Hunting Delilah

by Anne Baines

  “Tan? Like California tan?”

  “Sure, that describes a guy eating lunch right now.” Jake shrugged and then froze, his eyes finally catching Delilah’s.

  Ice formed in her veins and her hands shook for a moment before she turned and threw open the office door. She staggered down the hallway and scanned the dining room, her dark eyes searching each booth, each of the few faces. She wasn’t sure what she’d do if he were there, but visions of grabbing a steak knife and giving the bastard an eye-for-an-eye treatment drowned out rational thought.

  Delilah had never killed anyone, but she figured if she were to add murder to her list of offenses, starting with Ted wouldn’t be the worst way to do it.

  The booths were empty, though she could see the un-cleared remains of a meal in a couple of them. The front door was swinging shut, as though someone had just walked out. Crazily, Delilah envisioned it was Ted, that he was just outside, and the thought froze her solid for a second.

  Jake came up beside her and Delilah shook her head.

  “Hey, Dee!” Bridget’s bubbly voice called out, but Jake raised his hand to get the waitress’s attention and shook his head emphatically no. Bridget’s pink mouth made a little oh, but she turned back to the bartender, a thin young man Delilah didn’t recognize and the two of them exchanged a look.

  Not her problem. She doubted Ted would have come in and then left, but what the hell did she know. Delilah shook herself a little, thawing out from her fit of fear as Jake touched her shoulder gently, briefly.

  They went back to Jake’s office and Delilah leaned against one wall. The chair looked inviting, but she feared to sit. Movement at all seemed to exacerbate her injury and her belly was getting angrier by the minute as the drugs wore off and the throbbing ache won back more ground.

  Jake sank back into his chair and ran his hands through his thick curls. Delilah jammed her hands back into her pockets, remembering the slightly coarse feel of his hair, the brush of his full lips over her forehead, the caress of his tongue against her ear lobe.

  Then he looked her over, truly looked, for the first time since he’d come into the office and found her there.

  “Jesus, Lil. You look like hell,” he said, his tone softening. A little worried crease formed between his eyebrows.

  She could only imagine. “Hell, huh? I’ve upgraded from feeling like shit then.”

  She got a quick twitch of his lips, almost a smile, for that.

  “Tell me how this happened.”

  Delilah looked away from him. She’d come all this way, if he was going to let her help him, save him, she knew she’d have to give him a little more.

  “You remember Looney Ray?”

  Jake nodded, the line between his eyebrows growing deeper as he tilted his head.

  “He kept diamonds in his damn ice tray, did you know that?” Delilah twisted her fingers together inside the fabric of her sweatshirt and went on without waiting for an answer from Jake. “Ever since I found that out, well, I’ve had this thing about freezers. Like a superstition.”

  Jake snorted and Delilah looked up. Skepticism, pity, and something she couldn’t read shifted across his face. For the first time, Delilah saw a gulf between them, a gap in who they were, in their lives. She’d felt the cracks years ago, but hadn’t seen the chasm for what it was. She felt her heartbeat slow and a tiny fire deep inside of her flickered, not quite out, but starved for fuel, guttering.

  It was simple. Delilah was a pro, a heister, a career sort. Jake, well, he wasn’t. He’d really gone straight. Maybe just been that way the whole time. She pressed down on those thoughts and swallowed hard, continuing her explanation. If Jake noticed her sudden pause, he said nothing.

  “Basically, I opened the wrong freezer. Ted’s freezer. It had a girl’s head in it. This Ted guy showed up and stabbed me. Then he chased me around a couple of states and now he’s coming after Esther.” And you, she thought, but stopped the words.

  “Fucking-A.” He looked like he didn’t want to believe her but he knew her well enough not to ask what she’d been doing in this guy’s house in the first place. There was that, at least.

  “He’s evil, Jake.” She bit her lip. “Get protection, that’s a good idea. You have a gun?”

  “Yeah,” he said and swiveled in the chair, opening one of the filing cabinet drawers. Jake pulled out his father’s .45 Colt revolver. It looked clean enough, the ivory grip polished, the barrel and cylinder gleaming.

  “That thing loaded?” she asked.

  Jake flipped open the cylinder. “Looks like it. I clean it every few months.”

  “Few months? When was the last time it was fired?”

  He snapped the cylinder back in place and laid the gun in the drawer. His dark eyes met Delilah’s own and the lines around them crinkled as he half smiled. “Remember when we stole that Winnebago and went down to Crater Lake?”

  She smiled back, the memory bittersweet. “I shot a deer from the car.”

  “A four-point buck. Almost broke your nose with the recoil, too.”

  She chuckled and that little movement of her stomach muscles brought a wave of pain up from her gut. It was definitely getting worse.

  Jake half-rose from his chair, his arms coming up, and a strange expression on his face. But whatever he’d been about to do, about to say, died before manifesting and he fell back.

  “I’ve got a gun. I’ll call up Moose and see if he’s free to tag around with Nancy and Esther. School just started, so she’ll be watched during the day by a lot of people.” He glanced at the clock on his computer. “Nancy should be out picking her up soon, in fact.”

  Delilah nodded. It was something. Not enough, not against Ted, but maybe it would be. And this was a hell of a lot better than cops or doing squat. But until he implemented the private security measures, they’d be vulnerable. And Jake wasn’t up to real vigilance, it wasn’t in his nature.

  “You have to fix that back door, Jake,” she said. “And if your home security is as crap as this bar’s, he could be sitting in your living room right now and you’d never know.” Bile burned her throat as an image of Mr. Palmer’s mutilated corpse took over her brain.

  “We’ve got an alarm on the house, with a service. I spent enough time with you to know that’s a good investment.” He didn’t smile, letting the words carry their full sting.

  She shrugged and let it go. “Do you set it?”

  “Yes,” he said sharply, then, with a grimace added, “Well, Nancy does.”

  “When she’s in the house?”

  Jake’s look told her the answer to that, and it wasn’t a good one.

  “Riiight.” Delilah pushed herself away from the wall and crossed the short distance to the desk. She leaned down, getting in closer to Jake even though it hurt in more ways than just physical.

  He smelled a little like his bar, and underneath that of Old Spice deodorant and a fresh bread sort of scent that identified him as Jake. As her Jake.

  “Let me tail them,” she said, pressing her fingers to his lips to stop the automatic protest. “Just until Moose can. You’ll be working here until closing, won’t you? You’re just like the old man, I bet.”

  Jake wrapped a hand around her wrist, pushing her back. His fingers were warm, strong. “Nancy will throw a shit fit, Lil.”

  She swallowed a stupid, catty response about how she really didn’t care and shook her head. “No, she won’t. Because she’ll never even see me. I promise. You know how good I am.” She smiled with the last part, but doubted it reached her eyes.

  He pushed the chair away and stood up. “Yeah. I know.” Pacing to the kitchen door and then back to the desk, Jake rubbed his hands over his face. “You just have to be you, don’t you?” he muttered. She guessed it was more for his benefit than hers and stayed quiet.

  Another round of pacing and he stopped, looking up at her, his lips pressed into a pale line on his dark face. “Nancy sees nothing, you don’t talk to her, you don’t tal
k to Esther. Got it? Just follow. And you fucking call 911 if you see this guy and they are in any danger.”

  She raised her hands in a mocking gesture of surrender, regretting it even as the movement brought on more dizziness. “Okay, okay. Geez.”

  “I’ll give you directions.” Jake flopped back into the chair and grabbed a pen. She waited as he wrote them out. “Just for today, you’d better be gone by tomorrow,” he said, handing them over. “And seriously, Nancy can’t know about this.”

  If I had a nickel for every time I’d heard those words from him, I could go to the movies. She held her peace, barely.

  “She won’t know, I swear. I’ll keep an eye out, Jake. They’ll be safe.” She tucked the scrap of paper into a pocket.

  “I mean it, Lil.” His eyes glinted, hard and flat. “Gone by tomorrow.”

  “I swear,” she repeated. Like hell. Not until you’re safe and this is ended.

  Deep inside, in the soft secret place in her heart, the tiny flame guttered. All the things she’d just promised, well, only about half were lies.

  “The road to hell, and all that clichéd jazz,” she said softly as she slipped out the back door and headed toward her car.

  Thirty-six

  Ted sat in his rental car outside the crappy little bar, hands gripping the steering wheel tight enough that his joints started to hurt. He burned to take out a knife from his kit and go back in. He’d stab the fat cow first, just beneath her jiggly chins. The anorexic freak behind the bar wouldn’t give him trouble. Ted knew those types, sissy little emo boys barely out of college with liberal, pacifist sissy ideas. The kid would probably faint at the sight of all that beautiful blood spurting from the waitress.

  Then he’d go take care of anyone in the kitchens, efficiently and quickly. They were collateral, obstacles in his way.

  Jake would be the prize, and Ted very much ached to collect on what he felt the man owed him. He’d cripple him, just enough to make death take a while. And that scrawny, beta-male little asshole would learn exactly why it was happening to him.

  Forcing himself to release his grip on the wheel, Ted rubbed his hands over the fake leather and took deep, calming breaths. Jake was just bait, a toy, a means to a glorious pay back. He knew he’d better keep this in mind, or he risked letting Delilah, lovely scared Delilah, slip away for good.

  And the bitch couldn’t win.

  He decided he’d better leave; head back to the hotel and calm himself down, think out the next steps and make sure he was well-rested for the evening. Then he could return to the bar and follow Jake to get to the whole family. He wanted all of them.

  They were the bait.

  “Eyes on the prize,” he said into the stillness of the car.

  And then his prize appeared, slipping out of the bar through the back door.

  Stillness. Perfect calm took over, Ted’s focus coalescing on the hunched figure crossing the back lot and moving toward the street. She glanced around, but her dark eyes, made more vulnerable and hollow-looking by the exhausted puffiness and dark tint beneath them, stared right past him, not even looking into the car.

  He knew he could grab her right now. She hardly looked in a state to fight back, though Ted remembered her attempt in his house with a little smile. She’d try, oh yes, his Delilah would certainly try.

  But he had nowhere to take her, no plan. He didn’t want to just kill her; that would be far too easy. She needed to suffer, to look into his face and give up all control, give up all will to live as she finally saw the reality that Ted held her entire life in his hands. That he had all the power.

  She would whimper and beg before he was done and he would erase all thoughts of the black guy she clearly still cared for. Her final thoughts would be only of Ted.

  He wondered how she’d gotten into the bar. She must have come in just after he left, and exited out the back for some reason. Ted didn’t fancy the thought that she’d been in there the whole time, perhaps tucked away in the kitchen, or in the room with the “Bossman” sign on it. So close, perhaps even in the same room as that asshole, Jake.

  Ted growled, surprising himself with the sound. Delilah turned down the sidewalk, moving almost out of sight, and then crossed the street and got into a station wagon.

  She wasn’t going to escape him this time. As much as he wanted Jake, he could live with mopping up that particular insult later, after he’d enjoyed the main course.

  Ted turned on his car, and prepared to follow the prize.

  Thirty-seven

  The school was a private one apparently, just south of Portland. Given what she knew of Jake’s experiences in the public school system, Delilah didn’t really blame him for wasting money on a place like this.

  By the time she arrived and turned onto the tree-lined road, the big U-shaped pick-up lane in front of the school was half-clogged with parents collecting their offspring. Jake had written red Civic on the directions, so Delilah pulled over, parking in a bike lane just outside the turn-around.

  She fumbled out her bottle of painkillers. Six left. Damn. Carefully she dumped one into her hand and broke it in half, dry swallowing the chalky pill. If it just took the edge off the gnawing pain, she could deal with the leftovers. She hoped.

  For a moment as she scanned the parked and waiting cars with their bright swarm of children and parents, Delilah panicked. She could check the house after this, of course. She knew the address and more or less where it was. But if Ted was already in town, what if he’d grabbed Nancy and Esther already?

  Then she caught sight of a red Honda Civic with a brunette leaning against it and relaxed a little. Jake’s wife. The thought stung, but less than it might have before the conversation in the bar. After a moment the woman straightened up and a little girl, her dark skin standing out from the other children, walked down the shallow school steps and into Nancy’s arms.

  Esther.

  Delilah sat very still, trying to feel something, anything like what she thought she should. But it wasn’t there. There was no instant recognition, no sudden motherly feelings or really anything at all except a little curiosity and slight disappointment.

  The little girl wrapped her arms around Nancy’s leg in a quick hug and then started pulling off her backpack as Nancy opened the passenger door for her. Esther seemed smaller than a lot of the other children currently flowing in a steady stream from the school. Delilah wondered if that was because of her illness. She’d never asked Jake about the specifics.

  Delilah sighed and slowly got out of the car. Jake didn’t want Nancy to know anything, but that was stupid of him, selfish. She guessed that Jake’s wife would want to know, would probably take this more seriously than he had. Nancy had a typical person’s fear about criminals, lumping the world into categories of those who obeyed arbitrary rules, and those who wanted to rape and pillage all they surveyed.

  Jake was a terrible liar, but the champion of lies by omission. Delilah hadn’t really seen it in action until their affair. She doubted that Nancy would ever have heard about it if Delilah hadn’t gotten pregnant, if Jake hadn’t felt a duty to raise the baby. She hadn’t cared back then what Nancy knew or didn’t know. Jake had been halfway hers again, if only for a short time.

  But it mattered now. Jake’s life was on the line. This mysterious child that had ripped her way out of Delilah’s body was in danger. She might not feel motherly, but bile burned her throat at the thought of a man like Ted putting his hands on that cute little girl currently setting a My Little Pony backpack into the car.

  And Esther, if Delilah wanted to face the meat of it all, was her last excuse, her last reason to even stay connected to Jake. She was the link, the chain tying them together across the chasm.

  Nancy didn’t see Delilah until she was right next to the car. Then her hazel eyes widened and her already pale face blanched, her body tensing and flinching away.

  “I’m calling the police,” Nancy said, pushing Esther, who looked questioningly up at her,
into the car. “Buckle your seatbelt, honey.” Nancy fumbled in her purse, coming up with keys and then a cell phone.

  “Wait, Jesus,” Delilah said, halting a few feet away. “Just hear me out, please.”

  Tiny hairs rose on the back of her neck and movement in her periphery caught Delilah’s attention as Nancy hesitated, watching her. Delilah looked to the side. Just another car coming around the turn-about.

  Then she looked more closely and her legs went numb. Driving the car, staring right at her, was crazy Teddy.

  Thirty-eight

  Ted followed Delilah from the bar, keeping a couple car lengths behind her station wagon. She left the city, getting onto a freeway and driving south. He almost lost her at a four-way stop, but caught back up as she pulled over and parked along the side of the road just at the entrance to what looked like a school.

  He had no choice but to drive ahead and then turn around. As he drove by a second time, he saw her get out of the car and looked where she was heading.

  A brunette in a light blue long-sleeved shirt and white capri pants, helped a young black girl into a red car. The little girl in the pictures, the woman the same as well, though prettier in pictures than in person, at least from a distance. She looked more rumpled, less fresh, and plumper, gone soft around the edges.

  “Nancy,” Ted said, rolling the name in his mouth. “Esther.” He smiled. They were right here, all together, just as he’d envisioned. His threat in Atlanta had done its work, baited the trap nicely for unsuspecting little Delilah.

  He burned for a closer look and decided that driving past wouldn’t hurt anything. There were enough cars coming and going from the busy pick-up circle that he didn’t fear detection too much. And he needed to find a good place to follow them from.