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?”