Tick Tock

said the cashier.
    “I'll bet he knows that,” Del said, mischievously delighted by the woman's comment. “He probably uses it as a tool for seduction, can blush any time he wants to, the way some really good actors can cry on cue.”
    The cashier giggled again.
    Tommy let out a long-suffering sigh and surveyed the nearly deserted market, relieved that there were no other customers close enough to hear. He was blushing so intensely that his ears felt as though they were on fire.
    When the cashier ran the carton of tofu across the bar-code scanner, Del said, “He worries about prostate cancer.”
    Mortified, Tommy said, “I do not.”
    “Yes, you do.”
    “No, I don't.”
    “But he won't listen to me, won't believe that tofu can prevent it,” Del told the cashier.
    After hitting the key to total their order, the cashier frowned at Tommy, and in a matronly voice with no trace of the former musical giggle, almost as if speaking to a child, she said, “Listen here, you better believe it, 'cause it's true. The Japanese eat it every day and they have almost no prostate cancer.”
    “You see,” Del said smugly.
    Tommy shook his head. “What do you do when you aren't waiting tables—run a medical clinic?”
    “It's just widely known, that's all.”
    “We sell a lot of tofu to Japanese customers, Koreans,” said the cashier as she finished bagging their purchases and accepted payment from Tommy. “You must not be Japanese.”
    “American,” Tommy said.
    “Vietnamese-American?”
    “American,” he repeated stubbornly.
    “A lot of Vietnamese-Americans eat tofu too,” said the cashier as she counted out his change, “though not as much as our Japanese customers.”
    With a grin that now seemed demented, Del said, “He's going to wind up with a prostate the size of a basketball.”
    “You listen to this girl and take care of yourself,” the cashier instructed.
    Tommy stuffed the change into a pocket of his jeans and grabbed the two small plastic sacks that contained the purchases, desperate to get out of the market.
    The cashier repeated her admonition: “You listen to the girl.”
    Outside, the rain chilled him again, sluicing away the warmth of the blush. He thought of the mini-kin, which was still out there in the night—and not as mini as it had once been.
    For a few minutes, in the market, he had actually forgotten the damn thing. Of all the people he had ever met, only Del Payne could have made him forget, even briefly, that he had been under attack by something monstrous and supernatural less than half an hour earlier.
    “Are you nuts?” he asked as they neared the van.
    “I don't think so,” she said brightly.
    “Don't you realize that thing is out there somewhere?”
    “You mean the doll snake rat-quick little monster thing?”
    “What other thing would I mean?”
    “Well, the world is full of strange stuff.”
    “Huh?”
    “Don't you watch The X-Files?”
    “It's out there and it's looking for me—”
    “Probably looking for me too,” she said. “I must've pissed it off.”
    “I'd say that's a safe bet. So how can you be going on about my prostate, the benefits of tofu—when we've got some demon from Hell trying to track us down?”
    She went to the driver's door, and Tommy hurried around to the other side of the jukebox van. She didn't answer his question until they were both inside.
    “Regardless of what other problems we have just now,” she said, “they don't change the fact that tofu is good for you.”
    “You are nuts.”
    Starting the engine, she said, “You're so sober, serious, so straight-arrow. How can I resist tweaking you a little?”
    “Tweaking me?”
    “You're a hoot,” she said, putting the van in gear and driving away from the supermarket.
    He looked down glumly at the pair of plastic sacks on the floor between his legs. “I can't believe I paid for the damn tofu.”
    “You'll like it.”
     
    A few blocks from the market, in a district of warehouses and industrial buildings, Del parked the van under a freeway overpass, where it was sheltered from the rain.
    “Bring the stuff we bought,” she said.
    “It looks awful lonely here.”
    “Most of the world is lonely corners.”
    “I'm not sure it's safe.”
    “Nowhere is safe unless you want it to be,” she said, having entered her cryptic mode once more.
    “What does that mean exactly?”
    “What doesn't it mean?”
    “You're putting me on again.”
    “I don't know what you mean,” she said.
    She was not grinning now. The merriness that had brightened her when she had conducted the tofu