Smith's Monthly #7 Read online

  How does anyone tell a wife that her husband had been taken by ghost machines, and we had no idea to where, or to when, for that matter?

  I knew for a fact there just wasn’t an easy way.

  So instead, I changed the subject. I have learned over the years that changing the subject with a woman in the middle of a serious discussion often only makes matters worse, but at the moment it was the only thing I could think to do.

  I turned to Patty. “Have you had dinner?” I knew this was a strange way to get a first date, but at this point, any date was better than none.

  Besides thinking of the date and getting closer to that mole, I had to get us all out of the room, which was more than likely heavily monitored, before we could have any discussion about what we had seen.

  And I had to get myself out before I melted into a puddle of Poker Boy fluids that would surely stain the floor. The walls were getting really tight.

  Patty glanced at me, puzzled. Then she realized what I was doing. Or at least part of what I was doing. I hope she didn’t know about my desire to get closer to the mole on her neck.

  “No, I haven’t. And I’m hungry.”

  “How about you, Samantha?” I asked.

  “I don’t think I could eat,” she said. “I just want to know what happened to Ben.”

  “Well, you’re going to need to eat,” I said, making my voice sound as upbeat as I could without making it sound like a game show host. “To keep your strength up to help us find Ben. We’ll talk about all this over food, I promise.”

  Again the silence filled the room, making the walls close in even faster. This room was bad enough all by itself for me, but silence was making it torture. We needed to get out of here.

  Seconds ticked past.

  I started sweating. Or more likely I noticed I again that I was sweating.

  Patty and I just stood there, Sidekick and Superhero, staring at the woman we were supposed to be trying to help. But we needed to get out of this room, and maybe out of the casino for the coming discussion.

  More seconds ticked past as a blind woman faced us with sunglassed-covered eyes.

  I thought about putting out my arms and trying to hold the walls back, but I knew that wouldn’t work any more than it worked in the first Star Wars movie. I was in the trash-compactor of offices and there was no robot to throw a switch to save me.

  More seconds.

  Not even the wonderful raspberry smell of Patty kept me from sweating even more. I doubted even a close-up visit to the mole would save me at this point.

  The walls really were closing in.

  Honest.

  Finally, Samantha pushed herself to her feet, moving to get Sue into position. “I suppose I’m not going to find out what you saw while we’re in here. So lead me to food.”

  I barely made it through the door seconds before those walls smashed me into brainless pulp and trapped me in a windowless office, working a filing and data-entry job the rest of my life.

  It had been close.

  I had almost ended up living my worst nightmare. I was shaking as I went down the hall, forcing myself to not run.

  I’m a superhero who helps people, rescues dogs, and plays poker for a living. I never said things didn’t scare me.

  But it had been worth the risk. We knew what had happened to Ben, and I had a dinner date with Patty.

  Chapter Five

  ADDICTION

  PATTY SEEMED TO KNOW where she wanted to go, so I followed along as she took Samantha’s arm and expertly got her and her dog Sue from the back rooms, through the slots, and out one of the many doors of the Horseshoe Casino and Hotel.

  We emerged onto what used to be called “Glitter Gulch” back in the days when train passengers got off the train a few blocks away and faced a street lined with blazing lights and signs.

  Vegas Vic, a two-story tall, rail-thin, neon cowboy still looked over Frontier Street, just as he did back in the forties. He had a cigarette hanging from his mouth like a bad movie cliche, and a thumb that pointed toward who knew where.

  In the old days, his thumb was meant to direct customers to the Pioneer Club. I suppose a two-story tall cowboy with a butt hanging out of his mouth was an attraction. I never saw him as that. I thought of him more as a landmark of downtown Vegas, a symbol, if you will, of the merging of the cowboy west with the neon lights of gambling, punctuated by the threat of dying from cancer.

  A perfect Las Vegas icon.

  During the sixties, Glitter Gulch had become more like a classic skid row as the strip casinos miles away became more popular. Back then the bums hung out on the street corners, the casinos didn’t have the money to fix much of anything, and only the gamblers who were into grinding out each buck went downtown. Even with the Horseshoe starting the World Series of Poker back in the early seventies, I didn’t want to go down there. There was just too much fun to be had out on the strip.

  Things for downtown Las Vegas started to change in the early 1980’s as the city did everything it could to revive the downtown area. They even went so far as to turn a few blocks of Frontier Street into a pedestrian mall and cover it with a light show that was hard to match. I think I remember hearing there were about two and a half million bulbs in that canopy over those four city blocks, but I could be off by a few hundred thousand either way.

  Now, with the casinos around the big downtown mall remodeled as much as the space would allow, the area had at least held steady for a few years. I sort of liked it more now than the strip, actually. It had a more personal feel about it than the big super casinos.

  And it was only a few feet between casinos instead of dozens of football fields. And when you’re walking on a hot evening, that’s an important consideration.

  The heat slapped at me as we stepped outside. Even though the sun was setting on the town that never slept, it was still damn hot. In the middle of the night in the summer it was known to stay above a hundred degrees here. It was too early in the year for that kind of really intense heat, but it was still hot outside.

  Too hot for my tastes, but after my close call with office death, it felt good to be out under the darkening blue sky and millions of light bulbs.

  Patty quickly got us across the mall area, around a corner, and into the wonderful coolness of a cafe tucked between a casino and the side of an office building. The place had the feel of a fake diner, with bright replicas of things from the fifties plastered all over the walls.

  I doubted any place actually looked like this back in the fifties. This was just a twenty-first century version of what people thought diners looked like in 1955. I hope the history books recorded the decade more accurately than diners, or the country’s kids were going to be really messed up.

  However, what the tacky pictures of Elvis and poodle-skirts on the walls often meant was decent food and large portions. Monster portions, actually. A burger in a place with a bubbling jukebox (always a replica of a real bubblier) was extra big, with more fries than an Idaho potato field.

  And God forbid you order a milkshake with your burger. Unless your body had a high tolerance for sugar and milk, don’t order a milkshake in a place with fifties memorabilia on the walls. It will be so good you’ll have to drink it all, and so big you’ll regret doing it. So the safest course is just not order one.

  Since I was still full from my wonderful steak, I ordered an iced tea and nothing more from a woman who looked like she might have actually been a waitress since the fifties. Her face had more ravines than the Grand Canyon and her lips were painted bright red, with a gloss that made them seem to extend off her face. Her bright blue eyeliner contrasted with her large black hair and pink waitress uniform with the name Madge clinging to the top of her large right breast.

  Madge, chewing gum and without a word, took my drink order, Patty’s order of a salad and diet coke, and Samantha’s order of a cheese sandwich and coffee. Then she nodded to Sue and spoke for the first time. “I’ll bring the dog a dish of water.�
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  With a pop of her gum, she turned and headed for the kitchen.

  My gaze followed her for a moment, wishing almost instantly I hadn’t. My mind shouted, “Don’t look!”

  But habit wins, and even if I am a superhero, I am a male. I couldn’t help myself, honest. I looked at Madge’s ass moving under the tight skirt as she walked away. Her ass was large and sagged in places a woman’s ass shouldn’t sag. It was also clear that Madge wore bikini underwear under her pink uniform. Even through the uniform it looked like that underwear hurt.

  I knew, without a doubt, the image of Marge’s ass would haunt me for the rest of the World Series of Poker.

  Madge walked past a row of sit-down video poker machines, the type seen everywhere in Nevada and many other states. An elderly woman sat at the second one, her big black purse beside her, her attention focused on the screen, her hand shaking every time she made a play.

  She had thinning, gray hair done up in a type of bun, and was wearing an older-style long cloth coat that looked like it had seen better days back when Madge was young and could wear bikini underwear without shocking guys like me.

  When you play live poker against other players in a poker room, or home game, skill is everything. You win what the other players and your comparative skill allow you to win. But poker machines are set to pay the house a given amount, called an edge, just like a slot machine. Sure, it might be set loose, meaning it will return to the player ninety-nine out of every one hundred bets made, but it still kept that one bet. And given enough time, those one bets built huge casinos.

  Most video poker machines were not set that loose.

  On a video poker machine, you could knock that edge down some by making good decisions, but you could never really beat the machines day in and day out, no matter what any book (written by a guy making money from writing a book) told you.

  Studies have shown that of all the slot machines, for some reason, video poker was the most addictive. The theory was that it engaged the player more than just yanking on a crank, or pushing a button and watching wheels spin. And that engagement turned into a form of gambling addiction.

  As I watched, the old woman reached into her big black purse, pulled out a ten-dollar bill, and fed it to the machine, which yanked it from her trembling fingers.

  I had no idea what that woman’s story was. She might be very rich and very lonely, and playing that machine was just her way of passing the time.

  Or she might be playing a part of her retirement funds with that last bet, allowing herself only ten or twenty or thirty dollars in losses every time she played. She might have that kind of control. Most people did.

  Or maybe that was food money she had just put in there.

  Or money she had gotten from selling something she had owned for decades. Maybe she was one of the growing numbers of elderly that were addicted to the machines and unable to get away.

  Or not want to get away.

  For many people, playing the machines gave life reason, and hope, and excitement where there was none. It was a reason to get up in the morning, something to look forward to the next day. The excitement of the big wins made them feel alive for a short time.

  Las Vegas (and every casino in the world) was full of men and women like that gray-haired woman sitting at that machine. They all played for their own varied reasons, just like I played live poker for mine.

  But it was said that men and women like her created the ghost slots. Or at least so the theory goes. At some point in the past, I was sure that someone had spent weeks, or even years, playing the Saturn Slots, begging them, cussing at them, talking to them, pleading with them, day in and day out. Those slots had become a person’s life, had given them both joy and misery.

  Sometimes for months, sometimes for years, a person can pour his or her life force into a slot machine, until finally the time came when not only did the machine have all the person’s money, but it held their entire being.

  The numbers of people who died every year in Las Vegas playing slot machines was another well-kept secret, but it happened so often no casino thought much about it. There was always another live body to take the cold one’s place.

  But who were these people who died? No study I had ever seen had looked into it, but I was sure that most were just tourists who had heart attacks. But a few were regulars, local residents, gambling addicts who made one machine a part of their life, and of their death.

  And in that death, when some person gave a slot machine everything they had, the theory was that the machine took on a life of its own.

  But like any slot machine, it must be fed. Only ghost slots don’t need money, they need more life.

  I’m a superhero and I have no idea where my powers come from. Half the time I can’t even figure out names for the powers I have. As a person given superhero powers to help others, I know that there are many strange things in this world. And having ghost slots was not beyond my belief system.

  But I also understood that a person does not have to be kidnapped by a ghost slot to lose themselves, their lives, and their loved ones to a machine.

  It happened all the time, all over the world.

  As I watched the old woman with the big black purse, she pulled out another ten-dollar bill and the machine ate it like a hungry animal.

  She didn’t even seem to notice.

  Chapter Six

  ANOTHER SUPERHERO

  IT BECAME CLEAR, in very short order, before Madge even got back with our drinks, that Samantha was not going to believe Patty and me about what happened to her husband.

  We tried to tell her, honest we did, but our story sounded wild and far-fetched, even to me. I couldn’t blame her for not believing us. She was blind, hadn’t seen anything, and now had two people she had just met telling her that they had seen her husband taken away by ghost slot machines, but that the tape they had seen it on had been destroyed.

  Yeah, right.

  It would be simpler for her to believe we were trying to pull a scam on her than the story we were telling her.

  Madge delivered our drinks and turned away. I managed not to look at her ass, but the image of the first look was still with me clearly. And it was when I was trying to push the image of Madge in tight bikini underwear out of my mind that I realized I knew how to get Samantha to believe Patty and me.

  I needed the help of another superhero.

  “You have a cell phone?” I asked Patty.

  She looked at me with those big brown eyes questioning me, then nodded.

  The silence in our booth was cut only by the sound of Elvis singing “Hound Dog” on the jukebox. Patty handed me the phone and I dialed a number I had memorized a few years back.

  The voice on the other end said, “Yeah?”

  “Screamer,” I said. “I need your help.”

  “Where are you at, Poker Boy?” Screamer asked, recognizing my voice at once and not making me identify myself in front of the women.

  “A diner down off the mall on Frontier. Across from the Horseshoe.”

  “Madge working tonight?” he asked.

  “She is,” I said.

  “Whatever you do,” Screamer said, “don’t look at her ass.”

  “Too late,” I said.

  “No wonder you need my help,” he said. “I’ll be there in five.”

  And he hung up.

  “Who is Screamer?” Patty asked as Samantha shook her head in clear disgust. I had no doubt that she was about to get up and just leave.

  “Screamer is a guy named Toledo Moss. He’s been a friend of mine for years.”

  “Toledo Moss?” Patty said. “The same guy who helps the cops all the time?”

  “The same guy,” I said. “He does that for free. Mostly, he makes his living working with casinos stopping thefts.”

  Actually, what I didn’t want to tell either one of them, especially Samantha, was that Screamer had a superpower. He could take the image from one person’s mind and transfer it
into another person’s mind. Such a superpower made him a very strong weapon in solving all kinds of cases, especially if there wasn’t enough proof, or a body had been hidden.

  Screamer could take the image of the crime from the suspected criminal and transfer it into the cop’s mind, and then the cop would go out and find the evidence that would stand up in court.

  I was sure that taking of thoughts like that had to be protected under the Constitution in some fashion or another, but I doubt the original framers had given superpowers any thought. Just to be safe, though, Screamer never ended up in court on any case he helped solve, and no one really claimed what he said he could do actually worked.

  It just did, and the cops and casinos that hired him left that alone.

  “So how is this guy going to help find Ben?” Samantha asked.

  I didn’t answer, or brush off her question, because at that point Madge brought the food. And by the time she had turned to go back into the kitchen, Screamer had pulled a chair up to the table so he was between Patty and Samantha.

  Screamer looked to be about forty, had a smile on him that woman said was to die for, and could stop a truck with his intense, green-eyed gaze. As far as I knew, he had never married, and with his ability to get inside another person’s head, I wondered how he even managed to get close to many people.

  I know a lot of my superpowers did not have off switches, but at least my powers needed me to be near a Casino and have my coat on to work. I couldn’t imagine what kind of mental screens he must have developed if his powers worked all the time.

  “Toledo Moss,” I said, “meet Patty from the Horseshoe, and Samantha MacDuff, a guest there.”

  Samantha extended her hand and Screamer took it, gently shaking it while saying, “Nice meeting you.”

  Then he added, “I’m sorry about your husband. We’ll find him.”

  I nodded. It was always a real pleasure as a superhero to see another superhero at work.