Free The Last Tomorrow by Ryan David Jahn Page B

Hotel. If he meets a woman, he’ll take her to dinner at the Brown Derby just a few doors down, then home to his place for one last drink. If
he doesn’t, he’ll simply stumble home, eat dinner from a can, and pull out his typewriter. He’ll stare at the blank page for a long time. He’ll probably even get a couple
sentences down. But when he reads over them he’ll see how clumsy they are, how clumsy and false, and he’ll wish he hadn’t expended the energy it took to bang them into existence.
He’ll tear the sheet of paper from his typewriter and throw it away.
    A day like any other day. A day to forget.
    We fall into patterns, boring and comfortable and predictable.
    What he cannot predict is that by this time next week his life will be in turmoil.
    While he slept two men were murdered, one with a gun and one with a knife, and each of those murders, like stones dropped into still water, sent ripples outward, and eventually those ripples
will reach him, rock the small boat that is his life, and send him overboard.
    He won’t know it till this time next week, but this life he lives is already over.

EIGHT
    1
    Carl pulls his car to the curb in front of a diner on Broadway. He hasn’t had a meal since dinner, day before yesterday, and needs to eat. He isn’t hungry, nobody
would be after dealing with what he just dealt with, but that hardly matters. His body needs sustenance, so he’ll put food into his mouth, chew, and swallow.
    As soon as the boy confessed to the murder, Captain Ellis made a call to the Juvenile Division, and their detectives came in, took the boy in for processing, and took over the case. Except for
Carl’s report and testimony come the trial, his part in it is finished. Yet somehow he was the one left explaining to the boy’s mother what was happening. The look on her face was
heartbreaking.
    But that’s over. No point thinking about it.
    The trick is to keep your soul winter-numb.
    ‘What do you want?’
    ‘Cheeseburger, I guess.’
    Friedman nods, then steps out of the vehicle and walks across the pavement before disappearing through the diner’s smudged glass doors.
    Carl looks through the windshield to the street ahead. He frowns at nothing. Against his own will he thinks of his wife. He misses her.
    2
    They found the tumor in her left breast two years ago. Her doctor recommended a relatively new treatment – nitrogen mustard via hypodermic injection. American soldiers
exposed to mustard gas during the war had experienced, as well as blisters on the skin and in the lungs, a noticeably lowered white-blood-cell count. Military doctors thought sulfur mustards might
have a similar effect on cancer cells and began a series of secret experiments in which they treated patients with them. After the war ended the experiments were declassified. The best results had
come from treating certain lymphomas with nitrogen mustard, but there’d been a noticeable effect on other cancers as well. Carl was hesitant, didn’t like the idea of injecting his wife
with a chemical weapon, but Naomi’s cancer was serious and she wanted every possible chance of survival, I’m not ready to die, Carl, so she did it. And started feeling better
immediately. The nitrogen mustard appeared to be killing the tumor.
    But after a brief period of feeling well, she began to feel worse than she had before treatment. The nitrogen mustard was killing her white blood cells far more quickly than it was killing the
cancer cells. After a month they stopped the injections and Naomi had a mastectomy, followed by radium treatment.
    She was depressed for a long time. He held her while she cried about the loss of her breast. He told her she was beautiful to him no matter what. And it was true. When he looked into her eyes
all he saw was the woman he loved, not the disease that had maimed her. And slowly she came out of her depression, and things began to feel normal again.
    But nine months later the cancer returned. It