Left Hanging by Patricia McLinn Read Free Book Online

held on. “I’m sorry about the death of your partner.”
    He mumbled thanks.
    Still grasping his hand, I kept on. “I was hoping to ask you a few questions, strictly on background.” I stretched the fingers of my free hand wide to show its emptiness. “It would help in getting a handle on what this tragedy means.”
    “What kind of questions?”
    I took that as an invitation. “How long were you and Keith Landry partners?”
    He eased, having expected a classic attack question. Say, How much do you benefit from his death? I released his hand.
    “More than twenty years.”
    “Sounds like a successful partnership.”
    “It kept going along,” he said neutrally.
    “To keep it going along for twenty years, you must have worked closely with him, know what he— No?”
    He’d started shaking his head at worked closely .
    “He handled his side and I handled my side, and we didn’t meet much in the middle.”
    “Except at the bank?” I gave a small smile.
    “Except there,” he acknowledged, not smiling.
    “What was his side and what was yours? They never overlapped?”
    “Hardly ever.” At last he seemed to relax. “He got the contracts, set our schedule. I get the right livestock to the right place at the right time. Once in a while he’d get us overbooked and we’d be stretched thin as a wire. He’d stamp and holler, I’d go figure a way to do the impossible, and he’d deposit a check fatter than I’d even consider asking for.
    “He wasn’t an easy man, but his ways let me provide for my wife and baby girl better than I’d ever hoped when we started. When I got married after a stint of rodeoing, then we had our baby, I never thought—” He broke off with a jaw-cracking yawn, took a red bandanna from a back pocket, wiped it over his face, then gave his mouth a good rub, as if chastising that orifice for letting out the yawn. “Sorry, ma’am. I’ve been short on sleep, and getting shorter all the time.”
    Working for a stronger bond of empathy, I recalled Jenks’ comment, and said, “At such an exhausting time, it’s good you’re able to sleep anywhere. I saw you on what must be the most uncomfortable bench this side of the rack. By the rodeo office.”
    “Yeah. Caught a few winks there before that TV man interviewed me.”
    I’m surprised he didn’t catch a few more winks during the interview, considering the interviewer. I nodded, encouraging him to go on. He did.
    “Get my sleep when I can. Tending livestock on the move like we do’s a round-the-clock operation. Most people don’t realize these animals need the right conditions to do their best, just like the cowboys or  . . . or an Olympic athlete.”
    He put more spirit into those words than anything else he’d said. And he wasn’t done. “First you got to find the right ones, whether it’s buying ’em or breeding ’em. Next you pick through the ones you think ’ll make it to find ones that really will. And after you sort all that out and have your stock for rodeoing, then you got to feed them right, keep them toned up, make sure their days and nights go as smooth as possible so they’re rank in the arena. Travel will wear out your best stock if you’re not real careful.”
    Perhaps my eyebrows rose a bit.
    “They got their delicate ways,” he insisted. “Folks mostly expect it of horses, but it’s cattle, too. Between them being herd animals anyhow and being close together, why, when one gets out of sorts, the rest of ’em follow along like  . . . like  . . . ”
    “Sheep?”
    I’d only been in Wyoming since April, but I already knew how many of the people I’d met would respond—even a century after the cattle-sheep wars—to the heresy of likening one species to the other, but Street said, “I was thinking like teenage girls.”
    “That works,” I acknowledged. “With such delicate psyches, your animals—livestock—must be extremely upset after trampling Keith Landry.”
    His animation