[ WP ] How to kill your best friend and get away with it .

I waited silently in the car for Brit, his wife, to make her morning exit for work. She was running late, which meant that he would be, too. They only had one bathroom and her work as a first-year associate was far more important to her than his final year of law school. 
 
 I watch Brit drive to the end of Macon and take a left on Whitten toward 40. She was late enough at this point that if she had forgotten something at home, she'd have no time to come back and get it. 
 
 After the car was out of sight, I worked myself into as emotional a state as I could and made my way to Hud's front door. I knocked hard, three times. 
 
 `` I'm coming, I'm coming Christ, what did you forget this --''. He swung the door open and was surprised to see me standing there, looking a wreck. `` What the hell's going on, man? Are you alright? You look like someone just killed your mom something.'' 
 
 We had n't talked in over a month. Unbeknownst to *his* wife, Hud had had an affair with mine. 
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 It was n't a long or involved process. The two had gotten drunk one night when we were all watching basketball. Earlier in the evening, one my of clients had been picked up for assaulting a cop during a narcotics bust and I got en emergency call to sit in on questioning. By the time I got to the precinct, he'd manage to wrestle one of the detective's service weapons away from him and kill himself. There was nothing left for me to do - at least not for the night - so I went back home. 
 
 I caught Hud in the kitchen with Mel, on the table, fucking like rabbits. The looks on their faces when they saw held regret, astonishment, embarrassment... mortification, even, but the damage was done. Hud tried to give a `` sorry, bro'' hug but I pushed him off and he made it to his car where he slept off the booze'til morning. 
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 The affair was n't what had gotten to me, though. 
 
 I had always been the responsible one in our friendship. I had always put my nose to the grindstone, studied rigorously, and earned my way through undergrad and law school. I had submitted numerous papers for publication and esteemed peer review, but nothing had ever been published and I had never gotten any acclaim. But more than anything, I worked, and I worked *hard*. 
 
 Hud had always been irresponsible with money and came to me numerous times asking for help. I gave him what I could, within reason - enough to help a friend out but not enough to make money an issue. 
 
 Hard work and wise investment had seen my assets grow over the past five years. When was just about to make a large lump payment to rid myself of all educational debt, I received the worst punch to the gut that I had ever gotten before. All my money was gone. Someone had been taking it out of my bank account $ 500 at a time, once a week, for months. And it was gone. I put two and two together. 
 
 Hud and Brit's new car. No mention of financial stress in months. No more talk of being foreclosed on. That piece of shit stole money, *my money*, to help himself. I had planned to make him pay. Screwing my wife was simply the tipping point. 
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 `` It's Lucky, man, he died this morning.'' I was barely able to get the words out through my fake grief, and Hud bought it. 
 
 Lucky - officially Lucius Beauregard Prefontaine IV - was my thirteen year-old Scottish Terrier. My with parents' permission, Hud and his family had given Lucky to me as a present on my 14th birthday and we had been nearly inseparable through high school. During undergrad, we got special permission to live in an apartment our freshman year so that Lucky would n't have to stay behind with our parents in Jackson. 
 
 Though lucky *had* died, I was purposefully vague about the circumstances. I had taken Lucky to the vet countless times over the past year and he was on his way out as it was. The night before, he had an unfortunate encounter with porcupine and broke his hip while trying to evade the critter. Thinking of how much he would have to suffer and how expensive it would be - and simultaneously remember all of the good times we had had together when Hud, that traitorous bastard, was in the fold - I had figured that this was a better time than any to make my peace with his departure. I had taken him into the garage and left the car running while he slept. It was peaceful, but it was n't natural. 
 
 `` Shit, man, I'm sorry. Are you okay?'' 
 
 `` Yeah, he died in his sleep last night. I know we have n't talked in a month, but I was hoping - for old time's sake, that you'd come with to bury him in his woods and pay our last respects''. Lucky loved to roam the 5 acre woods behind my house. 
 
 `` Shit. I've got a really important seminar today at...'' His words trailed off as I willed the hurt in my eyes to include disappointment and to increase in gravity. `` Yeah man, let me just call my professor.'' 
 
 `` You need to call Brit, too?'' 
 
 `` I'll call her later. Her boss has been a real prick about cell phones at work lately, I'll call her at lunch at let her know.'' 
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 The drive from Memphis to Lexington take about ninety minutes, give or take. After picking up Lucky from home, I took the circuitous route out of the city to perplex anyone who might wonder where we had been heading. About 10 minutes out of the city Hud, like clockwork, had to stop for a leak. Since becoming a coffee drinker, he begun a daily routine of taking a piss exactly half an hour after every cup. 
 
 I pulled off the highway into pull-off area next to a berm and Hud went over to the other side to piss. While he was gone, I quickly removed the SIM card from his phone and replaced the battery with a dead one. 
 
 He got back in and we continued toward Lexington. It took about 45 more minutes to realize his phone was off. Once I reassured him that I was n't being a dick and messing with his phone, he concluded that he must have forgotten to charge his phone and told me to remind him to plug it in when we got to my parents house. 
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 I pulled into the driveway and opened the garage. Both of my parents were at work and would be gone for at least another 5 hours. Hud plugged his phone into the wall socket where my dad charges his tools. We grabbed two shovels and headed out the back door of the garage toward the woods. 
 
 My parents have neighbors, but the area is relatively sparse in terms of population. The closest neighbors to the left of my parents lived at least 1000 yards away and would n't see anything, while the closest ones on the right - closer by proximity - only lived in that particular house for a few weeks out of the year. 
 
 We walked for about twenty minutes before reaching our old camping spot. We'd spend many nights here as teenagers, with Lucky in tow, and this was as good a place as any to bury him. 
 
 Mastiffs are big dogs, so I figured 4 feet should do the trick. After I hit about the four foot mark, I just kept on going - harder, faster,'til my muscles burned and tears were streaming down my face. It took a lot of focus to conjure up every sad mental image I could, but I did. Hud yelled for me to stop, that I had gone far enough, but I was upset. After he finally got into the hole and put his arms firmly on my shoulders, I stopped long enough to hear him console me, and I stopped. Hud hopped up reached a hand down to help me out. The work gloves made the grip less than secure, but he managed to hold on. I asked him to help me retrieve Lucky from the tarp. 
 
 As he bent over, I thrust my steel-toed boot upward, with force, knocking him unconscious. I crouched down behind him and wrapped my forearm around his neck, pulling him firmly toward me. My grip tightened cutting of circulation to his brain. I counted thirty seconds - you only need ten - as his face turned blue and any fight that he may have had left in him drifted away. 
 
 I rolled his body into the hole along with my work gloves. I dumped about three feet of soil on top of his dead body and packed it down as firmly as I could. Then I climbed out of the hole, and rested Lucky's body on the top layer of dirt. I then filled in the hole and place an oak grave marker on the spot with Lucky's information on it. 
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 On the way back to my car, I grabbed Hud's phone and cable from the workbench and tossed them in the car. 
 
 I made the 90 minute drive back to Memphis in silence and paranoia. Every stop light, every siren, every thing I heard or saw that disrupted the continuous motion of the car made me certain that the police were on their way to arrest me. 
 
 At around ten minutes outside the city, I made a u-turn and pulled into the same emergency pull-off area that we had been to five hours before. I put the factory battery and SIM card back into the device an vigorously wiped my fingerprints from it. I tossed it over the berm, made another u-turn, then went home. 
 
 Though I've been twice questioned about his disappearance thanks to my wife's admission of her indiscretion, the police stopped short of making me a suspect and have never solved the mystery of Hudson Prentiss's disappearance. 
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