19. Omar
Omar
Kadeem put the name on my desk at APEX with a Post-it note stuck to the top: Three months overdue. Handle it.
The name was Dwayne Colley. He ran a car wash on Atlantic Avenue that Baptiste money had set up two years ago.
The deal was simple: we fronted the capital, Dwayne ran the business, profits split sixty-forty with a monthly payment back to us on the principal.
He'd been current for the first eighteen months.
Then the payments stopped. Kadeem had sent Devon to talk to him twice.
Both times Dwayne gave a story about cash flow problems, promised to catch up, and then went dark again.
Three months was the limit. After three months it stopped being a business conversation and became my conversation.
James drove. I pulled up Devon's file on Dwayne while we headed toward Atlantic.
Forty-one years old, lived alone in a duplex on Eastern Parkway, drove a leased BMW that cost more per month than his missed payments.
He had a girlfriend in Canarsie and a second phone he thought nobody knew about. Devon knew about everything.
"What's the approach?" James asked, turning onto Atlantic.
"Depends on him. We go in civil, give him a chance to explain. If the explanation's good, we work something out. If it's bullshit, we adjust the terms."
"And if he runs?"
"He won't run. Where's he gonna go? His whole life is on this block."
The car wash was at the end of a strip of businesses between a tire shop and a liquor store.
Two wash bays, a waiting area with plastic chairs and a vending machine, a small office in the back.
The lot was half full, so business was clearly moving.
A man in coveralls was spraying down a Honda in the first bay.
Two more were wiping down cars in the parking area.
We parked across the street and walked over. James stayed by the entrance to the lot, leaning against the fence, casual. I went to the office.
The door was open. Dwayne was sitting behind a metal desk with a calculator, a stack of receipts.
He was a big man, thick through the shoulders, with a goatee going grey at the edges.
He looked up when my shadow fell across his desk.
His face went through three expressions in about two seconds: surprise, recognition, then something that hardened into defiance.
"Omar." He leaned back in his chair and folded his arms. "Was wondering when y'all would send somebody."
"Not somebody. Me."
"Yeah, I see that." He didn't stand up. Didn't offer me a seat.
He stayed in his chair with his arms crossed, looking at me like I was a customer complaining about a missed spot on his hood.
"Look, I already told Devon what the situation is.
Business been slow, the winter killed us, I'm working through it. I got a plan to catch up."
"Devon came to see you twice. Both times you gave him a story. Both times you went dark after."
"I went dark because I was busy running a business. Your brother put money into this car wash, I appreciate that, but that don't mean I'm on a leash. I got overhead, employees, equipment to maintain. The money's coming. It just ain't coming on your schedule."
I closed the office door behind me. The click of the latch was the only sound in the room. Dwayne's arms uncrossed slightly.
"You driving a BMW, Dwayne."
"That's a lease. Business expense."
"It's a fifty-thousand-dollar car you're driving while you owe my brother twelve hundred a month for three months running.
" I pulled out the chair across from his desk and sat down.
"Devon pulled your financials. The car wash is clearing eight grand a month in revenue.
Your overhead is about four. That leaves you four thousand in operating profit, more than enough to cover what you owe.
So the question ain't whether you can pay. It's why you ain't been paying."
"I told you. Things are tight."
"Things ain't tight, Dwayne. You're lying to me."
His face tightened. "Excuse me?"
"You heard me."
The office door opened behind me. One of Dwayne's employees came in without knocking, a young guy in coveralls with soap suds on his arms, mid-twenties, built like he spent his mornings in the gym instead of the car wash bay. He looked at me, then at Dwayne.
"Everything good in here, boss?"
Dwayne glanced at the kid, then back at me. Something passed across his face. Calculation. He was wondering whether having his employee in the room gave him leverage.
"Everything's fine, J'Quell," Dwayne replied. "We're just having a business conversation."
"Don't look like a business conversation." The kid took a step into the office. His eyes were on me. "You need me to stay?"
I turned in my chair and looked at the kid. He was young enough to think his gym shoulders meant something in this room. Young enough to not know what happened to people who stepped into conversations between the Baptiste family and their business partners.
"What's your name?" I asked him.
"J'Quell."
"J'Quell, you work the wash bays?"
"Yeah."
"Then go work the wash bays." I held his eyes. "Right now."
Something in my voice or my face or the way I was sitting reached J'Quell in a place his gym shoulders couldn't protect. He looked at Dwayne one more time. Dwayne gave him a small nod and the kid backed out of the office. The door closed.
I turned back to Dwayne. The defiance was cracking at the edges.
"Your employee just walked into a conversation between you and the Baptiste family.
That tells me your people don't know who funds this operation.
That tells me you been keeping our arrangement private, which is smart, but it also tells me you've been treating our money like it's yours.
" I leaned forward. "So let me ask you again. Where has the money been going?"
Dwayne held for another ten seconds. His arms were back across his chest but the posture was different now. Defensive instead of defiant.
"I got into something," he said finally. "A side deal. Somebody came to me with an opportunity and I put some of the profits into it. It didn't pan out."
"What kind of opportunity?"
"A real estate thing. A building in Flatbush. The guy said we'd flip it in six months and triple the investment."
"Who's the guy?"
Dwayne shook his head. "Just a broker. Nobody connected. He wasn't Baptiste, wasn't Supreme's people, wasn't anyone. Just some dude with a pitch."
"And you put our money into his pitch."
"It wasn't your money. It was my profit share."
"Your profit share comes after you pay us back, Dwayne.
That's how the deal works." I stood up from the chair slowly.
Dwayne's eyes followed me upward. "You pay us first. Then you do whatever you want with the rest. You don't get to invest our principal in a Flatbush flip and then tell Devon the car wash is struggling. "
"The building sold last week. I'm getting my cut in about ten days. I can pay Kadeem everything I owe plus interest."
"Ten days."
"Maybe less. The escrow company said..."
"I don't care about escrow companies." I walked around the desk to where Dwayne was sitting.
He pushed his chair back but there was nowhere to go, the wall was right behind him.
I put one hand on the desk, the other on the back of his chair, and leaned down until my face was close enough to see the sweat forming on his forehead.
"One week. Seven days. You bring twelve hundred times three, that's thirty-six hundred, to Devon at APEX. Cash. If the money's there, we're good. The payment schedule resets and we forget this conversation happened."
"And if the escrow takes longer than a week?"
"Then I come back. And next time I won't be sitting in that chair asking questions." I let the silence do work for a second. "Next time J'Quell walks through that door, he won't find us having a conversation. You understand what I'm telling you?"
Dwayne nodded. His forehead was beading with sweat despite the air conditioning rattling in the window behind him.
"One week," I repeated. "Don't make me come back, Dwayne."
"You won't have to. I'll have it. I promise."
I straightened up, adjusted my jacket, and walked to the door. I stopped with my hand on the handle.
"The BMW," I said without turning around. "Turn that in. Get something reasonable. You're a car wash owner, not a Wall Street broker. Start acting like it."
"Yeah. Yeah, I will."
I opened the door and walked out into the lot. The sun was bright on the wet sidewalk, the hoses running in the first bay, the employees working like nothing was happening in the back office. James pushed off the fence and fell into step beside me as we crossed the street to the car.
"How'd it go?" James asked.
"He'll pay."
"You sure?"
"He was sweating before I finished talking. He'll pay."
James unlocked the car and we got in. He pulled out onto Atlantic heading back toward Bed-Stuy. The traffic was light, the city moving around us in its usual rhythm, people going about their business without any awareness of the conversations happening in back offices across Brooklyn.
"Can I ask you something?" James said after a while.
"Go ahead."
"This girl you been seeing."
My hands stayed where they were. My face stayed where it was. "What about her?"
"Nothing. Just... you been different lately. Looser. Like something changed."
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"Aight." James kept his eyes on the road. "I'm just saying. Whatever it is, it looks good on you. You used to come to work every day like you were carrying something heavy. Last couple weeks it's like someone took some of the weight off."
I didn't respond. James didn't push it. He drove and I sat in the passenger seat looking out the window at Atlantic Avenue passing by, the storefronts and the traffic and the people on the sidewalks.
He wasn't wrong. Something had changed. Asha had come back into my life.
The ground underneath me had moved. I'd spent fourteen years walking around with a hole in my chest where she used to be.
Now she was here, in the same city, the same borough.
Texting me from bathrooms, meeting me in coffee shops, looking at me with those eyes that hadn't changed since we were sixteen.
But I couldn't tell James that. Couldn't tell anyone. Asha was inside Supreme's operation, sleeping in his bed, performing for him every night. If anyone found out about us, the consequences wouldn't fall on me. They'd fall on her.
"Eyes on the road, James," I said.
He smiled. "Whatever you say, boss."
We drove back to Bed-Stuy. I dropped James at APEX, then sat in my car in the parking lot for a minute. My phone buzzed. Asha: Thinking about you.
I read it twice, deleted it, and typed back: Same. Be safe.
Deleted that too. Both sides of the conversation erased, the way we did it every time. Two people talking to each other through disappearing words.
I pulled out of the lot and drove home.
Dwayne's money would come in within the week.
I was sure of that because I'd seen his face when I stood over him and he'd understood what the alternative was.
Most people paid after the first visit. The ones who didn't pay after the first visit always paid after the second. I'd never had to make a third.
That was the job. Kadeem ran the business, Devon ran the intel, Stone gave the advice, and I made sure everybody played by the rules. Enforcer wasn't a title anyone put on a business card. It was a function. A necessity. The thing that made everything else possible.
I was good at it. I didn't enjoy it but I was good at it.
And right now, with Asha's text sitting in my recently deleted folder and Dwayne's sweat still drying on his desk, I was thinking about what it would mean to be something else.
Someone who came home to a woman who was waiting for him because she wanted to be there, not because she was trapped.
That thought was dangerous. I let myself have it for exactly ten seconds. Then I put it away and went upstairs.