“Is it true what they’re saying about these visitors?”
“Depends what they’re saying, brother.”
Tui’s glance was almost furtive, like he thought they were under surveillance.
“That they’re from the future, and they’ve got death rays and super-rockets and they take their women with them when they fight.”
Slim Jim laughed.
“That’s closer than I thought you’d get. Yeah. I’ve met them, been on one of their ships. I’ll tell you about it when we meet Big Itchy, but you ain’t gonna believe a word of it.”
“And the women. I heard they got women of all colors with them.”
“Damn, boy, you are well informed. Yeah, they do, but here’s the hell of it. The dames aren’t just traveling pieces of ass. The ship I was on? The captain was a nigger woman. And the officers had black dames and Asians. Mexicans, too. I tell you, it turns a man’s head. God only knows how they keep out of the sack when they’re supposed to be working.”
“You’re shitting me.”
“Not a word of it, brother. I brought some stuff. You’ll see.”
“The captain was a nigger you say,” mused Tui. “She the one got plugged on the beach, d’you think, with the Jap guy? Maybe the Klan did it. There’s a lot of southern boys on the island at the moment.”
Slim Jim shrugged. In the last twenty-four hours he’d heard about forty-three different versions of what had happened to Captain Anderson. It wasn’t his problem, so he didn’t care. They arrived at the office, a creaking timber cabin with threadbare towels hung for curtains in the broken windows. Tui pulled up to a full stop.
In contrast to the state of the yard, the interior of the cabin was uncluttered, clean, and comfortable. It was spacious, seeming larger on the inside than it should be. In fact the cabin jutted a few yards into the adjoining property, a lumberyard, which also formed part of Big Itchy’s fiefdom.
On balance, as long as the Japs didn’t invade, Big Itchy figured the war was a bonus. It brought a flood of money into the islands and a huge amount of passing trade from the millions of servicemen in transit to Australia and the Solomons. They tended to be much better customers for Big Itchy’s operation than the toffee-nosed swells who’d arrived on the China Clipper before the war. On the other hand, the town was now full of guys who’d been trained to kill, and who weren’t at all interested in being stood over by Big Itchy’s musclemen. After Tui and the boys got the shit kicked out of them for the third or fourth time down on Hotel Street, Itchy had decided to beat a tactical retreat from the mugging business, concentrating instead on sly booze, broads, and a modest numbers racket.
Turned out these palookas would just give you all their money if you asked them nice and got them laid or drunk in return.
Big Itchy’s office was neatly stacked with the raw material of his operation: crates of stolen booze, cigarettes, and food. The girls never came here. They hardly ever got out of the flophouses. Slim Jim knew there was a safe buried in the floor beneath Itchy’s desk, and it was a sign of the trust he’d earned that the knowledge hadn’t cost him his life. Big Itchy kept every dollar he earned in that safe. He didn’t trust the banks. They were full of Jews.
“Aloha, Jimmy,” the 240-pound criminal rumbled from the chair that sat astride his fortune. “You’re alive. That’s good. The war over yet?”
“No, the war’s got a way to run yet.”
“Fat times then.”
“Getting fatter by the day.”
Slim Jim undid the top button of his shirt. There were six men in the room watching him—Itchy, Tui, and four silent toughs. Big Itchy was unusual for his times, being an equal opportunity employer. As the bastard son of a white plantation owner and a lei girl, he had no truck with discrimination. As long as a man could throw a punch or shoot a gun, and keep his mouth shut, he had a future with Big Itchy Enterprises. The men who stood, without speaking, as Slim Jim stripped off his shirt, were a mix of Kanaks, one local Japanese, and two white men. As Davidson’s shirt came off they all saw the bandages he had strapped around his torso.
“Somebody’s husband catch you?” asked Tui.
Slim Jim just smiled. The wrapping bulged under his left armpit. He gritted his teeth and ripped off the plaster. A flexipad came away, stuck to it.
“That’s a lot of effort for a cigar box, Jimmy,” said Big Itchy. “What’s it made of, gold or something?”
“Nope,” said the sailor as he removed the last of the bandages. “Worth its weight in gold, though. Watch this.”
He was familiar enough with the device to power up and load an mpeg of Casablanca in just a few seconds. Handing the device to a quizzical Big Itchy, he put his shirt back on as the film’s soundtrack filled the room. It was surprisingly loud and rich. A few of the men jumped slightly, and all quickly gathered around Big Itchy.
“Damn! I heard of this,” one of the white men said. “It’s a Bogart movie, supposed to be great.”
“Yeah, but we won’t see it here for ten fucking years,” said the Japanese.
The screen was relatively small, but the picture was crisp, drawing a few childlike noises of appreciation from the huddled gangsters.
“You got any Edward G. Robinson?” asked one. “I love his stuff. You dirty rats.”
The hoodlum did his best Robinson, with a tommy gun, cutting down a room full of rivals.
“So it’s true,” said Tui. “They came back in time.”
“Sideways, they tell me,” said Slim Jim.
“I don’t understand,” said Tui.
“I don’t think anyone does,” Slim Jim said. “And what the fuck does it matter anyway? They’re here. They brought a shitload of dough with them, and all of this stuff, too. Stuff you can’t even imagine, that people are going to pay a fortune for. And information, too. Goddamn, the things these guys know.” Slim Jim smiled, breaking into a laugh when it all got too much. “The possibilities Itchy. Just think of them.”
Reluctantly, the corpulent gangster dragged his eyes away from the screen. The others, except for Tui, kept watching.
“What do you mean?”
“That machine there, they call it a flexipad. It’s not just a little movie screen. It’s a telephone, although it doesn’t work so well now they don’t have their satellite cover—”
He was careful to say the word properly.
“—and it’s like an automatic bookkeeper. You could do your taxes for the whole year in a two minutes.” He grinned, eliciting a chuckle from both men. “Their doctors, they’ve got flexipads they just wave over your body and they can tell all sorts of shit about you, whether you’re sick or not. They’ve got these games on them, I’d have to show you them, you just wouldn’t believe me otherwise. But most of all, they got information.”
“Again with the information, Jimmy. What the fuck are you talking about? You think I want to know how to build a death ray? My old shotgun works just fine for now.”
“No,” said Davidson, “that’s not what I mean at all. Although, that stuff you can get, too, and I’m thinking that maybe some of the syndicate boys would like to know. But no, I’m talking about the real inside dope, Itchy. Like, would you want to know every winner of the Kentucky Derby for the next fifty years?”
Everyone stopped still. A few stopped breathing.
Slim Jim held out his hand for the pad. He shut down the Bogart vid and brought up a Web page he’d downloaded from Fleetnet himself. He’d never been so proud as the moment he successfully called up that site. It had taken every one of his sneaky, underhanded tricks to get unsupervised access to a workstation. And then it had required real intelligence to work the search interface to find something like this. Originally, he’d been looking for scores of football games, but had found nothing. Betting there had to be at least one fan of the track among ten or twelve thousand sailors and marines, he went looking for the Derby instead. And bingo! Here he was with the inside running.
“The thing is, Itc
hy, we gotta move quickly. Some other smart guy’s gonna figure this out real quick, probably in the next couple of days. I grabbed as many results as I could and stored them in here. You’ll find them in the folder called WINNERS. I can’t get to a bookie, but I figure you can. We got to get as much dough down as quick as we can. Because pretty soon the future’s gonna start changing.”
Big Itchy nodded slowly. “Right. Who’s gonna run a race where everyone knows the result?”
“The mob,” said Slim Jim. “But of course, they don’t mean everyone, everyone.”
“You want to take down the mob?” said Big Itchy. “I’m incredulous, Jimmy. Flabbergasted even. I never took you for no suicide case. As soon as they found out what you’d done, they’d come back for their money, and take your nuts as interest.”
“They would, they really would,” Davidson admitted. “And there’s no cutting them in, because they’re not going to believe you. Not yet. So no, I was just joking about the mob. But if you can lay off twenty, thirty big bets around the whole country, we can clean up. Get a nice float for some other things I got in mind.”
“Like what?” asked Big Itchy, sounding more interested with every passing minute.
“Big man, I’d have to sit down and split that fifth with you while I filled you in on these characters and what they’re like. Things are going to change, Itchy. Even more than because of the war, I can feel it in my guts, man. And every time things change, there’s always some guy smart enough to cash in. I want to be that guy. You should, too. You all should,” he said broadening out his appeal to the other men in the room.
“Okay,” said Itchy, “we’ll talk. Talking’s for smart guys and I like to think I’m smarter than the average guy.” He paused for a moment, then said, “You tell me these guys got a lot of money.”
Slim Jim leaned forward, looking at each of the men before he said quietly, “A Marine Corps private starts out on a salary of thirty-five grand a year. That’s more than ten times what I make.”
A chorus of soft hoots and wolf whistles played homage to such an impressive figure. Even Big Itchy had to respect a wad of dough like that.
“So how do we get our hands on it? These guys, they like a drink, all guys like a fucking drink, don’t they? And getting laid, too, everyone loves to get laid.”
For the first time, Slim Jim looked a little less sure of himself.
“You know, Itchy, they’re kind of uptight, if you want to know. A lot of them, they don’t seem the type to be lining up outside some shanky whorehouse for two hours just to stick their thing into a dame’s been getting things stuck in her all day.”
“What, are they queer or something?”
“I don’t know man. Maybe it’s all the dames they got on the ships. Maybe they don’t need to. I haven’t been around them along enough to know. But I’m guessing you’ll make more of a buck getting them hammered than laid.”
Slim Jim could almost see the gears and wheels cranking over slowly in Big Itchy’s mind. It made him wish he had a classier connection out here in the islands, but this wasn’t his home turf. He’d have to make do with the shoddy materials he had at hand.
“What about I clean out one of the bars, really clean it out, you know, and put some of my best girls in there. Real clean and pretty ones. Let them make up their own minds.”
Slim Jim made a show of thinking it over.
“Only problem I can see with that,” he said, “you can guarantee it’ll end in a brawl.”
“So what? We got brawls every day.”
“Yeah, but they don’t like brawling much, either.”
“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.”
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.
He badged the spic at the foot of the gangplank, who checked him off against a list on one of them flexi-things and waved him on up. It was a hot bitch of a day, and his shirt was already stuck to his back. The limp started up. The headache got worse. He stopped to catch his breath and when he looked up, it was like standing at the foot of a steel fucking mountain range.
A marine met him at the top—which is to say, a colored broad of some sort, not even a regular nigger. She was dressed in fatigues and sporting a USMC patch, snapped to, and told him to follow her. At least she looked like she had a good ass under those fatigues. Buster was an enlightened guy when it came to ass-related issues. He’d take it wherever he could find it.
As they moved past work details and piles of strange-looking machinery and burned-out wreckage, he could see that the deck of the carrier had taken a beating.
Good. Serves ’em right.
From what he’d heard, these assholes had deep-sixed a lot of good boys out there. Some said it was robots did most of the killing. But from all the spics and rock apes he could see running about, Buster had his doubts. Those bastards were always hot shit on a trigger.
He really had to drag his bad leg along to keep up with the broad, but he’d be damned if he was gonna call on her to slow down. She was probably doing it on purpose, just to show him up. Christ only knows what’d become of the country if the marines were going to be taking on crossbreed trash like her in the future.
Nobody paid him any attention, he noticed. But he guessed they’d be used to sightseers picking their way through the scrap metal by now.
“Are you all right, Detective?” she asked. “Do you require assistance, sir?”
The black dame—she looked part Apache, or maybe even Chinese, now that he thought about it—she’d pulled up and was checking him out as he hauled his injured leg over the baking hot, rubbery surface of the flight d
eck.
“Don’t you worry about me, doll,” he wheezed. “I’m just saving my energy.”
Buster winked at her, but the woman just gave him a flat, level stare that betrayed nothing of her feelings.
Well, fuck you.
He made himself walk without favoring one leg over the other, and they didn’t speak again. She led him into the first of the two smooth, sort of swept-back cones that dominated the deck. It must have been like the island on the Enterprise, he figured. He could see the other carrier a mile away. It looked like a tin can next to this monster.
It was mercifully cooler inside, and the harsh brightness of the midday sun gave way to soft light coming from who-knows-where. Now that he was out of the heat and glare he noticed even more how his suit clung uncomfortably to the sweat-soaked shirt, and he could feel his pants grabbing and riding up at the crotch. He was really going to have to get a bag to the Chinese laundry. He’d been putting it off for weeks. But even he had to admit that he probably smelled bad. He hadn’t had a clean change of clothes in an age.
Things just got away from him after the shooting.
Although, when you thought about it, things had been slipping since Lauren had left him three years before that.
Well, fuck her, too.
They seemed to walk for miles along a single corridor, forcing him to high-step over dozens of knee knockers as they passed through watertight doors. Then they had to climb down a series of switchback metal staircases. That was a private kind of hell with his leg, but damned if he was gonna give this bitch the satisfaction of seeing him fall behind or hearing him whine about his troubles.
Just when he thought it was going to be too much, they stepped off the lower level of the main passage and into a smaller walkway that seemed to run right across the ship. Another turn took them through a pair of heavy swinging doors that looked like they were made of clear rubber or something.
The letters WCIU were stenciled on the doors, but Cherry recognized the smell immediately. They were in some kind of morgue.
Weapons of Choice — Axis Of Time Book I Page 35
