Ryan Jahn - The Last Tomorrow

He’s a vicious dog. He’s a wild horse. He’s anything he wants to be.

As he continues north apartment buildings give way to houses with neat square lawns. Eventually he arrives at one with a

FOR SALE

sign planted in the grass and walks up the oil-spotted driveway to look inside. He hops up three steps to the front porch, puts his face to the glass, sees an empty living room. The beige carpet has been recently vacuumed. The walls are white. A few nails jut from them where pictures once hung. He checks the door and finds it locked, and there’s no key under the mat. He walks around the building looking for a window to crawl through. He finds one cracked open a few inches at the back of the house and pries the screen out of the way, leaning it against the outside wall. Then pushes the window the rest of the way open and climbs inside.

He walks around the house, exploring the empty rooms, inhaling the scent of fresh paint. He checks the kitchen cupboards and drawers, hoping for a discovery of some kind, but they’re empty with the exception of a box of matches in a drawer near the stove.

He carries the box with him to the living room and sits down on the floor, leaning against the wall. He pulls the gun from his pants and sets it down beside him. Then he pulls the key from the side of the sardine tin, puts it into the metal eye at the top, and begins peeling the lid off, pulling away a twisted metal ribbon.

He’ll have to eat the sardines with his fingers. He doesn’t care. There’s no one around to yell at him for eating with his hands, no one around to smack him upside the head and call him a piggy little shit, so there isn’t any reason to care.

Once the lid is free of the tin he sets it on the floor beside the gun and plucks a sardine from within. He puts it into his mouth and chews. It tastes good. He licks the oil off his fingers, then eats another sardine, and another, and another.

When the tin is empty he sets it on the floor and wipes his fingers clean on the carpet, front and back. He stares at the white wall in front of him. He likes this, sitting here alone, not worrying about anything, not answering to anybody.

He thinks of his mother.

He knows he can’t go home. He knows that, he isn’t a baby. But he thinks maybe he should let her know he’s all right. She must be worried.

But not right now. He wants to be nowhere else but here right now, alone in this empty room, alone and safe. He was almost killed this morning, had to shoot someone to get away. The police are probably looking for him. He doesn’t want to go back out into that world. It’s a mean world filled with traps you can’t see till you step in them.

He unwraps the cellophane from his packet of cigarettes, peels away the foil, and plucks one from within. He lights a match and inhales.

The world shouldn’t scare him like that. He tells himself he shouldn’t let the world scare him. The world might be full of meanness, but he can handle it. He’s meaner.

He’s a vicious dog. He’s a wild horse.

He doesn’t need a mother. He doesn’t need anybody.

He’s a vicious dog. He’s a rampaging bull.

He begins to cry.

1

Eugene leans hard into a turn, swinging onto Sunset Boulevard, and speeds his way west toward Schwab’s Pharmacy. He squints ahead at the palm trees lining either side of the street, narrow trunks bending into the air topped with sagging fronds both brown and green. Behind them, a sky the color of faded denim in which a few wispy clouds blow past slow as they disintegrate.

He still doesn’t know what to do. He only knows what not to. He simply can’t go along with Evelyn’s plan. He’d never walk away alive. The police need someone to pin those murders on and he is that someone. He can blather all he wants and they’ll simply think he’s trying to talk his way out of the rap. It’s what a guilty man would do. But if he manages to pin the murder on Louis Lynch, he’s no longer of use to James Manning. Instead he’s a threat, he knows too much, and there’s only one way to ensure that guys who know too much don’t say too much: fill their mouths with dirt.

If he knew he could trust Evelyn he would tell her his concerns. Maybe together they’d be able to work something out. But he doesn’t know he can trust her. Just the opposite. He’s almost certain he can’t. He wants to, his heart wants him to, but hearts are stupid. And love is a liar.

For now he must keep his thoughts to himself. He must start planning what he’s going to do. In the back of his mind, in the darkness beyond the light of conscious thought, just beyond the edge at which that lamp’s glow fades, something is pulling itself from the mud, an idea, but he doesn’t yet know what it looks like. He can merely sense that it’s there, picking itself up, taking shape.

He pulls to a stop at the curb behind the Schwab’s delivery motorcycle. He steps off the bike, toes down the kickstand, and walks across the wide sidewalk to the front door. He pushes through.

Just inside the doorway he lights a cigarette, picks a bit of tobacco from the end of his tongue, and scans the anonymous faces lining the counter. He and Evelyn see one another at the same moment. She raises her hand in a wave, a touch of a smile on her gash-red lips. He nods, takes a drag from his cigarette, and makes his way toward her, reminding himself that she betrayed him, that she can’t be trusted, that she’s a serpent and has proven it by striking once already. But as he approaches her his palms begin to sweat. His mouth goes dry.

2

Evelyn watches Eugene walk toward her, a smile touching her lips as he approaches, but despite the smile this is serious business. Doing this will put Daddy at risk. She came out to the West Coast to take care of some trouble, but instead she’s here creating it. And the most horrible thing is, she doesn’t care. She should care, it’s her job to care, but she doesn’t. She can’t. For the first time in her life something other than her mind is guiding her, and she’s going to let it.

And despite the fact she’s creating trouble for Daddy, she’s fairly certain he’ll be fine. He can walk through a fire and come out the other side unharmed.

He certainly won’t go to prison.

They’ll arrest Lou and question him about why he killed Teddy Stuart. They may even bloody him up some. But Lou won’t talk. He’s a professional.

Not that he’d have a chance to open his mouth if he wanted to. He’d be dead before he could put his hand on the bible. He’d be dead before he got anywhere near a courtroom. It’d be another suspicious death in a string of them, but Daddy’s had suspicious deaths dragging behind him like anchors for thirty years. There’s no reason to think this would be the one whose weight would finally stop him.

And this will get Lou out of her way. For six years they’ve been in conflict with one another. This will put an end to it. A definitive one.

For the first time in her life something other than her mind is guiding her, and so far as she can tell, it’s wiser than she is.

Eugene sits down on the stool beside her.

‘Evelyn.’

‘Gene,’ she says, ‘I’m glad you came.’

He doesn’t respond. He simply takes a drag from his cigarette and nods without taking his eyes off the napkin dispenser sitting on the counter in front of him. His eyes are bloodshot, his shoulders slumped.

‘You look tired.’

‘Trouble sleeping.’

‘Me too. I kept thinking about you.’

A barmaid walks over and asks them what they’ll have. Evelyn orders a turkey sandwich on rye. Eugene asks for coffee.

After the barmaid leaves Eugene says, ‘Do you have the key?’