"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."

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 deck.

"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.

The forensic laboratory of the War Crimes Investigation Unit was familiar turf to Captain Margie Francois. She'd been attached to two such units during the previous fifteen years, earning a medal from the United Nations Human Rights Commission for her work in identifying the members of a "special purposes" battalion of the Iranian army, which was active during the second Iran-Iraq war. The purpose of the battalion had been to spread terror among subject Iraqis by a program of systematic rape.

Francois was first and foremost a Marine Corps combat surgeon, but she was also cross-trained as a special victims investigator. She had the graduation certificate from Quantico and a mass of emotional scar tissue to show for it.

As the wait for Detective Cherry dragged on, she worked hard at damping down the first sparks of her temper. There were six people in the morgue with her. Dr. Brumm, from the coroner's office in Honolulu. Assistant District Attorney Crew, standing in for the district attorney. Lieutenant Commander Helen Wassman, formerly the medical officer on the Leyte Gulf. Ensign Mitsuka, surviving senior officer on the Siranui. And Captain Hugh Lunn, from the Clinton's Legal Affairs Division, who doubled as the head of the War Crimes Unit when it was operational-it wasn't at this point, but Lunn was there as the senior legal affairs officer in the task force.