Dead Sleeping Shaman Read Online Free

together, he’ll be out. Wants to see you, Emily. He’ll need a statement.”
    Once away from town we didn’t pass another car on any of the roads leading to Deward. The siren screamed anyway, wailing through empty space.
    “I still think you could’ve handled this better,” Dolly groused, leaning forward over the wheel, staring out the front window, her eyes going from left to right, watching for deer or any animal that would have had to be deaf not to hear us coming.
    “And leave you out of it? Since when? You’d have skinned me alive when you found out.”
    “Not this time. Nothing to do with us. I got plenty going on in town. Bunch of nuts. They’re sticking around ’til the twenty-seventh. You believe it? Two weeks more of their crap.” She shook her head. “I’ve got a court date with those Mitchell boys. You watch, Brent’ll try to foist this one off on us. Got enough to …”
    “She probably died of natural causes. You’ll see what I mean when we get there. Could be a suicide. I didn’t look close …”
    “Good thing. We don’t need civilians pawing around a crime scene.”
    “Maybe not a crime scene …”
    She was quiet for a while, the siren the only sound, and that was muffled by the closed windows.
    “Can you imagine them believing such crap?” she asked.
    “Who? What crap?”
    “That the world’s going to end.”
    I shrugged. “Guess so. If you believe in your preacher …”
    “Crazy stuff.” Dolly shook her head. “You heard about those hoofprints he’s predicting?”
    “Hoofbeats,” I said. “Can’t hear hoofprints.”
    “Whatever.”
    We drove on a few miles. Dolly picked up speed. “You should’ve called Gaylord straight away.”
    I was tired of this reluctant virgin act. “I don’t have a cell phone.”
    “Closer than coming all the way back to Leetsville, where I was busy.” She gave me a stern look. “As you could very well see.”
    “It was all I could think to do.”
    “You gotta think things out better.”
    She made a sharp left turn at the dirt road leading to Deward. The ruts in the road made our voices staccato when we tried to talk.
    “What you need is to find yourself a real job. Keep yourself busy. Emily Kincaid, Fuller Brush salesperson. Something like that.”
    “They still sell Fuller Brushes?”
    “Think so. You could find out.”
    “I might have an agent for the book. Think I’ll start another one.”
    “Don’t put me in the next one. Bad enough with this dead, dancing thing.”
    “Wouldn’t think of it.”
    “And don’t just copy somebody else’s book either.”
    “I didn’t do that on purpose.”
    “Yeah, well. You don’t seem to do a lot of things on purpose. They happen to you.” Her voice shivered over the bumps in the road.
    “You mean like Jackson hanging around?”
    “Whatever …”
    She slowed, turned off the siren, and drove carefully onto the two-track sand trail leading into the long-gone town. There were more ruts than I remembered, having come out so fast. She pulled off the trail and parked where the sand wasn’t deep, in the same place I’d parked before. An ambulance was there, pulled in toward the entrance to the town. No Michigan State Police cars; no white vans. Dolly reached into the back of her patrol car and pulled out a cloth bag and a clipboard. She checked her equipment, got out, and strode off toward where I pointed.
    I didn’t want to have to go back to where the woman lay, but I had to. I wished for a whole phalanx of big, strong cops. I wanted deep male voices, and techs working where the body had been. I wanted that woman gone, Deward back to what it was, and those terrible pictures out of my head.
    I got out of the car slowly. All I had was Dolly. Like her, I didn’t always get what I wanted.

We cautiously stepped alongside the sand trail, trying not to disturb the ground. If there had been footprints, I’d probably already obliterated them. The place was creepy; nothing pretty about the