by Erica Hilton
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.”
Jasmine knew she had the power to press her distress button on the special BlackBerry phone that Gosling had given her, and within minutes she would have cops and federal agents coming to aid her. Although Gosling had stressed to her that she should only use the distress button in literal life-or-death situations, Jasmine was ready to press the button just to check the sassy black stewardess, if she had to.
“Miss, please, can you watch your language? There’s children on the plane,” one of the passengers yelled out to the relief of the white guy sitting in front of Jasmine.
Another passenger screamed, “Yeah, sit down and shut up, so we can take off!”
“Fuck all of y’all!” Jasmine shouted back before taking her window seat.
Just as other stewardesses were coming to the aid of their coworker, the black stewardess realized that Jasmine was backing down, so she retreated and held them off, telling them that everything was under control.
The six-hour flight was the most miserable flight that Jasmine had ever been on in her life, and when the plane landed at twelve thirty in the morning, she couldn’t wait to get off. It seemed like it took forever for the rows of passengers to exit the plane, and to make matters worse, Jasmine was all the way in the back.
Finally she retrieved her bag from overhead,
and her hand hurt like all hell as she got it without any assistance. She made her way to the front of the plane. “Tighten up your weave, bitch!” she said to the stewardess who had confronted her before the plane took off.
“Oh, please. This is all natural, baby girl!” The stewardess pulled on her hair to prove it. The stewardess was originally from Newark, New Jersey, so she knew how to handle herself. She would have fought Jasmine in a heartbeat had Jasmine taken it there.
“Whatever. Enjoy your little job,” Jasmine said and she kept it moving.
Jasmine was beyond stressed out. She needed a drink in the worst way, just to calm her nerves. As she made her way through the terminal she saw Las Vegas Sports Lounge and decided to go in and have a drink. The Sports Lounge was still inside the terminal, so it was perfect for her because she didn’t have to leave the airport or get in a cab or wait until she got to the hotel to get a drink.
Jasmine thought the Lounge was fairly crowded and somewhat poppin’ for that time of night. She made her way to the bar, trying to figure out where she was going to sit. She looked around and noticed a bunch of cute guys in the bar. Before she could finish figuring out where she was going to attempt to sit down, a light-skinned black dude, about six foot three and buff, with a thin beard, good hair, and diamond-studded chain that looked like it cost more than the average house, stood up from his seat at the bar and offered it to her.
“Thank you,” Jasmine said with a smile. She sat down at the bar and positioned her small suitcase next to her.
“I couldn’t have you standing there like that,” the gentleman said to her as he held out his right hand and introduced himself. “I’m Derek McGee,” he said.
Jasmine extended her hand to his for a gentle handshake. “Hi, Derek. I’m Jasmine,”
Jasmine figured she would cut right to the chase and try and determine if Derek was fronting with fake jewels on, or if he was really ’bout it. From his swagger she could tell that he wasn’t a hustler, because he came off way too polite—like he had manners from a two-parent household. And only good dudes with an education would introduce themselves with their full government name.
“Your hands are so soft. Either you don’t work too hard, or you have a bunch of women pampering you,” Jasmine said, blinded by his diamond-studded Audemars watch.
Derek smiled, and Jasmine noticed that all thirty-two of his Chiclet-looking teeth were perfectly aligned and bright white, another sign that he wasn’t a street dude.
“So you stereotyping me based on my hands?” Derek chuckled. “That’s a first,” he added and then asked Jasmine what did she want to drink.
Jasmine told him, and Derek ordered her a coco-loco, and for himself he ordered a Bacardi and Red Bull.
“So you don’t work hard, but you look very successful, you have a ton of women, and you look like a model, and you’re at a bar at one in the morning. That could be a dangerous recipe,” Jasmine said as soon as their drinks arrived.
Derek drank some of his drink and talked into Jasmine’s ear over all the noise and he explained to her that he was a professional football player.
“Okay, so now I have to leave, but thank you for the drink.” Jasmine smiled and pretended to be leaving.
Derek stopped her. “What?”
“You’re a liar, and if you aren’t lying, then that means you’re trouble, because all athletes are trouble.”
Derek smiled. And then he held out his right hand and showed Jasmine his Super Bowl championship ring from the Green Bay Packers.
“Okay, so you’re not a liar; let’s cross that off the list.” Jasmine closely examined the ring. Then she reached for his left hand to see if he had on a wedding ring. “You married?”
Derek shook his head and told her that he was having way too much fun and wasn’t even close to thinking about settling down.
“Yeah, I bet.” Jasmine downed her drink because she wanted to get buzzed.
Derek ordered her another drink. “So let me stereotype you now,” he said to her as her drink arrived. “You don’t work hard, but you look very successful, you have a ton of men, you look like a model, and you’re at a bar at one in the morning. That could be a dangerous recipe.”
Jasmine smiled. “Why would that be such a dangerous recipe?”
“Because that would make you my weakness.”
Jasmine told him she was in nursing school and stressed out because she had to withdraw because of surgery on her hand and neck.
“Wow!”
Jasmine was thankful that he didn’t ask her what the surgery was for. Then Derek looked at her hand and asked her if she was married.
“Nope,” Jasmine replied, and then she asked Derek if he could watch her bag for her while she went to the bathroom.
Jasmine got up and went to the bathroom, where she pulled out her cell phone and quickly logged on to Google and typed in the words “Derek McGee Green Bay Packers.” Jasmine clicked on the second listing, which clearly showed a headshot of the same Derek she was sitting with at the bar. She scrolled down and read about him being a top wide receiver and signing a twenty-million-dollar contract extension with thirteen million dollars guaranteed last summer.
Jasmine was convinced that he was no fraud. She had just used the bathroom on the plane, so she didn’t need to relieve herself, but she did wash her hands before exiting the bathroom and making her way back to the bar area.
“Everything good?” Derek asked.
“Yup,” Jasmine replied and then joked and told Derek that he better had not put anything in her drink.
“So back to what I was asking you, do you have a man?”
“Something like that.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, you know how y’all niggas do—Can’t keep your dick in your pants. So every time I think I got the man of my dreams and everything is all good, he ends up fuckin’ somebody else. Remember what you just said about having way too much fun? Yeah, well, all my men always seem to still be in the having-way-too-much-fun mode.”
Derek laughed. He ordered another Red Bull and rum, and Jasmine ordered another coco-loco.
“Derek, you want to open a tab, baby?” the sexy female bartender with over-spilling cleavage asked.
Derek shook his head and reached in his pocket and pulled out a bankroll of hundred-dollar bills. He handed a crisp Benjamin Franklin to her and told her to keep the change. And in the process Jasmine’s pussy began to throb. Liquor and a cute guy with money was usually what made her pussy jump, and it was twitching and ready to jump out of her pants. Jasmine hadn’t had any good dick in weeks, and she was jonesing for some quality dick, which Derek appeared to have.
“So you got no man, and where’d you say you were from? New York?”
Jasmine nodded. She was buzzing like crazy from the two drinks and couldn’t stop smiling at Derek.
Derek had been around every type of chick imaginable, and he knew he could smash Jasmine that night if he wanted to, which was just what he planned on doing. “New York girls are trouble,” he remarked.
“No, we’re not.”
“So you really have no man, you came out here to see nobody?”
“I told you, I was just stressed and I had to withdraw from school, so I decided to just fly out here and chill for a few days and clear my head.”
“So where are you staying?”
“At the Wynn Resort.”
“Okay.”
Derek, originally from Las Vegas, had just flown into town to visit his parents. He had a home in Las Vegas, but he didn’t want to take Jasmine there without knowing what she was really about.
“So if we leave here, I can go back with you to the Wynn?” Derek asked, testing her.
Jasmine didn’t respond with words. She just looked at Derek and slowly nodde
d.
“Can I stereotype you some more?” Derek asked.
Jasmine smiled and said yes.
Then Derek whispered in her ear and told her that she looked like she kept her pussy bald and that she probably only wore thongs.
“You funny.” Jasmine sipped some more of her drink. The smell of Derek’s cologne was making Jasmine so hot, she wanted to grab him by the dick and pull him into the bathroom and fuck his brains out in one of the stalls.
“But am I right?”
“Maybe,” Jasmine replied.
Derek took another sip of his drink, and then he placed fifty dollars on the bar and ordered another round for him and Jasmine. He positioned himself so he was right up on her and no one else could see as he unbuttoned and unzipped her jeans and felt around for the crotch of her panties, which he moved to the side, and slowly slipped his middle finger inside her soaking wet pussy.
Jasmine sighed in ecstasy, trying to be discreet, and then she slapped his hand. She zipped her pants and buttoned them back.
“So I was right about one thing,” Derek smiled and said.
Jasmine just looked at him and remained quiet.
After their fourth round of drinks, Jasmine and Derek made their way out of the bar and out of the airport. Derek called a number that was provided to all of the players who played for the Green Bay Packers that they could use to call a chauffeured car service to pick them up from anywhere in the country if they were ever out late drinking. Derek wasn’t going to put his NFL contract at risk by drinking and driving or getting arrested for public intoxication or something like that, so he always made sure to take advantage of that number whenever he went out partying.
Fifteen minutes later, Derek and Jasmine found themselves inside of an all-black chauffeur-driven Yukon Denali with tinted windows and headed to the Wynn. They both were feeling nice, and although Jasmine wanted some dick, she had let Derek freak her in the bar and now come back to her hotel room to fuck her simply because she was looking at the potential bigger picture, which contained possible NFL riches.
