Robbie Forester and the Outlaws of Sherwood Street (17 page)

“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 city, 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?”

“Video games, Mom,” he said. And then to me: “Gotta go.”
Click.

I wrote down
550 trucks,
a number that just jumped into my head.

That night sirens woke me up, real loud sirens racing down our street, one after another. I got out of bed and went into the hall. Mom and Dad were already there, gazing out the window.

“What’s going on?” I said.

“Must be a fire somewhere nearby,” my dad said.

I squeezed in between them, checked down at the street. Firefighters were hauling a hose toward a hydrant, and there were already spectators, some in winter jackets and pajama bottoms.

“I should really see this,” Dad said.

My mom gave him a funny look.

“I want to go, too,” I said.

“Get back to bed,” she told me.

“Come on, Mom. How can I sleep with all the noise?”

“She’s right,” Dad said. “Let’s all go.”

Mom shook her head. “Too ghoulish,” she said.

So just my dad and I went, but fully dressed. “Are we pajamas-on-the-street kind of people?” my dad said, I guess teaching me that we weren’t. We followed the hose down the block and around the corner, and there, on the far side of the street, a three- or four-story row house was on fire, flames roaring up to the sky and firefighters on ladders and on the ground spraying water in jets that looked kind of puny.

“Hey,” said my dad, “I love that building.”

I’d never noticed it before. The building seemed like lots of others around, maybe narrower than most. “What’s special about it?”

“It’s a landmark building,” he said, “one of the only original Federalist examples in the neighborhood.”

“What does landmark mean?”

“The owner can’t make any important changes—it has to be preserved.”

But it was much too late for that. As we watched, a whole big wall collapsed, flinging fiery debris into the night. The firefighters shouted for everyone to get back, and as we withdrew, I took notice of some of the people around me.

Such as: a man and a woman in tears, both in long coats and barefoot. She held a painting of some flowers, he held her, and they both gazed at the fire, tears streaming down their faces.

And: way at the back, leaning against the shuttered wall of a bodega, a little long-nosed guy who also couldn’t take his eyes off the fire. But no tears from him: he looked fascinated and kind of excited. Was there a word for people who got excited by fires? I couldn’t think of it at the moment, and was about to turn away from the guy when I saw that he had a briefcase in his hand; in his hand, but also resting on a stoop. There was
something familiar about that briefcase. I sidled a little closer, took a better look. Yes, a battered and scuffed-up briefcase, just like the one Egil Borg had been carrying. In fact, so much like it that—

The power hit me.
Hit
was the wrong word this time, and there was certainly no zap. Now the power seemed to come slowly and gently, trailing the slightest headache, hardly worthy of the name of pain. I had a second or two to take off my glasses and stick them safely in my pocket before my vision changed.

I kept my eyes on the long-nosed guy and waited. The pressure built behind my eyes and then the red-gold beam flashed out, invisible to everyone but me. The beam homed in on the briefcase, specifically striking the two ends of the handle. Then came two tiny sparks. The briefcase wobbled slightly on the stoop, but remained upright; the long-nosed guy didn’t feel the movement because the briefcase was no longer connected to the handle, and he didn’t feel a change in the weight because he hadn’t been bearing any of it.

I glanced at my dad—he was writing in his notebook—and sidled over some more. At that moment, there was an enormous
KA-BOOM,
and a big chunk of the roof exploded high into the air, sparks shooting all over the place. The long-nosed guy, still holding the severed handle, got this ecstatic look on his face, the fire
shining in his eyes. I swiped the briefcase in one smooth move, tucked it under the back of my jacket and partly beneath my belt, and quickly made my way through the crowd to my dad’s side.

“I’m ready to go home,” I said.

“Me too—it’s just as I would have imagined,” my dad said. We walked off. “Where are your glasses, by the way?”

“Oh, yeah,” I said, taking them out of my pocket and putting them back on. But the power still lingered in me, so my vision actually got blurry.

“You’ll have contacts before you know it,” my dad said. “Just be patient.”

“Okay, Dad.”

B
ack in my room, vision returned to normal, sirens no longer sounding, the night pretty quiet, and Mom and Dad asleep, I switched on my bedside light and took the briefcase out from under my bed. It was one of those rectangular, hard-bodied ones, with two brass fasteners that released when you dialed the right combination. The combination lock was made of brass, just a flat piece between the fasteners with four numbers showing—at the moment, 8657. I tried 1111, just in case Egil Borg or the long-nosed guy thought no one would be that stupid, and when that didn’t work, I clicked through 9999 and then my birthday, followed by a bunch of random numbers. Nada. Even if I could cut through the hard body with a kitchen knife, it meant going downstairs in the middle of the night, clattering around in the knife drawer, and maybe waking someone and leading to a scene that wouldn’t be good. I shoved
the briefcase under my bed, switched off my light, and lay sleepless for a while. Then I thought,
Combination lock!
And closed my eyes.

I saw Ashanti at basketball the next day. She and her mother—her father was on a shoot in LA—had slept right through the fire, hadn’t heard a thing.

“How is that possible?” I said.

“My mother’s a real light sleeper, so we had the place soundproofed,” Ashanti said. “We even have quadruple-paned windows. It’s like living in…” She searched for a word.

The country? I thought. A tomb? Before Ashanti came up with whatever it was, Ms. Kleinberg blew her whistle and yelled, “What are you two gossiping about? Five laps.”

We ran around the gym five times while the rest of the team also ran, but through this maze of cones and dribbling basketballs at the same time, a drill that always ended in chaos.

“Stay low,” Ms. Kleinberg called to all the dribblers. “What do you have knees for?”

Balls began bouncing all over the place, and Ms. Kleinberg had no more time for Ashanti and me. While we ran, I told Ashanti all about Egil Borg, the long-nosed guy, the briefcase.

“Borg’s the one who wrote that threatening letter to Heinz Mott?” she said.

“Yeah.”

“You think he paid the long-nosed guy to set the fire?”

“He’s the fixer,” I told her. “My mom said a fixer is a—”

“I know what a fixer is,” Ashanti said. I suppose that was a strange thing about Ashanti, the way she could snap at you unexpectedly; even stranger was the fact that I was starting to like it. “The question,” she went on, “is whether Silas is ready with his combo-busting app.”

“I was thinking the same thing,” I said.

“We need to get together,” Ashanti said. “You, me, Silas, briefcase.”

“Yeah, but where?”

“Your place after school?”

I shook my head. “My dad might be there. Or he could come back any time. How about your place?”

“Yeah, right,” said Ashanti.

“Silas’s?”

“Nope—his big brother’s back.”

“Silas has a brother?”

“Thaddeus. He’s some kind of genius.”

“Home from college?”

“Rehab,” Ashanti said. We ran a few more steps,
came to the scorer’s table, where we’d started. “That’s five,” Ashanti said. We stopped running, huffed and puffed a bit, hands on hips. “So where?” Ashanti said.