Free Dull Knife by C. J. Box Page B

was still annoyed at the tone of the conversation he had had with McLanahan.
    “You found her, huh?” McLanahan had said with a heavy sigh.
    “I think it’s her,” Joe had said, remembering her from seeing her on the basketball court. She had gained weight since those days, her face was round, like a hubcap.
    “Her mother called this morning, said she hadn’t shown up this morning. We always give missing person calls a few days if they come from the res, since those people vanish for days on end most of the time.”
    “‘Those people’?” Joe repeated.
    “You know what I’m talking about,” McLanahan said.”They operate on Indian time. If they say they’ll be someplace at nine, there’s no reason to worry until one or two. Same thing with the missing person calls. They always show up somewhere eventually, usually hungover.”
    “This is Jessica Antelope we’re talking about,” Joe said.
    “I know, I know. But she hasn’t played in five years. You know about her.”
    Joe did. He had heard. And he had seen her a few times since. But he chose to remember her from the basketball court, when he and his daughter Sheridan would drive to the reservation simply to watch her play. Sheridan had idolized Jessica Antelope, studied her, tried to emulate her on the court. But despite Sheridan’s grit and determination, she could not run as fast, pass as cleanly, or score 40 points a game. Jessica had a blinding crossover dribble that compared legitimately to those of the great NBA point guards as she brought the ball down the court, and she left opponents flailing at air in her wake, and fans gasping. Joe had never seen a girl play basketball with so much natural grace and style, and neither had anyone else. Sheridan still had photos of Jessica Antelope, clipped from the Saddlestring Roundup , taped to her wall. Jessica had led the Wyoming Indian Lady Warriors, made up of only seven Northern Arapaho girls, to the state championship game, where they had lost 77–75 against Cheyenne, a much larger school. Jessica had scored 52 points in the loss.
    But the scouts didn’t care about the loss. Jessica Antelope had been offered full-ride scholarships to over twenty universities, including Duke and Tennessee, the national powers. Instead, Jessica stayed on the reservation to take care of an ailing grandmother, she claimed. Then she gained weight, a lot of it. She drank beer and liquor with her friends. She took crystal meth, the scourge of the reservation, and was arrested for dealing it. Joe had seen her several times in the elk camps of out-of-state hunters, where she’d been hired as a camp cook. Joe suspected she was chosen for other services as well, and it pained him. Those hunters had no idea that the chubby twenty-two-year-old Northern Arapaho scrambling their eggs was once the greatest basketball player in the state of Wyoming.
    Joe had heard Jessica had fallen in with Darrell Heywood and his friends on the res as well, and he hoped it wasn’t true.
    JOE STOOD on the shore of the lake with Sheriff McLanahan, two deputies, and the tow truck driver. The temperature was now thirty degrees below zero, and the exhaust from the tow truck engulfed them in a foul-smelling cloud.
    “There’s no way we’ll get that truck out of there tonight,” the driver said. “We’d have to hire divers to hook up the cable, and nobody in their right mind would come out tonight to do it.”
    “What about Jessica’s body?” Joe asked McLanahan.
    The sheriff shrugged. “She’ll still be there tomorrow.”
    “What if there’s someone else in the truck?” Joe asked, exasperated.
    McLanahan shook his head. “They’ll keep,” he said. “They aren’t going nowhere.”
    Joe shot him a look.
    “Besides, we know who was in the truck with her,” McLanahan said. “There’s a guy in the clinic with hypothermia. It’s her brother, Alan Antelope. He’s called ‘Smudge’ on the res, I guess. He showed up last night—somebody