Empty Mummy Murders: A Poker Boy Story Read online

  The Empty Mummy Murders

  A Poker Boy Story

  Dean Wesley Smith

  The Empty Mummy Murders

  Copyright © 2012 by Dean Wesley Smith

  Published by WMG Publishing

  Cover Design copyright © 2012 WMG Publishing

  Cover art copyright © Renier Janse Van Vuuren/Dreamstime

  Smashwords Edition

  This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

  Chapter One

  It was a good ten minutes into the conversation over vanilla milkshakes and a side of fries with Scary Mary, as her friends called her and she called herself, before she got to the point.

  Scary Mary deserved the name. She had bright red hair tied up so tight on the top of her head that it pulled the skin of her face and scalp upward. She wore more make-up than a bad rodeo clown, and had breasts that must have arrived at the restaurant a good minute ahead of her.

  Her tight red dress, if you could call the small piece of cloth covering her largest assets a dress, I’m sure didn’t cover her butt when she slid into the leather booth at The Diner. But I didn’t look. In Vegas you saw all types, and a long time ago I had learned to not judge a person by their look or a woman by the expanded size of her chest.

  Some friend-of-a-friend had given Scary Mary one of my real-world names and told her I might be able to help with her problems.

  As Poker Boy, I find people to help in all sorts of ways. Sometimes I find them, sometimes they come to me, sometimes my boss, Stan the God of Poker, assigns me the task of helping someone. It never seems to make any sense how I find the people who need saving, but I do. Just as I find the people at poker tables who need me to take their money. It seems to be a natural way of the world.

  I had told Scary Mary to meet me at The Diner in downtown Las Vegas. The Diner serves the best milkshakes on the planet, and the waitress who is always there is Madge, a superhero in the food service business. The Diner is decorated like a fake 1960s diner. I am convinced there were no places in the 1960s that looked anything like The Diner, with records stapled on the walls and photos of Elvis, Marilyn, and James Dean on most walls.

  But the booths were comfortable and the milkshakes huge and made like old milkshakes from the 1930s. And it was where my team met when we had a job to plan.

  It was two in the afternoon. No one but Madge was with us in The Diner, and she was working up behind the counter. Scary Mary and I were in a booth near the front door. It was a perfect time to get to the bottom of her problem.

  Scary Mary kept looking at me in a worried fashion, so I sort of turned on my Trust-Me power and let it wash over her. I had on my black leather jacket and black fedora-like hat that was my superhero uniform, and I could feel the power they gave me drawing from the nearby casinos. It should be more than enough to get Scary Mary to talk.

  After a moment she blushed, which looked washed-out next to her blazing-red hair and beside her thick, blue eyeliner and red lipstick.

  “You’re not going to believe me and I just don’t know what you can do to help,” she said, her voice deep and throaty.

  “Try me,” I said, turning up my Trust-Me” power a little and adding a little Empathy power to it as well. “You would be surprised at what I might be able to do.”

  “That’s what my friend in the poker room at the MGM told me. But you just won’t believe me.”

  “Let me decide that,” I said.

  She signed, looked both directions. “I’m being harassed by aliens.”

  “Oh, no,” I said, sighing and stirring up my milkshake. This felt like a problem I had had three years before with an old girlfriend. She hadn’t let me help her and she had ended up dead.

  “I told you that you wouldn’t believe me,” Scary Mary said, clearly disgusted.

  “Oh, I believe you,” I said. “The aliens you are seeing have large heads, big eyes, and are gray. Right?”

  “Yes, yes,” she said, jumping a little in the booth in excitement and almost knocking over her milkshake with the large extensions on her chest.

  I sighed again. “Those aren’t aliens. Those are creatures called Silicon Suckers. And my bet is they are after your breasts.”

  Both her hands went to cover a few inches of the mass on her chest, her eyes wide, her mouth open.

  Silicon Suckers are the reason the UFO nuts think there are aliens visiting earth. They have big oblong heads with long thin excuses for chins. Their bodies are thin, humanoid, but all gray in color. Their feet are huge and they walk like they are floating through the air without a sound. And they have lived in their caves in the deserts for far longer than there have been humans around.

  What drives me nuts about them are their huge eyes. They don’t seem to blink, and that can just unnerve a guy, even me, a superhero.

  They have no smell, but can suck moisture out of an area faster than a hundred dehumidifiers on full blast. And for some stupid reason, of all the people and superheroes and gods that exist, I am the one who has become the go-to-guy for dealing with the Silicon Suckers.

  I keep wanting to tell people I play poker for a living, I work for Stan, the God of Poker, and I do my best work in casinos helping people who come into poker rooms solve their problems. As far as I know, Silicon Suckers don’t even know what poker is.

  Now here I was again, talking to a woman who needed help with the Silicon Suckers. If this trend didn’t stop, I might start being called Silicon Sucker Boy. And I would hate that.

  “So what have they been doing?” I asked, dreading the answer.

  She still had her hands firmly planted over small areas of her massive breasts.

  “What do you mean they might be after my breasts?”

  “First tell me what they are doing,” I said, sending as much Calming Power as I could generate her way. I wasn’t in that good of control of that superpower yet, but by simply trying to calm a person, I sometimes could.

  She took a deep breath and then nodded. “I first saw them in the parking garage off my apartment, out near the airport. They just stood there, staring at me.”

  “Two of them?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “At first I figured them for nutcases from a convention, but they are very skinny and I couldn’t see costumes.

  “You’ve seen them more times?”

  She nodded. “A couple of dozen times and twice they got into my apartment. Made the place so dry I was afraid it was going to burst into flames.”

  “Silicon Suckers live under the desert and take moisture out of the air,” I said, nodding. “Have they tried to touch you?”

  “No,” she said, shaking her head and shivering.

  I stared into her worried eyes and knew I was way out of my depth. Any question I might have next about changes to her chest would sound bad coming from me. I needed some help.

  “Hold on just a minute, would you?” I asked. “I want to call a friend to make sure there haven’t been any other sightings lately.”

  She nodded and I motioned for Madge to come over as I stood.

  “You interested in a hamburger?” I asked Scary Mary. “On me.”

  She nodded and I turned to Madge who had heard me. “My normal burger, one for Mary, and a shake and burger for Patty as well. I’ll be right back.”

  Madge nodded. She would entertain Scary Mary until I got back with Patty. With luck, it would only
be a minute.

  Chapter Two

  I stepped outside the door into the warm fall day, then jumped to a spot in front of the MGM Grand main hotel lobby check-in desk. Then, before a camera could pick up my sudden appearance, I pulled myself and Patty out of the flow of time.

  I loved being able to teleport, and even more being able to stop time. Actually, I couldn’t stop time but it looked like I could. I actually just could step between moments in time. And I could take others with me into that moment, which made everyone else look frozen around me.

  My girlfriend, Patty Ledgerwood, aka Front Desk Girl, had just finishing checking in a woman with two kids. The woman and the two kids were frozen in place moving away from the counter and Patty was smiling at me.

  “Thank you,” she said. “I needed a break.”

  “My pleasure,” I said, smiling back. Just seeing Patty always made me smile. She had long brown hair that she had tied back while working. Her wonderful brown eyes were deep enough for me to get lost in and I had many, many times. Today she had on a white blouse and black slacks and a light tan MGM jacket that was the uniform of the day. She looked good in anything, but I was in love with her, so my opinion was clearly not one anyone could trust.

  “So what’s happening?”

  “I need some help with a woman who’s being visited by Silicon Suckers,” I said.

  “Oh, oh,” Patty said. “Does she…?”

  “Bigger than I thought possible,” I said, indicating how large Scary Mary’s breasts were.

  “And you want me to help you question her about them?”

  “I screwed this up once,” I said. “I’d kind of like to get it right if her breasts are the problem.”

  Patty knew about my old girlfriend and how she had refused to give back her breast implants made out of silicon from a sacred Silicon Sucker’s burial ground. The Silicon Suckers had eventually removed the breasts through her ass, for some reason the only way they know of to get inside a human body, and it had killed her.

  Failing to save her always felt like one of my biggest mistakes.

  Patty nodded. “Meet me in the hallway down near my car. I’ll be right there.”

  I nodded and jumped to that spot while also stepping back into the flow of time. In Vegas a person couldn’t just jump around through space without also being careful to not be picked up on cameras. Patty and I had a regular camera dead spot.

  It took Patty exactly four minutes to get off work and meet me. Her boss at the MGM Grand knew what she did and that sometimes she just needed some time away. In fact, her boss was another superhero working the same area.

  I jumped us out of there the moment Patty hit the camera safe area and back to a spot just in front of The Diner.

  I led the way inside, telling Patty what I had ordered her. Madge was just heading back to the kitchen and Scary Mary was sitting nervously in the booth twisting the straw in her milkshake. Clearly Madge had stood and talked with her for a few minutes while I was gone.

  I introduced Patty to Scary Mary and then said, “Patty knows all about the Silicon Suckers.”

  Patty nodded as Scary Mary sort of beamed behind all the make-up.

  “I’ve seen them a number of times,” Patty said. “And even been down in one of the caves they call sand castles.”

  “Wow,” Scary Mary said. “I thought for sure I was going insane.”

  “Far from it,” Patty said. “But these creatures are very dangerous, and we need to try to figure out what changed for you that started them visiting you.”

  “That way we have a chance of stopping them,” I said.

  Scary Mary nodded and I hit her again with another wave of my Relax and Trust-Me super power. She seemed to calm a little more.

  Patty, who was sitting beside me in the booth, patted my leg and then leaned toward Scary Mary. “So what day exactly did you first see the Silicon Suckers?”

  Scary Mary twisted her face and layered make-up around, clearly trying to think, then said, “May sixteenth.”

  “So, anything major happen the week before that?” Patty asked. “Anything change?”

  “I got a new job,” Scary Mary said without hesitation. “Five days before. I remember because it was May Eleventh, one year from the day exactly that I had my sex change operation, and I figured that was a good sign.”

  So Scary Mary used to be Scary Martin, but I doubted that was going to have anything to do with this case. Patty clearly didn’t either because she said nothing. Again, this was Vegas. We had seen most everything.

  “What was your new job?” Patty asked.

  “Dispatcher,” she said. “Desert High Sand and Gravel. I used to drive a truck, but after my operation Ben, the owner, said that once I got recovered, he’d find a place for me. And he did.”

  “What happened to the previous dispatcher?” I asked, afraid of the answer.

  “Sharon? She vanished one day,” Scary Mary said. “No sign of her but her ex-husband was knocking her around at one point so they’re looking at him.”

  Patty sighed and looked down.

  I would bet anything that the previous dispatcher had been killed by the Silicon Suckers. But it would never be proved. Somewhere, at some point, the trucks that Scary Mary was sending out were doing something to anger the Silicon Suckers. And since she sent them out, they were blaming her. And clearly they’d blamed the woman who had her job ahead of her.

  Then Patty asked a question I hadn’t thought of to ask.

  “Did any other dispatchers disappear besides Sharon?”

  “Joyce,” Scary Mary said. “And there might have been another, but I’m not sure.”

  Then, suddenly she realized where we were going. “You don’t think that these aliens caused them to vanish?”

  Both Patty and I nodded and Scary Mary turned white under all the make-up.

  Chapter Three

  Madge brought the food at that point, and it gave me a chance to think. My entire premise that the Silicon Suckers were after Scary Mary’s breasts had gone out the window. Most of the time I dealt with the Silicon Suckers because of land problems. They were very, very protective of their land, and had negotiated with the Gods, including Lady Luck herself, a compromise that allowed humans to build Las Vegas. But with the recent expansion, there had been many dust-ups lately over land.

  This was looking like another one of those. And clearly the Silicon Suckers were warning each dispatcher in their own way, giving them time to stop, then killing them when they didn’t and starting over with a new dispatcher.

  Scary Mary had had no idea her job was so deadly when she took it.

  After Madge put down the wonderful-smelling hamburgers and fries and left, I started to quiz Scary Mary about the business as we ate.

  Turns out the company only had one large sand quarry in the desert outside of town. And the first mile of road from the pit were gravel across desert as well.

  Scary Mary’s job was to dispatch the trucks full of gravel or sand from the quarry to different jobs around the city or concrete mixing plants. She had to keep track of forty trucks, but in the boom times the dispatcher had managed over a hundred and had them on the go constantly for two shifts a day. She said she used to drive one of those trucks.

  “I need maps of the quarry and the road in and out of it,” I said. “And then I’ll compare them to Silicon Sucker lands.”

  I took a big bite of my hamburger, then stood. “It won’t take long,” I said.

  I headed out the door, and the moment I was on the sidewalk and the young couple walking toward Freemont Street had their back turned, I shouted to the air, “Stan. Need help in your office.”

  Since I didn’t have an office and I didn’t want Scary Mary to know what I could really do, I figured Stan’s office would be as good as any.

  A moment later I found myself in a standard business office and Stan in his normal black slacks and tan shirt stood facing me beside an oak desk with a computer and chair. A couple
plants filled the corners and the windows looked out over Vegas from high in the air. Far higher than any office building.

  “I got to teach you how to build yourself an office when you need it,” he said, shaking his head.

  “I can do this?” I asked, stunned, looking around at the furniture and the fantastic view of the invisible floating office. I had always figured that only the Gods could build offices.

  Stan just shook his head in slight disgust and then said, “What do you need?”

  I told him which maps I needed and a moment later they appeared in the air, the map of the Silicon Sucker lands floating on one side, the map of the quarry and road on the other.

  “You going to tell me why you need these two maps?” he asked.

  “Just put them at the same scale and overlay them,” I said. “We just might see why.”

  He did, the two maps floating until they merged. The quarry was a long ways from the Silicon Sucker land, but the road was another matter.

  “There,” I said, pointing to one area where the rood seemed to touch the Silicon Sucker’s land. “Can you make that larger?”

  The road clearly had been laid out to go around a corner of the Silicon Sucker’s land, making a ninety-degree corner.

  I was betting that corner had been cut off. And people had been dying because of it.

  I glanced around. “Can you put us and this office right over that corner?”

  An instant later we were over the corner of the dirt road, floating in the air still inside the office, only now part of the office floor under our feet was invisible.

  That felt kind of creepy and cool at the same time. I really needed to learn how to do all this.

  Below, I could still see the old road, but clearly a new one had been constructed a few years back that cut directly across Silicon Sucker land. More than likely the owner just figured it was desert land and no one would care. As we watched, floating invisible in an air-conditioned office above, a truck full of gravel powered through the corner leaving a trail of dust.