Jack rubbed snow in Ed’s face.

“Wake up!”

Ed sputtered and shook his head. His eyes opened. He looked dully at Jack, then around him. He looked down and stiffened. Panic flashed in his eyes.

“Hey! What—?”

“You’re dead, Ed. Ed is dead. It rhymes, Ed. That’s ’cause it’s meant to be.”

Jack was barely in control. He would look back in later years and know what he had done was crazy. A car could have come down the road and along the overpass at any time, or someone in the northbound lanes could have looked up and spotted them through the heavy snow. But good sense had fled along with mercy, compassion, and forgiveness.

This man had to die. Jack had decided that after talking to the State Police before his mother’s funeral. It had been clear then that even if they learned the name of whoever had dropped the cinderblock, there was no way to convict him short of an eyewitness to the incident or a full confession freely given in the presence of the defendant’s attorney.

Jack refused to accept that. The killer had to die—not just any way, but Jack’s way. He had to know he was going to die. And why.

Jack’s voice sounded flat in his ears, and as cold as the snow drifting out of the featureless night sky.

“You know who’s lap your ’bomb’ landed in last month, Ed? My mother’s. You know what? She’s dead. A lady who never hurt anyone in her whole life was riding along minding her own business and you killed her. Now she’s dead and you’re alive. That’s not fair, Ed.”

He took bleak satisfaction from the growing horror in Ed’s face.

“Hey, look! It wasn’t me! It wasn’t me!”

“Too late, Ed. You already told me it was.”

Ed let out a scream as he slid off the guard rail, but Jack held him by the back of his coat until his tied feet found purchase on the ledge.

“Please don’t do this! I’m sorry! It was an accident! I didn’t mean for anyone to get hurt! I’ll do anything to make it up! Anything!”

“Anything? Good. Don’t move.”

Together they stood over the right southbound lane, Jack inside the guard rail, Ed outside. Both watched the traffic roar out from beneath the overpass and flee down the Turnpike away from them. With his hand gripping the collar of Ed’s peacoat to steady him, Jack glanced over his shoulder at the oncoming traffic.

As the snow had continued to fall, the traffic had slowed and thinned. The left lane had built up an accumulation of slush and no one was using it, but there were still plenty of cars and trucks in the middle and right lanes, most doing forty-five or fifty. Jack saw the headlights and clearance lights of a tractor-semitrailer approaching down the right lane. As it neared the overpass he gave a gentle shove.

Ed toppled forward slowly, gracefully, his bleat of terror rising briefly above the noise of the traffic echoing from below. Jack had measured the rope carefully. Ed fell feet first until the rope ran out of slack, then his feet were jerked up as the rest of his body snapped downward. Ed’s head and upper torso swung over the cab of the oncoming truck and smashed against the leading edge of the trailer with a solid thunk, then his body bounced and dragged limply along the length of the trailer top, then swung into the air, spinning and swaying crazily from the rope around its feet.