The Drug Runners by H.C. Hannah

Author:H.C. Hannah
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: H.C. Hannah
Published: 2020-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

SEVENTEEN

08:55 am, Friday, September 20

St. John’s Magistrates’ Court, Antigua

Magistrate Gerald Darroux was suffering from a bad cold and had already decided that he wasn’t feeling gracious to anyone that morning, least of all the nefarious miscreants who should know better than to break the law. Already running a fever, on his arrival at the court building, Magistrate Darroux had been irked to discover that the air conditioning unit had still not been repaired from the previous week.

‘We’re working until eleven and then everyone’s going home,’ he had snapped to Anne, the court clerk, as she handed him a printed list of the cases he was due to hear that morning. ‘We’ll have staff passing out in the heat. This building’s unfit for purpose.’

‘I’ll contact the Ministry of Works again,’ Anne had replied. She knew better than to disagree with anything Magistrate Darroux proposed and none of the staff ever complained at the early finishes anyway, especially on Fridays. The magistrate frowned at the list he held in his hands before striding purposefully towards his office. It was the usual rubbish: summary offences, minor assaults, petty theft, public disorder and so on. There were the usual repeat offenders; sometimes he didn’t know why he bothered. But one case caught his eye. He scanned the details which had been submitted by the CDSLI. They outlined a drugs bust which had gone down in the early hours of the previous morning on a yacht at English Harbour. The captain of the yacht, a man by the name of Oliver Jacobs, was due to appear in court that morning on charges of possession, intent to transfer, being concerned with the supply of cocaine and the trafficking of over two thousand kilograms of the class A drug. The magistrate’s eyes nearly popped out of his head when he read the amount of cocaine the drug squad had seized from the yacht. Gerald reached for a tissue to blow his nose and continued reading. The frown on his face intensified. When he had finished reading the details of the case, he placed the papers on the desk in front of him, ignoring the rest of the list.

Gerald’s next birthday heralded his retirement and he was counting down the hours and minutes until that hallowed day arrived. One of the things Gerald was looking forward to most about his retirement was spending time with his five grandchildren who were aged between two and twenty-two. A year ago, Gerald had six grandchildren. But one devastating night, his third grandchild, eighteen year old Dylan, had taken a lethal cocktail of drugs which had resulted in his death. The person who had supplied the drugs which had killed Gerald’s grandson had never been caught, although Gerald had a fairly good idea of the man’s identity. But now Gerald had a serious problem with anyone who brought drugs to the island. Suppressing a violent sneeze, he opened one of his desk drawers and pulled out a thick pad of duplicate forms. He picked up a pen and began to fill in the blank form on the top.

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