Good luck and bad habits saved Detective Lou "Buster" Cherry. While he'd been on suspension, he'd taken to calling in at a couple of Big Itchy's bars for a liquid lunch-on the house, of course. He often stayed on for dinner, making selections from the same menu. Even after the Bureau had pulled a few strings to get him back his badge and gun, it was a routine he'd been unable-or unwilling-to break.
So noon found him at one of Itchy's new joints, a place called Irish Mike's, where they had those tasty fucking Buffalo wings he loved so much. Apart from beer and whiskey, there was probably nothing else in his bloodstream now. Except nicotine. And he seemed to recall having a doughnut for breakfast sometime last week.
He'd parked himself in the corner of the bar, where he could watch his subjects, some four-eyed Myron and his greasy girl. He wasn't supposed to pick them up until later, to learn whether they slept together. But after a couple of days on their trail, he'd come to know their routine. Chances were they'd end up at Mike's for lunch, which gave him every reason to be at Mike's, too-perhaps even to get there a little early, to set up a comfy surveillance position and to work on his bent elbow. Mike, who was Maori rather than Irish, and whose name was Tui rather than Mike-well, he didn't like customers who wouldn't bend elbow with the best of them.
And Buster Cherry was fine with that.
He licked the spice from his fingers and took a long, cold pull on his beer. A Bud. Not his favorite, but times were tough all over. He stared at the table next to his targets, watching some flyboy and his squeeze, a nurse from over at Pearl. That way he could keep his eyes on Myron and the broad without being so obvious about it. Besides, the nurse had bazongas out to Wednesday, and half the mutts in the joint were staring at them, so it was a good cover.
You could tell Myron's piece of ass was twenty-first, dressed as she was, although he didn't need to be Sherlock Holmes on that score. The feebs had given him some paper on her, and told him to get more. She was a reporter, name of Natoli, and a looker, too, if your tastes ran to foreign ass.
He could tell that Myron-actually, some gimp called Wally Curtis-was boring her silly, which wasn't surprising. The kid was boring him, too, and he couldn't even hear them over the jukebox playing some shit piece of nigger music from the future. The seventies, it sounded like. He was getting better at picking the era. This particular tar boy thought Buster was a "sexy thing" and he really believed in "Milko," whatever the hell that meant. He'd take Glenn Miller or Bing Crosby any day-no matter what they were saying about Bing.
Detective Cherry had just come to the conclusion that he'd grievously miscalculated the amount of beer he'd need to see off the rest of his Buffalo wings when Natoli started screaming at everyone to get down. Nearly twenty years on the job, he didn't need to hear it twice. That broad moved like she knew a thing or two. He was halfway to the floor, frantically scanning the room for a shooter, reaching for his own piece, when he saw that both she and her boyfriend were under the table, thumbs jammed in their ears, mouths wide open like they were fixing to swap spit or something.
It took a second, but he suddenly caught on.
Must be a bomb.
He got his own ears covered and was emptying his lungs when a cataclysmic roar shook the floor, the bar, the whole of fucking Diamond Head. It was so violent and lasted so long that Cherry thought it might just shake them off the side of the island and down into the sea.
When he was a little kid on the mainland, his old man had taken him up in a clock tower to hear the bell toll twelve. He'd started screaming at the first gong, at the size of it, and the feeling of his insides being shook to jelly. He was back there for a few seconds, until the monstrous rolling thunder trailed off and the sound of a screaming woman cut through the high-pitched whine he just knew he was gonna be hearing all day.
He felt tender inside. Not just his head, which always felt that way, but everywhere, like he was some sort of human fucking cocktail shaker and he'd just made up a couple of hundred daiquiris.
The bar wasn't nearly as badly fucked up as he expected. He'd thought a bomb might have gone off, but apart from a lot of broken glass and some upturned furniture that'd been knocked over by the patrons, there was remarkably little damage. A lot of people were wailing in pain, though, holding their hands over their ears. But there was none of the grotesque carnage he'd witnessed after the Jap attack last December. No severed limbs or chunks of meat hanging from the trees.
He caught sight of Natoli and Curtis busting out of the front door, and he chased after them without thinking about it.
For such a dive, Irish Mike's poorly named bar was superbly located. As soon as he stepped outside and his eyes adjusted to the fierce sunlight, he had a panoramic view back along Waikiki toward the harbor. An enormous cloud, looking just like a big mushroom, had swallowed up half of Honolulu. His balls contracted, and ice water filled his gut. He'd heard about those fucking things. They were bad fucking news. Even the cloud could kill you if you breathed it in or let it touch you.
Nevertheless, he was nailed to the spot, completely unable to move. The whole island seemed to be covered in twisting clouds of smoke. Pearl, Hickham, Schofield Barracks-they were all lost inside the firestorms.
But strangely enough, so were the mountains in the center of the island. And something had obviously exploded with great force a mile or so off Waikiki, where there was nothing but empty water.
"Hey, are you a police officer?"
At first he didn't realize they were talking to him.
"Hey, you there, are you a cop?"
Cherry looked up stupidly. His targets were walking toward him. He followed their eyes, looking down and seeing his.38 growing out of his hand like a blue metal tumor. It was so much a part of him that he'd forgotten about pulling it.
"Uh, yeah," he said, knowing that his surveillance was over, if not exactly blown.
"You got a radio? In your car?" Natoli asked. "You still got your car, right? You've been following us in that piece of shit for three days now?"
Blown, all right.
"What? Huh? Oh, yeah. Over there." He waved his gun in the general direction of the car.
"The black Dodge, I know. Do you have a radio?"
"Why?" He couldn't get his brain out of first gear.
"Just come on," said the broad. She raised a dust trail, she moved so quickly. When she reached the Dodge, she wrenched open the door with a yank.
"Hey, you can't do that!" he protested, starting to get his senses back at last. The sound of three gigantic eruptions reached them from the burning maelstrom of Pearl Harbor. He looked away from Natoli and Curtis, but he couldn't see a thing through the smoke.
"Secondary blasts," he said to himself, musing that only a cruiser or a battleship going up would sound like that. He saw the gimp playing with his police radio, and then with the car's own set.
"Get the hell outta there," he called out.
They emerged from the front of the Dodge, but not because of him.
"It's fried," said Curtis. "EMP."
"What?"
"Electromagnetic pulse. Every piece of wiring on the island is probably fused."
"Oh," said Cherry. "That's bad, right?"