Robbie Forester and the Outlaws of Sherwood Street Page 12

  “Where are we going?” I said, keeping my voice at whisper level.

  He pointed to the ceiling. I looked up, saw a dark opening in it, about the same size and shape as the steel slab. I stepped onto it. Tut-Tut pressed a button I hadn’t noticed on the wall. The steel slab gave a little shudder and then began rising, slow and silent. We rose, taking the light with us, leaving darkness below.

  In a moment or two, we passed through the opening in the ceiling. The lift reached floor level and came to a stop. We were in a room, small enough that Tut-Tut’s candle illuminated just about everything in it: a desk, two swivel chairs, some rolled-up blankets, a wide-plank wooden floor. But I didn’t really take in any of that at first; what grabbed my attention were the pictures spray-painted on the walls: parrots, flowers, butterflies, all in Tut-Tut’s style. And there was Tut-Tut’s tag, vudu, in purple. Plus some faces: Tut-Tut himself, his uncle Jean-Claude, a man and a woman, each with their eyes closed. The woman shared Tut-Tut and Jean-Claude’s high-cheekbone look; the man’s face seemed gentle and kind, although with his eyes closed, it was hard to be sure.

  I took a guess. “Is that your mother?”

  Tut-Tut nodded.

  And the kindly man with the closed eyes? “Your father?”

  Tut-Tut nodded again.

  “Are they still in Haiti?” I said.

  Tut-Tut shook his head, one curt movement.

  “Oh,” I said. So what was the implication of that, exactly? I glanced again at those two closed-eye portraits.

  Meanwhile Tut-Tut was dripping some molten wax on the desktop. He stuck the candle in it, sat in one of the swivel chairs, opened a desk drawer, and took out a spiral notebook and a pencil. It began to hit me, maybe somewhat late, that this room was Tut-Tut’s private office, and maybe, given those rolled-up blankets, his shelter, too.

  “How did you find this place?” I asked.

  Tut-Tut shrugged, like it was a long story, or not important, or maybe both. Then he opened the notebook to a blank page and started drawing.

  A scene began to take shape: flat, empty ocean with a big sun overhead; a beat-up sailboat crowded with people, all of them sketched so quickly, all with closed eyes, except for one small figure in the bow. His eyes were open, and even though only pencil marks, were amazingly like the real eyes I was seeing now. Then came another scene: empty ocean, but now very rough, with towering waves and rain pelting down; no sailboat, no people. Tut-Tut opened the drawer again, took out a pencil sharpener—PROPERTY OF NYC BOARD OF EDUCATION, it said on the side—and sharpened the pencil. He turned back to that rough, empty ocean and, with a few quick strokes, added a broken mast floating in the water, and the small figure clinging to it. You couldn’t see his face, just his hands and his modified dreads.

  “Oh, my God,” I said.

  Tut-Tut made that little shrug again. Then he tore the page from the notebook and held it to the flame. It caught fire, shining brightly on his face, very solemn at that moment. He dropped the burning paper into a metal wastebasket beside the desk, where it quickly turned to ash.

  We walked back to Tut-Tut’s apartment. “Sure it’s okay?” I said.

  Tut-Tut nodded. Maybe there was some sort of routine going on and he knew that Jean-Claude would be gone now, or passed out, or in a different mood.

  “Bye,” I said.

  “B-b-b-b-,” said Tut-Tut.

  Half an hour later, I was back home. “Hi! I’m back!”

  Silence. I was headed for the fridge when my phone rang.

  “Robbie?” It was my mom.

  “Hi.”

  “Are you at home?”

  “Yeah.”

  I could feel her relax a bit, even though she hadn’t made a sound. “What’s Pendleton up to?”

  I glanced around, spotted him under the kitchen table. “Sleeping.”

  “Can you take him for a walk?”

  “Okay.”

  “Thanks, honey. I’ll be another hour or so.”

  “Working on the New Brooklyn Redevelopment Project?”

  “No.” There was a pause. “Why do you ask that?”

  “I don’t know, Mom. But it’s pretty bad, right?”

  “Bad? In what way?”

  “The rich taking from the poor,” I said. “That way.”

  “It’s not so simple,” Mom said. “Let’s talk about it when I get home.”

  I had a snack—chips and salsa washed down with lemonade, a great combo—and turned to Pendleton. “Ready for your walk?”

  But he wasn’t.

  “Come on, Pendleton, don’t make this hard.”

  Pendleton made it hard. He wriggled farther back under the table, twisted his head away when I crawled under with the leash, dug in his heels when I got it attached and tried to drag him out.

  “How about a treat?” I said, which was where I should have started. In moments, we were on the street, Pendleton right beside me, pressing his nose against the pocket that held the biscuit. “First do what you’re supposed to do,” I said. In my other pocket, I had the plastic bag for dealing with what Pendleton was supposed to do once he’d done it. “Could be worse, Pendleton,” I told him. “Like if we had to walk pet elephants.” He showed no reaction, instead cowered against a building to let a Chihuahua pass by.

  “Robbie?”

  I turned. “Silas?”

  “Hi,” he said. Silas wore a tight red watch cap that emphasized the roundness of his face and made him hard to recognize. “Is that your dog?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Is he safe?”

  “Safe?”

  “I got bitten by a dog once.”

  “You won’t get bitten by Pendleton. You can pat him if you like.”

  “That’s all right,” he said. “What are you doing here, anyway?”

  “It’s my neighborhood, Silas. What’s your excuse?”

  He glanced around. “I’m doing some research,” he said, lowering his voice.

  “Into what?”

  He reached into his jacket, one of those padded Michelin-man-type jackets, and took out a bundle of printouts. “I’m mapping all the venues.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Of the people getting kicked out of their places by Sheldon Gunn.”

  “Hey! You found that list from Sheldon Gunn Is a Monster?”

  “Not exactly. It’s a little more complicated. I tracked down this server in Finland, and he and I—or it might have been a she—tweaked some code from these other people in China, hidden in a steganographic app, actually, that—”

  “Silas? I’m convinced. But the point is you’ve got the list?”

  “Right here,” he said, waving the sheaf of papers, a pleased smile on his face, although a bit distracting on account of the braces on his teeth, the most prominent I’d ever seen. And in that moment of distraction, with me staring at his teeth and him staring at me staring, he lost his grip on the papers. They scattered like cards in Fifty-two Pickup and then the wind rose and scattered them some more.

  Silas and I went hurrying after them, but I got tangled up in Pendleton’s leash right away. “Pendleton! For God’s sake!” He whimpered. What was the point of getting mad at Pendleton? I unlooped myself from the leash, saw Silas scurrying along the gutter, scooping up papers. He slipped on a grating, almost fell, and lost one or two. They came drifting back toward me. I snatched one right out of the air. The other one veered up onto the sidewalk and miraculously stayed still. I bent down to take the stupid thing, but a man stepped on it first. I didn’t see the whole man, just his shoe—a gleaming black shoe, the leather of the soft, expensive kind. I glanced up, took in a fancy dark topcoat, the perfect knot of a silk tie, and finally a face with perfectly symmetrical features, a square-jawed face that seemed a bit familiar, but I didn’t know why until I noticed the hair—very light, almost platinum—and worn short. I’d seen this man before, on a motorcycle outside Heinz Mott’s apartment. But way more surprising than that was the fact that
my mom was standing beside him.

  “Robbie?” she said.

  “Uh, hi, Mom.”

  The man gazed down at me, his eyes silvery blue, unreadable. I noticed he was carrying a briefcase, but a real battered and scruffy one that didn’t seem to match the rest of his getup.

  “What are you doing?” my mom said.

  “Taking Pendleton for a walk, like you said,” I told her. At the same time I was trying to tug the sheet of paper out from under the man’s foot, and he wasn’t helping in the least.

  And now Silas was coming back, in an ungainly sort of trot. “Got most of them—” he began, and then noticed the confusing scene and went quiet. My mom turned to him, looking puzzled.

  “Mom, Silas,” I said, not knowing what else to do. “Silas, Mom.”

  And I’d barely got through the introductions when—another surprise—the man stooped down quickly and smoothly and picked up the sheet of paper himself.

  “Um,” I said, and started to get up, bracing myself with one hand on Pendleton. With the other, I reached for the paper, but the man leaned back, keeping it out of my reach, moving it toward reading level.

  “Egil,” my mom began, “this is my daughter, Robbie. Robbie, this is Egil Borg, a colleague of—”

  Egil Borg? The signer of those threatening letters to Mr. Nok and Heinz Mott? Wham! The fastest yet—and strongest, too—the power came zooming back. Was there a headache? Electric ball? Vision change? Maybe all those things, but I was only aware of the silver heart fluttering on my wrist and then a surge down my arm into my hand, the hand in contact with Pendleton’s soft shoulder.

  That soft shoulder hardened instantly—I felt it under my hand—hardened and bunched with muscle. Then Pendleton snarled, a savage and terrifying sound, impossible that it could be coming from him. Not only that, but he was suddenly rising up, his mouth wide open, teeth exposed, saliva dripping all over the place.

  “Pendleton!” I cried, and so did my mom. But too late. Pendleton sprang at Egil Borg, a pretty big guy, and knocked him down like he was a cardboard cutout. Pendleton surged forward and stood over him, barking his head off, those teeth—suddenly so sharp-looking—inches from Egil Borg’s face. I took advantage of the situation to grab the paper from his hand and tuck it away.

  “Maybe I should be going,” said Silas.

  “Good idea,” I told him.

  Meanwhile Pendleton—this new Pendleton, transformed by the power—was still straddling my mom’s colleague, Egil Borg, barking and snarling. Whenever Borg tried to wriggle away, Pendleton lowered his head and barked and snarled louder.

  “Pendleton!” Mom screamed. She grabbed his leash and pulled with all her strength, not budging Pendleton an inch. I went forward to help her, reached out for Pendleton’s collar. Somehow he’d gotten it all twisted around so the metal tag was at the back, and that was what my hand closed around.

  Zap! A shock hit me, passed through my hand, into my wrist. The silver heart fluttered again and then went still. So did Pendleton. He stopped barking and snarling and after a few seconds raised his head and looked kind of confused. Then he rolled over and lay on the sidewalk, all four paws in the air, his posture when he wanted his stomach scratched.

  “Egil,” my mom said. “Are you all right? I’m so sorry. I don’t know what got into him.” She extended her hand to help him up. Borg pushed her hand away and rose by himself. “He’s never done anything remotely like this. Pendleton’s a big pussycat, afraid of his own shadow.”

  “Somehow I missed that,” Borg said, brushing himself off. A little crowd had gathered. He glared at them with his ice-blue eyes, and they all moved on.

  “No, really,” Mom said. “This is so out of character.” She turned to me. “Did anything happen to him on the walk, Robbie?”

  “No.”

  Mom looked around. “Where’s that friend of yours?”

  “He went home.”

  “Did he tease Pendleton?”

  “No, Mom.”

  “What was his name again?”

  “Silas,” said Borg before I could reply.

  “I don’t think you’ve mentioned him before,” my mom said.

  “Mom. He didn’t do anything to Pendleton.”

  She turned to me, which is why she couldn’t have seen Borg picking up his briefcase, now a little more battered. For a microsecond the briefcase opened up, just a fraction of an inch, but I glimpsed money in there, stacked in bundles. Borg clamped it shut, real quick, and shifted the keys of the combination lock.

  “Then what got into him?” Mom was saying. “I don’t understand.”

  The power, this very flaky power, had suddenly entered Pendleton and just as suddenly vanished. That was the answer, but was this the time to cough it up? Would there ever be that time? I gazed down at Pendleton, still on his back but now wriggling around, which is what he did when people didn’t pick up on the stomach-scratching hint fast enough.

  Mom shook her head, totally puzzled. “Egil, I feel terrible about this. Our place is just down the block—why don’t you come over? I could sew on that button, or—”

  Borg glanced down at the front of his coat, noticed the dangling button. He ripped it off and tossed it in the street. “I’m already running late.” His gaze went to me, back to Mom. “See you tomorrow.” He turned and strode away.

  “Oh, my God,” my mom said.

  “Is it that big a deal, Mom? He didn’t get hurt.”

  My mom’s voice rose. “You don’t understand. And this new friend of yours—is he the one who gave you that bracelet, by the way?”

  “Bracelet?”

  She pointed. “On your wrist.”

  “Oh, right. No, Mom.”

  “It wasn’t him?”

  I shook my head.

  Mom paused, maybe giving me a chance to cough up the name. Then, when I kept my mouth shut, she went on, “Well, he looked pretty shifty to me. I can’t believe he had nothing to do with—”

  “Shifty?” My voice rose, too. “Silas isn’t shifty.” But even as I said that, a quiet countervoice inside me was asking, Really? It’s not a bit shifty to be hacking on the net and inventing software to open combination locks? I took the edge off my tone and said, “He didn’t do anything to Pendleton—I promise.”

  Mom took a deep breath. “Okay,” she said. “I believe you.” Promises were very important to my mom. She gazed down at Pendleton; he’d stopped writhing around, was now just waiting patiently. “It’s such unbelievably bad luck. Why of all people…”

  “Egil Borg?”

  She nodded. “He was on my train tonight—that’s why we were walking together.”

  “Does he live near here?”

  Mom shook her head. “He lives somewhere in Connecticut, but he was meeting some people for dinner. I hardly know him—and want to keep it that way.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s complicated,” Mom said.

  An expression I was hearing too much, all of a sudden. “Try me,” I said.

  “Egil is a special kind of lawyer.”

  “Is he one of the partners?”

  “Not officially. His exact financial relationship with the firm is a mystery, at least to me.”

  I told her about the money in the briefcase.

  She blinked, a long, slow blink she sometimes did when hearing things she didn’t like. “I suppose it shouldn’t be unexpected. Egil is a fixer.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Maybe ‘troubleshooter’ is a better expression. One of the partners got into an accident on Long Island a few years ago, for example, and Egil smoothed it all out.”

  “A drunk-driving accident?”

  “Don’t know the details,” Mom said, “and I don’t really want to know.”

  That disappointed me. I had no right to be disappointed by my mom—she was a great mother—but I felt disappointment all the same.

  Did she see it on my face? She touched my shoulder and said, “This is a big ci
ty, Robbie, and very hard in some ways.”

  “I know, Mom.”

  “You do?” She looked surprised, then stepped forward and gave me a hug. Pendleton started whining right away; he disliked shows of affection that didn’t involve him. I bent down and scratched his stupid stomach. He rolled over and got up. We headed for home, met the Chihuahua coming the other way. Pendleton cringed against a wall.

  Back at home, I sat at my desk, working on a problem: The grocery store parking lot will hold 1,000 vehicles (so we were not in Brooklyn; I knew that right away), and 2/5 of the parking spaces are for cars. When you go to buy groceries (Hey! Would I own a car one day? What would be a good choice? I realized I knew practically nothing about cars.), there are 200 cars and some trucks in the parking lot, which is 3/4 full. How many trucks are there? I gazed at that for a while, then turned to the scrap of paper I’d rescued from Egil Borg. It was a list of names and addresses, none of which I recognized except for Your Thai. A few of them were printed in red, but not Your Thai.

  My phone rang. It was Silas.

  “I thought your dog was supposed to be gentle,” he said.

  “He is.”

  “Yeah? Then what got into him?”

  “Take a guess.”

  “He ate something spicy?”

  “Silas. Do you attack people if you eat something spicy?”

  “Why would I? I like spicy.”

  “So does Pendleton.” Pendleton had never met a food product he didn’t like. I got up, closed my door. “What got into him was the power.”

  “Wow. It can jump species?”

  “I just know it can jump to Pendleton,” I said. “I’ve got one of your pages. What does it mean if something’s in red?”

  “I’ve been wondering about that. Right now I’m working on this map of everybody getting pushed out by Sheldon Gunn.”

  “And?”

  “And there are so many! It’s like he’s taking over the whole of Brooklyn.”

  “What for?”

  “What for?” said Silas. “Don’t you play any video games?”

  “No.”

  “It’s so he can win. Don’t you—”

  In the background, I heard a woman say, “What are you talking about, Silas?”