Last Breath by Kieran Shea

Was there a need to drag this out further?

  Maybe.

  The clock was ticking for both of us. For Terrance Ames the ticking probably seemed a bit louder because he was about to give death a big, sloppy kiss. With the cancer cells metastasizing away from the tumors in my lungs, my own date with death was already booked. Hell, me and death had the honeymoon fuck suite reserved, heart shaped tub and all.

— Look. Don’t do this. Don’t. You don’t have to do this.

Yeah, the world spins off its timid, little axis when a doctor shrugs and tells you it might be a good idea to start putting your affairs in order. Now that was a laugh. To put my affairs in order took a little over an afternoon. Skipped out on my rent, traded in my ’68 Fairlane for a mattress saddled camper Dodge pick-up, and scored enough Oxycodone, dope and liquor to keep the oncoming pain at bay.

  Hospice care for the uninsured and condemned.

Maybe I should have taken action sooner, but at thirty-seven you just don’t believe your health is heading south. You chalk up feeling rotten to bad habits, to depression, to the brown bottle nights at Rosecroft losing on the trotters. Symptoms are practically the same. Headache, confusion, achy bone pain—

  Yeah right.

  Then you start coughing up blood.

  A lot of blood.

  And, of course, there’s the seizures.

To tell you the truth if I hadn’t asked for that second splash of coffee at the Donut Shack I might not have figured it out at all. And, shit, that was only ten days ago. I sat there in a pitying fog of drugs, a chubby baby-powdered waitress filling my cup and a guy just plopped his Baltimore Sun on the counter next to me. One curious fingering of a page and I read all about the sentencing of Terrance Ames. Suddenly my own sentence of stage two mesothelioma made a whole lot of sense.

  About ten years ago, on referral, I had done a bunch of contract work for said Mr. Ames. Man said he was from Minnesota, doing some real estate speculation out here in Maryland. Work was straightforward, you know, cash demolition jobs and whatnot. Level a couple of squat, fire-ravaged buildings that were once a Pentecostal church and an abandoned preschool. Shit. The second site was a bunch of shingled up, crappy duplexes. He wanted me on as crew foreman and run a bucket loader. I took a look at the sites, threw out an estimate and Ames didn’t flinch. Guess he had a bunch of developers waiting to McMansion every last shitacre. The fuck did I care. I picked up some Guatemalans at a Home Depot parking lot in Glen Burnie and got to work.

  The first jobs took about six and a half weeks. A bit longer than I expected because Ames wanted to maximize the capacity of the rolloff dumpsters he’d leased. That meant everything had to be broken up or cut up and packed in the dumpsters as neatly as possible. Old sheetrock, insulated pipes, everything. Plus he wanted to bury some of the masonry deep on the sites. Weird and quite a bit more work in the muggy summer heat for me and the Guatemalans, but those hombres didn’t complain and neither did I. Hell, I’ve always loved hard work. To sweat and labor in the sun is to feel what, more often than not, we deny we actually are.

  Since I had a Class A commercial license I was also responsible as foreman for hauling each packed dumpster to another property Ames told me he had. The lot was stuck way back off a country road down south in Calvert County and had a large rutted clearing surrounded by some woods and an empty pole barn. Ames told me to cover the dumpsters with tarps and line them up in an organized way so another contractor could handle the landfill dumping. I recognized this as total bullshit and I was going to tell him so, but the next day my envelope thickened and Ames said he had more work for me and my Mexicans.

  I corrected him.

  —They’re Guatemalans.

  —Whatever.

  I whittled down my guys to the strongest and most capable, and we set about zip gutting a bunch more properties ringed around Baltimore and some crappy fringes of the surrounding counties. Two and half years worth of dependable work. Mostly houses, some commercial. Real war-zone neighborhoods. Red capped crack vials crunching under your boots like acorns. Each time we had to carve up the pieces to economize, and each time I hauled all the dumpsters south to the property Ames said he owned, and no one, not one single guy ever came to haul the rented dumpsters to the landfill. Packed them in there tight as a checkerboard.

  Then Ames up and disappeared.

  Eight years later the Feds finally caught up with Ames pulling the same scheme in northeastern Pennsylvania, and it took two more years to drag his sorry ass before a Maryland judge. I did some digging on my own and one night I followed him home and sapped him in his driveway when he was climbing out of his Suburban. I then drove him in his Suburban to a private spot I knew.

  —You must’ve had a great lawyer. I mean, nine years probation and five hundred hours of community service?

  Ames sobbed.

  —You don’t understand.

  —The fine is what floored me, you had to have cleared at least twenty times that on the first two property sales alone.

  —Please. I—I have—

  —What?

  —I have a wife. A daughter. I have a fiver-year-old grandson.

  —Aw. They know what you did? I mean, I have my problems, and maybe I should have said something then, but you’re the one who started this, man.

  —This isn’t necessary.

  —It isn’t? Fuck you, you shit. You know what I’m thinking? I’m thinking where’s the fucking follow up? I mean, sure that place down in Calvert’s now a regular EPA nightmare, but what about the stuff buried on those properties? You made serious dime on those reimbursements. So where were the Feds? Guess those guys were too busy trying to keep their jobs. Bureaucratic bloodbath in DC these days.

  —Please.

  —Hey. Those townhomes near Timonium? You know last week I drove by and I saw a mother and her retarded kid playing on one of those playgrounds.

  —I am begging you.

  I pressed the barrel of my Browning 9mm harder against Ames’ bloodied ear.

  —Really, Terrance, I’m getting all sorts of misty here.

  —I’ve money.

  —Yes you do. Now do what I told you.

  Ames did what he was told. He placed his head inside the doubled up black Hefty garbage bag and breathed deep. Using his hands he cinched the bag close to his neck as I instructed him to, the black bag contracting and inflating in the moonlight, shining like old pan oil. A light wind hissed in the elms trees above us…yellow, ragged leaves falling. My last October.

  —If I knew where those Guatemalans were I’d have invited them along. They might’ve enjoyed this. Of course, they’d probably prefer a machete.

  Faster contractions and muffled whimpers.

  —Keep breathing, Ames. Big, deep breaths.

  Ames tried to remove his head from the garbage bags so I plugged a round in the dirt in front of his knees, the loud report rolling thorough the vacant woods. He gripped the edge of the bags tighter, and looked up at me, tears creasing his face. I shoved his head deeper into the shreds of broken asbestos and open jars of mercury.

  Lots of painful coughing.

  Yeah. I know what that’s like.

© Kieran Shea 2008 All Rights Reserved