Eleven

After a successful surgery on her hand, Jasmine was recovering in the post surgical unit, resting and trying to decide what she would do when she got out of the hospital. She was wondering if it would make sense to go back and live at Nico’s estate. She didn’t know how safe it would be living there, or if Nico even wanted her there, since she still hadn’t spoken to him.

Her options were limited because she hadn’t stashed enough money to get her own place, and she definitely wasn’t going to move back in with her parents. She thought about asking her friend Simone if she could live with her for a little while, but she quickly decided against that idea. Jasmine knew it would take all of two days for Simone to do something to piss her off, and they would end up in an argument or in some kind of drama she didn’t need.

With no viable options coming to mind, she decided not to stress herself out. She reached for the remote control with her good hand and started flipping through the limited channels the hospital had available. As she channel-surfed, she heard a knock on her room door.

Jasmine assumed it was one of the doctors or nurses coming to check on her, but instead she saw Agent Battle walking into her room accompanied by a handsome black man wearing a suit and a tie.

Purposely wanting to be rude, she continued to channel-surf and avoided looking directly at Agent Battle or the man with her.

“Hello, Jasmine,” Agent Battle said in a soft, neutral tone.

Jasmine really had no choice at that point other than to acknowledge Agent Battle, so she returned the hello.

“So how are you feeling? I hope you’re recovering well.”

“I’m good,” Jasmine said, flipping through the channels.

“Jasmine, do you mind if we talk for a few minutes?” Agent Battle asked.

Jasmine turned up the volume on the TV once she found ESPN.

The black guy asked her, “You a Lakers fan?”

Jasmine looked at him and rolled her eyes. She wasn’t a huge sports fan, but there was nothing else on TV worth watching. Plus, she didn’t know who he was, so she kept her mouth shut and ignored him.

“May I?” Agent Battle said, reaching for the remote control.

Jasmine didn’t answer her, nor did she object when Agent Battle took it upon herself to turn off the TV.

“Jasmine, this is Agent Gosling. I asked him to come with me, so I could revisit what we spoke about when we last saw each other.”

Jasmine looked at her and didn’t say anything.

“Jasmine, let’s be straight up with one another. I don’t know if you believe in miracles, but I think you would admit that your being alive and able to talk to me right now is pretty much a miracle. Would you agree?”

Jasmine had a nightmare the night before in which she relived the moment when Bebo fired the two gunshots at her. It woke her up in a panic about twelve hours earlier. She slowly nodded in response to Agent Battle’s question.

“So tell me—how many more miracles do you want to live through?”

Jasmine wondered why Agent Battle was the one doing all the talking. She asked the black man, “You a cop too?”

Agent Gosling nodded his head. “Yes, I’m a federal agent.

“Cop, federal agent, po-po, fed—it’s all the same shit.”

“Jasmine, we can talk, right?” Agent Battle asked her in a tone that was trying to get her to lower her guard.

“Yeah. That’s what we’re doing, right?”

“No. I mean, can we talk black woman to black woman, black man to black woman, no holds barred?”

“Yeah . . . I guess.”

“Jasmine, the people who came and shot you, you do know that wasn’t just some random shooting, don’t you?”

Jasmine wondered if Agent Battle had some specific information about the shooting that she didn’t have. She shrugged.

“You can shrug your shoulders, but let me just tell you, when you got shot the other day, please understand that that was a targeted hit on you. There was nothing random about it. There was no other motive behind that shooting other than to take you out. Hits aren’t random; hits are planned. You do follow me, right?”

Agent Battle’s words confirmed the thoughts Jasmine had been having about if Nico had tried to have her killed for snitching. Still, she made sure not to show her hand to Agent Battle.

Agent Gosling added, “So whoever did this to you will be coming back to finish the job.”

“Okay, and? Tell me something I don’t know.” Jasmine shook her head. “Cops make me laugh. Y’all never around to arrest nobody when shit happens, and y’all never know who did shit after it happens, and then y’all always come around after the fact, talking about the obvious. How about walking in this room and telling me that y’all arrested the muthafucka who shot me?”

Agent Battle looked at Agent Gosling, and in her heart she knew where Jasmine was coming from. “In many ways you’re right, Jasmine, and that’s why we’re here. We can’t effectively do our job without sources.”

“You mean, snitches,” Jasmine interjected.

“No, I mean sources. Snitches do crimes, and then to get their own asses out of a sling, they tell on the people involved with the crime. That’s not what our sources do.” Agent Battle reached into her jacket pocket and handed Jasmine a photo of Narjara lying naked on a silver coroner’s table with a huge hole on either side of her head.

“Why are you showing that to me?” Jasmine hollered. Her blood pressure rose, and her chest began to heave up and down. She dropped the photo on the floor.

“Jasmine, who is that in that photo?”

“You know who it is.”

“No. Who was she to you?”

“She was my friend.”

“No, she was more than your friend. Yeah, she was your friend who didn’t have a felony record, she was your friend who was in college trying to better herself, she was your friend who had all kinds of potential to be whoever she wanted to be. She was your friend who would have been a nurse, and a wife and a mother some day. But you know what?”

Jasmine looked at her and didn’t respond.

“Narjara is never going to get the chance to live out her life and chase her dreams. Never. It’s over. For Narjara—and you can correct me if I’m wrong—but it was just one random night that ended her life. One night where she was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and just like that”—Agent Battle snapped her fingers—“her beautiful life was snatched away from her through no fault of hers.”

Agent Battle took hold of Narjara’s picture, and tears came to her eyes. “Jasmine, this could have been my daughter in this picture laying there dead on that table. That could have been you laying on that coroner’s table waiting for your parents to come and identify you.”

“But it wasn’t.”

“Exactly. It wasn’t. But you know what our sources do? Our sources help us put away the scumbag muthafuckas who have the audacity to do shit like this to beautiful young women who haven’t even had a chance to live.” Agent Battle handed Agent Gosling the photo, so she could wipe a tear from the corner of her eye.

Jasmine could sense that Agent Battle’s tears were real. She couldn’t believe that a cop could genuinely care about a victim.

“Jasmine, I’ll be honest with you like I was honest with you when you were in the federal building in Manhattan. I could lock you up on a murder charge tomorrow, and a grand jury could indict you with no problem. I am absolutely confident of that. Or you could leave this hospital later today and end up on a coroner’s table like your friend. I’m confident of that as well. But whether you leave here and end up dead, or I lock you up and send you to the penitentiary, the end result is just going to be another beautiful life that is wasted. And you know what? Jasmine, I don’t want that. I don’t want you wasting your life, and when I say that, I mean it.”

“Why the fuck do you care so much? I mean, just do what you gotta do and let me do what I gotta do. But I ain’t no snitch.”

“I care because I have a responsibility to care.”

Jasmine held up her hands and looked at Agent Battle with a confused look, as if to say, “What the fuck are you talking about?”

“I have a responsibility to care, just like you have a responsibility to care. And the only difference is, I take my responsibility seriously. Like, if I were you and I had a friend in my life like Narjara, I would look at it as my responsibility to do whatever I had to do to put the people away who did this to her.”

“Yeah, but I don’t know who shot us,” Jasmine lied.

Agent Battle just looked at Jasmine and knew she was lying, so she kept quiet.

“I’m serious, I don’t.”

Agent Battle got the picture of Narjara from Agent Gosling and attempted to hand it back to Jasmine.

“Don’t give me that picture!”

“Jasmine, do what’s right for your friend, and do what’s right for the millions of other Narjaras out there. Do what’s right for the millions of parents out there who are trying to avoid their child becoming the next Narjara.”

“That’s what our sources help us do,” Agent Gosling added. “They help us do what’s right for everybody. Jasmine, all Agent Battle is asking you is to help us help you, and in doing that, you’ll be helping so many other people. Jasmine, you’ll be making a difference.”

Agent Gosling had done his homework on Narjara and had found out from interviews that he’d conducted with some of her friends that Narjara looked up to Jasmine as a big sister and that she often went to Jasmine during her battering crisis with her boyfriend.

“Help y’all help me?”

“Yes. Just like Narjara would reach out to you for help with her abusive boyfriend.”

“How did you know that?” Jasmine asked.

“When you do good like that, word gets around. Good has a much bigger impact on people than evil.”

Jasmine had never thought about things from that perspective.

Agent Gosling added, “Jasmine, even in death, Narjara is counting on you to continue to look out for her.”

Jasmine did always like feeling like the big sister and protector to Narjara, and when Narjara had gotten shot, she felt like she had failed her big time. Now Jasmine was truly starting to see working with the feds as a way to do right by her dead friend and turn a negative into a positive.

“So if I help you lock up the people who murdered Narjara, you’re saying you could help me?”

Agent Battle didn’t want to seem too overly excited, but those were the words she was waiting to hear. “Obviously that would be a start. But what we’re proposing is that you become a source of ours, a paid source, and the information that you would help us obtain would be information that would hopefully lead to the arrest of the people who murdered Narjara. We would also be looking for you to help us obtain information we could use to help us connect the dots on criminal targets we’ve already identified.”

Jasmine had heard of snitches working with the feds and the police in order to work out plea deals and avoid jail time, but she never knew that snitches got paid by the feds.

“So you said I would be a paid source?”

“Absolutely,” Agent Battle said.

“As a paid source, I wouldn’t have to worry about any criminal indictments coming my way?”

Agent Battle nodded. “That’s correct, but, and I stress the word but, let me be clear. You wouldn’t have to worry about any criminal indictments coming your way from any of your involvement in any past criminal activities. But if we agree on things and you become a source, that doesn’t give you a license to commit crimes. It’s like you help us, and we can wipe your past slate clean, but your future slate is contingent on you doing what’s right and abiding by the law.”

Agent Battle had to give that spiel, though she and Agent Gosling both knew that the feds and most law enforcement agencies often turned a blind eye to the continued criminal activities of their informants. But there was no way she could just outright say that to Jasmine.

Jasmine slowly nodded, deep in thought as she weighed her options. “Okay, so what kind of money are we talking about?”

“Well, it depends. It’s not as if you show up every week and you get a paycheck. It’s usually not structured that way. It’s more on a per-assignment basis. For example, let’s say the information that you source to us leads to us confiscating two kilos of cocaine. Something like that might get you a five-thousand-dollar payment. Or let’s say your information leads to us confiscating a million dollars in cash. That might get you a thirty-thousand-dollar payment. Or if we are targeting a specific individual, the payment would depend on the individual. If you got us a high-level drug distributor, that could generate you twenty thousand dollars. And obviously a lower-level drug distributor would get you less.”

Jasmine was starting to like the sound of the numbers she was hearing. She could easily see herself making a hundred grand a year for basically maintaining her current lifestyle.

Agent Battle went on to explain, “And, just so we’re clear, the payments wouldn’t always be so extravagant. We might give you a hundred dollars to make a hundred-dollar marijuana purchase, and for something like that, you would be paid dollar for dollar and would earn a hundred dollars for that purchase.”

Jasmine didn’t show it, but she was ready to leap out of her bed and do back flips. Jasmine never knew that being a snitch could be so lucrative. She was thinking how she could make a hundred-dollar weed purchase all day every day.

“Question,” Jasmine said.

“You got questions, we got answers,” Agent Gosling replied with a smile. He and Agent Battle both knew that they had Jasmine where they wanted her.

“This is just hypothetical, so don’t read more into it than necessary.”

Both agents nodded.

“So let’s say I was going to go work for BMW and they were going to pay me fifty thousand a year, but then I found out, for the same job, I could make seventy thousand a year working for Mercedes Benz, wouldn’t I be kind of stupid to not go and work for the company that’s paying me more money?”

Agent Battle was about to speak, but Jasmine cut her off.

“Okay, okay, what I’m saying is, can other agencies beat the FBI’s pay rate for sources. Like, if I could make more with the NYPD or with the DEA, then why wouldn’t I just fuck with them? I mean, no offense or anything, I’m just asking.”

“Actually, that’s a very good question,” Agent Battle responded. “All I can say is, there are no written rules about it. But all the agencies have unwritten rules where we all respect each other’s sources, and we don’t make it where sources are only going to the highest bidder.”

“But would I be wrong or get in trouble if I became a source for other law enforcement agencies? I just want to know up front.”

“No, you wouldn’t be doing anything wrong per se,” Agent Gosling explained. “And there have been times where sources were being handled by different agencies at the same time.”

“Just wanted to be clear,” Jasmine said with a slight smile that was almost undetectable, since she was trying so hard to suppress it. “Oh, one last thing. I mean, I’m not saying that I will definitely commit and do this whole snitch thing—”

Agent Battle interrupted her. “Jasmine, you would be a source, not a snitch. I don’t know any other way to convince you of that.”

“Source, snitch, confidential informant, yada yada yada—we’re talking about the same thing. Okay, but let’s say that I did commit to it. Is there any way I could get an apartment or a house out of this? I’m not talking about something that I would own or anything like that. I’m just saying something furnished where I could move into and not have to worry about paying rent or anything. Like, could y’all cover the rent for me?” Jasmine figured she might as well milk it for all it was worth.

Agent Battle and Agent Gosling both knew that the answer to Jasmine’s question was yes, but they didn’t want to give her the impression that they were desperate. See, the FBI had a lot of leeway with their confidential informants. They knew that the money that they paid them wasn’t coming from taxpayer dollars, so they could be flexible. All of the money paid to confidential informants was funded from money that had been confiscated from past drug busts and asset seizures. So Agent Gosling knew she would be able to find a house or an apartment that a government agency owned and let Jasmine use it if she wanted to.

The IRS, for example, had condos in Manhattan that they had seized from someone who had been arrested for tax evasion. It wouldn’t be anything other than the FBI filling out paperwork and sending it to the IRS for their approval, and once approved, Jasmine would be able to access the apartment. And, again, that would be at no cost to the taxpaying citizens of the country.

“Well, that’s something we could discuss.” Agent Battle began to gather her things, preparing to leave.

Jasmine wondered if she had pushed too far.

“I’ll leave you with another card and give you some more time to consider everything we spoke about. I don’t have more than thirty-six hours for you to think about this, and I would hate to have my agents come visit you with an arrest warrant because, if they do, it would be too late, and the offer we just spoke about would forever be off the table.”

Jasmine nodded.

Agent Gosling reached out his hand, and Jasmine shook it with her good hand, and then she reached for the remote control and turned the TV back on to ESPN.

Just as the two agents reached the door to exit Jasmine’s room, she said, “You’ll hear from me before I hear from you.”

Agent Battle paused, looked at Jasmine, and smiled.

When the door closed behind her, Jasmine buzzed the nurses’ station and asked them to bring her another painkiller. Within minutes, she popped the painkiller into her mouth, wondering when, if ever, she was going to hear from her man.

But her romantic thoughts about Nico were quickly replaced by thoughts of just how she was going to play both sides of the fence.