3. Omar
Omar
Devon was already at his desk when I came up.
The intel office at APEX took up half the second floor, set back from the club side of the building behind two locked doors.
Devon ran it. Three monitors, a long table he kept covered in paper, a window with the blinds always half down looking out across the rooftops toward the BQE.
He had two laptops open and a stack of folders next to his coffee, his glasses pushed up on his head where he'd forgotten them, papers spread out in the rough geometry he worked in.
Devon had been with Kadeem since before I'd come up.
He knew every corner of the operation, kept it all in his head and on his screens, and the only person who ever surprised him was Stone, who occasionally turned up with something Devon hadn't seen yet.
"Mornin'."
"Sup, O. Pull up."
I poured a cup of coffee from the pot he'd made and pulled a chair out across from him. The office was quiet at this hour. Kadeem wouldn't be in for another twenty minutes. Stone, if he was coming through today, hadn't shown.
"Last night went how I expected?" Devon asked.
"Pretty much. Supreme talked. Kadeem listened. We agreed to share the corridor."
"Stone do his thing?"
"Yeah. Named an old intermediary. Said he'd want everything you had on him."
Devon nodded and pulled one of the folders out of the stack and slid it toward me. "Then you wanna look at this. Came in late."
I opened it.
Devon's data on the Flatbush corridor had been building for weeks.
New plates kept coming through his salon contact, faces matched against vehicle records, the pattern slowly tightening.
What he was showing me now was the next layer.
Two of TK's confirmed plates had crossed paths with a third vehicle in the corridor twice in the last week.
Same parking lot, both times, an hour apart.
The third vehicle had been pulled by Devon's contact independently because of a back-and-forth between Crown Heights and Flatbush that had no obvious purpose.
I turned the page.
The third vehicle had a registration that came back to a small import-export company in East Flatbush.
Devon had pulled the corporate filings. The directors were two names neither of us recognized, but Devon had run the addresses and one of them tracked back to a mailbox on Atlantic that had been used in the past for a money operation that had been part of Supreme's network seven years ago.
"This connects them," I said.
"Yeah." Devon closed his laptop and rubbed his eye. "If TK's running supply through this company and this company's connected back to old Supreme paper, that's not just a coincidence in a corridor. That's an actual link."
"A link Supreme either knows about or doesn't."
"Right. And we don't know which."
I went back through the pages slowly. Vehicle tags, faces, dates.
The hub Devon was describing sat right in the middle of the gap between Flatbush and Crown Heights, in territory neither side had been claiming.
Convenient for both sides if both sides were running it.
Inconvenient for Supreme if it was TK doing it on his own under Supreme's old infrastructure.
I closed the folder and tucked it under my arm.
"Bring this to Kadeem when he's down?"
"Yeah."
"Stone gon' be in?"
"Stone said he'd come by later."
"A'ight."
Devon picked his coffee back up and looked at me over the rim. He was a man who watched people closely, watched everybody, and most of what he saw he kept to himself. He was watching me now.
"You good?" he said. "Anything else worth mentioning from last night?"
"Nah. I'm good."
He held my eye contact for a second. Then he let it go. "A'ight."
I took the folder up to Kadeem's office.
Kadeem's office was on the third floor at the back, the corner room with windows looking out over the rooftops in two directions and a heavy door that locked from the inside.
He was at his desk with a pen in his hand and a notepad open in front of him when I came in.
Stone was in the chair by the window, a book open on his knee, reading glasses on, cardigan buttoned over a button-down. He raised a hand when I walked in.
"Got somethin'?"
I set the folder on Kadeem's desk and walked him through it.
Devon's pattern, the third vehicle, the company, the address overlap with old Supreme paper.
Kadeem made notes as I talked, the small precise notes he made when something was going to require thinking through.
Stone listened without looking up from his book, but I knew he was tracking every word.
When I finished, Kadeem set his pen down.
"That third company," he said. "Old Supreme paper, you said."
"Mailbox tracks back to an operation he was running in 2018."
Kadeem looked over at Stone.
Stone closed his book and took the glasses off, and he did it without hurry, the way an older man does things when he's been around long enough to know rushing doesn't help.
"It's possible," he said, "that this is Supreme using infrastructure he already had in place, running a separate operation through TK so the hands don't trace back to him.
It's also possible TK is using infrastructure Supreme forgot about and Supreme will be unhappy when he finds out.
Either way, the corridor problem just got more complicated than what we agreed to last night. "
Kadeem nodded slowly.
"What you wanna do?" he asked Stone.
"I'd want Devon on this third company before anything else. Get me everything on the directors, the actual operational addresses, the bank flow. If we're going to talk to Supreme about it we need to know what we're talking about."
"Agreed."
Stone put his glasses back on and opened his book.
I waited a moment. He looked up.
"There was a name in last night's meeting," I said. "An old intermediary. You said you'd want Devon to pull what he had on him."
"I did say that."
"Devon's data has him connected to TK's new supply too. Not just the corridor. The supply itself. Twice in last week's paperwork, both routes."
Stone went still for a second. Not visibly. Just a small pause where his attention settled on what I'd said and stayed there. Then he nodded.
"Probably old paper that just hasn't been wiped down properly," he said. "But twice is interesting. Tell Devon I want everything by tomorrow night."
"A'ight."
Kadeem made one more note. Stone went back to his book.
I picked up the folder and went out.
Stone caught up to me at the front door. He had his coat over his arm and he was still moving easy, no urgency in him, just a man who'd decided he was leaving at the same time I was.
"You busy this afternoon?" he asked.
"Got a couple things on Nostrand. Devon flagged a plate."
"Mind if I walk you to your car?"
"No."
We went out into the cold. The street was quiet at this hour. He walked beside me toward where the Range Rover was parked at the corner, his hands in his coat pockets, his pace easy.
"Last night's meeting," he said.
"What about it?"
"There was a moment when the woman came out. You handled it well. Both of you did. I just want to make sure your head's where it needs to be going into this next stretch."
I kept walking.
"My head's right."
"That's all I needed to hear."
He stopped at the Range Rover and put his hand on my arm. Brief. A touch meant to make sure something he'd said had landed before he let it go.
"You're a steady man, Omar," he said. "I'm not worried about you. I just don't like surprises in rooms where there's a lot at stake."
"I hear you."
"Good."
He let go of my arm and gave me a small nod, then went off down the block toward his own car. Stone walked at his own pace, like the world was going to wait for him to get there, and the world generally did.
I got in the Range Rover.
The Nostrand work took the rest of the afternoon.
I sat on the address Devon had flagged. Logged plates.
Logged faces. Watched a barbershop trade nothing with a corner store across the street for two hours and decided whatever Devon had picked up from this address wasn't going to surface today.
I called him on the way back, gave him what I had, told him I'd run it again tomorrow.
I was supposed to drive home but I didn't. I came off the BQE at Atlantic, went left when I should have gone right, knew exactly what I was doing and let myself do it.
Supreme's building was on a quiet block in Crown Heights.
A six-story limestone with a doorman and gold trim around the entrance, the sort of building that didn't advertise itself but cost what it cost, the top two floors his apartment alone.
I parked four cars down on the opposite side of the street with the engine off, headlights dark, hands on the wheel. I watched the door.
A woman came out with a stroller and went south.
A man went into the building with a takeout bag and didn't come back out.
The light in the second-floor window came on at one point and went off again twenty minutes later.
She didn't appear.
Asha. Asha Cole. I said her name in my head and it landed the same as it had landed at sixteen, which was a problem.
She'd walked through a side door at Supreme's place last night, and I'd spent every hour since pretending I hadn't seen her, pretending her eyes finding mine across that table was something I could put away with the rest of the day's intel.
It wasn't. I'd known that within ten seconds of sitting back down in the Range Rover after the meeting.
I'd spent the entire day refusing to admit it to myself.
She hadn't looked at me when she walked out. She'd walked past me with her chin up and her face giving nothing away, the same control I remembered from when we were teens.
I sat thirty more minutes before I started the engine and pulled away from the curb, and I drove back to Bed-Stuy with my thumb moving across the stitching on the wheel.
By morning Devon would have the company filings on the East Flatbush import-export, and Stone would have whatever he wanted on the old intermediary.
I'd have a real, documented, justifiable reason to be in Supreme's part of the borough on a piece of work that connected him to the man currently roughing his own woman around as a performance for the room.
That was my reason for tomorrow.
For tonight, I had nothing but a name in my head I hadn't let myself say out loud in fourteen years.