The Outlaws of Sherwood Street: Giving to the Poor Read Online Free PDF Page A

movements unsteady.
    â€œWhere is he?” Ashanti said.
    â€œTell us, and you get it back,” I said.
    He called me that name again, then tried out another ugly one on Ashanti. We just stood there, not saying a word. It wasn’t that we were being brave—at least in my case—more just that I was so worried and confused about Tut-Tut that I forgot to be afraid.
    â€œAll right, have it your way,” Jean-Claude said. He held out his hand. “First the card.”
    I shook my head. “First the information,” said Ashanti.
    Jean-Claude thought for a moment or two, then nodded. “Sure,” he said, “for what good it will do you. They’ve got him down at the Flatbush Family Detention Center.”
    â€œBut that’s like a jail,” Ashanti said.
    â€œLike?” said Jean-Claude. “Couldn’t be liker.”
    I tossed him the card, an accurate toss that he failed to catch. He bent to pick it up, and we were out of there.

4
    W e walked away from the projects and went left at the next cross street. The sign, hanging crookedly from a single bolt, read Sherwood Street. Sherwood Street was a strange street, only a single block long, and populated by no one. On the far side stood an abandoned gas station and a fenced-in scrap metal foundry that never seemed to be open; on our side were an empty and weedy trash-strewn lot and then a huge boarded-up warehouse. Ashanti and I turned into the alley that ran along the side of the warehouse and walked to the back.
    We glanced around, saw we were alone, and climbed up on the loading dock. The entrance to the warehouse was a big roll-down steel door, padlocked at the bottom, but set in the big steel door was a small door for people to use when they weren’t loading or unloading. The small door no longer had a knob—a metal plate covered the hole where the knob had been—and a piece of plywood covered the window space. The first time Tut-Tut had brought me here, he’d pried the plywood off with a butter knife. Now Silas had it rigged so all you had to do was point your cell phone and press 13. Why 13? That was Silas.
    I pointed my phone and pressed 13. The plywood cover swung open. Ashanti reached through the glassless space, opened the door from the inside. We entered, the plywood closing back in place automatically. Behind us a deep male voice said, “Welcome to the Casbah.” I’d freaked the first time that had happened, but it was just a sound clip from some old movie Silas had found.
    It was dim inside the warehouse—just a few narrow blades of light leaking in from places where the boarding up had been a little careless—but we knew our way. We moved along a row of tall floor-to-ceiling pillars to the lift at the far side of the warehouse, a square steel slab with no doors or windows. We stepped on the slab and pressed a button on the wall, a button Tut-Tut had painted with his purple tag in tiny form:
vudu.
The steel slab shuddered and slowly rose through an opening in the ceiling.
    At the floor level above, we came to a stop. We were in a small room with a desk, some office-type swivel chairs, and Tut-Tut’s spray paintings on the wall: parrots, flowers, butterflies, and the
vudu
tag again, much bigger, plus portraits of Tut-Tut, his dead parents (their eyes were closed), Jean-Claude, and all of us as a group—me, Ashanti, Silas, Tut-Tut. This was HQ, the secret place Tut-Tut had found, exactly how he’d never explained. His stutter made explaining things hard, especially long, complicated stories, and he ended up getting impatient with himself. Normally we’d have had to switch on the light—a single bulb hanging from the ceiling—but it was already on and Silas was sitting at the desk, eating fast-food fries.
    â€œMy mistake, amigos,” he said. “I assumed you meant noon eastern time.”
    â€œYou’ve got ketchup all over your face,” Ashanti