Free Dull Knife by C. J. Box Page A

“We were going to walk over there and check it out, but the fish started hitting and, well, you know.”
    Joe nodded, handing back all of the licenses, but continued to look across the lake. As it got darker, the glow became more pronounced.
    Hans’ son said, “Jesus, it’s getting cold all of a sudden.”
    “We’d best head back,” Jack said, reaching down to clear a skin of ice from the top of his fishing hole so he could reel in.
    “Let me know what you find over there,” Hans said to Joe. “I’d go with you, but my feet are starting to freeze.”
    “That’s because you have old feet,” Hans’ son said, cracking open a beer.
    “Not so old I can’t kick your ass with one of ’em,” Hans said.
    Jack hooted.
    Joe smiled and left.
    HE SHUFFLED across the lake as the sun set. Hard white stars flickered in the sky, followed by a thin slice of moon that seemed too cold to bloom full. Joe felt icy fingers of cold probing into his collar, and up his sleeves. He knew his feet would freeze, even in his thick Sorel pac boots, the moment he stopped walking.
    There was no doubt that there was light under the surface of the lake. It now illuminated the very ice he was walking on, so his feet looked like black silhouettes. It reminded him of being on a hip dance floor once when he was in college. He remembered dancing very badly on it. Another crack on the lake brought a moan that made the hair on the back of his neck stand up. The moan echoed softly back and forth across the lake.
    He stopped and stared. Something was sticking up through the surface of ice in the middle of the glow; something thin, spindly, and black. His first thought was that it was a tree branch.
    The surface of the ice changed as he walked. There was a rim of broken ice plates, then a slick surface. Ice told stories, Joe knew. Whatever happened could be seen and felt by examining the ice. Something had crashed through here, and the water had recently frozen back over.
    It was a frozen human hand, reaching up through the ice, not a branch. As he stood above it, he could see the body below, and the source of the glow beneath the surface: headlights. He felt his heart race as he stared, and a line of sweat broke across his forehead, beneath his wool cap. He could see her face beneath the ice, despite the bolts of thick black hair that slowly whorled around it in the current. Her eyes were open, looking upward, her mouth set in a pout. She wore dark clothing. There was a light band of flesh between the top of her black jeans and the bottom of her coat. Her name was Jessica Lynn Antelope, and she had been a basketball star.
    THE STORY the ice told him was this:
    The night before, the pickup truck that was now on the bottom of the lake had gone off of the old two-track road that rimmed the bluff. It must have been going fast, he thought, to have launched this far into the lake. The truck had crashed through the ice and had settled on the deep floor of the lake, with its rear end down first so the headlights pointed up. The engine was obviously killed in the water, but the battery held enough of a charge to power the lights a day later.
    Jessica Lynn Antelope had been in the pickup, either as the driver or a passenger. She had attempted to swim to the surface toward the hole the truck had made. Whether she’d drowned before she froze to death would be a tossup. Joe wondered if she realized, before she died, that her grasping hand had broken through the rapidly forming new skin of ice into the twenty-below air. As the water froze, it had trapped her arm and held it fast in its grip. Now, her body swayed slowly in the current, her hair sweeping across her face in a fan dance.
    He said, “Jesus,” and dug in his parka for his cell phone to call the sheriff.
    JOE WAITED in his pickup on the shore of the lake—engine running, heater blowing full blast—for Sheriff McLanahan and the tow truck to arrive. His toes in his boots burned as they thawed out. He