Dean Koontz - Tick Tock

‘Whoever made the doll is willing to play by rules. Or maybe they have to, maybe that’s what the magic requires.’

‘Magic?’

He locked his door. ‘Magic sorcery, voodoo, whatever. Anyway, if I make it to dawn, maybe I’m safe.’ He reached across Del and locked her door too. ‘This creature it isn’t going to come after you if it’s been sent to get me and if it has only a limited amount of time to make the kill. The clock is ticking for me, sure, but it’s also ticking for the assassin.’

Del nodded thoughtfully. ‘That makes perfect sense,’

she said, and she sounded sincere, as though they were discussing the laws of thermodynamics.

‘No, it’s insane,’ he corrected. ‘Like the whole situation. But there’s a certain nutty logic to it.’

She drummed her fingers on the steering wheel. ‘One thing you’ve overlooked.’

He frowned. ‘What’s that?’

She checked her wristwatch. ‘It’s now seven minutes past midnight.’

‘I hoped it was later. Still a lot of time to get to the finish line.’ He looked over his shoulder, across the cargo hold, at the back door of the van, which wasn’t locked.

And dawn is in… probably five and half or at most six hours,’ Del said.

‘So?’

‘Tommy, at the rate you’re going, the creepy-crawler will catch you by one o’clock, tear your head off - and still have four or five hours of spare time on its hands. If it has hands. Then it’ll come for me.’

He shook his head. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘I think so.’

‘It doesn’t know who you are,’ he said patiently. ‘How would it find you?’

‘It wouldn’t need to hire your silly detective,’ she said.

Tommy winced because she sounded like his mother, and he never wanted this woman, of all women, ever to remind him of his mother. ‘Don’t call him silly.’

‘The damn thing will track me the same way it’s tracking you right this very minute.’

‘Which is how?’

She tilted her head in thought. The fluffy white pom-pon dangled. ‘Well… by the pattern of your psychic emanations, telepathy. Or if each of us has a soul that emits a sound... or maybe a radiance that’s visible in some spectrum beyond those that ordinary humans are able to sense, a radiance as unique as a fingerprint, then this thing could home on it.’

‘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 wind-shield 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-coloured 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 passer-by might have thought the company was engaged in plastic injection moulding, 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 qual-ity - 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 bil-lions 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 inscru-table, 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. Pomona 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 pos-itions.

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.