Reject Sniper: My Wife Banged a Bullrider novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Gate

Brody's riders jump Wyatt, Cassidy sides with them, and when Brody opens the bull pen on Poppy, Wyatt kills the bull with one shot.

"The fourteenth," I said. "Say that again."

Cassidy picked up a plastic cup of lemonade and drank from it.

"You're making a scene, Wyatt," she said. "Go home. We'll talk Monday."

"Home," I said. "The one I paid for?"

Brody stood up slowly, and he was a head shorter than me and sure of himself.

"Everybody's looking at you, brother," he said. "Take the hint."

Four riders in matching vests came up the stairs behind me.

I had not heard them until they were close.

Brody had called them with one finger.

The biggest one cracked his knuckles.

"Is this the guy?" he asked. "The war hero who left his wife to rot?"

"I left to feed her," I said.

"Hold him," Brody said.

Two of them took my arms.

I let them, because I wanted to see what the others would do.

The big one stepped in close to my face and grinned.

"We're gonna geld you in the dirt," he said, "then you can go home and tell your kid why you walk funny."

Brody laughed.

Cassidy did not.

She set her cup down, stood, and stepped behind Brody, so that his back was between us.

"Don't hurt him too badly," she said. "Poppy's going to see."

That was the line.

I broke the first man's wrist, and he screamed and let go.

I turned the second man into the rail with his own weight.

The big one swung, and I ducked and put two fingers into the side of his throat, and he sat down on the steps and could not breathe.

It took very little time.

Brody threw a punch at my face.

I caught his fist, held it, and looked at him.

"You stood at my wedding," I said.

"You were gone nine years of it," he said. "Somebody had to be here."

"Daddy!"

Poppy was coming down the steps two at a time with her pink hat in one hand.

The woman from the bleachers was behind her, shouting for her to stop.

I let go of Brody and turned.

"Poppy, go back up!"

She was already past me.

She ran to the arena fence, where the rodeo crew kept the bulls waiting in their pens, and she stopped there with her face pressed to the rail.

"Mama!" she cried. "Mama, make him stop!"

Cassidy looked down at her.

She did not go to her.

She looked at Brody.

Brody put two fingers to his mouth and whistled to a man at the pens.

The man at the pens swung open the heavy iron gate.

It was the pen for the big bulls, and I had walked past it on the way in.

The sign said IRONSIDE.

The bull came out of the dark with its head low and its horns up.

It was black, and it weighed nearly two thousand pounds.

It was not frightened, and it did not turn.

It ran straight at the only small thing in the alley, and that was my daughter.

"Poppy, get back!" I screamed.

She did not move.

She was seven and frozen at the fence, and the bull was thirty yards from her.

I had a pistol in my bag in the truck and nothing on my body.

There was a man in the arena behind the rail in a yellow vest with a rifle on his back.

I vaulted the rail and took it off him before he knew I was there.

He yelled.

I did not hear him.

Everything else went quiet, as it always did when I lined up a shot.

The crowd, my wife, the whole noise of the night went down to one point.

The bull was moving at full speed.

Poppy was six feet behind the line I had to hold.

If I fired high, the bullet would go over the bull and into the stands.

If I fired low, the bull would still come through the fence.

A bull that size keeps coming on a bad hit.

There was one place on its skull where it would stop right where it was.

I put the sight on it and breathed out.

I fired once.

The bull went down on its front legs, then its side, and slid in the dirt until its horn stopped at the toe of my daughter's boot.

It did not move again.

The silence in that arena was complete.

Poppy looked down at the bull and then up at me.

I ran to her and swept her up, and she wrapped her arms and legs around me and shook.

"I've got you," I said. "I've got you, baby."

Then I heard the scream.

A woman was running across the dirt from the chutes in a canvas jacket, with her braid flying.

She dropped to her knees beside the bull and put both hands on its neck.

"Ironside," she said. "Oh, no. No, no."

She looked up at me with her face wet and furious.

"You shot my bull!" she screamed.

Behind me, Cassidy's voice rang clear across the silent arena.

"Deputy!" she called. "Arrest him! He attacked those men, and he just shot an innocent animal in front of a child!"

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