Tick Tock Page 3

  He lived in a modest but comfortable two-story tract house in the exhaustively planned city of Irvine. The tract, as was the case with most of those in Orange County, featured none but Mediterranean architecture; indeed, the Mediterranean style prevailed to such an extent that it sometimes seemed restfully consistent but at other times was boring, suffocating, as if the chief executive officer of Taco Bell had somehow become an all-powerful dictator and had decreed that everyone must live not in houses but in Mexican restaurants. Tommy’s place had an orange barrel-tile roof, pale-yellow stucco walls, and concrete walkways with brick borders.

  Because he’d supplemented his salary from the newspaper with income from a series of paperback mystery novels that he’d written during evenings and weekends, he’d been able to buy the house three years ago, when he was only twenty-seven. Now his books were coming out in hardcover first, and his writing income had gotten large enough to allow him to risk leaving the Register.

  By any fair assessment, he was more of a success than either of his brothers or his sister. But the three of them had remained deeply involved in the Vietnamese community, so their parents were proud of them. They could never be equally proud of Tuong, who had changed his name as soon as he was legally of an age to do so, and who had eagerly embraced everything American since arriving on these shores at the age of eight.

  He supposed that even if he became a billionaire, moved into a thousand-room house on the highest cliff overlooking the Pacific Coast, with solid-gold toilets and chandeliers hung not with mere crystals but with huge diamonds, his mother and father would still think of him as the “failed” son who had forgotten his roots and turned his back on his heritage.

  As Tommy swung into his driveway, the bordering beds of white and coral-red impatiens glowed in the headlights as if iridescent. Swift shadows crawled up through the raggedly peeling bark of several melaleucas, swarming into higher branches, where moonlight-silvered leaves shuddered in the night breeze.

  In the garage, once the big door closed behind him, he remained in the silent car for a few minutes, savoring the smell of leather upholstery, basking in the pride of ownership. If he could have slept sitting upright in the driver’s seat, he would have done so.

  He disliked leaving the ’vette in the dark. Because it was so beautiful, the car should remain under flattering spotlights, as though it were an art object in a museum.

  In the kitchen, as he hung the car keys on the pegboard by the refrigerator, he heard the doorbell at the front of the house. Though recognizable, the ringing was different from the usual sound, like a hollow and ominous summons in a dream. The curse of home ownership: Something always needed to be repaired.

  He wasn’t expecting anyone this evening. In fact, he intended to spend an hour or two in his study, revising a few pages of the current manuscript. His fictional private detective, Chip Nguyen, had been getting wordy in his first-person narration of the story, and the tough but sometimes garrulous gumshoe needed to be edited.

  When Tommy opened the front door, ice-cold wind assaulted him, frigid enough to take his breath away. A whirl of dead melaleuca leaves like hundreds of tiny flensing knives spun over him, whispering-buzzing against one another, and he stumbled backward two steps, shielding his eyes with one hand, gasping in surprise.

  A dry, papery leaf blew into his mouth. The hard little point pricked his tongue.

  Startled, he bit down on the leaf, which had a bitter taste. Then he spit it out.

  As suddenly as it had burst through the door, the whirlwind now wound up tight and disappeared into itself, leaving only silence and stillness in its wake. The air was no longer cold.

  He brushed leaves out of his hair and off his shoulders, plucked them from his soft flannel shirt and blue jeans. The wood floor of the foyer was littered with crisp brown leaves, bits of grass, and sandy grit.

  “What the hell?”

  No visitor waited beyond the threshold.

  Tommy moved into the open doorway, peering left and right along the dark front porch. It was little more than a stoop—ten feet wide and six feet deep.

  No one was on the two steps or on the walkway that cleaved the shallow front lawn, no one in sight who might have rung the doorbell. Under tattered clouds backlighted by a lambent moon, the street was quiet and deserted, so hushed that he could half believe that a breakdown in the machinery of the cosmos had brought time to a complete halt for everyone and for all things except for he himself.

  Tommy switched on the outside light and saw a strange object on the porch floor immediately in front of him. It was a doll: a rag doll no more than ten inches tall, lying on its back, its stubby arms spread wide.

  Frowning, he surveyed the night once more, paying special attention to the shrubbery, where someone might be crouched and watching him. He saw no one.

  The doll at his feet was unfinished, covered entirely with white cotton fabric, unclothed, without facial features or hair. Where each eye should have been, two crossed stitches of coarse black thread dimpled the white cloth. Five sets of crossed black stitches marked the mouth, and another pair formed an X over the heart.

  Tommy eased across the threshold onto the porch. He squatted on his haunches beside the doll.

  The bitterness of the dry leaf no longer lingered in his mouth, but he tasted something equally unpleasant if more familiar. He stuck out his tongue, touched it, and then looked at the tip of his finger: a small red smear. The point of the leaf had drawn blood.

  His tongue didn’t hurt. The wound was tiny. Nevertheless, for reasons that he could not fully explain, Tommy was unnerved by the sight of the blood.

  In one of the doll’s crude, mittenlike hands was a folded paper. It was held firmly in place by a straight pin with a glossy black enamel head as large as a pea.

  Tommy picked up the doll. It was solid and surprisingly heavy for its size, but loose-jointed and limp—as though it might be filled with sand.

  When he pulled the pin out of the doll’s hand, the death-still street briefly came alive again. A chilly breeze swept across the porch. Shrubbery rustled, and trees shuddered sufficiently to cause moonshadows to shimmer across the black lawn. Then all fell quiet and motionless again.

  The paper was unevenly yellowed, as though it might be a scrap of ancient parchment, slightly oily, and splintered along the edges. It had been folded in half, then folded in half again. Opened, it was about three inches square.

  The message was in Vietnamese: three columns of gracefully drawn ideograms in thick black ink. Tommy recognized the language but was not able to read it.

  Rising to his full height, he stared thoughtfully at the street, then down at the doll in his hand.

  After refolding the note and putting it in his shirt pocket, he went inside and closed the door. He engaged the dead-bolt lock. And the security chain.

  In the living room, Tommy put the strange blank-faced doll on the end table beside the sofa, propping it against a Stickley-style lamp with a green stained-glass shade so it was sitting with its round white head cocked to the right and its arms straight down at its side. Its mittenlike hands were open, as they had been since he had first seen it on the porch, but now they seemed to be seeking something.

  He put the pin on the table beside the doll. Its black enamel head glistened like a drop of oil, and silvery light glinted off the sharp point.

  He closed the drapes over each of the three living-room windows. He did the same in the dining room and family room. In the kitchen, he twisted shut the slats on the Levolor blinds.

  He still felt watched.

  Upstairs in the bedroom that he had outfitted as an office, where he wrote his novels, he sat at the desk without turning on a lamp. The only light came through the open door from the hall. He picked up the phone, hesitated, and then called the home number of Sal Delario, who was a reporter at the Register, where Tommy had worked until yesterday. He got an answering machine but left no message.

  He called Sal’s page
r. After inputting his own number, he marked it urgent.

  Less than five minutes later, Sal returned the call. “What’s so urgent, cheesehead?” he asked. “You forget where you put your dick?”

  “Where are you?” Tommy asked.

  “In the sweatshop.”

  “At the office?”

  “Wrangling the news.”

  “Late on another deadline,” Tommy guessed.

  “You called just to question my professionalism? You’re out of the news racket one day and already you’ve lost all sense of brotherhood?”

  Leaning forward in his chair, hunched over his desk, Tommy said, “Listen, Sal, I need to know something about the gangs.”

  “You mean the fat cats who run Washington or the punks that lean on the businessmen in Little Saigon?”

  “Local Vietnamese gangs. The Santa Ana Boys…”

  “…Cheap Boys, Natoma Boys. You already know about them.”

  “Not as much as you do,” Tommy said.

  Sal was a crime reporter with a deep knowledge of the Vietnamese gangs that operated not only in Orange County but nationwide. While with the newspaper, Tommy had written primarily about the arts and entertainment.

  “Sal, you ever hear about Natoma or the Cheap Boys threatening anybody by mailing them an imprint of a black hand or, you know, a skull and crossbones or something like that?”

  “Or maybe leaving a severed horse’s head in their bed?”

  “Yeah. Anything like that.”

  “You have your cultures confused, boy wonder. These guys aren’t courteous enough to leave warnings. They make the Mafia seem like a chamber-music society.”

  “What about the older gangs, not the teenage street thugs, the more organized guys—the Black Eagles, the Eagle Seven?”

  “The Black Eagles have the hard action in San Francisco, the Eagle Seven in Chicago. Here it’s the Frogmen.”

  Tommy leaned back in his chair, which creaked under him. “No horse’s head from them, either, huh?”

  “Tommy boy, if the Frogmen leave a severed head in your bed, it’s going to be your own.”

  “Comforting.”

  “What’s this all about? You’re starting to worry me.”

  Tommy sighed and looked at the nearest window. Clotting clouds had begun to cover the moon, and fading silver light filigreed their vaporous edges. “That piece I wrote for the ‘Show’ section last week—I think maybe somebody’s threatening to retaliate for it.”

  “The piece about the little girl figure skater?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And the little boy who’s a piano prodigy? What’s to retaliate for?”

  “Well—”

  “Who could’ve been pissed off by that—some other six-year-old pianist thinks he should have gotten the coverage, now he’s going to run you down with his tricycle?”

  “Well,” Tommy said, beginning to feel foolish, “the piece did make the point that most kids in the Vietnamese community don’t get mixed up in gangs.”

  “Oooh, yeah, that’s controversial journalism, all right.”

  “I had some hard things to say about the ones who do join gangs, especially the Natoma Boys and Santa Ana Boys.”

  “One paragraph in the whole piece, you put down the gangs. These guys aren’t that sensitive, Tommy. A few words aren’t going to put them on the vengeance freeway.”

  “I wonder….”

  “They don’t care what you think anyway, ’cause to them, you’re just the Vietnamese equivalent of an Uncle Tom. Besides, you’re giving them a whole lot too much credit. These assholes don’t read newspapers.”

  The dark clouds churned from west to east, congealing rapidly as they moved in from the ocean. The moon sank into them, like the face of a drowner in a cold sea, and the lunar glow on the window glass slowly faded.

  “What about the girl gangs?” Tommy asked.

  “Wally Girls, Pomona Girls, the Dirty Punks…it’s no secret they can be more vicious than the boys. But I still don’t believe they’d be interested in you. Hell, if they got steamed this easily, they’d have gutted me like a fish ages ago. Come on, Tommy, tell me what’s happened. What’s got you jumpy?”

  “It’s a doll.”

  “Like a Barbie doll?” Sal sounded bewildered.

  “A little more ominous than that.”

  “Yeah, Barbie isn’t the nasty bitch she used to be. Who’d be afraid of her these days?”

  Tommy told Sal about the strange white-cloth figure with black stitches that he had found on the front porch.

  “Sounds like the Pillsbury Doughboy gone punk,” Sal said.

  “It’s weird,” Tommy said. “Weirder than it probably sounds.”

  “You don’t have a clue what the note says? You can’t read any Vietnamese at all, not even a little?”

  Taking the paper from his shirt pocket and unfolding it, Tommy said, “Not a word.”

  “What’s the matter with you, cheesehead? You have no respect for your roots?”

  “You’re in touch with yours, huh?” Tommy said sarcastically.

  “Sure.” To prove it, Sal spoke swift, musical Italian. Then, reverting to English: “And I write to my nonna in Sicily every month. Went to visit for two weeks last year.”

  Tommy felt more than ever like a swine. Squinting at the three columns of ideograms on the yellowed paper, he said, “Well, this is as meaningless as Sanskrit to me.”

  “Can you fax it? In maybe five minutes, I can find someone to translate.”

  “Sure.”

  “I’ll get back to you as soon as I know what it says.”

  “Thanks, Sal. Oh, hey, you know what I bought today?”

  “Do I know what you bought? Since when do guys talk shopping?”

  “I bought a Corvette.”

  “For real?”

  “Yeah. An LT1 Coupe. Bright aqua metallic.”

  “Congratulations.”

  “Twenty-two years ago,” Tommy said, “when I first came through the immigration office with my family and stepped into my first street in this country, I saw a Corvette go by, and that was it for me. That said everything about America, that fantastic-looking car, going by so sleek.”

  “I’m happy for you, Tommy.”

  “Thanks, Sal.”

  “Now at last maybe you’ll be able to get girls, won’t have to make it any more with Rhonda Rubbergirl, the inflatable woman.”

  “Asshole,” Tommy said affectionately.

  “Fax the note.”

  “Right away,” Tommy said, and he hung up.

  A small Xerox machine stood in one corner of his office. Without turning on any room lights, he made a photocopy, returned the note to his shirt pocket, and faxed the copy to Sal at the Register.

  The phone rang a minute later. Sal said, “You put it through the fax wrong-side up, dickhead. All I’ve got is a blank sheet of paper with your number at the top.”

  “I’m sure I did it right.”

  “Even your inflatable woman must be frustrated with you. Send it again.”

  After switching on a lamp, Tommy returned to the fax machine once more. He was careful to load the page properly. The mysterious ideograms had to be face-down.

  He watched as the rollers pulled the single sheet of paper through the machine. The small message window displayed Sal’s fax number at the newspaper and the word sending. The page of ideograms slid out of the machine, and after a pause, the word in the message window changed to received. Then the fax disconnected.

  The phone rang. Sal said, “Do I have to drive over there and show you how to do it right?”

  “You mean you got a blank page again?”

  “Just your sender-ID bar at the top.”

  “I absolutely loaded it right this time.”

  “Then something’s wrong with your fax,” Sal said.

  “Must be,” Tommy said, although that answer didn’t satisfy him.

  “You want to bring the note by here?”

  �
��How long will you be there?”

  “Couple of hours.”

  “I might stop by,” Tommy said.

  “You’ve got me curious now.”

  “If not tonight, I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  Sal said, “It might be some little girl.”

  “Huh?”

  “Some other figure skater jealous about the one in your article. Remember that Olympic skater, Tonya Harding? Be careful of your kneecaps, Tommy boy. Some little girl out there may have a baseball bat with your name on it.”

  “Thank God we don’t work in the same building any more. I feel so much cleaner.”

  “Kiss Rhonda Rubbergirl for me.”

  “You’re a diseased degenerate.”

  “Well, with Rhonda, you’ll never have to worry about catching anything nasty.”

  “See you later.” Tommy put down the telephone and switched off the lamp. Once more, the only light was a pale pearlescence that spilled in from the second-floor hallway.

  He went to the nearest window and studied the front lawn and the street. The yellowish glow of the streetlamps didn’t reveal anyone lurking in the night.

  A deep ocean of storm clouds had flooded the sky, entirely submerging the moon. The heavens were black and forbidding.

  Tommy went downstairs to the living room, where he discovered the doll slumped on its side on the end table beside the sofa. He had left it propped with its back against the stained-glass lamp, in a sitting position.

  Frowning, Tommy stared at it suspiciously. The doll had seemed to be full of sand, well weighted; it should have stayed where he had put it.

  Feeling foolish, he toured the downstairs, trying the doors. They were all still securely locked, and there were no signs of visitors. No one had entered the house.

  He returned to the living room. The doll might not have been balanced properly against the lamp, in which case the sand could have shifted slowly to one side until the damn thing toppled over.

  Hesitant, not sure why he was hesitant, Tommy Phan picked up the doll. He brought it to his face, examining it more closely than he had done earlier.

  The black sutures that indicated the eyes and the mouth were sewn with heavy thread as coarse as surgical cord. Tommy gently rubbed the ball of his thumb across a pair of crossed stitches that marked one of the doll’s eyes…then across the row of five that formed its grimly set lips.

  As he traced that line of black stitches, Tommy was startled by a macabre image that popped into his mind: the threads abruptly snapping, a real mouth opening in the white cotton cloth, tiny but razor-sharp teeth exposed, a quick but savage snap, and his thumb bitten off, blood streaming from the stump.

  A shudder coursed through him, and he nearly dropped the doll.

  “Dear God.”

  He felt stupid and childish. The stitches had not snapped, and of course no hungry mouth would ever open in the thing.

  It’s just a doll, for God’s sake.

  He wondered what his detective, Chip Nguyen, would do in this situation. Chip was tough, smart, and relentless. He was a master of tae kwon do, able to drink hard all night without losing his edge or suffering a hangover, a chess master who once defeated Bobby Fischer when they encountered each other in a hurricane-hammered resort hotel in Barbados, a lover of such prowess that a beautiful blond socialite had killed another woman over him in a fit of jealousy,