The Cartel - Ashley Antoinette Snell [14]
“Fuck is you talking about?” Carter asked, hostility and anger in his tone.
Polo could see that the young man’s temper was beginning to flare and then remembered that Young Carter had a valid reason to be upset. He took a deep breath and calmed himself down, to de-escalate the situation. “Look, Young Carter, I’m not here to bump heads with you. As your father’s best friend, I’ve got nothing but respect for you. You have a misconception about the man that your pops was. I’m not saying that every decision he made regarding you and your mother was right, but he did the best that he could. Think about it, young’un. Your mother worked as a CNA since you were young. She’s bringing home thirty stacks a year at the most, but you grew up in a two-hundred-thousand-dollar house in the suburbs of Flint. Who do you think purchased that house? Who paid those bills? Use your head, young fella. How many fourteen-year-old boys you know kept a thousand dollars a week in his pocket? When you graduated you were pushing a limited edition Mercedes. Who do you think copped that car for you? Let me tell you, it wasn’t Mommy.”
Polo’s words were enough to silence Carter and make him think. His mother never told him about his father. She had never even talked about him and would explain their living situation by saying that she worked overtime, sometimes double-time, to allow them to live the way that they did. She often claimed to hit big at the casino or to have the winning lotto number. She had given her son every excuse in the book to explain the extra income. All this time my father was sending money back home to take care of me? Carter tried to wrap his mind around the fact that his father had never forgotten him.
“Your father never missed a beat in your life, son. You may not have gotten the chance to meet him, but he knew everything about you. It was nothing for him to fly in and out of Flint in the same day just so he could be at your Friday night football games. Remember that game you ran three hundred yards against Southwestern?”
Carter nodded his head as he placed it in his hands. “Yeah, I remember.”
“Your father was there. I know he was there because he dragged my black ass with him every week. Every touchdown, every awards assembly, your graduation, he was there for all of that. When you got into that trouble with the law as a juvenile, he made sure that the case was thrown out. Fifty grand made that little mishap disappear from your record.
“Your father loved you very much, but he was a hustler too. He met your mother when she was fifteen and he was seventeen. They dated throughout his senior year in high school, and when it was time for him to go to college, he regretfully left her to better himself. Your mother was so upset with him that when he moved down here she stopped contacting him. He tried to call her, but she would never return his calls. A couple years later he met Taryn. She was beautiful, unlike any woman he had ever met, and they fell in love quickly. She is a full-blooded Dominican though, and they don’t play that interracial dating shit. He had to prove himself time and time again just to be with her. If it weren’t for his persistence and her refusal to leave him alone, they never would have been allowed to stay together. He knew that she was the daughter of Emilio Estes.”
Carter lifted his head in surprise at the notorious drug lord’s name. His eyebrows rose in speculation as he thought, I know this nigga ain’t talking bout—
Before Carter could finish his thought, Polo said, “Yeah, I’m talking about the Emilio Estes.”
“Damn!”
“Emilio took Carter under his wing. His coke connect allowed Carter to establish The Cartel as the most notorious and prosperous illegal enterprise Miami has ever seen. Emilio was clear in his concerns though. He told Carter that if he wanted to be with his daughter then he would have to keep up the lifestyle that