Robbie Forester and the Outlaws of Sherwood Street

by Peter Abrahams

  Silas backed away, his mouth wide open in a big, silent O.

  “You all right?” I said. “Headache, but now it’s gone?”

  He rubbed his head, nodded. “But how did you—” He glanced at the ashes on the floor, just a few, hardly noticeable. “What—what’s going on?”

  We sat him down, started telling our story. Silas had that easy-to-read face, so it was obvious at first that he didn’t believe us. But his expression started to change when I showed him the bracelet and he felt the silver heart, much warmer than it should have been.

  “It’s shaped like a heart,” he said.

  “How observant,” said Ashanti.

  “Not a real heart, of course,” Silas said. “Just the common misrepresentation.” Ashanti rolled her eyes. Meanwhile Silas had the heart on his fingertip. “Too heavy to be silver,” he said.

  “Platinum, right?” said Ashanti.

  “More likely palladium or rhodium,” Silas said. “We could expose it to various altering agents, I suppose, or get some electromagnets and—”

  “Silas!” Ashanti said. “You’re missing the point.”

  “What’s the point?”

  “It has power—that’s the point,” she said.

  Silas’s face wrinkled up, a very unpleasant look on him, showing he wasn’t buying it. “So if I put it on, I’d have the power?” he said.

  “For God’s sake,” Ashanti said.

  But I slipped off the bracelet and handed it to Silas. “Let’s see,” I said.

  He put on the bracelet. “Now we’re friends, right?” he said.

  Ashanti and I ignored him. We sat in Silas’s bedroom, waiting for something to happen.

  “Nothing’s happening,” Silas said. Time passed. “Do you think bored people live longer?” he said. “Or would it be the other—whoa!”

  “Whoa?” we said.

  “This thing is getting super cold,” he said. “Ow! That hurts.” And he yanked off the bracelet, threw it on the bed. Ashanti and I both touched the heart. It felt icy, but warmed up very fast, back to room temperature.

  Ashanti and I exchanged a glance. She put the bracelet on her wrist. We gazed at the heart, resting against her skin.

  “It’s happening again,” she said quietly, and then, louder, “Ow.” She took off the bracelet and gave it to me. The icy heart warmed up. I put it on. The heart lay against my skin, rose to the temperature of my own body, and stayed there.

  “Wow,” said Silas. “Talk about data points.”

  “What does that mean?” I said.

  “Too soon to say,” Silas said. “But something’s going on, no doubt about it. Tell me the whole story again.”

  We told him the whole story again.

  “Hmmm,” he said.

  “Meaning you’re in?” said Ashanti.

  “In what?”

  “With us.”

  “Us?”

  “Me and Robbie.”

  His eyes went to me, back to Ashanti. Sometimes boys look scared for no reason.

  “What are you planning?” he said.

  A good question. There was silence for a few moments. Ashanti and Silas both seemed to be looking at me, like I had the answer or something, which was pretty far from the story of my life so far. But then, out of nowhere, I did have it.

  “How does robbing from the rich and giving to the poor sound?” I said.

  Ashanti and I took the elevator down to the lobby in Silas’s building, a fresh printout in my hand. I’d plucked this one out of the tray myself, Silas refusing to touch it, even though Ashanti said there’d be no shock this time.

  “What makes you so sure?” he’d said.

  “I just am,” she’d told him.

  The elevator doors slid open, and we walked out. A woman was waiting to get on: red-haired, roundish, not a doubt in my mind about who she was. She gave us a sharp-eyed glance as we went by.

  “Do you think she knows about the app?” I said when we were on the street.

  “Nope,” said Ashanti. “But that’s not our problem.”

  “What is?”

  “Robbing the rich,” Ashanti said. “The giving to the poor part sounds easy enough, but how are we going to rob the rich? We know the power won’t turn on without injustice in the mix. So what’s the solution, exactly?”

  I didn’t know. “We’ll just have to give it a shot,” I said.

  Ashanti thought for a moment or two. “Sounds like a plan,” she said.

  It did to me, too. We were dealing, after all, with a flaky power; or it was dealing with us—a scarier interpretation that I banished instantly from my mind.

  The blogger’s name was Heinz Mott. He lived over a deli on Flatbush Avenue and had a credit score of 620, whatever that meant. It was after five when we got there, so it seemed like a good idea to call home, which we both did. No answer at either place. We both left messages saying we were with each other and on the way home, very close to the whole truth and nothing but.

  A small door stood by the deli entrance; lights shone through a window on the floor above. Ashanti was just raising her hand to press the buzzer when the small door opened and a man came out, struggling with some suitcases. There was something rabbity about his face; and like the White Rabbit, he seemed to be in a big hurry, such a big hurry that he bumped into Ashanti and lost his grip on one of the suitcases. The suitcase was battered and cheap-looking, had duct tape reinforcement here and there, but not enough, because it popped open.

  He turned surly right away, the surly-rabbit combo turning out to be a pretty unpleasant sight. “Can’t you stupid girls watch where you’re going?” he said. He crouched down and started tossing stuff back into the suitcase: mismatched socks, frayed T-shirts, lots of papers, some bundled together and some loose, an envelope. The envelope got away from him, came drifting on a breeze over to me. He didn’t seem to notice.

  As I picked it up, I couldn’t help seeing the name of the addressee: Heinz Mott. And, whoa! What was this? The sender’s name, up in the top left-hand corner: Jaggers and Tulkinghorn. I kind of slid the envelope behind my back, but without the slightest intention, at least at that moment, of not giving it back.

  “You’re Heinz Mott?” I said.

  He turned quickly to me, the way people do when suddenly scared. “How do you know my name?”

  “A long story,” I said, “but it’s good to meet you. We’ve got some questions about your blog.”

  He went still, a ratty bedroom slipper sliding through his fingers and into the suitcase. “Blog?”

  “Yeah,” Ashanti said. “Sheldon Gunn Is a Monster dot-com.”

  He rose, glancing quickly around. “Shh. Keep your voice down.”

  “Huh?” said Ashanti.

  There was no one around except for maybe a few dozen people or so, all of them the normal kind of people you’d see on Flatbush Avenue, meaning just about anyone from anywhere on the whole planet; and that wasn’t counting all the motorized traffic, of course. But no one seemed the least interested in our conversation: that was the point. An old lady unwrapping a candy bar came out of the deli. She moved carefully around a pair of tighty whiteys lying by the suitcase and kept going.

  “The thing is,” Ashanti said, “how come the blog’s not up anymore?”

  “I don’t know about any blog,” he said.

  “But you are Heinz Mott?” I said.

  He gazed down at me, although not far down, since he wasn’t very tall. “Who are you people? What do you want?”

  “We’re working on a school project,” I said. “All about the New Brooklyn Redevelopment thing.”

  “And we were checking out your blog and then it disappeared,” Ashanti said. “We need the list of all the people getting forced out.”

  Heinz Mott’s mouth started doing this strange twitchy thing. “List?” he said. “Where would I ever get a list like that?”

  “Good question,” I said.

  “Yeah,” said Ashanti. “Let’s start the
re—where did you get the list?”

  His mouth twitched a little more. Then he turned and started flinging stuff in the suitcase, wildly now.

  “Also,” I said, “why do you call Sheldon Gunn a monster?”

  “Do you know him personally?” said Ashanti.

  “Know him personally? There is no personally with the likes of him.” Heinz Mott rose, fumbling with his suitcases. A taxi appeared in the traffic stream. New Yorkers often sound desperate when they’re hailing a cab, but I’d never heard one as desperate as Heinz Mott.

  “Taxi!” he screamed. “Taxi!”

  The cab pulled over. Heinz Mott yanked the back door open, jammed in the suitcases, crawled in.

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “We need to—”

  “You can’t just—” Ashanti began.

  Heinz Mott slammed the door closed. The cab drove off. Another car honked. The cab honked back.

  “We could jump in another cab and follow him,” Ashanti said.

  I got the feeling that that only worked in the movies. Plus I had two dollars in my wallet. “How much money have you got on you?” I said.

  Ashanti dug in her pocket. “Fifty-five cents.”

  “Then that’s that.”

  We watched the cab getting away, but we weren’t the only watchers. A few parking spaces down from us I saw a fair-haired, square-jawed man on a motorcycle doing the same thing. Then he put on a helmet, kicked the starter pedal, and swerved into the stream of traffic. The light on the next corner turned red, the taxi already across. The motorcycle shot through. More honking.

  “So what do we do now?” Ashanti said.

  “No idea,” I said with a shrug, and somewhere in that shrug became aware of the envelope, still in my hand.

  I stepped into the light shining through the deli window, examined the envelope. It had already been slit open at the top, so this wasn’t quite the same as opening someone else’s mail, at least in my mind at that particular second. Was the letter inside? Yes.

  I unfolded it. “Dear Mr. Mott,” it began. Then came a confusing paragraph where the phrase “cease and desist” was repeated a couple of times, and after that a signature: Egil Borg. And his title: Associate, Litigation.

  “Same guy who wrote to Mr. Nok?” Ashanti said.

  “Yeah.” I read the letter a few times, felt Ashanti reading along with me over my shoulder.

  “What’s he trying to say?” Ashanti asked.

  “Don’t know,” I said. “It could be about suing unless the blog goes away.”

  “Where do you see that?”

  I pointed to a sentence. “Maybe here.”

  Ashanti shook her head. “Remind me not to go to law school.”

  “Deal.” I started to fight my way through the letter one more time. And then, above that impossible paragraph, I noticed a simple thing. The date: July 8 of last summer.

  “Hey!” I said.

  “Meaning Heinz Mott didn’t cave,” Ashanti said.

  “Not until yesterday,” I said. “Wonder what happened in between.”

  “Have to ask Egil Borg,” Ashanti said.

  We both laughed, but not our usual full-bodied-tending-toward-giddy laughter, more a quiet sound that petered out quickly.

  Getting late, getting cold: we decided to take the subway. But when we reached the nearest station, it was closed for track rehabilitation, so we kept walking, and on a fairly sketchy block that was new to me, a big guy stepped out of the shadows between two buildings and said, “Interested in a little smoke, ladies?”

  We picked up the pace, saying nothing. But he followed us; I could feel his gaze right between my shoulder blades.

  “Smoke?” he said again. He had that low, intimate, street drug dealer way of talking, where the sound still somehow carries plenty well enough. Street drug dealers were an occasional fact of life, and Ashanti and I kept doing what we were supposed to do, which was to keep walking and ignore him completely.

  He kept following us. We picked up the pace some more. His soft, padding footsteps were soon joined by others. I couldn’t stop myself from glancing back, and I didn’t like what I saw: another guy had joined him, not as big, but with a look that scared me, a look that included a teardrop tattoo on his cheek, which was supposed to mean you’d killed someone.

  “These girls don’t seem so interested in smoke,” the first guy said.

  And then came the voice of the second—the teardrop guy—a scary, stoned kind of voice. “Maybe they just wanna make a donation,” he said.

  The big guy laughed. “Yeah—you girls look like you can afford a nice donation.”

  “Generous,” said the teardrop guy.

  The big guy laughed some more. “You girls generous?”

  I sensed quicker movements behind me, and right after that I felt heavy breath on the back of my neck. It was too much.

  “Run!” I yelled to Ashanti, and took off.

  Ashanti took off, too. We were fast runners, me and Ashanti, but those two guys blew by us almost right away, and whirled around to face us. We skidded to a halt.

  They were both smiling. “Rude, not answering a nice, polite question,” the big guy said. “Your mommas didn’t tell you?”

  “You girls generous?” said Teardrop. “That’s our nice, polite question.”

  I could feel Ashanti trembling, or maybe that was me. “We don’t want any drugs,” she said. “And we don’t have any money.”

  They shook their heads. “Girls with no money have a kind of look,” said the big guy. “Not your kind of look.”

  “Too true,” said Teardrop. “You got the rich-kid look.”

  “We’re not rich,” I said, trying to keep my voice steady, but without much success.

  “Cool,” said the big guy.

  “Too cool for school,” said Teardrop. “So let’s just take a real quick peek into those backpacks of yours.”

  “You can take them,” I said right away.

  “Just let us go,” said Ashanti.

  “Let you go?” said the big guy. “We don’t even have you yet.”

  But the next second they both reached out, the big guy grabbing my arm—and digging in his fingers till it hurt—and Teardrop grabbing Ashanti.

  “And now we do,” Teardrop said.

  We struggled to get free, but they were so much stronger. In a flash, they’d wrestled us into this alley I hadn’t even noticed, an alley squeezed between two dark-windowed buildings. I remembered that right about now was when you were supposed to scream your head off, and I tried, but no sound came out. The big guy gave me a push, real hard, and I fell to the ground. Ashanti saw that happen—a furious look crossing her face—and even though Teardrop had both arms around her, she still managed to kick out sideways at the big guy, hitting him on the kneecap.

  “Ow,” he yelled, and turned toward her, his hand balling into a fist. The expression, to be paralyzed with fear: I understood it now, because that was me, on the ground in this alley. And then I felt the silver heart heating up against my skin. Next would come the electric ball, the power, and somehow we’d be saved. But I didn’t feel power, not the slightest bit! The big guy raised his fist. Oh, no. Somehow the horror of what was about to happen unparalyzed me and I found myself scrambling up and diving at the back of the big guy’s legs. He lost his balance and fell, knocking Ashanti and Teardrop down, too. And that was the moment—with everyone but me on the ground—when the power did hit at last. Almost immediately the red-gold beam shone from my eyes—I whipped off my glasses as my vision sharpened—and right at the back pocket of the big guy’s jeans. Then came a sizzling sound, a burst of flame, and a rolled-up wad of money came popping out, practically landing in my hands. I snatched it up, and meanwhile Ashanti was back on her feet, too.

  “Run,” she yelled, and we wheeled around toward the entrance to the alley.

  But Teardrop bounced up, so quick, and blocked our way. He reached into his jacket. We didn’t wait to find out what he was reac
hing for, just sprinted in the other direction, deeper into the alley. The shadows grew, and the alley got darker and darker, but not before I saw there was no way out: the alley ended in high chain-link fence topped with razor wire. I glanced back and saw two moving shadows in that narrow unlit trap: Teardrop coming fast, something shiny in his hand, and the big guy just behind, limping a little.

  “No way out, schoolgirls,” the big guy called.

  The chain-link fence, barely visible, just a gleam here and there, was only steps away. Maybe we could try to climb it, but what about the razor wire?

  Help! Help! Those screams didn’t get out, stayed inside my head.

  Then Ashanti said, “Robbie! Take my hand!”

  What good would that do? But I reached out, took her hand. Almost too late, because Ashanti was already rising off the ground! She squeezed my hand tight. I squeezed hers even tighter. She kept rising, pulling me up with her into the air, over the chain-link fence, and higher.

  From below, voices. “What the… ?” said Teardrop.

  “Must be a hole in the fence,” the big guy told him.

  After that came lots of swearing, but by then Ashanti and I were almost out of hearing range.

  We weren’t flying, Ashanti and I, not in the way a bird flies, since there was no flapping of wings, or like a plane, because there was no engine roar, no sense of that tremendous thrust. In fact, what we were doing was very quiet, just a faint whisper of wind in my ears. It came to me: this was soaring, just like in my soaring dream, where I’d soared over Manhattan. This was Brooklyn: that was one difference. Another was that we weren’t way up high, over all the rooftops, but were more at the three- or four-story level, drifting along at a slow pace. Through a window I saw a woman having trouble opening a bottle of ketchup. A few windows down, a man in a wife-beater was admiring his biceps in a mirror.

  But I noticed those things only in passing. I was totally caught up in this feeling of soaring, the best feeling I’d experienced in my whole life. We were in midair, with nothing supporting us, wafting now over a bunch of forklift trucks parked behind a warehouse, where a foreshortened man sat smoking on a stool. If he looked up, he’d get a big surprise, but of course he didn’t. Why would he? Why would anyone?