Tick Tock

‘They make excellent prosthetic limbs these days.’

‘I’d bleed to death.’

‘I know first aid.’

‘You’re a total fruitcake, Del.’

He meant what he said. To one extent or another, she had to be mentally unbalanced, even though she had told him earlier that she was the sanest person he knew. Regardless of what mysteries she guarded, what secrets she held, nothing she ultimately revealed to him would ever be sufficiently exculpatory to prove her behaviour was reasoned and logical. Nevertheless, though she scared him, she was enormously appealing as well. Tommy wondered what it said about his own sanity to acknowl¬edge that he was strongly attracted to this basket case.

He wanted to kiss her.

Incredibly, she said, ‘I think I’m going to fall in love with you, Tuong Tommy. So don’t make me blow your leg off.’

Astonished into a blush, conflicted as never before,

Tommy reluctantly turned away from the stairs and went past Del to the front door.

She tracked him with the Desert Eagle.

‘Okay, okay, I’ll wait until you’re ready to show them to me,’ he said.

At last she lowered her weapon. ‘Thank you.’

‘But,’ he said, ‘when I finally do see them, they damn well better be worth the wait.’

‘Just kittens,’ she said, and she smiled.

He was surprised that her smile could still warm him. Seconds ago, she had threatened to shoot him, but already he felt a pleasant tingle when she favoured him with a smile.

‘I’m as crazy as you are,’ he said.

‘Then you’ve probably got what it takes to make it till dawn.’ Slinging her purse over one shoulder, she said, ‘Let’s go.’

‘Umbrellas?’ he wondered.

‘Hard to handle an umbrella and a shotgun at the same time.’

‘True. Do you have another car besides the van?’

‘No. My mom has all the cars, quite a collection. If I need something besides the van, I borrow it from her. So we’ll have to use the Honda.’

‘The stolen Honda,’ he reminded her.

‘We’re not criminals. We just borrowed it.’

As he opened the front door, Tommy said, ‘Lights off,’ and the foyer went dark. ‘If a cop stops us in our stolen Honda, will you shoot him?’

‘Of course not,’ she said, following him and Scootie into the courtyard, ‘that would be wrong.’

‘That would be wrong?’ Tommy said, still capable of being amazed by her. ‘But it would’ve been right to shoot me?’

‘Regrettable but right,’ she confirmed as she locked the door.

‘I don’t understand you at all.’

‘I know,’ she said, tucking the keys in her purse.

Tommy checked the luminous dial of his watch. Six minutes past two o’clock.

Ticktock.

While they had been inside the house, the wind had died away completely, but the power of the storm had not diminished. Although no thunder or lightning had disturbed the night for hours, cataracts still crashed down from the riven sky.

The queen palms hung limp, drizzling from the tip of every blade of every frond. Under the merciless lash of the rain, the lush ferns drooped almost to the point of humble prostration, their lacy pinnae glimmering with thousands upon thousands of droplets that, in the low landscape lighting, appeared to be incrustations of jewels.

Scootie led the way, padding through the shallow puddles in the courtyard. In the quartzite paving, specks of mica glinted around the dog’s splashing paws, almost as if his claws were striking sparks from the stone. That phantom fire marked his path along the walkway beside the house, as well.

The Art Deco panels of copper were cold against Tommy’s hand as he pushed open the gate to the street. The hinges rasped like small whispering voices.

On the sidewalk in front of the house, Scootie abruptly halted, raised his head, and pricked his ears. He dropped his rubber hotdog and growled softly.

Alerted by the dog, Tommy brought up the shotgun, gripping it with both hands.

‘What is it?’ Del asked. She held the gate open behind them to prevent it from falling shut, automatically lock¬ing, and inhibiting their retreat if they needed to go back to the house.

But for the splatter-splash-gurgle-plink of water, the lamp lit street was silent. The houses were all dark. No

traffic approached from either east or west. Nothing moved except the rain and those things that the rain disturbed.

The white Honda stood fifteen feet to Tommy’s right. Something could be crouched along the far side of it, waiting for them to draw nearer.

Scootie was not interested in the Honda, however, and Tommy was inclined to trust the Labrador’s senses more than his own. The dog was riveted by something directly across the street.

At first Tommy could not see anything threatening —or even out of the ordinary. In the storm, the slumbering houses huddled, and the blackness of their blind windows revealed not even a single pale face of any neighbourhood insomniac. Palms, ficuses, and canopied carrotwoods stood solemnly in the windless downpour. Through the cone of amber light cast by the streetlamp, skeins of rain unravelled off the spool of night above, weaving together into a stream that nearly overflowed the gutter.

Then Scootie stiffened and flattened his ears against his skull and growled again, and Tommy spotted the man in the hooded raincoat. The guy was standing near one of the large carrotwoods across the street, beyond the brightest portion of the lightfall from a streetlamp but still vaguely illumined.

‘What’s he doing?’ Del asked.

Although Tommy couldn’t see the stranger’s shad¬owed face, he said, ‘Watching us.’

Del sounded as if she had seen something else that surprised her: ‘Tommy…?‘

He glanced at her.

She pointed east.

Half a block away, on the far side of the street, her battered van was parked at the curb.

Something about the imposing figure under the carrot¬wood tree was anachronistic — as though he had stepped

through a time warp, out of the medieval world into the late twentieth century. Then Tommy realized that the hooded raincoat was the source of that impression, for it resembled a monk’s robe and cowl.

‘Let’s get to the Honda,’ Del said.

Before they could move toward the car, however, the observer stepped away from the carrotwood, into the glow of the streetlamp. His face remained hidden under the hood, as if he were Death engaged on his nightly collections of those poor souls who perished in their sleep.

Nevertheless, as faceless as he was, the stranger was naggingly familiar to Tommy. Tall. Heavyset. The way he moved.

He was the good Samaritan from earlier in the night, the man who had clumsily descended the embankment from MacArthur Boulevard and crossed the muddy field where the Corvette had crashed. He had been approaching the blazing car when Tommy turned and ran from the fire-enraptured demon.

‘Let’s see what he wants,’ Del said.

‘No.’

How the thing-from-the-doll could now be riding the Samaritan, or hiding inside him, or posing as him — this was a mystery that Tommy was not able to fathom. But the fat man in that muddy field no longer existed; he had been either slaughtered and devoured or conquered and controlled. Of that much, Tommy was certain.

‘It’s not a man,’ he said.

The Samaritan moved ponderously through the lamp¬light.

Scootie’s growl escalated into a snarl.

The Samaritan stepped off the curb and splashed through the deep, fast-moving water in the gutter.

‘Get back,’ Tommy said urgently. ‘Back to the house, inside.’

Although his growl had been menacing and he had seemed prepared to attack, Scootie needed no further encouragement to retreat. He whipped around, shot past Tommy, and streaked through the gate that Del was holding open.

Del followed the dog, and Tommy backed through the gate as well, holding the Mossberg in front of him. As the patinated copper panel fell shut Tommy saw the Samaritan in the middle of the street, still heading toward them but not breaking into a run, as if confident that they could not escape.

The gate clacked shut. The electric security lock would buy no more than half a minute, because the Samaritan would be able to climb over the barrier with little trouble.

The portly man would no longer be hampered by his less-than-athletic physique. He would have all the strength and agility of the supernatural entity that had claimed him.

When Tommy reached the courtyard, Del was at the front entrance to the house.

He was surprised that she had been able to fish her keys out of her purse and get the door open so quickly. Evidently Scootie was already inside.

Following Del into the house, Tommy heard the gate rattle out at the street.

He closed the door, fumbled for the thumb-turn, and engaged the deadbolt. ‘Leave the lights off.’

‘This is a house, not a fortress,’ Del said.

‘Ssshhh,’ Tommy cautioned.

The only sounds from the courtyard were rain splat¬tering against quartzite payers, rain chuckling through downspouts, rain snapping against palm fronds.

Del persisted: ‘Tommy, listen, we can’t expect to defend this place like a fort.’

Wet and chilled yet again, weary of running, taking

some courage from the power of the Mossberg and from the door-buster pistol that Del carried, Tommy hushed her. He remembered a night of terror long ago on the South China Sea, when survival had come only after those refugees in the boat had stopped trying to run from the Thai pirates and had fought back.

Twelve-inch-wide, six-foot-tall sidelights flanked the front door. Through those rain-spotted panes, Tommy was able to see a small portion of the courtyard: wetly glimmering light, blades of darkness that were palm fronds.

The flow of time seemed suspended.

No tick.

No tock.

He was gripping the shotgun so tightly that his hands ached, and the muscles began to twitch in his forearms.

Remembering the green reptilian eye in the torn cotton face of the doll, he dreaded meeting the demon again, now that it was no longer merely ten inches tall.

A moving shadow, swift and fluid and less geometric than those cast by the palm trees and ferns, swooped across one pane of glass.

The fat man didn’t knock, didn’t ring the bell, didn’t leave a note and quietly depart, because he wasn’t a good Samaritan any more. He slammed into the door, which shook violently in its frame, slammed into it again so hard that the hinges creaked and the lock mechanism made a half-broken rattling noise, and slammed into it a third time, but still the door held.

Tommy’s hammering heart drove him across the dark foyer and nailed him against the wall opposite the door.

Although the sidelights were too narrow to admit the fat man, he smashed his fist through one of them. Shattered glass rang across the travertine floor.

Tommy squeezed the trigger. Flame flared from the

muzzle of the Mossberg, and the deafening roar of gunfire rebounded from the walls of the foyer.

Even though the shot gunned Samaritan reeled back from the broken sidelight, he didn’t scream in pain. He wasn’t a man any more. Pain meant nothing to him.

Her voice hollow and strange in the shivery echo of the blast, Del shouted, ‘No, Tommy, no, this place is just a trap! Come on!’

With tremendous force, the fat man slammed into the door again. The deadbolt skreeked against the striker plate, and the squeal of shearing metal rose from the tortured hinges, and wood splintered with a dry cracking sound.

Reluctantly Tommy had to admit that this was not the South China Sea and that their inhuman adversary was not as vulnerable as a mere Thai pirate.

The fat man hit the door again. It would not hold much longer.

Tommy followed Del across the dark living room, able to see her only because she was silhouetted against the wall of glass that faced the harbour lights. Even in the gloom, she knew the place well enough to avoid the furniture.

One of the large sliding glass doors was already open when they reached it. Apparently, Scootie had rolled it aside, because he was waiting for them on the patio.

Tommy wondered how the dog, even as clever as he was, could have managed that feat. Then he heard the front door crash open at the other end of the house, and that frightful sound knocked all of the curiosity out of him.

For some reason, Tommy had thought that Del intended to escape by water, across the harbour to the far shore. But the back-glow from the pier light that shone on her rain-soaked flag was bright enough to reveal that no boat

was tied at her private dock. In the empty slip was only rain-stippled black water.

‘This way,’ she said, hurrying not toward the harbour but to the left across the patio.

Then he expected her to turn left once more into the service way between her house and the one next door, go out to the street again, to the Honda, and try to split before the Samaritan found them. But when she didn’t choose that route, he understood why she avoided it. The passage was narrow, flanked by the two houses, with a gate at the far end; once they had entered it, their options would have been dangerously limited.

The homes along the harbour were set close together on narrow lots, because the land on which they stood was enormously valuable. To preserve the multimillion dollar views, the property lines between neighbours’ patios and backyards were delineated neither by high walls nor by dense masses of foliage, but by low shrubs, or planter boxes, or fences only two to three feet high.

Scootie bounded over a foot-high planter wall that overflowed with vine geraniums. Del and Tommy fol¬lowed him onto the brick patio of the neighbouring Cape Cod-style house.

A security lamp on the nearby dock revealed cushion-less teak outdoor furniture left to weather through the winter, terra-cotta pots full of stalk primrose, and a massive built-in barbecue centre now covered with a tailored vinyl rain shield.

They leaped over a low plum-thorn hedge that delin¬eated another property line, squished through a muddy flower bed, crossed another patio behind a stone and mahogany house that seemed inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright, and clambered over more plum-thorn that snagged at the legs of Tommy’s jeans, pricked through his socks to puncture the skin at his ankles.

As they headed west along the peninsula, sprinting

past the back of a brooding Spanish colonial home with deep balconies on three levels, a formidable dog penned in a narrow run between houses began to bark savagely at them and throw itself against a restraining gate. The hound sounded as eager to rend and kill as any German shepherd or Doberman ever trained by the Gestapo’s. Ahead, still more barking arose from other dogs anticipating their approach.