Little Girl Gone Read Online Free Page B

having sex with him after a concert and making a plaster cast of his penis.
    Gross.
    He went to Facebook and did a quick scroll, not paying much attention to the entries, looking for a clue that his parents were alive. He was sure they would find a way to send him a message. He went to his e-mail, saw nothing interesting. If the story of the accident was part of a top secret government thing, a message from his parents verifying this would be in code, of course. Django was smart; he would figure it out. Or, if they were being held for ransom, the note would come by mail or maybe a telephone call. Django’s father was super rich and famous, and his half brother, Huck, was probably a billionaire. The kidnappers would want a lot of money, but Django had made up his mind that he wouldn’t call the FBI when he heard from them. The feds would tell him to be cagey, not to pay the demand, but he was willing to pay any amount to rescue his mother and father.
    There was nada from his homies on Facebook or e-mail or Twitter despite his having written them a couple of timesevery day since he got to his aunt’s house. Plus texting and tweeting and leaving messages on their cells. He looked up at the ceiling and opened his eyes wide to dry up the tears he felt coming. He blinked hard but it didn’t help. He was twelve and everyone said his parents were dead so it was normal to cry; but Django had never wanted to be normal.
    Jacky and Caro Jones had driven to Reno over the Memorial Day weekend because Jacky wanted to try out his new black Ferrari on Interstate 395, the sweeping stretches of highway and long sight lines north of Bishop. If they had left Reno a half hour later or stopped in Bishop for coffee, if they’d gotten sleepy and decided to risk the bedbugs in a roadside motel. If they hadn’t been driving back to Beverly Hills late Monday night along the dark, deserted highway through the Rand Mountains, the hilly, twisty section between Johannesburg and Randsburg. If a drunk in a pickup had not shot out of an unmarked side road: no lights, ninety miles an hour.
    Django wanted to jam a pencil through his ear, kill his imagination and obliterate the screams and the sound of metal slamming into metal.
    The morning after the accident when Django came into the kitchen, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes, it had not seemed unusual to see his father’s manager, Ira, leaning against the kitchen counter, drinking coffee. Ira had been his father’s manager since the seventies, and they often had morning meetings at the house in Beverly Hills.
    It was Ira who had broken the news and swore toDjango that his parents had not suffered. Death had come instantly, he said. The news charred Django like a sapling struck by lightning. It burned a hollow space inside him that now, two weeks later, he knew nothing would ever fill. That first morning, Mrs. Hancock, the housekeeper, put her arms around him, and they sat beside each other on the double chair on the kitchen porch. As Django recalled—his memory of those first days had big holes in it—they sat there all day as the sun moved across the wide planks of the whitewashed floor; but it couldn’t have been that long because his parent’s lawyer came, Mr. Guerin; and he and Ira closed themselves in Jacky’s office. While they talked Django went outside and sat by the swimming pool. His father said that exercise was the best thing when a person was upset so he tried to swim laps, but he only got to the middle of the pool before he couldn’t be bothered. He lay on his back and floated, staring up at the gray sky. Typical June gloom.
    The truth was, when Ira told him his parents were dead, Django had not felt much of anything except stunned. And later, when he started to think about what
automobile accident
and
dead
really meant—what Ira and Mr. Guerin would call
the long-term ramifications—
he mostly felt scared because no one seemed to know what was going to happen to him. He thought he