When Pranav looked back on it, he decided it could have gone a lot smoother.

“Well duh,” his best friend said. “Smoother? We have two bodies in the trunk. Two. That’s twice as many as I agreed to help out with.”

“Buck,” he said, slowing down when the speed limit decreased, “how long have we known each other?”

“Since I died of cancer at the old age of seventy nine.”

Buck was nineteen. A full half as old as Pranav. Yet he would say things like this. Much like he would lord over Pranav that he would live a year longer than him. Scratch that- lived. Buck always spoke of Pranav’s respiratory disease in past tense. The one he didn’t have at forty. Yet he was complaining about the two bodies in the trunk.

“Well, if you don’t want that to be the case, I could always drive three bodies to the docks instead.”

Buck was unaffected by the threat, but Pranav couldn’t make himself mean it. He hadn’t wanted to have the first two.

Two more hours to drive, the stench was going to be awful.