Tick Tock

a reporter at the Register, where Tommy had worked until yesterday. He got an answering machine but left no message.
    He called Sal's pager. After inputting his own number, he marked it urgent.
    Less than five minutes later, Sal returned the call. “What's so urgent, cheese head?” 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, alright”
    “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.”
    Sal sounded bewildered. “Like a Barbie Doll?”
    “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