Tick Tock

by Dean Koontz

  Tommy had been plunging forward so rapidly that he had lost track of what he had said, and he didn’t understand his brother’s reaction. “Huh?”

  “Total stranger?” Gi repeated.

  “Well, yes, up to an hour and a half ago, and still she put her life on the line—”

  “He means,” Del explained to Tommy, “that he thought I was your girlfriend.”

  Tommy felt a blush, as hot as oven steel, rising in his face.

  Gi’s somber expression brightened slightly at the prospect that this was not the long-anticipated blonde who would break Mama Phan’s heart and divide the family forever. If Del was not dating Tommy, then there was still a chance that the youngest and most rebellious of the Phan boys would one day do the right thing after all and take a lovely Vietnamese girl as his wife.

  “I’m not his girlfriend,” Del said to Gi.

  Gi appeared willing to be convinced.

  Del said, “We’ve never dated. In fact, considering that he doesn’t like my taste in hats, I don’t see how we ever could date. I couldn’t go out with any man who was critical of my taste in hats. A girl has to draw the line somewhere.”

  “Hats?” Gi said, confused.

  “Please,” Tommy said, speaking as much to Del as to Gi, “can we just sit down and talk about this?”

  “About what?” Gi asked.

  “About someone trying to kill me, that’s what!”

  Stunned, Gi Minh Phan sat with his back to his computer. With a wave of his hand, he indicated the two chairs on the other side of his desk.

  Tommy and Del sat, and Tommy said, “I think I’m in trouble with a Vietnamese gang.”

  “Which?” Gi asked.

  “I don’t know. Can’t figure it out. Neither can Sal Delario, my friend at the newspaper, and he’s an expert on the gangs. I’m hoping you’ll recognize their methods when I tell you what they’ve done.”

  Gi was wearing a white shirt. He unbuttoned the left cuff, rolled up the sleeve, and showed Del the underside of his muscular forearm, which bore a long ugly red scar.

  “Thirty-eight stitches,” Gi told her.

  “How awful,” she said, no longer flippant, genuinely concerned.

  “These worthless scum creep around, saying you have to pay them to stay in business, insurance money, and if you don’t, then you and your employees might get hurt, have an accident, or some machinery could break down, or your place could catch fire some night.”

  “The police—”

  “They do what they can—which often amounts to nothing. And if you pay the gangs what they ask, they’ll want more, and more, and more still, like politicians, until one day you wind up making less out of your business than they do. So one night they came around, ten of them, those who call themselves the Fast Boys, all carrying knives and crowbars, cut our phone lines so we couldn’t call the cops, figuring they could just walk through the place and smash things while we would run and hide. But we surprised them, let me tell you, and some of us got hurt, but the gang boys got hurt worse. A lot of them were born here in the States, and they think they’re tough, but they don’t know suffering. They don’t know what tough means.”

  Able to repress her true nature no longer, Del couldn’t resist saying, “It never pays to go up against a bunch of angry bakers.”

  “Well, the Fast Boys know that now,” Gi said with utmost seriousness.

  To Del, Tommy said, “Gi was fourteen when we escaped Vietnam. After the fall of Saigon, the communists believed that young males, teenagers, were potential counterrevolutionaries, the most dangerous citizens to the new regime. Gi and Ton—that’s my oldest brother—were arrested a few times and held a week or two each time for questioning about supposed anticommunist activities. Questioning was a euphemism for torture.”

  “At fourteen?” Del said, appalled.

  Gi shrugged. “I was tortured when I was twelve. Ton That, my brother, was fourteen the first time.”

  “The police let them go each time,” Tommy continued, “—but then my father heard from a reliable source that Gi and Ton were scheduled to be arrested and sent upcountry to a reeducation camp. Slave labor and indoctrination. We put to sea in a boat with thirty other people the night before they would have been taken away.”

  “Some of our employees are older than me,” said Gi. “They went through much worse…back home.”

  Del turned in her chair to look out at the men on the bakery floor, all of whom appeared deceptively ordinary in their white caps and white uniforms. “Nothing’s ever what it seems,” she said softly, thoughtfully.

  To Tommy, Gi said, “Why would the gangs be after you?”

  “Maybe something I wrote when I still worked at the newspaper.”

  “They don’t read.”

  “But that has to be it. There’s no other reason.”

  “The more you write about how bad they are, the more they would like it if they did read it,” Gi said, still doubtful. “They want the bad-boy image. They thrive on it. So what have they done to you?”

  Tommy glanced at Del.

  She rolled her eyes.

  Although Tommy had intended to tell Gi every incredible detail of the night’s bizarre events, he was suddenly reluctant to risk his brother’s disbelief and scorn.

  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 harbored 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’s 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 Nera,” 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, Natoma 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.r />
  “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 parchmentlike 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 disbelievingly.

  “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 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 Capulets and Montagues and the Hatfields and McCoys 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 humor 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 Tommy 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?”