The Last Tomorrow

TWENTY

1

Lou steps off an elevator and walks down a corridor that stinks of the cigarettes smoked behind the doors lining the walls on either side of him. He can see a cop standing in front of the door he wants to walk through. The cop is about twenty-three years old and wears a heavily starched uniform. His red hair is cut short and freckles dot his cheeks. His hands are clasped behind his back and he stares straight ahead at the wall, mouth a soggy teeter-totter drooping over his chin. Lou’s guessing this young cop used to be a marine. It’s in his posture. His older brother saw combat, has stories about storming the beach at Normandy, battling on vast fields of blood, bayoneting teenage warriors and feeling no remorse, for it was us or them, and we had God on our side. He’s unhappy that he was too young to join before the end of World War II and was unlucky enough to be discharged before the Korean War began. Probably he left to join the police force after two years at Camp Gordon, Georgia, or some other place equally as boring, hoping for action in the city if not on the battlefield. He wants to taste blood. That’s what Lou sees as he walks toward this young cop. That’s what he sees, but he hopes he’s wrong, because if he’s right it might mean trouble.

He approaches the cop, walking casually, hands in pockets. The hand in his right hip pocket grips the cool handle of a switchblade knife. If things had gone to plan, there’d be an identical knife in the milkman’s apartment. Evelyn bungled it, but he still wants to use the knife here; a gunshot will give Teddy Stuart too much warning. The cop looks toward him without moving his head. His eyes shift left, that’s all. Lou smiles at him and gives him a small nod. The cop does not return Lou’s smile.

Instead he says, ‘I think you’re on the wrong floor, sir.’

‘No, it’s all right, I’m just going-’

And then Lou’s upon him. He moves quickly, pulling both hands from his pockets simultaneously. With the left he reaches out and grabs an ear and pulls down, bending the cop forward. With the right, before the man can recover, before the hat which has fallen from the cop’s head has even hit the floor, he flicks open the switchblade and plants it in the back of the cop’s neck, slamming it straight down, aiming for the spinal cord. The cop crumples to the ground, unsheathing the blade now dripping with blood, nothing remaining of him but a pile of blue laundry, no sound escaping him but the single grunt he made when Lou grabbed him by the ear.

His blue hat lies on the floor a few feet away.

A strange chuckle escapes Lou’s throat. He’d thought the cop might be trouble but he wasn’t any trouble at all. If the police were going to use such an incompetent to protect Teddy Stuart they should have just left him unattended. It would have saved a life, and while Lou doesn’t get emotional about murder, not at this point, he sees no reason to commit the act unless it’s necessary. It is, after all, a messy and dangerous affair. Especially when the victim’s a cop.

He wipes the blade off on the cop’s uniform and puts it away. Later he’ll throw it into the ocean and have an ice cream at Santa Monica pier. But for now he must get on with business. He reaches into his coat pocket and grabs a pair of leather gloves. He slips his hands into them, removes the milkman’s revolver from his waistband, thumbs back the hammer.

He pulls back with his right foot and kicks. The door-jamb cracks but doesn’t give completely; he kicks again, it splinters, and the door swings open. He grabs the cop by the back of his collar and drags him into the room, which appears to be empty. No sign of Teddy Stuart. He dumps the cop just inside the door. Then he grabs the hat from the hallway floor and throws it on top of the corpse. It flips off the body and onto the carpet, where it lies upside down. He closes the door. It won’t latch, but at least it’ll provide a temporary barrier if Teddy Stuart makes a run.

‘Now,’ he says, taking a step deeper into the room, ‘if I were a rat, where would I hide? Under the bed, maybe.’

He leans down and looks. There’s nothing there but floor.

‘Maybe the armoire,’ he says. ‘Rats like the dark, don’t they?’

2

Teddy sits in bed wearing nothing but pants and an undershirt. He has a couple days of beard-growth on his face. He’s been stuck in this hotel room for four days and each day he feels less inclined to groom than he did the day before.

First couple days he got up early, showered, shaved, put on a suit — and spent the rest of his daylight hours sitting alone in this goddamn prison of a room. Last two days he hasn’t really bothered. There’s no point in hygiene. Hygiene is for other people and right now there are no other people.

He looks through the newspaper absently, reading headlines, sometimes the first paragraph of a story, but mostly he flips through pages simply to be doing something. His thumbs are black from the newsprint rubbing off on them. Nothing interests him. Each day he’s here he fades a little more out of existence. Soon he’ll go transparent and shortly after that will cease to exist altogether. Air will fill the space he once displaced.

He needs to go for a walk. He needs to grab a hamburger at a hamburger stand and eat it while making small talk with the man perched next to him. He needs to smile at pretty girls and feel the sunshine on his face. Only four days and he’s tired of being protected. He isn’t sure how much more he can take.

This thought, then a sound just outside his door. A grunt. Then another sound. The heavy thud of a man collapsing to the floor. His first thought is that the cop guarding his door fainted, but he knows that isn’t right. One doesn’t grunt before fainting; one grunts while being knocked unconscious.

The Man has come for him. The Man has sent someone to kill him. He knew this might happen, knew it probably would happen, and now that it is happening the biblical corner of his mind which before was preaching so loudly has gone silent. That feeling of fading from existence is also gone. He feels fully in himself, fully alive, and his only concern now is for survival.

He lifts his heavy frame from the bed, cringing as the springs creak, wishing he hadn’t let himself get so fucking fat. He pads to the bathroom, eye on the door, every moment expecting it to open, to see a killer revealed. His first thought is that he can hide behind the shower curtain, but as soon as his feet are on cold tile he sees there is no shower curtain. The shower’s enclosed in glass. He knew that. He’s been here for days.

Why didn’t he-

Someone in the corridor kicks at the door and the doorjamb cracks without giving completely. A few jagged splinters of wood fall to the carpet.

He pushes the bathroom door shut, knowing he’s only delaying the inevitable, knowing it but not having the courage to face head-on what’s coming.

Another kick at the room door and this time it swings open.

Death has just walked in, but he’ll not greet it. Every second he can cling to life is a second he wants, filled with terror though it might be. It’s a second that belongs to him rather than God.

3

Lou pulls open the armoire. Empty wood hangers line the length of the warped dowel, interspersed like crows on a telephone line. On the left side of the dowel, a coat, a few shirts, a few pairs of pants. Two black shoes sit on the floor, empty of feet.

He pushes the door shut and turns around.

A smile touches his lips.

‘You’re in the bathroom, aren’t you, Teddy?’

He walks toward the door, stepping slowly, moving fluidly. He knows that Teddy Stuart’s behind that door. There’s nowhere else for him to be unless he’s not here, and he is here. The cop was guarding the door because of what was on the other side of it.

Though he remains calm and his actions deliberate Lou knows he needs to get this done quickly. He called the police before taking the elevator up, called them from the lobby and said he needed to report a murder, told them that Teddy Stuart had been killed, and now he must make that killing happen and get out of here before the police arrive.

He reaches the door and toes it open.

It swings wide, revealing the man whose life he’s to end. He stands barefoot on the bathroom floor in a pair of wrinkled slacks and a Dago T-shirt. He holds in his hands the heavy lid of the toilet tank. He holds it over his head, ready to swing it down — except Lou is not within swinging distance. His eyes are red, face unshaven and tired-looking. Lou can almost find it in himself to feel sorry for the son of a bitch.

Almost.

He raises the gun.

‘You had to know the Man would send someone,’ Lou says. ‘He liked you. He trusted you. And you betrayed him.’

4

Teddy looks through the doorway and down the barrel of a gun. Behind the gun, the skeletal face of a killer. He thinks of his ex-wife. They lived together unhappily for a decade, but she was the only person he ever loved. He wonders why he couldn’t find happiness. He’s going to die now and he never knew happiness. A few good and true moments, yes, but it wasn’t enough.

He’s not going to die now. He can’t die. He doesn’t deserve to die.

He wants more, and he needs it.

He throws the toilet tank’s heavy lid at the man standing across from him. It flips end over end once. The killer puts up his arm to block the object. It hits the arm and he grunts, ugh, and falls backwards to the floor, and the porcelain lid lands beside him.

Teddy looks from the killer on the floor to the hotel room’s door. It’s only ten steps away and it isn’t latched. Loose splinters of wood hang from the doorframe. He can make it. If he can get to the door and through it he might actually live.

He can make it.

He takes a single step.

5

Lou pulls the trigger. The revolver explodes in his hand. A small dot appears on Teddy Stuart’s forehead, dead-center, like a birdhouse door, tweet, and his brains and small flecks of bone splatter the white wall behind him. The scent of cordite and the coppery odor of blood fill the room. He shoots again, hitting the already dead man in the shoulder as he falls to the floor. One clean shot in the head would look too much like a professional hit. Two shots, though, one in the shoulder and one in the head, well, maybe the shooter got lucky.

He tosses the revolver to the floor.

He pulls a sheet of paper from his back pocket, one of the milkman’s H.H. White Creamery Company stock-request forms. It includes the milkman’s name, truck number, and how much product he needed for his route three days ago.

Lou drops it.

It falls to the carpet, looking like planted evidence.

He picks it up, crumples it up a bit, walks to the armoire. He drops it to the floor. With his toe he pushes it till it’s half hidden beneath the large piece of furniture, more than half hidden, just a corner of paper poking out of the shadows. That’s better. Looks less obvious and therefore more real.

His job is now finished. He glances at his watch. He needs to get out of here. The police will be arriving soon. The milkman will be arriving soon.

He steps from the hotel room and into the corridor, turns left and walks toward the elevator. As he does he sees a man stepping off said elevator. The man’s about five-ten, an inch shorter than Lou himself. He’s wearing well-ironed white slacks, a white shirt, a black bowtie, and a pair of tortoiseshell glasses.

Eugene Dahl, right on time.

Lou strolls toward him casually, not a care in the world. They nod at one another the way strangers sometimes do when passing, giving simple courteous acknowledgments, and then Lou steps onto the elevator. Before the doors close he watches Eugene Dahl continue his walk down the corridor, toward the murder scene.