His hip ached. A lump on the back of his skull throbbed when he rolled over on it. He was stiff from sleeping on cement. The cold air had tempered overnight to something more seasonable, maybe forty degrees. The sun blazed brightly outside the shadow of the bridge. He lay wrapped in blankets on a cramped ledge, the size of an average living room, which jutted out from a concrete bridge abutment. Nine parallel steel I-beams, five feet overhead, carried the bridge to another abutment, maybe fifty feet away. All sorts of trash was strewn around the ledge: empty soup cans, cat food boxes, fast food and cigarette wrappers. Old clothes, dirty sheets and blankets were in piles. A yellow plastic milk crate nearby held coffee mugs, cutlery, two long white candles, a bottle of lemon juice and a handful of new syringes wrapped in plastic. Eddie crawled naked to the edge of the ledge. It dropped twenty-five feet straight down a wall of granite blocks to two sets of railroad tracks.
