Read Online First Round Lottery Pick by Franklin White - Free Book Online Page B

girl Tori.”
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    Tori ran off with her girl Kelly to get some grub at a Waffle House about an hour before I jumped in the car with Jalen to go meet up with them. We hadn’t even been in the car five minutes before my phone rang. It was Kelly, and she was crying.
    â€œKelly, what’s up?”
    â€œTori.”
    â€œWhat about her?”
    Kelly was crying so much, I could barely understand her. I turned the music in Jalen’s car all the way down.
    â€œI’m at the hospital,” she wailed, “and my head hurts so bad.”
    â€œThe hospital? Tell me what happened. Kelly, where is Tori?”
    Kelly was hysterical by now. “Langston, I don’t know where she is. We were stopped at a light on Livingston and Nelson, and they jumped in our car and snatched her.”
    â€œWhat? Who snatched her? Kelly, what’re you talking about?”
    â€œI don’t know who. When I woke up, I was coming into the hospital. I don’t know where Tori is.”

    We were on the freeway next to the exit that put us where Kelly said she was. When I pointed to the exit, Jalen slammed on the gas from the far left lane, maneuvered through traffic, and zoomed down the hill to the exit without flinching. I don’t know how he made it without getting us killed or causing a major pileup. We couldn’t get all the way down the ramp to Livingston, so we jumped out the car and ran all the way down to see what was going on.
    Police cars were everywhere, and we stood looking at Kelly’s car, which was smoking and looked as though it was in some sort of movie scene.
    â€œDamn! L , who shot up Kelly’s car like that?”
    â€œI don’t know.” My heart was pumping faster than it ever had for a basketball game.
    You could hear in Jalen’s voice how worried he was. “You see Tori anywhere?”
    I didn’t. I pulled up the yellow tape over my head and walked over with Jalen closer to the car.
    â€œHey, you guys have to get back,” some thick-neck police officer told us.
    â€œLook, I need to find out what happened to the other girl who was riding in this car.”
    â€œNo. What you need to be doing is what I tell you,” he said. “Now get your asses behind that tape.”
    Another officer walked up toward us. He looked familiar, but nothing was clicking in my mind but Tori and where she was. “Aren’t you, Holiday? Langston Holiday? The ballplayer from East going pro?”
    â€œYeah, that’s me.” I was looking around at all the commotion, listening to him, but not really listening.
    â€œYeah, I remember you. I coached the team you played against every Saturday at the YMCA, PAL, when you were a young’un,” he said.
    â€œSir, look, my girl was riding in this car. I need to find out what happened to her.” I couldn’t believe all the bulletholes in the car.
    â€œWell, that’s what we’re trying to find out, son. Maybe you should go with me to the car and try to straighten this out.”
    Jalen went with me to the officer’s car, and we answered questions about what we knew about what was going on. Which was, not a damn thing. I started to get mad when the officer started asking me and Jalen where we were when the shooting went down, and if I or Jalen were having any beef with the girls. Jalen told the man he wasn’t answering any more questions like that, and I agreed.
    When Officer Cummings saw that there was nothing he could get from us, that’s when he started to help. He took us to get Jalen’s car, and we followed him to the hospital to see Kelly to find out what she knew.
    By the time we got there, Tori’s people had already been there and gone out to the streets to search for her, since no one seemed to know what happened to her.
    Kelly couldn’t tell us anything. The only thing she told the police that she remembered was that they stopped at a light and out of nowhere