“How did you know it was him?” Dad said. “I mean, how could you be sure?”

Without bothering to remove the black lead foil, Jack wound the screw through it and into the cork.

“He told me. Name was Ed, and he bragged about it.”

“Ed…so, the shit had a name.”

Jack blinked. Other than hell and damn, his father had always been scrupulous about four-letter words. At least when Jack was a kid.

He lifted his head but didn’t look at Jack. “How?” He licked his lips. “How did you do it?”

“Tied him up and dangled him by his feet off the same overpass. Made him a human piñata for the big trucks going by below.”

The cork popped from the bottle as Jack remembered seeing Ed swinging over the road, the meaty thunk! as the first truck hit him, then the second.

Music. Heavy metal.

Dad was finally looking at him. “That’s why you left, isn’t it. Because you’d committed murder. You should have stayed, Jack. You should have come to me. I would have helped you. You didn’t have to spend all those years dealing with that guilt alone.”

“Guilt?” Jack said, pouring more wine for both of them. “No guilt. What did I have to feel guilty about? No guilt, no remorse. Send me back in time to relive that night and I’d do the same thing.”

“Then why on earth did you just take off like that?”

Jack shrugged. “You want an eloquent, thoughtful, soul-searching answer? I don’t have one. It seemed to make sense at the time. From that moment on the world looked different, seemed like another place, and I didn’t belong. Plus I was disgusted with just about everything. I wanted out. So I got out. End of story.”

“And this creep, this Ed…why didn’t you call the police?”

“That’s not the way I work.”

Dad squinted at him. “Work? What does that mean?”

Jack didn’t want to go there.

“Because they’d have carted him off and then let him out on bail, and then let him plead down to a malicious mischief charge.”

“You’re exaggerating. He’d have done hard time.”

“Hard time wouldn’t cut it. He needed killing.”

“So you killed him.”

Jack nodded and sipped his wine.

Dad started waving his arms. “Jack, do you have any idea what could have happened to you? The chance you took? What if somebody saw you? What if you’d been caught?”

Jack opened his mouth to reply, but something in his father’s words and tone stopped him. He was going on about…he seemed more concerned about the possible consequences of the killing rather than the killing itself. Where was the outrage, the middle-class repugnance for deliberate murder?

“Dad? Tell me you wish I hadn’t killed him.”