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