Hoax
Chapter One
Eleven days earlier...
The air in the nightclub pulsed to the repetitive throbbing of a bass guitar as two spotlights swept above the bobbing heads of the audience. With the recent ban on cigarettes in Manhattan restaurants and bars, the wraiths of smoke that danced to the beat in the glare of the lights emanated from quick secret tokes on marijuana pipes, giving the big room a smokey-sweet smell and a decidedly outlaw ambiance.
The beams of light met at center stage and focused on a pair of young men who had stepped from behind a curtain. The men -- one black and one Hispanic -- sauntered to the center of the stage where they were handed microphones by the master of ceremonies like eighteenth-century duelists accepting pistols. But instead of "ten paces turn and fire," they stood two feet apart, glaring at each other and seemingly oblivious to the throbbing music and the pumped-up crowd.
Six inches taller than his counterpart, black rap musician ML Rex was thin as a slab of bacon and wore a loose muscle shirt to show off a bevy of thick gold chains and tattoos on his mocha-brown ski ... read full excerpt from Hoax: A Novel ebook
