Ryan Jahn - The Last Tomorrow

He aims the gun with a shaky hand at the bald spot at the top of Neil’s head. He closes his eyes. Neil’s going to look up now and stop him.

Right now. Right now.

Sandy opens his eyes. The man still sits, sagging, looking down at a dark circle of spit on the carpet. Drool hangs from his face. He has a strange rotten-sweet smell to him, like a fruit bowl left on the table too long in the heat of summer. He always smells that way after he’s been drinking. Sandy’s come to associate that sweet smell of fermentation with violence, with getting hit.

Tears stream down his face.

‘You shouldn’t have been so mean,’ he says.

His stepfather starts to look up at him now, too late, saying in a slurred voice, ‘Wha-’

But that’s all he ever manages.

1

Teddy wakes up face-down in a parking lot. He rolls over, sits up, touches his face. There are bits of gravel imbedded there. He brushes them from his cheek and they fall to the ground.

At first he’s possessed by confusion and a strange uncomprehending sadness, as if he’d awakened from a nightmare he could not quite remember — just vague unpleasant images and a sound like a gate swinging on a rusty hinge — but that soon gives way to anger as he remembers what happened, how he was humiliated.

He looks to his right and sees a black coupe looming over him. Reaches up and grabs the jutting door handle. Pulls himself to his feet, swaying there a moment unbalanced. Looks down at his clothes. His suit is ruined. It’s covered in grime and dirt, one of his waistcoat’s buttons is missing, and a pocket has torn loose.

His head throbs.

He touches his temple and feels the sharp sting of pain and a crust of dried blood.

That little pimple-faced son of a bitch.

Teddy’s gonna make him sorry. The hell he won’t. He’ll not be made to feel this way by anyone. He’s been through too much in the last ten years to take what he took tonight without giving some back.

He’s been through far too much.

2

A decade ago Teddy was simply an accountant in Jersey City. He had, over the years, developed a reputation as someone who could and would massage numbers when necessary, and that occasionally brought those with less than fully legal interests to his office. But these were smalltime guys. Greek deli owners who wanted their taxes to reflect a mere fraction of their income, cops who skimmed drugs from busts to resell on the street and wanted a way to invest the money without raising eyebrows, that sort of thing. He’d never expected the Man to walk through the finger-smudged front door of his small rented office. But that was what happened. He walked in and sat down across from Teddy and crossed his not insubstantial arms in front of him after scratching his fat rippled neck like an overstuffed sausage skin and said, ‘I think we can probably do a little business, you and me.’

At first Teddy simply handled taxes for a couple of the Man’s legitimate businesses — a car dealership in Newark, a stationery store in Hoboken that maybe saw more cash filter through its till than was strictly legitimate. Sometimes the numbers by themselves wouldn’t say exactly what you wanted them to say. But Teddy was adept at algebraic ventriloquism, could make numbers say whatever he wanted them to say, and he thought nothing of the Man’s requests.

And, as will happen, when the requests got more extreme Teddy found himself going along with them, telling himself it’s not that big a deal, not much worse than anything I’ve already done, and now a decade later he’s doing things he never would have agreed to during that first meeting.

Teddy climbed down that ladder same as anyone would: one rung at a time.

Now he knows as much about the Man’s business affairs as the Man himself, which means, of course, that there’s no way to sever ties with him. The only thing that can end their relationship at this point is death, either Teddy’s or the Man’s.

But Teddy knows which is likelier.

3

Despite the stories he’d heard about the Man’s ruthlessness, Teddy went a very long time before seeing that side of him. The Man was quiet. You had to lean toward him to hear what he was saying. And his voice was gentle when he spoke, as if soothing a frightened animal. When he talked it was because he had something specific to say and once it was said he stopped working his jaw. He could, at times, seem almost shy. But the stories Teddy heard about him suggested a monster, someone who’d snap your legs for the smallest offense, who’d put a hatchet into your skull if he even suspected something more serious, who’d put your corpse on the hood of your mother’s car if you expired without first apologizing for what he thought you’d done. And then, when he was finished, he’d wash his hands of blood and go to his favorite steakhouse, sit at his corner booth (always held for him, no matter how busy the place got) and have himself an English-cut prime rib slathered in horseradish, a baked potato fully dressed, two orders of creamed spinach, two slices of apple pie with melted cheese on top, and finally a glass of scotch. Then, if it was the weekend and he wasn’t staying in his apartment in the city, he’d head home to Shrewsbury and sleep like a baby in his large comfortable bed, warmed by the body of his faithful wife, who seemed to be the only person on the East Coast who had no idea what he did for a living, how he paid for their four-thousand-square-foot house and their frequent vacations.

At first Teddy was certain the stories that surrounded the Man were simply part of the mythology that built up around him during his twenty — now thirty — years in business. One could not do the kind of work the Man did without being hard, of course, but Teddy found the stories which surrounded him impossible to believe. These were things no human was capable of.

But things have changed since Teddy first heard those stories. He is, for one thing, no longer certain the Man is strictly human.

In the years since Teddy first started hearing stories about the Man he’s witnessed horrors beyond anything Goya could have imagined, and without having to close his eyes or paint them into existence. He knows now that if the stories he heard aren’t true, other stories like them are. And worse.

But despite what he’s witnessed, despite what he’s experienced, he’s still only an accountant. A corrupt accountant, sure. He massages numbers, he helps launder dirty money, he delivers and explains the terms of briefcase loans to people whose names end up in obituary pages. But his hands to now have remained bloodless.

Yet there’s a part of him that believes he’s learned important lessons in detached violence. So he believes he knows what he’s getting into as he removes the knife from his coat pocket, as he thumbs it open, as he stands in the shadows of night to await the kid. He’s wrong about what he is capable of, of course, wrong about his ability to remain detached from what he’s doing, but he can’t know that.

Otherwise he wouldn’t do what he does.

4

He stands in the dark parking lot with a knife gripped in his fist and watches the red-painted metal back door. The knife was a birthday gift from his ex-wife. He’s been carrying it for years. He frequently has to deal with dangerous people, hard people, people who view weakness as an invitation, people whose first instinct is destruction, and while he’s never cut anyone he has on more than one occasion used the blade to bluff his way out of a situation. He might have knelt before the toilet later, covered in sweat, entire body shaking, but he got through.

One thing about working for the Man: people who have something against him but are afraid to take him on directly will make themselves feel tough by coming after you instead. It’s what happened tonight. He’s sure of it.