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Jim, as he had done for thousands of days, took the ferry to work that morning. Now friend, I'd love to review with you the was the sky appeared that day.....wisps of blue expectant cloudless soliliquy, free of the ballsy metropolitan thrum of cacaphonic and endless cascade of barking and choking balloons, but I, impersonating Jim, went to work just the same, brushing my teeth sideways in the thousand domicilic ways that the vanished trees of Staten Island dictated. Jim's partner, my partner, Ned, had been murdered a few weeks previously, and although the horror of Ned's death was no longer as lancinating as it was when Jim/I received that 3 AM call from the cops, those words still scorch your brain like a sadistic firebrand. Truth be revealed, bubba, we never really liked Ned all that much. I don't feel like going into what the shit was that rubbed Jim about Ned, but this didn't matter, because Ned, well, Ned was Jim's partner, and Ned had been killed and Jim felt bound by some ineffable duty honor code to avenge the murder. It had nothing to do with anything other than some ancient hindbrained atavistic function of doing the right thing. Doing the right thing. The ghostly, reflexive spectre of this haunted Jim's every fucking waking nano-thought. "Haunting" is, I feel, a poor word choice here. "Haunting" smacks, I think, of negativity and bad voodoo mojo. If this is the way it strikes you, then "haunting" is the wrong choice. But Jim needed to avenge Ned's whack to set and see it right. Karma. Karmic balance and all that shit. These thoughts, this over-riding feeling that the world was imbalanced due to Ned and this balance was to be restored and it was up to me to do this restoring was the main issue for him on that ferry ride.