Red Knife by William Kent Krueger Read Free Book Online Page A

run with an article about the plight of the rez: the deterioration, the drunkenness, the desperation. It hadn’t been an unfair article, Cork had thought at the time, but it had made the situation on the rez sound hopeless. The Ojibwe may have lacked many things, but they’d never lacked for courage and they’d never lost hope.
    Behind the Blessing house was a marsh full of cattails and red-winged blackbirds. In the summer, the marsh was home to great blue herons that waded among the lily pads with awkward majesty and bent with a formal-looking stiffness to snatch at fish and crawdads.
    It was Fanny Blessing who answered Cork’s knock. She appeared to be headed out. A big black purse hung on her shoulder and a jean jacket was slung over her arm.
    “ Boozhoo, Fanny,” he said, offering the familiar Ojibwe greeting.
    “If you’re here to arrest Tommy, I ain’t going to stop you,” she said.
    She was a heavy woman. She was also a smoker, had been since she was a kid, and she was paying the price: emphysema. She wore a tube that ran from her nostrils, over both ears, and down to a small green oxygen tank, which she pulled around beside her on a little wheeled cart. She was a couple of years younger than Cork and had been a wild one in her day. Fanny had loved a good time, loved Wild Turkey with a beer chaser, loved dancing in bars and at powwows, and loved men, no-good men especially. She’d had three children by three different fathers. One had died young, a drowning. The middle one, a girl named Topaz, had run away when she was sixteen and, as far as Cork knew, hadn’t been in touch with Fanny since. Thomas, her youngest, was the only one left with her, but she didn’t seem particularly inclined to want to keep him.
    “I know whatever you’re here for, he probably done,” she said. “All that crazy Red Boyz shit.”
    “I haven’t done anything,” Tom Blessing said from somewhere in the room behind her. “And even if I did, he wouldn’t be taking me anywhere, Mom. He’s not the sheriff anymore.”
    “Just here to talk to Tom, if you don’t mind,” Cork said.
    “He’s the one you got to convince.” She waved away her responsibility. “You two go at it. Me, I’m heading to the casino.” She let the screen door slam shut behind her and maneuvered past Cork with her oxygen cart in tow.
    Thomas Blessing stepped into the light that fell through the doorway into the living room. “I keep telling you,” he called after her, “it’s like taking water from a lake and just pouring it back in.”
    Cork figured he was speaking about the checks each registered tribal member received as a share of the profits from the Chippewa Grand Casino, south of Aurora. Fanny took the money then gave it right back at the slot machines.
    “What do you want me to do?” she called as she opened the door of her big white Buick, which was parked next to her son’s black Silverado. “Sit around all day listening to the preachers on television? Least at the casino I can smoke without you giving me a lot of crap for it.”
    She settled her oxygen tank in the passenger seat, kicked the engine over, backed onto the road, and shot toward Aurora.
    Blessing looked at Cork coldly through the screen door. “What do you want?”
    “You heard about Alex and Rayette?”
    “Nothing happens on the rez we don’t know about it right away.”
    “What do you think?”
    “I think Buck Reinhardt just bought himself a ticket to hell.”
    “You think it was Reinhardt?”
    “What are you doing here? What’s with all the questions?”
    “You have any idea why Alex—”
    “His name was Kakaik.”
    “You know why he wanted to see me?”
    “No.”
    “He asked me to arrange a meeting with Reinhardt.”
    That seemed to surprise him. “What for?”
    “Said he wanted to offer Buck justice.”
    “Looks like Reinhardt decided to deliver his own form of justice first.”
    “You have any idea what Kingbird—sorry, Kakaik—might have been