The Last Tomorrow (37 page)

He inhales and exhales in jagged breaths. He tries to think of an alternative to what he’s about to do. He could get on his motorcycle and ride away. He could simply leave all this. He
could do that, but it would solve nothing. He’d still be wanted for murder. It wouldn’t matter where he went or what he did, it would always hang over him. He can’t live like
that. These last few days during which he’s been wanted for murder have been the hardest of his life. He can’t imagine living in such a state for years.

But he doesn’t want to do what he’s about to do. He believes Evelyn’s being straight with him. He believes she cares for him. He knows he cares for her. He doesn’t want
to destroy that. But he’s afraid he must. He’s certain of it.

Or they could follow through on Evelyn’s plan. Afterwards maybe she could get him a meeting with her father. He could explain that all he cared about was getting his life back and now that
he’s got it back he wants only to live it, to live it with Evelyn. Maybe that would be enough.

No. He knows better than that.

He has only one choice. If he cares at all about his own survival he has but one choice, and it doesn’t matter how much he hates it.

The alternative is death.

He looks again at Evelyn lying peacefully in bed and wants more than anything to lie beside her. To feel the warmth of her body against his body. He wants to wake beside her and look into her
eyes and regret nothing.

But, so far as he can tell, that isn’t possible.

He pulls the end of the duct tape, listening to it peel off the roll. Evelyn stirs but doesn’t awaken. Soon she will – to an ugly surprise.

He exhales in a heavy sigh.

Then steps forward quickly, rushing toward Evelyn. He puts his knee into her neck to hold her down, pulls her arms behind her back, and wraps her wrists with tape.

She wakes with a scream and fights him, but he doesn’t stop.

Not until he’s finished.

Carl sits up in bed and tries to read a story called ‘I Joined a Gang of Hoods’ in the most recent issue of
Stag
, but is finding it impossible to
concentrate. Instead his mind turns to his last conversation with Friedman. He went to his partner’s house and said we need to talk. He said you’re right, I need to get this under
control, but now isn’t the time. We’re wrapping up this case. If I try to quit now I’ll get sick, I’ll be useless. Let me finish this case, bring in the milkman, then
I’ll take time off and clean up. I have vacation days coming. I know how you feel about me using, you made that clear, but I need time. Friedman looked at him in silence, then nodded. Keep
yourself as clean as possible. Use as little as you need to to keep yourself functioning, but when we wrap up this case you get yourself clean. I mean it. I won’t watch you kill yourself.
Okay, Carl said. Okay. And about earlier, when I said we weren’t friends, I didn’t mean it. Friedman nodded, said I know, I’ll see you tomorrow at work, Carl, and went inside.

So he bought himself some time, which is good.

And if he finds another source he might not have to quit. It only got out because he was buying from within the department. That was a mistake. He can find another source. He can wave his badge
around some jazz club and confiscate what he wants. He won’t arrest anybody, he’s not that big a hypocrite, just scare them a little and take their junk. Why not? There’s no
downside.

Except he really does need to quit. He hates that his life now revolves around using. He hates the control it has over him. He lost Candice to it already, and she was the first glimpse of light
he’d seen since Naomi’s death. For months he’s been walking toward a dark horizon and when light finally appears there, a faint white line, he runs in the opposite direction so
that he can remain in darkness.

Only a fool would do such a thing.

If he’d known at the beginning this would lead to the needle he’d never have used in the first place. He just wanted a little quiet in his mind. He wanted to get away from himself.
And he got what he wanted, didn’t he? For a while he got exactly what he wanted. But things have turned and he knows it, and he knows too he needs to do something about it. He needs to
quit.

He’ll maintain until this case is closed, and then he’ll take some time off. He needs to do exactly what he told Friedman he’d do. He needs to regain control of himself and his
life. He’s fifty-six years old, not twenty. He shouldn’t be living in some rooming house making mistakes he knows better than to make.

And what’s he going to do about this case?

Neighbors and coworkers have been questioned. Evidence has been catalogued. Reports have been written. The only thing left is to find the guy and arrest him. His picture is out to the uniforms,
and his apartment and the bar at which he works are being watched, so it’s now nothing but a waiting game.

Part of him hopes they wait forever. Then he never has to quit. The case can remain open till the sun explodes and its fires envelop the earth. That would be good. He could use junk forever and
Friedman wouldn’t be able to call him a liar.

He needs to quit.

They should follow up with Darryl Castor tomorrow, find out if he learned anything about where the milkman might be.

Then something occurs to him, and he sits up in bed unable to believe a connection he’s overlooked until now. They’ve been operating under the assumption that Eugene Dahl was working
alone when he killed Theodore Stuart, but Carl now thinks that Darryl Castor might be reason to doubt that. The man is called Fingers because he has them in everything. He knows everybody. Someone
has a product they don’t know what to do with, Darryl Castor can find him a buyer. Someone needs something extra delivered with the morning milk, Darryl Castor knows where to get it.
There’s a chance he worked for James Manning at some point, peddled goods for him. He could easily be the connection between James Manning and Eugene Dahl.

But if that’s true, if that’s a legitimate piece of the puzzle, it means the picture he’s been putting together is wrong. It means he might have to tear the whole thing apart
and start again, start with this piece and work outward.

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.

‘Do you need to pee or anything?’

‘What?’

‘Do you have to use the toilet?’

‘No.’

He nods. ‘Good.’

He slips a pair of leather gloves onto his hands, grabs the roll of tape from the table, gets to his feet. He picks up her panties from the floor and walks toward her. He shoves them into her
mouth. They taste of laundry soap and of her sex. He shoves them down her throat, making her want to gag. She tries to spit them out, but it’s difficult, the dry fabric clings to the walls of
her mouth, and before she can do anything more than ineffectively cough Eugene is wrapping tape around her head. She coughs a few more times, tears streaming down her face, before she gets the
fabric out of her throat. She wants to rub the moisture from her eyes but her hands are still taped behind her back. Eugene must sense it. He wipes the tears away from her cheeks himself, smearing
them away with his gloved thumb.