Page 24 of Omar

Stone was at Ma's when I got there that afternoon.

She was at the stove with a pot of something going. The kitchen was warm. Onions and thyme sat on the counter next to the chicken stock she made every other week whether anyone asked for it or not. Stone was at the table talking to her while she worked. He looked up when I came in and nodded.

Ma turned around and gave me the look she always gave me when I came through the door, somewhere between relief and worry, something I'd stopped trying to name years ago.

"You eat today?" she said.

"I'm good, Ma."

"That's not what I asked."

I sat down at the table. Stone had his reading glasses on and a folder open in front of him. He closed it when I sat.

"How's Kadeem?" he asked.

"Busy."

"Always is." He took his glasses off and set them on top of the folder. "You good?"

"Yeah."

Ma brought a plate over, set it in front of me without asking. Rice and chicken with greens, a piece of cornbread on the side. I picked up the fork.

"Rashid has a show this week," Ma said. She was back at the stove. "First proper one in a real venue."

"He's gonna be fine," Stone said.

"I know he is."

Stone had been like a father figure to Rashid since we lost Pops. Showed up every week even though Pops was gone. Maintained the watch on my little brother. Made sure Ma knew he was still here.

I finished the plate. Ma took it from me and told me to come back before the weekend if I could. I told her I would. Stone was getting ready to leave too, reaching for his jacket on the back of the chair. We walked out together.

"You alright?" he asked when we got to the door.

"Yeah."

He looked at me for a second longer than necessary. Then he nodded and let me go.

At home that night I opened my laptop and pulled up Asha's Instagram.

Her salon feed was public. Before-and-after shots filled the grid. Client work, transformations. I scrolled back through six months of posts. A year. Further. The early ones were Atlanta shots, different shop, different light coming through the windows.

I stayed on one picture longer than I meant to. Her reflection in a salon mirror, blurred in the background while the client's finished hair filled the foreground. You could barely see her face but I saw it.

I clicked through to her profile. There was a phone number listed for bookings. I pulled it up and stared at it. My thumb hovered over the call button.

I just saved it to my phone, closed down that fucking browser, and opened Devon's older files instead.

We'd been pulling threads on Pops for two years now. The Hampton Royal hotel records from the week before he disappeared were still sitting in a folder on my desktop, meeting logs and transaction receipts that Deonte had pointed us to before the cancer took him. Deonte had heard Pops arguing with someone in the back office that night but was too terrified to say who. Said even mentioning the name would get him killed. Tommy Vicks, the street witness who claimed he'd seen Pops being taken, had vanished before Devon could get a second meeting. Somebody got to him first.

Then there was the watch. Pops' custom gold Audemars Piguet with the engraving on the back. Devon's contacts had spotted it on a man on Pitkin Avenue. Kadeem and I had paid that man a visit. Before Kadeem finished with him, the man taunted us: Your pops knew. Before the end. He knew exactly who fucked him. His brother was the one we'd grabbed at the end of it. I'd interrogated him at the warehouse and what he'd told me was enough to keep me up at night. The money funding TK's street war was connected to Pops' disappearance. The person behind it was close. Real close.

That was the thread I was sitting on. Close enough to feel the heat of it but not close enough to see the face.

The peripheral name from Devon's files kept appearing in the TK financial trail. It showed up in a document from when Pops disappeared. A meeting that never made it into any formal record, two names listed. One of them was the intermediary Stone had mentioned at the warehouse. The other name meant nothing to me but it sat next to the first one like it belonged there.

I stared at both names. Tried to find a pattern Devon had seen that I was missing. Tried to see how this connected to TK, to Supreme, to the intermediary who kept showing up in places he shouldn't be.