"Jesus, you fuck Benny," Bogey thought. "You had to just up and die on me here in this shit hole."

He pulled the dirty sheet over Benny's rebar stiff body not disturbing at all the piles of rotting garbage, abandoned clothes, and moldy newspapers that surrounded it. He sat down heavily on top of of dark blue plastic milk cartoon facing his friend's dead body. The morning sun was just rising blood red through the bluish commute haze coming off the nearby freeway. The squat they'd been living in for the past two weeks was a derelict office building  just south of Oakland. The Mexican Brown was surprisingly cheap here despite being a long way away from the border. 

"Too cheap," he thought. "Probably cut Benny's last dime bag with 70% strychnine."

"But we had some times didn't we," he thought staring down at the corpse shaped sheet. 

He rummaged around in the pockets of his faded Army jacket. He pulled out a bent spoon,  a tiny empty white plastic bag, a lighter and three quarters of a cigarette.  He licked the inside of the bag for resin to take the edge off and then light the cigarette. For a brief moment he ran the flame from the lighter over the extensive scar tissue on his left forearm.  The large patch of needle ravaged skin was almost completely numb now. 

"How long since we did that show together Benny, what was it The Tweenie Bop Parade or some shit like that. Man, time goes fast. Can't believe we were only fourteen years old back then. Now you're dead at thirty two." 

Bogey rubbed the hard stubble on his sore jaw and noted the irony. "Hired me because of my smile originally, now almost all of my teeth are gone. Hair too." A pile of trash rustled behind him and Bogey turned cat quick at the noise. He saw a furry black rear end and a long pink tail dart under some newspapers. "Yeah, the rats man. I don't want to do this, but you know what rats will do to a dead body if they have the chance." 

He stood up from the milk crate still puffing away at the cigarette. In the back off the building there was a public bathroom. Someone had long ago ripped the door of it's hinges. White porcelain  from the smashed toilets littered the floor, though all of the metal fixtures, copper piping, and tile flooring had been neatly scavenged by desperate junkies at some point in the buildings sad down fall. The sink had survived and years of it serving as a makeshift meth lab had chemical burned it black. Bogey rummaged around looking for cans of lighter fluid, acetone, paint thinner from the huffers, anything that had a little bit of flammable liquid left in it. After collecting what he could find he went back to Benny's body. He set the cans down and used his pocket knife to open each one up length wise. He poured as much of the remaining liquid as he could over Benny. The outline of Benny's long pointy nose bled through the sheet and Bogey had to hold back a strong sob.

"I don't want to do this, but I have to," he said though tears. "Remember what old Vinnie use to say to us when we were inside for that two year stretch? Yeah, that's right Benny, always burn the body up with the building. It takes the cops longer to investigate it and you have time to get out of town. And I can't risk sweating out the junk in County Benny. You've been there before. You know what it's like."    

From his battered leather wallet he unfolded a faded old photograph. Two young boys stood smiling outside in a parking lot of a sunlight Hollywood studio. Tossing it onto Benny's body he took a long pull on the cigarette until the end glowed red. And then turning to go without looking back he flicked it onto the body. The flames had eaten up the east wall and ceiling by the time he hopped a freight train heading south towards Tijuana.