Tomorrow Wendell (White Dragon Black) by R. M. Ridley Page B

the abominations, he had killed it.
    Jonathan held no illusions; he knew how it would end for him. This wasn’t like smoking where you pushed the reality of the coffin nail and the scary big C behind a curtain and said ‘not me.’
    He used and thus would be used up—end of story. All he could do was try to stay on top of it for as long as he might. Walk the line and hope not to fall. He’d already made Ralph promise to finish him off in the end—no matter what form that end took.
    Late at night, when haunted by visions of the last moments of his father’s life, Jonathan would hope he would be allowed a slow painful death. Sometimes, when he felt optimistic, he thought maybe the job would catch up with him before the using did.
    He entered his dark apartment but didn’t bother with the lights for the same reason he had walked and left the car in front of the office building, so he didn’t alert anyone to his presence. Better to let someone—a couple zombie thugs for example—think he remained in the office working late, than know where he called home.
    There was just enough light, even with the fog, from the bank of windows for him to navigate his Spartan space. Jonathan thought briefly about calling his friend, Mary, to ask about the tarot cards displayed in the fortune machine, but only briefly.
    He grabbed a few beers from the fridge and set all but one on the floor beside him, as he settled into his chair facing the windows. He opened the first beer and looked at the thickening fog.
    “Wendell. What the hell have you done?”

J onathan woke at nine-thirty the following morning. He would have just rolled over and buried his head under the covers, if it weren’t for the fact that he had a client.
    A client for whom, though he had spent hours working the case, he’d accomplished nothing for except feed him dinner and give him the advice to get plastered.
    Jonathan’s bones felt like they were filled with broken glass syringes and a cold sweat filmed his skin —he felt like a dead fish’s eye.
    He clearly should have drunk more.
    After getting out of bed and finding trousers and a shirt, Jonathan went into the kitchen and took the last bottle of beer from the fridge. He spun the top into the sink and wandered to the front window. A thin layer of snow had dusted everything during the few hours he had slept. The street showed nothing more than puddles now, and on the sidewalk most of the snow had been trampled to extinction.
    Jonathan shuddered. Every year, for the last five, he had hoped global warming would finally do something in his favor and make this year the one he didn’t have to contend with frozen bits of dirt drifting down from the toxin-laden skies.
    Heaving a sigh, Jonathan turned away from the window and drank his breakfast. He’d stayed up for quite a while thinking about Wendell’s problem, trying to figure out the what and how, which eluded his powers of investigation. He had finally gone to bed with a spinning head, which had nothing to do with the beers and everything to do with his lack of answers.
    He had promised Wendell he would phone, but he couldn’t recall why now that morning had arrived. Jonathan had meant it as a reassurance to his client—he didn’t feel very reassuring. Admitting to the poor guy that he still hadn’t found a clue didn’t seem helpful, and the only other thing floating in his head—‘Keep calm and carry on’—proved to be of little help.
    Jonathan downed the last of the beer and set the bottle on the counter. He took his coat from the kitchen island where he’d tossed it the night before and left the apartment.
    The day was calm and, without the wind of the day before, warmer, but it didn’t make Jonathan any happier to see the white dust everywhere. He made his way to his office building thinking of what he could say to Wendell when he called.
    In his distraction over Wendell’s peculiar predicament, Jonathan got caught unaware. His mind, running