Smith's Monthly #25 Read online

  The Diner was one of those toss-backs to the 1950s and early 1960s, with phony decorations and everything in red and black checks, including the tile on the floor and the booths. It just glared pretend memories. I didn’t need to pretend to have memories—I had enough real ones of my own.

  The minute we had dropped into a booth, I had used Patty’s cell phone to call the third member of our superhero trio. Screamer, a guy who could take the thoughts out of one person’s mind and let another person see them. He also could roam around inside a person’s head on touch, and make them see things they didn’t want to see. He got his nickname from making a mass-murderer scream so loud that the murderer damaged his vocal cords and had to write down where he had buried ten different bodies. Screamer often worked with the Las Vegas police and casino owners.

  I just had a gut feeling that we were going to need him.

  When I had told Screamer that Patty and I had an important case, he had said. “At The Diner?”

  “Yup,” I had said.

  “Be there in ten minutes.” Not even one complaint about it being Christmas Eve.

  For over five cases now, since the great Ghost Slots case, we had used The Diner as a meeting place. It was like a second home for all three of us in Vegas.

  No one was on The Diner’s five slots tonight, which for some reason made me feel a little better about humanity in general. Usually the elderly played those slots at all times of the day or night, pumping away their retirement savings simply because they had nothing better to do with their time. Hitting a small jackpot gave them a moment of excitement, a feeling of youth for a fleeting second before the bell stopped and the machine asked for another dollar.

  At least tonight, on this one special night, they had something else to do for a few hours. Chances are some of them would be back tomorrow.

  Patty and I decided to split a chocolate milkshake, since the milkshakes here were large enough to send a normal person into a diabetic coma. Patty had had dinner at the Mirage earlier with her father, and my wonderful turkey and gravy from the buffet was still keeping me satisfied. Madge had just brought the shake when Screamer came in and dropped into the booth beside Patty.

  Screamer’s real name was Toledo Moss, and he looked like any other tourist you would see walking the Strip, with his short cut brown hair, his dark glasses, his loud Hawaiian shirt, Bermuda shorts, and sandals.

  Screamer had lived in Vegas his entire life and knew exactly how to blend in. No one looking at any of us sitting in that booth would think we were three superheroes, fighting to help the weak, and this time bring luck back to the planet.

  “I’m hearing rumors that something big is going on,” Screamer said turning back to face me after he asked Madge for his own chocolate shake.

  “Laverne is missing,” Patty said.

  Screamer snorted, just as I had done, then laughed. I’m glad I wasn’t the only one who snorted at the news.

  “Stan told us a few minutes before I called you,” I said. “She’s been missing for two and a half hours now.”

  Screamer stared at me, then glanced at Patty to see her serious face before turning back to face me across the booth. “Is luck missing as well?”

  I nodded. “Completely, from the entire world, from what Stan said.”

  Screamer opened his mouth, then closed it, clearly stunned.

  We all sat there for a long minute, just thinking, until finally Screamer said, “I can’t imagine the world without luck.”

  I shrugged. “Since I’m a poker player and don’t believe in luck, I can imagine it just fine. Everything will just continue to happen as it statistically should.”

  Screamer again started to say something, then smiled and stared right at me. “Poker Boy, I can tell you have a plan.”

  “Read me like a book,” I said, smiling back. “First off, we need to figure out who would get the most out of Lady Luck, and all luck for that matter, being gone. Who would have the power to trick or trap Laverne and hold her, and gain by doing so?”

  “Not many, I would guess,” Patty said.

  “That’s what we need to find out,” I said.

  Patty and Screamer both nodded so I went on. “Second, we need to find out statistically what the chances are for different causes of Laverne’s vanishing. Since luck is no longer with us, only numbers will dictate what happened—or will happen—to her.”

  “And how are we going to do that?” Screamer asked.

  “Oh, don’t tell me,” Patty said, staring at me, looking disgusted.

  I didn’t blame her. Just the idea had me feeling a little nauseous, but I could see no choice. “The Bookkeeper.”

  “Oh, no chance,” Screamer said, shaking his head from side to side. “I’d rather crawl around in a mass murderer’s head than go into that house again.”

  “I’ll do it,” I said, sounding a lot more sure of myself than I actually did. The Bookkeeper was the most brilliant statistician in history, and a superhero over in the mathematics world of gods. He had been around and working for the gods for centuries. However, he looked very much like a rat, and his house smelled so bad that last time I went in there I had to stand in a shower for an hour to even pretend to get the smell off of me.

  “Good,” Screamer said. “I’ll start asking around about who had it out for Laverne, who was feuding with her, that sort of thing.”

  “I’ll go with you,” Patty said to me, “but I’m changing into old clothes first.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “We’re a long-shot on solving this.”

  “Not as long a shot as you might think,” Screamer said. “The three of us are a pretty powerful team.”

  I could only nod at that, but I still didn’t believe we had much of a chance. We were only lowly superheroes. Lady Luck was one of the top gods of all gods. And without luck, who knew what would happen.

  Screamer stood and tossed a five on the table to pay for the milkshake Madge hadn’t delivered yet. “I’ll get going, see what I can dig up, meet you two back here? How long?”

  “Three hours,” I said. “We’ll need time for showers.”

  “Good luck out there.” He turned and headed for the door.

  Patty and I sat, just enjoying each other’s company as we finished our milkshake and part of Screamer’s. Neither of us was in a real hurry to wade into that smell that filled The Bookkeeper’s home.

  THREE

  Patty changed clothes while I waited in the car outside of her condo, not really wanting to chance going upstairs and getting distracted. Twenty minutes later, we pulled up in front of the dark house belonging to The Bookkeeper.

  It was a standard, suburban house in a pretty standard subdivision. Only unlike the others along the street, his house had no landscaping at all, just weeds and covered-over windows. The house had tall fences on both sides, built by the neighbors to shut off the look of the house from the rest of the homes along the silent street. Christmas decorations lit up most of the homes, looking odd in the desert climate. Only The Bookkeeper’s house had no decorations, and clearly hadn’t been painted in decades.

  I left my hat and coat in the car, not wanting to get my superhero costume smelling so much I couldn’t wear it again. I had other black coats and other hats that worked just as well as a superhero costume, but they were back in Oregon in my double-wide trailer near the casino. Luckily I had left a few changes of regular clothes, including another pair of shoes, in Patty’s apartment a month or so back, so I could change everything but my coat and hat after we were finished here.

  About halfway up the sidewalk on this warm Christmas Eve, the smell started to hit us, and by the time we were standing at the door, my eyes were watering.

  Let me try to describe this smell. Imagine a full garbage can behind a fish restaurant sitting in the sun for a few days, then combine that with a dirty cat box that hadn’t been changed for a month, and mix in a full latrine stench.

  Yeah, bad didn’t begin to describe it.


  “You don’t need to do this,” I said to Patty, trying to cover my nose with my arm but failing miserably.

  “I have a hunch this is going to need us both,” Patty said, blinking hard and clearly trying to not choke.

  I had learned while working with Patty that her “hunches” were part of her super power as Front Desk Girl. It was her ability to foresee problems for guests in hotels before they actually happened. I never doubted her hunches, and they had always been right so far.

  I banged on the door, then rang the doorbell. We both stepped back, trying to get away from the smell a little and waited.

  Nothing.

  I banged on the door again, then shouted, “Bookkeeper, it’s Poker Boy. I need to talk to you!”

  Nothing.

  The super ability that kept me out of bad situations and bad poker hands was going off like a large gong in my head. Something was very wrong here, and my warning wanted me to avoid it. I often ignored that warning, especially in rescue situations.

  I glanced at Patty. “You feeling it?”

  She nodded.

  Suddenly, a car pulled up behind Patty’s car and Screamer climbed out. There was no reason for him to be here except to warn us about something or tell us that Laverne had been found. I was hoping for the latter, but my senses were telling me that wasn’t the case.

  We went down the driveway to meet him, trying to put some distance between us and the smell radiating out of that house.

  “Glad I caught you,” Screamer said. “You could be walking into a trap. It’s The Bookkeeper who has had a problem with Lady Luck lately.”

  “You’re kidding,” I said. “He’s no more than a superhero like we are. Why would he go up against Lady Luck herself?”

  “He’s crazy,” Patty said, waving her hand in front of her nose to make her point, as if any of us could forget the smell The Bookkeeper lived in.

  “He’s been claiming that he can prove that luck is not needed in the universe,” Screamer said, “that it is a man-made assumption to explain statistical occurrences.”

  “If he actually proved that, then Lady Luck would vanish,” Patty said.

  “And The Bookkeeper would be in charge,” I said, glancing at the dark, ugly, smelling house behind us. “We need to get in there and find out what is really going on.”

  I went back to Patty’s car and got my hat and coat and put them on. Smell or not, I was going to need the power. Patty grabbed a flashlight out of her glove box, then the three of us headed up the driveway toward the front door, fighting our way into the waves of smell.

  At the front door, Patty put her hand on the door handle and I could hear the lock click.

  It seemed that another power that Front Desk Girl had was helping people into their rooms after they’d locked themselves out. I just figured that power would be in making a new key, but I had learned a few cases back that it extended to opening just about anything that was locked.

  “I’m going to be ready to shift us out of time,” I said as I took Patty’s hand. “Screamer, stay close.”

  He nodded. I had discovered during the problems with the Ghost Slots that an extension of my ability to stop and analyze a poker hand extended to taking myself out of time, or basically freezing time around me. Stan had first showed me that trick, but it wasn’t until I was with Patty that I had learned how to do it myself. On our last adventure, I had saved the three of us from getting killed by a huge wall of water washing down a dry gulch as we looked for an ancient burial ground of the Silicon Suckers. I just stopped time and the three of us moved out of the way of the water.

  I just hoped that if something happened here I could do it again quickly.

  It was just too bad that none of the three of us had an odor-repelling super power.

  I led the way as we waded into the thick smell of the dark living room. The air got warmer, which made the smell even worse, if that was possible. The farther we got into the room, the more worried about this I felt.

  The living room was piled high with rotting boxes of who-knew-what kind of trash. A path wound its way through the boxes toward the hallway and the back room where The Bookkeeper kept his computer set up with a small bed tucked in one corner.

  In the faint light of the flashlight that Patty held, I could see littered remains of hundreds of different meals, mostly T.V. dinners, some still covered with black flies. Disgusting didn’t begin to describe it.

  Behind me Patty coughed softly and Screamer just said “Oh, man.”

  The house was a standard ranch house, with three bedrooms and a bath down a hallway off the living room. I knew, from the last time I had been here, that The Bookkeeper had set up his computer in the first bedroom on the right, across from a bathroom that smelled like the toilet had been used and used and not flushed in five years.

  A faint light came from the computer room, and the humming sounds of powerful computers working filled the hallway.

  Every sense in my body was telling me to turn and get out of here, to lay down this hand and just go to the next one. But sometimes in a hand you are what is called “pot committed,” and in this instance, we were committed to finding out what was happening in that small bedroom, no matter how much I really didn’t want to know.

  I eased into the room where The Bookkeeper sat hunched over a keyboard, his fingers flying faster over the keys than I thought humanly possible.

  “Bookkeeper,” I said. “It’s Poker Boy.”

  “I was wrong,” he said, not stopping. “I’m sure I was wrong. I just have to prove it.”

  “Wrong about what?” I asked, stepping far enough into the small room that Patty and Screamer could move into the door behind me. In my mind I extended an area around the three of us and held that image just in case I needed to shift us out of time very, very quickly. I had no idea what The Bookkeeper would do next, but I wanted to be ready for anything.

  “About luck,” he said. “I have to prove she exists very quickly, before everything starts to unravel.”

  He pointed to his right between keystrokes; then, without missing a beat, kept typing.

  “Oh, my,” Patty said from behind me, flashing her light to the right where The Bookkeeper had pointed. In the beam of light, unseen in the darkness of the room, was Lady Luck. Actually, it was just a faint, shimmering image of Lady Luck, frozen in mid-sentence. The beam from Patty’s flashlight went right through her.

  Even like that, Lady Luck still scared hell out of me.

  “She’s slowly vanishing,” Screamer said.

  FOUR

  “I used twelve of the world’s most powerful computers, linked up, to prove that luck did not exist,” The Bookkeeper said, never looking up, never stopping his work. “And she ended up here, frozen in a moment, slowly fading. I had no intention of killing Lady Luck. I was just trying to prove a point.”

  “And if she vanishes completely?” Patty asked.

  “Then slowly the rest of the world starts to do the same. Everything as we know it will slowly unravel.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” The Bookkeeper said. “But that’s what the computers tell me will happen if Luck dies.”

  “And now you’re trying to do what exactly?” I asked.

  “Prove that luck, Lady Luck does exist,” he said.

  I glanced back at Patty and Screamer. Patty’s wonderful eyes were wider than normal which let me know she was both afraid and very worried. Screamer just looked intent, staring at Lady Luck.

  Prove that luck existed. How could anyone do that?

  I concentrated for an instant and took all three of us out of time, leaving The Bookkeeper in mid-stoke of the keyboard. We needed to talk and not have him hear us. I could hold all three of us in a bubble out of time for about a minute.

  “Do you actually think The Bookkeeper’s calculations brought Laverne here?” Patty asked.

  “I have no doubt of that,” Screamer said.

  “Neither do I,” I sa
id. “Statistics are one of the greatest forces in the world, governing everything in every detail of life as we know it. I’m sure that power could do this, especially to Lady Luck, and she wouldn’t even know what hit her. I’ve seen it a million times in poker hand after poker hand. Statistics win out over luck.”

  “I agree,” Screamer said. “And clearly The Bookkeeper here is a master of statistics.”

  “And now he’s trying to undo what he has done,” Patty said.

  I started to agree, but then one of my special powers kicked in. It was a power that sort of had a faint “ding” that signaled to my mind that it was in use. A “ding” that I had missed something that was important to the situation. When I heard that “ding” in my mind, I always stopped and went back over what had just happened. The power had saved me a lot of money on the poker tables.

  It took me a moment, because I was also holding the bubble of the three of us out of time, but then I realized what I had missed. The Bookkeeper was not in charge of statistics, was not the master of them at all. He was only a lowly superhero like we were. He had a boss just like the rest of us.

  I dropped us back to real time. “Bookkeeper, who is your boss?”

  “A guy named Harold. Haven’t seen him in a few hundred years.”

  “We’ll be right back,” I said, then nodded to Screamer and Patty that we should head outside.

  The Bookkeeper didn’t even slow down in the slightest.

  The moment we were back outside into the warm Christmas Eve night, I shouted into the air, “Stan!”

  He appeared near Patty’s car and then motioned for us to stop about five feet away, wrinkling his nose. “Wow, do you three smell. What do you need?”

  “Who is Harold? And who is Harold’s boss?”