9. Omar
Omar
Kadeem was in his office when I got to APEX. The door was open. He was at his desk with a file in front of him but he wasn't reading it. He looked up when I came in.
"Close the door."
I closed it and sat down across from him.
"You bout to tell me what happened?"
I told him about Nostrand. I'd been supposed to be watching Holt, but instead I watched him push about a woman. Then I handled it.
Kadeem listened without interrupting. When I finished he was quiet for a moment.
"Why?"
"That limp nigga put his hands on her."
"You don't step into Crown Heights business over someone putting hands on a woman you don't know."
I didn't answer.
"Wait, so you do know her?"
I kept my mouth shut.
"Omar."
I waited another second. Then I said it.
"It was Asha."
Kadeem went still. His eyes stayed on me but something changed behind them, working through it. Asha had come in fast at the warehouse, kept her eyes off me, walked back out. He'd known something was off but he hadn't placed her face. Now he placed it.
"Asha Cole?"
"Yeah."
"Asha Cole is Supreme's woman?"
"Yeah."
He ran a hand down his face and said, "Fuck," then said it again quieter, sat with it for a moment while he went through the same math I'd been going through since the warehouse.
Asha Cole, fourteen years gone, sitting at Supreme's table as his woman, me putting my career on the line over her in a way Supreme was going to feel.
"You been seeing her?"
"Only that time at the warehouse and then I just came from seeing her now."
"Fuck, Omar." Kadeem ran a hand over his face. I knew I'd fucked up. Man, it was worse than that.
"I know, I know."
"Do you? Because what just happened with Holt is what happens when you don't know."
I didn't have an answer for that.
Kadeem looked at me for a long moment. "You know what she is to Supreme?"
"I know."
"Then you know what this costs if it gets complicated."
"It won't."
He gave me the look. The one that said he didn't believe that and I'd hear about it later if I was wrong. Then he let it go.
"Don't make me regret that," he said.
I stood up. "You won't."
He went back to the file on his desk. I left him there and walked out.
Stone was at Ma's when I got there that afternoon.
She was at the stove with a pot of something going. The kitchen was warm. Onions and thyme sat on the counter next to the chicken stock she made every other week whether anyone asked for it or not. Stone was at the table talking to her while she worked. He looked up when I came in and nodded.
Ma turned around and gave me the look she always gave me when I came through the door, somewhere between relief and worry, something I'd stopped trying to name years ago.
"You eat today?" she said.
"I'm good, Ma."
"That's not what I asked."
I sat down at the table. Stone had his reading glasses on and a folder open in front of him. He closed it when I sat.
"How's Kadeem?" he asked.
"Busy."
"Always is." He took his glasses off and set them on top of the folder. "You good?"
"Yeah."
Ma brought a plate over, set it in front of me without asking. Rice and chicken with greens, a piece of cornbread on the side. I picked up the fork.
"Rashid has a show this week," Ma said. She was back at the stove. "First proper one in a real venue."
"He's gonna be fine," Stone said.
"I know he is."
Stone had been like a father figure to Rashid since we lost Pops. Showed up every week even though Pops was gone. Maintained the watch on my little brother. Made sure Ma knew he was still here.
I finished the plate. Ma took it from me and told me to come back before the weekend if I could. I told her I would. Stone was getting ready to leave too, reaching for his jacket on the back of the chair. We walked out together.
"You alright?" he asked when we got to the door.
"Yeah."
He looked at me for a second longer than necessary. Then he nodded and let me go.
At home that night I opened my laptop and pulled up Asha's Instagram.
Her salon feed was public. Before-and-after shots filled the grid. Client work, transformations. I scrolled back through six months of posts. A year. Further. The early ones were Atlanta shots, different shop, different light coming through the windows.
I stayed on one picture longer than I meant to. Her reflection in a salon mirror, blurred in the background while the client's finished hair filled the foreground. You could barely see her face but I saw it.
I clicked through to her profile. There was a phone number listed for bookings. I pulled it up and stared at it. My thumb hovered over the call button.
I just saved it to my phone, closed down that fucking browser, and opened Devon's older files instead.
We'd been pulling threads on Pops for two years now.
The Hampton Royal hotel records from the week before he disappeared were still sitting in a folder on my desktop, meeting logs and transaction receipts that Deonte had pointed us to before the cancer took him.
Deonte had heard Pops arguing with someone in the back office that night but was too terrified to say who.
Said even mentioning the name would get him killed.
Tommy Vicks, the street witness who claimed he'd seen Pops being taken, had vanished before Devon could get a second meeting. Somebody got to him first.
Then there was the watch. Pops' custom gold Audemars Piguet with the engraving on the back.
Devon's contacts had spotted it on a man on Pitkin Avenue.
Kadeem and I had paid that man a visit. Before Kadeem finished with him, the man taunted us: Your pops knew.
Before the end. He knew exactly who fucked him.
His brother was the one we'd grabbed at the end of it.
I'd interrogated him at the warehouse and what he'd told me was enough to keep me up at night.
The money funding TK's street war was connected to Pops' disappearance.
The person behind it was close. Real close.
That was the thread I was sitting on. Close enough to feel the heat of it but not close enough to see the face.
The peripheral name from Devon's files kept appearing in the TK financial trail.
It showed up in a document from when Pops disappeared.
A meeting that never made it into any formal record, two names listed.
One of them was the intermediary Stone had mentioned at the warehouse.
The other name meant nothing to me but it sat next to the first one like it belonged there.
I stared at both names. Tried to find a pattern Devon had seen that I was missing. Tried to see how this connected to TK, to Supreme, to the intermediary who kept showing up in places he shouldn't be.
The document didn't give me anything I didn't already have. Two names and a gap where an explanation should've been.
I was getting closer though. The pattern was there. I just had to see it.
I closed the file and shut the laptop.
I sat in the dark for a while after that. My phone was on the table next to me. The building was quiet. Outside someone's car alarm went off and stopped a minute later. A siren went past a few blocks over and faded.
The Malik thread didn't leave. It never did. But neither did Asha.
I got up and went to bed.