Free The Clinch Knot by John Galligan

my hair on end, vigilant for screws in the sawdust, for birds of prey swooping down, for Sudden Exploding Toddler Syndrome. When Peter Gray reached into the sawdust, pinched out a caulking tube tip and aimed it toward his mouth, I dove. I grabbed his chubby hand, pried his find away, causing him to shriek first with fright and next indignation.
    “You’re good,” his mother said, exchanging the choking hazard for something that looked like iced tea but tasted more like some whoop-ass cocktail for college kids. “Not good,” I said. “Just traumatized,” and she looked at me strangely, hoping for an explanation she wouldn’t get.
    “So Dane Tucker’s one of your husband’s clients?”
    “There.” She was decisive. “Now I know. You’re after a piece of Tucker. Well, good for you, that asshole deserves it, but sorry, you’re out of luck. My husband
was
Tucker’s lawyer.”
    “I heard it in the present tense.”
    “Nope.” She squeezed lemon over her drink, rattled her ice. “Tucker was one of Hendy’s main clients. But Tucker fired him over a year ago. It was because of some forty-mile fence that the old ranch manager put up. Tucker was on location in Australia. The ranch manager claimed the fence was my husband’s idea and that Hendy okayed the job. Turns out Tucker got sued by some radical group for supposedly blocking a pronghorn migration route. He bought himself some science and my husband won the case, but it cost Tucker a load of money and brought a lot of bad press, which the moron then multiplied for himself by refusing to take the fence down. It was all pointless and ugly. Tucker fired Hendy as soon as it was over.”
    “People don’t seem to know that.”
    “Oh, Hendy hides it. He hides all his little failures. Like not making the Berkeley Law Review. Like Peter’s delayed speech. Like me and this.” She waved her empty glass at me.
    I set my drink down empty, too. Wow.
    “Another?”
    “Sure.”
    “You’re on day care again.”
    This time I was proactive. I distracted the boy by burying my hand in sawdust and wiggling my fingers like worms. He chortled and tried to clobber the worms with a Matchbox Camero. When Charlotte Gray came back, she said, “But you’re not trying to extort Dane Tucker?”
    “I’m not.”
    “Too bad. That could be fun.” She sat back with a little smile and sipped. “I should have visitors more often,” she said. “Especially mysterious ones.”
    “Nice to be appreciated,” I said, and then I looped back, following something. “Is that where your husband runs deer,” I asked, “on Tucker’s land?”
    “No. He crosses Tucker’s land to get to the place where he runs them.”
    I pictured Henderson Gray the first time I saw him, his showy finishing kick down Livingston’s Main Street, his dramatic heaving goober onto the sidewalk, the water bottle over the head.
    “So what’s it take to run deer? What’s it about?”
    Gray’s wife shrugged. “We don’t talk about it much any more. It’s one of our issues. He trains constantly. I don’t know how he finds the time or the energy to—”
    She stopped herself. She lifted her glass too strongly and ice hit her in the face. “It takes open land,” she said, “good visibility. And you have to understand which direction the animal doesn’t want to go. You run them that way, the way they don’t want to go, and the stress tires them out.”
    “If your husband is fired, how does he get across Tucker’s land?”
    She laughed. This was nothing. “Along with Hendy, Tucker fired the ranch manager and the most of the hands too. I’m sure they all just kept their keys. Tucker’s only here one month out of the year. He has no idea what goes on there day to day.”
    She finished her drink. She looked at me pointedly, a long time, raised her eyebrows. “Well? It’s Peter’s nap time. Is there anything else?”
    “I’m here about your husband’s girlfriend.”
    She did not look surprised.