Tick Tock

go kill your dog?”
    She frowned. “You're saying that's unlikely?”
    “It's me that's cursed, me that it's been sent to get.” Glancing at him disapprovingly, she said, “Well, look who's all of a sudden turned into Mr. Ego. You're not the centre of the universe, you know.”
    “I am as far as this demon is concerned! I'm its whole reason for existence!”
    “Whatever, I'm not taking any chances with my Scootie,” she said stubbornly.
    “He's safer at home than with us.”
    “He's safest with me.”
    She turned south on Harbour Boulevard. Even at that hour and in the rain, there was a steady flow of traffic.
    “Anyway,” she said, “as far as I can see, you don't exactly have any clever plan for survival that we have to put into action right this minute.”
    “Just keep moving, I think. When we stop, it's easier for the thing to find us.”
    “You can't know that for sure.”
    “I have intuition too, you know.”
    “Yeah, but it's mostly bogus.”
    “It is not,” he disagreed. “I'm very intuitive.”
    “Then why did you bring this devil doll into your house?”
    “It did make me uneasy.”
    “Later, you thought you'd gotten away from your house clean. You didn't know the creature was hitching a ride in the Corvette's engine compartment.”
    “No one's intuition is totally reliable.”
    “Now, honey, face it. Back there at the bakery, you would've gotten in the van.”
    Tommy chose not to respond. With a computer—or even a pencil and paper—and enough time, he could have crafted a reply to refute her, to humble her with logic and penetrating insights and dazzling wit. But he had neither a computer nor (with dawn rolling inexorably toward them out of the now-black east) enough time, so he would have to spare her the punishing experience of his devastating verbal virtuosity.
    Placatingly, Del said, “We'll stop at my place just long enough to pick up Scootie, and then we'll hit the road again, cruise around until it's time to call your brother and see if he's been able to translate the note.”
     
    Newport Harbour, home to one of the largest armadas of private yachts in the world, was enclosed on the north by the curve of the continental shoreline and on the south by a three-mile-long peninsula that extended west to east and separated the hundreds of protected boat docks and moorings from the surges of the Pacific.
    The homes on the shoreline and on the five islands within the harbour were among the priciest in southern California. Del lived not in a less expensive home on one of the land-locked blocks of Balboa Peninsula, but in a sleek three-story contemporary house that faced the harbour.
    As they approached the place, Tommy leaned forward, staring out of the windshield in astonishment.
    Because she had left her garage-door opener in the van, Del parked the stolen Honda on the street. The police wouldn't be looking for it yet—not until the shifts changed at the bakery.
    Tommy continued to stare through the blurring rain after Del switched off the windshield wipers. In the burnishing glow of the landscape lighting that under lit the queen palms, he could see that every corner of the house was softly rounded. The patinated-copper windows were rectangular with radius corners, and the white stucco was towelled so smoothly that it appeared to be as slick as marble, especially when wet with rain. It was less like a house than like a small, gracefully designed cruise ship that had run aground.
    “You live here?” he asked wonderingly.
    “Yeah.” She opened her door. “Come on. Scootie's wondering where I am. He's worried about me.”
    Tommy got out of the Honda and followed her through the rain to a gate at one side of the house, where she entered a series of numbers—the disarming code—into a security keypad.
    “The rent must be astronomical,” he said, dismayed to think that she might not be a renter at all but might be living here with the man who owned the place.
    “No rent. No mortgage. It's mine,” she said, unlocking the gate with keys that she had fished from her purse.
    As he closed the heavy gate behind them, Tommy saw that it was made of patinated geometric copper panels of different shapes and textures and depths. The resultant Art Deco pattern reminded him of the mural on her van.
    Following her along a covered, pale-quartzite walkway in which flecks of mica glimmered like diamond chips under the light from the low path lamps, he said, “But this must've cost a fortune.”
    “Sure did,” she said brightly.
    The walkway led