25. Omar
Omar
Nene texted me at twelve-forty: She's coming out in twenty. Be on DeKalb, east side, past the bodega.
I was already in the car. I'd been parked three blocks away for an hour, running surveillance reports on my phone, pretending to work while checking the time every ninety seconds.
Devon had texted earlier with an update on the men from the bar.
He'd tracked the heavyset one through social media, a man called Curtis Boone from East Flatbush.
His cousin, the one who'd claimed to have seen Pops in chains, was a name Devon was still running down.
Three known addresses, two disconnected phone numbers.
Devon was working through them methodically.
When he found the cousin, we'd have a conversation. A real one.
But right now my head wasn't on Pops or Curtis Boone or chains. Right now my head was on Asha.
Asha had told me how the plan worked. Nene walked into the salon at one o'clock carrying a smoothie and her phone, looking every bit the best friend dropping in for a chat.
Cee glanced up from his chair by the door, clocked her, went back to scrolling.
Nene had been coming to the salon regularly enough that Cee didn't register her as anything other than background noise.
She sat in the empty chair beside Asha's station and they talked at normal volume for a few minutes.
Hair, clients, Nene's neighbor who kept leaving notes on her door.
Cee didn't look up once. Then Nene leaned in close and said something about needing to show Asha something outside, some gossip she couldn't say in front of other people.
Asha put down her flat iron, told her one o'clock she'd be ten minutes, and walked to where Cee was sitting.
"Hey Cee, I'm gonna step out with Nene for a minute. She got some drama she needs to talk through. We'll be right outside."
Cee barely looked up. "How long?"
"Twenty minutes, maybe thirty. Girl stuff."
He shrugged and went back to his phone. Asha and Nene walked out the front door together, turned left past the bodega, turned right at the corner.
I pulled onto DeKalb and found a spot past the bodega where the street curved and the sightline from the salon was blocked.
At one-fifteen Asha came around the corner walking fast. She was in leggings and a denim jacket, her bag across her body, her eyes scanning the street before they found my car. She got in, closed the door, and let out a breath.
Nene kept walking in the other direction, already on her phone, ready to loop back to the salon in twenty minutes and wait for Asha to return.
"How long?" I asked.
"Twenty minutes. Maybe twenty-five before Cee starts wondering."
I pulled out and drove. The Bed-Stuy apartment was fifteen minutes away, which left us nothing.
I headed east instead, past the residential blocks toward the industrial stretch near the water where we kept a warehouse for storage.
The lot behind it was fenced, gated, no cameras. I had the fob on my keys.
I pulled through the gate, parked behind the building where the car was hidden from the street, and killed the engine. The lot was empty. Chain-link fence on three sides, the warehouse wall on the fourth. Nobody coming back here without a reason.
Asha looked at the warehouse, then at me. "Romantic."
"Best I got on twenty minutes' notice."
She laughed. That laugh hit me in the chest the same way it had since we were sixteen. She unbuckled her seatbelt and turned toward me in the passenger seat.
"Come here," she said.
I leaned across the console and kissed her.
Her hand went to the back of my neck, pulling me closer, her mouth already open under mine.
The kiss was different from the apartment.
Hungrier. We hadn't seen each other in days because Cee had been sitting inside the salon cutting off every route, and the deprivation was all over both of us.
"Back seat," I told her.
We climbed through the gap between the front seats, clumsy, knees hitting the console, her elbow catching the headrest. She landed on the back seat laughing and I came down on top of her, my hand bracing against the door behind her head.
The back seat of my Range Rover was plenty big enough for both of us and if I'd been thinking proper I would've had that row folded flat, but I had to work with what I had.
I kissed her neck while she pulled at my belt, her fingers working fast, urgent.
I got my hand under her jacket, up her shirt, found her bra and pushed it up without unhooking it, my palm closing over her breast. She arched into my hand and made a sound against my ear.
"We don't got long," she breathed.
"Then stop talking."
She bit her lip and grinned. I tugged her leggings down her hips and she lifted up to help me, kicking them off one leg so they hung around her ankle on the other.
Her underwear came with them. I got my jeans down far enough and she reached between us, wrapping her hand around my dick, stroking me twice before guiding me between her legs.
"Turn around," I said.
She turned over onto her knees on the back seat, her hands gripping the headrest of the passenger seat in front of her. Her ass pressed back against me and I grabbed her hips, pulled her closer, positioned myself behind her.
I pushed inside her from behind and she dropped her head forward against her forearms with a moan that fogged the window in front of her. The angle was deep, deeper than the bed, and I gripped her hips harder to hold the position. Her back curved as she pressed into me, taking everything.
"Shit," she gasped. "Oh shit, Omar."
I pulled back and thrust into her again, harder this time. The car rocked on its suspension. Her fingers whitened on the headrest. I set a pace that was fast and rough because we didn't have time for anything else, my hips slamming against her ass, the sound of skin on skin filling the car.
"Harder," she demanded, her voice muffled against her arm.
I gave her harder, drilling that pussy down.
One hand on her hip, the other sliding up her spine to the back of her neck, holding her there.
She pushed back against me with every thrust, meeting my rhythm.
The car was creaking, rocking on its suspension, the windows completely fogged.
I couldn't see anything except her body moving underneath me.
"You feel so fucking good," I groaned. "This pussy was made for me."
"Then take it," she shot back over her shoulder. "It's yours. Take it."
I grabbed a fistful of her hair and pulled her head back. She gasped and her back arched deeper and the angle changed again and we both made sounds that would have carried if anyone had been within a hundred yards.
My free hand slid around her hip, down between her legs, my fingers finding her clit. I rubbed in tight circles while I fucked her from behind. Her whole body started shaking and she was gripping the headrest so hard I thought she'd tear it off the seat.
"I'm gonna come," she breathed. "Fuck, I'm gonna..."
"Let me hear it."
She came with her face pressed against the seat, her body clenching around me, her voice breaking on a sound that was half scream and half sob. I lasted maybe ten more seconds before I followed, my grip tightening on her hips, burying myself deep as I finished inside her.
We stayed there for a second. Both of us breathing hard, the car still rocking gently from the momentum. The windows were white with condensation. My knees were bruised from the seat frame and my neck was bent at an angle that was going to hurt tomorrow.
She turned over slowly and collapsed onto the back seat, pulling me down beside her. We lay there in a tangle of half-removed clothes and fogged windows, her head on my chest, both of us trying to catch our breath in a car that was too small for one person to stretch out in let alone two.
"Romantic," she said again, but this time she was smiling.
"You complaining?"
"Not even a little." She kissed my shoulder. "But next time I want a bed."
"Next time you'll get one."
We lay there for another minute. I checked my phone. Twelve minutes left before Nene would start worrying.
"I need to ask you something," I said, hoping to discuss it before I dropped her off.
She lifted her head. "About what?"
"About your pops, Ray."
Her face changed. The softness went out of it and something harder came in. "What about him?"
"When he made the deal with Supreme. The trade. Did he ever mention who set it up? Who connected them?"
She was quiet for a moment, her finger tracing a line across my chest. "Ray didn't set up nothing.
He went to someone. Someone who had connections to Supreme's people.
A middleman or a fixer, I don't know what you'd call it.
Ray owed money to the wrong people and this person told him there was a way to clear the debt. "
"You remember a name?"
"Ray never said a name. He just called him 'the connect.' Said the connect could make the problem go away if my dad was willing to negotiate."
"Negotiate meaning you."
"Meaning me." Her voice was flat. "The connect introduced Ray to Supreme's people. The deal got made. I moved into Supreme's apartment three weeks later."
"This connect. He work for Supreme or for somebody else?"
"Why are you asking about this?" She sat up and looked at me. "Was this the only reason you wanted to get close to me?" For a moment she looked hurt, her brow furrowed tightly.
"Never!" I said quickly. "You know how it's always been you. You don't got to worry about that. I'm asking because names keep coming up in the financial trail Devon's been running. Names that connect Supreme's operation to TK. And some of those names go back to when my Pops disappeared."
She stopped pulling up her leggings and looked at me. "You think Ray's connect is connected to your dad?"
"I don't know yet. But the infrastructure Supreme uses to run his money was set up right before Pops went missing.
Somebody built that. Somebody introduced the players.
If the same person who connected Ray to Supreme also had a hand in what happened to my father, then your story and mine are the same thing. "
She stared at me for a long time. "You think Supreme had something to do with your dad disappearing?"
"I think Supreme's money does. Whether he pulled the trigger or just funded the people who did, I don't know. But Devon's getting close."
She pulled her leggings up the rest of the way, fixed her bra, smoothed her jacket. Her face was composed but her eyes were working through it.
"If the connect is the same person who built Supreme's financial setup," she said slowly, "then my father didn't just trade me to clear a debt. He traded me to the people who might have taken your dad."
I didn't answer. She didn't need me to.
She checked her phone. "I gotta go. Nene's waiting."
I started the car, pulled out of the lot, locked the gate behind us, and drove back toward the salon. She was quiet beside me, her hands in her lap, her eyes on the windshield. I could tell the gears were turning but I gave her the space to work through it.
I stopped two blocks from where Nene was waiting. Asha sat there for a moment without reaching for the door handle.
"If it's the same person," she said quietly, looking straight ahead.
"If the connect who brokered the deal between Ray and Supreme is the same person who built Supreme's financial pipeline.
Then the man who sat at my kitchen table and drank my mama's coffee and arranged my life...
that man also had something to do with what happened to your father. "
"That's what I'm trying to find out."
"And I've been living inside his work the whole time.
" She turned to look at me. "I've been sleeping in the house that his money built, eating food his pipeline paid for, sitting next to a man his infrastructure keeps in power.
The whole time, the operation I was trapped in might be the same one that took your father. "
"Asha..."
"Three years, Omar." Her voice was steady but her hands were pressing hard into her thighs.
"I was inside the machine. I was sleeping next to the man at the center of it.
If I'd known, if I'd been looking for it, maybe I could have found something.
Some piece of evidence, some document, some name that would have led you to Pops sooner. "
"You didn't know. Nobody knew."
"Ray knew." Her fingers curled into fists against her legs. "Ray sat across from this man and shook his hand and handed me over, and he never once asked who he was really dealing with. He never looked past the debt and the deal to see what was underneath it."
She exhaled slowly, uncurled her hands, pressed them flat against her knees.
"I'll find out the name," she said. "I'll call him. He's still my dad at the end of the day, even if I hate him for what he's done."
The idea of her calling the man who'd traded her away sat wrong in my chest but I didn't argue. She knew what she was doing.
"Be careful," I said.
"Always am." She kissed me once, fast, then got out and walked toward the corner where Nene was standing with her phone out looking impatient.
She walked quickly, her jacket pulled tight around her, her head down.
I knew what was happening inside her because I'd seen it happen to Kadeem when Devon first showed us the financial trail.
The moment when the pieces connect and the picture gets bigger and uglier than you were prepared for.
When you realize the thing that hurt you wasn't random or isolated.
It was part of something larger, something that touched other people, other families, other lives.
Asha had just learned that her captivity and my father's disappearance might share the same architect.
The man who'd brokered her sale to Supreme might be the same man who'd set up the financial infrastructure that funded whatever happened to Pops.
Her time inside Supreme's operation wasn't just her tragedy.
They were a thread in a web that connected to mine.
She fell into step with Nene, who was talking immediately, gesturing with her hands, covering the gap.
They walked back toward the salon together.
From the car I could see Asha nodding along, responding, playing the part.
But her stride was different. Tighter, faster, her shoulders carrying something new.
I drove back to APEX and sat at the desk with Devon's files open in front of me. The connect. The middleman. The fixer who'd introduced Ray Cole to Supreme's people and put Asha inside the operation.
If that person was Leonard Pryce, then the same man who'd set up Greyline Holdings and booked the conference room at the Hampton Royal had also been the one to hand Asha to Supreme.
Asha's three years of captivity and Pops' disappearance, connected by the same hand.
I needed that name.