Let's recap going into volume 36: The Straw Hats' ship is beyond repair. Usopp, reeling from the news and feeling worthless, left the crew, then challenged Luffy for the Going Merry. He lost, but Luffy and the others left Merry to him. Another crew member, Nico Robin, is missing, and accused of attempting to assassinate beloved local industrialist/politician, Iceberg, last night. So the entire town is after the Straw Hats, including some especially strong carpenters at the shipbuilding company Iceburg runs. A local gang leader that dresses like Ace Ventura is after Luffy for destroying his house and beating up his gang. And, there's a notorious annual high tide, the Aqua Laguna, on its way.
The volume starts with the carpenters interrupting the fight between Luffy and Franky. This is when Luffy learns about Iceberg, and Robin's alleged involvement. It also establishes the carpenters as tough fighter in their own right, as Luffy gets kicked around by them while protesting his (and Robin's) innocence.
(The fight also establishes Franky as a wildly erratic character. He goes from laughing at Luffy's troubles to flipping a table (he presumably made himself off panel) and yelling at the carpenters for interfering in his fight. Later, he'll grouse at a bartender for charging customers money for drinks, then freak out when he learns he's still got some of the money his gang stole from Usopp, and buy rounds for the entire bar.)
Luffy manages to escape to confront Iceberg, but that only frustrates him further. Iceberg remains insistent it was Robin he saw last night. That doesn't help anyone find her, but Robin finds Sanji and Chopper instead, telling them she did attack Iceberg, and she's leaving the crew. From how she phrased it, the crew concludes there may be another attempt on Iceberg and try to stake it out.
That doesn't go well, as Luffy flies off half-cocked and gets separated from the others, who have to fight their way through an army of shipwrights, all while the real killers (and Robin) are already in there with Iceberg. It's talking, interspersed with brief scenes of the masked figures tearing through the shipwrights with ease, as Iceberg discusses what these people are really after (blueprints to an ancient, powerful battleship), and that his mentor always told him Robin needed to die because she was the last person left who could read the stone blocks that might reveal the location of that battleship.
Iceberg's attempt to pull a fast one on the assassins falls apart for a variety of reasons. Primarily that they were both closer to him and stronger than he suspected. They're able to figure out who really has the blueprints, but before they can track him down (it's Franky), Luffy and the most of the remaining Straw Hats bust in from two different directions.
(Sanji's gone off on his own somewhere, and won't pop up until later on. Which is kind of a thing he does a lot, drift off by himself somewhere and do something quietly critical. It's weird to me that a character that becomes such a loud, obnoxious dumbass around any woman can be that good at being covert, but I guess if you grade on a curve, relative to the rest of the crew, he's pretty quiet.)
Franky, meanwhile, has gotten fed up at being unable to find Luffy and finish their fight. But his gang have figured out Usopp is alone on the Merry. And Usopp is out there working on repairs, largely oblivious to everything that's going on around him.
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