Chapter Three
Friday, she was in deep sleep sometime after midnight when her cell phone started ringing. Mickie was on the line.
She felt like not answering, but he would only call again. She pressed the call button.
“Sonya, I’m leaving Jamaica for good. I need some money to take care of some things.”
“So what has that got to do with me?”
“Once I leave Jamaica, you’ll never see or hear from me again.”
“How do I know that you won’t try to blackmail me? How do I know that it wasn’t my gun that was used to kill Chester?”
“Where are you thinking of going?”
She wasn’t aware of him travelling to any foreign countries before.
“I’m going to the United States of course, where else?”
She declined from asking him if he had a visa.
“I’m going back to bed.”
She pressed the call button and ended the call.
He called her back.
“I want some money to take care of some things before I leave.”
“Go to hell.”
“You wouldn’t want me to go to Delta about your secret receipt books.”
“What! You wouldn’t dare.”
“Try me, you wouldn’t want her to know how you got the
money to buy the taxis you have on the road and the apartment you have renting out in Old Harbor.”
“You, dirty traitor, so you’d sell me out to Delta? What is she going to give you?”
“I don’t want anything from her. I need some money from you to take care of some things. I told you that already.”
“I’ll see what I can do. All I tell you is not to go to Delta with any stories about me.”
“I won’t if you help me out.”
He ended the call abruptly.
Sonya was taken aback that he had ended the call so suddenly. She was afraid of Delta finding out anything about her. Whether she liked it or not, she had to give Mickie the money to keep him quiet.
She lay in bed thinking. How was she sure that even if he was abroad, he wouldn’t try to blackmail her?
She thought about Judy. She had never wanted the girl dead. All she had wanted Carlos to do was to warn her off. She was horrified when she heard about the hit and run accident in which Judy had been killed. She had chased Mickie away from her when he came to tell her about Judy. She didn’t feel responsible for anything that had happened to her. She didn’t know how Carlos had gotten paid as she had refused Mickie’s request for money to pay him.
Come to think of it maybe the money Mickie wanted from her was to pay Carlos for Chester’s murder. But she didn’t care, what he did with the money after she gave it to him.
She didn’t want anything to do with Carlos. That guy was just too trigger happy for her liking. He had been thrown out of the police force and more than one security company because of how cold blooded he was.
Sunday night she didn’t know when she dropped off to sleep. She woke up in bright sunshine and realized that she had overslept. As she went out to the driveway, she noticed an object, lying in some roses. It was a gun! She rushed inside for a rag. She picked it up and took it inside. It was her gun, she was sure of that. She took out her file with the gun papers, like the permit and compared the serial number with that on the gun. It was her gun, all right.
She put the gun in a drawer and locked it. She wondered if any cartridges were missing. She knew she should take it to the police, but she had to have some questions answered by Mickie before she did that.
That evening she called Mickie. He denied being the person who had brought back the gun. He didn’t want to repeat himself that he wasn’t the one who took away her gun in the first place.
She was at her house, Saturday evening when he came. This time he was riding a motorcycle. She noticed that he wasn’t wearing a helmet. She didn’t comment on his need to wear one as she didn’t care.
“I got back my gun. Somebody threw it in the garden last
night. I don’t even know if any of the bullets have been fired from it.”
“Why would a thief give you back your gun? Guns are so precious in Jamaica. I don’t believe that you really got back your gun.”
“You’re the one who took it away. Lent it to Carlos to kill Chester and now you’re trying to plant it on me.”
“Listen, Carlos hasn’t surfaced yet. I doubt if it was he who shot Chester. That guy had lots of enemies. It could have been anybody who murdered him.”
“Do you have the thing? I’m in a hurry.”
“Where are you going, to the airport?”
“No, some other places.”
She went into her bedroom for the money. He took the envelope from her.
“I hope it’s the right amount.”
He opened the envelope.
“Why didn’t you change it out into American dollars?”
“You didn’t tell me which currency, you wanted it in.”
“You know I’m going away. So what am I doing with Jamaican money?”
He hissed his teeth and moved towards the door.
“What are you complaining about? Are you afraid of going to the bank and changing out the money?”
“They ask too many questions. What do I tell them? Sonya Brown gave me some money to change.”
He went outside, opened the gate, jumped on the bike and
rode away.
As she watched him ride away, she knew she had to talk to somebody. She called Marsha.
She told her about everything that had been happening to her.
“You have to go to the police, Sonya. You have to tell them everything.”
Sonya was taken aback by the girl’s insistence that she go to
the police. Marsha had always been a no nonsense sort of person. It was only that she couldn’t fight.
“I plan to go there one day next week.”
“I’ll go with you. You needn’t worry, I won’t let Odel know about any of this.”
“Thanks, Marsha. You’re a real sister. I know that I can always depend on you.”
“I just hope you don’t take too long.”
“I won’t, I just want this thing to be over.”
“Okay, call me when you’re ready, bye,” Marsha said and ended the call.
Sonya decided to go to the police on Sunday and told Marsha so that evening. She hadn’t heard from Mickie. She felt that he had left the island without telling her. Well, good riddance to him.
Just as she was getting ready for bed, her cell phone rang. It was a number she wasn’t familiar with. She pressed the call button.
Kirk Palmer was on the line.
“Sonya, it’s about Mickie, the police held him at the airport. I dropped him there this afternoon. He wants you to come and bail him.”
“He wants me to come and bail him. Mickie must be joking.”
“I thought the two of you had something going on.”
“Look Kirk, Mickie and I might have had a thing going on at one time, but not again. I could never trust him again.”
Kirk sounded as if he was in disbelief. She heard him sigh in the background. She knew that he and Mickie were good friends.
“Why did they arrest him, Kirk?”
“He didn’t have the right papers.”
My God, so Mickie had bought a visa to go to the United States.
“I wish I could help him. But as I explained to you, he and I aren’t on friendly terms anymore. I wouldn’t trust him to bail him. He might just run away and leave me having to pay back the bail bond.”
“Mickie is a fool. I just hope that he gets out of this mess that he’s put himself in,”Kirk opined.
“I hope so too,” she told Kirk before ending the call.
She should have known that was what he wanted the money to do. She was worried, if he came out of jail, he would just pester her about money or try to blackmail her about going to Delta.
That Sunday morning she called Marsha and told her that she was ready to go to the police station.
A year ago Marsha and Odel had relocated to Kingston after the latter landed a big job at a bank in the Corporate Area.
They had rented out their apartment in Montego Bay. Marsha had little trouble finding a job in Kingston at one of the top hotels.
Marsha left her children with her helper at Sonya’s house. She had told Odel that she was going to visit Sonya.
So the two of them went down to the police station in Half Way Tree. When Sonya handed her gun to the corporal on desk duty, the man wanted to arrest her immediately.
“So you lost your gun and didn’t tell the police. Somebody just threw it back in your garden. I wasn’t born yesterday. I think you killed somebody. This gun has to be examined. Pray that no shots have been fired from it.”
“The gun wasn’t fired while I had it.”
“Lady, if shots were fired from the gun, how will we know it wasn’t you who fired those shots? That’s why we always warn people when their gun goes missing to report it immediately to the nearest police station.”
He called a young constable to record her gun and give her a receipt. He told her that she would definitely be charged for not reporting the missing gun. He said he would soon assign a detective to the case.
Sonya was admonished by the corporal. She had to give copies of her drivers license. The policeman warned her that she would be prosecuted if it was found that she had given the police false information. He told her to make sure she got a lawyer.
She left the police station in deep thoughts. Marsha drove them home.
Sonya cooked dinner for all of them. Marsha told her that she had to take home some of the food for Odel. They went on the lawn to talk out of earshot of Marsha’s helper.
Marsha told her that she should take the policeman’s advice and seek a lawyer. Sonya wasn’t sure she wanted one just yet. They talked some more until Marsha decided to drive home.