The Last Tomorrow

FORTY-FOUR

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.

‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘I didn’t mean to choke you. I have to take care of some business. I’ll be back soon. With breakfast.’

He collects his own gun and hers, then walks to the door, grabs the doorknob, and pulls. He steps over the threshold. He closes the door behind him, leaving her alone.

Her first thought is to start banging against the walls, to get someone’s attention, but she needs to think of something better than that. That will result in the police being called, which is the last thing she wants. The police will ask questions.

What are you going to do, Evelyn? Think.

She falls back in bed and kicks her legs up. Starts working her taped-together hands around her naked backside, up toward the backs of her knees, squirming through the tight loop of her arms. If she can get her legs through, if she can get her hands in front of her, well, she isn’t sure what she’ll do, but it’ll be a start. And that’s what she needs: a start. A beginning.

She’ll think of something.

But first she needs to get her hands free.

4

He puts the Berretta into his motorcycle’s saddlebag and his own pistol down the front of his pants, then rides to a diner. He parks at the curb and steps into the place. It smells good, of coffee and bacon. The chatter of the patrons is pleasant. He walks across the black-and-white-checkered floor to the payphone in the corner and drops a dime. He listens for a moment to the tone, then dials. It rings several times. If this call remains unanswered Eugene doesn’t know what he’s going to do.

‘Hello?’

He exhales, relieved.

‘Fingers.’

‘Eugene?’

‘That’s right.’

‘What’s up, man?’

‘Last time we spoke you offered to help.’

A long pause, then, finally: ‘I did.’

5

Evelyn lies on her back with her feet in the air. Her right shoulder is screaming with pain. She curses into the fabric shoved down her throat. Her breathing is jagged and short. If her feet weren’t taped together she could get her legs through one at a time, that would be far less painful, but her feet are taped together. That makes her task, as well as painful, nearly impossible. This is her third attempt. With her wrists at the backs of her ankles she draws her knees to her chest and tries, with a grunt, to force her hands over her heels. She feels a great tearing pain in her shoulder and screams into the wet fabric in her mouth. She rolls to her side. She closes her eyes and tears stream down her hot, sweaty face. She opens her eyes and finds herself looking, through a kaleidoscope of tears, at her hands. They’re held together as if in prayer.

She laughs through her pain. She did it.

She did it.

She sits up in bed, a wet clump of hair falling into her face, and reaches to the tape covering her mouth. She pulls down, pulls the tape down over her chin, and reaches into her mouth with her searching fingers. She removes the now-sopping panties, gags, almost vomits, and throws them to the floor. She allows herself to sit motionless and catch her breath. She can’t sit here doing nothing indefinitely — Eugene will return at some point, and she needs to figure out what she’s going to do about him — but she allows herself a moment.

She sniffles, brings her taped-together hands to her nose, wipes at it.

Okay. What next?

She turns her wrists in opposite directions to see how much movement is available, how much give the tape has. Not much. But, with luck, enough. With pain in her wrists she picks at the end of the tape with a fingernail, picks at the tape until almost a third of an inch has been pulled away. She brings her wrists to her mouth and bites down on the tape end, then pulls her hands away, unwinding it.

In less than five minutes her hands are free.

A minute after that her feet are free as well.

She stands and walks to her purse. She finds her cigarette case, removes a filtered Kent, and lights it. She inhales deeply, coughs, looks around the room. She has no idea how long it’s been. Eugene could return at any moment. She needs to figure what she’s going to do when he does.

Her first thought is to call Lou, but there’s no telephone here. And anyway, she’d have a hard time explaining to him what she was doing in this room.

She could simply leave, find a phone, make an anonymous call to the police. Except she doesn’t want Eugene in police custody.

He can tell them far too much, and he would.

She takes another drag from her cigarette.

He has to die. That’s what Daddy would say, and Daddy’d be right. She has to kill him and get rid of the body. Drive it out to the desert, bury it. The police will still think he did the murders for which he’s been framed; they’ll just also think he got away with it, made it down to Tijuana where they’ll never catch up with him.

Why didn’t he go down to Mexico when she suggested it? She would’ve gotten money to him. Maybe they could have made a small life together down there. If he’d listened maybe the two of them would still have some small chance at something.

No more childish thoughts, Evelyn.

You would have gotten bored. It never could have worked out.

You have to kill him and you know it, so figure out how you’re going to do it and get ready. He might show up at any moment.

She nods at that.

You’re right. Of course.

It has to be something simple and brutal.

But first she has to get some clothes on. She picks her dress up from the floor and steps into it, reaching behind her to zip it up. She looks toward the panties on the floor, but refuses to put them on. This wrinkled, sweat-stinking dress alone will have to suffice.

She looks around the room for a weapon.

She has to be ready for him.

6

Eugene rides his motorcycle into the motel parking lot, steps off the bike, knocks the kickstand into place. He reaches into the saddlebag and removes a brown paper bag and, with the paper bag gripped in his fist, walks to his motel room. He keys open the door, steps inside.

First thing he notices is that the bed is empty. A wad of duct tape lies on the mattress, another wad on the floor by the foot of the bed.

His mouth goes dry. His heart knocks in his chest like a bad car engine. He reaches for the Baby Browning in his waistband, gets his hand around the cool grip, and is about to pull it out when he feels a dull thud at the back of his head and falls to his knees. He touches the back of his head and feels pain. He looks at his fingers and sees blood. He looks over his shoulder.

Evelyn stands behind him in the doorway, her red hair a wild mess, her brow furrowed, her eyes glistening. She holds in her hands a large stone with this motel room’s number painted on it, a white 13. She must have been waiting outside for his return, hiding around the corner or behind a car.

She steps into the room.

He crawls backwards, away from her, until he’s pressed against the bed and can crawl no further.

Then pulls the pistol from his waistband, aims it at her, gets to his feet.

‘Don’t take another step, Evelyn.’

She takes another step.

‘You’re not gonna shoot me.’

She raises the stone over her head and takes yet another step toward him.

He wills himself to shoot her. If he can’t do it now he’s never going to be able to do it, and it has to be done eventually. He has to do it now. If he doesn’t, she’ll kill him. And she won’t hesitate. He can think of a new plan, a new story that makes it all make sense. The point is living, and if he’s to live she must die.

The gun shakes in his hand. He looks past it to her face. He aims over her head. He pulls the trigger.

The stone splits into two big chunks, one in each hand, and rock shards and bits of lead scatter outward. Evelyn gasps and takes a staggering step backwards.

Eugene moves on her, raises the gun, and brings it down onto the side of her head.

She collapses to the floor.

He steps forward and looks out into the parking lot, sees a couple people wandering out of their rooms to find out what that noise was. Someone asks him did he hear that, too. He says, yeah, think it was only a car backfiring, and pushes the door closed. He looks down at Evelyn. She’s unconscious. Blood trickles into her hair. He swallows, then reaches down to pick her up.

7

Evelyn awakens in bed. She feels slightly disoriented. She blinks at Eugene. He’s once more sitting at the table. He looks at her for a long time. Then nods his head toward a paper bag sitting beside him.

‘I got us some breakfast,’ he says.