The Hallelujah Chorus

I've had, for some time, an idea. One of the nasty sorts of ideas that takes up residence in ones brain and surfaces, from time to time, just to make you feel bad for not acting on it. It began its germination in a form wholly different from the one that it has begun to take here and will probably evolve beyond recognition before it has exhausted either me or itself.
Suffice it to say that this is the beginning of a longer piece, possibly novel length. It will be a narrative in three parts, each part following a different character; Devin, Gideon, and the as yet unnamed woman that I am thinking of as Holly, a name that I probably can't use for copyright reasons and that wouldn't fit anyway.
The setting is the Twin Cities metro area plus a city in Colorado, probably Boulder, and there will be more overtones of magical realism. Cities and places with strong emotional resonance will have anthropomorphic identities and the death of Minneapolis is what will drive the plot, though in what direction I have not yet decided.
Please, please, please, comment. Give me encouragement or critique and I will be eternally grateful.

There was something familiar about the dark blue Honda civic. The old car, run down and winter dirty, with too dark tinted windows spotlit under streetlights. An ill defined impression of menace, palpable yet impossible to pin down that welled in Devin's brain until he quieted it with a deluge of false logic hidden beneath a thin veneer (as though there were any other kind) of desperate nonchalance.
He kept his head down, and one hand on the messenger bag slung over one shoulder, conscious, perhaps overly so, of the value of its contents. His pale eyes were in constant, automatic, motion scanning the sidewalk for the tell-tale skid marks that would reveal glare ice beneath the dirty snow. He very much did not look up at the sound of distant sirens, and though he never checked for cop cars he did it through sheer force of will.
Black and white thoughts occupied the almost panicking parts of his brain. The gray matter back of his frontal lobe flitted with equal concern between official, stripped cars, the gangs that he dodged and dealt with and tried to remain independent of, and the fatal black ice hidden beneath thin layers of white snow ready to drop him, painfully, with a single misstep. Not least of all he worried about thin letters printed cheaply on translucent paper, accusatory, damning.
The car rolled to a stop despite having a green light and that's when he should have started to run but so caught up was he, in his machinations and invisible thoughts, that it was only the whir of the windows worn down motor breaking the late winter stillness that attracted his attention. His eyes raised themselves in time to catch the face of a woman, head shaved almost bald, hard eyed and expressionless, and the golden glint of halogen off of cold steel. The bullet was only nine millimeters, ubiquitous and, with the right after market modifications applied to the barrel of a gun, anonymous; he was just seventeen and more than usually slight and so he found himself spinning, before the sound caught up with the bullet, and falling face first into yellow-brown slush.
The woman rolled up her window, and the car peeled away from the curb, passing through the intersection on the yellow. It's common knowledge that the longer you remain at a crime scene the more likely it is that you will leave clues, it is also well known that a bullet wound in the left breast is almost certainly fatal if left untreated, especially if it is not kept clean. A few fat snowflakes were falling, the shock and the cold would get him, even if he didn't bleed out before someone stumbled over his body.
The sound of the cars receding engine echoed vaguely through the all but empty alleys of the cities warehouse district until they reached the ringing ears of a man who for a hundred and fifty years had been called (through no fault of his own) Gideon. He was a tall man, and powerfully built, with a long beard that would have resisted the predations of a razor blade even if he regularly had access to a mirror or a sink, and that had been on the verge of going to salt and pepper as long as he could remember. He was dirty, and his clothes should have been altogether insufficient for the weather, but beneath it all his body remained resolutely hail and well formed.
He had been awakened from his nightly torment, his visions of the flaming sword and haloed attacker, at the sound of the gunshot, and now he stood, stretching to try and relieve the pain in his shoulder blades before walking over to the small shape a little over a hundred feet away.
He examined the boy for a time, dispassionately, taking in his expensive wool coat and leather boots, the red scarf that he wore clearly out of vanity and not a desire for warmth, and tried to reconcile these with the numerous places in which his jeans were nearly worn through. He saw the blood trickle that mixed with the slurry of snow and dirt and exhaust before meandering into a storm and noted that it came from the boys head, not his heart.
He touched the boys shoulder and shook him gently, a moment later three things happened almost simultaneously.
Six blocks away a well dressed black man with blinding white teeth and deep laugh lines was hit by an Asian Foods delivery truck while crossing the street and killed almost instantly. The next morning his death would make the news for no other reason than that he had no relatives and that his many friends knew him only as Minneapolis.
On the west bank of the Mississippi river a women in her mid twenties sat up in bed in her apartment above a store that sold futons and almost screamed reflexively. She stopped herself in time, shocked. It was the first time, in all her years of having the dream, that she didn't dream the boys last heart beats, it was the first time that she saw him opening his eyes. She had never realized that he was beautiful.
The third thing that happened was that Devin rolled onto his back at the homeless mans touch and, after a couple abortive attempts opened his eyes. On the horizon Foshay tower swam leisurely into focus. Gideon stepped back and offered his hand, Devin took it and stood, hesitantly.
“Thank you,” he said. Gideon didn't reply, he just watched as he had for decades, watched as the world began again to shift under him.
Devin shook his head at the homeless man's stoicism and began again to walk, trying to wipe the blood from his forehead as he did so. He was tired, he was scared, his chest was burning, and something in the stranger had awoken a sense of entrapment that he was unfamiliar with, accompanied by a serious wanderlust.
Abruptly he turned right, cut across a park, empty and still, and made his way under an anachronistic foot bridge that spanned the river, composed of numerous stone arches. There he sat down and opened the bag. Sewn into the bottom of the bag was a large piece of black fabric in imitation of the original lining and with deft fingers he pulled out a few stitches left intentionally large for this purpose. From under the fabric he extracted a plastic bag filled with crushed green and purple plant matter, dried and carefully weighed.
Shaking slightly with the cold he reached into the interior pocket of his coat, over his left breast, and pulled out the bible he had put there that morning. A bullet had penetrated almost all the way through before stopping, leaving only the last pages intact, one of these he tore out and sprinkled the marijuana liberally down it's center. He rolled it carefully, and lit it with an ostentatiously cheap Zippo from his left pocket.
After a few long drags he had stopped shaking, and looked thoughtfully out over the ice chocked river. He tapped the blunt with one aristocratic finger, knocking the accumulated ash onto the rock beside him and said, to no one in particular, “I need to get out of here.”