Ticktock

by Dean Koontz

  “Okay, all right, maybe it could do something like that if it was a supernatural entity—”

  “If it was a supernatural entity? If? What else do you think it is, Tommy? A shape-changing robot they send out from MasterCard to teach you a lesson when your monthly payment is overdue?”

  Tommy sighed. “Is it possible that I’m insane, tenderly cared for in some pleasant institution, and all this is happening only in my head?”

  At last Del pulled back into the street and drove out from under the freeway, switching on the windshield wipers as heavy volleys of rain exploded across the van.

  “I’ll take you to see your brother,” she said, “but I’m not just dropping you off, tofu boy. We’re in this together, all the way…at least until dawn.”

  In Garden Grove, the New World Saigon Bakery operated in a large tilt-up concrete industrial building surrounded by a blacktop parking lot. It was painted white, with the name of the company in simple peach-colored block letters, a severe-looking structure softened only by a pair of ficus trees and two clusters of azaleas that flanked the entrance to the company offices at the front. Without the guidance of the sign, a passerby might have thought the company was engaged in plastic injection molding, retail-electronics assembly, or other light manufacturing.

  On Tommy’s instructions, Del drove around to the back of the building. At this late hour, the front doors were locked, and one had to enter through the kitchen.

  The rear parking area was crowded with employees’ cars and more than forty sizable delivery trucks.

  “I was picturing a mom-and-pop bakery,” Del said.

  “Yeah, that’s what it was twenty years ago. They still have two retail outlets, but from here they supply breads and pastries to lots of markets and restaurants, and not just Vietnamese restaurants, in Orange County and up in L.A. too.”

  “It’s a little empire,” she said as she parked the van, doused the headlights, and switched off the engine.

  “Even though it’s gotten this big, they keep up the quality—which is why they’ve grown in the first place.”

  “You sound proud of them.”

  “I am.”

  “Then why aren’t you in the family business too?”

  “I couldn’t breathe.”

  “The heat of the ovens, you mean?”

  “No.”

  “An allergy to wheat flour?”

  He sighed. “I wish. That would have made it easy to opt out. But the problem was…too much tradition.”

  “You wanted to try radical new approaches to baking?”

  He laughed softly. “I like you, Del.”

  “Likewise, tofu boy.”

  “Even if you are a little crazy.”

  “I’m the sanest person you know.”

  “It was family. Vietnamese families are sometimes so tightly bound, so structured, the parents so strict, traditions so…so like chains.”

  “But you miss it too.”

  “Not really.”

  “Yes, you do,” she insisted. “There’s a deep sadness in you. A part of you is lost.”

  “Not lost.”

  “Definitely.”

  “Well, maybe that’s what growing up is all about—losing parts of yourself so you can become something bigger, different, better.”

  She said, “The thing from inside the doll is becoming bigger and different too.”

  “Your point?”

  “Different isn’t always better.”

  Tommy met her gaze. In the dim light, her blue eyes were so dark that they might as well have been black, and they were even less readable than usual.

  He said, “If I hadn’t found a different way, one that worked for me, I would have died inside—more than I have by losing some degree of connection with the family.”

  “Then you did the right thing.”

  “Whether it was or not, I did it, and it’s done.”

  “The distance between you and them is a gap, not a gulf. You can bridge it.”

  “Never quite,” he disagreed.

  “In fact, it’s no distance at all compared to the light-years we’ve all come from the Big Bang, all the billions of miles we’ve crossed since we were just primal matter.”

  “Don’t go strange on me again, Del.”

  “What strange?”

  “I’m the Asian here. If anyone’s supposed to be inscrutable, it’s me.”

  “Sometimes,” Deliverance Payne said, “you listen but you just don’t hear.”

  “That’s what keeps me sane.”

  “That’s what gets you in trouble.”

  “Come on, let’s go see my brother.”

  As they hurried through the rain, between two rows of delivery trucks, Del said, “How do you expect Gi to be able to help you?”

  “He’s had to deal with the gangs, so he knows about them.”

  “Gangs?”

  “Cheap Boys. Natoma Boys. Their kind.”

  The New World Saigon Bakery operated in three eight-hour shifts. From eight in the morning until four in the afternoon, Tommy’s father served as the shift manager while also conducting corporate business from his front office. From four o’clock until midnight, the oldest of the Phan brothers, Ton That, was the chief baker and the shift manager, and from midnight until eight in the morning, Gi Minh filled those same positions.

  Organized gangs, intent on extortion, were active around the clock. But when they used sabotage to get their way, they preferred the cover of deep darkness, which meant that Gi, by virtue of running the graveyard shift, had been on duty during some of the nastier confrontations.

  For years, all three men had worked seven days a week, a full fifty-six hours each, because most of the bakery’s customers needed fresh merchandise on a daily basis. When one of them needed to have a weekend off, the other two split his time between them and worked sixty-four-hour weeks without complaint. Vietnamese-Americans with an entrepreneurial bent were among the most industrious people in the country and could never be faulted for failing to carry their own weight. Sometimes, however, Tommy wondered how many of Ton and Gi’s generation—former refugees, boat children highly motivated to succeed by early memories of poverty and terror in Southeast Asia—would live long enough to retire and enjoy the peace that they had struggled so hard to earn.

  The family was finally training a cousin—the American-born son of Tommy’s mother’s younger sister—to serve as a shift manager on a rotating basis that would allow everyone at the management level to work approximately forty-hour weeks and, at last, have normal lives. They had resisted bringing in the cousin, because for too long they had stubbornly waited for Tommy to return to the fold and take the job himself.

  Tommy suspected that his parents had believed he’d eventually be overwhelmed with guilt as he watched his father and brothers working themselves half to death to keep all the principal management positions in the immediate family. Indeed, he had lived with such guilt that he’d had dreams in which he’d been behind the wheel of a car with his father and brothers as passengers, and he’d recklessly driven it off a high cliff, killing them all while he miraculously survived. Dreams in which he had been flying a plane filled with his family, had crashed, and had walked away as the sole survivor, his clothes red with their blood. Dreams in which a whirlpool sucked down their small boat at night on the South China Sea, drowning everyone but the youngest and most thoughtless of all the Phans, he himself, the son who was sharper than a serpent’s tooth. He had learned to live with the guilt, however, and to resist the urge to give up his dream of being a writer.

  Now, as he and Del stepped through the back door of the New World Saigon Bakery, Tommy was conflicted. Simultaneously he felt at home yet on dangerous ground.

  The air was redolent of baking bread, brown sugar, cinnamon, baker’s cheese, bitter chocolate, and other tantalizing aromas less easily identifiable in the fragrant mélange. This was the smell of his childhood, and it plunged him into a sensory river of wonderful
memories, torrents of images from the past. This was also the smell of the future that he had firmly rejected, however, and underneath the mouthwatering savor, Tommy detected a cloying sweetness that, by virtue of its very intensity, would in time sour the appetite, nauseate, and leave the tongue capable of detecting only bitterness in any flavor.

  Approximately forty employees in white uniforms and white caps were hard at work in the large main room—pastry chefs, bread bakers, assistant bakers, clean-up boys—amid the assembly tables, dough-mixing machines, cooktops, and ovens. The whir of mixer blades, the clink-clank of spoons and metal spatulas, the scrape-rattle of pans and cookie sheets being slid across baking racks, the muffled roar of gas flames in the hollow steel shells of the minimally insulated commercial ovens: This noise was music to Tommy, although like everything else about the place, it had two conflicting qualities—a cheerful and engaging melody, but an ominous underlying rhythm.

  The hot air immediately chased away the chill of the night and the rain. But almost at once, Tommy felt that the air was too hot to breathe comfortably.

  “Which one’s your brother?” Del asked.

  “He’s probably in the shift manager’s office.” Tommy realized that Del had removed the Santa hat. “Thanks for not wearing the stupid hat.”

  She withdrew it from a pocket in her leather jacket. “I only took it off so the rain wouldn’t ruin it.”

  “Please don’t wear it, don’t embarrass me,” he said.

  “You have no sense of style.”

  “Please. I want my brother to take me seriously.”

  “Doesn’t your brother believe in Santa?”

  “Please. My family are very serious people.”

  “Please, please,” she mocked him, but teasingly and without malice. “Maybe they should have become morticians instead of bakers.”

  Tommy expected her to don the frivolous red flannel chapeau with characteristic defiance, but she crammed it back into her jacket pocket.

  “Thank you,” he said gratefully.

  “Take me to the somber and humorless Gi Minh Phan, infamous anti-Santa activist.”

  Tommy led her along one side of the main room, between the equipment-packed baking floor and the stainless-steel doors to a series of coolers and storerooms. The place was brightly lighted with banks of suspended fluorescent fixtures, and everything was nearly as well scrubbed as a hospital surgery.

  He had not visited the bakery in at least four years, during which time its business had grown, so he didn’t recognize many of the employees on the graveyard shift. They all appeared to be Vietnamese, and the great majority were men. Most of them were concentrating so intensely on their work that they didn’t notice they had visitors.

  The few who looked up tended to focus on Del Payne and give Tommy only scant attention. Even rain-soaked—again—and bedraggled, she was an attractive woman. In her wet and clinging white uniform and black leather jacket, she possessed an irresistible air of mystery.

  He was glad she wasn’t wearing the Santa hat. That would have been too much novelty to ignore, even for a roomful of industrious Vietnamese fixated on their work. Everyone would have been staring at her.

  The manager’s office was in the right front corner of the room, elevated four steps above the main floor. Two walls were glass, so the shift boss could see the entire bakery without getting up from his desk.

  More often than not, Gi would have been on the floor, working elbow to elbow with the bakers and their apprentices. At the moment, however, he was at his computer, with his back to the glass door at the top of the steps.

  Judging by the tables of data on the monitor, Tommy figured his brother was putting together a computer model of the chemistry of a new recipe. Evidently some pastry hadn’t been coming out of the ovens as it should, and they hadn’t been able to identify the problem on the floor, with sheer baker’s instinct.

  Gi didn’t turn around when Tommy and Del entered, closing the door behind them. “Minute,” he said, and his fingers flew across the computer keyboard.

  Del nudged Tommy with one elbow and showed him the red flannel cap, half out of her pocket.

  He scowled.

  She grinned and put the cap away.

  When Gi finished typing, he spun around in his chair, expecting to see an employee, and gaped wide-eyed at his brother. “Tommy!”

  Unlike their brother Ton, Gi Minh was willing to use Tommy’s American name.

  “Surprise,” Tommy said.

  Gi rose from his chair, a smile breaking across his face, but then he registered that the person with Tommy wasn’t an employee, either. As he turned his full attention to Del, his smile froze.

  “Merry Christmas,” Del said.

  Tommy wanted to tape her mouth shut, not because her greeting was completely off the wall—after all, Christmas was only seven weeks away, and supermarkets were already selling decorations—but because she almost made him laugh, and laughter was not going to help him convince Gi of the seriousness of their plight.

  “Gi,” Tommy said, “I would like you to meet a friend of mine. Miss Del Payne.”

  Gi inclined his head politely toward her, and she held out her hand, and Gi took it after only a brief hesitation. “Miss Payne.”

  “Charmed,” she said.

  “You’re terribly wet,” Gi told her.

  “Yes. I like it,” Del said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Invigorating,” she said. “After the first hour of a storm, the falling rain has scrubbed all the pollution from the air, and the water is so pure, so healthy, good for the skin.”

  “Yes,” Gi said, looking dazed.

  “Good for the hair too.”

  Tommy thought, Please, God, stop her from warning him about prostate cancer.

  At five-feet-seven, Gi was three inches shorter than Tommy, and though as physically trim as his brother, he had a round face utterly unlike Tommy’s. When he smiled, he resembled Buddha, and as a child he had been called “little Buddha” by certain members of the family.

  His smile, though stiff, remained on his face until he let go of Del’s hand and looked down at the puddles of rainwater both she and Tommy were leaving on his office floor. When he raised his gaze and met Tommy’s eyes, he wasn’t smiling any more, and he didn’t look anything at all like Buddha.

  Tommy wanted to hug his brother. He suspected that Gi would return his embrace, after a moment of stiffness. Yet neither of them was able to display affection first—perhaps because they both feared rejection.

  Before Gi could speak, Tommy hurriedly said, “Brother, I need your advice.”

  “My advice?” Gi’s stare was disconcertingly direct. “My advice hasn’t meant much to you for years.”

  “I’m in deep trouble.”

  Gi glanced at Del.

  She said, “I’m not the trouble.”

  Clearly, Gi doubted that assertion.

  “In fact,” Tommy said, “she saved my life earlier tonight.”

  Gi’s face remained clouded.

  Beginning to worry that he was not going to be able to make this connection, Tommy found himself babbling: “Really, she did, she saved my life, just put herself on the line for me, a total stranger, got her van bashed up because of me, she’s the reason I’m even standing here, so I’d appreciate if you’d invite us to sit down and—”

  “Total stranger?” Gi asked.

  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.”