Ryan Jahn - The Last Tomorrow

Lou pulls open the door. She pushes into the room past him.

‘It smells like asshole in here, Lou.’

‘Why are you here?’

‘To get this over with,’ Evelyn says. Then she unzips her purse. With a white napkin she removes a revolver and sets it on a table. Then she removes a folded-up sheet of paper with writing on.

‘His fingerprints should be all over both of them.’

‘What’s the paper?’

‘You know how to read.’

‘And the knife?’

She shakes her head. ‘I fell asleep last night and this morning had to do what I could. I got you the gun.’

‘Will he notice it missing?’

‘He has work, then his appointment. I doubt he’ll have time to notice it missing. I’m going to bed.’

She turns and walks back out to the corridor. She walks to her room and keys it open and steps inside. She’s surprised by how much she hates herself for what she’s doing. She tells herself to be hard. She tells herself to get her head right. This is business. If there’s no room for God in this business, there’s no room for love.

Love? There’s sex and there’s marriage; she doesn’t even know what love is.

She unzips her dress and lets it fall to her feet and kicks it away. She crawls into bed. She can still smell the man she spent the night with on her skin, she can taste him in her mouth. She covers herself in blankets and closes her eyes, hoping she might be able to catch a few more hours’ sleep. But she can sense the morning’s swift approach. Soon it will be daylight and her mind knows it.

This is the reason there’s no chance of sleep. This is the reason her mind will not go silent. There’s no other possible explanation.

This is business.

3

Eugene’s experience of his day is like a dream remembered. There are faces and colors and places, but they don’t combine to create an experience. He goes to the warehouse and picks up the day’s work; he drives his route and delivers his milk; he collects payment when payment is due; when he sees someone he knows he says hello, yeah, it does look like a storm might be brewing, hope I get done with the job before it starts pouring — but none of his conscious mind is present, and when the day’s over and he’s parking his truck in front of a hotel at 535 South Grand Avenue, he remembers very little of it.

He lights a cigarette and inhales deeply and pulls it from his mouth. He holds it between his fingers and looks at the orange glow of the cherry. He glances over at the Shenefield Hotel, a fourteen-storey block building made filthy by smog. Inside it, someone awaits his arrival. He wonders if he’s making a mistake coming here without the money. There’s a chance he is, a chance he’s making a serious mistake coming here at all, but there was no alternative. He doesn’t have the money. He doesn’t know a way of getting it. He tells himself, too, that even if he could get the money he wouldn’t. He tells himself there’s no way he’d bring a thousand dollars down here without knowing what he was walking into, without knowing who was doing this to him. He tells himself that, but he doesn’t believe it. If he had the money he’d pay. The district attorney might not care about such a nobody as him. The grand-jury investigation could end with the district attorney being told there’s no case. The grand jury could decide there is a case, but the trial result in a not-guilty verdict. Any number of things might happen. But mights and coulds don’t make for restful nights. Even certain doom is somehow better than not knowing. You can wrap yourself in the dark blanket of doom and get some comfort from it. It’s warmer, anyway, than the frigid air of uncertainty.

He steps from the milk truck, tossing his hat onto the seat. He runs his fingers through his oily hair, takes a final drag from his cigarette, flicks it away. Walks under an American flag snapping in the breeze and, doorman pulling the door open for him, thank you, into the hotel lobby.

After taking a few steps inside he stops and stands and does nothing else. He exhales in a sigh and tells himself God hates a coward. Maybe it’s even true.

He walks to the elevator and hits the call button.

A minute later he’s stepping off the elevator and onto the sixth floor.

The corridor is wide and carpeted with red carpet. The walls are white. A man is walking toward him. He was stepping out of one of the rooms as Eugene was stepping off the elevator. Eugene didn’t see which room. He wonders if it’s his man come to greet him. He’s a thin man with a pale, skeletal face, his black hair slicked back with pomade. Eugene continues to walk as if everything were normal, but he watches as the man approaches him. Watches him with great caution. The man wears a black pinstriped suit. He also wears black leather gloves, despite it being spring in Los Angeles.

They pass one another. The man nods, makes brief eye contact, and is gone. It wasn’t his man. Of course it wasn’t. His man’s in room 645.

Eugene wishes he’d thought to bring his gun. Instead it lies useless on his dining table back home. It’d be a good thing to have. Or maybe it would be yanked out of his hand and he’d be shot with it.

He stops at the hotel room. The door’s unlatched, the doorframe cracked, the wood split. He glances back toward the man who walked by him, the thin man with the gloved hands. He stepped out of a room — was it this room? Eugene doesn’t know.

And the corridor is now empty.

He steps forward and something squishes beneath his foot. He looks down. A puddle of liquid on the carpet, darkening it. He reaches down to touch the puddle. His fingers come away wet with red liquid, with blood, and the blood’s still warm, near body temperature.

He closes his eyes, exhales, opens his eyes.

Then opens the door.

1

Vivian pulls a black dress from her closet and holds it up at arm’s length to give it a once-over. She picks a few pieces of lint from it. It’s a nice dress and aside from being perhaps too brief quite funereal in its simplicity. She believes it’ll do. She will, after all, only be sitting in a pew beside Can-dice while a man of the cloth speaks of death and the departed and how the soul may move on but our memories remain, God bless us all, amen. She wonders how Candice is feeling. She seems to be holding up fairly well, as well as could be expected under these circumstances, but people put up facades. It’s hard to tell what’s going on inside another person’s mind.

Sometimes it is. But she’s fairly certain Leland knew exactly what she was thinking when he walked out the front door fifteen minutes ago, when he left to meet with Seymour Markley. He stood in the entry sulking, saying don’t be like that, darlin, like he thought he could just do whatever he wanted, ignoring her protests, and she had to be okay with it. She isn’t okay with it. She might be a whore, as Markley said, and she might be a blackmailer, but she’s not a liar. She wasn’t until Leland made her one.

And aside from any ethical qualms she has with what Leland is doing — and despite who and what she is, she does have those: how she makes her money might not be legal, but it’s honest — there’s another reason she’s upset with him. She lives by a rule that Leland’s breaking. You do not put your hand twice into the same till. Not unless you want your fingers cut off when the drawer slams shut. Leland knows this, they’ve been through this before, but once more he’s being stupid about it.

It infuriates her.

It doesn’t even matter if it works out. It has before. That isn’t the point. Every time it works out, it only encourages Leland to try something like this again, and next time it won’t work out. Or the time after that. You have to do things the right way. You have to be honest. You’re dealing with important people who aren’t used to being made vulnerable. You’re embarrassing them. You’re making demands. You have to be straight with them if you expect to come out of that unscathed.