Tick Tock

by Dean Koontz

  Chagrined, he said, “I’m sorry.”

  “I was only asking if you ate tofu because if you eat it five times a week or more, then you’ll never have to worry about prostate cancer. It’s a homeopathic preventative.”

  He had never met anyone whose conversation was as unpredictable as Del Payne’s. “I’m not worried about prostate cancer.”

  “Well, you should be. It’s the third-largest cause of death among men. Or maybe fourth. Anyway, for men, it’s right up there with heart disease and crushing beer cans against the forehead.”

  “I’m only thirty. Men don’t get prostate cancer until they’re in their fifties or sixties.”

  “So one day, when you’re forty-nine, you’ll wake up in the morning, and your prostate will be the size of a basketball, and you’ll realize you’re a statistical anomaly, but by then it’ll be too late.”

  She plucked a carton of tofu from the cooler and dropped it into the shopping cart.

  “I don’t want it,” Tommy said.

  “Don’t be silly. You’re never too young to start taking care of yourself.”

  She grabbed the front of the cart and pulled it along the aisle, forcing him to keep pace with her, so he didn’t have an opportunity to return the tofu to the cooler.

  Hurrying after her, he said, “What do you care whether I wake up twenty years from now with a prostate the size of Cleveland?”

  “We’re both human beings, aren’t we? What kind of person would I be if I didn’t care what happens to you?”

  “You don’t really know me,” he said.

  “Sure I do. You’re Tuong Tommy.”

  “Tommy Phan.”

  “That’s right.”

  At the checkout station, Tommy insisted on paying. “After all, you wouldn’t have a broken window or all the mess in the van if not for me.”

  “Okay,” she said as he took out his wallet, “but just because you’re paying for some plumbing tape and paper towels doesn’t mean I have to sleep with you.”

  Chip Nguyen would have replied instantly and with a playful witticism that would have charmed her, because in addition to being a damn fine private detective, he was a master of romantic repartee. Tommy, however, blinked stupidly at Del, racked his brain, but could think of nothing to say.

  If he could just sit down at his computer for a couple of hours and polish up a few gems of dialogue, he would develop some repartee that would have Ms. Deliverance Payne begging for mercy.

  “You’re blushing,” she said, amused.

  “I am not.”

  “Yes, you are.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  Del turned to the cashier, a middle-aged Hispanic woman wearing a tiny gold crucifix on a gold chain at her throat, and said, “Is he blushing or isn’t he?”

  The cashier giggled. “He’s blushing.”

  “Of course he is,” said Del.

  “He’s cute when he blushes,” said the cashier.

  “I’ll bet he knows that,” Del said, mischievously delighted by the woman’s comment. “He probably uses it as a tool for seduction, can blush any time he wants to, the way some really good actors can cry on cue.”

  The cashier giggled again.

  Tommy let out a long-suffering sigh and surveyed the nearly deserted market, relieved that there were no other customers close enough to hear. He was blushing so intensely that his ears felt as though they were on fire.

  When the cashier ran the carton of tofu across the bar-code scanner, Del said, “He worries about prostate cancer.”

  Mortified, Tommy said, “I do not.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “But he won’t listen to me, won’t believe that tofu can prevent it,” Del told the cashier.

  After hitting the key to total their order, the cashier frowned at Tommy, and in a matronly voice with no trace of the former musical giggle, almost as if speaking to a child, she said, “Listen here, you better believe it, ’cause it’s true. The Japanese eat it every day, and they have almost no prostate cancer.”

  “You see?” Del said smugly.

  Tommy shook his head. “What do you do when you aren’t waiting tables—run a medical clinic?”

  “It’s just widely known, that’s all.”

  “We sell a lot of tofu to Japanese customers, Koreans,” said the cashier as she finished bagging their purchases and accepted payment from Tommy. “You must not be Japanese.”

  “American,” Tommy said.

  “Vietnamese-American?”

  “American,” he repeated stubbornly.

  “A lot of Vietnamese-Americans eat tofu too,” said the cashier as she counted out his change, “though not as much as our Japanese customers.”

  With a grin that now seemed demented, Del said, “He’s going to wind up with a prostate the size of a basketball.”

  “You listen to this girl and take care of yourself,” the cashier instructed.

  Tommy stuffed the change into a pocket of his jeans and grabbed the two small plastic sacks that contained the purchases, desperate to get out of the market.

  The cashier repeated her admonition: “You listen to the girl.”

  Outside, the rain chilled him again, sluicing away the warmth of the blush. He thought of the minikin, which was still out there in the night—and not as mini as it had once been.

  For a few minutes, in the market, he had actually forgotten the damn thing. Of all the people he had ever met, only Del Payne could have made him forget, even briefly, that he had been under attack by something monstrous and supernatural less than half an hour earlier.

  “Are you nuts?” he asked as they neared the van.

  “I don’t think so,” she said brightly.

  “Don’t you realize that thing is out there somewhere?”

  “You mean the doll snake rat-quick little monster thing?”

  “What other thing would I mean?”

  “Well, the world is full of strange stuff.”

  “Huh?”

  “Don’t you watch The X-Files?”

  “It’s out there and it’s looking for me—”

  “Probably looking for me too,” she said. “I must’ve pissed it off.”

  “I’d say that’s a safe bet. So how can you be going on about my prostate, the benefits of tofu—when we’ve got some demon from Hell trying to track us down?”

  She went to the driver’s door, and Tommy hurried around to the other side of the jukebox van. She didn’t answer his question until they were both inside.

  “Regardless of what other problems we have just now,” she said, “they don’t change the fact that tofu is good for you.”

  “You are nuts.”

  Starting the engine, she said, “You’re so sober, serious, so straight-arrow. How can I resist tweaking you a little?”

  “Tweaking me?”

  “You’re a hoot,” she said, putting the van in gear and driving away from the supermarket.

  He looked down glumly at the pair of plastic sacks on the floor between his legs. “I can’t believe I paid for the damn tofu.”

  “You’ll like it.”

  A few blocks from the market, in a district of warehouses and industrial buildings, Del parked the van under a freeway overpass, where it was sheltered from the rain.

  “Bring the stuff we bought,” she said.

  “It looks awful lonely here.”

  “Most of the world is lonely corners.”

  “I’m not sure it’s safe.”

  “Nowhere is safe unless you want it to be,” she said, having entered her cryptic mode once more.

  “What does that mean exactly?”

  “What doesn’t it mean?”

  “You’re putting me on again.”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” she said.

  She was not grinning now. The merriness that had brightened her when she conducted the tofu torture was gone.

  Leaving the engine running, she got out f
rom behind the wheel and went around to the back of the Ford—which wasn’t a recreational vehicle, but a delivery van of the kind commonly used by florists and other small businesses—and she opened the rear door. She took the supermarket bags from Tommy and emptied the contents on the floor of the cargo hold.

  Tommy stood watching her, shivering. He was wet through and through, and the temperature, as midnight approached, must have been in the low fifties.

  She said, “I’ll put together a cover for the broken window. While I’m doing that, you use the paper towels to soak up as much water as you can from the front seat and the floor, get rid of the glass.”

  With no residential or commercial structures in the area to draw traffic, the street seemed to be another set from that same science-fiction movie about a depopulated, post-apocalyptic world that Tommy had remembered in the supermarket. A rumble overhead was the sound of trucks on the freeway above, but because those vehicles could not be seen from here, it was easy to imagine that the source of the noise was colossal machinery of an alien nature engaged in the fulfillment of a meticulously planned holocaust.

  Considering his overactive imagination, he probably should have tried writing a type of fiction more colorful than detective stories.

  In the cargo hold was a cardboard carton full of smaller boxes of dog biscuits. “I went shopping this afternoon for Scootie,” she explained as she removed the packages of biscuits from the larger container.

  “Your dog, huh?”

  “Not just my dog. The dog. The essence of all dogginess. The coolest canine on the planet. No doubt in his last incarnation before Nirvana. That’s my Scootie.”

  With the new tape measure, she got the accurate dimensions of the broken-out window, and then she used one of the razor blades to cut a rectangle of that precise size from the cardboard carton. She slid the panel of cardboard into one of the plastic garbage bags, folded the bag tightly around that insert, and sealed it with lengths of the waterproof plumbing tape. More tape secured the rectangle, inside and out, to the glassless window frame in the passenger’s door.

  While Del made the rain shield, Tommy worked around her to purge the front seat of water and sparkling fragments of tempered glass. As he worked, he told her what had happened from the moment when the minikin had shorted out the office lights until it had erupted from the burning Corvette.

  “Bigger?” she asked. “How much bigger?”

  “Almost double its original size. And different. The thing you saw clinging to the van window…that’s a hell of a lot weirder than it was when it first began to emerge from the doll.”

  Not one vehicle drove through the underpass as they worked, and Tommy was increasingly concerned about their isolation. Repeatedly he glanced toward the open ends of the concrete shelter, where heavy rain continued to crash down by the ton weight, bracketing the dry space in which they had taken refuge. He expected to see the radiant-eyed demon—swollen to greater and stranger dimensions—approaching menacingly through the storm.

  “So what do you think it is?” she asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Where does it come from?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What does it want?”

  “To kill me.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “There’s a lot you don’t know.”

  “I know.”

  “What do you do for a living, Tuong Tommy?”

  He ignored the purposeful misstatement of his name and said, “I write detective stories.”

  She laughed. “So how come, in this investigation, you can’t even find your own butt?”

  “This is real life.”

  “No, it’s not,” she said.

  “What?”

  With apparent seriousness, she said, “There’s no such thing.”

  “No such thing as real life?”

  “Reality is perception. Perceptions change. Reality is fluid. So if by ‘reality’ you mean reliably tangible objects and immutable events, then there’s no such thing.”

  Having used two rolls of paper towels to clean the passenger’s seat and the leg space in front of it, heaping the last of them on the sodden little pile that he had created against the wall of the underpass, he said, “Are you a New Age type or something—channel spirits, heal yourself with crystals?”

  “No. I merely said reality is perception.”

  “Sounds New Age,” he said, returning to watch her finish her own task.

  “Well, it’s not. I’ll explain someday when we have more time.”

  “Meanwhile,” he said, “I’ll wander aimlessly in the wilderness of my ignorance.”

  “Sarcasm doesn’t become you.”

  “Are you about finished here? I’m freezing.”

  Del stepped back from the open passenger-side door, the roll of plumbing tape in one hand and the razor blade in the other, surveying her work. “It’ll keep the rain out well enough, I guess, but it’s not exactly the latest thing in aesthetically pleasing motor-vehicle accessories.”

  In the poor light, Tommy couldn’t clearly see the elaborate Art Deco, jukebox-inspired mural on the van, but he could discern that a substantial portion of it had been scraped off the passenger side. “I’m really sorry about the paint job. It was spectacular. Must have cost a bundle.”

  “Just a little paint and a lot of time. Don’t worry about it. I was thinking of redoing it anyway.”

  She had surprised him again. “You painted it yourself?”

  “I’m an artist,” she said.

  “I thought you were a waitress.”

  “Being a waitress is what I do. An artist is what I am.”

  “I see.”

  “Do you?” she said, turning away from the door.

  “You said it yourself earlier—I’m a sensitive guy.”

  On the freeway overhead, the airbrakes of a big truck screeched like the cry of a scaly behemoth raging through a Jurassic swamp.

  Tommy was reminded of the demon. He glanced nervously at one end of the short concrete tunnel, then at the other end, but he saw no monster, large or small, approaching through the rain.

  At the back of the van, Del handed one of the two bottles of orange juice to Tommy and opened the other for herself.

  His teeth were chattering. Rather than a swig of cold orange juice, he needed a mug of steaming coffee.

  “We don’t have coffee,” she said, startling him, as though she had read his mind.

  “Well, I don’t want juice,” he said.

  “Yes, you do.” From the two vitamin bottles, she counted out ten one-gram tablets of C and four gelatin capsules of E, took half for herself, and handed the rest to him. “After all that fear and stress, our bodies are totally flooded with dangerous free radicals. Incomplete oxygen molecules, tens of thousands of them, ricocheting through our bodies, damaging every cell they encounter. You need antioxidants, vitamins C and E as a minimum, to bond with the free radicals and disarm them.”

  Though Tommy wasn’t much concerned about maintaining a healthy diet or vitamin therapy, he remembered having read about free-radical molecules and antioxidants, and there seemed to be medical validity to the theory, so he washed down the pills with the orange juice.

  Besides, he was cold and weary, and he could save a lot of energy by cooperating with Del. She was indefatigable, after all, while he was merely fatigued.

  “You want the tofu now?”

  “Not now.”

  “Maybe later with some chopped pineapple, maraschino cherries, a few walnuts,” she suggested.

  “That sounds nice.”

  “Or just a slight sprinkle of shredded coconut.”

  “Whatever.”

  Del picked up the red flannel Santa hat with the white trim and white pom-pom, which she had found in the display of Christmas items at the supermarket.

  “What’s that for?” Tommy asked.

  “It’s a hat.”

  “But what
are you going to use it for?” he asked, since she’d had such specific uses for everything else they had picked up at the market.

  “Use it for? To cover my head,” she said, as if he were daft. “What do you use hats for?”

  She put it on. The weight of the pom-pom made the peak of the cap droop to one side.

  “You look ridiculous.”

  “I think it’s cute. Makes me feel good. Puts me in a holiday mood.” She closed the back door of the van.

  “Do you see a therapist regularly?” he asked.

  “I dated a dentist once, but never a therapist.”

  Behind the wheel of the van again, she started the engine and switched on the heater.

  Tommy held his trembling hands in front of the dashboard vents, relishing the gush of hot air. With the broken window covered, he might be able to dry out and get warm.

  “Well, Detective Phan, do you want to start this investigation by trying to find it?”

  “Find what?”

  “Your butt.”

  “Just before I totaled the Corvette, I’d decided to go see my brother Gi. Could you drop me off there?”

  “Drop you off?” she said disbelievingly.