Page 40 of Omar

His reply came fast: Yeah. They left. What the fuck was that about?

Stay inside. I'm handling it.

O, I don't need you to...

Stay inside, Rashid.

He didn't reply after that. He was angry, probably pacing the studio, telling Tre about it, wanting to handle it himself. That was Rashid's problem. He always wanted to handle things himself and he never understood that handling things in this family didn't mean throwing punches at a venue. It meant something different entirely.

Devon came back within the hour. Darren Yates ran with a crew out of Flatbush that had loose ties to Kyran's people. Street-level affiliates who did favors when the money was right. The other man in the car was a cousin, Anthony Mills. Both had records. Assault, possession, the usual progression. Devon had addresses for both of them, plus a location where they spent most evenings: a barbershop on Nostrand near Church Avenue. The back room.

"They connected to Supreme?" I asked.

"Doesn't look like it. This is personal. Kyran put the word out after what Rashid did to him at The 4Q. Somebody's paying these two to send a message."

"Then we'll send one back."

James drove. I opened what Devon had sent to my phone on the way. Photos of both men pulled from their social media. Darren Yates was tall, lean, wore his hair in short twists. Anthony Mills was shorter, heavier through the chest, had a tattoo on his neck that said something I couldn't read in the photo. Both of them looked like what they were: hired muscle doing a job for someone else's grudge.

The barbershop was on the corner of Nostrand and Church, a narrow storefront with a striped pole that hadn't been lit in years. Three barber chairs visible through the front window, two of them occupied. A television mounted on the wall was playing a game nobody was paying attention to. The back room was through a doorway covered by a heavy curtain.

We parked half a block away on the residential side of the street. James checked his piece, tucked it back, and looked at me.

"How you wanna do this?"

"I go in through the front. You cover the back exit. There's an alley that runs behind the building, should be a door."

"And if they come out shooting?"

"They won't. This is a barbershop full of civilians. They pull a weapon in there, they've got witnesses. They're stupid but they ain't that stupid."

"You sure about that?"

"Cover the back, James."

He got out and disappeared around the corner toward the alley. I gave him two minutes to get in position, then got out of the car and walked up Nostrand to the barbershop.

The bell above the door rang when I pushed it open. The barber nearest the entrance looked up from his client, studied my face for a second, then went back to his fade. The second barber didn't react at all. A man in the waiting chair glanced at me over his magazine.

I walked straight to the curtain at the back and pushed through it.

The back room was small, maybe twelve by fifteen. A card table in the center with four chairs around it, a mini fridge in the corner, a television on a shelf showing the same game as the one out front. Darren Yates was sitting at the table with a plate of food in front of him, a fork halfway to his mouth. Anthony Mills was in the corner on his phone, leaning against the wall with one foot up.

Both of them looked at me when I came through the curtain. Yates put his fork down slowly. Mills straightened up from the wall and slid his phone into his back pocket.

"The fuck are you?" Yates asked.

"Omar Baptiste."

The name landed in the room. Yates's eyes moved from my face to my hands to the curtain behind me, calculating whether there were more people coming through it. Mills hadn't moved from the corner but his right hand had drifted toward his waistband.

"I wouldn't," I told him without looking at him. "There's someone on the other side of that back door who'll put you down before you get that piece out."

Mills's hand stopped moving. He looked at Yates. Yates looked at me.

"We ain't got no beef with you," Yates tried. "This ain't about..."

"You followed my brother to his studio. Sat outside his building in a black Camry for forty minutes. You know whose brother he is and you did it anyway." I pulled out the chair across from Yates and sat down. "That makes it about me."