Tick Tock

district. The broad avenue was lined with commercial enterprises. Beauty salons. Video stores. Discount electronics and discount furniture and discount glassware stores. Except for an occasional 7-Eleven or twenty-four-hour-a-day coffee shop, the businesses were closed and dark.
    Del said, “When the pain got so bad Daddy couldn't concentrate on the cards any more, he was ready to go. He loved cards, and without them, he just didn't feel he had any purpose.”
    “Cards?”
    “I told you—Daddy was a professional poker player.”
    “No, you said he now plays poker with the angels.”
    “Well, why would he be playing poker with them if he wasn't a professional poker player?”
    “Point taken,” Tommy said, because sometimes he was smart enough to know when he had been defeated.
    “Daddy travelled all over the country, playing in high stakes games, most illegal, though he played a lot of legal games in Vegas too. In fact, he twice won the World Championship of Poker. Mom and I went with him everywhere, so by the time I was ten, I'd seen most of this country three times or more.”
    Wishing he could just keep his mouth shut but too fascinated to resist, Tommy said, “So your mother shot him, huh?”
    “He was in the hospital, pretty bad by then, and he knew he was never getting out.”
    “She shot him right there in the hospital?”
    “She put the muzzle of the gun against his chest, positioned it very carefully right over his heart, and Daddy told her he loved her more than any man had ever loved a woman before, and she said she loved him and would see him on the Other Side, and then she pulled the trigger, and he died instantly.”
    Aghast, Tommy said, “You weren't there at the time, were you?”
    “Heavens, no. What kind of person do you think Mom is? She'd never have put me through something like that.”
    “I'm sorry. I should have—”
    “She told me all about it an hour later, before the cops came by the house to arrest her, and she gave me the expended cartridge from the round that killed him.”
    Del reached inside her wet uniform blouse and fished out a gold chain. The pendant suspended at the end of the chain was an empty brass shell casing.
    “When I hold this,” Del said, wrapping her hand around the shell casing, “I can feel the love—the incredible love—they had for each other. Isn't it the most romantic thing ever?”
    “Ever,” Tommy said.
    She sighed and tucked the pendant inside her blouse once more. “If only Daddy hadn't gotten cancer until I was closer puberty, then he wouldn't have had to die.”
    For a while Tommy struggled to understand that one, but at last he said, “Puberty?”
    “Well, it wasn't to be. Fate is fate,” she said cryptically.
    Half a block ahead of them, on the far side of the wide street, a police cruiser was just starting to turn out of the westbound lane into the parking lot at an all-night diner.
    “Cops,” Tommy said, pointing.
    “I see them.”
    “Better slow down.”
    “I'm really in a hurry to get back to my place.”
    “You're doing twenty over the speed limit.”
    “I'm worried about Scootie.”
    “We're in a stolen car,” he reminded her.
    They breezed past the police cruiser without slowing. Tommy twisted in his seat to look through the back window.
    “Don't worry about him,” Del said, “he won't come after us.”
    The squad car had braked when they shot past it. “Who's Scootie?” Tommy asked, still watching the patrol car behind them.
    “I told you before. My dog. Don't you ever listen?” After a hesitation, the squad car continued to pull into the parking lot at the diner. The lure of coffee and doughnuts was apparently stronger than the call of duty.
    As Tommy let out a sigh of relief and faced front again, Del said, “Would you shoot me if I asked you to?”
    “Absolutely.”
    She smiled at him. “You're so sweet.”
    “Did your mother go to jail?”
    “Only until the trial was over.”
    “The jury acquitted?”
    “Yeah. They deliberated only fourteen minutes, and they were all crying like babies when the foreman read the verdict. The judge was crying too, and the bailiff. There wasn't a dry eye in the courtroom.”
    “I'm not surprised,” Tommy said. “After all it's an extremely touching story.” He wasn't sure whether he was being sarcastic or not. “Why are you worried about Scootie?”
    “There's some weird thing driving around in my van, you know, so maybe it knows my address now and even knows how much I love my Scootie.”
    “You really think it stopped chasing us just so it could