Daddy is an Undertaker: A Poker Boy story.

  Daddy is an Undertaker

  A Poker Boy Story

  Dean Wesley Smith

  Daddy is an Undertaker

  Copyright © 2012 by Dean Wesley Smith

  Published by WMG Publishing

  Cover Design copyright © 2012 WMG Publishing

  Cover art copyright © Nejron/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.

  One

  I usually find the people I’m going to help by accident. Most of us superheroes do, or we are told to help someone by one of our bosses. But this time, my sidekick and girlfriend, Patty Ledgerwood, aka Front Desk Girl brought me a person who really needed help.

  And I do mean a lot of help if she planned on staying alive more than another few hours.

  Actually, Patty sent my boss, Stan, the God of Poker, to get me.

  It was a dark and rainy Oregon Saturday night in March. I was dressed and watching a rerun of an old Star Trek show starring the bald actor whose name I can never remember. In an hour or so, I planned on heading over to the casino near the doublewide trailer I called home. I never went near the casino too early on a weekend night, because the players were new and fresh and hadn’t had enough drinks.

  I always gave the Saturday players a few hours, and then went over to take the money that they were willing to give to me across the poker table. Even though I was a superhero, I still had to make a living, and playing poker was my way of doing it.

  “Knock, knock. Poker Boy, need to talk,” the voice-without-a-body said from the middle of the air in my living room, interrupting a scene with an alien with a forehead problem and some sort of sticky paste-like substance.

  I knew the voice. Stan had only been to my home once before for only a second. It wasn’t like him to be polite and actually knock.

  “I’m decent,” I said, standing and heading for my superhero costume on the hook by the door. I had on tennis shoes, jeans, and a white Polo shirt, but my costume was my black leather coat and black Fedora-like hat that I never took off in a casino. It helped funnel the power of the casino to me. If Stan was coming to talk to me, I know I was going to need the costume very quickly.

  Stan appeared in the middle of my living room and glanced first at the old television, then the remains of my T.V. dinner on the scarred coffee table, then around at the old 1970s furniture and green shag carpet that had come with the doublewide when it was new.

  “We clearly don’t pay you enough,” Stan said, disgusted at what he saw.

  “You don’t pay me anything,” I said as I slipped on my coat and hat.

  “Oh, yeah, there’s that,” Stan said. “But I know for a fact you have enough in your bank accounts to buy a dozen mansions in every state in the country, with enough left over for a castle in Britain.”

  I shrugged. He was right. In about fifty accounts in fifty different banks, I had a vast amount of money. And a ton of investments that seemed to be doing real well when I bothered to check on them. I had won a lot of tournaments and just didn’t spend much money after taxes every year.

  “I like it here,” I said. “Keeps me humble.”

  “Oh, yeah, Poker Boy humble,” Stan said, laughing. “I bet Patty doesn’t come over often,”

  With that he had a point. We always stayed at her wonderful place in Vegas. She had only seen my home once and never come back. Maybe Stan was right, it might be time to upgrade some. When I had the time.

  And besides, Patty thought I was a broke gambler. Maybe at some point I should get around to telling her about my money. Not a conversation I was looking forward to.

  “So what do I owe this visit?” I asked the God of Poker.

  “Just doing a favor for your girlfriend,” Stan said. “She needs your help on a case and she asked me to come get you. Guess there isn’t enough time for you to fly commercial.” Stan just shook his head at my old doublewide. “You know, you could afford a few private jets as well.”

  “Or you could teach me the jumping-around-in-space skill,” I said. “Or is that only for Gods?”

  He shrugged. “Maybe when you’re done helping Patty.”

  I was actually surprised at that. I didn’t know I might be able to actually teleport around the world. Of course, I still didn’t know what half my powers were. I was still pretty new at this superhero stuff.

  The next moment I was in the crowded lobby of the MGM Grand.

  The noise of the casino and the hundreds of guests in the lobby slammed into me. But at the same time I could feel the energy coming from the casino through my coat and hat, making me feel extra alive.

  Patty was standing in front of the desk, talking to a woman with longish blonde hair. Patty glanced over, saw me, and smiled.

  Like normal, her smile melted a part of me and got other parts all agitated in a very good way. She had the ability to do that to me with just a look. Her long brown hair was pulled back and she was dressed in the standard MGM front desk uniform of white shirt and black slacks and MGM vest. She made it look great.

  She was a stunningly attractive woman. What she saw in me was anyone’s guess.

  I made my way through the crowd and luggage over to her and she gave me a hug. “Thanks for coming.”

  “Anytime,” I said, and I meant it.

  “Thanks, Stan,” Patty said to the air.

  “More than welcome,” Stan said without showing himself.

  The young woman with Patty sort of looked around for the voice, but before she could say anything Patty said, “Lisa, this is Poker Boy.”

  I turned on my what I called my “Charming Power” for lack of a better name. It helped put people I was trying to help in a more relaxed and talkative mood. I shook her firm hand. “Very nice meeting you.”

  Lisa looked like an odd imitation of an American flag, with a red, white and blue outfit that included a too-tight skirt. It really wasn’t a flattering look on her. Up close I could tell she couldn’t be more than twenty-two, and more than likely she would get carded everywhere she went in this town.

  Plus she had on way too much makeup. Her eyelashes seemed to extend halfway into the big lobby.

  She smiled, but the smile didn’t reach her dark eyes. I could tell that something was very wrong in her life.

  “Tell him what’s bothering you,” Patty said, patting Lisa’s arm gently in support.

  As a superhero in the world of hospitality, Patty could calm the most upset person and make them feel good about anything. It was one of her many superpowers.

  Lisa nodded, took a deep breath, and then in a deep southern accent she said, “My daddy is an undertaker.”

  I waited for her to keep going, but she seemed to think that was enough explanation of her problem.

  Finally I said, “Yes, go on. What’s happening?”

  “No, you don’t see do you?” Lisa said, clearly about to break into tears that I was sure would run black from all the makeup. “I’m turning twenty-one in four hours, and my daddy is an undertaker.”

  I looked puzzled and was about to try a tell-me-the-truth power on her when Patty said softly to me, “Capitalize the word Undertaker.”

  I opened my mouth to say something, then the realization hit me: the young woman in front of me was the child of an Undertaker, the most feared branch of all the deities.

  That wasn’t pos
sible.

  Undertakers never had children.

  I had never heard of an Undertaker having a kid, and of all the rumors about Undertakers, the worst rumor was that their kids never lived past the first moment of their twenty-first birthday!

  Now I saw the problem.

  “Which one of the twelve is your father?” I asked softly, almost afraid to hear the answer. There were only twelve, one per month. It seems the twelve of them took turns being Death for the month.

  “They call him Mortuary Dan,” Lisa said.

  Patty’s face went white, and I felt like the chicken TV dinner I had eaten was about to make another showing in the lobby of the MGM Grand.

  “I’m assuming you want to live longer than four more hours?” I asked, getting right to the point as I tried to get my stomach back under control.

  The worst part of the kid rumor was that their own fathers took them.

  The Undertakers took everyone at one point or another, except for maybe the Gods, who seemed to live a very long time. And some superheroes as well. Patty had been a superhero for about a hundred years before I became one. I’m not aging now and so far we’ve never talked much about what happened in those hundred years before I was born.

  “I would like to live longer,” she said. “Much longer. Can you help me?”

  Usually I just say that I can help the person, give them encouragement, make them feel something positive. But all I said to Lisa was, “We can try.”

  But what Patty and I could do against an Undertaker was beyond me. Especially Mortuary Dan, the oldest of all the Undertakers. He was the worst, the nastiest of the twelve from what I had heard. All twelve were nasty people. Dealing with the dead and dying every day, day after day, would do that to a person. It was no wonder they only worked one month at a time. I had no idea what they did the other eleven months of the year. I honestly didn’t want to know.

  Somehow, to save this woman, we had to stop Death himself.

  The big problem was that Death was her father.

  Two

  I took a deep breath and tried to pull my thoughts together. Somehow, we had to stop the tradition of not letting a child of an Undertaker live longer than the first moment of their twenty-first birthday.

  I had no idea at all why such a stupid rule existed.

  “Has your father ever talked to you about this?” I asked Lisa.

  She shook her head.

  “Do you have a place to stay here in Vegas?” I asked.

  Lisa nodded. “I came here to enjoy my last night, then when checking in, I broke down in front of Patty and told her the entire story.”

  “Tell you what, Lisa, go ahead and go to your room, have a nice relaxing bath, then meet us down here in two hours if we haven’t contacted you first. We need to do some work and you might as well enjoy the time it’s going to take us.”

  “I’ll upgrade you to a nice suite,” Patty said, nodding to me and gently turning Lisa around toward the front desk before the Daughter of Death could object.

  I pulled out my phone and called Screamer and had him meet us at our normal place downtown in fifteen minutes. Then I called The Smoke, the fourth member of my team, a human who could turn into a wolf when he wanted. He was out of town and working a case in the Canadian woods. There was no way he could make it in time, and I could tell he felt bad. I assured him that missing this one was a very good idea.

  Then, as Patty got Lisa headed toward the elevators and turned to join me, I shouted into the noise and crowds of the large lobby, “Stan! Need some help!”

  Around me the room froze except for Patty, as Stan took us out of time and appeared beside me. Everyone else just stopped in the instant of time. I had the power to do that as well, but Stan was better at it than I was.

  “I thought I might be getting a call when I saw who needed help. You know the rumor is that she’s going to be dead in a few hours by her own father’s hand.”

  “That’s what we need help with. We want to try to stop that.”

  Stan just laughed long and hard, choking before catching his breath. His laugh echoed in the quiet of the frozen huge lobby.

  Patty and I didn’t join him.

  After a moment he said, “You two are serious, aren’t you?”

  Patty and I both nodded. “I don’t even understand why a rule like that exists,” I said.

  “Because it does,” Stan said.

  “Why?” Patty asked. “How did it get started? Maybe if we knew that, we might be able to figure a way around it.”

  Stan shrugged. “I honestly don’t know. It’s just been a rule for the few children of Undertakers for as long as I have been around. Although, to be honest, no Undertaker has had a child except for Lisa in all my years. She’s the only one.”

  I wanted to ask Stan how long that was, but decided it was a question for another time.

  “Would Laverne know the reason behind all of this?” I asked, not really believing I had asked that question. Laverne was Lady Luck herself, one of the most powerful of all the gods. Patty and Screamer and I had saved her once, but that doesn’t mean lowly superheroes like me and Patty and Screamer can bother her at every whim. But I was hoping that Stan might ask Burt, the God of Casino Operations; and if he didn’t know, maybe Burt would ask Lady Luck.

  “I don’t know if she does or not,” Stan said. “You meeting the rest of your team at The Diner?”

  I nodded. “The Smoke is busy in Canada, but Screamer will be there.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” Stan said. “I’ll meet you at The Diner as soon as I get some information. You know, you two worry me sometimes, screwing with things you shouldn’t screw with.”

  Both of us nodded at that. What could we say?

  He vanished, letting us slip back into normal time as he did. Around us the movement and the noise filled the air again, slamming around us like a stream moving around rocks.

  “Sorry to get you into this,” Patty said, looking worried as we turned and headed for the parking garage.

  “Any excuse to spend time with you is great by me.”

  She laughed. “Silly, you never need an excuse, you know that.”

  For a moment I actually forgot that we were going up against an Undertaker, Death himself, to try to save Death’s daughter.

  Three

  Fifteen minutes later I told the problem to Screamer, a superhero with the power to read other people’s minds and transfer thoughts.

  We were sitting at a large table in The Diner, a hole-in-the-wall little restaurant decorated with pretend 1960s stuff. It was on a side street downtown, and a woman named Madge was our normal waitress. She always wore her uniform three sizes too small, and it was a chore to not stare when she had to pick anything up.

  If you did stare, you ended up having nightmares for a week about exploding humans. Or at least I always did.

  We had started going to The Diner when the team first formed and we had to fight the Slots of Saturn. And for every mission since, we met here to talk and plan and drink the fantastic milkshakes.

  Madge had just sat down our milkshakes when Screamer said he was very worried about even thinking of going up against an Undertaker. “Superheroes can live a long time, but we do die. We can be killed.”

  That was a thought I didn’t want to think about at all.

  Suddenly the sounds from the street stopped, and Madge froze in mid-stride back toward the lunch counter in the back.

  A moment later Laverne showed up with thin man dressed only in a loud-colored bathing suit and a white towel. I had no idea who he was, but he wasn’t looking happy.

  Stan appeared a moment later, smiled a sheepish grin, and sat down without a word at a nearby table to watch the fireworks.

  “You know, Laverne,” the man said, “I could have gotten at least two more waves in before sunset.”

  “Sorry, Dan,” Laverne said, shaking her head.

  Dan’s bathing suit changed to a dark, silk business suit with hi
s tie perfectly in place and a blue shirt under it that seemed like it belonged on a surfer.

  Then Laverne said, “But after the month is over, you’re going to have a lot of time to surf all you want.”

  Dan smiled, and an image of a skeleton face sort of flashed over his face. “You got that right.”

  All three of us at the table had slid back away from the front edge where Laverne and Dan were pulling up chairs and talking. I had zero doubt I was about to meet the most feared Undertaker of them all, Mortuary Dan.

  Dan sat down and then glanced at us, nodding. “I see, Laverne, that you have your top superhero team together here, minus one. What can I do to help?”

  Laverne glanced at the milkshake in front of Patty.

  Patty nodded that it was all right for Laverne to take a drink and slid it to Lady Luck. After a sip, Laverne smiled, then turned to Dan with a serious expression. “You need to talk to your daughter.”

  “Why?” Dan asked. “I’m going to see her in just under four hours.”

  Wow, this guy was cold, even for Death.

  “She doesn’t know what’s going to happen,” Laverne said.

  “That’s silly,” Dan said, taking Screamer’s untouched milkshake and sipping it. “Wow! These are darned fine milkshakes. I can see why you guys meet here.”

  I think I nodded, but damned if I was going to say anything.

  “She doesn’t know, Dan,” Laverne said, again sipping on the milkshake. “All she knows is the rumors handed down over centuries. You know she’s the first kid of any Undertaker since the Dark Ages.”

  Dan nodded and made a large dent in the milkshake. “Yeah, those were tough times. It’s been easier since.”

  The four of us just sat and listened to the two major gods talk and drink our milkshakes. As superheroes, what else could we do?

  “She thinks she’s going to die,” Laverne said.

  “Technically, she is,” Dan said, slurping the milkshake and somehow managing to not get any on his silk suit.