Dragon Tears (39 page)

“…forty-nine…fifty!”

For a while he would keep his promise to hunt them down only with the aid of ordinary human senses. It would be fun. Challenging. And it would be good to experience the severe limitations of their existence, not in order to develop compassion for them—they did not deserve compassion—but to enjoy more fully, by comparison, his own extraordinary powers.

In the body of the hulking vagrant, Bryan moved from the street into the fabulous amusement park that was the dead-still, whisperless town.

“Here I come,” he shouted, “ready or not.”

A dangling pinecone, like a Christmas ornament suspended by a thread from the bough above, had been arrested in mid-drop by the Pause. An orange-and-white cat had been stilled while leaping from a tree branch to the top of a stucco wall, airborne, forepaws reaching, back legs sprung out behind. A rigid, unchanging filigree of smoke curled from a fireplace chimney.

As she and Harry ran farther into the strange, unbeating heart of the paralyzed town, Connie did not believe that they would escape with their lives; nonetheless she frantically conceived and discarded numerous strategies to elude Ticktock for one hour. Under the hard shell of
cynicism that she had nurtured so lovingly for so long, like every poor fool in the world, she evidently treasured the hope that she was different and would live forever.

She should have been embarrassed to find within herself such a stupid, animal faith in her own immortality. Instead, she embraced it. Hope could be a treacherous kind of confidence, but she couldn’t see how their predicament could be made worse by a little positive thinking.

In one night she had learned so many new things about herself. It would be a pity not to live long enough to build a better life on those discoveries.

For all of her fevered thinking, only pathetic strategies occurred to her. Without slowing, between increasingly ragged gasps for breath, she suggested they change streets often, turning this way and that, in the feeble hope that a twisting trail would somehow be harder to follow than one that was arrow-straight. And she guided them along a downhill route where possible because they could cover more ground in less time if they weren’t fighting a rising grade.

Around them, the inert residents of Laguna Beach were oblivious to the fact that they were running for their lives. And if she and Harry were caught, no screams would wake these enchanted sleepers or bring help.

She knew why Ricky Estefan’s neighbors had not heard the golem exploding up through his hallway floor and beating him to death. Ticktock had stopped time in every corner of the world except inside that bungalow. Ricky’s torture and murder had been conducted with sadistic leisure—while no time at all was passing for the rest of humanity. Likewise, when Ticktock had accosted them in Ordegard’s house and had thrown Connie through the glass sliding door onto the master-bedroom balcony, neighbors had not responded to the crash or to the gunshots that had preceded it because the entire confrontation had taken place in non-time, in a dimension one step removed from reality.

As she ran at her top speed, she counted to herself, trying to maintain the slow rhythm in which Ticktock
had been counting. She reached fifty much too soon, and doubted they had put half enough ground between them and him to be safe.

If she had continued counting, she might have reached a hundred before, finally, they had to stop. They leaned against a brick wall to catch their breath.

Her chest was tight, and her heart seemed to have swelled to the point of bursting. Each breath felt searingly hot, as if she were a fire-eater in a circus, exhaling ignited gasoline fumes. Her throat was raw. Calf and thigh muscles ached, and the increased circulation renewed the pain in all of the bumps and bruises she’d gotten during the night.

Harry looked worse than she felt. Of course, he had received more blows in more encounters with Ticktock than she had sustained, and had been on the run longer.

When she could speak, she said, “Now what?”

At first each word puffed from him explosively. “What. About. Using. Grenades?”

“Grenades?”

“Like Ordegard.”

“Yeah, yeah, I remember.”

“Bullets don’t work on a golem—”

She said, “I noticed.”

“—but if we blew the damn thing to pieces—”

“Where we going to find grenades? Huh? You know a friendly neighborhood explosives shop around here?”

“Maybe a National Guard armory, someplace like that.”

“Get real, Harry.”

“Why? The rest of the world isn’t.”

“We blow one of these damn things to smithereens, he just scoops up some mud and makes another.”

“But it’ll slow him down.”

“Maybe two minutes.”

“Every minute counts,” he said. “We’ve just got to get through one hour.”

She looked at him with disbelief. “Are you saying you think he’ll keep his promise?”

With his coat sleeve, Harry wiped sweat off his face. “Well, he might.”

“Like hell.”

“He might,” Harry insisted.

She was ashamed of herself for wanting to believe.

She listened to the night. Nothing. That didn’t mean Ticktock wasn’t nearby.

“We’ve got to get going,” she said.

“Where?”

No longer needing to lean against the wall for support, Connie looked around and discovered they were in the parking lot beside a bank. Eighty feet away, a car was stopped near the twenty-four-hour automatic teller. Two men stood at the machine in the bluish glow from an overhead security lamp.

Something about the postures of the two was wrong. Not just that they were as still as statues. Something else.

Connie started across the parking lot toward the odd tableau.

“Where you going?” Harry asked.

“Check this out.”

Her instinct proved reliable. The Pause had hit in the middle of a robbery.

The first man was using his bank card to get three hundred dollars from the machine. He was in his late fifties with white hair, a white mustache, and a kind face now lined with fear. The packet of crisp bills had begun to slide out of the dispenser and into his hand when everything had stopped.

The perp was in his late teens or early twenties, blond, good looking. In Nikes, jeans, and a sweatshirt now, he was one of those beach-boy types who could be found all summer long, on every street of downtown Laguna, wearing sandals and cutoffs, flat-bellied, with a mahogany tan, white-haired from the sun. To look at him as he was at that moment or as he would be when summer came, you might suspect that he lacked ambition and
had a talent for leisure, but you would not imagine that anyone so wholesome in appearance could harbor criminal intentions. Even in the act of robbery he appeared to be cherubic, and had a pleasant smile. He was holding a .32-caliber pistol in his right hand, the muzzle jammed against the older man’s spine.

Connie moved around the pair, studying them thoughtfully.

“What’re you doing?” Harry asked.

“We’ve got to deal with this.”

“We don’t have time.”

“We’re cops, aren’t we?”

Harry said, “We’re being hunted, for God’s sake!”

“Who else is going to keep the world from going to hell in a handbasket, if we don’t?”

“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” he said. “I thought you were in this line of work for the thrill, and to prove something to yourself. Isn’t that what you said earlier?”

“And aren’t
you
in it to preserve order, protect the innocent?”

Harry took a deep breath, as if to argue, then let it out in an explosive sigh of exasperation. It wasn’t the first time during the past six months that she had elicited that reaction from him.

She thought he was sort of cute when he was exasperated; it was such a pleasing change from his usual equanimity, which got boring because it was so constant. In fact, Connie even liked the way he looked tonight, rumpled and in need of a shave. She had never seen him this way, had never
expected
to see him this way, and thought he seemed more rough than seedy, more dangerous than she would have believed he could look.

“Okay, okay,” he said, stepping into the robbery tableau to inspect the perp and victim more closely. “What do you want to do?”

“Make a few adjustments.”

“Might be dangerous.”

“That velocity business? Well, the moth didn’t disintegrate.”

Cautiously, she touched one finger to the perp’s face. His skin felt leathery, and his flesh was somewhat firmer than it should have been. When she took her finger away, she left a shallow dimple in his cheek, which evidently would not disappear until the Pause ended.

Staring into his eyes, she said, “Creep.”

In no way whatsoever did he acknowledge her presence. She was invisible to him. When time resumed its usual flow, he would not be aware that she had ever been there.

She pulled back on the perp’s gun arm. It moved but with stiff resistance.

Connie was patient because she worried that time might begin to move forward again when she least expected it, that her presence might startle the reanimated gunman, and that he might accidentally pull the trigger. Conceivably she could cause him to blow the older man away, although his original intention might have been only to commit a robbery.

When the muzzle of the .32 was no longer pressed against the victim’s spine, Connie slowly pushed it to the left until it was not pointed at him at all but aimed harmlessly into the night.

Harry carefully pried the gunman’s fingers off the pistol. “It’s like we’re kids playing with life-size action figures.” The .32 stayed precisely where it had been when the perp’s hand had encircled it, suspended in midair.

Connie found that the gun could be moved more easily than the gunman, although it still offered some resistance. She took it to the man at the automatic teller, pressed it into his right hand, and closed his fingers tightly around it. When the Pause ended, he would find a pistol in his hand where none had been a fraction of a second previously, and would have no idea how it had gotten there. From the pay-out tray of the machine, she removed the banded packet of twenties and put it in the customer’s left hand.

“I see how the ten-dollar bill ended up magically back in my hand after I gave it to that hobo,” she said.

Surveying the night uneasily, Harry said, “And how the four bullets I pumped into him ended up in my shirt pocket.”

“The head of that religious statue in my hand, from Ricky Estefan’s shrine.” She frowned. “Gives you the creepy crawlies to think we were like these people, frozen in time, and the bastard played with us that way.”

“You done here?”

“Not quite. Come on, help me turn the guy away from the machine.”

Together, they rocked him around a hundred and eighty degrees, as if he were a garden statue carved from marble. When they were finished, the victim not only had the pistol but was covering the perp with it.

Like set dressers in a wax museum handling extremely realistic mannequins, they had redesigned the scene and given it a new kind of drama.

“Okay, now let’s get out of here,” Harry said, and started to move away from the bank, across the parking lot.

Connie hesitated, examining their handiwork.

He looked back, saw she wasn’t following him, and turned to her. “Now what?”

Shaking her head, she said, “This is too dangerous.”

“The good guy has the gun now.”

“Yes, but he’ll be surprised when he finds it in his hand. He might drop it. The creep here might get hold of it again, probably will, and then they’re right back where we found them.”

Harry returned, an apoplectic look on his face. “Have you forgotten a certain dirty, demented, scar-faced gentleman in a black raincoat?”

“I don’t hear him yet.”

“Connie, for God’s sake, he could stop time for
us
, too, then take however damn long he wants to walk up to us, wait until he was right in front of us before letting us back
into the game. So you
wouldn’t
hear him until he tore your nose off and asked you if you’d like a handkerchief.”

“If he’s going to cheat like that—”

“Cheat? Why
wouldn’t
he cheat?” Harry demanded exasperatedly, though two minutes ago he had been arguing that there was a chance Ticktock would keep his promise and play fair. “We aren’t talking about Mother Teresa here!”

“—then it doesn’t matter whether we finish our work or run. Either way, he’ll get us.”

The keys to the white-haired bank patron’s car were in the ignition. Connie took them out and unlocked the trunk. The lid did not pop up. She had to lift it as if she was raising the lid on a coffin.

“This is anal-retentive,” Harry told her.

“Oh? Like
you
might ordinarily be expected to handle it, huh?”

He blinked at her.

Harry took the perp under the arms, and Connie grabbed him by the feet. They carried him to the back of the car and gently lowered him into the trunk. The body seemed somewhat heavier than it would have been in real time. Connie tried to slam the lid, but in this altered reality, her push didn’t give it the momentum to go all the way down; she had to lean on it to make the latch click into place.

When the Pause ended and time started up again, the perpetrator would find himself in the trunk of the car with no memory whatsoever of how he had wound up in that unhappy position. In the blink of an eye he would have gone from being assailant to prisoner.

Harry said, “I think I understand how I wound up three times in the same chair in Ordegard’s kitchen, with the barrel of my own gun in my mouth.”

“He kept taking you out of real time and putting you there.”

“Yeah. A child playing pranks.”

Connie wondered if that was also how the snakes and tarantulas had gotten into Ricky Estefan’s kitchen. During
a previous Pause, had Ticktock gathered them from pet shops, laboratories, or even from their nests in the wild, and then put them in the bungalow? Had he started time up again—at least for Ricky—startling the poor man with the sudden infestation?

Connie walked away from the car, into the parking lot, where she stopped and listened to the unnatural night.