Wire to wire : a novel
(Book)

When rail rider Michael Slater gets smacked in the head by a power line while riding a train through Detroit, it sets his life on a course no boxcar could follow. A few years later, working as a speed-popping video editor in New York, Slater is cursed with watching his past unfold on the screens in his editing suite. He watches the story of his fellow stowaway Harp Maitland and how the two of them outrun drug dealers, crooked cops, and small-town creeps without ever being particularly sympathetic: as Slater concludes, "the doomed... have no need for guilt."