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Twilight cast a shadowy light as he rounded a curve and turned off the blacktop onto an old logging road. His lights bounced as he wrestled with the steering wheel to keep his truck out of the deeper ruts in the narrow lane. Couldn’t afford to get stuck, not with his cargo.

He pulled to a stop at the location he’d picked out earlier and climbed out of the truck. Mosquitos buzzed his head as the muggy night wrapped around him. Waving them off, he lowered the tailgate and pulled the body wrapped in a tarp to the end of the bed and eased it to the ground. Humidity thick enough to swim in soon had him panting from the exertion of pulling the tarp with the dead man in it over the terrain.

Sweat drenched his shirt by the time he reached the spot he’d picked out. He rolled the body into a shallow trench hollowed out by spring rains and pulled the tarp off, then covered the body with branches he’d cut earlier. With the heat, it shouldn’t take more than a month for the body to become skeletonized.

He folded the tarp until it was a neat square and carried it back to his pickup. A check of his watch indicated it was a little after nine.