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  She poked me in the stomach then said, “Hey, L.”

  “Hey, what’s up?” I kind of figured she was ’bout to start some drama because of what I’d told her the night before.

  Tori was sitting next to me on my other side. “Hey, Katrina,” she said. Then she looked at her to see what she wanted.

  “So, what’s up, L? We goin’ to kick it tonight when this slow down or what?”

  I looked down at Katrina, trying to tell her with my eyes not to start because I really didn’t want to flow with her on that negative vibe ’cause we was having a good time.

  Tori snapped right in. “No, I don’t think so. He’s goin’ to be with me tonight and every night after we get married.”

  Katrina paused for a moment and scanned Tori up and down. “Yeah . . . I heard,” she sang out.

  Tori smiled then looked out at the crowd when the DJ ripped her song “on the ones and twos.”

  I thought it was squashed, until Katrina opened her mouth again.

  “Yeah, he told me right after we were together.”

  Jalen knew what kind of drama Katrina always liked to get started, so he had moved over close by. “Ohh, see, c’mon now. Don’t start, Katrina, a’ight,” he pleaded.

  “I ain’t worried about her, Jalen,” Tori said. “I ain’t never tried to stop L from going up inside her. The only thing I always asked of him was to wear protection, and he already told me he never did anything with you anyway without wearing a jimmy, sometimes two to be extra, extra safe, ’cause you neva know.”

  Jalen snickered a bit, and Katrina didn’t like it.

  “So what you sayin’, Tori?”

  “I’m saying he was going through the motions, ’cause, in my book, it ain’t real like that.”

  Katrina put her hand up then back down like she was playing imaginary ping-pong. “How do you know what’s real from what isn’t? It’s not like you have ever been with anybody anyway.”

  Tori smiled at her. “Sure haven’t. But I tell you this—When I do, he’s goin’ in without the hat.”

  I looked at Tori, and she kissed me on my cheek.

  Jalen was in the background, instigating and agitating like he does best. “I heard that,” he mumbled.

  Katrina yelled, “Look, you don’t know a damn thing about me, so you need to just shut the hell up!”

  “Oh, I know this about you, Katrina. I know for the longest I’ve been letting you play number two ’cause I just don’t believe in giving up the goodies before marriage. Put it like this—L already done worn you out. He had permission. I’m goin’ to be wifey, okay, and handling all his needs from now on, but good looking out, and I hope he saved some for the next one who run up in you.”

  I don’t know why, but Katrina looked at me.

  “So, is that how it is, L?”

  I felt Jalen looking at me. Then Tori.

  “Yeah, that’s exactly how it is. I already told you.”

  “Oh, all right. Forget both of y’all!” Katrina said then stormed away.

  Jalen pointed to the girls he was sitting next to. “See, that should be a lesson to all of you. Stop running around here boning everybody who you think like you. Keep those legs shut, you hear me? It will pay off. Just ask my girl Tori.”

  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.

  “Kelly, what’s up?”

  “Tori.”

  “What about her?”

  Kelly was crying so much, I could barely understand her. I turned the music in Jalen’s car all the way down.

  “I’m at the hospital,” she wailed, “and my head hurts so bad.”

  “The 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.”

  “What? Who snatched her? Kelly, what’re you talking about?”

  “I 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.

  “Damn! L, who shot up Kelly’s car like that?”

  “I 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.

  “Hey, you guys have to get back,” some thick-neck police officer told us.

  “Look, I need to find out what happened to the other girl who was riding in this car.”

  “No. 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?”

  “Yeah, that’s me.” I was looking around at all the commotion, listening to him, but not really listening.

  “Yeah, I remember you. I coached the team you played against every Saturday at the YMCA, PAL, when you were a young’un,” he said.

  “Sir, 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.

  “Well, 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 her door was ripped opened and she saw a balled-up fist headed straight for her face, which knocked her out.

  Officer Cummings told her that whoever shot up her car didn’t want to kill her because if they did, they could have easily done it.

  I walked out the hospital with Jalen without a clue to what was going on. As always, Jalen became quiet when he was upset. I knew he was hurting like I was because he and Tori had always been like brother and sister.

  “What we going to do, L?”

  “I don’t know, man. I mean, what can we do? Ain’t nobody see nothing, and Kelly can’t tell us anything.”

  “If they took her out the car, that means they wanted to take her someplace. Let’s go back to The Vil and find out if anybody heard anything.”

  I wanted to go see my mother and Tori’s people.

  When I got home, my mother was on the couch. I didn’t have to tell her anything. She already knew what was going on, and even
though she was shaken, she was trying to make sure we were okay. She must have seen the anger in our eyes.

  “Now you two ain’t really been through nothing like this, so don’t go out of here and get yourself into any trouble. The police is out there trying to find out where Tori is, and the more time you give them to look for her, instead of going out there and looking for somebody, like I know you want to do, it will give them a chance to find her.”

  “Yeah, but people ain’t goin’ to talk to no police,” Jalen said. “Tori like family, and family need to take care of family, no matter who involved.”

  “Ma, we gotta at least go out and ride around and see what we see. I mean, ain’t no way we staying up in here trying to wait to hear something.”

  “Well, what can I say? Y’all two are men now, but don’t forget everything you got going for yourself, L.”

  “I won’t,” I told her.

  “And I ain’t going to let him,” Jalen assured.

  “But we gotta find her, Ma, we got to.”

  Our first stop was over Tori’s to see her mom and sisters. I can’t lie, I couldn’t take it. I could hear the crying and the calling of Tori’s name through the door before we even knocked. I stood on the step with Jalen and swear I was almost in tears, but I was trying to be strong before I knocked on that door.

  Jalen wasn’t able to keep the tears from flowing and was wiping his eyes every chance he got in case I got the strength to knock.

  The courage wouldn’t come to knock, so I backed away from the door.

  As soon as we stepped away, the door opened. “Tori?”

  It was her mom, and when she called out Tori’s name, I could feel the pain she was going through.

  We turned around.

  “Oh, Langston, Jalen,” she figured out.

  “Ah, hey, we were just going to stop by to see how everybody was doing but thought we should give you a little bit more time before we came in,” I told her.

  “No, no, c’mon in,” she said.

  Jalen wiped his eyes and stopped before we went inside. “No, we gotta go find her, Ms. Hicks,” he said. “That’s what we should be doin’ right about now, you know.”

  She tried to smile, but tears rolled down her face instead. “I know. I want to go out there too, but I’m afraid if I do, I’ll miss her call. The police told me to just stay by the phone.”

  It was weird talking outside in the dark about Tori over all the nighttime action in The Vil that didn’t stop for anything. The sirens were blaring, and people were on the hunt for whatever they were getting into.

  I went over to Ms. Hicks and gave her a hug. I couldn’t help but start to feel like Tori missing was my fault. As I had my arms around her while she cried, my mind went back to the day when were just freshmen and Tori’s mom gave me the third degree about taking care of her and making sure she would always be safe when we were out. I wanted to tell her it was all my fault, that I would find Tori and bring her back home, but I wasn’t so sure. We didn’t have any kind of clues as to where she could be or what could have happened to her, and it was driving me crazy. So, as I held Ms. Hicks, I cried too.

  Chapter Twelve

  Hard-Pressed

  It was hard to take, but three days had almost passed since Tori went missing. It was quiet all around The Vil, and I hadn’t slept more than three hours straight since the night Tori was taken. The police didn’t have any witnesses and didn’t know anything. All they knew was that she was gone and that Kelly’s car had been shot up. I heard they even questioned Katrina because of the beef she and Tori had right before Tori left. Katrina had all types of people speaking for her and stepping up to clear her name. I didn’t think she had anything to do with it. Besides, her bark was always louder than her bite.

  I was pissed because no one in the media was really saying anything about Tori missing like they do for those suburban girls when they get snatched up. I wasn’t too young to know what it was about though. The media never cared about what went down in the hood and wasn’t going to waste time on some young black girl, so I did what I could on that end. Out of the seven interviews I had concerning going pro, I told them what I was going through and made sure I talked about Tori because I wanted somebody to find my girl.

  “C’mon, Langston, that shot’s going to be your bread and butter when you come overseas,” I heard Barcelona’s head scout voice echo through the gym. “I can see it now. You’re going to be hell to defend. Do you know how hard it was to play against Scottie Pippen back in the day? When you’re floating around the elbow looking straight at the bucket we’re going to want you to take it. It’s what you’re going to be known for on our team,” the scout shouted.

  I couldn’t believe I kept shooting and missing it as the scout continued to run his mouth.

  “Make it your signature, baby. Live it and love it!”

  The traveling scout working me out was sitting in the bleachers next to Coach Pierce. It was my second workout in two days for Barcelona. I can’t even front—I wasn’t even impressing myself.

  Coach showed up big though. He was my buffer between the scouts and the terrible workouts I was having. He pulled them aside to let them know my situation. He explained to them why my vertical had been forty-one inches instead of a consistent forty-six and the reasons my shooting touch was off. He knew Tori and understood what I was going through. There had been a few times when Coach didn’t think he was reaching me during the season and he went to Tori to get into my head, and it worked every time. She was definitely in my head by this time, because I was worried to death about her.

  I looked over toward the bleachers to Coach and the scout. “I’m sorry, but this just ain’t going to work today. I need to find out what’s going on with Tori. I shouldn’t even be doing this right now.”

  The scout looked over at Coach then back at me. “Look, son, it’s this simple. In the pros there is no time for a break when things are tough. We work on our game, get our heads right, and try as best as we can to do what we’re paid to do. Ask any of the players when you meet them. It’s how you become a star.”

  I couldn’t tell if the scout knew, but Coach Pierce did, and he stiffened a bit.

  He must have remembered the time when one of the assistants on our team tried the same take-one-for-the-team speech when my grandmother died and the entire team had to pull me off him. Coach put his hand up to silence me before I cussed the scout out.

  “Look, Langston,” the scout said, “listen to me. Things will work out for the better. You have to believe that, son. Dig in and do what we’ve seen you do in the state championships and on tape in your all-star summer league games. I want you to have a good workout, so I can go back and tell my people that you’ll be worth all the money you’ll be paid.”

  I stood there looking at Coach and the scout, along with the side exit to the streets, with the ball up under my arm. I had major thoughts running through my head. Should I tell this baldheaded Dick Vitale look-alike to kiss the bottom of my shoes and come back another day, or should I stay on the court like a piece of meat and let him evaluate my skills like he came to do in the first place? I don’t know why, but I didn’t like the way Coach and the scout were looking at me while I stood there. It made me feel like a slave on the block getting ready to get sold or something. I took a deep breath and gutted it out though. I just let their looks and stares motivate me and gave them what they wanted to see.

  Afterward, the scout was all smiles. He shook my hand like a groupie then told me he would be in touch later that night.

  Jalen walked in about five minutes later. “How’d it go?” he asked, his voice echoing throughout the gym.

  “A’ight. Said he was gonna call me tonight.”

  Jalen put three or four balls back on the rack, grabbed my towel then threw it to me.

  I knew right away something wasn’t right with him. It was written all over his face. “What? What’s wrong? They find Tori?”

  He dropped his hea
d and took a deep breath.

  “What is it, Jalen? What’s wrong?” I walked over to him. “Talk, J.”

  “Toy just stopped me in The Vil.”

  “And?”

  “He say he can get Tori back.”

  “What you mean, get her back?”

  “That’s what he sayin’.”

  “That means she ain’t dead, right?”

  “He just say he can get her back. Didn’t say if she was dead or not.”

  My mind just wanted to explode. “C’mon, Jalen, tell me what you’re talking about!”

  “Toy made it clear he didn’t have anything to do with her getting snatched up, but he can get her back to us, if you sign with him.”

  “Sign?”

  Jalen nodded.

  “He said that? Oh, hell no. That scandalous bastard.” With the quickness, I started to think about a way to hurt Toy and get Tori back.

  “C’mon, L, don’t even think about it. Toy said he knew you, L. Said you go to the police talking smack, and he’ll deny saying a word. Then he say, if you get a gang of peeps to come after him, he’s not going to say a word, and we may never see her again.”

  “So what he want then?”

  “You to sign. Make him your agent for three years and he has full control of your career.”

  “He said that?”

  “Every word.”

  What could I do? If Toy knew where Tori was, I wanted to know too. It didn’t matter to me if we found her dead or alive. Of course, I wanted little mama alive because that was my baby, but if we found her dead, at least we knew. It was a terrible-ass way to think, but I wanted to know. I needed to know.

  “So when he wanna do this?”

  “You’re going to do it?”

  “What else can I do? Man, forget Toy! I’ll sign with him and get Tori back then fire him.”