46. Omar
Omar
Devon called at six in the morning. "We got a location on TK. Queens, off Jamaica Avenue. A second-floor apartment above a bodega. His phone pinged there twice in the last hour."
"How solid?"
"Solid enough. The phone's registered under a fake name but the IMEI matches the one we pulled from Supreme's contact list during the raid. He's been there since last night."
I called James. He picked up on the first ring, already awake, already dressed. His piece clicked on the other end as he checked the chamber.
"Jamaica Avenue," I told him. "Second floor. Devon says TK's been there since last night."
"I'll be outside in ten."
We drove to Queens in the pre-dawn grey. The city was starting to wake up, delivery trucks on the expressway, a few early commuters on the platforms, the sky turning from black to a washed-out purple above the rooftops. James drove. I sat with Devon on speaker, getting the layout.
"The bodega's closed until seven," Devon reported. "Front entrance to the apartment is a side door off the alley. One staircase up. No fire escape on the back, just a window that drops twelve feet to a concrete yard."
"Exits?"
"Just the one. Front door, up the stairs, apartment door at the top. If he's in there, there's nowhere to go."
"Cameras?"
"Nothing I can see on the exterior. The bodega has one over the register but it doesn't cover the alley."
We parked on a residential street two blocks from Jamaica Avenue.
The neighborhood was quieter than Brooklyn, smaller buildings, more trees, a block where people walked their dogs at six in the morning and minded their business.
We walked to the location, keeping to the sidewalk, two men in dark jackets heading somewhere with purpose.
The bodega was shuttered, the metal gate down, the neon signs off. The side door to the apartment was halfway down the alley, a metal door with a handle that had been replaced recently. The lock was new.
James tried the handle. Locked. He looked at me.
"Breach?"
"Breach."
James hit the door with his shoulder, once, twice. It held. I stepped back, lifted my foot, and drove my heel into the lock plate. The frame cracked on the second kick and the door swung inward, bouncing off the wall behind it.
The staircase was narrow, dark, the walls close on both sides. I went first, my weapon up, James behind me covering the angles. The stairs creaked under our weight. At the top, a single door, closed. Light coming from underneath it.
I kicked this one too. It came open easier than the first, the lock cheap, the frame soft. The door slammed against the interior wall and we were through.
The apartment was empty.
Not abandoned empty. Recently empty. Someone had been here an hour ago and left in a hurry.
The living room had a couch with the cushions dented, an ashtray on the coffee table with three cigarette butts still warm.
A television was on the floor, unplugged, the power cord coiled beside it.
The kitchen had dishes in the sink, a pan on the stove with grease congealing, and a coffee cup on the counter.
I touched the cup. Warm. Not hot, but warm enough that whoever drank from it had been standing in this kitchen within the last thirty minutes.
"James."
He came into the kitchen. I held up the coffee cup.
"Still warm," I said.
"Shit." James looked around the apartment. "He was here. He was right here."
We went through the place room by room. The bedroom had a mattress on the floor, sheets thrown back, a duffel bag open and empty beside it.
The closet was cleared out. The bathroom had a toothbrush, toothpaste, and a razor by the sink, the mirror still fogged from a shower that hadn't been taken long ago.
"Devon," I said into the phone. "TK's gone. The place is cleared out but he was here less than an hour ago. Coffee's still warm, bathroom mirror's still fogged."
"How's that possible? I've been watching the phone signal. It's still pinging from that location."
"He left the phone." I looked at the coffee table. A burner phone was sitting on the edge, screen down, powered on. He'd left it on purpose. Left the phone pinging from this address while he walked out the door.
"He knew we were coming," Devon said. "He couldn't have known from the phone tap, the signal's clean. Somebody told him."
I picked up the phone from the coffee table.
A prepaid cell, cheap, the kind you buy at a bodega and throw away after a week.
The call log showed three incoming calls in the last twelve hours from blocked numbers.
The last one came in at five-fifteen in the morning.
Forty-five minutes ago. Somebody had called TK at five-fifteen, woken him up, told him to run, and he'd grabbed his bag and left everything else behind.
"The last call came in at five-fifteen," I told Devon. "Forty-five minutes before we got here. Somebody woke him up and gave him enough time to shower, dress, pack, and leave. Blocked number."
"That's a tight window. Whoever called him knew our timeline."
"Not our full timeline. Just enough to give TK a head start."
"Who knew we were hitting Queens today?"
The question hung in the car. Somebody close to the operation had made that call. Somebody who had access to the planning, the timelines, the target locations. Somebody we trusted.
"Bag the phone," I told James. "Devon, see what you can pull from it. Blocked numbers, cell tower data, anything."
"On it."
I stood in TK's empty apartment and looked at the coffee cup on the counter, the burner on the table, the fogged mirror in the bathroom. A man who'd been sleeping here an hour ago, comfortable enough to make coffee and take a shower, then ran with forty-five minutes' warning.
Someone on the inside had given him that warning. Someone we trusted.
The thought sat in my chest. I didn't let it go further, not until Devon ran the number and the evidence pointed somewhere real. But the shape of it was forming, taking hold in the space between what I knew and what I didn't want to believe.
James was in the bedroom, checking the closet for anything TK had left behind. He came out with a receipt from a hardware store and a prepaid credit card with the balance scratched off.
"He cleared out clean," James said. "Professional. This wasn't a panic move, Omar. He had a go-bag ready. He's been expecting this."
"Or somebody told him to expect it."
James looked at me. "You think we got a leak?"
"I think somebody called TK at five in the morning and told him to run. I think that same somebody might have known about the Canarsie location where Kadeem got shot." I paused. "I think we've got a problem that goes deeper than TK."
James didn't respond. He didn't need to. The implications were sitting in the room with us, heavy as furniture, impossible to ignore.
I took one more look around the apartment.
The dented couch cushions, the warm cup, the burner phone left behind as a decoy.
Everything about this scene said the same thing: TK had been warned by someone who knew our plans, someone who had access to the operational brief, someone sitting close enough to the Baptiste family to know our movements in real time.
I'd deal with that later. Right now TK was in the wind and every minute he had on us was a minute he was using to disappear.
"Let's go," I told James. "Devon, expand the search. Every transport hub, every known associate, every property connected to TK outside of Brooklyn. He's running and he's got a head start. We need to close the gap before he goes underground."
We left the apartment the way we'd come in, down the narrow stairs, through the broken door, into the alley. The sky was lighter now, the morning settling in over Queens, the bodega still shuttered, the street still quiet.
James drove us back toward Brooklyn. I sat in the passenger seat with TK's phone in my jacket pocket, the warm coffee cup still in my mind.
Who the fuck made that call at five-fifteen in the morning?