The Last Tomorrow (32 page)

‘Are you certain?’

He looks up to see his boss’s face drain of color.

Into the phone Seymour says, ‘How could this happen?’

He puts his hand over his opened mouth.

‘You need to find him.’

He hangs up the phone and looks across the desk.

‘There was an accident.’

‘What kind of accident?’

‘Automobile.’

‘What happened?’

‘A sheriff’s deputy crashed into a Mack truck. He was transporting our witness.’

‘Is anyone hurt?’

‘The deputy’s dead from injuries and another man’s been shot.’

‘In a car accident?’

‘It’s confused right now.’

‘What about the boy?’

‘Fled the scene. And it looks like he took the deputy’s service revolver with him.’

3

Seymour closes his eyes and rubs his temples with the first two fingers on each hand. His head is throbbing. He can’t believe what a nightmare this has become. It might
be time to end it. Without Theodore Stuart or the boy to testify they have very little to work with. They have the Bunker Hill murder and a weak connection to a comic book with a weak connection to
James Manning. They have the skeleton of something, maybe, but the meat has been torn away from the bones and hauled off by hyenas.

And the threat against him has been eliminated.

He won’t be able to simply drop it. He made the grand-jury investigation a public matter, and the public will demand answers. His career will suffer, probably permanently, but if he cuts
his losses now it won’t be over. He needs to think this through.

The telephone rings again.

He looks at it hatefully, considers picking it up and dropping it right back down into its cradle. He wants it silenced.

Instead he grabs it, puts it to his ear.

‘What now?’

‘Candice Richardson and her lawyer have arrived.’

Sandy hops out the back of a truck, swinging out over the side and dropping to the sidewalk, both feet slapping the ground. He wears a pair of khaki slacks and a T-shirt. The
khaki shirt with the detention facility’s initials stenciled onto the back is now lying in a ditch several miles away. The revolver is tucked into his pants, pressed against his stomach. He
lifts a hand to the driver and says thanks mister though he doesn’t know if the driver can hear him. The driver lifts a hand in return, then pulls his truck back out onto Olympic Boulevard.
Sandy watches it shrink and disappear. Once it’s gone he turns in a slow circle, taking in his surroundings. He’s never felt more alone. The streets have never been wider, nor the sky
emptier. He’s back in the city and has no idea what to do. He can’t go home but has nowhere else to be. He feels planted where he stands, rooted, and his brain won’t help him,
frozen in indecision. His stomach growls. He’s hungry and should get something to eat. He likes that idea. It gives him a way to move forward. He begins walking. At first he drags his feet,
but he doesn’t like the sound of that or the feel, so he begins taking big steps instead, begins stomping. That’s better. His feet like hammers falling. Cars roll by to his left. He
wishes he had a cigarette. He would feel like a man if he had a cigarette. He’s smoked a couple before, on the back of Bunker Hill, sitting on a truck tire that had been tossed there, and it
made him feel sick, but it also make him feel ten feet tall. He should feel like a man right now, not lonely or scared. He never has to go to school again. He never has to say yes sir or no sir or
please. He never has to tell other people’s lies.

Not if he doesn’t want to.

He has a gun tucked into his pants. That means he can do whatever he wants. It doesn’t matter that he’s thirteen years old. It doesn’t matter that he’s small. Being
meaner than everybody else makes you bigger than you really are, and having a gun makes you bigger still. He only wishes he’d learned that lesson sooner. He spent so much time being scared.
Even now he feels afraid and hates it. He wishes he could banish the feeling from his heart. That’s why he killed his stepfather. Because he didn’t want to be afraid anymore,
didn’t want to feel sick to his stomach every time he walked through his own front door. He tells himself there’s no place for fear. He’s not a lightning rod and he’s not a
cup. He’s a vicious dog. He’s a wild horse. He’s anything he wants to be.

Up ahead on the right he sees a small shop. He decides he’s going to get his lunch there. He’s hungry and he’s going to get lunch and it doesn’t matter that he has no
money. He doesn’t need money. He’ll take what he wants. That’s what men do. They take what they want and they don’t say please.

He steps into the store and walks up and down the aisles looking at the loaded shelves, at the jars of pickles and mayonnaise, at the tubes of toothpaste. He stops in front of the canned meats.
Rows of corned-beef hash, Spam, tinned herring snacks in sour cream, oysters, sardines. He glances toward the man behind the counter. He’s looking directly at Sandy, watching him. When they
make eye contact he nods. Sandy quickly turns back to the canned meats. He shouldn’t have looked. He doesn’t know why he did. Now the man behind the counter will know he’s up to
something. But he has no choice. He’s very hungry.

He picks up a tin of sardines, reads the label as if considering the purchase. Boneless, skinless sardines in cottonseed oil. Lightly smoked. He nods to himself and steps away from the canned
meats. Continues down the aisle toward the back of the store. He wants to find a place where the man behind the counter can’t see him. Then maybe he’ll be able to slip the sardines into
his pocket. Then maybe he’ll—

‘I know what you’re up to.’

He turns around and looks at the man behind the counter. His face feels suddenly hot. The skin tingles. The man looks back, a heavy-set Greek guy with a bushy beard and a sweat-glistening
forehead. He stands casually, one hand resting on the counter near a glass ashtray, a brown cigarette between his lips sending up a thin stream of smoke toward the ceiling. He has sleepy eyes. He
blinks at Sandy. A small breeze blows in through the glass front door, disturbing the stream of smoke, breaking it apart, and causing a small plastic American flag jutting from a cigarette rack to
wave briefly before once more going still.

‘What?’

He takes a drag from his cigarette, taps ash into the tray, blinks again.

‘I know what you’re up to.’ His tone is flat, unconcerned.

‘I’m not.’

‘You got any money? You gonna pay for those sardines?’

Sandy has a decision to make. After a moment’s thought he nods and walks toward the counter. He licks his lips.

Then grabs a packet of cigarettes from the rack on the counter, knocking the rack over in the process, cigarettes spilling across the counter and falling to the floor, and runs for the exit. The
man behind the counter yells after him, get back here you little shit, but he doesn’t stop and he doesn’t look over his shoulder. He runs through the door, out into daylight. He runs
down the sidewalk. His feet pound against the pavement. Thud, thud, thud like falling hammers.

Once he reaches the corner he stops running. He looks back. The man stands in the shop’s doorway, looking in his direction, but he doesn’t give chase. Sandy turns away and turns the
corner, heading up a small street, looking for a place to eat his lunch.

He should’ve pulled out his gun. He should have waved it around. That would have let that fat Greek bastard know he meant business. Then he could have taken his time, took as many cans of
sardines as he wanted and as many packets of cigarettes too. He could have emptied the register and had a nice lunch at a restaurant, like it was Easter or something. That’s what he should
have done, but he didn’t think to. Still thinking like a little boy, he only wanted to get away. He needs to stop that, needs to stop thinking scared. Next time he goes into a store
it’s with his gun drawn.

He’s a vicious dog. He’s a wild horse. He’s anything he wants to be.

As he continues north apartment buildings give way to houses with neat square lawns. Eventually he arrives at one with a

FOR SALE

sign planted in the grass and walks up the oil-spotted driveway to look inside. He hops up three steps to the front porch, puts his face to the glass, sees an empty living
room. The beige carpet has been recently vacuumed. The walls are white. A few nails jut from them where pictures once hung. He checks the door and finds it locked, and there’s no key under
the mat. He walks around the building looking for a window to crawl through. He finds one cracked open a few inches at the back of the house and pries the screen out of the way, leaning it against
the outside wall. Then pushes the window the rest of the way open and climbs inside.

He walks around the house, exploring the empty rooms, inhaling the scent of fresh paint. He checks the kitchen cupboards and drawers, hoping for a discovery of some kind, but they’re empty
with the exception of a box of matches in a drawer near the stove.

He carries the box with him to the living room and sits down on the floor, leaning against the wall. He pulls the gun from his pants and sets it down beside him. Then he pulls the key from the
side of the sardine tin, puts it into the metal eye at the top, and begins peeling the lid off, pulling away a twisted metal ribbon.

He’ll have to eat the sardines with his fingers. He doesn’t care. There’s no one around to yell at him for eating with his hands, no one around to smack him upside the head and
call him a piggy little shit, so there isn’t any reason to care.

Once the lid is free of the tin he sets it on the floor beside the gun and plucks a sardine from within. He puts it into his mouth and chews. It tastes good. He licks the oil off his fingers,
then eats another sardine, and another, and another.

When the tin is empty he sets it on the floor and wipes his fingers clean on the carpet, front and back. He stares at the white wall in front of him. He likes this, sitting here alone, not
worrying about anything, not answering to anybody.

He thinks of his mother.

He knows he can’t go home. He knows that, he isn’t a baby. But he thinks maybe he should let her know he’s all right. She must be worried.

But not right now. He wants to be nowhere else but here right now, alone in this empty room, alone and safe. He was almost killed this morning, had to shoot someone to get away. The police are
probably looking for him. He doesn’t want to go back out into that world. It’s a mean world filled with traps you can’t see till you step in them.

He unwraps the cellophane from his packet of cigarettes, peels away the foil, and plucks one from within. He lights a match and inhales.

The world shouldn’t scare him like that. He tells himself he shouldn’t let the world scare him. The world might be full of meanness, but he can handle it. He’s meaner.

He’s a vicious dog. He’s a wild horse.

He doesn’t need a mother. He doesn’t need anybody.

He’s a vicious dog. He’s a rampaging bull.

He begins to cry.

1

Eugene leans hard into a turn, swinging onto Sunset Boulevard, and speeds his way west toward Schwab’s Pharmacy. He squints ahead at the palm trees lining either side of
the street, narrow trunks bending into the air topped with sagging fronds both brown and green. Behind them, a sky the color of faded denim in which a few wispy clouds blow past slow as they
disintegrate.

He still doesn’t know what to do. He only knows what not to. He simply can’t go along with Evelyn’s plan. He’d never walk away alive. The police need someone to pin those
murders on and he is that someone. He can blather all he wants and they’ll simply think he’s trying to talk his way out of the rap. It’s what a guilty man would do. But if he
manages to pin the murder on Louis Lynch, he’s no longer of use to James Manning. Instead he’s a threat, he knows too much, and there’s only one way to ensure that guys who know
too much don’t say too much: fill their mouths with dirt.

If he knew he could trust Evelyn he would tell her his concerns. Maybe together they’d be able to work something out. But he doesn’t know he can trust her. Just the opposite.
He’s almost certain he can’t. He wants to, his heart wants him to, but hearts are stupid. And love is a liar.

For now he must keep his thoughts to himself. He must start planning what he’s going to do. In the back of his mind, in the darkness beyond the light of conscious thought, just beyond the
edge at which that lamp’s glow fades, something is pulling itself from the mud, an idea, but he doesn’t yet know what it looks like. He can merely sense that it’s there, picking
itself up, taking shape.

He pulls to a stop at the curb behind the Schwab’s delivery motorcycle. He steps off the bike, toes down the kickstand, and walks across the wide sidewalk to the front door. He pushes
through.

Just inside the doorway he lights a cigarette, picks a bit of tobacco from the end of his tongue, and scans the anonymous faces lining the counter. He and Evelyn see one another at the same
moment. She raises her hand in a wave, a touch of a smile on her gash-red lips. He nods, takes a drag from his cigarette, and makes his way toward her, reminding himself that she betrayed him, that
she can’t be trusted, that she’s a serpent and has proven it by striking once already. But as he approaches her his palms begin to sweat. His mouth goes dry.

2

Evelyn watches Eugene walk toward her, a smile touching her lips as he approaches, but despite the smile this is serious business. Doing this will put Daddy at risk. She came
out to the West Coast to take care of some trouble, but instead she’s here creating it. And the most horrible thing is, she doesn’t care. She
should
care, it’s her job to
care, but she doesn’t. She can’t. For the first time in her life something other than her mind is guiding her, and she’s going to let it.

And despite the fact she’s creating trouble for Daddy, she’s fairly certain he’ll be fine. He can walk through a fire and come out the other side unharmed.