Ticktock

by Dean Koontz

  The rain continued to fall.

  At fifteen seconds, the rain abruptly stopped.

  Tommy’s smile faded, and Mrs. Payne’s returned.

  “You were five seconds off,” he said.

  “I never claimed to be God, dear.”

  “What do you claim to be, Lilith?”

  She pursed her lips, considering his question, and then said, “Just an ex-ballerina with a considerable amount of enriching and strange experience.”

  Slumping back in his armchair, Tommy said, “I’m never going to doubt a Payne woman again.”

  “That’s a wise decision, dear.”

  “What’s a wise decision?” Del asked as she returned.

  Mrs. Payne said, “He’s decided never to doubt a Payne woman.”

  “Never doubting a Payne woman,” Del said, “is not just wise. It’s the prerequisite for survival.”

  “Although I keep thinking about the female praying mantis,” Tommy said.

  “How so?”

  “After she mates, she bites the head off her partner and eats him alive.”

  Mrs. Payne said, “I think you’ll discover that Payne women will usually settle for a cup of tea and a scone.”

  Indicating the portable telephone on the coffee table, Del said, “Did you make the call, Tommy?”

  “What call?”

  “Your brother.”

  He had completely forgotten Gi.

  Del handed him the phone, and he punched in the number for the back-office line at the New World Saigon Bakery.

  Leaning forward in her chair without disturbing Scootie, Mrs. Payne switched off the transtemporal radio, silencing the Glenn Miller band in the middle of “Little Brown Jug.”

  Gi answered on the second ring, and when he heard Tommy’s voice, he said, “I was expecting you to call an hour ago.”

  “I was delayed by a yacht wreck.”

  “By what?”

  “Have you translated the note?”

  Gi Minh hesitated and then said, “Are you still with that blonde?”

  “Yes.”

  “I wish you weren’t with her.”

  Tommy looked at Del and smiled. To Gi, he said, “Well, here I am.”

  “She’s bad news, Tommy.”

  “More like the comics pages.”

  “What?”

  “If Jeffrey Dahmer were a cartoonist.”

  Gi was silent. It was the silence of confusion, with which Tommy was too familiar.

  Tommy said, “Were you able to translate the note?”

  “It didn’t dry out as well as I hoped. I can’t give you an entire translation of it—but I figured out enough to scare me. It’s not any gang that’s after you, Tommy.”

  “Who?”

  “I’m not sure. What you’ve got to do is, you’ve got to go see Mom right away.”

  Tommy blinked in surprise and rose from his armchair. His hands were suddenly clammy with the sweat of familial guilt. “Mom?”

  “The longer I worked on the note, the more it worried me—”

  “Mom?”

  “—and finally I called her for some advice.”

  “You woke Mom?” he asked in disbelief.

  “When I told her about the note, as much as I could understand of it, she got scared too.”

  Pacing nervously, glancing at Del and her mother, Tommy said, “I really didn’t want Mom to know about this, Gi.”

  “She understands the Old World, Tommy, and this thing is more a part of the Old World than it is of this one.”

  “She’ll say I’ve been drinking whiskey—”

  “She’s waiting for you, Tommy.”

  “—like my crazy detective.” His mouth went dry. “Waiting for me?”

  “You don’t have much time, Tommy. I think you better get there as fast as you can. I really think you better. Fast. But don’t take the blonde.”

  “I have to.”

  “She’s bad news, Tommy.”

  Tommy glanced at Del. She sure didn’t look like bad news. She had combed her hair. Her smile was sweet. She winked at him.

  “Bad news,” Gi repeated.

  “We’ve been on this page before, Gi.”

  Gi sighed. “Well, at least cut Mom a little slack. She’s had a terrible day.”

  “Mine hasn’t exactly been a piece of cake.”

  “Mai eloped.”

  Mai was their younger sister.

  “Eloped?” Tommy said, thunderstruck. “Eloped with whom?”

  “A magician.”

  “What magician?”

  Gi sighed. “None of us knew she was dating a magician.”

  “This is the first I’ve heard she was dating any magician,” Tommy said, eager to establish that he could not be accused of complicity in his sister’s astounding act of independence.

  From her armchair, the ex-ballerina who hadn’t slept since Mud Lake said, “A magician—how romantic.”

  Gi said, “His name is Roland Ironwright.”

  “Doesn’t sound Vietnamese.”

  “He isn’t.”

  “Oh, God.” Tommy could too easily imagine the mood in which his mother would be stewing when he arrived at her doorstep with Del Payne.

  Gi said, “He performs in Vegas a lot. He and Mai hopped a plane to Vegas and got married, and Mom only learned about it this evening, didn’t tell me about it until I called her a little while ago, so cut her some slack.”

  Tommy was overwhelmed by remorse. “I should have gone to dinner, had com tay cam.”

  “Go now, Tommy,” Gi said. “She might be able to help you. She said hurry.”

  “I love you, Gi.”

  “Well, sure…I love you, Tommy.”

  “I love Ton and Mai and Mom and Dad, I really do, I love all of you so much…but I’ve got to be free.”

  “I know, Brother. I know. Listen, I’ll call Mom and tell her you’re on your way. Now get moving, you’re almost out of time!”

  When Tommy hung up, he saw that Del’s mother was blotting tears from the corners of her eyes.

  With a tremor in her voice, she said, “This is just so moving. I haven’t been so touched since Ned’s funeral, when Frank Sinatra gave the eulogy.”

  Del moved beside her mother’s chair and put a hand on the older woman’s shoulder. “Now, now. It’s okay, Mom.”

  To Tommy, Mrs. Payne said, “Frank was so eloquent. Wasn’t he eloquent, Del?”

  “As always,” Del said, “he was a class act.”

  “Even my policemen were moved to tears,” Mrs. Payne said. “I had to attend the funeral between these two burly guards, of course, because I was under arrest for murder.”

  “I understand,” Tommy assured her.

  “I never held that against them,” said Mrs. Payne. “They knew I’d shot Ned through the heart, and they couldn’t see it as anything but murder, they were so blind to the truth, but everything turned out all right in the end. Anyway, these two dear policemen were so moved by all the lovely things Frank had to say about Ned, and then when he began to sing ‘It Was a Very Good Year,’ they just broke down and sobbed like babies. I let them share my little pack of Kleenex.”

  At a loss for comforting words, Tommy could think of nothing to say except: “Such a tragedy, dying so young.”

  “Oh,” said Del’s mother, “Ned wasn’t all that young. Sixty-three when I shot him.”

  Fascinated with this peculiar family even as his personal clock of doom ticked rapidly toward the fatal hour, Tommy did some quick mental calculations. “If he died eighteen years ago when Del was ten…you would have been thirty-two at the time. And he was sixty-three?”

  Nudging Scootie to the floor, rising from her armchair, Julia Rosalyn Winona Lilith said, “It was a May-December romance. I was twenty when we met, and he was over fifty, but from the first moment I saw Ned, I knew he was the one. I wasn’t your ordinary young girl, Tommy dear. Oh, I was hungry for experience, for knowledge. I wanted to devour life. I needed an older man who
had been around, who had seen it all, someone who could teach me. Ned was glorious. With Elvis singing ‘Blue Hawaii’—the poor dear had a bad cold, but he came to sing anyway—we married at a chapel in Vegas, nineteen hours after we met, and never regretted it for one minute. On our honeymoon we parachuted into the heart of the Campeche jungle on the Yucatan Peninsula with only two sharp knives, a coil of rope, a map, a compass, and a bottle of good red wine, and we made it out safely to civilization in only fifteen days, more madly in love than ever.”

  “You sure were right,” Tommy told Del. “Your mother’s a hoot.”

  Smiling radiantly at her daughter, looking so unlike Tommy’s mother in her ao dais, Winona said, “Deliverance, did you really say that about me, dear?”

  The two women embraced.

  Then Tommy hugged Del’s mother and said, “I hope you’ll invite me over some night to watch the David Letterman show.”

  “Of course, dear boy. And I hope you’ll live long enough to have a chance to see it.”

  “Now,” Del said to Tommy, “it’s my turn to meet your mother.”

  Mrs. Payne walked them out of the music room, down the great hall, to the front door.

  The Jaguar 2+2 was waiting outside in the now rainless November night.

  When Tommy opened the passenger-side door and pulled the seat forward, Scootie romped into the back.

  As Del went around to the driver’s side, Mrs. Payne called to her daughter from the front door of The Great Pile: “When you bite his head off and eat him alive, try to make it quick and painless. He’s such a nice boy.”

  Tommy locked eyes with Del across the roof of the car.

  Del said, “It’ll be over before you realize what’s happening. I promise.”

  EIGHT

  At the Phan house in Huntington Beach, Tommy’s mother waited in the driveway. Although the clouds had begun to shred in the night sky, she wore ankle-high rubber boots, black slacks, a raincoat, and a plastic rain scarf. Her ability to predict the weather was not as impressive as Mrs. Payne’s.

  Del stayed behind the wheel with the engine running.

  Getting out of the Jaguar, Tommy said, “Mom, I don’t—”

  Interrupting him, she said, “Get in backseat. I sit up front with terrible woman.” When he hesitated, she said, “Go, go, foolish boy, less than hour to dawn.”

  Tommy scrambled into the backseat with Scootie.

  When his mother got in beside Del and pulled the passenger door shut, Tommy leaned forward from the back and said, “Mom, I’d like you to meet Deliverance Payne. Del, this—”

  Glowering at Del, his mother said, “I don’t like you.”

  Grinning, Del said, “Really? Already, I like you a lot.”

  “Let’s go,” Tommy’s mother said.

  Backing into the street, Del said, “Where?”

  “Go left. Just drive, I tell you when turn. Gi say you save Tommy’s life.”

  “She saved my life more than once,” Tommy said. “She—”

  “Don’t think you save my son’s life then I like you,” Tommy’s mother warned Del.

  “Earlier, I almost shot him.”

  “Is true?”

  “True,” Del confirmed.

  “So okay, maybe could like you a little,” Tommy’s mother grumbled.

  Glancing back at Tommy, Del said, “She’s a hoot.”

  “Gi says you total stranger to Tommy.”

  “Served him dinner maybe ten hours ago but only really met him less than six hours ago,” Del confirmed.

  “Served dinner?”

  “I’m a waitress.”

  “He eat cheeseburgers?”

  “Two of them.”

  “Stupid boy. No dating?”

  “Tommy and me? No, we’ve never dated.”

  “Good. Don’t. Here, turn right.”

  “Where are we going?” Tommy asked.

  “Hairdresser.”

  “We’re going to the hairdresser? Why?”

  “You wait, you see,” said his mother. Then to Del: “He bad boy, break your heart.”

  “Mom!” he said, mortified.

  “Can’t break my heart if I don’t date him,” Del said.

  “Smart girl.”

  Scootie squeezed past Tommy and thrust his big head into the front seat, sniffing suspiciously at the new passenger.

  Turning in her seat, Tommy’s mother met the dog face to face.

  Scootie grinned, tongue lolling.

  “Don’t like dogs,” she said. “Dirty animals, always licking. You lick me, lose tongue.”

  Scootie still grinned at her and slowly eased his head closer, sniffing, surely on the verge of licking.

  Baring her teeth at the Labrador, Tommy’s mother made a warning sound low in her throat.

  Startled, Scootie twitched, drew back, but then bared his teeth and growled in response. His ears flattened against his skull.

  Tommy’s mother bared her teeth further and issued a growl meaner than the dog’s.

  Whimpering, Scootie retreated, curling up in a corner of the backseat.

  “Turn left next block.”

  Hoping to ingratiate himself, Tommy said, “Mom, I was so sorry to hear about Mai. What could’ve gotten into her, running away with a magician?”

  Leaning sideways to glower at Tommy in the rearview mirror, she said, “Brother was bad example. Young girl ruined by brother’s bad example, future destroyed by brother’s bad example.”

  “Which brother would that be?” Del asked teasingly.

  Tommy said, “Mom, that’s not fair.”

  “Yeah,” Del said, “Tommy’s never run off with a magician.” She glanced away from the street, at Tommy. “Er…have you, tofu boy?”

  Mother Phan said, “Marriage already arranged, future bright, now good Vietnamese boy left without bride.”

  “An arranged marriage?” Del marveled.

  “Nguyen boy, nice boy,” said Tommy’s mother.

  “Chip Nguyen?” Del wondered.

  Tommy’s mother hissed with disgust. “Not silly detective chases blondes, shoots everyone.”

  “Nguyen is the Vietnamese equivalent of Smith,” Tommy told Del.

  “So why didn’t you call your detective Chip Smith?”

  “I probably should have.”

  “I’ll tell you why you didn’t,” Del said. “You’re proud of your heritage.”

  “He piss on heritage,” Tommy’s mother said.

  “Mom!”

  Tommy was so shocked by her language that his chest tightened, and he had to struggle to draw a breath. She never used foul words. That she had done so now was proof of an anger greater than she had ever displayed before.

  Del said, “Actually, Mrs. Phan, you misunderstand Tommy. Family is very important to him. If you’d give him a chance—”

  “Did I say don’t like you?”

  “I believe you mentioned it,” Del said.

  “More you talk, less I like.”

  “Mom, I’ve never seen you be rude to anyone before—anyone not in the family.”

  “Just watch. Turn left, girl.” As Del followed instructions, Tommy’s mother let out a quavery sigh of regret. “Boy for Mai not silly Chip Nguyen. This Nguyen Huu Van, family in doughnut business, have many doughnut shops. Perfect for Mai. Could have been many grandchildren pretty as Mai. Now strange magician children.”

  “Isn’t that what it’s all about?” Del asked.

  “What you say?”

  “Strange magician children. If there are three words that sum up what life should be all about, it’s strange magician children. Life shouldn’t be too predictable. It should be full of chance and mystery. New people, new ways, new hopes, new dreams, always with respect for the old ways, always built on tradition, but always new. That’s what makes life interesting.”

  “More you talk, less I like.”

  “Yes, you said.”

  “But you not listen.”

  “It’s a fault of mine,”
Del said.

  “Not listening.”

  “No, always talking. I listen but I always talk too.”

  Tommy curled up in the backseat, in the corner opposite the dog, aware that he could not compete in this conversation.

  His mother said to Del, “Can’t listen if talk.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “You bad news.”

  “I’m the weather,” Del said.

  “What say?”

  “Neither good nor bad. Just there.”

  “Tornado just there. But bad.”

  “I’d rather be weather than geology,” Del said.

  “What mean?”

  “Better to be a tornado than a mountain of rock.”

  “Tornado come and go. Mountain always there.”

  “The mountain is not always there.”

  “Mountain always here,” Mother Phan insisted.

  Del shook her head. “Not always.”

  “Where it go?”

  With singular élan, Del said, “The sun explodes, goes nova, and the earth blows away.”

  “You crazy woman.”

  “Wait around a billion years and see.”

  Tommy and Scootie locked eyes. Only minutes ago, he wouldn’t have believed that he could ever have felt such a kinship with the Labrador as he felt now.

  Del said to Tommy’s mother, “And as the mountain blows away, there will be tornadoes of fire. The mountain will be gone, but the tornadoes still whirling.”

  “You the same as damn magician.”

  “Thank you. Mrs. Phan, it’s like the rock-and-scissors game writ large,” Del said. “Tornadoes beat rock because tornadoes are passion.”

  “Tornadoes just hot air.”

  “Cold air.”

  “Anyway, air.”

  Glancing at the rearview mirror, Del said, “Hey, guys, we’re being followed.”

  They were on a residential street lined with ficus trees. The houses were neat but modest.

  Tommy sat up and peered out the rear window of the teardrop-shaped sports car. Looming behind them was a massive Peterbilt tractor-trailer, like a juggernaut, no more than twenty feet away.

  “What’s he doing in a residential neighborhood at this hour?” Tommy wondered.

  “Killing you,” Del said, tramping on the accelerator.

  The behemoth of a truck accelerated to match their pace, and the yellow glow of sodium-vapor streetlamps, flickering across its windshield, revealed the portly Samaritan behind the wheel, his face pale and his grin broad, although they were not close enough to see the green of his eyes.