Free Robbie Forester and the Outlaws of Sherwood Street by Peter Abrahams Page B

walls, the same beautiful young woman in each of them. Ashanti noticed me staring at them and said, “My mom—back in her modeling days.”
    “Wow,” I said. “She was a professional model?”
    “Uh-huh.”
    “Hey! This one’s a
Vogue
cover.”
    “Yeah.”
    “Wow,” I said again. I’d never seen anyone so beautiful. Ashanti—lighter-skinned than her mother—was beautiful, too, but not like this, so perfect, so dramatic. “She’s not a model anymore?”
    Ashanti shook her head. “They’re like athletes,” she said. “All washed-up at thirty-five, sooner in her case.”
    “What does she do now?” I said.
    Ashanti glanced down the hall. “At this very moment?” she said. “Probably resting.”
    “Oh,” I said. I got the impression—maybe later than most people would—that Ashanti didn’t feel like discussing her mother. Then—maybe sooner than most people—I found myself asking about her father. “What does your dad do?”
    Ashanti’s eyes narrowed. “Are you always this nosy?”
    “Sorry.”
    “He’s a film editor.”
    “Yeah? Cool.”
    “It’s not. Mostly he does car commercials.” She sat on the couch, flipped open a laptop.
    “What cars?” I said.
    Ashanti glared at me. “Look. Are you in on this or not?”
    “In on what?”
    “Helping Mr. Nok.”
    “How are we going to do that?”
    “How? Like you helped that soup kitchen place, that’s how.”
    “But that just happened,” I said. “I can’t make it happen—didn’t we just go through all this?”
    “So we give up?” Ashanti said. “Just roll over without a fight?”
    “No,” I said. Rolling over without a fight sounded bad. “But what are we going to do?”
    “That’s what we’ve got to figure out, right?” Ashanti said. She patted the cushion beside her. I sat down. “What’s the guy’s name, again?” she said.
    “Sheldon Gunn.”
    We looked up Sheldon Gunn. He turned out to be a billionaire, and not just a billionaire but the third richest billionaire in the whole world.
    “A billion is what, exactly?” I said.
    “A thousand million,” Ashanti said. “A one and nine zeroes.” She glanced at me. “Hard to get your head around a number like that, huh?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Suppose,” she said, tapping at the keyboard, “you took that billion dollars and invested it for a measly three percent return, like in the bank.” More tapping. “You’d get thirty million dollars per year. About eighty-two thousand a day. That’s if you have one billion. Sheldon Gunn has forty-three, so you’d have to multiply that by eighty-two thousand to find out what he’d be making a day.” Tap-tap. “Three million five hundred twenty-six thousand.”
    “A day?”
    “Yeah,” said Ashanti. “But that’s not good enough for Sheldon Gunn.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “If he was just letting his money pile up in the bank, then he wouldn’t be doing what he’s doing.”
    “The Brooklyn redevelopment thing?”
    “And God knows what else. That’s why we have to do some research. But here’s our one hard fact—three million five hundred twenty-six thousand a day’s not getting it done for him.”
    We researched Sheldon Gunn. He owned things, lots and lots, including
Boffo
, the second biggest yacht in the world; all kinds of art; many houses, including castles in Ireland and France; the biggest ranch in Wyoming, and another even bigger one in Argentina. But the center of it all seemed to be the Sheldon Gunn Organization, which was about real estate holdings—tower after tower in New York, Chicago, London, Dubai, and other cities. The New Brooklyn Redevelopment Project was one little arm of the Sheldon Gunn Organization, hardly mentioned at all, except by residents who’d pretty much given up on trying to stop it. Sheldon Gunn also had a wife—his fourth, way younger than him—named Genevieve. There were lots of pictures of Genevieve online, making it easy, as Ashanti said, to trace the course of her