Hunting Delilah

by Anne Baines

  But Ted sipped at his beer, keeping his head turned a little away, as though looking into the parking lot for someone, his blood rage turning his vision spotted and blank in time to his pulse. Jake passed by him, unmolested.

  The cow came back to see if his water needed a refill, but it was untouched. Ted waved her off, asking for the check. He decided he’d nurse his beer, check out the back hallway, and then decide his next move.

  Minutes ticked past as he sipped the beer and considered having another. He was tired from his recent travels and more alcohol could let slip the killer before it was prudent. But it did feel good to sit and think about his prey, so near and unsuspecting. He loved this first stage of the hunt. He’d never hunted a man before, but an alpha had to defend what was his, and Jake had defiled his vision of lovely, deceitful Delilah.

  Ted sat, lost in a bloody fog of death and desire, letting the anger ants settle in his stomach around the heavy meal he’d consumed. Finally he finished his drink and rose, taking the check with him.

  He walked into the back hallway. The bathrooms were on his left, as he’d thought. On his right was a wall covered in hideous gold and black wallpaper that looked like brocade fabric but to his tentative touch proved to be a faux velvet and foil sort of concoction. Ted shuddered. He’d definitely need another shower after this venture.

  At the end of the short hallway was the rear door; it had a push bar on it for fire safety and an un-lit exit sign precariously hung above. To his right was another door that had a narrow plaque stuck to it that read “Bossman” in gold foil lettering. Ted considered trying the door, but he had no plan and none of his tools on him.

  He sighed and turned away, walking back out to pay his check. He decided he’d pay, sit in his car and watch the flow around the bar for a little while, and then, if no immediate opportunity presented itself, he would go back to the hotel, take a nap, and return closer to closing time. He wanted the woman and child as well, and to give Delilah a sporting chance to show up in town, if she’d gotten his message. Better to follow his prey, he decided, and watch. For now.

  The blonde cow tried to engage him in banter, or at least what her low-class idea of flirting might be, but Ted just stared at her, anatomically cutting her apart and envisioning her body rotting beneath a bed of blooming Plumeria. In death, at least, she’d finally smell like what a truly fragrant flower should, and the blooms were often just the same deep pink blushing shade as her garish, wet mouth. She shut up quickly after eyeing whatever expression these thoughts evoked on his face and gave him his change.

  He didn’t leave a tip.

  Thirty-four

  Delilah, groggy from the drugs and her too-short nap, tried not to run off the plane. She clutched her bag and walked through the airport, hungry for fresh air and her first sight of a city she hadn’t seen in years.

  She’d hoped that sleeping would help the pain in her gut, but unfolding from the seat hurt seemingly worse than it had before. Her bandage had dried out again, tape curling and sticking to her shirt as she slept. Her head felt full of fog and cobwebs.

  All she wanted was to lie down and sleep for a week. Maybe a month. The hours on the plane had been a teaser, and her body was trying to make her sorry for it.

  A cool breeze and overcast sky greeted her as she left the airport. Daytona Beach, Atlanta, the smoggy, humid southern summer and all the bloodshed and fuck-ups of the last hours faded back a little in her mind as she stood on the curb and breathed in.

  She caught a shuttle out to long-term parking. It was broad daylight, but the middle of a weekday, so Delilah hoped that no one would be paying too much attention to her search for a car. The vague thought that this habit of hers should be changed up, that it made her awfully predictable, wandered through her brain, but she wasn’t in a mental or physical state to think about a different plan and shoved the idea aside.

  After she made sure Jake and the little girl were safe, then she could wallow in self-doubt and examine all the idiot moves that had brought her here. After she found Ted and figured out how to get rid of him.

  And to find Ted, she needed wheels. Without a valid credit card to go with her fake ID, and low on cash as she was, there was really no question about a rental. She knew she might have to ditch any car she drove depending on how this situation panned, and leaving a paper trail wasn’t on her list.

  Well, more of a paper trail. She’d already fucked that up royally in Florida. Paper and blood and fingerprints. Jesus. Might as well yank off her shirt and paint “Arrest Me” across her breasts.

  Delilah sighed, aware that she was slowly wandering down an aisle. She started her search for cars that might have hide-a-keys, and older cars that might be easier to break into. She had no tools, but there were ways around it, and she’d learned early in life that most cars carried the tools necessary to steal them already inside.

  A tiny ray of luck pierced through her pain and brain fog. A dark green Toyota Corona station wagon. Delilah bit her lip and looked around. No one was nearby, though she’d noticed a security patrol vehicle cruising around as the shuttle was offloading.

  Delilah stepped up to one of the passenger doors and pumped the handle quickly a few times. The handle had resistance and she could hear the mechanisms inside the door clicking and grinding in protest. She pumped it again a few times and then pulled hard toward herself.

  The door opened, even though the lock was down and supposedly engaged. It was a trick Colin had taught her about these old Toyotas. Oftentimes the locks broke but in a way that owner’s rarely noticed since the door would stay locked if someone yanked on it once or twice. But pull a few times in succession and bingo, open door.

  She unlocked the other doors and tossed her bag into the passenger seat. The glove box had nothing useful in it. The car’s soft beige upholstery smelled like it had been cleaned recently with something lemony, but scattered fast food wrappers and a few empty Tupperware containers littered the floor. A handful of receipts from gas stations were shoved down between the middle divider and the seats.

  Even the thought of leaning over the rear seat to check the compartment in the cargo space that usually held the jack and a tire iron made Delilah’s guts churn with anticipated agony. She pulled up on the little knobs and laid the rear seat down flat, then crawled into the rear of the car and opened the side compartment.

  Just a jack. Damn. No tire iron, no screwdriver, nothing. She was going to have to figure out a way to get the steering console open without tools. It was possible, but annoying. Urgency and frustration helped clear the fog in her head, but the pulsing pain radiating out of the wound threatened to take over.

  Delilah slammed the panel back into place, jarring her wrist. It wasn’t fair. Her life had come down to this moment, kneeling in some sloppy stranger’s car while a crazy man could be out there doing horrible, gruesome acts on the one person who’d ever really given a damn about her.

  “Shut up, Dee. Do what you have to,” she said the words aloud, forcefully. Ted hadn’t killed her, he hadn’t won yet. As long as she was alive and active, there was a chance she could do something about Jake. And Esther. It wasn’t the little girl’s fault. She was the victim of all sorts of bad choices her parents had made, and the product of maybe the one good choice Delilah had ever agreed to.

  She hadn’t wanted the baby. At first she had, a little, since the pregnancy represented a possible way to get Jake back to herself, to bind him to her forever. But months into it she’d seen the truth. Jake loved Nancy and, despite his stupid indiscretions, was committed to making a life with her, a straight-up life.

  Maybe if his father hadn’t had the stroke. Maybe if Delilah had agreed to go straight.

  By the time she saw what a mess she was in with a baby on the way, it was too late to do anything legit about it. But Delilah knew a lot of non-legit people. Instead, she’d let Jake talk her into delivering the baby and giving it to him. Her. Esther.

  She saved Esther’s li
fe once. On her hands and knees in the station wagon, Delilah gritted her teeth and started to back out. She had to do it again. Go forward, do something right and good again.

  Her hand brushed away a Jiffy Lube receipt, uncovering a metal spoon. It was one of the generic cafeteria spoons she remembered from school with a shallow dish and a narrow, squared off handle.

  “When you’re super fucked,” she muttered, quoting Colin again, hearing his slight lisp in her mind. “Improvise, girl.”

  Crouching as best she could half inside the car, Delilah made short work of the steering column’s plastic housing, prying it open with her spoon. The screw holding the ignition barrel gave her some trouble since her injuries prevented her from bending over too far, so she had to use the narrow end of the spoon on the tiny screw pretty much blind. Finally her fingernails scraped under the screw and she pulled it out.

  Then it was simple: jam the spoon end into the hole in the barrel, twisting it until the mechanism turned and the check oil and engine lights flicked on. The radio, an old cassette player, flipped on, blaring some man’s deep, soothing voice.

  She slid awkwardly into the seat and pulled the door shut. This time she remembered to buckle her seatbelt, though pulling it across her body caused another nauseating wave of agony to shoot up from her guts.

  She hit the power button on the self-help or hypnotism tape or whatever it was and then turned the spoon one final time after pushing in the clutch. The car choked for a second, then started. She gave it a little gas and then let down the emergency brake.

  It was a small accomplishment, but she had wheels under her again. Tiny muscles in her neck and forehead relaxed and she let out a slow, long breath.

  It wasn’t until she was almost to the pay kiosk that she realized she had no ticket to hand to the attendant.

  Thirty-five

  Fortunately for Delilah, the attendant bought her story about losing her ticket, charged her for a full week, and was slouched too low in his booth to notice the other side of the steering column where the ignition barrel and spoon key dangled, only sort of hidden with the ill-replaced plastic housing.

  She forked over the cash without complaint, giving him a fake smile even though he barely glanced up. She guessed she wasn’t the first person to lose a parking stub.

  She drove toward No Man’s Land, her mind easily finding the path, retracing what had once been familiar highways and roads. The afternoon sun broke through the clouds and highlighted the taller buildings across the river as she drew closer to downtown. In her teen years, these streets had been her playground, the seedier corners of this little city her real school. She passed the turn off that would have taken her toward her old stomping ground, to Kimbo’s Auto Shop where she’d spent so many summer days boosting car stereos. Or she could keep going, drive by her old school, though she’d skipped so many classes she could barely remember the layout. She’d mostly shown up to make extra cash selling fake ecstasy and oregano passed off as pot to idiot classmates. Until Colin put the brakes on that.

  She licked her lips and headed toward No Man’s Land instead, shoving away the memories once again.

  The bar was just as she remembered and a phantom pang of longing made her chest hurt as she slowly drove past the black lacquered door. The parking lot was nearly deserted; the bulk of the workday lunch crowd had disappeared by now. She came in around the back and smiled at the sight of her Mustang.

  Her smile faded as she drove back around, out of the lot, and parked down a side street. The Mustang meant Jake. Delilah couldn’t even begin to pull apart and sort her emotions over their impending face-to-face meeting. She twisted the spoon and shut off the car, leaving the doors unlocked and the spoon on the seat as she climbed out.

  She didn’t know what to tell him, what she even really wanted. Jake to run away with Esther to somewhere crazy Ted couldn’t follow? Jake to let her stick around so she could deal with Ted herself, somehow?

  Sick, exhausted, scared, hurting. Delilah could admit to herself that partly she just hoped he’d see her and be at least sympathetic. In a dark, secretly optimistic part of her mind she wanted his strong arms to wrap around her, his soft voice telling her he was here for her and everything would be all right. All she had to do was close her eyes and she could almost feel him beside her again, the years between them shifting to minutes, moments.

  For a brief second she paused in the parking lot, leaning on the dumpster surround. The smell of grease and trash dissipated in the face of memory and for that one moment there was only the seaweed and brine, moonlight and the rush of waves, and Jake’s hand sliding gently up and down her bare back, his fingers counting her vertebra one by one.

  Then reality reasserted itself, the dull, angry ache of her belly and searing nausea dragging her away from fantasy. There was no ocean, just the sound of cars going by. Delilah shivered, thinking that either her wound had gone bad and gotten into her brain somehow, or she needed to lay off those damn pills.

  The back door was the same as when they’d been teens together. Maybe Jake’s old man had meant to replace it, but she supposed a stroke would sort of kill those ideas. The cover plate over the lock was sheered off, something she and Jake had done back when she was sixteen. Delilah ran her fingers over the scarred metal and smiled again.

  They’d gotten so damn drunk off the booze in the bar that they’d never made it out again. Boss Leventon had found them half-naked and passed out, all tangled up together.

  “Bad news Squaw,” she muttered as she pulled out her driver’s license. That’s what Jake’s father had called her on that morning. First time he’d used that particular nickname for her, but it certainly hadn’t been the last.

  Her ID slid into the crack of the door and she wiggled it around until the tongue of the lock depressed and the door clicked open to her gentle pressure. She opened it slowly, only enough to squeeze through, and then closed it just as carefully behind her.

  The hallway was exactly as she remembered. Peanuts and beer filled her nose, bringing on another wave of nausea. Delilah walked forward a few steps, placing a hand on the velvet wallpaper to steady herself.

  She traced one of the fleur-de-lis designs with a fingertip. It looked like Jake had left the place exactly as his father had put it together. She looked out into the main room, moving forward just enough to see the bar.

  Her heart punched her breastbone at the sight of Jake’s back. She knew it was him, even if his hair was different than she recalled, no tight braids, just loose curls. But she recognized the slight tilt of his head, the way he draped his arm half on the bar. He was talking to a punk-looking woman in a studded leather jacket.

  Bridget, the waitress who Delilah was pretty sure had worked at this place as long as it had existed, started toward the back booths and Delilah stepped quickly backward into the rear of the hallway, out of sight.

  She turned and tried the door to the office. It was, in true Jake Leventon fashion, unlocked. With a tiny sigh she let herself in.

  The office was different. The army-green filing cabinets were the same, but the patterned glass-topped desk, computer monitor, and two cushy chairs were definitely not old man Leventon’s choices. There was a tack board full of pictures, some from the bar, most of Jake and his family.

  Delilah checked the second door, the one that led directly to the kitchen, and found it unlocked as well. She considered locking it, but she’d had enough of tight, closed off spaces for a while and left it. It was unlikely anyone would bug Jake, and even less likely anyone working here besides maybe Bridget would remember Delilah at all.

  She twisted her hands inside her sweatshirt pockets and stared at the pictures on the wall, her mind spinning with what the hell she’d say to him.

  After what felt like years, Delilah heard the handle turn. She stepped further into the office and leaned back on the heavy metal and glass desk, facing the hallway entry.

  “Hi, Jake,” she said softly, her voice thin and weak ag
ainst the rush of her pulse in her ears. She held out her hands, half in supplication, half in welcome.

  He stood in the doorway a moment, then stepped in and shut the door behind himself. He looked good, filled out, older. There were tiny laugh lines around his eyes that hadn’t been there before and he had a small pink scar on his chin she didn’t remember.

  “Fucking-A, Lil.” Jake walked around her and sat down with a sigh in one of the chairs.

  That popped the last vestiges of the fantasy. So much for a warm hug and a knight in shining armor getting this kitten out of the tree, she thought. At least he was still using his pet name for her. No one besides Jake ever called her Lil.

  “Now do you believe I’m serious, Jake?” She could cut right to it, if that was how he was going to be after nearly six years. “I got on a fucking plane.”

  He knew what that meant, was one of the only people who would understand. If he wanted to.

  “You hung up on me,” he said. He wasn’t looking at her, not quite. His eyes kept darting around, to the tack board, the door, the computer monitor which had a spreadsheet displayed on the screen.

  “I know,” she said, looking down at her hands. Her fingernails were dirty and needed to be trimmed. “I’m sorry, Jake, but this is important.”

  “This guy, Ted?” At her nod he continued, “You sure about him?”

  “That he’s fucked in the head and dangerous? Yeah.” She glanced back up, but Jake still looked through her.

  “I meant about him coming here,” he said, shaking his head as though the gesture itself would make her answer no.

  Delilah considered. “Sure? I don’t know. But he found my home, followed me from one state to another. My gut says yeah, he’s coming here.”

  “Your gut? For fuck’s sake. If he’s coming here, then give me everything you know so I can get police protection, or,” he added as she grimaced and tried to cut in with a protest, “Hire somebody to cover us privately. I’m sure some of the weekend bouncers wouldn’t mind helping my family out. But I need more to go on. The description you gave me is like half the people who might visit this place. There’ve been two or three who might be him eating here today, even.”