I knew I was going to die. If the vital geyser of blood hadn’t tipped me off, the sensation of an increasingly accelerating decline into freezing waters was a dead give away. Excuse the pun.

Thoughts were melting away from my mind faster than I could bid them farewell, and yet I grasped onto one notion, one concept I wanted to let go into oblivion but couldn’t. Who had done this to me? What exactly had they done? I couldn’t feel any pain, only a growing numbness. Once that numbness had claimed me, I presumed, that would be it.

Why would anybody kill me? I was a nice person. I was a good neighbor. I gave to charity, I tutored neighborhood kids gratis, I even pitched in at the animal shelter. I couldn’t imagine what I had done to get someone this mad at me.

Then I saw a movement, the flicker of a figure in the glow of a streetlight. My killer? A vulture? Not rescue, that I knew. Suddenly, I saw a face looking at me from the cowl of a black robe.