“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.
It was as if everything in the world had suddenly died, from the wind to all of humanity, leaving a planetwide cemetery where grass and flowers and trees and mourners were made from the same granite as the tombstones.
At times in recent years, she had considered chucking police work and moving to some cheap shack on the edge of the Mojave, as far away from people as she could get. She lived so Spartanly that she had substantial savings; living as a desert rat, she could make the money last a long time. The barren, peopleless expanses of sand and scrub and rock were immensely appealing when compared to modern civilization.
But the Pause was far different from the peace of a sun-baked desert landscape, where life was still a part of the natural order and where civilization, sick as it was, still existed somewhere over the horizon. After only about ten non-minutes of silence and stillness as deep as death, Connie longed for the flamboyant folly of the human circus. The species was too fond of lying, cheating, envy, ignorance, self-pity, self-righteousness, and Utopian visions that always led to mass murder — but until and if it destroyed itself, it harbored the potential to become nobler, to take responsibility for its actions, to live and let live, and to earn the stewardship of the earth.
Hope. For the first time in her life, Connie Gulliver had begun to believe that hope, in itself, was a reason to live and to tolerate civilization as it was.
But Ticktock, as long as he lived, was the end of hope.
“I hate this son of a bitch like I’ve never hated anyone,” she said. “I want to get him. I want to waste him so bad I can hardly stand it.”
“To get him, first we have to stay alive,” Harry reminded her.
“Let’s go.”
3
Initially, staying on the move in that motionless world seemed to be the wisest thing they could do. If Ticktock was faithful to his promise, using only his eyes and ears and wits to track them, their safety increased in direct proportion to the amount of distance they put between him and them.
As Harry ran with Connie from one lonely street to another, he suspected there was a better than even chance that the psycho would keep his word, stalking them only by ordinary means and releasing them unharmed from the Pause if he could not catch them in one hour of real time. The bastard was, after all, demonstrably immature in spite of his incredible power, a child playing a game, and sometimes children took games more seriously than real life.
Of course, when he released them, it would still be twenty-nine minutes past one in the morning when clocks finally started ticking again. Dawn remained five hours away. And while Ticktock might play this particular game-within-a-game strictly according to the rules he had outlined, he would still intend to kill them by dawn. Surviving the Pause would only win them the slim chance to find him and destroy him once time started up again.
And even if Ticktock broke his promise, using some sixth sense to track them, it was smart to keep moving. Perhaps he had pinned psychic tags on them, as Harry had speculated earlier; in which case, if he did cheat, he could find them regardless of where they went. By remaining on the move, at least they were safe unless and until he could catch them or get ahead by anticipating their next turn.
From street to alley to street, across yards and between silent houses they ran, clambering over fences, through a school playground, footfalls vaguely metallic, where every shadow seemed as permanent as iron, where neon lights burned steadier than any Harry had ever seen before and painted eternal rainbows on the pavement, past a man in a tweed coat walking his Scottie dog and both of them as motionless as bronze figures.