The Last Tomorrow

FOUR

1

Teddy wakes up face-down in a parking lot. He rolls over, sits up, touches his face. There are bits of gravel imbedded there. He brushes them from his cheek and they fall to the ground.

At first he’s possessed by confusion and a strange uncomprehending sadness, as if he’d awakened from a nightmare he could not quite remember — just vague unpleasant images and a sound like a gate swinging on a rusty hinge — but that soon gives way to anger as he remembers what happened, how he was humiliated.

He looks to his right and sees a black coupe looming over him. Reaches up and grabs the jutting door handle. Pulls himself to his feet, swaying there a moment unbalanced. Looks down at his clothes. His suit is ruined. It’s covered in grime and dirt, one of his waistcoat’s buttons is missing, and a pocket has torn loose.

His head throbs.

He touches his temple and feels the sharp sting of pain and a crust of dried blood.

That little pimple-faced son of a bitch.

Teddy’s gonna make him sorry. The hell he won’t. He’ll not be made to feel this way by anyone. He’s been through too much in the last ten years to take what he took tonight without giving some back.

He’s been through far too much.

2

A decade ago Teddy was simply an accountant in Jersey City. He had, over the years, developed a reputation as someone who could and would massage numbers when necessary, and that occasionally brought those with less than fully legal interests to his office. But these were smalltime guys. Greek deli owners who wanted their taxes to reflect a mere fraction of their income, cops who skimmed drugs from busts to resell on the street and wanted a way to invest the money without raising eyebrows, that sort of thing. He’d never expected the Man to walk through the finger-smudged front door of his small rented office. But that was what happened. He walked in and sat down across from Teddy and crossed his not insubstantial arms in front of him after scratching his fat rippled neck like an overstuffed sausage skin and said, ‘I think we can probably do a little business, you and me.’

At first Teddy simply handled taxes for a couple of the Man’s legitimate businesses — a car dealership in Newark, a stationery store in Hoboken that maybe saw more cash filter through its till than was strictly legitimate. Sometimes the numbers by themselves wouldn’t say exactly what you wanted them to say. But Teddy was adept at algebraic ventriloquism, could make numbers say whatever he wanted them to say, and he thought nothing of the Man’s requests.

And, as will happen, when the requests got more extreme Teddy found himself going along with them, telling himself it’s not that big a deal, not much worse than anything I’ve already done, and now a decade later he’s doing things he never would have agreed to during that first meeting.

Teddy climbed down that ladder same as anyone would: one rung at a time.

Now he knows as much about the Man’s business affairs as the Man himself, which means, of course, that there’s no way to sever ties with him. The only thing that can end their relationship at this point is death, either Teddy’s or the Man’s.

But Teddy knows which is likelier.

3

Despite the stories he’d heard about the Man’s ruthlessness, Teddy went a very long time before seeing that side of him. The Man was quiet. You had to lean toward him to hear what he was saying. And his voice was gentle when he spoke, as if soothing a frightened animal. When he talked it was because he had something specific to say and once it was said he stopped working his jaw. He could, at times, seem almost shy. But the stories Teddy heard about him suggested a monster, someone who’d snap your legs for the smallest offense, who’d put a hatchet into your skull if he even suspected something more serious, who’d put your corpse on the hood of your mother’s car if you expired without first apologizing for what he thought you’d done. And then, when he was finished, he’d wash his hands of blood and go to his favorite steakhouse, sit at his corner booth (always held for him, no matter how busy the place got) and have himself an English-cut prime rib slathered in horseradish, a baked potato fully dressed, two orders of creamed spinach, two slices of apple pie with melted cheese on top, and finally a glass of scotch. Then, if it was the weekend and he wasn’t staying in his apartment in the city, he’d head home to Shrewsbury and sleep like a baby in his large comfortable bed, warmed by the body of his faithful wife, who seemed to be the only person on the East Coast who had no idea what he did for a living, how he paid for their four-thousand-square-foot house and their frequent vacations.

At first Teddy was certain the stories that surrounded the Man were simply part of the mythology that built up around him during his twenty — now thirty — years in business. One could not do the kind of work the Man did without being hard, of course, but Teddy found the stories which surrounded him impossible to believe. These were things no human was capable of.

But things have changed since Teddy first heard those stories. He is, for one thing, no longer certain the Man is strictly human.

In the years since Teddy first started hearing stories about the Man he’s witnessed horrors beyond anything Goya could have imagined, and without having to close his eyes or paint them into existence. He knows now that if the stories he heard aren’t true, other stories like them are. And worse.

But despite what he’s witnessed, despite what he’s experienced, he’s still only an accountant. A corrupt accountant, sure. He massages numbers, he helps launder dirty money, he delivers and explains the terms of briefcase loans to people whose names end up in obituary pages. But his hands to now have remained bloodless.

Yet there’s a part of him that believes he’s learned important lessons in detached violence. So he believes he knows what he’s getting into as he removes the knife from his coat pocket, as he thumbs it open, as he stands in the shadows of night to await the kid. He’s wrong about what he is capable of, of course, wrong about his ability to remain detached from what he’s doing, but he can’t know that.

Otherwise he wouldn’t do what he does.

4

He stands in the dark parking lot with a knife gripped in his fist and watches the red-painted metal back door. The knife was a birthday gift from his ex-wife. He’s been carrying it for years. He frequently has to deal with dangerous people, hard people, people who view weakness as an invitation, people whose first instinct is destruction, and while he’s never cut anyone he has on more than one occasion used the blade to bluff his way out of a situation. He might have knelt before the toilet later, covered in sweat, entire body shaking, but he got through.

One thing about working for the Man: people who have something against him but are afraid to take him on directly will make themselves feel tough by coming after you instead. It’s what happened tonight. He’s sure of it.

He thinks about how the kid embarrassed him. He thinks about how the kid made him feel stupid and weak. He refuses to be seen as stupid and weak. He refuses to be stupid and weak. A man is defined by his actions in difficult situations. If someone walks on you and you lie there, you’re a rug. You’re made to be walked on. Soon others will see the footprints on your back and know it too. It’s how a path is made. No, if someone tries to walk on you, you stop them. You stop them dead. You’re no rug and you will not be stepped on.

Teddy waits a long time.

There are false alarms. A drunk fellow stumbling to his car. Someone taking out a bag of trash to throw into a bin in the alley. A stray dog. Occasionally while he waits the tide of anger and humiliation goes out and he thinks about leaving, about simply driving away, and if he were to do that things would turn out differently, not only for him but for many people — because his actions and the actions of a small boy named Sanford Duncan fifteen miles away will affect the lives of several people whom they will never meet — but every time he considers absenting himself, driving back to his hotel and getting some sleep, he thinks again about what happened in there, and the tide of emotion comes flooding back.

Eventually when the red door opens it’s the kid.

Teddy refuses to think of him by his name. He can have no name, for things with names deserve to live. To Teddy he’s simply the kid.

The kid reaches into his pocket and removes his wallet. He pulls a narrow cigarette from within and puts it between his lips. He lights the cigarette with a match. He pinches it between finger and thumb and takes a deep drag, holding it in for some time before releasing a wave of smoke and jagged coughs.

The scent comes to Teddy on the breeze. The kid’s smoking a reefer.

Teddy stands in the shadows at the back of the parking lot and lets him smoke it. He watches him while he smokes it. That greasy forehead. Those patches of acne. Again and again that son of a bitch shamelessly dealt him crooked hands. Then humiliated Teddy for calling him out on it. The little shit. The worthless little-

His face gets hot. A saltwater sting in the eye.

He steps out of the shadows and walks with great purpose across the black asphalt toward the kid. His steps are long and solid. Tears stream down his face.

As Teddy nears him the kid looks up while simultaneously hiding the reefer behind his back and saying, ‘It’s not what you-’ But then he recognizes Teddy and goes silent. When next he speaks his tone has changed. ‘You,’ he says.

‘Yes, me, you dismissive son of a bitch. You goddamn piece of-’

He swings the blade in an uncontrolled arc. The kid sees it coming and turns away. The blade slices through the back left shoulder of his shirt. At first it seems as though Teddy missed the person beneath. The fabric simply hangs in two pieces from the shoulder like a pair of sails on a windless day. Then the blood begins to flow. The pain must arrive with it, because Teddy watches it slap a grimace onto the kid’s face. The kid grabs at the bleeding spot and his eyes go wide and glistening, and for a moment, three ticks of the clock, four at most, there’s some chance that Teddy will be able to stop himself from going any further. Pity envelopes him. He recognizes the pain on the kid’s face so wholly it could be his own. He almost steps back and disappears into the shadows with an apology falling from his tongue.

But then the kid’s pained expression turns into a scowl.

‘You fat fuck,’ he says. ‘You have no idea what hell you just walked into.’

The kid reaches down to his boot.

Teddy knows he can’t let him get to it. The kid has a weapon there. A single-shot pistol. A knife. Something. Whatever it is, one thing’s clear. Teddy’s begun something he must finish. He swings the blade at the reaching arm and puts a deep gash into it. A sheet of blood pours from within. Then he swings again and the face opens up, the left cheek, revealing white bone, the Halloween skeleton beneath. Then he swings again, the throat opens with a clogged-drain gurgle, and he finds himself standing over this motionless thing which a moment ago was moving, which a moment ago was human.

There’s nothing left in Teddy now but sorry. All the rage and humiliation which were in him as he approached the kid and swung for the first time have vanished. It seems so long ago that he began this. Could it really have been less than a minute ago that he took that first step? He feels like a different person from the one who was standing at the back of the parking lot with bad intentions.

Who was that guy?

5

He drops the bloodied knife. It rattles against the asphalt before going still beside the kid’s dead body. He reaches down and touches the kid’s face and says the kid’s name. ‘Francis,’ he says. ‘Francis, are you. . are you okay?’

But of course he’s not okay, and he’ll never be okay again.

Teddy looks down at his hand. There’s blood on it, a lot of blood. There’s less on his coat sleeve, a few scattered droplets. It looks black beneath the light of the three-quarter moon. His mother told him once that you had to scrub bloodstains with soap and cold water right away if you hoped to get them out. This after he’d been punched in the nose on his way home from school, punched and had his hard-rock candy stolen. He’d bled down the front of his shirt, but his mom had managed to get the stains out, scrubbing them in the washtub. He liked to wear that shirt afterwards because it made it seem like the punch in the face had never happened. If it happened, where was the blood?

But some stains neither cold water nor hot can remove.

He turns away from the body and the blood pooling beneath it. If he were thinking clearly he’d pick up the knife, walk to his car, and drive back to the hotel, where he could clean himself up, discard his bloody clothes, and go to the bar freshened up and ready to chat with someone who might be willing to give him an alibi, some drunkard with no concept of time, yes, officer, he was drinking with me all night. But he’s not thinking clearly. The detached violence he thought he was capable of he was not. The violence was angry and scared and the scene bears witness to that.

He leaves the knife where it lies.

He walks with jerky, robotic steps, like a man suffering advanced syphilis, vertebrae welded together; walks across the parking lot, down the alley, toward Sunset Boulevard. He stands near the street and watches cars go by. Then he sits. Several more cars pass him. Streaks of color: green blue black. Then one does not pass by. It slows and pulls up in front of him. At first he can’t see it clearly, the headlights blinding him. Then it stops and he sees that it’s a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s car. A deputy sits behind the wheel, a young man with light brown hair and an Errol Flynn mustache. He looks down at Teddy and asks him, is everything all right.

‘I think I just killed someone,’ Teddy says. He looks down once more at his hand. ‘Can you — can you tell him I’m sorry?’