Pistol Fanny's Hank & Delilah (48 page)

Time seemed to freeze again, except for Cray creeping toward a hallway in the back, Hank right along with him. Pistollette didn’t move at first. She watched as he slowly moved away, and as he did, she tapped her pinky finger on Rosemary’s hand. Rosemary shook her head and Pistollette tapped even harder. She made a twirling motion with one of her guns, as if to say, wrap it up.

Finally, Rosemary agreed and went down to the floor, next to the woman who had the ticket. Pistollette started to move then, both of her pistols still locked and loaded, ready to shoot if she had the chance. Cray moved faster, but Pistollette still moved slowly until they were in a darkened hallway. Cray moved until his back was against the wall. No one from behind could get a shot on him.

Pistollette stood facing Hank, her back to the long hall leading back into the bank. The three of them were nothing but darkened shadows stretching across black and white stone. Footsteps clapped and echoed, and then Booty appeared, gun outstretched, centering his weapon on Pistollette’s back. She had heard him coming. She had pulled her gun on him before he even appeared, but she was stuck. She had lost every choice she ever had.

They had her or they had Hank.

“Any of ya’ll come near this hallway and we’ll kill them both! I mean it now!” Cray yelled toward his office. He pressed the guns to Hank’s temples even harder. “Remove that shameful mask off your face, you coward bitch!”

Pistollette didn’t move. She kept her pistols steady. Not a trembling hand or a shaking leg or even so much as a quiver. Even though she was the one sinking, she still commanded that room. She owned it and they knew it and that’s why they were trembling in fear. They didn’t know what she could do. She was a ghost, wasn’t human, not even close.

Cray saw it and he feared it. His eyes spilled secrets his mouth would never, unless it was to a woman he was about to murder.

“Put your guns down!” Cray yelled, more frantic, more feral. “Put them down, or I swear it, I don’t care if you kill me, I’m going to kill him. Now. Do it now!”

Hank shook his head. “Don’t do it,” he begged. “Don’t put them down. Please.” If he lost her, he lost everything. He would be as sorry as Job.

She had never surrendered before, never. Never would have. Love, love had her hostage. Love had her chained and bound and she had no other choice. She didn’t fear death. She feared the death of her lover. Her eyes, so controlled, so steady, were now resolved to reveal to Hank all that her heart yearned for him to know.

After one long second, Pistollette lowered her weapons to her sides. She looked Hank in the eye. She nodded at him. She looked to the left and then to the right and then once more at him.

“Drop them to the floor,” Cray ordered with a nod of his head.

She dropped them one at a time. The one in her left hand landed on the floor, dangerous side pointed at Cray. The one in her right landed with its barrel facing Booty.

“That’s it, you bitch,” Cray growled like a rabid animal. He foamed on Hank, spitting and rasping. “You think you can play with me! You think you can just come in here and shoot all my men, take my women to jail and steal my money! Say something, you mute bitch!” Cray looked at Booty. “Wait, before you do anything rash. There’s something I’m going to have to do first. I enjoy this part the most. I’m going to bury you under every sin I’ve ever committed. Boy, oh, boy, this is going to feel so damn good.” He shivered.

There went those whispers…whisper, whisper, whisper…shh, don’t tell a soul. I killed her this way, I killed her that way, I put the bodies here and there…

“Look at me good, darlin’,” Hank said, mixing his voice in with all those whispers. He intended for his soft intonation to drown out the torrid and horrendous secrets, like a prayer in the darkest of hours. Preacher John used to always say that just because a voice is louder than the rest didn’t mean it was more powerful than the rest—a soft voice could be even more powerful, as long as the heart and soul behind it were true. Hank’s was truer than true. He whispered the lyrics to the song that Delilah had played that rainy Sunday in her room. “And the bad news is…” Hank swallowed hard. “I have to put my finger on your trigger.”

It was now or never.

Hank slipped between Cray’s guns like glass slipping through a well-oiled hand. He hit the floor. Pistollette was already beside him, the left pistol aimed at Cray. The right was in Hank’s hand, aimed at Booty.

Four shots were fired.

Pistollette had shot and killed the man, the past, who had tortured her her entire life.

Hank had shot and killed the man who was going to kill his Delilah. The same man, the same past, who turned a boy into a man long before his time because he had killed two innocent men over greed and power.

Hank’s hands trembled, but he took the pistol and tucked it in the back of his pants. He slowly rose to his knees, bringing Pistollette up from the floor with him. Her hand was still outstretched, her gun still pointed at Cray. The barrel had followed him to the stone grave.

“It’s all right now, darlin’.” Hank’s voice was reassuring, firm, in control. “You can let go…”

She wouldn’t move. She was deathly still. Hank couldn’t hear her breathing or see her chest moving. Hank took her hand and she allowed him to lower it. He took the gun from her and tucked it away. He hesitated a moment and finally, he removed her mask.

“I’ve been fighting for so long,” Delilah whispered. “I’ve been fighting all my life.”

“I know, darlin’. I know.”

Silence stretched between them, the air attempting to filter out the past before allowing the future in. But it would take a while. Hank could feel it. Still beating in that room. Not ready to let go unless the people holding onto it did first.

“Hank,” Delilah pleaded.

Hank watched as she turned into that frightened little girl again. She trembled, crumbling right in front of him, breathing hard. She trembled not for the man who stole so much from her, but for what she could have lost. Hank picked his Delilah up off her feet, and she collapsed in his arms, just as he swept her away, leading her away from the mess of the storm.

“Y
ou all right, baby?” Delilah ran her fingers over Hank’s face, tears swelling in her eyes at what Cray had done to him. If he weren’t dead, she would have killed him again. “Dear Lord, I didn’t mean for him to take you. I was on my way to kill Booty when they took you. Damn, fate was always so kind to him. Bad people are always having the good things happen to them. Doesn’t it seem that way?”

“I’m all right, darlin’. We’re all going to be all right now,” Hank said as they walked toward her car. He could see Freud in the back seat. His ears popped up when he heard Hank’s voice. She was parked underneath an oak tree. The branches rocked with the wind. “Delilah, is that lady, the one who gave me the ticket, is she going to be all right?”

“She’s going to be all right. Aunt Kitty and Uncle Hennessey, they took her away. She was wearing protection. That’s my mama. She’s been running for a long time now, Hank. She wasn’t supposed to get so close to him. That was ad-libbed at the last minute on her part. I think when she saw him she must’ve gotten real mad to charge him like that.

“My mama is a sweet woman, Hank. All she ever wanted was a nice little house, a white picket fence. She loved to cook and sing sweet songs. She wanted her freedom, Hank. She wanted it no matter what the cost. You get like that after a while. You become more afraid of the walls than you do of the killer outside of them.”

“Rosemary?”

“The devil killed Aunt Rosemary. Mama and Aunt Rosemary had traded IDs not long before he arrived. His cleanup crew thought she was my mama. The devil never bothered to check the reports because he owned the ones who wrote them. Not until recently, anyway. When he read that a gun had killed Lilly Beth, he knew something smelled. But he was so paranoid he thought they both had survived. He thought Rosemary was still alive. And she was coming after him. We let him believe it. He started looking for my mama. I’d never let him touch her again. That’s why I started robbing his banks. I was sending him a message. It was all messages, Hank.”

“REO…he’s Paulie?”

Delilah nodded, her eyes watering again. “Cray had Booty kill him. They must have found out that he was planning on taking us. Or they could’ve killed him just because they wanted to see a man die. You don’t know how many times I’ve heard people make deals with them and as soon as they get up to leave they shoot them in the back.”

“How do you know all this, darlin’?”

“Well, Hank, I spent a lot of time on their ceilings. Most of their buildings have rafters. I’d hide up there. Sometimes, me and Uncle Hennessey hid together.”

“And they never caught you?”

“No, I’m very fast, Hank. Faster than any person should have the right to be. My grandma was Weepin’ WillaMae, my grandpa Wild Wyatt. You know my past. Tommy, or Barb, has filled you in. My Aunt Rosemary was better than Wild Wyatt. And somehow, I became better than the both of them put together. Uncle Hennessey always says to me, ‘Little Sister’—they call me Little Sister sometimes because I’m so much like her, then he started calling me Pistol because I was even faster; he loves the name Pistollette, by the way, wishes he had come up with it—so he says to me, ‘You’re so fast, baby girl, not even time can keep tabs on you to make you late!’” Delilah took a breath. “I guess he was wrong, wasn’t he, Hank? I’m months late.”

Hank stopped walking. They stared at each other for a minute. Now that Hank could breathe, he noticed just how much her belly had grown.

Hank was mad now. He could afford to be. “How could you do this! God Almighty, Delilah, you’re carrying our baby!”

“Babies,” Delilah corrected, a shy grin appearing, shooing the scowl lines further away.

Hank’s eyes lost their focus for a second. “Pardon?”

Delilah pointed to the left side of her stomach. “I call him Ham. But I’d love for his name to be Huckleberry.” She pointed to her right side. “I call her Rosie. Ham seems to like attention. He kicks a lot, and she always kicks back. They’re quite a pair. I’d hoped no one would notice the weight gain, but here it is. I guess I’m trading my four- to- sixes in for straight eights. Good thing our suits were modeled after Little Sister. She would have loved that.”

“Rosie Rivers,” was all he could manage.

“Yes, Rosie Rivers. Has a ring to it, don’t you think, Hank?”

Hank needed gum. He started going on about how he couldn’t believe she would take such a risk. How sick he felt just thinking about if something would have went wrong. He wanted to know why she didn’t just leave well enough alone. Why she didn’t just stop.

“You shook the hive, Hank. They were going to kill you. It didn’t matter if the mean devil wanted you for personal reasons. Booty wanted you dead. Booty was never really his flunky. He went along for the most part, but he was an equal player. I was going to stop, Hank.” A big gust of wind surged through the air and Delilah took a deep breath.

“I would have never stopped for anyone but you and these babies. I was split in two, Hank. Pistollette became half of me. The line between us was so thin, it was almost invisible. I had a straight line and I was following it. Then you came along, and you changed every course I had mapped out. You made me feel, Hank. You made me feel and that scared the tar out of me. It tore Pistollette and me apart because I had a conscious again.

“I didn’t want to disappoint you. I couldn’t walk away from you. After Tupelo, I was going to leave you somewhere else. I was going to drive away and never look back. I couldn’t do it, Hank. I was afraid for the first time since the day in those cotton fields. I was afraid of walking away from you and never feeling that way again. I was never afraid of getting caught or dying. But I was terrified of never seeing you again. Then we got twisted up in this deep and dark and desperate place that we just couldn’t seem to fight our way out of. They were blackmailing me, planning to kill you. You wouldn’t listen to me! You kept interfering. I didn’t want to strip your manhood by stepping in, because I knew somewhere deep down it was your way, a man’s way of protecting his family, but he was going to kill you.

“I was working on a new plan. But the wheels were set into motion then. Cray knew you were coming for him next. He knew I’d be there and he took you. That was that mean ole devil’s mother who took you. She killed that man in California. Those two FBI agents were in his pocket. They were all in on it, planning on setting up a dead woman. I couldn’t let them have you, Hank. Delilah without her Hank is not Delilah. I was the only one who could stop them. I would never allow anyone to hurt you, Hank. Dear Lord,” she gasped. “The words just keep flowing!” She took a moment to catch her breath, and Hank stared at her. “Hank, you knew it was me all along. You knew I was Pistollette.” Not a question, a certified statement.

Hank looked to the ground. “Yes, darlin’, I did. California threw me for a loop, I’ll admit. After the bank in New Orleans, I had no doubt it was you. I feel alive. I can breathe whenever we’re together. It doesn’t matter what your face or body looks like, I know you, regardless. I would’ve never ratted on you. But I didn’t want to know for the same reasons you never showed me. It was best if we kept that part separate until now. Until it was over. I loved you enough not to care about the shady parts of who you are. I’ve got shady parts myself. What I just did—I’d do again for you, and now those babies.”