“Holy shit, Jimmy, they are a bunch of queers. Still, you know, it’s gotta save me some dough on repair bills. It’s killing me, replacing the bar stools these fucking idiot marines are always breaking over each other’s heads.”

“Up to you, Itchy. You want to open a new bar? That’s your business. But it’s a risk. And it’s a risk in a way that this ain’t.”

He held up the flexipad.

“So are we going to do some business?”

“Tui,” said Big Itchy to his right-hand man, “you get to work on my new bar. Take a few of the boys, shut down the Black Dog, throw out the trash, get it cleaned up and ready for a more refined sort of clientele, the sort that gets out of the bath to take a piss.”

“Right, boss.”

“And you, Jimmy, you take this pencil and paper and get to work on your crystal ball there. Fucking navy’s got this place sealed tight since you guys came back, but I’ll make sure we can get a line to the West Coast later today. That good enough for you?”

“Sweet as a nut, my man.”

Chapter 26

26

USS HILLARY CLINTON, PEARL HARBOR, 1143 HOURS, 9 JUNE 1942

A Mexican pimp in a zoot suit had put a .38 slug into Detective Sergeant Lou “Buster” Cherry’s thighbone. Buster had returned the favor, of course, putting a clean six into the spic’s head, turning it into a pile of bone splinters, teeth, and blood pudding. But he’d never really been the same afterward. His leg healed up after six months but he limped if he had to run for more than a few yards, and occasionally a small shard of bone or a fragment of the pimp’s bullet would work its way up out of his skin.

He’d tried to enlist after Pearl Harbor, but they’d stamped him unfit for active duty and sent him back to the force.

Like the fucking force wasn’t active duty!

At least they’d been glad to have him back. A lot of the younger guys, they’d been accepted by the army and marines straight away, and now he was left holding the fort with a bunch of old geezers and a couple of asthmatic queers with flat feet. God help him.

His leg was aching. His hemorrhoids were playing up. He had a dull headache from the fifth of Old Grandpa he’d polished off last night, and now he had to drag himself up what looked like about five hundred steps to get onto this fucking big boat, to watch some lippy dyke chop up a dead nigger and her Jap boyfriend. He shoulda been down the mortuary doing this, not all the fucking way out at Pearl, tooling up for a turf war with these asshole time bandits.