Page 14 of Omar

"Glass of water be nice."

"I got you, mama."

He kissed the back of my head, then stood there for a moment with his arm around my waist and his weight against my shoulders, then he let me go.

He was one of the most dangerous men in three boroughs. The man my father had handed me to like a receipt for a debt. And he was also, sometimes, this. A man who'd come up behind me at the stove and kiss the back of my head before he stepped away to get me a glass of water.

That was the thing about Premie. Half the time he was the boyfriend in the magazines, the one you saw in pictures with his arm around his woman looking at her like she'd hung the moon. The other half he was a man who'd have me killed and not lose sleep over it. Both versions lived in the same body. Both versions came home to the same bed.

He came back from the fridge with the glass, set it on the counter next to me, kissed my temple, then walked off to the couch.

I drank it slowly, watching the rice steam, and I knew the warm version of him was the more dangerous of the two. Because the warm version was the one that made it possible to stay.

I stood at the bathroom mirror with the tap running.

The face in the reflection was tired and no amount of makeup could fix that. I leaned on the sink, both hands pressed against the porcelain, and looked at myself.

I was going back to Carroll Gardens.

Not to find him. That's what I told myself first, before anything else.

I just needed to see him. Once, in daylight, on a street, as the man he was now and not the boy I'd held in my head for fourteen years. I needed to look at him and feel nothing, or something small enough to ignore. Then I could let him go.

Whatever had passed between us across that warehouse table, the thing that stole my breath and left me frozen by that office door, I couldn't carry it. I had a life to survive, a number to hit, a man asleep in the next room I belonged to until I didn't. I couldn't afford to be a woman with her heart elsewhere.

Then I'd have seen him, looked, finished it. Then I could put him away.

My reflection didn't argue.

I turned the tap off, dried my hands, and went to bed beside Supreme. I lay in the dark a while before I closed my eyes.

Chapter 6

Omar

I'd been thinking about Asha since the warehouse meeting. Standing beside Supreme with her hand on his arm, her face composed, her posture careful. Fourteen years since I'd seen that face and the first time I see it again she's next to the most dangerous man in Crown Heights. Something in her eyes when she'd looked at me across the room. Something I couldn't name yet but couldn't stop thinking about. My chest hadn't stopped being tight since I left that building.

The Nostrand block was Devon's. He'd had it tagged as a Supreme logistics point for six weeks now, a barbershop two doors down from a check-cashing place where two mid-level men kept arriving separate and leaving together. That kind of pattern wasn't personal. It was business. I parked on the east side a little after three, engine off, window cracked, and pulled up the latest plate run on my phone.

The block moved around me. A kid on a bike. A woman with two grocery bags. A delivery van that double-parked outside a corner store and got nowhere fast. I worked through Devon's data and kept an eye on the barbershop door.

Marlon Holt came out of the barbershop at four. I recognized him off Devon's photos before he hit the second step. Medium build, grey tracksuit, gold chain outside the collar of his shirt, a small scar through his left eyebrow. He stopped on the step, lit a cigarette, scanned the block. Slow scan. Landed on nothing. Missed nothing.

A second man came out behind him. Lean. Younger. The two of them stood close enough to talk without it carrying.

I knew the second man's build. Devon had him on file as one of TK's outer contacts, a name that moved between crews depending on who was paying that week. His being here, on a Supreme block, talking to Supreme's man at four in the afternoon, was a connection Devon hadn't been able to lock down through the paperwork.

I pulled my notebook out of the door pocket and wrote Holt's name at the top of a clean page. Drew a line between him and the second man's initials. Added the time and the address.

The second man finished what he was saying and walked north. Holt watched him go for a second, then dropped his cigarette without finishing it and went back inside.

I went back to the notebook.

When I looked up again, Asha was coming out of the side door of the building across the street.

I froze.

Her salon bag was on her shoulder. Her hair was done. Her coat was open. She walked off the steps at her own pace, finished with whatever she came to do, and turned left up the block.