Their would-be attacker jackknifed over as she rammed the heel of her running shoe into his groin with an elegant, sweeping back kick. She continued the pivot to bring her other leg to bear, grabbing the man’s lank, sweaty hair in her bunched fists and using it to guide his head down toward her knee, which she smashed into his face three times. She turned ninety degrees, imparting a sharp twist to the guy’s head that spun him to the ground. When he fell she seemed to step back, only to sail in and snap two more kicks into his ribs.

She bent at one knee, plucked the club from his hand, and placed one running shoe on his throat.

“We’ll be going now,” she said. “Don’t bother to get up. I’d just have to split your fucking skull open. Okay?”

The man groaned and coughed blood before nodding weakly.

Dan was stunned. He could tell she was about to head into the trouble.

“Julia! Wait on!”

“No. Come on!” she snapped. “We’ve got to get down there.”

Dan shook his head.

“No we don’t.”

In the opinion of Detective Sergeant Lou “Buster” Cherry it wasn’t an entirely bad thing, that nigger and her toy Jap getting themselves killed. From what he’d seen and heard of these time travelers, they needed putting in their place.

Buster had been on the job for twenty-three years, eighteen of them in Chicago, and if he’d learned anything it was that once you had your boot on somebody’s throat, you didn’t take it off. They were liable to come at you with a knife or a gun. Your niggers and your spics and dagos and so on, they needed keeping down. They bred quicker than white folk. They had no respect. And if they got wind of the idea that a bunch of superniggers had somehow grabbed the keys to the kingdom, there’d be no stopping them. They’d come roaring out of the ghetto demanding a piece of the action for themselves.

Buster was certain of it, even if his thinking was a little slowed down by the three bourbons he’d taken after the autopsy. Not that he was squeamish, mind you. He’d eaten his lunch during postmortems in the past.

No, he was just shook up by that ship full of freaks.

He was so shook up that rather than heading back to the station he drove down to Hotel Street, and walked into the Black Dog, where he ran a tab that was probably larger than his annual wage. He’d never bothered to keep track, and the owners were never going to ask him about it.