Cartier Cartel (13 page)

At that moment, she decided to send the girls back to foster care. Let them
be the system's problem and not her problem. The foster care agency kept
putting pressure on her to adopt the girls for good. All she had to do was sign
her name on the dotted line. But Marianne just couldn't do it. She couldn't
allow herself to be attached permanently to those juvenile delinquents. At
thirty-seven, she had plans of getting married and having her own children.
And none of the girls would be a role model to any of her children. She had tried to be a good foster mother and it didn't work. She could do bad all by
herself. This was worse than having a worthless-ass man by her side.

t was eight in the morning and Marianne had to call in and take a day
off, a day she couldn't afford to take off. She could never go on vacation,
because she'd used all her vacation days for crazy shit concerning her four
delinquents. Whether it was talking to school principals, store managers and
detectives, truant officers, or visiting hospitals in the middle of the damn
night, she was always taking days. She could be sleeping in her warm bed
right now, but instead she was standing inside a cold, dank hospital with a
bunch of hooligans.

A weary-eyed doctor in a white lab coat and clutching a surgical hat
approached Marianne. "Ms. Jones?"

Trina nudged Cartier, who had fallen asleep in the hard waiting-room
chair. Everyone stood in anticipation of the news.

"Yes," Marianne responded.

"Your daughter's going to be fine," the doctor replied. "She's sustained
severe head trauma, but once the swelling goes down, she should be
somewhat all right. The parts of the brain that sustained the most injury were
the cerebellum and brain stem that control motor skills and speech. With
physical and speech therapy she should improve over time. She's stable and
sedated. If all of you are family, you can go in to see her for five minutes. But
realize she won't know you all are there.

"Also, there are a couple of detectives who'd like to ask you a few
questions"

"But I don't know anything!" Marianne replied excitedly.

"They still need to talk to you, ma'am. Goodnight."

Everyone glanced at the two detectives. Out of respect, the detectives
decided to wait until after the family saw Bam.

The group filed into the room and was immediately aghast at the sight of Bam. She was hooked up to a couple of machines with tubes running in and
out of her nose, mouth, and arms. Her head was bandaged and her left hand
was in a cast. Her entire face was swollen to an unrecognizable state.

Cartier, Monya, and Shanine burst into tears, while Lil Momma
miraculously held it together. Trina and Janet embraced their daughters as
Marianne held Bam's hand.

An overwhelming force of emotions came flooding out as Marianne
realized one of her girls was lying in that hospital bed. Bam had been her
child for six years and she couldn't give up on her, no matter what her mind
told her. Her heart couldn't listen, wouldn't listen. She wasn't raised that way.
Family stuck with family.

"Bernice, this is Mama." Marianne choked up. "You gotta be strong so
I can get you out of this hospital, baby." Marianne was giving it her all to
keep it together. "When you come home, I'm going to cook you your favorite
dinner. You love my baked macaroni and cheese, don't you?"

Tears streamed down Cartier's face. "Of course she does. And when you
get better you can borrow my Xbox for as long as you want and I won't pester
you to give it back."

Theyhoped their words of encouragement somehow reached Bam. It was
hard to see how she could hear them in her condition. And it was even harder
to walk out of Bam's room and face two detectives who wanted answers.

"Who did this to my baby?" Marianne asked them.

"Well, ma'am, that's exactly what we wanted to ask you," the smaller
of the two detectives replied. He was around five feet eight with a medium
build, blond hair, and a thick mustache.

"Ask me?" Marianne replied. "How should I know? Aren't you the cops?"

"Yes, and we're doing our job," the second detective stated. He was the
taller of the two detectives by several inches. His portly belly had seen its
share of Budweiser and Miller, and nothing light. "We've already been on
the block and tried questioning a few leads, but everyone claims they didn't see anything. We were hoping you could tell us who had a vendetta against
Bernice.

Marianne looked toward her friends. "You know parents are the last to
know if their child has trouble. You need to ask her friends."

Each girl had only one name in their minds: Donnie. He was their trouble
with a capital T. He had warned them. He was the only one who would
benefit from hurting Bam.

Neither girl spoke a word about their rival, because of the code of the
streets: Don't Snitch.

"Do any of you girls know who would do this to your friend?" the lead
detective asked.

Each girl either shook her head or shrugged her shoulders.

"If you're protecting someone, then sooner or later we're going to find
out," the detective said.

"There's no one to protect, because we don't know nothing," Cartier
answered.

"And your name is?"

"Cartier"

"Cartier what?" the second detective asked.

"That's enough, Officer," Trina intervened. "My daughter hasn't done
anything, and I'm not going to allow you to interrogate her as if she's the bad
guy. You need to go out and find out who hurt Bernice."

"And why don't you let us do our job?" The lead detective stepped toward
Trina. He was short on patience and had an obvious disdain for the present
company.

Trina looked to Cartier and her friends, while Janet grabbed Monya.

"Marianne, we'll wait for you over here," Trina said. "You know these
girls don't know nothing."

The detectives asked Marianne a few more questions, handed her a
business card and left. As everyone began to leave the floor, a registered nurse named Kathleen came from around the corner and approached Marianne.
The nurse had been watching the events unfold from afar and she was certain
that the coast was clear. She didn't want to get Barn in trouble after the ordeal
she had gone through.

"Ms. Jones?" the nurse stepped forward.

"Yes," Marianne replied.

"These are your daughter's clothes," the nurse said as she passed a plastic
bag of bloody clothes to Marianne. "We had to cut them off her, but I think
you'll know what to do with what's inside."

Marianne opened the bag and peered down at the bloody, ripped
clothing. "Thank you for giving me this, but you could have just thrown these
in the trash," Marianne said. "They aren't any good anymore."

Marianne tried to give the bag back to the RN, who refused to take them.

"Don't throw that bag away if you know what I mean," the nurse stated.
The nurse had a little sister, Regina, who knew Bam well. After Barn was
assaulted, Regina called her sister at the hospital and told her to be on the
lookout for Bernice. Regina wanted a play-by-play account of Bernice's
injuries and if she was dead or alive. Kathleen wasn't any stranger to the drug
game being born and raised in Brownsville. Her current boyfriend was a drug
hustler who paid all her bills. Even though Kathleen had always been a good
girl, she was only attracted to bad boys.

Cartier had intentionally overheard the conversation and knew exactly
what the nurse was saying. Without hesitation, she took the bag from
Marianne and said, "I'll take it. That's Bam's favorite shirt. I'll sew it back
together and fix it for when she comes home."

Marianne was tired and making a beeline for home and getting some
much needed rest was all on her mind. She would get some sleep, get on the
other three girls, and return to the hospital to stay by Bam's side.

veryone was tired when they reached Trina's apartment. Trina headed
straight to her bedroom to get some sleep while Cartier and her crew
went to her room. "Y'all know what's in this bag, don't you?" Cartier asked.

"Bloody clothes?" Shanine answered.

"You're as dumb as the day is long!" Lil Momma snapped. "What do you
think Barn was almost killed over?"

"Oh. . ." Shanine said.

Carefully, Cartier rummaged through the bloody, torn clothing until she
reached inside Bam's inside ski jacket pocket and retrieved $2,200 in cash
and another $300 worth of heroin. The crew thought Donnie had someone
rob Barn and beat her down. But with the money and product still on her
person, they didn't know what to think.

"Maybe she wouldn't give it up and that's why they did her dirty like
that," Shanine commented. "All she had to do was give up the shit. Now look
at her."

Shanine's comments instantly pissed off everyone. "How you sound?"
Cartier spoke up, rising up on Shanine. "You blaming Barn for getting a beatdown, instead of praising her for taking a beat-down. We crew. She stood
out there and held her own for the crew and you talking down about her?"
Cartier was disgusted with Shanine's accusation. As she glared into Shanine's eyes, she wondered what Shanine or the rest of the crew, including herself,
would have done if placed in the same predicament.

"I didn't mean it like that," Shanine replied in her defense.

"Yes, the fuck you did!" Monya jumped in.

"How you gonna tell me what I meant, Monya? You don't even think for
yourself. Whatever Cartier says, goes."

At this point everyone was shocked. Shanine was obviously speaking her
true feelings, and no one appreciated her being candid.

Cartier was furious. She was the leader and what she said was supposed
to go. And that included Shanine.

"First of all," Cartier began, "when I formed this crew it was understood
by everyone that I was the leader. It if wasn't for me we'd still be out here
starving and begging people for shit. My thinking is what got us-"

"Is what got Barn nearly killed!" Lil Momma spat.

Cartier got even more furious. She couldn't believe two members of her
crew were turning their backs on her, or had the gumption to stand up against
her. She was the leader. She ruled. She made the decisions, and whatever
decisions she made, the crew suffered the consequences as one, as a team.