Read The Grim Reaper's Dance for Free Online Page B

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