Sign Off (Caught Dead In Wyoming, Book 1)

Excerpt from LEFT HANGING

I waved off that irrelevance. "-while you were playing pro football and otherwise frittering away your time. I don't miss Haeburn even in this extremity."

Commercials ended and, too soon for my taste, the face of Thurston Fine reappeared.

Keith Landry and his partner built their business up from their roots in Enid, Oklahoma, and had been stock contractor for the Sherman Fourth of July Rodeo in previous years. Glorious, successful years for our community's greatest event.

The screen cut to a choppy montage of Cottonwood County notables riding in convertibles in parades.

"What do you know?" came from the back of the room. "Fine got in a shot of himself doing the parade wave."

The montage continued with western-clad young men in various rodeo events, rodeo clowns playing tag with lumbering bulls, and a string of girls with big smiles, big cowboy hats, and increasingly outdated hairstyles. Going backward in time was a disorienting finish to the over-long, under-relevant package.

But last year, under new and inexperienced committee chair Linda Caswell- Back live, Fine's voice and face registered grave disapproval.

Mike growled, "Wrong again, Fine."

-the rodeo signed with a new company. In an effort to save money.

"It had to save money after losing sponsorships because the former committee chair and Fine's great buddy was disgraced," Mike inserted.

"Details, details," I murmured.

But when that new, cheap rodeo producer turned out to be a chimera-

"A what?" chorused his newsroom audience. He'd pronounced it like shimmering, confusing those in his audience who knew its Greek mythology origins, along with everyone else.

-Keith Landry returned to Sherman in its hour of need and rescued this rodeo that he continued to love, even after it had thrown him over for another contractor.

"And was paid a big fat bonus for his trouble, which Fine would know if he'd listened to my reports," Mike said.

Photos on the screen showed a middle-aged man, his belt dropped low by the bulge above it. His hair was going gray under the inevitable cowboy hat. In all but one photo, he'd posed wearing sunglasses, smiling broadly and with at least one arm slung across the shoulders of a companion. The exception was a candid that caught puffiness under his small eyes and his mouth in an arch of displeasure.

Then, tragically, the white knight of the Sherman Rodeo-a groan filled the newsroom-lost his life before he could enjoy the fruits of his rescue efforts by seeing next weekend's spectacular rodeo.

"Yeah, boy, I bet he'd've been happy to be stomped to death by bulls if only it had happened after the rodeo. Don't even know why the bulls were there anyway." Mike added in a mutter low enough that only I heard, "We should be on this story."

Yes, the long, successful, storied association between Keith Landry and the Sherman Fourth of July Rodeo came to a tragic end today in the Sherman rodeo grounds' bull ring. Fine shifted to a ghoulishly chipper tone to add, More on that when we come back, including exclusive video from KWMT.

"Twice! Twice the jerk called it a bull ring, like Keith Landry was a matador. God, I told him in the pre-rodeo meeting that it wasn't a bull ring. I told him three times." Paycik's dour mood was beginning to worry me.

"That isn't even where Landry was found. He was in a bull pen, not the arena," said a cameraman named Jenks. Since he and Fine had been first on the scene-literally-he should know.