Smith's Monthly #22 Read online

  Copyright Information

  Smith’s Monthly Issue #22

  All Contents copyright © 2015 Dean Wesley Smith

  Published by WMG Publishing

  Cover and interior design copyright © 2015 WMG Publishing

  Cover art copyright © by Superherotm/Dreamstime.com, Villmek/Dreamstime.com

  “Introduction: Bringing Back a Novel” copyright © 2015 Dean Wesley Smith

  “Nonexistent No More” copyright © 2015 Dean Wesley Smith, cover design copyright © 2015 WMG Publishing, cover art by Sdmix/Dreamstime.com, Deniscristo/Dreamstime.com

  “In the Shade of the Slowboat Man” copyright © 2015 Dean Wesley Smith, cover design copyright © 2015 WMG Publishing, cover art by Boborsillo/Dreamstime.com

  An Easy Shot copyright © 2015 Dean Wesley Smith, cover design copyright © 2015 WMG Publishing, cover art by Fotoslaz/Dreamstime.com

  “Standing in Line at the Intersection” copyright © 2015 Dean Wesley Smith, cover design copyright © 2015 WMG Publishing, cover art by Elena Volkoya/Dreamstime.com

  “It’s a Story About a Guy Who...” copyright © 2015 Dean Wesley Smith, cover design copyright © 2015 WMG Publishing, cover art by Mircala/Dreamstime.com

  Dead Money: A Doc Hill Thriller copyright © 2015 Dean Wesley Smith, cover design copyright © 2015 WMG Publishing, cover art by Superherotm/Dreamstime.com, Villmek/Dreamstime.com

  This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in the fiction 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.

  Introduction

  BRINGING BACK A NOVEL

  The novel in this issue has a very long history for me. Far, far, far too long for me to detail out here in an introduction.

  But I do want to hit the high points of why the novel existed and why I am now putting it in these pages.

  First off, I wrote Dead Money: A Doc Hill Thriller about twelve years ago. Actually, working with my former agent, we built Dead Money through an outline process that we both wanted to try. The process worked in its own fashion. And I learned a ton.

  But I had not written the book, only a very detailed outline when the process stopped.

  About a year (and two agents) later (as I said, a long and unpleasant story), I got around to actually writing the book.

  My new agent at the time sent it to six of the top presidents of major publishing companies, asking for a quarter of a million advance for the book and a sequel to follow.

  It was to be a start of a major new thriller series under my pen name Dean Edwards. My agent was all excited. Me, at that point, not so much.

  And we got six glowing letters, all passing on the book for one reason and one reason only: Poker does not sell.

  They loved the book and the characters. Poker does not sell.

  Yup. The insanity of traditional publishing just keeps rearing its ugly head over and over. The moment when the brains in New York thought poker didn’t sell was right in the middle of the boom-time for poker, when it was being picked up by every television channel on the planet.

  Poker does not sell.

  One president of a major publishing company actually said that Dead Money had kept him up all night reading, but he couldn’t make a case for a poker thriller. He wanted me to write something different, not focused on poker because poker does not sell.

  Because the experience with Dead Money and a few other books had been so bad, at that point I was pretty fed up with the stupidity of traditional publishing anyway. I said thanks, but no thanks to writing another thriller for the idiot and tossed the book in a drawer and went and played professional poker instead of writing about it.

  And I had a blast and made great money.

  So along comes this indie publishing revolution and Kris and I decided we wanted to be a part of it and be a part of the new publishing company WMG Publishing Inc. At that point, about five years ago, I was back writing and enjoying it again. Mostly only short fiction.

  So about three years ago, the fine publisher of WMG Publishing, Allyson Longueira along with my wife, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, approached me about WMG Publishing buying Dead Money.

  I said sure. I no longer cared. The book just had too much baggage for me to write any more Doc Hill stories yet and I told them that. So they would be publishing the book alone, without a series to follow it.

  And WMG Publishing Inc. did, doing a great job with the publishing and promotion. But as we all expected, it had few sales because I didn’t follow it with more thrillers.

  It just sort of sat out there, all alone.

  The saga of Dead Money continued.

  Then two more years pass. I have written a couple dozen novels for this magazine you are reading, and I am spending time in July this summer writing a bunch of short stories instead of a new novel.

  And more importantly, I had left most of the baggage that the poor Dead Money novel had been carrying beside the road along the way.

  So now, finally after twelve years, I am interested in writing more Doc Hill novels and stories.

  Doc Hill, for those following this magazine, makes appearances in the Cold Poker Gang novels. Doing that series has certainly helped shed some of the problems with writing more Doc Hill books as well.

  So it was time to get Dead Money in Smith’s Monthly.

  The novel has been called by many a great thriller and I am honestly, in hindsight, very proud of the book. With some luck, over this next year, I’ll write another thriller with Doc Hill as the star.

  And finally, the idea of that sounds like fun.

  I hope you enjoy the book.

  —Dean Wesley Smith

  July 18, 2015

  Lincoln City, Oregon

  When the wife of one the guardians of humanity, herself one of the most powerful beings in the universe, comes looking for help, a superhero does what he can.

  Poker Boy and his sidekick (and girlfriend), Front Desk Girl, must help with no idea why.

  NONEXISTENT NO MORE

  A Poker Boy Story

  ONE

  Who knew that Wolfgang Sucker had a wife? A Mrs. Sucker.

  And since Wolfgang was a blue-skinned Searchlight, if I had thought of him having a wife, I would have assumed that Mrs. Sucker would be blue as well.

  Wrong. Mrs. Wolfgang Sucker was bright pink, and depending on the light, the pink shifted to bright purple, very bright purple. And she had wide brown eyes instead of blue eyes.

  Just as the first time I saw her husband, I first saw Mrs. Sucker walking toward me across the lobby of the MGM Grand Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. I was leaning against one of the stone pillars in the lobby waiting for my girlfriend and sidekick, Patty Ledgerwood, aka Front Desk Girl to get off work.

  Stunning didn’t begin to describe Mrs. Sucker, even though no one in the lobby seemed to even notice her, and they should have. Every man in the room should have been staring. Her body suit, or at least I hoped it was a body suit, blended perfectly with her pink/purple skin making her look to be a very bright nude, only with no real details showing.

  Maybe she didn’t have any of those details. I just didn’t know. In fact, what I knew about Searchlights wasn’t much, other than they were very, very powerful.

  She stood as thin and as tall as her husband, at least six-six, and she couldn’t have weighed more than one-hundred-and-twenty pounds.

  And I was sure that most of that weight she carried on the front of her chest.

  She was the wet dream of every modeling agency on the planet. Even with the bright pink/purple skin color. It was
just weird how the color kept changing from shade to shade the closer she got.

  And on her completely bald head she had the same patterns of white marks as her husband. The patterns shifted as she moved her head slowly from one side to the other, making different scenes.

  Searchlights were a race that no one in the superheroes and gods seemed to know much about, or even where on Earth they lived. They seemed to exist in nowhere land.

  The Searchlights were called the guardians of the human race, and usually worked with the different deities when a problem threatened humanity.

  I first met her husband, Wolfgang Sucker, during the big fight against the Fuzzy-Wuzzy bugs from another dimension. He had been assigned to the Gambling Gods, and since as Poker Boy, I work for them, I got a chance to work with him.

  “Poker Boy,” the female Searchlight said, her voice as raspy as her husband’s, and her breath just as bad. “My name is Emmanuel Sucker, the wife, as you humans would call it, of Wolfgang Sucker.”

  I wanted to back away to get out of the smell of rotted garlic and dead fish that was her breath, but instead I somehow managed to bow slightly as is a traditional show of respect when talking to a Searchlight.

  Then I said, “Very nice to meet you.”

  “My husband spoke highly of you and your team in our last mating.”

  I opened my mouth to say something, then closed it and decided that a nod was safer. I was learning far more about the Searchlight society and relationships than I wanted to at that moment. And any question I might ask might cause a lot of problems—or more likely, answers I just didn’t want to hear.

  And I didn’t need my imagination going any farther thinking about a tall pink woman and blue man mating, constantly turning their heads from side to side.

  “I need to talk to Front Desk Girl, if you don’t mind?” Emmanuel Sucker asked.

  “Of course,” I said. “Would you wait here while I jump and get her? It will take only a moment.”

  She nodded.

  I knew exactly where Patty was, and could have easily marched the ten or fifteen steps to the front desk and asked for her, but I wanted to practice my newly discovered superpower of jumping around in space.

  And besides, when a Searchlight started asking to talk with other superheroes, it usually meant they wanted to talk to the major gods as well. And that meant something very bad was about to happen to humanity in general.

  So I winked out, appearing beside Patty in the employee lounge at the same moment taking us out of time so that no other employee saw me appear.

  Taking myself out of time used to be my most fun superpower before I learned how to jump around in space. Now I was doing both and that just made me happy. It’s not often a simple poker player can learn to teleport and step between moments in time.

  Around us a half-dozen of Patty’s co-employees were frozen in positions of that moment in time. One woman was chewing on a candy bar and her mouth was half open and it wasn’t a pretty sight.

  “I love doing that,” I said, smiling at Patty’s wonderful brown eyes. She had her long brown hair let down and was wearing the standard black slacks and white blouse of the MGM front desk employee.

  “You are getting pretty good at it,” Patty said, smiling and kissing me. “Just like many other things.”

  I think I blushed. In fact I was sure I blushed. And that simple hint of suggestion almost made me forget about Emmanuel Sucker standing in the front lobby.

  “We have a problem,” I said. “Did you know Searchlights have mates?”

  “No, I didn’t,” Patty said, frowning. Even with a frown on her face, she was the best-looking woman I had ever seen.

  “Well, they do, and Emmanuel Sucker, Wolfgang Sucker’s wife, is out front in the lobby and wants to talk to you.”

  Patty’s eyes got wide. “Me? Why?”

  “I didn’t ask.”

  Patty was a superhero like I was. There was little if any reason a Searchlight would ask for one of us.

  Then I looked up and shouted “Stan! Need help!”

  Patty nodded and I flicked us back to a position in front of the Searchlight, then took all three of us out of time so we could talk without all the noise of the lobby.

  An instant later, Stan, the God of Poker, joined us, going through the ritual slight bowing to the Searchlight.

  Then Emmanuel Sucker, her bald purple head moving slowly from side to side, the patterns on her head moving and changing, bowed slightly to Patty. “Thank you for seeing me.”

  Patty bowed slightly in return. “It is my honor to meet you. What can we do for you? Is there a problem we are going to need help with?”

  “To be most honest,” Emmanuel said to Patty, the patterns on her head seeming to move slightly faster than normal, “I only need your help concerning a problem with my husband.”

  I glanced at Stan, who looked as shocked as I felt.

  As far as the little bit of history I knew, no Searchlight had ever come to just talk with one superhero before. They always contacted superheroes first to be taken to the higher gods of each deity. Sort of like going to a servant to be taken to the Queen.

  “That will be no problem,” Patty said. She turned to Stan. “Can you jump Mrs. Sucker and myself to the meeting room off the main corridor near the lobby? I will call for you when we are finished.”

  Stan nodded, and an instant later the two women were gone.

  “You have any idea what that is about?” Stan asked.

  “No more than you do,” I said.

  He nodded, then said, “I had better tell Laverne and Patty’s boss what’s happening.”

  Then he too was gone.

  TWO

  I let myself drop back into real time.

  The sounds of the lobby of the MGM Grand smashed into me. It was always a shock going from the complete silence of between-time and back to real time when it came to the noise. All the people who had been frozen in mid-stride or mid-sentence a moment before were now suddenly moving and talking again.

  I stood against the stone pillar off to one side of the grand lobby, no longer waiting for Patty to get off work, but to work her superhero magic with a Searchlight.

  I had a sinking feeling about this, and I couldn’t tell if that sinking feeling was one of my superpowers trying to warn me, or my normal guy worries about his girlfriend being in some sort of trouble.

  I was just starting to try to sort that out when Stan appeared again and took us back out of time, freezing all the movement in the lobby and silencing all the noise.

  “I talked to Laverne,” he said. “She didn’t seem worried, and told me to keep her informed.”

  Laverne was Lady Luck herself, one of the most powerful gods anywhere.

  “Did you tell Judy what was happening?” I asked.

  Judy was the God of Hospitality, the top deity that covered everything to do with lodging and guests staying anywhere. Patty was a superhero under the hospitality gods, working directly under the God of Front Desks, Benson, just like I worked directly under Stan, the God of Poker.

  “All Judy said was she was wondering when this was going to happen,” Stan said, “and told me to keep her informed as well.”

  “What was going to happen?” I asked.

  Stan shrugged. “Now you know exactly as much as I do. Neither of them would say another word.”

  “Did you know Searchlights were married?” I asked Stan.

  “I assumed they had something like that, otherwise how would they have little Searchlights.”

  “I thought they lived forever.”

  “No one lives forever,” Stan said. “Even gods have to be born.”

  I just shook my head as Stan dropped us back into real time and everyone in the lobby started moving again and the noise of regular people doing regular things washed over us.

  We both leaned back against the stone pillar and using the skill of calm that all good poker players have, we just waited while Patty talked with the brig
ht pink Mrs. Sucker.

  But I had to say, the curiosity was killing me.

  And the worry for Patty was making my stomach twist into knots.

  THREE

  About fifteen minutes of intense worry later, Stan nodded to something I couldn’t hear and jumped us both to the meeting room.

  Patty was alone, sitting at the head of the long oak table in the ornate MGM Grand meeting room. The only sign that Emmanuel Sucker had been there was the lingering odor of her bad breath.

  Patty looked worried and tired. I had rarely seen her look like that.

  “She wants a place to live,” Patty said, looking up at me and giving me a tired smile. “And a job.”

  Okay, I had to admit, my mouth sort of gaped open at that. The idea of a Searchlight wanting a job was just nuts. They were the beings that gods bowed to, that watched over humanity against all the threats that might harm us regular people.

  Why would Emmanuel Sucker, a Searchlight, need a place to live and a job?

  Patty signed and said, “She wants to live here in Vegas for the next twenty-one plus years. She likes it here. And she’s pregnant.”

  Like that was going to explain everything.

  “You mean Wolfgang kicked her out for getting pregnant?” I asked.

  Behind me Laverne and Judy both laughed.

  Stan and I both spun around, moving quickly aside to let Lady Luck and the God of Hospitality closer to Patty. There was a real disadvantage to jumping through space. You could really sneak up on someone. And those two had snuck up on both me and the God of Poker.

  Lady Luck had on a black pants suit and black business jacket and looked like every powerful businesswoman tended to look. And she was thin enough and had her hair pulled back tight, making her look like she was even more in control of everything.