33. Omar
Omar
Devon's contact at the phone company came through in forty minutes.
Nene's number had pinged off a cell tower in Crown Heights three times in the last few hours, all from the same location.
A ground-floor unit on Sterling Place, a building Supreme's crew had been using for storage and meetings for at least two years.
Devon cross-referenced the address with his surveillance data and confirmed it.
Two guards outside, rotating in shifts. One inside.
I called Kadeem from the car outside APEX.
"Sterling Place," I told him. "Ground floor. Two outside, one in."
"How many inside with her?"
"Devon's contact says one. But that could change."
"When are you going?"
"Tonight. Me and James. Devon stays with the car."
Kadeem was quiet for a second. "You need more bodies?"
"Three is enough. More than that draws attention."
"Aight." Another pause. "Omar."
"Yeah?"
"Bring her back clean. No mess that leads to us."
"Understood."
I hung up and drove to James's building in Bed-Stuy. He was in his apartment cleaning a weapon at his kitchen table when I knocked. He looked at me, looked at the piece in his hand, and nodded.
"When?" he asked.
"Two hours. You driving or am I?"
"You drive. I'll ride."
We picked Devon up at APEX at eleven. He had his laptop, two phones, and a scanner running frequencies from Supreme's crew communications. We drove to Crown Heights in my car, parked four blocks from the location on a residential street with no cameras.
Devon stayed in the car. He had eyes on the building through a long-range feed from a camera he'd placed on the block two weeks ago during the surveillance phase. The feed showed the front entrance, the side alley, and most of the street.
"Two outside," Devon confirmed, his eyes on the screen. "One sitting on the steps, one leaning against the car on the corner. Front door is closed. Lights on inside."
"Back entrance?" I asked.
"Alley access. Metal door, probably locked from inside. No camera coverage on the back."
James and I looked at each other. He nodded.
"James takes the back," I said. "Give him three minutes to get in position, then I go through the front. Devon, you flag anything that moves on that street."
"Got it."
James got out of the car without a word and disappeared into the dark between two buildings. I checked my phone. Asha hadn't texted. She was sitting in the apartment waiting and that was the hardest thing I'd ever asked her to do.
Three minutes. I counted them in my head, my hands on the steering wheel, my breathing steady.
"James is in position," Devon said, looking at his phone. "He's at the back door."
I got out of the car.
The walk to Sterling Place took ninety seconds.
I came up the block from the east side, keeping to the shadows under the trees.
The guard on the steps saw me first. He was young, mid-twenties, sitting with his elbows on his knees scrolling through his phone.
He looked up when my footsteps hit the sidewalk and his hand went to his waistband.
"Yo, who the fuck...?"
I was on him before he finished the sentence.
My hand closed around his wrist and twisted until the bone ground against itself.
He yelped and the gun came loose. I caught it with my free hand, flipped it, and cracked the butt across the side of his head.
He went down on the steps, his phone clattering to the concrete.
The second guard was at the car on the corner.
He'd heard the sound, was already reaching inside his jacket.
I crossed the distance between us in four strides.
He got the gun out but I grabbed the barrel, pushed it upward so the shot would go into the sky, then drove my elbow into his throat.
He gagged, his grip loosened on the weapon.
I ripped it free, hit him twice in the face with my fist, short compact shots that split his eyebrow open and dropped him to his knees.
A knee to his face put him on the ground.
Both guards down in under fifteen seconds. Neither one conscious. I zip-tied their wrists with the strips I kept in my jacket and left them where they fell.
The front door was unlocked. I pushed it open slowly. The hallway inside was narrow, lit by a single overhead bulb. A door on the left, closed. A door at the end of the hall, also closed. Somewhere in the building James was at the back entrance waiting for my signal.
I texted him one word: Go.
The sound of the back door being forced open came from the far end of the building. A crash, metal on metal, then James's voice saying "Get down" to whoever was on the other side.
The door on the left opened. The inside guard came out fast, a pistol in his right hand, his eyes going to the sound from the back.
He didn't see me until I was already moving.
I grabbed his gun arm at the wrist and the elbow simultaneously, driving the elbow joint backward until something popped.
He screamed and the pistol hit the floor.
I swept his legs and he went down hard, his head bouncing off the tile.
I picked up his gun, checked the chamber, and moved to the door at the end of the hall.
Kicked it open.
The room was small. Concrete floor, bare walls, a single chair under a fluorescent light.
Nene was sitting in the chair with her wrists zip-tied to the arms. She looked up when the door crashed in, her eyes wide for half a second before they locked onto me and the fear turned into something else entirely.
"Get me out of here," she said. "Quickly!"
James appeared from the back corridor. He scanned the room once, confirmed it was clear, and nodded at me.
I crouched in front of Nene and cut the zip ties with the knife from my belt. Her wrists were raw where she'd been pulling against them. She rubbed them once, stood up, and looked me dead in the eye.
"Where is she?" Nene asked.
"Safe. At my apartment."
"Thank God. The way they spoke about her..." She trailed off, rubbing her wrists.
"Don't think on it now. Let's concentrate on getting out of this place."
Nene looked around the room one more time. Her face was tight with anger, her hands balled into fists at her sides. She wasn't scared. She was furious. Furious at Supreme, furious at the situation, furious at being used as leverage against the person she cared about most.
"Let's go," she said. "I been in this room long enough."
James went first, clearing the corridor. I walked behind Nene with my hand on her shoulder, guiding her toward the front entrance. We stepped over the inside guard who was still on the floor holding his arm and moaning. He looked up at us with his face twisted in pain.
"Who are you?" he managed.
I didn't answer. We kept moving.
The two outside guards were still down. One had rolled onto his side, the zip ties holding.
The other hadn't moved at all. We walked past them to the corner where Devon had brought the car around.
Nene got in the back seat. I got in the passenger side.
James took the driver's seat from Devon, who moved to the back with his laptop.
"Clean?" Devon asked.
"Clean enough." I looked over my shoulder at Nene. "You hurt?"
"No." She was rubbing her wrists. "They didn't touch me. Just tied me to that chair and left me there."
"Did they say anything? Mention Supreme by name?"
"One of them said 'the boss wants his girl back and this is how we make that happen.' That's it. They fed me once, let me use the bathroom twice, and otherwise just sat outside that door scrolling their phones." She looked at me. "Real professional operation he's running."
"Did they take your phone?"
"Yeah, soon as they grabbed me. But they didn't turn it off." She shook her head. "They left it on the table in the hallway outside that room. I could see the screen glowing through the crack under the door. They wanted someone to trace it, Omar. They wanted Asha to come running."
That confirmed it. The phone ping wasn't a mistake. Supreme's people had left it powered on at the location on purpose, banking on Asha tracking it herself and walking straight into their hands. They hadn't counted on Devon finding it first and sending me instead.
"Where'd they pick you up?"
"Outside my building. I was coming back from the store. Two of them, black sedan, one grabbed my arm, the other opened the door. Thirty seconds and I was in the car." She paused. "They knew where I lived, Omar. They knew my schedule."
I filed that. Supreme's people had been watching Nene before they took her. Surveillance on Asha's known contacts. He was organized about this, methodical. He wasn't searching blindly for Asha. He was mapping her network.
James drove us back to Bed-Stuy. The streets were quiet, the car moving through Brooklyn at a speed that said nowhere urgent.
Devon ran his scanner in the back, checking for any communication about the Sterling Place location.
Nothing yet. Supreme's people hadn't reported in, probably because the guards were still on the ground and nobody had checked on them.
We had time. Maybe a few hours before Supreme knew his leverage was gone.
Nene was quiet in the back seat. She sat with her hands in her lap, her eyes on the passing streets, her face still tight. Devon kept his distance, working his laptop, giving her space.
We pulled up outside the apartment. I got out and opened Nene's door. She stepped out and stood on the sidewalk looking up at the building.
"This where she's been?" Nene asked.
"Yeah."
"It's nice." She looked at me for a long moment. Her eyes were searching my face, reading something. "You really care about her, huh?"
"Yeah. I do."
Nene nodded once, slow. "Good. Cos she deserves that."
"Let's go see your girl."
We went up the stairs. I unlocked the door and Nene walked through it.
I stayed in the hallway and let them have the moment. Through the open door Asha's voice cracked, then Nene's went low and soft. Two women holding each other, scared, relieved, furious all at once.
I closed the door quietly and went back down to the car where James was waiting.
"We good?" he asked.
"We're good."
I got in the passenger seat and leaned my head back. My hands were steady. My breathing was normal. The adrenaline was already fading, replaced by something quieter and more permanent.
Asha was upstairs with her best friend and Supreme had lost his leverage and tomorrow Kadeem would present the full case to the Associates and the operation would begin.
I closed my eyes for a second. Then I opened them, told James to drive me to Kadeem's, and we pulled into the night.