Ryan Jahn - The Last Tomorrow

He feels sweaty and sick in his stomach. His legs feel cramped. He rubs his face, walks back to his room, grabs a clean pair of underwear. He looks at the brown paper bag in the top drawer of his dresser, tucked in beside his underclothes, but tells himself no, don’t, not right before a job. You have to keep this in check. You can’t let yourself lose control. He pushes the drawer closed, tries to massage the cramp out of his left thigh.

Ignore it.

He grabs a towel from the back of a chair where he set it out to dry and walks down the hallway to the second-floor bathroom. His landlady walks behind him telling him no showers after nine o’clock, it wakes the other tenants. He tells her your running mouth is more likely to wake them than running water, so why don’t you clap your trap. Then he walks into the bathroom and closes the door in her face. He turns on the shower and waits for the water to get hot. While he waits he pulls off his underpants and kicks them into the corner. He steps into the shower with one sock still on his foot, curses, pulls it off his foot, throws it over the curtain rod. It hangs there, dripping water onto the floor.

He washes himself quickly — armpits, asshole, face, and feet — steps out of the shower, dries off. He wipes the mirror and looks at himself, deciding he doesn’t need to shave. He puts on his clean underwear and pads back to his room. He slips into blue slacks, a white shirt, a holster, a red tie, a coat. He runs his fingers through his wet hair and puts a fedora onto his head. He clips his badge onto his belt.

The telephone in the hallway rings again.

He walks out and picks it up himself.

‘Captain?’

‘Friedman.’

‘Shit.’

‘Nice to hear your voice, too, Carl. You mind picking me up on the way?’

‘It’s not on the way.’

‘You mind picking me up not on the way?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Will you do it anyhow?’

‘You need to get yourself a more reliable car.’

‘This week. Will you pick me up?’

‘Yeah.’

He drops the phone.

Locks his room door.

Heads down the stairs to the front of the house.

Two steps from the exit door, his stomach goes sour. He turns around, walks to the first-floor bathroom (which none of the tenants are supposed to use, but he isn’t walking back upstairs), unsnaps his belt, hooks his thumbs in, and pulls down his pants and underwear in one motion. He sits on the toilet just in time. He’s been constipated for two days and now diarrhea. While he’s there he checks his pockets for cigarettes, finds a crumpled packet of Chesterfields, slips one between his lips, lights it. He takes a deep drag. When he’s finished with his shit he wipes twice, pulls up his pants, buckles his belt. He checks his stool for blood, but finds none. He always expects blood in his stool, but there never is any. Sometimes he’s disappointed, sometimes relieved. Depends on his mood. He flushes, takes another drag from his cigarette, heads once more toward the front door.

This time he makes it through, pulls it shut behind him, trudges across the lawn to a black Ford parked at the curb.

It takes three attempts to get it started, but finally the engine rumbles to life.

He rolls down the window and inhales the chill night air. He takes another drag from his cigarette and steels himself for what’s coming.

He likes the puzzle aspect of being murder police, likes fitting together the pieces till he has a picture of what happened, but the blood and loss he hates. The dull shocked expressions on the faces of those left behind. The swollen eyes. The question there’s no answer to: why. You try to wall yourself off from that part of it, crack jokes (as long as survivors aren’t around), pretend you don’t care, but you can’t block it all out. It simply can’t be done.

Still, you try.

He’s become, in the last several months, better at it than many.

He puts the car into gear and gets it rolling.

Despite what he will have to deal with at the scene he’s glad to have a case. It might distract him from everything else that’s going on in his life right now. Something outside himself and his own bullshit. Even someone else’s pain would be better than his own, and he’ll do his best to avoid even that. He’ll focus instead on how the pieces fit together. If you think of human troubles, you’re thinking human thoughts, and those just get in the way. Human emotions get in the way. The trick is to feel nothing. The trick is to keep your soul winter-numb.

He drives in silence through the night, stopping only once between the boarding house and the murder scene. His partner Zach Friedman is already in front of his house when Carl pulls to the curb. He’s standing on the porch sipping coffee from a red cup.

He pulls open the car door and gets inside.

‘Thanks for picking me up.’

‘You’re buying breakfast when we get done with this.’

‘Deal.’

Fourteen minutes after pulling away from one curb they pull up to another. Carl brings the car to a stop behind a row of police vehicles. Wooden sawhorses stand in the street, cordoning off a large area, and uniformed police officers stand with them, smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee from thermoses. Other cops are already knocking on doors, asking questions. And the crime lab boys are going about their business flashing bulbs and taking swabs.

Carl and Friedman push out of the car and walk toward Captain Ellis, who stands smoking a cigarette and watching the madness.

To no one in particular Carl says, ‘What do we got?’

Sam Avery from the crime lab says, ‘White male between thirty-five and fourty years old. About five foot ten, one ninety-five. Supine on the street beside a motor vehicle. Gunshot wound to the left temple, another to the crown of the head. Five-pointed star carved into the forehead. Doesn’t look like he put up a fight. Gunman must’ve took him by surprise.’

‘Interesting,’ Carl says.

The trick is to keep your soul winter-numb.

2

Candice leans against the outside wall, hugging herself, shielding herself against the night. Vivian stands silent beside her. Candice’s favorite thing about Vivian is that she knows when not to speak. You wouldn’t think it to look at her, you wouldn’t think she’d know two plus two, her large eyes seeming lifeless as empty fishbowls more often than not, but she can be surprising in her intelligence, and in how she’s intelligent.

Most people don’t know when to keep their mouths shut.

Candice watches the chaos. Several police cars, a coroner’s van, sawhorses, cops knocking on doors, voices overlapping one another. Do you know what time it is? I don’t care if you are the police. Has anyone told you what his wife does for a living? That poor little boy. And below the voices she imagines she can hear the steady grinding sound of the world turning on its axis, a sound like a great stone rolling.

And Neil is dead. Her husband of four years is dead. The only man who’d ever stuck around once he learned she had a son. He’s dead in the street while the world continues to turn and somewhere someone’s laughing. There is no justice.

She finds a man, a man with a decent job, a man who loves her, a man willing to be a father to her son after his biological father decided to take a powder, and he gets murdered in the street.

She’s not a regular churchgoer, but she believes in God, she believes He’s looking down on the world, and right now she hates Him for what He allowed to happen. She knows it’s wrong, she knows there’s a reason for everything, but she hates Him anyway. Because right now she doesn’t care what the reasons are; she doesn’t care about reason at all. Right now all she sees in God is meanness, set-a-cat-on-fire cruelty. One moment Neil was alive and now he’s dead and God allowed it to happen.