Dull Knife

by C. J. Box

  “Are you thawed out yet?” she asked.

  He looked up. “Why? Do you have something in mind?”

  LATER, JOE slipped out of the bed and pulled on his own robe against the cold that sliced into the house through the walls. He stood at the window, looking out at the night. He could feel the furnace working, fighting a holding action against the outside and not winning. A light snow fell, but the night was so cold that the flakes hung in the air and didn’t land. He thought of the moan of the ice and Jessica’s hand reaching through it toward the sky.

  “That was nice,” Marybeth said from bed, from somewhere beneath the quilts.

  “She was the best point guard Sheridan and I have ever seen,” Joe said.

  AT BREAKFAST, Joe told Sheridan about Jessica Antelope.

  “Who is she?” Lucy asked.

  “She used to play basketball,” Sheridan said, her eyes moistening but her face holding steady. “Dad and I used to watch her.”

  “Was she as good as you?”

  Sheridan exchanged looks with Joe. “She was a lot better,” Sheridan said. “You know those pictures on my wall?”

  “Oh,” Lucy said, and went back to her cereal.

  “Sorry, Sheridan,” Joe said. He couldn’t tell what Sheridan was thinking.

  “If I could do what she did,” Sheridan said, “I wouldn’t waste my talent like that. Why didn’t she keep playing, Dad?”

  “I don’t know. She’s the only one who could answer that.”

  “What was wrong with her?” Sheridan asked. “Didn’t she know how good she was?”

  Joe couldn’t answer that one, either.

  HE DROVE to Dull Knife Reservoir in the morning after breakfast and watched as divers in thick winter dry suits chopped Jessica Lynn Antelope’s body out of the ice. When they pulled her free, her body was dark and limp and lay on the surface of the lake like a wet rag until the EMTs loaded her up on a gurney. Her frozen arm stuck out of the blanket like an antenna. The ambulance stayed until they could determine whether there were any more bodies.

  It took half the day to hook up the pickup and winch it through the ice onto shore. The ice broke with the sound of explosives as they pulled it through.

  Joe hung back, watching closely as the sheriff looked in the cab of the pickup.

  “Dead men everywhere,” McLanahan declared loudly, and a hush fell over the workers, EMTs and sheriff’s office personnel.

  Then McLanahan reached through the broken-out side window and showed everyone an empty sixteen-ounce Budweiser can. “At least two six-packs of dead men in there,” he said, nodding at the can. “The official beverage of the Wind River Indian Reservation.” Everyone laughed.

  Joe sighed and left the scene. He hated McLanahan’s casual racism. Worse, he hated the fact that in too many instances, McLanahan was right.

  ON HIS WAY to the hospital, Joe called Nate Romanowski on his cell phone. Nate lived alone in a stone house on the bank of the Twelve Sleep River, where he flew and hunted falcons and lived well with no visible means of support. Joe trusted Nate even though most feared him, and Joe knew Nate was intimate with the tribal council of the reservation as well as many of both the Shoshone and Northern Arapaho who lived there.

  Nate had already heard about the discovery of Jessica Antelope’s body.

  “Did they find anyone else?” Nate asked.

  “Not yet.”

  “That surprises me,” Nate said. “I can’t see Jessica and her brother out together by themselves. They were always surrounded by other people.”

  Joe told him what the sheriff had said about Alan.

  “Smudge,” Nate said, and Joe could picture him nodding.

  “Why do they call him that?”

  “When he was a little boy, his face was always dirty,” Nate said. “His grandmother called him Smudge. It stuck, because his face is still always dirty.”

  “Hmm.”

  “I’d see if Smudge will talk to you,” Nate said. “He’s Jessica’s only brother, although he’s a real meth junkie. She’s got a sister, too, named Linnie. I’d check to make sure she’s all right. Linnie and Smudge hang out with Darrell Heywood. There might have been more than the two of them in that pickup.”

  “I hope not,” Joe said, imagining other bodies drifting in Dull Knife Reservoir, their lifeless bodies bumping up against the thick shield of ice.

  JOE STRODE down the hallway of the hospital, found the door with a placard in it that read ALAN ANTELOPE, and went in to find Smudge awake and alert and trembling violently.

  Smudge was slight and dark and reminded Joe of a ferret. He had a huge blade-shaped nose and furtive eyes that didn’t hold on Joe for more than a second. His head was abnormally small, perched on the end of a long neck like a balled fist.

  “I thought you were supposed to be in a coma,” Joe said, closing the door behind him.

  “I wish I was,” Smudge said, his voice a buzz-saw timbre. “I’m a fucking hurting unit, man.”

  Joe looked Smudge over, saw no wounds.

  “I need something,” Smudge said.

  “You’re withdrawing from meth,” Joe said, as much to himself as to Smudge. “That’s what hurts.”

  Smudge’s face screwed up into a petulant fist. “Yeah, man, that’s what hurts. Go tell the nurses I need something. They don’t even know I’m here.”

  “They know,” Joe said. “They just don’t know you’re awake. How long have you been conscious?”

  “Shit, I don’t know. Not long.”

  “What do you remember about getting here?” Joe asked.

  Smudge thrust his fist of a face toward Joe to show his impatience. “I don’t remember anything,” he said.

  “You don’t remember being in a pickup with Jessica? Out at Dull Knife?”

  Smudge sat back as if he’d been slapped. Joe watched his eyes. Smudge was recalling something.

  “We were in my truck,” Smudge said slowly. “Out by the lake . . .”

  “That we know,” Joe said. “What else?”

  Smudge shook his head. “It was dark, I know that.”

  Joe rolled his eyes.

  “Next thing I remember, I was getting pushed out of a car in front of the hospital.”

  “Who pushed you?” Joe asked. “Who else was in the truck when it went into the lake?”

  Smudge started to speak, then stopped himself. “Nobody. Just me and Jessica.”

  “So someone asked you to keep your mouth shut. You do remember that, then?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, man,” Smudge said, shaking his head from side to side in an exaggerated way.

  “Sure you do,” Joe said. “Who told you to keep quiet? Who else was in the truck?”

  “No one, I said. Man, could you get me a nurse?”

  Joe tried not to glance at the call button hanging on a cord near Smudge’s shoulder.

  “I’ll get you the nurse when you tell me who else was in the truck when it went into the lake.”

  “That’s extortion,” Smudge said.

  “Yup,” Joe said.

  “I need something,” Smudge said, rubbing his arms with his hands as if killing ants that were crawling on his skin. “I need something bad.”

  “Your sister didn’t make it,” Joe said. “Remember her?”

  Smudge looked up, stopped rubbing. His eyes glistened. “Jessie?”

  “Yes. She tried to swim to the top, but she didn’t make it.”

  Smudge nodded. He knew.

  “She was the best basketball player I ever saw,” Joe said. “My daughter worshipped her.”

  “Yes,” Smudge said. “She was good, man.”

  “She was more than good,” Joe said, remembering what Sheridan had said that morni
ng. “Why didn’t she keep playing?”

  Smudge shrugged. It was as if Joe had asked him why Jessica liked chocolate over vanilla.

  “Didn’t she ever say?” Joe asked.

  “Why are you asking me about her basketball?” Smudge asked angrily. “She didn’t care about that so much. Why are you asking me? Get a nurse.”

  “Did she ever know how good she really was?”

  “You white people. All you care about is how good she was at a stupid sport.”

  “Better than keeping her down with the rest of you, like you did,” Joe said in a flash of rage.

  Smudge said, “Fuck you! Get me a nurse. I’m dying here.”

  Joe was across the room before he even realized it, his fingers squeezing Smudge’s windpipe, Smudge turning red, his eyes bulging.

  “Who was in that truck with you?”

  Smudge told him.

  “That’s who I thought,” Joe said, releasing Smudge.

  The door to the room flew open, an angry nurse filling it.

  “What are you doing to him?” she demanded of Joe.

  “I thought he was choking,” Joe said, backing away, not quite believing what he had done, how angry he had been. “I think he’s all right now.”

  IT WAS DARK, already fifteen below. Joe cruised his pickup on the gravel roads of the Wind River Indian Reservation. Less than half of the streetlights worked. Wood smoke from the chimneys of tiny box houses refused to rise in the cold and hung like London fog, close to the ground.

  He had always been taken by the number of basketball backboards and hoops on the reservation. Nearly every house had one, and they were mounted on power poles and on the trunks of trees. In the fall, during hunting season, antelope and deer carcasses hung from them to cool and age. In the summer, they were used by the children. This is where Jessica had learned how to play.

  Beyond the homes, the brush grew thick and high along the river. The road coursed through it, and Joe slowed, inching his way along the road, looking for a sweat lodge he had been told was there.

  When his headlights lit up the squat dome covered in hides, Joe keyed the mike on his radio and called Sheriff McLanahan.

  “KNOCK, KNOCK,” Joe said, shoving aside the heavy elk hide that covered the doorway. A thick roll of steam greeted him, the steam smelling like burning green softwood and human sweat.

  “Hey, close the frigging door!” a man shouted inside, and a female giggled.

  Joe ducked through the doorway, squatting under the low ceiling. The air was thick with steam and light smoke, so thick he could barely breathe. The only light was the flicker of the fire beneath the cast-iron pot of boiling water filled with herbs, roots, and leaves.

  It took a moment for Joe’s eyes to adjust, but as they did he could see the two people inside across from him. Linnie Antelope, Jessica’s younger sister, naked and gleaming with the reflection of the fire, her wide young face staring at Joe, her eyes glazed over and vacant. A meth pipe sat on an upturned coffee can lid near her thigh.

  Darrell Heywood was next to her, fat, white, and sweating. His long blond hair was stuck to his neck and chest with perspiration. He had no body hair.

  “Joe Pickett,” Joe said. “I’m the game warden.”

  “What the fuck is a game warden doing here?” Heywood asked, “You’ve got no jurisdiction on the reservation. We’re a sovereign nation.”

  “We?” Joe asked rhetorically. “I thought you were from Connecticut.”

  Linnie giggled, then stifled the sound with her hand. Joe thought she looked a lot like Jessica, when Jessica was younger. But Linnie was just skinny; her arms were sticks. She didn’t play basketball.

  “You’re breaching etiquette,” Heywood said. “You don’t just come into another man’s sweat lodge. You must be invited in. And you aren’t invited.”

  God, it was hot in there, Joe thought. He was already sweating beneath his heavy winter clothes.

  “It’s important,” Joe said. “I couldn’t wait for an invitation. I wanted to talk with you before the sheriff got here and took you off to jail.”

  He let that sink in.

  Heywood had heavy cheekbones and a thick brow and bright blue eyes made brighter from the pipe. “What are you talking about?”

  “You know,” Joe said.

  Heywood looked around the structure as if someone there could interpret for him.

  “Darrell knows everything,” Linnie said, her laugh a tinkle.

  “Shut up, Linnie,” Heywood scolded, then turned back to Joe. “The sheriff has no more jurisdiction than you do here.”

  “You’ve got a thing about jurisdiction, don’t you?” Joe said. “But the sheriff is calling the tribal police. They’ll be here together.”

  Heywood’s face was red from the heat, but got even redder. “Get the hell out of here. Now.”

  “You just left her out there,” Joe said. “She was trying to swim to the surface. In fact, her hand was sticking up out of the ice when I found her. If you’d stuck around just a few minutes longer, you might have helped her out.”

  Heywood just glared.

  Joe said, “You made it to shore after the truck went into the lake and called one of your friends to pick you up from the pay phone in the campground. As far as you were concerned, both Smudge and Jessica went down to the bottom together.”

  “You’re crazy, man. You can’t prove that.”

  Linnie, though, had withdrawn from him, and was now looking back and forth from Heywood to Joe.

  “Smudge must have gotten out on his own,” Joe said. “I can’t imagine you and your friends taking him to the hospital out of the kindness of your heart, but you couldn’t just leave him there. Unlike you, he had no body fat to keep him warm. But you just left Jessica back there, didn’t you? You didn’t figure she was tough enough to try and swim out, did you?”

  “Look,” Heywood said, “I told you to leave—”

  “Is he talking about my sister?” Linnie asked, her voice high, unmodulated, unhinged.

  “But you never saw her play,” Joe said. “You didn’t have a clue how tough she was, how talented she was. You never saw her potential. You didn’t think of her that way.”

  “Jessica!” Linnie shrieked, flailing at Heywood, her bare palms slapping his naked skin, leaving white handprints.

  “I thought she was in the truck!” Heywood yelled in self-defense, trying to ward off her blows. “There wasn’t anything I could do!”

  “You could have grabbed her hand and pulled her out,” Joe said calmly. “You could have taken her to the hospital.”

  Linnie was whaling away at him now, her hands balled into fists, swinging like an eggbeater.

  “Linnie . . .” Joe said.

  “Damn you!” Heywood cried, backhanding her across the face. “Stop it! I was freezing and wet. Smudge drove us into the goddamn lake! There was nothing I could do!”

  Linnie was thrown back, but kicked at him hard. The heel of one of her feet caught him under the heart and brought a groan.

  Joe had his weapon out, finding it in the folds of his clothes. “Darrell, you’re under arrest. I think the charge is officially ‘Reckless Endangerment.’ Kind of describes your whole life here, I’d say. You could have helped Jessica Antelope, but that wouldn’t have fit your little movie here, would it?”

  Heywood howled in response, and stood up, tearing the top of the sweat lodge off, diving naked through the hole, his big body thumping the ground outside.

  II WASN’T hard for Joe to follow the footprints in the snow, weaving in and out of the brush toward the river. And when Darrell Heywood began to moan, he was easy to locate.

  Joe pushed through the brush.

  Heywood had slipped on the ice of the river and fallen and was now stuck fast to it, h
is entire belly glued to the surface.

  “I’m freezing here,” he said between sobs. “I can’t get free. I’m going to freeze to death.”

  Joe shuffled across the ice and squatted down in front of Heywood.

  “Hey, White Buffalo,” Joe said. “A real Indian would know not to run across a frozen river naked, I think.”

  Heywood spat, and cursed. Said, “I’m freezing to death.”

  “You’ve got a while yet,” Joe said. “But it’s not going to feel good when they peel you off.”

  Heywood sobbed, his tears freezing instantly on the ice.

  Joe saw the flash of wigwag lights bouncing off of the low-hanging wood smoke, heard the sirens coming.

  “You never saw her play,” he said. “You didn’t know what she could do.”

  G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS

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