37. Omar
Omar
Ifound Rashid at his apartment in Williamsburg.
Fourth floor, no elevator, a door that he'd painted matte black because he said it made the place look like a studio entrance.
I knocked twice and he opened it in basketball shorts and no shirt, headphones around his neck, a beat playing from the speakers in his living room.
"O." He stepped back to let me in. "Wasn't expecting you tonight."
"We need to talk."
His face changed. He turned off the speakers, pulled the headphones from his neck, and sat down on the arm of his couch. "Aight. Talk."
I closed the door behind me and stayed standing.
The apartment was small but clean. Rashid kept his space tight, everything in its place, the opposite of how he operated everywhere else.
His turntables were against the far wall, vinyl organized in crates by genre.
A framed photo of Pops on the bookshelf beside a stack of notebooks.
"Supreme's operation is coming down," I told him. "Kadeem's presenting to the Associates tomorrow. If they approve, we move within the week."
Rashid sat up straighter. "For real?"
"The financial trail connects Supreme to TK. They're running one operation through shell companies. Everything TK's been doing to our territory for the last two years was funded by Supreme's money."
"Shit." Rashid rubbed his face with both hands. "So all those meetings Kadeem had with Supreme, the territory agreements, the handshake deals. Supreme was playing us the whole time."
"Yeah."
"And you're moving on him?"
"We're taking his cash locations first, then his main base. Two nights. Coordinated. Devon's running the intel, James is leading one team, I'm leading the other."
Rashid looked at me. "What about me?"
"You stay here."
"O."
"I mean it. This is operational. After what happened last time, Kadeem doesn't want you anywhere near the field. You went too far in Flatbush and it took weeks to clean up."
"That was different. I was right about who was in that building."
"You shot the place up with civilians next door, RB. Right or wrong, that's reckless. And reckless gets people killed."
I sat down in the chair across from the couch.
Rashid was watching me with those eyes that looked so much like Pops' it made my chest tight.
Twenty-five years old, stubborn as hell, talented enough to have a future outside of all this.
But he'd been in the thick of it since Pops disappeared.
Kadeem had pulled him back after the Flatbush incident, tried to redirect him toward the music. Rashid had taken it as punishment.
"There's something else," I said.
"What?"
"The financial trail connects to Pops."
Rashid didn't move.
"The shell company Supreme uses, Greyline Holdings, was set up around the same time Pops went missing.
The original signatory was a man named Leonard Pryce.
We don't know who he is yet but he was at the Hampton Royal hotel three days before Pops disappeared.
The same hotel where Deonte heard Pops arguing with someone before he disappeared. "
"So Supreme's money is connected to what happened to Pops?"
"The infrastructure is. Whether Supreme himself knew about Pops or just used the same financial network, we don't know yet. But the connection is there."
Rashid was quiet for a long time. His eyes went to the photo of Pops on the bookshelf. Pops in a suit at somebody's wedding, smiling, his arm around Ma, looking like a man who owned the world and didn't need anybody to know it.
"That thing at the bar," Rashid said quietly. "The guy who said he'd heard about Pops being in chains. You think that's connected to this?"
"Devon's trying to find him. If his cousin really saw Pops alive after the disappearance, that means Pops was held somewhere.
And if the same financial infrastructure that runs Supreme's operation was set up right before Pops was taken, then the people who held him might be the same people whose money we're about to take. "
"So taking down Supreme might lead us to whoever took Pops."
"It might."
Rashid leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. "Then you definitely ain't cutting me out of this."
"Rashid."
"Listen to me, O." He looked up and his face was different from the kid brother who argued about music mixes at the studio.
This was a man making a decision. "I'm not asking to kick down doors with you and James.
I'm not trying to be an enforcer. But I got eyes and ears in places you don't. I'm in studios, clubs, venues every night.
People talk around me cos they think I'm just RB.
They don't see me as Baptiste business. That's an advantage you're throwing away by telling me to stay home. "
He had a point. I didn't want him to have a point but he did.
"If something comes up," I said carefully, "if you hear something or see something that's connected to the operation or to Pops, you bring it to me. You don't act on it, you don't confront anyone, you don't start fights in bars. You bring it to me or Kadeem. That's the deal."
"Done."
"And if I tell you to stay somewhere or go somewhere during the operation, you do it. No arguments, no pushback. If I say stay at Ma's house, you stay at Ma's house."
"Fine."
"Rashid."
"I said fine, O. I hear you." He sat back on the couch. "But for the record, I been staying at Ma's house my whole life. I know how to do that."
Despite everything, I almost smiled. "You sound like Pops right now."
"Good." Rashid picked up one of his notebooks from the coffee table and turned it over in his hands. "Somebody should."
We sat there for a while. The apartment was quiet without the music playing, just the city noise coming through the windows, the traffic and the sirens and the baseline hum of Brooklyn at night. Rashid's notebook was open on his lap, pages covered in lyrics I couldn't read from where I was sitting.
"You scared?" he asked.
"Of what?"
"Of what happens when you go into Supreme's territory and try to take everything from him."
"Scared ain't the right word."
"Then what is?"
I thought about it. "Focused. There's a lot riding on this. If we get it wrong, people die. Our people."
"And if you get it right?"
"Supreme's done. TK loses his funding. The territory stabilizes. And maybe, if Devon can follow the money far enough, we find out what happened to Pops."
Rashid closed his notebook. "Then get it right."
"Planning on it."
"O."
"Yeah?"
"When this is over, when Supreme's handled and the territory's secure, I want in on the Pops thing.
For real. I want to be at the table when you and Kadeem go through the evidence.
I want to see the documents, hear the names, understand what we're looking at.
I'm done being the little brother who gets told after the fact. "
I looked at him across the small apartment. Pops' photo on the shelf behind him, Pops' eyes in his face, Pops' stubbornness in every word.
"When this is over," I said. "Yeah. You'll be at the table."
"Promise me."
"I promise."
He nodded once. Then he reached for the speakers, turned the music back on, and the apartment filled with a beat he'd been working on. Something heavy, something with weight. He picked up a pen and started writing in his notebook, his lips moving silently over words I couldn't hear.
I stayed for another twenty minutes. He didn't look up from his writing. He didn't need to. We'd said what needed saying and now he was turning it into music. That was Rashid. Everything went through the notebook eventually.
I let myself out. Took the stairs down to the street. Stood by my car for a minute looking up at the fourth-floor window where the light was on behind his black door.
My little brother. He was going to be at the table when this was over, hearing things about his father that no son should have to hear.
But he was right. He'd earned that by being a Baptiste, by refusing to look away, by sitting in bars where strangers laughed about his father and answering with his fists when his brothers would have told him to walk away.
Kadeem would be angry. Kadeem was always angry when it came to Rashid taking risks.
But Kadeem would come around because underneath the anger was the same thing I was carrying: the knowledge that Rashid was one of us and keeping him out wasn't protecting him.
It was just postponing the moment when he stepped in.
I got in the car and drove to Kadeem's. Tomorrow was the Associates meeting. After that, the operation. After that, Supreme.
And after Supreme, the real work began. Finding Pops. Finding out who took him, who held him, who put chains on Malik Baptiste and thought they could get away with it.
They couldn't. They wouldn't. I'd make sure of that.
All three of us would.