Grim Reaper's Dance, The

by Judy Clemens

  He was right. The photos—mostly Polaroids, which was interesting, since Casey hadn’t been sure Polaroids still existed—could be organized chronologically, with locations and names. A lot of the people were repeated, but several faces appeared only once.

  “These papers,” Davey said, holding them out at arm’s length and squinting. “Some of ’em are truck manifests. Where the truck had been, where it was going, mileage, load, fuel stops, all that stuff.”

  Casey took a bite of an almost-ripe apple and scanned one of the pages. “Do they say what exactly the trucks were hauling?”

  Davey shuffled through the pages. “All sorts of things. Grain, office supplies, hardware, frozen broccoli. I don’t see a pattern, right off. I’d need some time with this stuff in order to figure anything out. I’m not an expert on trucking.”

  “This is just notes.” Wendell held up a small, spiral-bound notebook. “Names, companies, questions. Like Evan was trying to figure something out by writing it all down.”

  Trixie barked outside, the sound harsher than her happy conversational yipping. The barks ended with a loud whine, and then silence. Davey looked out the window, and Casey could see immediately that something was wrong. She scooped the papers, photos and last pieces of fruit into a wastebasket at the side of the desk and grabbed it, heading toward the door where Rachel had appeared earlier. Rachel, who sat at a table with an adding machine, looked up as Casey entered, and Casey put a finger to her lips.

  Casey closed the door almost completely, still able to peer out the crack, just around the file cabinet, but from knee level, where no one would think to look.

  Davey stood, plunking cups of coffee down on the desk where they’d been working, one in front of Wendell, and one at his spot. He was just sitting back down with a donut when a man came in the door—a man Casey recognized from the crash site and from the photos in the wastebasket—the man who had climbed up into the cab and yelled at Evan not to die.

  “Help you?” Davey said, his voice an attempt at casual. Casey hoped the man couldn’t hear the underlying nervousness.

  “Hope you can,” the man said. “I believe you met some of my friends last night, and you didn’t show them any of our famous Midwestern hospitality.”

  Davey took a bite of donut and chewed it. “Don’t recall as I’m supposed to be charming to folks who trespass in the wee hours of the morning.”

  The man smiled. “The middle of the night—just when people might need your help the most.”

  Casey glanced around the small room where she found herself. There were two small windows, and a larger one probably meant as an emergency exit. She studied it, hoping it could be opened without noise.

  “You have something I want here in your junk yard,” the man said. “A semi, would’ve come in yesterday, late afternoon.”

  “Sounds familiar,” Davey said. “What’s your business with it?”

  “Don’t think I need to tell you that, do I?”

  Rachel had gotten up from her chair to join Casey, and she pinched two buttons together on the right-hand side of the window. The pane slid quietly sideways, to reveal a screen. With another pinch the screen lifted up and out, squealing. Casey froze.

  “If there’s something in it you’re looking for, I could tell you if we found it or not,” Davey said. “We’ve been through it pretty good.”

  “And?”

  “Didn’t find much. Nothing unusual, anyhow.”

  Casey let out her breath. The man hadn’t heard the screen. She stuck her head out the window, hoping he didn’t have an accomplice standing just outside. No one there. If he had a partner, he was probably out front.

  “I don’t think you’d find what I’m looking for,” the man said. “It was probably hidden.”

  “Well, then, I don’t guess you were meant to find it, were you?” Davey took a loud a sip of coffee.

  “I think I was,” the man said. “And you’re going to help me.”

  Davey and Wendell both exclaimed, and Casey dashed back to the crack in the door. The man was pointing a gun across the counter, directly at Davey’s face.

  Casey mouthed a thank you at Rachel, who was punching 911 into her phone, and eased the wastebasket liner, along with the papers and photos, from the trashcan. She tied the top with a loop and held it, climbing onto a chair to ease out of the open window, right leg first. She swung her left leg out, then hung onto the window frame, dropping quietly to the ground. She held her breath, listening. No movement outside. Not even Trixie, who lay motionless in the driveway.

  On her hands and knees, Casey crawled to the back of the trailer, and saw no one there. A stack of crates sat at the front corner of the trailer, so she couldn’t see around to the front. She lay on her stomach and looked underneath. Two sets of feet. She sat on her heels. The man inside had a gun, so she had to assume these two did, as well. The first man would be bringing Davey and Wendell outside soon, and she wanted to get these others out of the way before she dealt with him.

  Quietly, she slid the bag of papers as far underneath the trailer as she could, then looked around for something to use as a weapon. Bricks. Rocks. A shop broom. She grabbed the broom and twisted the head until she freed the stick. She stood and balanced it in her hands. Heavier than the Bo she used in hapkido, but about the same length.

  Taking a deep breath and centering herself, she stood with her left side against the crates, her back against the trailer. She held the broomstick against her right side, her right arm extended along underneath it, resting the stick on her fingers, the back of her left hand flat against her right shoulder, the stick balanced on her palm.

  She scraped her foot along the ground, the gravel loud in the quiet afternoon.

  One of the men out front said something, and she heard footsteps. He came around the corner, turning toward her when he cleared the crates. Casey swung the stick upward, striking him in the groin. He bent over with a grunt, and she stepped forward, sweeping the stick over her head to strike him on the back of the neck. He sprawled at her feet, unconscious.

  The second man ran around the corner, gun extended. Casey rocked back, pivoting on her left foot and swinging the stick upward. It hit the man’s wrist, knocking his arm back, but he held onto the gun. Pulling the stick forward, Casey hit the bony back of his wrist, and the gun flew about ten feet away. The man lunged toward it, and Casey leapt after him, striking the side of his knee with the point of the stick.

  He screamed and fell to the ground, clutching his now-useless knee. Casey jumped forward, flicking the gun away with her staff, and swung the stick around under the man’s chin, lifting his face toward hers. “Who are you guys?”

  He groaned, his eyes bright with pain.

  The door to the trailer slapped open and Wendell walked down the steps, his face white. Davey came next, followed by the man with the gun, who held the pistol against his thigh. When he saw Casey he dropped the casual pose and wrapped his arm around Davey’s neck, holding the gun at his temple.

  Casey looked quickly for the gun on the ground, but she’d knocked it too far away for her to reach. The man on the ground gave a strangled half-laugh, half-groan, and Casey swung the stick from under his chin and knocked the side of his head, putting him out of his immediate misery, laying him flat out on the ground. She faced the last man, the stick balanced in her hands.

  “You again?” the man said, a mocking smile on his face. “Dix will be glad to hear you’re still around.”

  “Dix?”

  “My friend you met at the accident yesterday. You embarrassed him in front of the guys.”

  “You can tell him I’m not sorry.”

  The man laughed. “Oh, I’ll tell him. Now, honey, why don’t you just put down that little stick of yours.”

  Casey gripped the staff tighter.

  “Put it down.” The man emphasized the last word by shoving the gun harder against Davey’s head. Davey winced, and Wendell went even paler.

  Casey cle
nched her jaw, then slowly lowered the stick to the ground. She rose, her hands palms-out at her shoulders. “Let the men go.”

  “And do what with them? Let them go back inside and call the cops? I don’t think so.”

  The sound of a siren split the air.

  Casey kept her hands up. “Guess they won’t have to call now, will they?”

  The man looked wildly at his fallen comrades, then dropped his gun hand and ran around the trailer. Casey ran the other way, jumping over her first victim and keeping out of the gunman’s sightlines so she wouldn’t be a target if he still wanted to shoot somebody.

  But he wasn’t looking for her anymore. He jumped into a dark blue Explorer and flew out of the driveway, tires spinning on the gravel as he sped in the opposite direction as the sirens.

  “Let’s go after him!” Wendell was behind her, his color more than fully back.

  “The cops will get him.” Casey returned to the side of the trailer and dropped to her knees, pulling the bag out from under the trailer. “But I don’t want them to get me, too.”

  “Where are you going? I’ll drive you.”

  Davey came around the side of the trailer, Trixie limp in his arms. Where Wendell was now beet red, Davey had gone almost completely white.

  “You guys will be in a lot of trouble because of me,” Casey said, indicating the two unconscious men. “I’m sorry.”

  “I’m not.” Davey’s voice shook. “They deserved what you gave them.”

  Casey looked at Trixie. “Is she alive?”

  Davey clutched her to his chest. “She’s breathing.”

  “I want to do something.” Wendell’s voice grew loud.

  Casey held up the bag. “You already have.”

  The sirens came closer, and Rachel stuck her head out of the open window. “I see cruisers.”

  “I’m sorry,” Casey said again, and ran toward the far end of the lot, where she climbed a stack of crushed cars, dropped over the fence, and sprinted as fast as she could through the cornfield.

  Chapter Five

  “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.

  The shed was larger than she had first thought, big enough to house a tractor or two, although there was nothing there at the moment. A few rusty and unidentifiable implements and tools hung from nails, along with some burlap sacks and a dusty oil lamp. Several five-gallon buckets were lined up against the wall, and a broom leaned crookedly on a wall slat. This broom probably wouldn’t make such a good weapon, its handle cracked almost in half. But it still had its straw tines, and she could see tracks in the dirt floor where it had been used to sweep.