Dragon Tears

Dare we linger, dare we skate?

Dare we laugh or celebrate,

knowing we may strain the ice?

Preserve the ice at any price?

— The Book of Counted Sorrows

When tempest-tossed,

embrace chaos.

— The Book of Counted Sorrows

THREE

1

They took the coast highway because a tanker truck loaded with liquid nitrogen had overturned at the junction of the Costa Mesa and San Diego freeways, transforming them into parking lots. Harry cranked the Honda, weaving from lane to lane, speeding through yellow traffic lights, running the reds if no cars were approaching on the cross streets, driving more like Connie in a mood than like himself.

As relentless as a circling vulture, doom shadowed his every thought. In Connie’s kitchen, he’d spoken confidently of Ticktock’s vulnerability. But how vulnerable could the guy be if he could laugh off bullets and bonfires?

He said, “Thanks for not being like the people in one of those movies, they see huge bats against the full moon, victims with all the blood drained out, but they keep arguing it can’t be happening, vampires aren’t real.”

“Or like the priest sees the little girl’s head spin three-hundred-sixty degrees, her bed levitates — but he still can’t believe there’s a devil, so he consults psychology books to diagnose her.”

“What listing you think he looks up in the index?”

Connie said, “Under ‘W’ for ‘Weird shit.’”

They crossed a bridge over a back channel of Newport Harbor. House and boat lights glimmered on the black water.

“Funny,” Harry said. “You go through life thinking people who believe this stuff are as dumb as lobotomized newts — then something like this happens, and you’re instantly able to accept all kinds of fantastic ideas. At heart we’re all moon-worshipping savages who know the world’s a lot stranger than we want to believe.”

“Not that I’ve accepted your theory yet, your psycho superman.”

He looked at her. In the instrument-panel light, her face resembled a sculpture of some goddess from Greek mythology, rendered in hard bronze with verdigris patina. “If not my theory, then what?”

Instead of answering him, she said, “If you’re gonna drive like me, keep your eyes on the road.”

That was good advice, and he took it in time to avoid making a ton and a half of Honda jelly against the back of a lumbering old Mercedes driven by Methuselah’s grandmother and sporting a bumper sticker that said LICENSED TO KILL. Tires squealing, he whipped around the sedan. As they passed it, the venerable lady behind the wheel scowled and gave them the finger.

“Even grandmothers aren’t grandmothers any more,” Connie said.

“If not my theory, then what?” he persisted.

“I don’t know. I’m just saying — if you’re going to surf on the chaos, better never think you’ve got the pattern of the currents all figured out, ‘cause that’s when a big wave will dump you.”

He thought about that, driving in silence for a while.

To their left, the Newport Center hotels and office towers drifted by as if they were moving instead of the car, great lighted ships sailing the night on mysterious missions. The bordering lawns and rows of palms were unnaturally green and too perfect to be real, like a gargantuan stage setting. The recent storm seemed to have swept across California from out of another dimension, washing the world with strangeness, leaving behind a residue of dark magic.

“What about your mom and dad?” Connie asked. “This guy said he’d destroy everyone you love, then you.”

“They’re a few hundred miles up the coast. They’re out of this.”

“We don’t know how far he can reach.”

“If he can reach that far, he is God. Anyway, remember what I said, how maybe this guy pins a psychic tag on you? Like game wardens tag a deer or bear with an electronic gizmo to learn its migratory habits. That feels right. Which means it’s possible he can’t find my mom and dad unless I lead him to them. Maybe all he knows about me is what I’ve shown him since he tagged me this afternoon.”

“So you came to me first because…”

Because I love you? he wondered. But he said nothing.

He was relieved when she let him off that hook:

“… because we brought Ordegard down together. And if this guy was controlling Ordegard, he’s almost as angry with me as with you.”

“I had to warn you,” Harry said. “We’re in this together.”

Though he was aware of her studying him with keen interest, she said nothing. He pretended to be oblivious of her analytic stare.

After a while she said, “You think this Ticktock can tune in and hear us, see us, any time he wants? Like now?”

“I don’t know.”

“He can’t know everything, like God,” Connie said. “So maybe we’re just a blinking light on his mental tracking board, and he can only see or hear us when we can see and hear him.”

“Maybe. Probably. Who knows?”

“We better hope that’s how it is. Because if he’s listening and watching all the time, we don’t have a snowball’s chance in Hell of nailing the son of a bitch. The moment we start getting close, he’ll burn us to the ground as sure as he burned down your condo.”

On the shop-lined main street of Corona Del Mar, and along the dark Newport coast where land was being graded for a new community on the ocean-facing hills and where enormous earth-moving machines stood like prehistoric beasts asleep on their feet, Harry had a crawling sensation along the back of his neck. Descending the coast highway into Laguna Beach, it got worse. He felt as if he were being watched in the same way that a mouse is watched by a stalking cat.

Laguna was an arts colony and tourist mecca, still renowned for its beauty even though it had seen better days. Speckled with golden lights and adorned with a softening mantle of greenery, serried hills sloped down from the east to the shores of the Pacific, as graceful as a lovely woman descending a stairway to the surf. But tonight the lady seemed less lovely than dangerous.