They're Back Read online

  CHAPTER ONE

  Not Possible, but Fact

  “The Slots of Saturn are back,” Stan, the God of Poker said to me as he slid into the booth beside Patty.

  I laughed and pointed out the window. “Pig just flew by. Pink, a ribbon on its tail. Really flapping hard.”

  Patty giggled and shook her head.

  Stan said nothing, didn’t even laugh at my stupid joke.

  “Wait, just saw another.”

  Again he didn’t laugh or even shake his head in disgust, which he often did when I got really silly.

  Both Patty and I just stared at him, waiting for his punch line. He had just said that the Slots of Saturn were back. That had to be a joke with a really stupid punch line, because those monsters were not a laughing matter.

  But no punch line was coming, at least none that I could tell. Trying to get a read on the God of Poker was just about impossible. He had the best poker face on the planet and with his tan slacks, button-down brown cardigan sweater and short brown hair, he could make himself invisible in a crowd without any powers at all.

  “Sorry, Poker Boy, Patty,” Stan said. “I can’t believe it either.”

  “Serious?” I asked. “No flying pigs with pink ribbons?”

  “Serious,” he said.

  Patty and I had been having a quiet lunch in my invisible office, floating high over the Las Vegas strip. I should have known a wonderful day like today would have a crisis in the middle of it.

  Just not this crisis.

  Any crisis would be fine except this one.

  Patty and I were both dressed in casual jeans and light shirts to spend the day together, since she had a day off from her job at the MGM Grand Hotel front desk. I still had on my black leather coat and fedora-like hat that was my uniform as a superhero. I just didn’t feel comfortable going many places without them.

  We had plans to tour the Mob Museum that both of us had wanted to see for a year, but hadn’t found the time. Then we hoped to have a nice dinner and then go back to her apartment, watch a movie, and see what happened next.

  I had been looking forward to that “next” part of the plan all morning.

  And lunch in my office had seemed like a great way to start a relaxing and fun day together.

  My invisible office floated a thousand feet over the Las Vegas Strip and consisted of four walls of windows and a diner booth smack in the middle of the room. The red vinyl booth had soft seats and could hold eight around the table with room enough for another two to pull up chairs on the end. It was patterned after Madge’s imitation 1960’s diner my team had met in for years down near Fremont Street in downtown Las Vegas.

  An invisible door led from Madge’s Diner to this office so that Madge, the waitress (who was also a superhero in the food service part of the gods) could wait on us in here. It was also the entrance for those without teleportation powers.

  My office actually served as more of a clubhouse for the members of my team more than anything else. Sitting up here at night on a chair with your feet up on the railing looking out over the city and The Strip was always amazing and relaxing.

  After hard days, a lot of the team members did just that.

  There was also another invisible door that led to Patty’s apartment where we stayed while in town. When we completed our new home we were building in the Oregon Coast Mountains, I would put in a direct door to this office from there as well.

  Since Patty didn’t teleport, that would allow her to get back to Vegas anytime she wanted from our new home in Oregon.

  Patty Ledgerwood, aka Front Desk Girl, was my sidekick and partner and the woman of my heart. We met the first time The Slots of Saturn ghost slots had attacked the city. And we had been a pair ever since.

  Now it seemed the ghost slots were back.

  Not possible, just not possible.

  I just wasn’t going to let myself believe it yet.

  Madge came through the door from the diner with my cheeseburger and Patty’s salad and a big basket of fries. She had already brought us both a large vanilla milkshake to share and had Stan’s favorite strawberry shake on her tray as well.

  She slid lunches in front of us and gave Stan his shake. Then she slid the fries over to an open spot at the end of the table and turned to leave without saying a word.

  The fries only meant one thing. Laverne, Lady Luck herself, was on the way and had ordered ahead.

  So the ghost slots really were back, even though that was completely impossible.

  A moment later Screamer, the other original member of our team, and Ben, the oldest and yet newest member of our team appeared and slid into the other side of the booth facing me and Patty.

  Screamer had taken part when we rescued over a hundred people from near death in the Slots of Saturn the first time. But wow, that was a long time ago.

  Ten years ago, to be exact.

  Screamer had the ability, among other things, to get into someone’s head and read their thoughts and transfer those thoughts to others. He was a superhero working on the law enforcement side of the gods.

  Ben was a god himself, just as Stan was. Ben had been the God of Lamplighters for centuries, but as they didn’t need lamplighters as a profession anymore, he had faded. He had spent a lot of time over centuries reading and he remembered every detail. I got him moved over to work with the Gods of Books and Libraries to get him healthy again, and he had became a critical part of our team. He knew history and he knew all the politics and history of the gods. I couldn’t believe how much he had helped us so far.

  “So what Stan said is true?” I asked, looking at Screamer.

  “We got ten people missing so far,” Screamer said, nodding, “and my sources with the police think it might be a few more.”

  “But how?” Patty asked, her voice sounding as stunned as I felt. “We all three stood there outside that warehouse and watched those three slot machines be hauled off to be crushed and destroyed.”

  I glanced at Stan, who only shrugged. “We don’t know, but we’ve seen security images of the Slots of Saturn appearing and taking someone and vanishing. Just as they did the first time. Exactly, actually. Same spots in the casinos. The locations they appear, that we know about, we now have blocked off.”

  “So they really are back?” I asked, the fear crushing any idea I had of taking a bite out of my cheeseburger, no matter how good it smelled.

  “It seems that way,” Stan said. “And we checked and they are not returning to the old Standard Machines warehouse.”

  “So we don’t have any idea where they are stored this time?” I asked. That was how we had managed to deal with them the first time. We found their home.

  “No clue at all,” Lady Luck said, appearing and pulling a chair up to the table. She didn’t grab a fry, but instead just sat there, staring at me.

  And when Lady Luck just stares at you, that is not a good sign.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Searching for a Clue in the Past

  Ghost slots had been a myth or urban legend in Las Vegas since slot machines started to become popular. The myth was that a person could pour their entire soul into the machine and thus vanish into the machine.

  In other words, slot machines took the souls of people.

  I had walked by enough people glassy-eyed in front of slot machines over the decades to think there was some gems of truth in those legends.

  And then ten years ago I discovered ghost slots were very, very real when the Slots of Saturn started to attack.

  The Slots of Saturn were a three-seat set of very old, very tall slot machines with incredibly-beautiful images of the rings of Saturn all over the machines. You actually had to pull the handle and coins rattled out into the metal tray when you won. They w
ere old machines, retired in the late 1980s and stored in a giant warehouse called a “graveyard.”

  That’s where we had found them through an incredible series of lucky events and teamwork. That day the team had managed to save over a hundred people from the ghost slots.

  And we thought we had killed the slots.

  Seems we hadn’t.

  The next two hours we all sat there in the booth, trying to figure out what to do next.

  A couple times Lady Luck popped out to check on something, and Stan at one point agreed to talk with the Bookkeeper to see if he could get projections on the machines, assuming no one was controlling them.

  Stan said the Bookkeeper was working on it when he came back and would call if he got some results.

  The Bookkeeper was a god in the numbers area who never left his house or his computers. He could work a computer and research through the internet faster than anyone in existence. And he had an amazing talent of projecting events that would happen in the future using just numbers.

  If someone had learned how to control those deadly slot monsters, then nothing the Bookkeeper could do to project their appearance would help. But if, like the first time, they were just runaway machines hungry for power from those who fed them, aka humans, then they could be predicted.

  And the Bookkeeper could do it.

  When they took a human, they jumped back to their original location. Then on some hidden schedule that only the Bookkeeper and all his computers could project, the machines would jump again to a location, wait for another victim to sit down and pull the old handle, then with the victim trapped inside the machine, jump back to their original location.

  The one limitation ghost slots had was that they could only go back to a place they had occupied in a casino at some point in the past. The problem was that in those days, slots were moved around from casino to casino all the time.

  Records of slot movements were hard to find, hard to follow, or had been destroyed by now. There just didn’t seem to be much of a reason to save where old slot machines had been thirty or forty or fifty years before and in old buildings now torn down.

  Finally, after two hours, Patty and I and Ben were the only three left in the booth. Madge had long since taken away my partially eaten cheeseburger and brought Patty and me another vanilla milkshake.

  Lady Luck had jumped off to talk with the gods of law enforcement to see what the real total of missing people might be.

  And from exactly where.

  Screamer had gone with Stan to talk with the only remaining slot machine tech who had been part of that rescue ten years before. The slot repairman who had triggered the first attack of the Slots of Saturn was now dead.

  The three of us were in a wait-and-think mode.

  Ben looked like anyone’s standard image of the perfect grandfather. Short and square, dressed in a suit without a tie, with short gray hair and a receding hairline. He had a smile that could disarm anyone and now, after a year of working in the area of books and libraries, he had regained his strength from the centuries of being drained in the disappearance of his old job of being the God of Lamplighters.

  I sipped on the remains of the milkshake and figured Patty and I needed to order something from Madge pretty soon to keep our strength up. Patty had barely touched her lunch salad as well.

  Ben hadn’t eaten a thing, even though I offered to buy him something a couple of times.

  Patty was sitting beside me, but staring off out the window at a Southwest airliner making an approach into the airport.

  “You know,” Ben said. “Part of the solution to this might be in how you dealt with these monsters the first time.”

  “I’ve been thinking the same thing,” I said. “But nothing we did back then seems to matter much this time around. At least not until we find their home and if they are being controlled.”

  Patty nodded to that.

  “So I heard,” Ben said, “that you two met fighting these slots. Is that right?”

  Patty nodded and smiled, touching my leg, which always calmed me and excited me in a wonderful way, and this touch was no exception.

  “We met slightly before we started working on beating the Slots,” I said, smiling and putting my hand over Patty’s hand on my leg, “but yes, it was the event that pulled us together.”

  “So tell me about the meeting,” Ben said. “I’m becoming sort of the unofficial historian for the gods, and since you two and your team have saved us all a number of times, it seems logical for me to know how all this started.”

  I honestly didn’t know what to say. I wasn’t sure how this would help us find the ghost slots, but at this point I trusted Ben and he seemed to think it might be a good use of our time.

  Besides, there wasn’t one damn thing I could think to do otherwise at the moment.

  “You tell your side, first,” Poker Boy,” Ben said. “Then Patty, you can tell your side of the event.”

  “The first meeting?” I asked, glancing at Patty. “I honestly can’t see how this will help.”

  “The first meeting,” Ben said. “If it doesn’t trigger something, then at least it will kill some time here while we wait.”

  I nodded and sat back. With Patty’s hand on my leg, I let myself remember that first meeting with the woman of my life.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Memory of that First Meeting

  I love casinos. Always have.

  I mean I truly love them, like some people enjoy sitting beside a calm mountain lake. Walking into a casino, it feels like I’ve stepped on an ocean beach on a warm evening with no wind, combined with the at-home feel of sitting by a fire, under a nice reading light, with a warm drink and a good book.

  I admit, casinos are loud, with both machine and people noises, and are designed by experts to take a person’s money. Yet every time I step through the door into a casino, either in Vegas, Atlantic City, or in Timbuck-six North Dakota, I know I am home, that I am safe, that I am in control of my surroundings.

  As I stepped through the side door of the Horseshoe that day ten years ago, I walked right into the center of at least forty poker tables. I knew at once I had once again found my own little slice of heaven.

  I could feel the power flowing through me. My muscles, tense and tight from the long plane and cab ride, relaxed as if rubbed by a Swedish hot-rub expert.

  Now remember, at that point I had only been in the superhero ranks for less than five years, and Stan had pretty much let me go on my own after a little talk or two. So green doesn’t begin to describe me when it comes to all this god stuff. I’m still that way.

  Ben waved for me to continue, so I did.

  I remember that day stopping and just taking a deep breath of the smoke-tainted air of the old casino, filling my lungs with the poisons that killed others, but gave me strength.

  Stopping just inside a casino front door was a habit of mine. Still is when I have time.

  That day I remember clearly that everything around me looked like a standard day in casino world. And I had no sense that anything was off.

  On my right were some of the live poker games, on my left the overflow part of the tournament area, now with all the tables empty. The main desk for the hotel was beyond all the tables, and I had to get there by sort of following the yellow brick road of the pattern on the carpet, through the tables, down between the railings along the live poker tables, and then through the ropes in the open area in front of the hotel desk.

  Those ropes that guard the front desks of most hotels and ticket counters in airports always make me feel like a cow being herded to the guy with the hammer who would hit me, put me out of my misery, and turn my body into prime rib and flank steaks. I’m fairly certain some hotels have almost done that to me in the past.

  There wasn’t anyone waiting in line to check in at that moment. I remember clearly thinking that maybe I could avoid the ropes altogether and just go for the hammer.

  I remember putting my head do
wn and moving toward the front desk, pulling my suitcase behind me like a bad child, following the pattern on the carpet, hoping I could get checked in quickly and then take a nap.

  I was there for the World Series of Poker which at that point was still held at Binion’s Horseshoe Casino. I remember I somehow made it all the way to the front desk without stopping.

  “Good afternoon, sir,” I remember the woman behind the front desk saying as I stepped up to the polished wood counter.

  I remember looking up and honestly, from that point things get a little fuzzy. It was Patty. I remember her smile actually included her brown eyes as she leaned forward a little. And what eyes they are.

  “Thank you,” Patty said and squeezed my hand.

  Ben motioned that I continue and I did.

  I think I remember having an out-of-body experience as I studied her eyes.

  I knew I could stare into those eyes forever, but I knew I shouldn’t.

  Yet I remember wanting to.

  I remember floating there, arguing with myself, until I finally returned to my body.

  “Checking in,” I remember that I managed to say, even though my throat was suddenly dry.

  “Here for the tournament?” she asked me in return.

  I remember saying I was and asking if it was that obvious?

  “Poker players do have a look about them,” she said to me.

  I was in lust with Miss Brown-eyes behind the front desk. I wouldn’t learn her name was Patty until later that day.

  I gave her one of my many false travel names.

  After a moment she said, “Here is your key,” and slid the paper packet with the plastic key toward me. I reached for it and her hand brushed mine.

  I remember seeing stars!

  She wished me, I think, good luck with the tournament, and I thanked her somehow, I think.

  Then I turned and tripped over my luggage.

  I managed to miss getting tangled in the front desk rope maze as I fell.

  That floor may have been carpeted, but I remember it was still hard, and it still hurt.