In addition to a nagging inability to define his own identity in a way that fully satisfied him—and compared to his brothers—Tommy suffered from an offspring crisis. He didn’t have any. To his mother, this was worse than a crisis; this was a tragedy. His parents were still old-world enough to think of children neither as mere responsibilities nor as hostages to fortune, but primarily as wealth, as blessings. In their view, the larger that a family grew, the better chance it had to survive the turmoil of the world and the more successful it would inevitably become. At thirty, unmarried, childless, with no prospects—except the prospect of a successful career as a novelist writing silly stories about a whiskey-guzzling maniac detective—Tommy was undermining his parents’ dreams of a sprawling Phan empire and the security that, to them, sheer numbers ensured.
His brother Ton, sixteen when they had fled Vietnam, was still sufficiently mired in the ways of the old world that he shared some of the elder Phans’ frustration with Tommy. Ton and Tommy had been reasonably close as brothers, but they had never been the kind of brothers who were also friends. Gi, on the other hand, though six years older than Tommy, was a brother and a friend and a confidant—or once had been—and if anyone in this world would give the devil-doll story a fair hearing, it would be Gi.
As Tommy crossed San Juaquin Hills Road, less than a mile from Pacific Coast Highway, he was planning the easiest route north to the family bakery in Garden Grove, where Gi managed the graveyard shift, so he didn’t immediately react to the peculiar noise that rose from the Corvette’s engine compartment. When he finally took note of it, he realized that he’d been dimly aware of the noise on a subconscious level for a couple of minutes: underlying the monotonous squeak-and-thump of the windshield wipers—a soft rattling, a whispery scraping as of metal abrading metal.
He was at last warm. He turned off the heater in order to hear the sound better.
Something was loose… and working steadily looser. Frowning, he leaned over the steering wheel, listening closely.
The noise persisted, low but troubling. He thought he detected an industrious quality to it.
He felt a queer vibration through the floorboards. The noise grew no louder, but the vibration increased.
Tommy glanced at the rear-view mirror. No traffic was close behind him, so he eased his foot off the accelerator.
As the sports car gradually slowed from fifty-five to forty miles per hour, the noise did not diminish in relation to the speed, but continued unabated.
The shoulder on his side of the highway was narrow, with a slope and then a dark field or a gully beyond, and Tommy didn’t want to be forced to pull off here in the blinding downpour. The Newport Beach Library lay in the near distance, deserted looking at this hour, and the lights of the high-rise office buildings and hotels in Fashion Island loomed somewhat farther away through the silvery veils of rain, but in spite of being in a busy commercial and residential area, this stretch of MacArthur Boulevard was less of a boulevard than its name implied, with no sidewalks or streetlamps along its westbound lanes. He wasn’t sure that he would be able to pull off the pavement far enough to eliminate the risk of being sideswiped—or worse—by passing traffic.
Abruptly the noise stopped.
The vibration ceased, as well.
The ‘vette purred along as smoothly as the dream machine that it was supposed to be.
Tentatively, he increased his speed.
The rattling and scraping didn’t return.
Tommy leaned back in his seat, letting out his pent-up breath, somewhat relieved but still concerned.
From under the hood came a sharp twang as of metal snapping under tremendous stress.
The steering wheel shuddered in Tommy’s hands. It pulled hard to the left.
“Oh, God.”
Traffic was headed upslope in the eastbound lanes. Two cars and a van. They were not moving as fast in the rain-slashed night as they would have been in better weather, but they were coming too fast nonetheless.
With both hands, Tommy pulled the wheel to the right. The car responded—but sluggishly.