Page 116 of Omar

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?"