Tick Tock

reverse. As she tramped the accelerator, the car shot forward across the parking lot, and the door beside Tommy was flung shut.
    They were briefly blinded by the rain until Del found the switch for the windshield wipers.
    “You're not thinking this through,” he argued.
    “I know what I'm doing.”
    The engine screamed, and great plumes of water sprayed up from the tires.
    “What if the cops stop us?” Tommy worried.
    “They won't.”
    “They will if you keep driving like this.”
    At the end of the large building, before turning the corner, Del braked hard. The car shrieked, fishtailing as it slid to a full stop.
    Studying her rear-view mirror, she said, “Look back.”
    Tommy turned in his seat. “What?”
    “The van.”
    Under the tall lamppost, falling rain danced on empty pavement.
    For a moment Tommy thought he was looking in the wrong place. There were three other lampposts behind the bakery. But the van was not under any of those, either.
    “Where'd it go?” he asked.
    “Maybe out to the alley, or maybe around the other side of the building, or maybe it's just behind those delivery trucks. I can't figure why it didn't come straight after us.” She drove forward, around the corner, along the side of the bakery, toward the front.
    Bewildered, Tommy said, “But who's driving it?”
    “Not a who. A what.”
    “That's ridiculous,” he said.
    “It's a lot bigger now.”
    “It would have to be. But still—”
    “It's changed.”
    “And it got a driver's license, huh?”
    “It's very different from what you've seen before.”
    “Yeah? What's it like now?”
    “I don't know. I didn't see it.”
    “Intuition again?”
    “Yeah. I just know… it's different.”
    Tommy tried to envision a monstrous entity, something like one of the ancient gods from an old H.P. Lovecraft story, with a bulbous skull, a series of mean little scarlet eyes across its forehead, a sucking hole where the nose should be, and a wicked mouth surrounded by a ring of writhing tentacles, comfortably ensconced behind the steering wheel of the van, fumbling with a clumsy tentacle at the heater controls, punching the radio selector buttons in search of some old-fashioned rock-'n'-roll, and checking the glove box to see if it could find any breath mints.
    “Ridiculous,” he repeated.
    “Better belt up,” she said. “We might be in for a bumpy ride.”
    As Tommy buckled the safety harness across his chest, Del drove speedily but warily from the shadow of the bakery and across the front parking lot. Clearly, she expected the Art Deco van to bullet out of the night and crash into them.
    A debris-clogged storm drain had allowed a small lake to form at the exit from the lot. Leaves and paper litter swirled across the choppy surface.
    Del slowed and turned right into the street, through the dirty water. Theirs was the only vehicle in sight.
    “Where did it go?” Del Payne wondered. “Why the hell isn't it following us?”
    Tommy checked his luminous wristwatch. Eleven minutes after one o'clock.
    Del said, “I don't like this.”
    Ticktock.
     
    Half a mile from the New World Saigon Bakery, in the stolen Honda, Tommy broke a three-block silence. “Where did you learn to hot-wire a car?”
    “My mom taught me.”
    “Your mom.”
    “She's cool.”
    “The one who likes speed, races stock cars and motorcycles.”
    “Yep. That's the one. The only mom I've got.”
    “What is she—a getaway driver for the mob?”
    “In her youth, she was a ballet dancer.”
    “Of course. All ballet dancers can hot-wire a car.”
    “Not all of them,” Del disagreed. “After she was a ballet dancer, she married Daddy.”
    “And what does he do?”
    Checking the rear-view mirror for any sign of a pursuer, Del said, “Daddy plays poker with the angels.”
    “You're losing me again.”
    “He died when I was ten.”
    Tommy regretted the sarcastic tone he had adopted. He felt coarse and insensitive. Chastened, he said, “I'm sorry. That's tough. Only ten.”
    “Mom shot him.”
    Numbly, he said, “Your mother the ballerina.”
    “Ex-ballerina by then.”
    “She shot him?”
    “Well, he asked her to.”
    Tommy nodded, feeling stupid for having regretted his sarcasm. He slipped comfortably back into it: “Of course, he did.”
    “She couldn't refuse.”
    “It's a marital obligation in your religion, is it? To kill one's spouse upon request?”
    “He was dying of cancer,” Del said.
    Tommy felt chastened again. “Jesus, I'm sorry.”
    “Pancreatic cancer, one of the most vicious.”
    “You poor kid.”
    They were no longer in an industrial