So, I always knew Dan Black was returning for this next AoT series. I didn’t realise until recently that Detective Lou “Buster” Cherry would be hitching a ride back with him.
But here we are.
Last time we saw Buster, in Designated Targets, things looked… less than awesome. My memory had him bleeding out on a beach in Hawaii after taking a bayonet. But when I went back to the original text, I realised we never actually saw him die. His last moment on the page was blowing the face off the guy stabbing him, which, in hindsight, is a pretty Buster way to leave things unresolved.
So he’s back. Older, a touch mellower, but still bringing his Officer Not-So-Fuckin’-Friendly vibe. And my god, he’s fun to write — or in my case, dictate while walking the dogs. Noir just flows when you speak it aloud.
And while we’re talking about surprises… I confessed on the blog yesterday that this “trilogy” will probably run long. So let’s make it official. I’m 100,000+ words into WW 3.2, and I’ve only moved the story forward two days.
I’ve decided to lean into this project until it’s done. That means a lot more coming your way (including WW 3.3 in November, since I’ve been writing them together).
After that, we’ll roll on through 2026, following this thing wherever it leads. By the time it’s done, it will sprawl over three-quarters of a million words — maybe even a million by Christmas 2026.
Yeah. I’m writing the LOTR of alternate history. No, not The Wheel of Time. L!O!T!R!
But enough of my yapping — let's spend a little quality time with our man Buster Cherry.
They had six uniformed guards in the foyer of this place. When Cherry had been a punk patrolman in the Honolulu PD, they'd sent him off to a two-man station on the outskirts of East Kapolei. The goddamn foyer of Davidson's Tower had three times the number of cops as his first posting.
Of course, they weren’t real cops, and at least he didn't have to check in at the desk like a mope. He didn't keep an office here; that wouldn't be seemly, according to O'Brien. But he did have come-n-go privileges.
"Good evening, Mr Cherry," the girl on the front desk said. She was a hottie, of course. It seemed to Cherry that Davidson only ever hired absolute smokestacks. Though if you got him after two or three shots, he'd tell you that from what he'd observed over the years, Maria O'Brien employed Davidson, and not the other way around. It seemed obvious to Cherry that the woman wore the pants in that relationship, even if it was a purely business set-up. Same way, she wore pants every time he'd met her. Hell of a thing, really, when you thought about the shit these people had changed.
But he wasn't one to complain, because his fortunes had been part of those changes. Cherry didn't care to think about how things might have gone for him if he hadn't got this… thing… with Davidson. The uptimers had saved him twice; he was man enough to admit it. Once on that beach in Hawaii, and again five years later when he washed up in LA.
Not that you'd call what he had here a job, exactly. His name wasn’t listed on any employee payroll anywhere in the tower; there were no pay slips with his name on them. There was an account he kept at the track, and every two weeks, on the knocker, a couple of grand would drop onto the balance, whether he came calling on Davidson Tower or not. Whether he did anything for them. Or not. Two grand on the knocker every couple of weeks. A man would be a fool to turn that down, especially when the money got better, if it turned out they did have something for him to do, like they did now.
"What are you fuckin' lookin' at?" one of the rent-a-cops snarled.
Cherry stopped and unfurled a slow smile for him.
The guy bristled, working up some backchat, but Lou Wanamaker, the shift supervisor, an old hack out of the 27th Precinct, gave him some supervision with the back of his leathery old hand.
"Just do your job, Neilson”, he said, nodding at Cherry, who returned the nod and got moving again.
The mouthy rent-a-cop went back to whatever pornmag he had on the desk, and Cherry snorted quietly to himself. They must be paying old Lou some good coin for him to wear a clown costume like that. The guy had retired on a good pension, unlike Cherry, who was forced out by the toe-cutters. He’d lost his pension of twenty years and nearly ended up in the jug. That's what he meant about having no trouble with the changes Davidson and his crew had made in LA, because those changes had worked out pretty good for former detective Lou ‘Buster’ Cherry.
He rolled into the elevator and waited for the doors to close.
No attendant. Not even a button to push. The elevator was smart enough to just take him where he was going. Helluva lot smarter than Nielsen back there.
He rode up in the silent, gleaming box of brushed steel and blue glass. Soft music hummed from unseen speakers, and a wall of those weird three-dimensional movie screens glowed with abstract art, shifting cityscapes, and market data. A gentle chime, barely audible, announced their arrival, and the doors slid open.
He no longer expected to find O'Brien waiting for him up here. He never expected to even meet Davidson. But the chickadee on the other side was a new one. A hot one, too, of course, this being Davidson's personal floor. And his personality flaw, Buster thought to himself. The woman waiting for him on the 73rd floor was a vision from a pin-up calendar, all curves and coiffed blonde hair, but that suit wore was cut razor sharp, and her eyes, framed by sleek, wire glasses, held a knowing glint.
He knew that fucking glint.
He’d seen it on plenty of women the last ten years. First they got ideas, then they got the glint.
Buster kept these thoughts to himself. That was one of the other things he’d learned: to keep his opinions to himself, at least around these characters. That's how he kept the big numbers dropping into his account at the track. Getting the job done and keeping his mouth shut.
He followed the young lady along the corridor, a long tunnel of polished concrete and dark wood, punctuated here and there by stark lighting fixtures. It felt less like a business office and more like an art gallery, or maybe a Japanese temple with all the deliberate emptiness, a helluva contrast to the streets seventy-plus floors below.
He almost chuckled. The Japs had done some terrible things in the Pacific. They’d done some of those things to him, sticking a bunch of bayonets in his ass back on Honolulu. Killing those poor kids, Rosanna and Wally. So, fuck them for that.
And yet, here was Davidson fitting out his playroom like he’s best buds with Tojo.
It was hard to understand, was all. But, Cherry supposed, as bad as the Japs had been, they’d got it back with compound interest. They'd lost their goddamn country out of it, or at least half. The commies had taken the north of Japan, and the southern half was still full of white men with guns. Although he supposed the Japs would be happy to have them there now, with the commies trying to take over the whole show.
They arrived at the main entrance, which the hottie opened by placing her thumb on a small glass plate. He assumed it was reading her thumbprint, but with these guys, you could never be sure. Mighta been taking a picture of her immortal soul for all he knew. The heavy wooden doors clicked open, and he had the distinct sense of passing through the gates of some castle in medieval Japan about five hundred years ago, which was weird, because when he got through to the other side, it was like he was five hundred years in the future. He resisted the urge to shake his head. He'd been in this office three times, and every time was a trip to fucking Disneyland.
The office was less an office and more your private sky-palace. Seventy-odd stories above the sprawling grid of Los Angeles, the entire outer wall was a massive glass wall offering a dizzying, panoramic view. That was no exaggeration, neither. Buster got dizzy if he looked at it too long. Wasn’t natural to live up here like this. Drones orbited the building, red and green lights blinking in the perpetual nighttime haze. Further out, military jets carved figure-eight loops over the city. But it was the apartment that truly stole the breath away. The space was fucking vast, with soaring triple-height ceilings and a floor of polished black granite that reflected the city lights like a pool of wine. Sculptural furniture seemed to float on the huge expanse. A living wall of vines and ferns climbed one entire inner surface, misted by unseen nozzles, and a burbling, shimmering waterfall cascaded down another, disappearing into a rock pool. The air was cool, faintly scented with something alpine. It was a space designed to overwhelm, to make a man like Buster Cherry feel both insignificant and privileged to be there.
And sitting in the middle of it all, in his old bathrobe and socks with his feet up on the couch, was the big man himself, James Earl Davidson, watching a replay of a football match on a TV screen that was about half the size of your average football field. He perched a bowl of corn chips on his lap and drank a beer.
"Hey, Buster," he said, "you want a brew?"
"No brew for Buster," Maria O'Brien said. "He's on the clock."
"Just being sociable," Slim Jim said. He pointed the magic stick at the giant television screen and stopped the action play. On the screen, the action froze: a replay of a college football game, the USC Trojans in their cardinal and gold, locked in a brutal tackle with the Bruins. Buster hated the Trojans. Too flashy, too arrogant, too many of their players in the news for all the wrong reasons. Fucking crooks, every last one of them.
But so fucking what. He'd ended up working for the world's richest criminal, hadn’t he? That's what James Earl Davidson was, a two-bit bunko man who'd grifted his way into this joint. But Cherry wasn't here to judge. He was here for a job. And who the hell was he to judge anyway? The reason he'd needed the work was because they took his pension away from him, because he'd been moonlighting for hoodlums with much less money and much shittier connections than Davidson there in his fucking socks and jimmyjams.
"You called? I came," he said to Maria O'Brien. She nodded, fetching a buff-coloured envelope from a desk on the other side of the room. It was such a big room that it took her a minute to walk over there and back.
"You know who won this game, right?" Buster said to Davidson, while they waited.
"Yeah," Davidson shrugged. "But you know how it is. There's no games on anywhere at the moment."
"You had money on this?" Buster asked.
Davidson snorted, then huffed out a brief laugh. "Yeah, I had a grand on the spread. Did my dough cold.”
“So what’re you watching it for now?”
“Tryin to learn from my mistakes.”
Cherry snorted. “Amen to that, brother.”
O’brien returned. The envelope she handed him was thick and heavy. It had some heft but it wasn’t like phone-book weight or anything.
He didn’t bother to open it in front of her. “What’s the job?” he asked.
“Joe McCarthy,” Davidson smiled from the couch, sucking at his beer, looking like he was enjoying watching for Buster’s reaction almost as much as he’d been enjoying re-watching the football match. Buster gave him nothing; after all, McCarthy wasn’t the biggest name they’d fed him.
“It’s gonna cost you,” he said.
“It always costs something,” O’Brien pointed out. “We’ll make the deposit into your betting account as normal, $10,000 a week for the next four weeks. Sound about right?”
“For the retainer?” Buster said. “Yeah, that sounds about right.”
“Usual arrangement for expenses in the file,” she said. “There’s a clean Amex for you. Rack up your legitimate travel and investigatory spend on that. There’s five grand in cash in there for anything you have to cover that we can’t tell the IRS about.”
He laughed. “Lady, if I thought you were telling the IRS about any of this, I wouldn’t be doing the job for you.”
Davidson laughed at that too, but O’Brien did not. “That’s why we like working with you, Buster,” she said. “You are the soul of discretion. You’re on a red-eye to Washington tonight. There’s a car waiting downstairs for you.”
“What about my cat?” he asked.
“The usual arrangements for the cat,” Maria O’Brien replied.
“Okay,” he said. “But just tell that Mexican broad not to tidy my apartment this time. I like it the way it is. And the cat does too.”
“I’ll let her know,” O’Brien said.
“So, what’s the brief?” Buster asked, holding up the packet. He knew they wouldn’t have committed anything to paper; the envelope would contain information but no instructions. It was safer that way.
“It’s just a look-see this time,” she said. “We don’t need you to do anything. We just need you to have a look at this guy and figure out where he’s going to fall apart if you press in hard.”
“But you’re going to want me to press in hard at some point, aren’t you?” Buster asked, “Because that’s usually how these things go. There’s a logic to it.”
“For the moment, you’re just having a look.”
“What about cover?” he asked. “What sort of cover do I got?”
“All the money in the world, man,” Davidson replied before O’Brien could say anything. “That cover enough for you?”
“I’m not talking about legal or medical expenses,” Buster said, holding the envelope up. “This is political. This guy’s got enemies—I’m looking at two of them. I can think of another one who lives on Pennsylvania Avenue.”
O’Brien said nothing, and for once, Davidson managed to keep his mouth shut too.
“But a guy like this has friends too,” Buster went on. “Or if they’re not friends, they’re at least people who share mutual interests. They’re the people I need cover from.”
O’Brien nodded. “You’ll have it,” she said.
“When do you want the information?” Buster asked.
She looked at him. “Why are you still standing here?”
“Right,” he said, and he left.
World War 3.2. Coming Soon.