Dean Koontz - Tick Tock

‘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, hot as oven steel, rising in his face. Gi’s sombre expression brightened slightly at the pros-pect 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 Delano, 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 poli-ticians, 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 com-munists believed that young males, teenagers, were potential counter-revolutionaries, 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 anti-communist 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 - but then my father heard from a reliable source that Gi and Ton were scheduled to be arrested and sent upcountry to a re-education camp. Slave labour 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 incred-ible 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 understand-ing than Ton or their parents. He might even have envied Tommy’s bold embrace of all things American and, years ago, might have secretly harboured 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.