Mia didn’t have to use the bathroom; she just wanted to reply to Jasmine’s text and didn’t want to do it in Nico’s presence. Her response to Jasmine was simple and to the point: Bitches get riches. Snitches get ditches.
Sixteen
After her meeting with Agent Gosling at Dallas BBQ, Jasmine didn’t even go back to her parents’ home. Instead, she drove to Nico’s Long Island estate so she could book her trip to Las Vegas and grab some sexy outfits to take with her.
This was the first time she had been at the house since the shooting. Jasmine remembered being wheeled into the ambulance on the night of the shooting, and wondering if she would ever come back to that house. But now that Bebo was dead, she felt a bit safer.
When she pulled up to the Long Island home, things felt eerie to her. As she pulled into the circular driveway, she noticed yellow-and-black police tape still littered the front yard of the house. The sight of it made her cringe. She exited her BMW truck and made her way to the front door, unlocked it, and went inside. As she closed the door behind her, her heart beat rapidly from nervousness.
Jasmine exhaled as she walked past the spot where Narjara’s dead body had been. She couldn’t believe that Nico hadn’t had a company come in to clean the bloodstains off the floor.
Her heart began to beat even faster after she heard a noise. “Who is that?” she yelled out.
Jasmine paused and listened closely, only to later realize that the noise was just the sound of a fence in the backyard slamming shut in the wind.
“I have to hurry up and get out of here,” she said to herself.
She then went on to the computer and turned it on. Then she logged on to Expedia and searched for flights to Las Vegas.
“This is some bullshit,” she said to herself after realizing that the cheapest roundtrip flight, which was on JetBlue Airways, was going to cost her a thousand dollars. It was going to eat up almost half of her twenty-five hundred dollars. She reluctantly booked the flight, putting the charges on the bankcard that Gosling had given her.
With the flight booked, Jasmine grabbed a small rolling suitcase that she could carry on to the airplane. Then she went upstairs to her closets and began filling the suitcase. She grabbed three of her sexiest pairs of high-heel shoes, one of which she was going to wear on the plane. Then she grabbed a pair of tight-fitting jeans and two additional sexy outfits that she put into the suitcase. She felt that that would be enough because she didn’t plan on staying in Vegas for more than three days. She also went into her panty drawer and grabbed matching lace bras and panties and two rhinestone-studded thongs.
Jasmine didn’t want to just leave without first showering, but she was scared to take a shower there. All she could envision playing out was a scene from the movie Psycho, where she would end up getting stabbed to death in the shower.
Jasmine was able to calm herself down, and after taking off the splint on her hand and removing the bandage from her neck, she stripped out of her clothes and took a quick three-minute shower.
As soon as she finished applying baby oil to her body, she once again got spooked. She screamed out loud, and her heart rate picked up. Then she realized it was just her cell phone vibrating.
She picked up the phone and saw a text from Mia.
Bitches get riches. Snitches get ditches.
Jasmine’s pressure instantly shot through the roof. She didn’t have a ready comeback. If Mia was calling her a snitch, then Nico had to be putting that in her head.
Finally, Jasmine had the confirmation she needed. She had been afraid that Nico was avoiding her out of fear that she was a snitch, and now that she was officially a snitch, she didn’t know what to think.
Jasmine shook her head and put her phone away. She continued to get dressed. She was going to put the splint back on her hand, but she realized it was totally screwing up her look, as was the scar on her neck. She quickly retreated to the bathroom and began applying makeup to her neck to conceal the redness and the bruising. Although her hand was a little swollen, she figured that a slightly swollen hand looked a lot better than a hand in a splint. She applied much-needed polish to her fingernails, which were badly in need of a manicure. After they dried, she got dressed and headed out the door, on her way to Kennedy Airport in Queens.
***
“This is really some bullshit,” Jasmine said to a white man preparing to sit down in the row in front of her. “I paid damn near a thousand dollars for this ticket, and you would think I would be sitting up in the first row of the plane, and here I am all the way in the back of the plane near the fuckin’ bathroom.”
The white man looked like a straight-laced biology or world history professor. He looked shocked when he heard Jasmine curse.
Jasmine caught on to the fact that she had offended him. “Oh, I’m sorry. Please excuse my language. I’m just frustrated. My hand is hurting, and you know how it goes. Hey, would you mind placing this bag overhead for me?” she asked him. “I just had surgery on my hand, and I really can’t lift much with it.”
The white guy helped Jasmine out, looking somewhat relieved that she had apologized for cursing. After he helped her with her bag, he told her that she really needed to look into getting some kind of adjustment to her fare because he had only paid two hundred and seventy-five dollars for his ticket.
“Two seventy-five?” she screamed. “See, this is some muthafuckin’ bullshit right here!” Jasmine called for one of the flight attendants to come her way.
The white man turned red with embarrassment. He regretted having said anything. He was with his four-year-old granddaughter and wanted desperately to press a rewind button so that she didn’t have to hear the filthy language that came out of Jasmine’s mouth. At the very least, he was definitely going to ask for a seat change.
Within seconds, an argument ensued between Jasmine and a black flight attendant.
The thirty-year-old dark-skinned stewardess with naturally long, wavy hair and a voluptuous body stated, “Ma’am, I’m going to kindly ask you one more time to please sit down, or otherwise I will have no choice but to have the authorities remove you from this plane,”
“Ma’am, I’m going to kindly ask you one more time to please sit down, or otherwise I will have no choice but to have the authorities remove you from this plane,” Jasmine repeated, mocking the stewardess. “You can call whatever fuckin’ authorities you want to call, but I can guarantee you one muthafuckin’ gotdamn thing—My black ass ain’t going nowhere. And I can also guarantee you that JetBlue is going to refund me my money.”