Excerpt: The Virtue of Menace

Chapter One: Descent
Darkness descended as Wesley stared at the contents of the worn brown leather wallet in his beefy dark brown hands. It contained one silver metal business card with two words etched in black letters across the center: Agent Yellow.
Wesley looked around to see if anyone noticed his hulking body crouched over the former owner of the wallet.
In the alley between the Uncle Jacob’s Meat Emporium, the Liquor Super store and Pizzeria, behind the large smelly black dumpster, under a dimly blinking street light, Wesley searched through the pockets of the dead man on the ground beneath him.
Nothing but lint.
The dead man was a young black man who wore a tight form fitting white tee shirt, blue jeans and white sneakers. The sneakers were the latest Pegasus brand that was currently a hot commodity on the street.
Wesley placed his black combat boot sole up against the dead man’s foot.
A match.
He ripped the sneakers off stone cold feet, tossed his old worn boots in the dumpster and slipped his feet in the $400 dollar state of the art white sneakers.
A good snug fit.
A soft noise startled Wes as he laced up the sneakers on his feet. He looked at the black doorway behind the meat emporium, in the narrow opening he noticed a Halftone security guard looking directly at him.
Wesley pulled a lighter out of his cargo pants pocket, flicked it with his thumb once, watching the angry orange flame shoot up three inches from the lighter in his hand. He made sure that flat freak had seen the flame as it danced long and tall creating an eerie glow across the grimace set on his face.
John, the security guard, begrudgingly moonlighted at the meat emporium. John, a sad faced Halftone, looked like he was drawn by a depressingly, demented illustrator, with his physical color limited to gradations of gray.
John usually worked the during the day at university but his hours were cut when they hired a black man to take the morning shifts.
John noticed the large blurry figure bending over the dead body for sometime. What surprised him was how clearly he saw the dead black man’s features as his body lay on the ground.
Black people always looked like a dizzying blur of energy to him. Their facial features were difficult to discern and when they moved it was difficult to keep up with them as difficult as it is to follow the movements of a fly. Yet this dead black man was easy to look at. He supposed that it was their life force which made black people difficult to really “see.”
The flame however was too disturbingly distracting so John quietly shut the backdoor to leave the menacing black blur to his criminal pursuits. Besides, he was paid to watch for shoplifters at the meat emporium. It looked like the commonplace black-on-black crime he heard about on the radio. He didn’t want to get involved in non-Halftone business.
Wesley pocketed his lighter contemplating whether he should set the freak on fire. He done it many times before sending those disturbing silhouette cut outs to an ashtray. He squashed those destructive thoughts with the notion that he needed to contain this fuck up to its simple elements: dead body, no weapon, no way to tie him to the cause of it.
That Halftone wouldn’t be able to finger him bedsides those “cardboards” (a common slang used to describe Halftones) tended to keep to themselves which was very cool with Wesley.
Wesley learned to think of deep strategic shit like that up in the pen. Since Wesley was released two years ago from his last stint in prison he grew more paranoid having a hard time adjusting to the technological advances of life. He found cell phones intrusive and the public surveillance cameras through out the city made it difficult but not impossible for him to navigate unseen.
Wesley particularly detested the electronic cards used to gain entrance to the subway system which recorded when and where a nigga traveled on the city subway station and the credit cards folks used instead of the cash folks carried back in the day. Wesley loved dealing with cash only - it gave a brother anonymity.
When Wesley was a young nigga, throughly bored with any schooling, he felt that pointless shit was for losers who couldn’t regularly pull bitches. As his stomach growled and he dick swelled he lamented that them damn losers have made it nearly impossible for a straight up thief like himself to make a decent living.
Wesley tossed the wallet aside pocketing the metal business card, while sub-vocally cursing to himself. He knew these fuckers tended to travel in twos and he had no time to cover his tracks before this asshole’s partner stumbled up on him and this very incriminating dead body.