For three days, I strove to go about my normal business, barely able to concentrate on the work I had before me. My distraction made mild annoyances out of things I usually have no quarrel
with---Quincy's choice in music, the smell of oil and solvent that always lightly permeates my side of the shop---and heightened my awareness of the people entering and exiting my peripheral vision. For this reason, it was I who looked up first when two young bucks sauntered into the shop just before noon, moving with the leisurely pace and unsettling silence of encroaching death.

The older and larger of the two couldn't have been much more than seventeen. He had jet-black skin and a head crowned with a white Yankees cap over a red bandana, the cap's visor turned at a right-angle to his slitted eyes. His younger, fair-skinned homie wore a mushroom cloud Afro and a giant ski jacket festooned with logos on the back and along the length of both sleeves. Both boys were otherwise dressed in the standard urban uniform of oversized baggy pants and sports jersey, gleaming white tennis shoes barely visible beneath pants legs that scraped the ground in a dozen folds of excess material. None of this by itself was cause for alarm, of course; the clothes and the attitudinal gait, even the big kid's sneer were all too commonplace for young people today. But the younger boy, the one with the big hair and benign facial expression, had brought a distinctive aura into the shop along with his shadow, and I knew what it was even before the door had completely closed behind them.

Quincy did too. He watched the pair slink around between his racks of precious videos for a full minute, Yankee-boy fingering through the cases as if he actually knew who the hell Fred Williamson was, then said, "Can I help you boys?" Asking the question in that way salespeople always do when what they really want to know is, Why the fuck did you pick my place to jack?

"We just lookin'," the big kid said.

His friend said nothing, but both of them continued to inch along their separate aisles, patiently and all-too conspicuously working their way toward Quincy and the counter he stood behind, right beside the cash register.

The boy with the Afro was just slipping a long-barreled revolver out from under his jacket when I eased up behind him and jammed the