Deciding that he should at least call his mother, he picked up the car phone. But he put it down again without punching in her number.
Car phones for big shots. You big shot now? Phone and drive too dangerous. Gun in one hand, whiskey bottle in other, how you hold phone anyway?
Tommy reached to the passenger seat and briefly put his right hand on the Heckler & Koch. The shape of the pistol, the sense of godlike power cast in steel, did not comfort him.
Minutes later, after the rhythmic thump of the wind-shield wipers had once more half hypnotized him, he came out of his daze and saw that he was on MacArthur Boulevard, on the southern end of Newport Beach. He was travelling west in light traffic.
According to the dashboard clock, the time was 10:26p.m.
He couldn’t go on like this, driving aimlessly through the night until he ran out of fuel. Preoccupied as he was, he might become so inattentive that he skidded on the rain-slick pavement and crashed into another car.
He decided to seek family help, after all, but not from his mother and father. He would go to his older and beloved brother Gi Minh Phan.
Gi had changed his name too – from Phan Minh Gi, merely reversing the order to place the surname last. For a while he had considered taking an American name, as Tommy had done, but decided against it, which earned points with their parents, who were far too conservative to adopt new names themselves. Gi had given American names to his four children – Heather, Jennifer, Kevin, and Wesley; however, that was all right with Mom and Dad because all four had been born in the United States.
The oldest of the three Phan brothers, Ton That, eight years Tommy’s senior, had five children, all born in the USA, and each of them enjoyed both a Vietnamese and an American name. Ton’s first-born was a daughter whose legal name was Mary Rebecca but who was also known as Thu-Ha. Ton’s kids called one another by their Vietnamese names when they were around their grandparents and other traditionalist elders, used their American names when with friends of their own age, and used both names with their parents as the situation seemed to require, yet not one of them had an identity crisis.
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.