d received last week, she needed to know that the precious animals were safe.

Ruben had gone off to the midway for food and sodas. She’d told him there was no need to bring her anything, but he probably would. Ruben, a full-blooded member of the Tohono O’ odham tribe, might be an employee of the Alamo Canyon Cattle Ranch, but he treated Lexie and her sister Tess as if they were his own daughters.

Alone for the moment, she leaned against the six-foot portable steel fence, resting a boot on one of the lower rungs as she gazed across the complex of pens and chutes. Here the rodeo bulls, trucked in by stock contractors like the Champion family, waited to be herded through the maze of chutes, rigged with a flank strap and bull rope, mounted, and set loose to buck.

Until the instant a rider’s weight settled onto their backs, most of the animals were calm. They were bred and raised to do one job—buck that annoying cowboy off into the dust. They knew what to expect and what to do. But at up to a ton in weight, with the agility of star athletes, they were amazingly powerful, incredibly dangerous. And in the arena, at any adrenalin-charged moment, the most amiable bull could turn murderous.