Dean Koontz - Tick Tock

Wishing he could just keep his mouth shut but too fascinated to resist, Tommy said, ‘So your mother shot him, huh?’

‘He was in the hospital, pretty bad by then, and he knew he was never getting out.’

‘She shot him right there in the hospital?’

‘She put the muzzle of the gun against his chest, positioned it very carefully right over his heart, and Daddy told her he loved her more than any man had ever loved a woman before, and she said she loved him and would see him on the Other Side, and then she pulled the trigger, and he died instantly.’

Aghast, Tommy said, ‘You weren’t there at the time, were you?’

‘Heavens, no. What kind of person do you think Mom is? She’d never have put me through something like that.’

‘I’m sorry. I should have-’

‘She told me all about it an hour later, before the cops came by the house to arrest her, and she gave me the expended cartridge from the round that killed him.’

Del reached inside her wet uniform blouse and fished out a gold chain. The pendant suspended at the end of the chain was an empty brass shell casing.

‘When I hold this,’ Del said, wrapping her hand around the shell casing, ‘I can feel the love - the incredible love - they had for each other. Isn’t it the most romantic thing ever?’

‘Ever,’ Tommy said.

She sighed and tucked the pendant inside her blouse once more. ‘If only Daddy hadn’t gotten cancer until I was closer puberty, then he wouldn’t have had to die.’

For a while Tommy struggled to understand that one, but at last he said, ‘Puberty?’

‘Well, it wasn’t to be. Fate is fate,’ she said cryp-tically.

Half a block ahead of them, on the far side of the wide street, a police cruiser was just starting to turn out of the westbound lane into the parking lot at an all-night diner.

‘Cops,’ Tommy said, pointing.

‘I see them.’

‘Better slow down.’

‘I’m really in a hurry to get back to my place.’

‘You’re doing twenty over the speed limit.’

‘I’m worried about Scootie.’

‘We’re in a stolen car,’ he reminded her.

They breezed past the police cruiser without slowing. Tommy twisted in his seat to look through the back window.

‘Don’t worry about him,’ Del said, ‘he won’t come after us.’

The squad car had braked when they shot past it. ‘Who’s Scootie?’ Tommy asked, still watching the patrol car behind them.

‘I told you before. My dog. Don’t you ever listen?’ After a hesitation, the squad car continued to pull into the parking lot at the diner. The lure of coffee and doughnuts was apparently stronger than the call of duty.

As Tommy let out a sigh of relief and faced front again, Del said, ‘Would you shoot me if I asked you to?’

‘Absolutely.’

She smiled at him. ‘You’re so sweet.’

‘Did your mother go to jail?’

‘Only until the trial was over.’

‘The jury acquitted?’

‘Yeah. They deliberated only fourteen minutes, and they were all crying like babies when the foreman read the verdict. The judge was crying too, and the bailiff. There wasn’t a dry eye in the courtroom.’

‘I’m not surprised,’ Tommy said. ‘After all it’s an extremely touching story.’ He wasn’t sure whether he was being sarcastic or not. ‘Why are you worried about Scootie?’

‘There’s some weird thing driving around in my van, you know, so maybe it knows my address now and even knows how much I love my Scootie.’

‘You really think it stopped chasing us just so it could go kill your dog?’

She frowned. ‘You’re saying that’s unlikely?’

‘It’s me that’s cursed, me that it’s been sent to get.’ Glancing at him disapprovingly, she said, ‘Well, look who’s all of a sudden turned into Mr. Ego. You’re not the centre of the universe, you know.’

‘I am as far as this demon is concerned! I’m its whole reason for existence!’

‘Whatever, I’m not taking any chances with my Scootie,’ she said stubbornly.

‘He’s safer at home than with us.’

‘He’s safest with me.’

She turned south on Harbour Boulevard. Even at that hour and in the rain, there was a steady flow of traffic.

‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘as far as I can see, you don’t exactly have any clever plan for survival that we have to put into action right this minute.’

‘Just keep moving, I think. When we stop, it’s easier for the thing to find us.’

‘You can’t know that for sure.’

‘I have intuition too, you know.’

‘Yeah, but it’s mostly bogus.’

‘It is not,’ he disagreed. ‘I’m very intuitive.’

‘Then why did you bring this devil doll into your house?’

‘It did make me uneasy.’

‘Later, you thought you’d gotten away from your house clean. You didn’t know the creature was hitching a ride in the Corvette’s engine compartment.’

‘No one’s intuition is totally reliable.’

‘Now, honey, face it. Back there at the bakery, you would’ve gotten in the van.’

Tommy chose not to respond. With a computer - or even a pencil and paper - and enough time, he could have crafted a reply to refute her, to humble her with logic and penetrating insights and dazzling wit. But he had neither a computer nor (with dawn rolling inexorably toward them out of the now-black east) enough time, so he would have to spare her the punishing experience of his devastating verbal virtuosity.

Placatingly, Del said, ‘We’ll stop at my place just long enough to pick up Scootie, and then we’ll hit the road again, cruise around until it’s time to call your brother and see if he’s been able to translate the note.’

Newport Harbour, home to one of the largest armadas of private yachts in the world, was enclosed on the north by the curve of the continental shoreline and on the south by a three-mile-long peninsula that extended west to east and separated the hundreds of protected boat docks and moorings from the surges of the Pacific.

The homes on the shoreline and on the five islands within the harbour were among the priciest in southern California. Del lived not in a less expensive home on one of the land-locked blocks of Balboa Peninsula, but in a sleek three-story contemporary house that faced the harbour.

As they approached the place, Tommy leaned forward, staring out of the windshield in astonishment.

Because she had left her garage-door opener in the van, Del parked the stolen Honda on the street. The police wouldn’t be looking for it yet - not until the shifts changed at the bakery.

Tommy continued to stare through the blurring rain after Del switched off the windshield wipers. In the burnishing glow of the landscape lighting that under lit the queen palms, he could see that every corner of the house was softly rounded. The patinated-copper windows were rectangular with radius corners, and the white stucco was towelled so smoothly that it appeared to be as slick as marble, especially when wet with rain. It was less like a house than like a small, gracefully designed cruise ship that had run aground.

‘You live here?’ he asked wonderingly.

‘Yeah.’ She opened her door. ‘Come on. Scootie’s wondering where I am. He’s worried about me.’

Tommy got out of the Honda and followed her through the rain to a gate at one side of the house, where she entered a series of numbers - the disarming code - into a security keypad.

‘The rent must be astronomical,’ he said, dismayed to think that she might not be a renter at all but might be living here with the man who owned the place.

‘No rent. No mortgage. It’s mine,’ she said, unlocking the gate with keys that she had fished from her purse.