Judy Clemens - The Grim Reaper's Dance

“You know,” Death said, “you really have to stop doing things like this.”

Casey groaned and held her stomach. The banana and not-quite-ripe apple weren’t sitting too well after her two-mile run through the corn. She lay now in a thicket of trees which had yet to be cut down to make more farmland, probably because a creek ran through it, gurgling and spitting over rocks.

“You kill somebody, you run,” Death said. “You get in an accident, you run. You beat up some guys, you run. You’re getting predictable.”

Casey groaned again and rolled over, holding her arm over her ear to block out Death’s yammering.

“You should at least do something no one expects,” Death said, “like giving yourself up to the police, or heading home.”

Casey took her arm away from her face. “Are you serious ?”

Death grinned. “Not really. I just wanted to see if I could get you to do something other than moan and writhe around.”

Casey put her arm back up to her head. “Can you just shut up? For a few minutes, at least?”

“If you say the magic word.”

“Fine. Can you just shut the hell up?”

Death sighed. “That’s two words. But okay. I’ll stop talking.”

Casey relaxed against the ground. Silence. Blissful silence.

A shrill chord rent the air, and Casey shot up. Death was blowing into a harmonica.

“What are you doing ?” Casey shrieked.

“Playing a song,” Death said. “To help you sleep.”

Casey wrenched the harmonica from Death’s hands and threw it into the creek, where it immediately sank under the water.

“Well,” Death said. “ That wasn’t very nice.”

“I’m not a very nice person.”

“I guess not.”

Casey fell back onto the ground and watched as Death went sloshing into the creek, feeling around the creek’s rocky bed and pulling the harmonica from its watery resting place.

Death shook water from the instrument and traipsed back to the dry ground. “You know, Wendell and Davey are probably your only hope for figuring out that information.”

Casey closed her eyes. “I can’t exactly go back to the junk yard at this moment, can I?”

“No, but maybe later.”

“Yeah, after the cops have cleared away the bad guys, questioned Davey and Wendell for hours, and put someone at the yard to watch the truck, that would be a great time for me to go back to talk to the guys. Thanks so much for the advice.”

“No need to be sarcastic. I’m only trying to help.”

“Yeah, well, maybe it would be more help if you would just leave me alone .”

Death didn’t reply.

Casey peeked out from under her eyelids, then perched on her elbows. Death was gone. She collapsed back onto the ground and cursed to herself. What had she gotten herself into this time? Could nothing be straightforward? Could she not hitch a ride with a normal truck driver who was driving a normal truck and didn’t have squads of bad guys chasing him and setting up accidents to kill him? Was that too much to ask? That she could just have one day where nothing out of the ordinary happened?

She lay there for a few moments, thinking. If her previous assumptions were correct, the men weren’t trying to actually kill Evan—at least not until they’d gotten what they were after. They most likely wanted to stop the truck, question Evan, and take whatever information he had gathered. Which Casey now had. She glanced at the bag, lying on the ground beside her, and clenched her hand around the handles, crinkling the plastic. She had gotten Davey and Wendell in trouble for sure. What were they going to tell the cops about those two men lying senseless in the yard, one of them with a destroyed knee? And what was with her, hurting someone like that again? She had to comfort herself with the idea that the men were attacking her and that she hadn’t killed them—even though she would have liked to, after they’d hurt Trixie like that.

She rolled onto her stomach, resting her face on her forearm. It would serve her right if Davey and Wendell told the police about her. She had stumbled into their lives, bringing questions and secrets and men with guns. They should tell the cops everything, sending them on a quest to find her and haul her in. She was a killer and a thief, taking what wasn’t hers, messing up people’s lives, making even more of a hash of her own…

Oh, God, she was tired.

Her brain went fuzzy for a moment, and sleep pushed its way into her consciousness. She wanted to sleep. Needed to sleep. But not there, where the next farmer to drive his John Deere out to harvest corn would see her.

She forced herself to her hands and knees, then into a squat. Her arm throbbed where her wrist had been almost crushed the day before—two days before now, wasn’t it?—and her shoulder wound had opened up again, adding her own bright red blood to Evan’s, which had darkened on her clothes into a crusty black. She shook her head, took a deep breath, and stood, blinking as she gained her equilibrium. She had to find somewhere to go where she could rest and look over the contents of the bag more carefully.

Sticking to the creek bed and cornfields, Casey made her way further from Davey’s business and the town, heading into miles and miles of golden corn. The sun gained in its height, heating up the day, and Casey knelt more than once to scoop water from the stream. At one point a herd of cows watched her, each raising its head as she walked by, returning to grazing once it realized she was neither threat nor server of food.

She startled a lone antelope when she stepped out of a cornfield and onto an empty road. The animal stood half-in and half-out of the stalks on the opposite side of the gravel, staring at her wide-eyed, long neck stretched as it determined the danger. Casey waited, watching the trembling legs of the animal, wondering why it had been separated from its herd. A breeze wafted through the corn, rattling the dry leaves, and the antelope spun, leaping into the field and out of sight.

Casey moved into the middle of the road, bag dangling at her side, sweat running down the side of her face. A bird flew overhead, screeching, and Casey followed its path with her eyes as it flitted away, disappearing into the clear blue sky. Which way should she go?

“How about this way?” Death appeared in front of her, arm pointed to the west.

“Why?”

“I did a little scouting last night when I wasn’t waking you up and suffering your abusive language. I found a place.”

Having no reason not to, Casey turned west and followed. After a while the cornfields ended, and a wave of soybeans began, shimmering under the glaring light. In the distance, in the middle of the field, crouched an old shed, sides weather-beaten, red paint flaking off to reveal graying lumber. The tin roof reflected the sun’s rays, and the large sliding door hung crooked on its track, revealing the black of the interior. Again Casey looked up and down the road. She had neither seen nor heard any vehicles for miles, which meant there had been nothing and no one to see her.

“So what’s so great about that place?”

“It’s perfect,” Death said. “You’ll see.”

Casey looked around, her hands on her hips.

“You’re not going to get a better offer, you know. No money, no ID, no decent clothes—”

“All right .” Casey put her hands over her ears. “Fine. Just…stop talking.”

Death ran a finger across closed lips and gave a little bow, gesturing for Casey to continue. She walked past and arrived at the end of a long lane leading toward the shed. She examined the ground. The dirt was hard and gave no indication of recent activity. But then, it had rained only a day before. She looked around again, then headed down the lane.