Full Service
by Edward Ahern
It’s a peculiar occupation,
dealing out death. And one I just stumbled
into.
It happened after my divorce,
which hit me hard. I lost my job as a programmer
and scrambled around on the cheap for a year. I eventually got another
programming job, and decided to recover some sort of life. On line dating
services don’t cost all that much
Cathy was my first re-relationship.
She was attractive, smart and sharp
edged. She liked to talk things through when I overnighted at her place. If
there’s one thing I’m expert at its appearing to listen intently.
She sprung it on me after
we’d made love. “I’m dying of MS, Hector. If I
let it play out it’ll be messy, painful and expensive. And the life insurance
is voided if I commit suicide. I want my
sister’s kids to go to college on that money.”
She’d shocked me into
attentiveness. “Jesus, Cathy, that’s terrible. What
can I do?”
“You strike me as
a man with manageable scruples. I’d like you to help organize
my accidental death, preferably something painless. I’ll pay you twenty
thousand dollars.”
“But wouldn’t
that lead back to me?”
She sighed, which I knew
meant she was getting impatient. “Maybe I’m in a relationship
with the wrong guy.”
“Okay, okay. How much
time do you have?”
“Six to nine months
before it gets messy.”
“Let me think it through.”
I didn’t get a lot
of sleep that night. Once I got past the realization of
another woman leaving me, I had to figure out where to find a dealer who
couldn’t rat me out. And the next morning did. I’d rehabbed for a booze problem
with a druggie named Hank. Hank was a chronic relapser who had his dealers on call.
He gave me the name and number of a guy who he swore was stand up.
The next day I suggested
an idea to Cathy.
“You’re going
to have a mood change.”
“That’s a given.”
“The acceptance of
your eventual death leads you to a couple bad habits-
gambling and fentanyl.”
“I’ve never
done drugs, and gambling strikes me as an always losing
proposition.”
It was my turn to sigh.
“You’re not really going to do either. You’re
going to start taking cash out of your accounts, and you’re going to make a few
day trips to the casinos. From that money that you don’t really gamble away you
pay me and a drug dealer that I’ll give you the contact for. You schedule
activities with friends for the next several months, just to show that you’re
not planning an exit. You buy regularly from the dealer for a month or so. Then
when you’re ready, you juice yourself with a fentanyl overdose. Accidental
death. The insurance can’t prove otherwise and pays off.”
Cathy thought about it. “Fentanyl
seems so down market. What about heroin?”
“A little more expensive,
but sure, doable.”
And that’s how it
went down. Cathy left me completely stoned, I pocketed twenty
thousand in relatively small bills and the grandkids got the insurance money. The
cops chased down Cathy’s dealer, but
since she’d been making the buys there was no blowback to me.
I’d about decided
that I was cursed to singlehood. But then I realized
that there might be hundreds of women in similar binds, wanting to end
themselves. Women who could develop into a profitable side hustle for me. Finding
them was the difficulty.
The solution was elegant.
God bless
AI. I set it to pose as human, go to dating sites, and seek out women with
specific ethnicity, age range, geographic proximity, relationship status and
income category. That last part was tricky, because AI didn’t do a very good
job of rating finances. With prospects
listed, I told Helen (I know, but I had to name it something) to use an alias
and friend the prospects on Instagram, Facebook and X, and then mine for stated
or implied anxieties. At that point I had to begin to monitor things, because
Helen couldn’t distinguish between the merely neurotic and the suicidal.
I also had to create a repertoire
of personal and money movement that
would leave me anonymous or clearly innocent—the cash from casinos ploy would
get discovered pretty quickly if I repeated it. On the plus side, relatively
few women in this category relied on insurance for their estates.
I narrowed the focus down
to a dozen prospects and befriended them. A
little bit like speed dating except I had to remember their names and
preferences. Half of them preferred to just be friends, which was fine by me.
At my age frequent sex with more than one woman is debilitating.
My working lie in most cases
was that I was still married, although
separated, and needed to be discreet about relationships. Several of the women,
bless them, were comfortable with this discretion.
The bait was passive, I
invented a slow-moving disease that was taking
over my body and waited for them to tell me about their own health issues. It
took a couple unsuccessful forays before Marge of the bad marriage to a guy
with his own drug habit opened up about her metastasized cancers.
“So there it is, Hector. The pains
only just started, but the oncologist says it’ll get bad enough that I’ll be on
constant opioids that the pain will gradually overwhelm.”
She was zaftig, a buxomness
I found endearing. I sympathy squinted. “Jesus,
Marge, they can’t do anything more than that for you?”
We were sitting side by
side, her perfume delicate yet faintly musky. I suspected
it went for more than $1,000 an ounce.
“They say they can’t,
Hector.” She started softly crying. “I can’t die
that way, I can’t.”
I put my arm almost around
her. “Not to sound ghoulish, but it’s a shame
assisted suicide isn’t legal in this state.”
She took a long breath.
“If I do it myself who’s going to get convicted?”
I’d already taken
a long drive out of state to street-buy recreational dry
goods and a couple ghost guns, and was stocked up. I gave it my own three-second
pregnant pause and said, “Ah, you should see another doctor before even
thinking about doing that, but, if you get desperate, I can see about getting
some drugs. It would at least be painless.”
Her smile diverted a tear.
“Would you really? For me?”
“Of course.”
We left it there, not further spoken about for two weeks,
when she brought it up again.
She’d winced a couple
times while we made love, and I looked at her
questioningly afterwards. “The pain is getting a lot worse. I think your Plan B
is called for.”
“You’re really
sure? Your reputation will be shot—junkie suicide and all.”
“Screw ‘em.
I want to leave while I’m still recognizable.”
“Okay, let me see
what I can do. There’ll be some expenses, would you mind
picking them up?”
“Of course not, how
much would you need?”
“Twenty thousand should
keep the dealer closed-mouthed and cover my costs.”
Her expression hardened.
“Are you conning me, Hector? Give me sugar pills
and take off?”
My wounded expression, developed
during the married days, was pretty
convincing. “Of course not. I’m just not as well off as you are.”
Marge shrugged. “I’ll
be dead, I shouldn’t care so much. Okay. How soon
can you manage the drugs?”
Once she wired the money
to an offshore account, I pretended for two weeks
that things were getting organized, then presented Marge with enough heroin to
kill off three of her. And waited. At her suggestion we’d stopped texting and
hooking up, but I monitored the news outlets and social media services. A funny
thing popped up. James Cuthbert, husband of Marge, had died of a drug overdose.
I was initially shocked, then annoyed. I’d been played.
I waited three hours in
her condo parking garage and braced her after she
pulled the Lexus into her slot and got out. “You should have told me. I’m an
accessory to murder.”
She laughed. “Sweetie, you’re an
accessory either way. We both have to keep my little secret. And forget about
trying to gouge me for more money. If you open up to anyone, you’re liable.”
I tried to angle the play.
“Marge, that’s true, but I could only be
convicted of supplying drugs, but you…well you know what you might be liable
for. You should keep me happy.”
She laughed again, more
harshly. “And pay you for the rest of my life? No
thanks. I’ll take my chances that you don’t want to go to prison.” She turned
to get into her car, then swiveled her head back toward me. “I’m afraid our
personal and business relationships are over.”
I nodded and walked up one
level to my own car. I suddenly realized that
Marge had shown me that my business model could accommodate second-hand murder,
an idea I didn’t immediately reject.
Once inside my car I took out the
burner phone I used for dating. “Hello, Carmen? Honey, turns out I’m free for
dinner. Pick you up at seven?”
end
