Hanging a hard left into the street, Harry clipped a parked car with the rear bumper of the van but kept going, blowing the horn at the few ravers who had made it that far and were running down the middle of the street like terrified people in one of those Godzilla movies fleeing from the giant thunderlizard.
Connie said, “You pulled your gun on that bald guy.”
“Yeah.”
“I hear you tell him you’d blow his head off?”
“Something like that.”
“Didn’t show him your badge?”
“Figured he’d have respect for a gun, none at all for a badge.”
She said, “I could get to like you, Harry Lyon.”
“No future in it — unless we get past dawn.”
In seconds they were past all of the partiers who had left the warehouse on foot, and Harry tramped the accelerator all the way to the floor. They shot by the nursery, body shops, and recreational-vehicle storage lot that they had passed on the way in, and were soon beyond the partiers’ parked cars.
He wanted to be long gone from the area when the Laguna Beach Police arrived, which they would — and soon. Being caught in the aftermath of the rave debacle would tie them up too long, maybe just long enough so they would lose their one and only chance at getting the drop on Ticktock.
“Where you going?” Connie asked.
“The Green House.”
“Yeah. Maybe Sammy’s still there.”
“Sammy?”
“The bum. That was his name.”
“Oh, yeah. And the talking dog.”
“Talking dog?” she said.
“Well, maybe he doesn’t talk, but he’s got something to tell us we need to know, that’s for damn sure, and maybe he does talk, what the hell, who knows any more, it’s a crazy world, a crazy damn night. There are talking animals in fairy tales, why not a talking dog in Laguna Beach?”
Harry realized he was babbling, but he was driving so fast and recklessly that he didn’t want to take his eyes off the road even to glance at Connie and see if she was giving him a skeptical look.
She didn’t sound worried about his sanity when she said, “What’s the plan?”
“I think we’ve got a narrow window of opportunity.”
“Because he has to rest now and then. Like he told you on the car radio.”
“Yeah. Especially after something like this. So far there’s always been an hour or more between his… appearances.”
“Manifestations.”
“Whatever.”
After a few turns they were back in residential neighborhoods, working through Laguna toward the Pacific Coast Highway.
A police car and an ambulance, emergency beacons flashing, shot past them on a cross street, almost certainly answering a call to the warehouse.
“Fast response,” Connie said.
“Someone with a car phone must have dialed 911.”
Maybe help would arrive in time to save the girl who had lost an arm. Maybe the arm could even be saved, sewn back on. Yeah, and maybe Mother Goose was real.
Harry had been buoyant because they had escaped the Pause and the rave. But his adrenaline high faded swiftly as he recalled, too vividly, how savagely the golem had torn off the young woman’s slender arm.
Despair crept back in at the edges of his thoughts.
“If there’s a window of opportunity while he rests or even sleeps,” Connie said, “how can we possibly find him fast enough?”
“Not with one of Nancy Quan’s portraits, that’s for sure. No time for that approach any more.”
She said, “I think next time he manifests, he’ll kill us, no more playing around.”
“I think so, too.”
“Or at least kill me. Then you the time after that.”
“By dawn. That’s one promise our little boy will keep.”
They were both silent for a moment, somber.
“So where does that leave us?” she asked.
“Maybe the bum in front of The Green House—”
“Sammy.”
“—maybe he knows something that will help us. Or if not… then… hell, I don’t know. It looks hopeless, doesn’t it?”
“No,” she said sharply. “Nothing’s hopeless. Where there’s life, there’s hope. Where there’s hope, it’s always worth trying, worth going on.”
He wheeled around another corner from one street full of dark houses to another, straightened out the van, let up on the accelerator a little, and looked at her in astonishment. “Nothing’s hopeless? What’s happened to you?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. It’s still happening.”
6
Although they had spent at least half of the hour-long Pause on the run before they had wound up in the warehouse at the end of that canyon, they didn’t need nearly as long to get back to where they had started from. According to Connie’s wristwatch, they reached the coast highway less than five minutes after commandeering the nitrous-oxide dealers’ wheels, partly because they took a more direct return route and partly because Harry drove fast enough to scare even her.
In fact, when they slid to a stop in front of The Green House, with some still-unbroken Christmas lights clinking noisily along the sides of the van, the time was just thirty-five seconds past 1:37 in the morning. That was little more than eight minutes since the Pause had both begun and ended at 1:29, which meant they had taken about three minutes to fight their way out of the crowded warehouse and seize their transportation at gunpoint — though it sure had seemed a lot longer.
The tow truck and the Volvo, which had been frozen in the southbound lane, were gone. When time had started up again, their drivers had continued on with no realization that anything unusual had happened. Other traffic was moving north and south.
Connie was relieved to see Sammy standing on the sidewalk in front of The Green House. He was gesticulating wildly, arguing with the permed host in the Armani suit and hand-painted silk tie. One of the waiters was standing in the doorway, apparently prepared to help the boss if the confrontation got physical.
When Connie and Harry got out of the van, the host saw them and turned away from Sammy. “You!” he said. “My God, it’s you!” He came toward them purposefully, almost angrily, as if they had left without paying their check.
Bar patrons and other employees were at the windows, watching. Connie recognized some of them as the people who had been watching her and Harry with Sammy and the dog, and who had been frozen there, staring fixedly, after the Pause hit. They were no longer as rigid as stone, but they were still watching with fascination.
“What’s going on here?” the host asked as he approached, an edge of hysteria in his voice. “How did that happen, where did you go? What is this… this… this van!”
Connie had to remind herself that the man had seen them vanish in what seemed to him a split second. The dog had yelped and nipped the air and plunged for the shrubbery, alerting them that something was happening, which had spooked Sammy into sprinting for the alley. But Connie and Harry had remained on the sidewalk in full view of the people at the restaurant windows, the Pause had hit, they had been forced to run for their lives, then the Pause had ended without them where they originally had been on the sidewalk, and to the onlookers it had seemed as if two people had vanished into thin air. Only to turn up eight minutes later in a white van decorated with strings of red and green Christmas lights.
The host’s exasperation and curiosity were understandable.
If their window of opportunity for finding and dealing with Ticktock had not been so small, if the ticking seconds had not been leading them inexorably closer to sudden death, the uproar in front of the restaurant might even have been funny. Hell, it was funny, but that didn’t mean she and Harry could take the time to laugh at it. Maybe later. If they lived.