Robbie Forester and the Outlaws of Sherwood Street

by Peter Abrahams

  Two helicopters sat on the top deck. There were antennas and rotating things, and all sorts of other equipment. Also: no shelter, except a squat steel hutlike structure with tiny windows, through which flowed the only light around. Snow flew sideways; the wind howled; Tut-Tut and I huddled behind the flattened-out bear.

  A man emerged from the steel hut wheeling something big on a dolly. Leaning into the wind, he came toward the sculpture garden. He was headed our way! Tut-Tut and I slid around the sculpture, trying to keep it between us and him, but he drew closer and closer. For an instant, he seemed to look right at us. Tut-Tut and I backed quickly out of sight, and kept backing until we were out of the sculpture garden and on the deck. The man stopped by the flattened-out bear and stood the dolly up. Because of the darkness, or all the snow, he hadn’t seen us. We ducked behind the steel hut.

  And then the sculpture garden was on the move again, going down. At the same time, the lights in the hut went out, and the darkness deepened. Tut-Tut was shivering inside his hoodie, snow all down his neck. I was cold, too, that strange warm period long past.

  “Tut-Tut?”

  “Y-y-y-yeah?”

  My heart went bang-bang in my chest. “Are you all right?”

  “Could be warmer,” he said.

  Whew. That last little stutter was just from the cold: for a moment I’d thought we were losing the power.

  “How about we go inside?” he said.

  With a grunt, he opened the thick steel door of the hut. We went inside. The only light came from an instrument panel. I saw another dolly, some boxes, and a steep metal staircase descending into darkness. What choice did we have? I got a good grip on the suitcase, put my foot on the first step; and as I did a horrible bwa-da bwa-da alarm went off, very loud, like in a prison movie when they find out that what’s sleeping on the inmate’s bunk is a bundle of clothes.

  I froze. BWA-DA! BWA-DA! Then a radio crackled over by the instrument panel. “All hands! All hands! Suspected intruders on board! All hands!”

  “Hurry!” I said. We had to get down the ladder, find some hideout deep inside the ship. I felt with my foot for the next step. A light went on down below, followed by the sound of running footsteps.

  I jumped back up to floor level.

  A man’s voice rose up the staircase. “Whoever it is, we want them alive.”

  BWA-DA! BWA-DA!

  I threw open the door of the steel hut. We raced outside. The wind was shrieking. The snow blinded me now; I could barely see the dim shape of the nearest helicopter. We ran to it, hoping for a hiding place. Lights flashed back on in the hut and then men came pouring onto the deck.

  Hey! You guys around? Over.

  Silas? Silas! Silas!

  A searchlight went on, the beam sweeping toward us. Tut-Tut and I were holding hands; I wasn’t sure when that had started. In my other hand, I still gripped the suitcase. We scrambled away from the searchlight beam, which almost reached us as it swept by. The men were coming, big dark shapes behind the screen of flying whiteness. Tut-Tut and I backed away and backed away until we had nowhere to go.

  We stood on the edge of Boffo’s top deck—a top deck that had no rail—high above an ice-cold ocean we couldn’t even see. I peered into the storm.

  Silas! Silas!

  No response.

  Silas! Silas! Over!

  But nothing.

  On deck, a man shouted. “Do you see something?”

  And another shouted, “Where?”

  “There!”

  A machine gun fired. Ack-ack-ack. Ack-ack-ack. And a stream of hot light shot through the night, but nowhere near us. Then another gun joined in, much closer, firing on and on, shooting another stream of bullets aimed in an arc just like the searchlight, coming closer and closer. We darted sideways, or tried to, but we lost our footing on the slippery deck, losing it at the same instant that the wind rose up to a whole new level. With one enormous gust, it blew us right off the deck and into the night.

  For a long moment, we seemed to hang there, hovering in the air, actually above deck level. Through the scrim of snow, I could even make out Borg and Sheldon Gunn yelling at each other by the hut. No one on deck was looking up.

  I still had the suitcase. The thought of taking all that money to the bottom was kind of comforting. We started our plunge.

  Tut-Tut and I held hands tight. I was aware of that, and of the fact that his eyes were closed and his face seemed calm, and that his dreads were pointing straight up, but I knew nothing else, except that I had a monstrous terror inside, ready to swell up into something way bigger than me. It made me want to scream and scream; I tried my hardest not to. Then, through a little break in the snow, I glimpsed the ocean, with its towering white-capped waves, coming up so fast, and the terror monster hit the screaming button. Before I could actually let out that first scream, I heard Silas, not a thought message, but his actual voice, high and squeaky and barely audible through the storm and the roar of the sea.

  “Hang on!”

  We plunged. Two enormous waves crashed together, sending a jet of spray high enough to hit my face. And just as it did, a hand reached out of all the blowing snow and grabbed onto Tut-Tut’s shoulder. Then came a sudden lurch and we leveled out, skimming over the ragged wave tops so low that I got soaked from my hand—the one holding on to Tut-Tut—all the way to my shoulder. We rose slightly and I saw Silas, very strange-looking in a one-piece ski suit and a tasseled ski hat, now grasping Tut-Tut’s free hand. With his other hand, he held on to Ashanti. She flashed me a big grin.

  “Don’t blame me,” she said. “I was out hours ago, but Silas got lost in the basement of his own building.”

  “Not lost,” Silas said. “More disoriented.”

  We soared, the four of us stretched out in a line and holding hands—me, Tut-Tut, Silas, Ashanti—ten or fifteen feet above the sea; a sea that sounded angry to me, like it had been cheated.

  “Can we take this a little higher?” Silas said.

  “It does what it does,” Ashanti said.

  “Good enough for me,” Tut-Tut said.

  “Hey,” said Ashanti. “Will you listen to him.”

  Tut-Tut smiled.

  And then we did rise a bit, maybe another twenty feet. Up ahead loomed Boffo’s huge form. Lights were going on all over the ship. A voice from up high called out, “What’s that? A paraglider?”

  A searchlight flashed on and the beam came probing toward us, sweeping by just over our heads. We swerved around Boffo, but way too slowly and way too close; I saw a man running across one of the lower decks with a rifle in each hand, and then the beam arced by again, missing by only a few feet.

  Meanwhile the four of us—Ashanti slightly out front and doing the towing—moved in a gentle curve around the boat, rising gradually, and then straightened out, the city glowing in the distance. I glanced back at Boffo: up on the top deck, figures swarmed around one of the helicopters.

  We soared toward land, the wind at our backs, or actually at the soles of our feet, since we were horizontal, our bodies parallel to the sea below.

  “What’s in the suitcase?” Ashanti said.

  “Casheroo,” I said. “Have you got your list, Silas?”

  “Does the bear poop in the woods?”

  “Just a simple yes or no.”

  “Yes.”

  “Good,” I said. “That means we can—”

  A helicopter roared up into the sky off Boffo’s top deck. At first it took off in the wrong direction, out to sea. Then it veered left and came circling back.

  “Can’t we go faster?” Silas said.

  “You know the answer to that,” Ashanti said.

  The helicopter tilted hard, the blades going thwap-thwap-thwap, and shot right over us, but high above, a light on the front casting a long narrow beam. Just keep going. But the helicopter did not keep going; instead it veered left again and started another circle, swooping lower this time. I saw what was happening.

  Powe
r, make us invisible.

  We remained visible. The helicopter swung in a wide turn, farther out to sea, then returned, flying lower now, almost down to our level.

  Power, make us invisible. Over.

  We remained visible. I looked back. The bright narrow light zoomed toward us, closer and closer. Thwap-thwap-thwap filled the night, even drowning out the storm.

  “Silas! Use your telepathy!”

  “To do what?”

  “Something, for God’s sake!” I glanced at the silver heart on my—but no: the silver heart—the whole bracelet, was gone. The sea had torn it away. My heart pounded. I came close to crying out in despair. Then I realized we hadn’t crashed. Why not? If we’d lost the power, why were we still soaring? Why was my vision still perfect without my glasses?

  THWAP-THWAP-THWAP. The helicopter’s beam homed in, closer and closer, and now its fuzzy outer edge reached us and—

  And then a huge bird—an owl, snowy white, but could owls really be so big?—emerged from all that snow, kind of like a bird version of the storm itself, and flew right by us. Did owls come out to sea? This one did. It seemed to watch me for a second or two, and I thought I knew this owl: the one with the strange washed-out blue eyes. It glided between us and the helicopter, appearing in silhouette not unlike a paraglider. The light beam passed over the owl’s wings, just for a split second, but someone in the helicopter must have caught a quick glimpse of something, because it veered sharply away from us and took off after the owl.

  Some kind of gun started firing from the helicopter, the orange tracks of the bullets cutting through the blowing snow. The owl soared higher, out of range of the helicopter’s searchlight. The helicopter rose, too, the searchlight probing higher and higher, but it shone only on blowing snow and dark night. The shooting went on and on—ACK-ACK, ACK-ACK. The helicopter made a circle, moving out to sea, and then another, each circle farther away and less certain, and either the shooting had stopped or it was too distant to hear. I thought I heard a far-off hoot-hoot, but it might have been the storm.

  We soared on, the wind starting to lose some of its force at last, the snow falling not quite so hard. The towers of Manhattan appeared, and then the bridges, all lit up, and the harbor. The Statue of Liberty, too, was lit, the torch shining bright. We glided right by her face, so strong and beautiful.

  Snow lay thick all over the city. The streets were buried, the rooftops white—no traffic, no people. Silas took out his list. We crossed the river, soared through the streets of Brooklyn, hovering by every doorway on the list long enough for Tut-Tut and me to open the suitcase, count out a bundle of money, and make a deposit.

  The night slipped by, snow falling lightly, the wind just the odd gust, and the city quiet. The sky was beginning to lighten in the east when we came to Your Thai, last in the mind of the power, if the power had a mind. Mr. Nok was clearing snow from the stairwell. He opened up and went inside.

  We hovered by the door. I opened the suitcase. Tut-Tut scooped out the last of the money and shoved it through the letter slot. Mr. Nok must have heard the sound. He turned and moved toward the money, his eyes opening wide. Mr. Nok looked out, but not up, so he missed us, on the rise.

  “Where are we going?” Silas said. “I’m sleepy.”

  No one answered. No one knew. We glided over the snowy streets at first-floor level. The canal came in sight. As we passed over it, only a foot or two above the surface, turning sickly green as the light grew stronger, I let go of the empty suitcase. It landed without a splash and disappeared.

  “Th-th-th-th-,” said Tut-Tut.

  I glanced his way in alarm. At the same time, my vision started to blur.

  “Uh-oh,” said Ashanti.

  We thumped down heavily in the snow on the far side of the canal, just yards from the Red Goat. Or at least I thought it was the Red Goat, with my vision all screwy. I rose, dusted off the snow, put on my glasses. Yes, the Red Goat.

  “N-n-n-n-,” Tut-Tut said.

  “No power,” said Silas.

  “It lasted just long enough,” said Ashanti.

  Maybe, I thought, but not for Tut-Tut. He saw me looking at him, shrugged his shoulders, smiled a little smile.

  “We should all give that silver heart a kiss,” Ashanti said.

  “This thing is…” I said, and held up my bare wrist.

  “Oh, my God! When did that happen?”

  I told them.

  “So what does this mean?” Ashanti said. “The power’s in you now?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “We could run some tests,” Silas said.

  “Some other time,” I told him. “Let’s go home.”

  We started walking through the snow. Soon a plow came along and we followed it, but other than that one plow, we had the streets of Brooklyn to ourselves. No one spoke: we were all way too tired. First Silas peeled off, then—near HQ, not his apartment—Tut-Tut, and finally Ashanti. She took out her key. “My dad’s out of town, and my mom never gets up before eleven.” Ashanti gave me a look. “You did good.”

  “Thatcha,” I said.

  “Comin’ atcha,” said Ashanti. She went inside.

  I came to the alley, followed it toward the opening that led to our back yard. The ladder was still down, exactly as I’d left it. I climbed up to the platform outside our downstairs bathroom window—dragging my feet, now so heavy—pulled the ladder after me, laid it down in its place. Looking back, I noticed the clear track of my footprints in the yard. Nothing I could do about it but hope that the snow, still drifting down, would fall a little longer.

  I climbed to the next level, reached my bedroom window, open a crack the way I’d left it. I got my hands under the frame and pushed up. Nothing happened. I bent my legs, put my whole body into it. No use. I was too tired, or maybe not strong enough to begin with. The window was frozen stuck. All of a sudden, I felt close to tears. I’d come so close!

  I was considering smashing the glass and inventing some stupid story, when, with a wag-wag of his tail, Pendleton appeared on the other side of the glass. My heart lifted, just from the sight of him. No way that Pendleton could actually do anything to—

  Then, without a word or gesture on my part, Pendleton stuck his muzzle in the crack and raised his head in a single strong motion. The window slid up. I climbed inside and closed it. The house was silent.

  “Pendleton,” I said in a low voice. “Is the power in you?”

  How was that possible?

  I gave him a big hug. He licked my face.

  A minute or two later, I was under the covers, Pendleton beside me, hogging most of the bed.

  When I woke up, Pendleton was gone. I put on my glasses, hurried to the window, and looked out. It was still snowing—very lightly, just the occasional flake, but: no tracks.

  I went downstairs, found Mom and Dad relaxing in front of the TV, shoulders touching, both of them in jeans and sweatshirts. This did not look normal.

  “Good morning, sleepyhead,” said Mom.

  “Make that afternoon,” Dad said. “But there’s no school tomorrow, in case you’re worried about getting your homework done.”

  “Why not?”

  “The mayor declared a snow day,” Mom said.

  My dad gave me funny glance. “You haven’t looked outside, Robbie? The whole city’s shut down.”

  I peered through the window, pretended to be stunned.

  “Nice to see you wearing your glasses,” Mom said. “They’re really very stylish.”

  “And even if they aren’t,” said Dad, “you’ll be eligible for contacts in—”

  Mom held up her hand. “Here he is now,” she said.

  “Who?” I asked.

  “Your buddy.”

  Uh-oh. “Who’s my buddy?”

  “Sheldon Gunn,” said Mom. “Just being facetious.”

  Didn’t know that word. Had Mom figured something out? I gave her a quick glance, detected no hidden meaning. I moved closer to the TV, t
ook a look at Sheldon Gunn.

  “…and so,” he was saying, “in light of current market conditions, we have taken the prudent decision to postpone the enactment of the New Brooklyn Redevelopment Project at this time.” He stepped away from the mic.

  The reporter—Dina DiNunzio, I remembered her hard face and fluffy hair—shoved the mic back in his face and said, “Is it true, Mr. Gunn, that you’ve had a major falling out with your Saudi financiers?”

  “Absolutely not. Prince Abdul and I remain the closest of friends.”

  “What about these reports that you raised the rents on hundreds of Brooklyn tenants to drive them out and clear the way for the project, but that some business rivals managed to get those rents paid in the hope of later taking over the redevelopment of Brooklyn themselves?”

  Sheldon Gunn paused. His eyes appeared to hood over. “You seem to know more than I do, Dina. Have these so-called business rivals got a name?”

  “I’m asking you, sir.”

  “I have no reason to believe there’s the slightest truth in your hypothesis,” Gunn said.

  “There are also rumors that some sort of anonymous Robin Hood type is the source of all this rent money.”

  “Complete fiction,” said Gunn. “And let me add that my organization has the highest possible reputation when it comes to landlord-tenant relations. We’ve won the Mayor’s Cup ten years in a row.”

  “But—”

  Gunn moved away.

  Mom’s phone rang. She answered, listened, said, “Really?” And then. “Oh.” She hung up and rose. “Have to go into work,” she said.

  “Now?” said Dad.

  “Emergency department meeting,” Mom said. “Gunn fired us, as of today. He wants his fees back, going all the way to last May. And Egil Borg got the ax. It sounds like chaos.”

  Mom went to work. Later on TV came a brief report about a convicted arsonist named Harry Henkel who was under arrest but refusing to talk. Not long after that, Dad sent me to Your Thai to pick up some dinner. Mr. Nok looked very happy. He was running a special on just about everything.