Ryan Jahn - The Last Tomorrow

If his mind was clear he’d have thought of this much sooner. He’d have investigated it sooner. He used to be a good cop. He used to take pride in being a good cop. He can’t believe he let the junk get to him in this way. It’s confused his mind. He’s either on the stuff or sick and in need of it.

This job was the only thing he had left that he gave a damn about after Naomi died, and he’s thrown it away. He let himself stop caring. He told himself it didn’t matter. But he needs to care again, and he should care. Despite what he sometimes tells himself, he knows it matters.

He needs to get some sleep. It’s late and he needs to get some sleep. His eyes sting and he knows his mind isn’t functioning at full capacity. He needs to get some sleep, and tomorrow he needs to start approaching this case like a real cop. He needs to become a real cop again. He needs to start with that new piece of the puzzle and see if he can’t put together a different picture.

But not tonight. His brain is too worked over. He needs rest.

He throws the magazine he’d been reading to the floor, then reaches to the nightstand and clicks off the lamp.

1

Next morning, with sunlight just beginning to seep in through the curtains, Eugene lights a cigarette and watches Evelyn as she stirs in bed, asleep on her stomach, taped up so she can move neither her arms nor her legs. Until this is finished, he’s stuck in a dangerous situation with a dangerous woman. He might still feel love for her, but that’s got nothing to do with anything. If they ever had a chance together, and he doesn’t think they did, that chance is a thing of the past.

You should kill her. You’re going have to do it eventually. You know that, right? If you’re to walk away from this situation she can’t live to walk away from it herself.

He closes his eyes and pinches the bridge of his nose, lifting his glasses and rubbing the skin where they usually rest.

You don’t know that. I might think of a way for her to live.

God, he’s tired.

No, you have to kill her. You might as well do it now.

But he can’t kill her now. If his plan is going to work she can’t have been dead for days when the police find her. They have ways of determining such things.

I can’t think like that. She doesn’t have to die. I’ll think of a way around it.

It’s been a long night. He hasn’t slept at all.

2

Once her wrists and ankles were taped he rolled her onto her back. She glared at him with tear-filled eyes, a bubble of snot in her left nostril making her look to Eugene like a small child, and called him a motherfucker. I trusted you, you piece of shit. I was willing to give up everything for you, and you do this? She was nude. Her breasts had settled toward her armpits. Her red pubic hair glistened with sweat and flakes of his dried seed. Seeing her that way, nude and vulnerable and once-used, made him feel uncomfortably predacious, so he pulled her into a sitting position and wrapped a sheet around her shoulders.

‘I’m sorry. I can’t think of another way out of this.’

‘Fuck you.’ Rage flared in her eyes.

He looked back in silence for some time, then nodded, resigned to what this situation had become. He turned and walked to her purse. He picked it up and dug through it, found a Berretta 418 in a thigh holster, then the message he’d left her at the front desk, which was what he’d been looking for.

He took that note and the biblical passage he typed earlier in the evening and carried them both to the bathroom sink. He set them on fire and watched them burn. He turned on the water and rinsed the ashes down the drain.

He walked back out to the main room, removed the gloves from his sweaty hands, lit a cigarette. He sat down.

‘Whatever your plan is, it won’t work.’ She turned to look at him after she spoke, the anger now gone from her eyes.

‘That so?’

‘You know it is. Your hand is shaking.’

He looked at the cigarette pinched between his shivering fingers as a short piece of ash fell from it to his leg. He rubbed it into the fabric of his pants.

‘It’s been a long day.’

‘You’re scared. I understand that. But you’re being stupid. We had a plan, a good plan, and we can still follow through on it. Lou will take his own fall and that’ll be that. We can be together. Isn’t that what you want?’

‘Lou will take his own fall, but it can’t happen like you planned.’

‘Why?’

‘Because of your father.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘I think you do.’

She looked away a moment, sighed, looked back.

‘You mind sharing that cigarette?’

He got to his feet, walked to the bed, sat down beside her. He held the cigarette to her lips and let her take a drag. When he pulled the cigarette away her lipstick was smeared across the end of it. She exhaled.

‘We can go away,’ she said. ‘Together.’

‘I want to believe you.’

‘But you don’t.’

‘I don’t think you’re lying.’

‘What do you think?’

‘I think if we do your plan your dad will know I know too much and want me dead. I think I’m nothing but some guy you met less than a week ago and no matter how much you protest he’ll still kill me. And I think that even if your dad by some miracle does let me live you’ve already destroyed my life once and no matter what you say now, no matter how sincerely, if we’re together for long enough you’ll do it again. I can’t let that happen.’

She looked at him with red eyes.

‘Give me another drag.’

He held the cigarette to her lips. She inhaled.

‘Is that it then?’

‘I guess it is.’

‘You’re making a mistake.’

‘I’m sorry, Evelyn.’

3

She opens her eyes to see a nicotine-stained wall. She smells cigarette smoke. The room is cool. Her right shoulder aches with a bone-deep pain. She’s confused, doesn’t know where she is. She tries to sit up, tries to reach out and push herself into a sitting position, but something holds her hands behind her back. After a moment she remembers. She rolls over and with her stomach muscles pulls herself up into a sitting position. She looks across the room. Eugene sits in a chair. A cigarette between his fingers sends smoke wafting toward the ceiling. He looks tired, haggard. She can almost feel sorry for him. She understands what he’s going through. She thinks she does, anyway, to some degree. But she can’t let him do what he plans to do. She isn’t even certain of what it is, but she knows she needs to stop it. It was her job to come out to the West Coast and clean things up; instead she only managed to smear the mess around.

She was stupid to think she could run away from the business, stupid to think she could shack up with some milkman.

Stupid to think she might love him.

For a brief time it made her into a child again. Those fantasies of the future were childish fantasies. She’d get bored with any life other than the one she now lives. No other life suits her. She can’t afford childish emotions like love.

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

So he makes her heart beat faster simply by being near her. So he makes her palms sweat. So he makes her stomach feel funny. None of that means anything. She momentarily regressed into childhood, that’s all, into feeling that she needed someone other than herself to rely on. She momentarily allowed herself to go soft.

It won’t happen again.

Eugene takes a drag from his cigarette, then puts it out on the bottom of his shoe and sets the butt on the edge of the table.

‘Good morning.’

She doesn’t respond.