Tick Tock (14 page)

Gi was far less of a traditionalist and more understanding than Ton or their parents. He might even have envied Tommy's bold embrace of all things American and, years ago, might have secretly harboured similar dreams for himself. Nevertheless, on another level, faithful son in the fullest Vietnamese sense, he disapproved of the path that Tommy had taken. Even to Gi, choosing self over family was ultimately an unforgivable weakness, and his respect for his younger brother had declined steadily in recent years.

Now Tommy was surprised by how desperately he wanted to avoid sinking further in Gi's esteem. He had thought that he'd learned to live with his family's disapproval, that they could not hurt him any more by reminding him how much he had disappointed them, and that what they thought of him was less important than what kind of person he knew himself to be. But he was wrong. He still yearned for their approval and was panicky at the prospect of Gi dismissing the tale of the doll-thing as the ravings of a drug-addled mind.

Family was the source of all blessings—and the home of all sadness. If that wasn't a Vietnamese saying, it should have been.

He might have risked speaking of the demon anyway, if he had come here alone. But Del Payne's presence already prejudiced Gi against him.

Therefore, Tommy thought carefully before he spoke, and then he said, “Gi, have you ever heard of the Black Hand?”

Gi looked at Tommy's hands, as if expecting to be told that he had contracted some hideous venereal disease affecting the upper extremities, if not from this blonde-who-was-nearly-a-stranger, then from some other blonde whom he knew far better.

“La Mano Negra,”
Tommy said. “The Black Hand. It was a secret Mafia organization of blackmailers and assassins. When they marked you for murder, they sometimes warned you by sending a white piece of paper with the black-ink imprint of a hand. Just to scare the crap out of you and make you suffer for a while before they finally popped you.”

“This is ridiculous detective-story stuff,” Gi said flatly, rolling down the sleeve of his white shirt and buttoning the cuff.

“No, it's true.”

“Fast Boys, Cheap Boys, Natona Boys, the Frogmen, their types—they don't send a black hand first,” Gi assured him.

“No, I realize they don't. But have you ever heard of any gang that sends… something else as a warning?”

“What else?”

Tommy hesitated, squirmed in his chair. “Well… say like a doll.”

Frowning, Gi said, “Doll?”

“A rag doll.”

Gi looked at Del for illumination.

“Ugly little rag doll,” she said.

“With a message on a piece of paper pinned to its hand,” Tommy explained.

“What was the message?”

“I don't know. It was written in Vietnamese.”

“You once could read Vietnamese,” Gi reminded him in a tone of voice thick with disapproval.

“When I was little,” Tommy agreed. “Not now.”

“Let me see this doll,” Gi said.

“It's… well, I don't have it now. But I have the note.”

For a moment Tommy couldn't recall where he had stashed the message, and he reached for his wallet. Remembering, he slipped two fingers into the pocket of his flannel shirt and withdrew the sodden note, dismayed by its condition.

Fortunately, the parchment-like paper had a high oil content, which prevented it from dissolving entirely into mush. When Tommy carefully unfolded it, he saw that the three columns of ideograms were still visible, though badly faded and smeared.

Gi accepted the note and held it in his cupped palm as if he were providing a perch for a weary and delicate butterfly. “The ink has run.”

“You can't read it?”

“Not easily. So many ideograms are alike but with one small difference. Not like English letters, words. Each small difference in the stroke of the pen can create a whole new meaning. I'd have to dry this out, use a magnifying glass, study it.”

Leaning forward in his chair, Tommy said, “How long to decipher it—if you can?”

“A couple of hours—if I can.” Gi raised his gaze from the note. “You haven't told me what they did to you.”

“Broke into my house, vandalized it. Later… ran me off the road, and the car rolled twice.”

“You weren't hurt?”

“I'll be sore as hell in the morning, but I got out of the car without a cut.”

“How did this woman save your life?”

“Del,” said Del.

Gi said, “Excuse me?”

“My name is Del.”

“Yes,” said Gi. To Tommy, he said, “How did this woman save your life?”

“I got out of the car just in time, before it caught fire. Then… they were coming after me and—”

“They? These gangsters?”

“Yes,” Tommy lied, certain that every deception was transparent to Gi Minh. “They chased me, and I ran, and just when they might have nailed me for good, Del here pulled up in her van and got me out of there.”

“You haven't gone to the police?”

“No. They can't protect me.”

Gi nodded, not in the least surprised. Like most Vietnamese of his generation, he did not fully trust the police even here in America. In their homeland, before the fall of Saigon, the police had been mostly corrupt, and after the communist takeover, they had been worse—sadistic torturers and murderers licensed by the regime to commit any atrocity. Even more than two decades later, and half a world away from that troubled land, Gi was wary of all uniformed authorities.

“There's a deadline,” Tommy said, “so it's really important that you figure out what that note says as soon as possible.”

“Deadline?”

“Whoever sent the doll also sent a message to me by computer. It said, ‘The deadline is dawn. Ticktock.’”

“Gangsters using computers?” Gi said disbelieving.

“Everyone does these days,” said Del.

Tommy said, “They mean to get me before sunrise. and from what I've seen so far, they'll stop at nothing to keep to that timetable.”

“Well,” Gi said, “you can stay here while I work on the message, until we figure this out—what it is they want, or why they're out to get you. Meanwhile, no one can hurt you here, not with all those men down on the floor to stand with you.”

Tommy shook his head and rose from his chair. “I don't want to draw these… these gangsters here.” Del got to her feet as well and moved to his side. “I don't want to cause you trouble, Gi.”

“We can handle them like before.”

Tommy was sure that the pastry and bread artists of New World Saigon Bakery could hold their own against any group of human thugs. But if it chose to reveal itself in order to get at Tommy, the demon-from-the-doll would be as unfazed by bakers as it was by bullets. It would cut through them like a buzz saw through a wedding cake—especially if it had grown and had continued its apparent evolution into ever more fierce predatory forms. He didn't want anyone to be harmed because of him.

He said, “Thank you, Gi. But I think I'd better keep moving, so they can't find me. I'll call you in a couple of hours to see if you've been able to translate the note.”

Gi rose from his chair but did not step out from behind his desk. “You came for advice, you said, not just to have this message translated. Well, my advice is… you're safer trusting in family.”

“I do trust in you, Gi.”

“But you trust a stranger more,” Gi said pointedly, although he did not look at Del.

“It saddens me to hear you say that, Gi.”

“It saddens me to have to say it,” his brother replied.

Neither of them moved one inch toward the other, though Tommy sensed a yearning that matched his own.

Gi's face was worse than angry, worse than hard. It was placid, almost serene, as if Tommy could no longer touch his heart for better or worse.

“I'll call you,” Tommy finally said, “in a couple hours.” He and Del left the office and went down the steps into the enormous bakery.

Tommy felt profoundly confused, petty, stubborn, stupid, guilty, and miserable—all emotions that the legendary private detective, Chip Nguyen, had never felt, had never been
capable
of feeling.

The aromas of chocolate, cinnamon, brown sugar, nutmeg, yeasty baking bread, and hot lemon icing were no longer appealing. Indeed, he was half sickened by the stench. Tonight the smell of the bakery was the smell of loss and loneliness and foolish pride.

As he and Del passed the coolers and storerooms, heading toward the back of the building and the door through which they had entered, she said, “Well, thanks for preparing me.”

“For what?”

“For the glorious reception I received.”

“I told you how it was with me and the family.”

“You made it sound strained between you and them. It's more like the Capulet's and Montague's and the Hatfield's and the McCoy's all thrown together and named Phan.”

“It's not that dramatic,” he disagreed.

“Seemed pretty dramatic to me, quiet but dramatic, like both of you were ticking and liable to explode at any second.”

Halfway across the room from the shift manager's office, Tommy stopped, turned, and looked back.

Gi was standing at one of the big windows in that managerial roost, watching them.

Tommy hesitated, raised a hand, and waved. When Gi didn't return the wave, the bakery stench seemed to intensify, and Tommy walked faster toward the rear exit.

Lengthening her stride to keep up with him, Del Payne said, “He thinks I'm the whore of Babylon.”

“He does not.”

“Yes, he does. He disapproves of me even if I did save your life. Severely disapproves. He thinks I'm a succubus, a wicked white temptress who's leading you straight into the fiery pit of eternal damnation.”

“Well, you're lucky. Just imagine what he'd think if you'd worn the Santa hat.”

“I'm glad to see you still have a sense of humour about this family stuff.”

“I don't,” he said gruffly.

“What if I was?” she asked.

“Was what?”

“A wicked white temptress.”

“What are you talking about?”

They reached the rear exit, but she put a hand on Tommy's arm, halting him before he could open the door. “Would you be tempted?”

“You
are
nuts.”

She pretended to pout as if hurt. “That's not as flattering a response as I'd hoped for.”

“Have you forgotten the issue here?”

“What issue is that?” she asked.

Exasperated, he said, “Staying alive.”

“Sure, sure. The doll snake rat-quick little monster thing. But listen, Tommy, you're a pretty attractive guy in spite of all your glowering, all your deep angst, all your playing at being Mr. Mysterious East. A girl could fall for you—but if she did, would you be available?”

“Not if I'm dead.”

She smiled. “That's a definite
yes.”

He closed his eyes and counted to ten.

When he was at four, Del said, “What're you doing?”

“Counting to ten.”

“Why?”

“To calm down.”

“What number are you at?”

“Six.”

“What number now?”

“Seven.”

“What number now?”

“Eight.”

When he opened his eyes, she was still smiling. “I
do
excite you, don't I?”

“You
scare
me.”

“Why scare?”

“Because how are we going to manage to keep this supernatural
thing
from killing us if you keep acting this way?”

“What way?”

He took a deep breath, started to speak, decided there was no adequate reply, exhaled explosively, and said only, “Have you ever been in an institution?”

“Does the post office count?”

Muttering a curse in Vietnamese, the first words he had spoken in that language in at least twenty years, Tommy pushed open the metal door. He stepped into the skirling wind and the rain—and he immediately regretted doing so. In the bakery heat, he had gotten warm for the first time since scrambling out of the wrecked Corvette, and his clothes had begun to dry. Now he was instantly chilled to the marrow once more.

Del followed him into the storm, as ebullient as any child. “Hey, did you ever see Gene Kelly in
Singin' in the Rain?”

“Don't start dancing,” he warned.

“You need to be more spontaneous, Tommy.”

“I'm very spontaneous,” he said, tucking his head down to keep the rain out of his eyes. He bent into the wind and headed toward the battered, mural-bright van, which stood under a tall lamppost.

“You're about as spontaneous as a rock.”

Splashing through ankle-deep puddles, shivering, poised at the slippery slope of self-pity, he didn't bother to answer.

“Tommy, wait,” she said, and grabbed his arm again. Spinning to face her, cold and wet and impatient, he demanded, “Now what?”

“It's here.”

“Huh?”

No longer flirtatious or flippant, as alert as a deer scenting a wolf in the underbrush, she stared past Tommy:
“It.”

He followed the direction of her gaze. “Where?”

“In the van. Waiting for us in the van.”

FIVE

Oil-black rain briefly blazed as bright as molten gold, down through lamplight, drizzled over the van, and then puddled black again around the tires.

“Where?” Tommy asked, blinking rain out of his eyes, studying the murkiness beyond the van's windshield, searching for some sign of the demon. “I don't see it.”

“Neither do I,” she said. “But it's there, all right, in the van. I sense it.”

“You're psychic all of a sudden?”

“Not all of a sudden,” she said, her voice thickening, as though sleep was overcoming her. “I've always had strong intuition, very reliable.”

Thirty feet away, the Ford van was exactly as it had been when they had left it to go into the bakery. Tommy didn't feel what Del felt. He perceived no sinister aura around the vehicle.

He looked at Del as she stared intently at the van. Rain streamed down her face, dripped off the end of her nose and off the point of her chin. Her eyes weren't blinking, and she seemed to be sinking into a trance. Her lips began to move, as though she were speaking, but no sound escaped her.

“Del?”

After a moment her silently moving lips produced a wordless murmur, and then she began to whisper:

“Waiting… cold as ice… dark inside… a dark cold thing… ticktock… ticktock…”

He shifted his attention to the van again, and now it seemed to loom as ominously as a hearse. Del's fear had infected him, and his heart raced as he was overwhelmed by a sense of impending assault.

The woman's whisper faded into the susurration of the raindrops dissolving against the puddled pavement. Tommy leaned closer. Her voice was hypnotically portentous, and he didn't want to miss anything that she said.

“Ticktock… so much bigger now… snake's blood and river mud… blind eyes see… dead heart beats… a need… a need… a need to feed….”

Tommy wasn't sure which frightened him more at the moment: the van and the utterly alien creature that might be crouching within it—or this peculiar woman.

Abruptly she emerged from her mesmeric state. “We have to get out of here. Let's take one of these cars.”

“An employee's car?”

She was already moving away from the van, among the more than thirty vehicles that belonged to the workers at New World Saigon Bakery.

Glancing warily back at the van, Tommy hurried to keep up with her. “We can't do that.”

“Sure we can.”

“It's stealing.”

“It's survival,” she said, trying the door of a blue Chevrolet, which was locked.

“Let's go back into the bakery.”

“The deadline is dawn, remember?” she said, moving on to a white Honda. “It won't wait forever. It'll come in after us.”

She opened the driver's door of the Honda, and the dome light came on, and she slipped in behind the steering wheel. No keys dangled in the ignition, so she searched under the seat with one hand to see if the owner had left them there.

Standing at the open door of the Honda, Tommy said, “Then let's just walk out of here.”

“We wouldn't get far on foot before it caught us. I'm going to have to hot-wire this crate.”

Watching as Del groped blindly for the ignition wires under the dashboard, Tommy said, “You can't do this.”

“Keep a watch on my Ford.”

He glanced over his shoulder. “What am I looking for?”

“Movement, a strange shadow, anything,” she said nervously. “We're running out of time. Don't you sense it?”

Except for the wind-driven rain, the night was still around Del's van.

“Come on, come on,” Del muttered to herself, fumbling with the wires, and then the Honda engine caught, revved.

Tommy's stomach turned over at the sound, for he seemed to be sliding ever faster down a greased slope to destruction—if not at the hands of the demon, then by his own actions.

“Hurry, get in,” Del said as she released the hand-brake.

“This is car theft,” he argued.

“I'm leaving whether you get in or not.”

“We could go to jail.”

She pulled the driver's door shut, forcing him to step back, out of the way.

Under the tall sodium-vapour lamp, the silent van appeared to be deserted. All the doors remained closed. The most remarkable thing about it was the Art Deco mural. Already its ominous aura had faded.

Tommy had allowed himself to be infected by Del's hysteria. The thing to do now was get control of himself, walk over to the van, and show her that it was safe.

Del put the Honda in gear and drove forward. Quickly stepping in front of the car, slapping his palms down flat on the hood, Tommy blocked her way, forcing her to stop. “No. Wait, wait.”

She shifted into reverse and started to back out of the parking space.

Tommy ran around to the passenger's side, caught up with the car, pulled open the door, and jumped inside. “Will you just wait a second, for God's sake?”

“No,” she said, braking and shifting out of reverse. As she tramped the accelerator, the car shot forward across the parking lot, and the door beside Tommy was flung shut.

They were briefly blinded by the rain until Del found the switch for the windshield wipers.

“You're not thinking this through,” he argued.

“I know what I'm doing.”

The engine screamed, and great plumes of water sprayed up from the tires.

“What if the cops stop us?” Tommy worried.

“They won't.”

“They will if you keep driving like this.”

At the end of the large building, before turning the corner, Del braked hard. The car shrieked, fishtailing as it slid to a full stop.

Studying her rear-view mirror, she said, “Look back.”

Tommy turned in his seat. “What?”

“The van.”

Under the tall lamppost, falling rain danced on empty pavement.

For a moment Tommy thought he was looking in the wrong place. There were three other lampposts behind the bakery. But the van was not under any of those, either.

“Where'd it go?” he asked.

“Maybe out to the alley, or maybe around the other side of the building, or maybe it's just behind those delivery trucks. I can't figure why it didn't come straight after us.” She drove forward, around the corner, along the side of the bakery, toward the front.

Bewildered, Tommy said, “But who's driving it?”

“Not a who. A what.”

“That's ridiculous,” he said.

“It's a lot bigger now.”

“It would have to be. But still—”

“It's changed.”

“And it got a driver's license, huh?”

“It's very different from what you've seen before.”

“Yeah? What's it like now?”

“I don't know. I didn't see it.”

“Intuition again?”

“Yeah. I just know… it's different.”

Tommy tried to envision a monstrous entity, something like one of the ancient gods from an old H.P. Lovecraft story, with a bulbous skull, a series of mean little scarlet eyes across its forehead, a sucking hole where the nose should be, and a wicked mouth surrounded by a ring of writhing tentacles, comfortably ensconced behind the steering wheel of the van, fumbling with a clumsy tentacle at the heater controls, punching the radio selector buttons in search of some old-fashioned rock-'n'-roll, and checking the glove box to see if it could find any breath mints.

“Ridiculous,” he repeated.

“Better belt up,” she said. “We might be in for a bumpy ride.”

As Tommy buckled the safety harness across his chest, Del drove speedily but warily from the shadow of the bakery and across the front parking lot. Clearly, she expected the Art Deco van to bullet out of the night and crash into them.

A debris-clogged storm drain had allowed a small lake to form at the exit from the lot. Leaves and paper litter swirled across the choppy surface.

Del slowed and turned right into the street, through the dirty water. Theirs was the only vehicle in sight.

“Where did it go?” Del Payne wondered. “Why the hell isn't it following us?”

Tommy checked his luminous wristwatch. Eleven minutes after one o'clock.

Del said, “I don't like this.”

Ticktock.

Half a mile from the New World Saigon Bakery, in the stolen Honda, Tommy broke a three-block silence. “Where did you learn to hot-wire a car?”

“My mom taught me.”

“Your mom.”

“She's cool.”

“The one who likes speed, races stock cars and motorcycles.”

“Yep. That's the one. The only mom I've got.”

“What is she—a getaway driver for the mob?”

“In her youth, she was a ballet dancer.”

“Of course. All ballet dancers can hot-wire a car.”

“Not all of them,” Del disagreed. “After she was a ballet dancer, she married Daddy.”

“And what does he do?”

Checking the rear-view mirror for any sign of a pursuer, Del said, “Daddy plays poker with the angels.”

“You're losing me again.”

“He died when I was ten.”

Tommy regretted the sarcastic tone he had adopted. He felt coarse and insensitive. Chastened, he said, “I'm sorry. That's tough. Only ten.”

“Mom shot him.”

Numbly, he said, “Your mother the ballerina.”

“Ex-ballerina by then.”

“She shot him?”

“Well, he asked her to.”

Tommy nodded, feeling stupid for having regretted his sarcasm. He slipped comfortably back into it: “Of course, he did.”

“She couldn't refuse.”

“It's a marital obligation in your religion, is it? To kill one's spouse upon request?”

“He was dying of cancer,” Del said.

Tommy felt chastened again. “Jesus, I'm sorry.”

“Pancreatic cancer, one of the most vicious.”

“You poor kid.”

They were no longer in an industrial district. The broad avenue was lined with commercial enterprises. Beauty salons. Video stores. Discount electronics and discount furniture and discount glassware stores. Except for an occasional 7-Eleven or twenty-four-hour-a-day coffee shop, the businesses were closed and dark.

Del said, “When the pain got so bad Daddy couldn't concentrate on the cards any more, he was ready to go. He loved cards, and without them, he just didn't feel he had any purpose.”

“Cards?”

“I told you—Daddy was a professional poker player.”

“No, you said he now plays poker with the angels.”

“Well, why would he be playing poker with them if he wasn't a professional poker player?”

“Point taken,” Tommy said, because sometimes he was smart enough to know when he had been defeated.

“Daddy travelled all over the country, playing in high stakes games, most illegal, though he played a lot of legal games in Vegas too. In fact, he twice won the World Championship of Poker. Mom and I went with him everywhere, so by the time I was ten, I'd seen most of this country three times or more.”

Wishing he could just keep his mouth shut but too fascinated to resist, Tommy said, “So your mother shot him, huh?”

“He was in the hospital, pretty bad by then, and he knew he was never getting out.”

“She shot him right there in the hospital?”

“She put the muzzle of the gun against his chest, positioned it very carefully right over his heart, and Daddy told her he loved her more than any man had ever loved a woman before, and she said she loved him and would see him on the Other Side, and then she pulled the trigger, and he died instantly.”

Aghast, Tommy said, “You weren't there at the time, were you?”

“Heavens, no. What kind of person do you think Mom is? She'd never have put me through something like that.”

“I'm sorry. I should have—”

“She told me all about it an hour later, before the cops came by the house to arrest her, and she gave me the expended cartridge from the round that killed him.”

Del reached inside her wet uniform blouse and fished out a gold chain. The pendant suspended at the end of the chain was an empty brass shell casing.

“When I hold this,” Del said, wrapping her hand around the shell casing, “I can feel the love—the
incredible
love—they had for each other. Isn't it the most romantic thing ever?”

“Ever,” Tommy said.

She sighed and tucked the pendant inside her blouse once more. “If only Daddy hadn't gotten cancer until I was closer puberty, then he wouldn't have had to die.”

For a while Tommy struggled to understand that one, but at last he said, “Puberty?”

“Well, it wasn't to be. Fate is fate,” she said cryptically.

Half a block ahead of them, on the far side of the wide street, a police cruiser was just starting to turn out of the westbound lane into the parking lot at an all-night diner.

“Cops,” Tommy said, pointing.

“I see them.”

“Better slow down.”

“I'm really in a hurry to get back to my place.”

“You're doing twenty over the speed limit.”

“I'm worried about Scootie.”

“We're in a stolen car,”
he reminded her.

They breezed past the police cruiser without slowing. Tommy twisted in his seat to look through the back window.

“Don't worry about him,” Del said, “he won't come after us.”

The squad car had braked when they shot past it. “Who's Scootie?” Tommy asked, still watching the patrol car behind them.

“I told you before. My dog. Don't you ever listen?” After a hesitation, the squad car continued to pull into the parking lot at the diner. The lure of coffee and doughnuts was apparently stronger than the call of duty.

As Tommy let out a sigh of relief and faced front again, Del said, “Would you shoot me if I asked you to?”

“Absolutely.”

She smiled at him. “You're so sweet.”

“Did your mother go to jail?”

“Only until the trial was over.”

“The jury acquitted?”

“Yeah. They deliberated only fourteen minutes, and they were all crying like babies when the foreman read the verdict. The judge was crying too, and the bailiff. There wasn't a dry eye in the courtroom.”

“I'm not surprised,” Tommy said. “After all it's an extremely touching story.” He wasn't sure whether he was being sarcastic or not. “Why are you worried about Scootie?”

“There's some weird
thing
driving around in my van, you know, so maybe it knows my address now and even knows how much I love my Scootie.”