The Last Tomorrow Read Free Page B

hobo life. Maybe that’s where his real father is, riding the rail, looking for day-labor jobs, cooking beans over an open fire in a hobo camp somewhere. He might run into his real
father. They would instantly recognize each other, and his father would say he was sorry for leaving, and he would teach him about hobo life, and he would tell him stories of his adventures. He
could do that instead of this. He could do that and everything would be okay. Everything would be fine. Everything would be great.
    He aims the gun with a shaky hand at the bald spot at the top of Neil’s head. He closes his eyes. Neil’s going to look up now and stop him.
    Right now. Right now.
    Sandy opens his eyes. The man still sits, sagging, looking down at a dark circle of spit on the carpet. Drool hangs from his face. He has a strange rotten-sweet smell to him, like a fruit bowl
left on the table too long in the heat of summer. He always smells that way after he’s been drinking. Sandy’s come to associate that sweet smell of fermentation with violence, with
getting hit.
    Tears stream down his face.
    ‘You shouldn’t have been so mean,’ he says.
    His stepfather starts to look up at him now, too late, saying in a slurred voice, ‘Wha—’
    But that’s all he ever manages.

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