Tick Tock

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's eye: 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 damn 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 had once defeated Bobby Fisher 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, a collector of vintage Corvettes who was able to rebuild them from the ground up, and a brooding philosopher who knew that humanity was doomed but who gamely fought the good fight anyway. Already, Chip would have obtained a translation of the note, tracked down the source of the cotton cloth and the black thread, punched out a thug just for the exercise, and (being an equal-opportunity lover) bedded either an aggressive redhead with a gloriously pneumatic body or a slender Vietnamese girl with a shy demeanour that masked a profoundly lascivious mind.
    What a drag it was to be limited by reality. Tommy sighed and wished that he could step magically through the pages of his own books, into the fictional shoes of Chip Nguyen, and know the glory of being totally self-confident and utterly in control of life.
    The evening was waning, and it was too late to drive to the newspaper offices to see Sal Delano. Tommy just wanted to get a little work done and go to bed.
    The rag doll was strange, but it wasn't half as menacing as he tried to pretend that it was. His fertile imagination had been running away with him again.
    He was a master of self-dramatization which, according to his older brother Ton, was the most American thing about him. Americans, Ton had once said, all think the world revolves around them, think each individual person more important than whole society or whole family. But how can each person be most important thing? Can't everyone be the most important thing, all equal but all the most important at same time. Makes no sense. Tommy had protested that he didn't feel more important than anyone else, that Ton was missing the point about American individualism, which was all about the right to pursue dreams, not about dominating others, but Ton had said, Then if you don't think you better than us, come work in bakery with your father and brothers, stay with family, make family dream come true.
    Ton had inherited certain sharp debating skills—and a useful stubbornness—from their mother.
    Now Tommy turned the doll over in his hand, and the more that he handled it, the less ominous it seemed. Ultimately, no doubt, the story behind it would turn out to be prosaic. It was probably just a prank perpetrated by children in the neighbourhood.
    The pin with the black enamel head, which had fastened the note to the doll's hand, was no longer on the end table where Tommy had left it. Evidently, when the doll had toppled over, the pin had been knocked to the floor.
    He couldn't see it on the cream-coloured carpet, although the glossy black head should have made it easy to spot. The vacuum cleaner would get it the next time he swept.
    From the refrigerator in the kitchen, he retrieved a bottle of beer. Coors. Brewed high in the