Weapons of choice

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, Itchy, 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."