Ticktock (11 page)

Her slender throat.

Her lovely face.

Tommy didn't have time to argue with her. “Okay, a doctor, okay, get me out of here.”

Holding his arm as if he were a doddering old man, she started to walk him around to the passenger door, which was the side of the van closest to the vacant lot.

“Drive the fucking thing!” he demanded, and at last he tore loose of her.

Tommy went to the passenger door and yanked it open, but the waitress was still standing in front of her jukebox van, stupefied by his outburst.

“Move or we'll
both
die!” he shouted in frustration.

He glanced back into the vacant lot, expecting the minikin to spring at him out of the darkness and rain, but it wasn't here yet, so he clambered into the Ford.

The woman slid into the driver's seat and slammed her door an instant after Tommy slammed his.

Switching off “One O'clock Jump,” she said, “What happened back there? I saw you come shooting off MacArthur Boulevard—”

“Are you stupid or deaf or both?” he demanded, his voice shrill and cracking. “We gotta get out of here
now!
”

“You've no right to talk to me that way,” she said quietly but with visible anger in her crystalline-blue eyes.

Speechless with frustration, Tommy could only sputter.

“Even if you're hurt and upset, you can't talk to me that way. It isn't nice.”

He glanced out the side window at the vacant lot next to them.

She said, “I can't abide rudeness.”

Forcing himself to speak more calmly, Tommy said, “I'm sorry.”

“You don't sound sorry.”

“Well, I am.”

“Well, you don't sound it.”

Tommy thought maybe he would kill her rather than wait for the minikin to do it.

“I'm genuinely sorry,” he said.

“Really?”

“I'm truly, truly sorry.”

“That's better.”

“Can you take me to a hospital,” he asked, merely to get her moving.

“Sure.”

“Thank you.”

“Put on your seatbelt.”

“What?”

“It's the law.”

Her hair was honey-dark and lank with rain, pasted to her face, and her uniform was saturated. He reminded himself that she had gone to some trouble for him.

As he unreeled the shoulder harness and locked it across his chest, he said as patiently as possible: “Please, miss, please, you don't understand what's happening here—”

“Then explain. I'm
neither
stupid nor deaf.”

For an instant the improbability of the night left him without words again, but then suddenly they exploded in a long hysterical gush: “This thing, this doll, on my doorstep, and then the stitches pulled out and it had a real eye, green eye, rat's tail, dropped on my head from behind the drape, and it pretty much eats bullets for breakfast, which is bad enough, but then it's also
smart,
and it's growing—”

“What's growing?”

Frustration pushed him dangerously close to the edge of rudeness once more: “The doll snake rat-quick little monster thing! It's growing.”

“The doll snake rat-quick little monster thing,” she repeated, eyeing him suspiciously.

“Yes!” he said exasperatedly.

With a wet
thunk,
the shrieking minikin hit the window in the passenger door, inches from Tommy's head.

Tommy screamed.

The woman said, “Holy shit.”

The minikin was growing, all right, but it was also changing into something less humanoid than it had been when it first began to emerge from the doll form. Its head was proportionately larger than before, and repulsively misshapen, and the radiant green eyes bulged from deep sockets under an irregular bony brow.

The waitress released the emergency brake. “Knock it off the window.”

“I can't.”

“Knock it off the window!”

“
How,
for God's sake?”

Although the minikin still had hands, its five digits were half like fingers, half like the spatulate tentacles of a squid. It held fast to the glass with pale suckerpads on both its hands and its feet.

Tommy wasn't going to roll down the window and try to knock the thing off. No way.

The blonde shifted the Ford into drive. She stomped on the accelerator hard enough to punch the van into warp speed and put them on the far side of the galaxy in maybe eighteen seconds.

As the engine shrieked louder than the minikin, the tires spun furiously on the slick pavement, and the Ford didn't go across the galaxy or even to the end of the block, but just hung there, kicking up sprays of dirty water from all four wheels.

The minikin's mouth was open wide. Its glistening black tongue flickered. Black teeth snapped against the glass.

The tires found traction, and the van shot forward.

“Don't let it in,” she implored.

“Why would I let it in?”

“Don't let it in.”

“Do you think I'm insane?”

The Ford van was a rocket, screaming north on Pacific Coast Highway. Tommy felt as if he were pulling enough g's to distort his face like an astronaut in a space-shuttle launch, and rain was hitting the windshield with a clatter almost as loud as submachine-gun fire, but the stubborn minikin was glued to the glass.

“It's trying to get in,” she said.

“Yeah.”

“What does it want?”

He said, “Me.”

“Why?”

“For some reason, I just piss it off.”

The beast was still mostly black mottled with yellow, but its belly was entirely pus yellow, pressed against the glass. A slit opened the length of its underside, and obscenely wriggling tubes with suckerlike mouths slithered out of its guts and attached themselves to the window.

The light inside the van wasn't good enough to reveal exactly what was happening, but Tommy saw the glass begin to smoke.

He said, “Uh-oh.”

“What?”

“It's burning through the glass.”

“Burning?”

“Eating.”

“What?”

“Acid.”

Barely braking for the turn, she hung a hard right off the highway into the entrance drive of the Newport Beach Country Club.

The van canted drastically to the right, and centrifugal force threw Tommy against the door, pressing his face to the window, beyond which the minikin's extruded guts wriggled on the smoking glass.

“Where are you going?”

“Country club,” she said.

“Why?”

“Truck,” she said.

She turned sharply to the left, into the parking lot, a maneuver that pulled Tommy away from the door and the dissolving window.

At that late hour the parking lot was mostly deserted. Only a few vehicles stood on the blacktop. One of them was a delivery truck.

Aiming the van at the back of the truck, she accelerated.

“What're you doing?” he demanded.

“Detachment.”

At the last moment she swung to the left of the parked truck, roaring past it so close that she stripped the elaborate custom paint job off the front fender and tore off the van's side mirror. Showers of sparks streamed from tortured metal, and the minikin was jammed between the van window and the flank of the big truck. The rocker panel peeled off the side of the van, but the minikin seemed tougher than the Ford—until its suckers abruptly popped loose with a sound Tommy could hear even above all the other noise. The window in the passenger door burst, and tempered glass showered across Tommy, and he thought the beast was falling into his lap, Jesus, but then they were past the parked truck, and he realized that the creature had been torn away from the van.

“Want to circle back and run over the damn thing a few times?” she shouted over the howling of the wind at the broken-out window.

He leaned toward her, raising his voice. “Hell, no. That won't work. It'll grab the tire as you pass over it, and this time we'll never shake it loose. It'll crawl up into the undercarriage, tear through, squeeze through, get at us one way or another.”

“Then let's haul ass out of here.”

At the end of the country-club drive, she turned right onto the highway at such high speed that Tommy expected the Ford to blow a tire or roll, but they came through all right, and she put the pedal to the metal with less respect for the speed limit than she had shown, earlier, for the seatbelt law.

Tommy half expected the minikin to explode out of the storm again. He didn't feel safe until they crossed Jamboree Road and began to descend toward the Newport harbor.

Rain slashed through the missing window and snapped against the side of his head. It didn't bother him. He couldn't get any wetter than he already was.

At the speed they were making, the hooting and gibbering of the wind was so great that neither of them made an effort to engage in conversation.

As they crossed the bridge over the back-bay channel, a couple of miles from the parking lot where they had left the demon, the blonde finally reduced speed. The noise of the wind abated somewhat.

She looked at Tommy in a way that no one had ever looked at him before, as though he were green, warty, with a head like a watermelon, and had just stepped out of a flying saucer.

Well, in fact, his own mother had looked at him that way when he first talked about being a detective-story writer.

He cleared his throat nervously and said, “You're a pretty good driver.”

Surprisingly she smiled. “You really think so?”

“Actually, you're terrific.”

“Thanks. You're not bad yourself.”

“Me?”

“That was some stunt with the Corvette.”

“Very funny.”

“You went airborne pretty straight and true, but you just lost control of it in flight.”

“Sorry about your van.”

“It comes with the territory,” she said cryptically.

“I'll pay for the repairs.”

“You're sweet.”

“We should stop and get something to block this window.”

“You don't need to go straight to a hospital?”

“I'm okay,” he assured her. “But the rain's going to ruin your upholstery.”

“Don't worry about it.”

“But—”

“It's blue,” she said.

“What?”

“The upholstery.”

“Yeah, blue. So?”

“I don't like blue.”

“But the damage—”

“I'm used to it.”

“You are?”

She said, “There's frequently damage.”

“There is?”

“I lead an eventful life.”

“You do?”

“I've learned to roll with it.”

“You're a strange woman,” he said.

She grinned. “Thank you.”

He felt disoriented again. “What's your name?”

“Deliverance,” she said.

“Yeah?”

“Deliverance Payne. P-A-Y-N-E. It was a hard birth, and my mom has a weird sense of humor.”

He didn't get it. And then he did. “Ah.”

“People just call me Del.”

“Del. That's nice.”

“What's your name?”

“Tuong Phan.” He startled himself. “I mean Tommy.”

“Tuong Tommy?”

“Tuong nothing. My name's Tommy Phan.”

“Are you sure?”

“Most of the time.”

“You're a strange man,” she said, as if that pleased her, as if returning a compliment.

“There really is a lot of water coming in this window.”

“We'll stop soon.”

“Where'd you learn to drive like that, Del?”

“My mom.”

“Some mother you have.”

“She's a hoot. She races stock cars.”

“Not
my
mother,” Tommy said.

“And powerboats. And motorcycles. It has an engine, my mom wants to race it.”

Del braked at a red traffic light.

They were silent for a moment.

Rain poured down as if the sky were a dam that had just broken.

Finally Del said, “So…back there…That was the doll snake rat-quick little monster thing, huh?”

FOUR

As they drove, Tommy told Del about the doll on his doorstep, everything up to the moment when it had shorted out the lights in his office. She never gave the slightest indication that she found his story dubious or even, in fact, particularly astonishing. From time to time she said “uh-huh” and “hmmmm” and “okay,” and—two or three times—“yeah, that makes sense,” as if he were telling her about nothing more incredible than what she might have heard on the nightly TV news.

Then he paused in his tale when Del stopped at a twenty-four-hour supermarket. She insisted on getting a few things to clean the van and close off the shattered window, and at her request, Tommy went shopping with her. He pushed the cart.

So few customers prowled the enormous market that it was almost possible for Tommy to believe that he and Del were in one of those 1950's science-fiction movies, in which all but a handful of people had vanished from the face of the earth as the result of a mysterious apocalypse that had left buildings and all other works of humanity undisturbed. Flooded with glary light from the overhead fluorescent panels, the long wide aisles were uncannily empty and silent but for the ominous low-pitched hum of the compressors for the refrigerated display cases.

Striding purposefully through these eerie spaces in her white shoes, white uniform, and unzipped black leather jacket, with her wet blond hair slicked straight back and tucked behind her ears, Del Payne looked like a nurse who might also be a Hell's Angel, equally capable of ministering to a sick man or kicking the ass of a healthy one.

She selected a box of large plastic garbage bags, a wide roll of plumbing tape, a package containing four rolls of paper towels, a packet of razor blades, a tape measure, a bottle of one-gram tablets of vitamin C, a bottle of vitamin-E capsules, and two twelve-ounce bottles of orange juice. From an early-bird display of Christmas decorations, she snatched up a conical, red flannel Santa hat with a fake white fur trim and white pom-pom.

As they were passing the dairy-and-deli section, she stopped and pointed at a stack of containers in one of the coolers and said, “Do you eat tofu?”

Her question seemed so esoteric that Tommy could only repeat it in bafflement: “Do I eat tofu?”

“I asked first.”

“No. I don't like tofu.”

“You should.”

“Why,” he asked impatiently, “because I'm Asian? I don't eat with chopsticks, either.”

“Are you always so sensitive?”

“I'm not sensitive,” he said defensively.

“I didn't even think about your being Asian until you brought it up,” she said.

Curiously, he believed her. Though he didn't know her well, he already knew that she was different from other people, and he was willing to believe that she had just now noticed the slant of his eyes and the burnt-brass shade of his skin.

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 from 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.