Smith's Monthly #5 Read online

  Stan didn’t say anything after his disgusted look at my place. He was wearing his standard tan sweater, tan slacks, and loafers. He looked so nondescript, he could blend in anywhere and no one would notice him. I had a hunch if he stood in my trailer long enough, his sweater and slacks would turn 1970s green.

  I took one more bite of the cold chicken leg, then stood and headed for the coat hanger beside the front door to get my black leather coat and black fedora-like hat. They were my superhero uniform that helped make me Poker Boy.

  Stan only came here to get me when something was going wrong somewhere. Never a good sign. So the coat and hat were going to be needed for something very soon.

  “So where to?” I asked as I slipped on my coat.

  “You look like you need a drink,” he said.

  “What?” He knew I didn’t drink. Never had and I sure couldn’t see myself starting now.

  I was about to say something about going back to my chicken and news when Stan jumped us to position beside a large white-marble pillar with people walking by. There were slot machines and a nearby restaurant. I could feel the power from the casino around us flowing into me.

  The air smelled of prime rib and faint cigarette smoke. It took me only a second before I realized we were on the second floor, the mezzanine level, of the Eldorado Hotel and Casino in downtown Reno, Nevada.

  To my left along the interior mall-like area was the Silver Legacy Hotel and Casino and beyond that the Circus Circus Hotel and Casino.

  This interior mall area stretched for a very long three blocks and must have a couple dozen restaurants, shops and gift stores along its wide corridor. It was a nice place considering Reno’s weather in the winter, allowing people to move between the three casinos without ever going outside.

  I had always liked this interior mall and the feel of it. Some people said it reminded them of a huge cruise ship, only without ocean views and people getting seasick.

  I glanced around. No one had noticed our arrival so I figured Stan had jumped us into a blind camera area.

  “Back with your girlfriend in a moment,” Stan said and vanished, leaving me alone.

  I had no idea what the problem was, or why we were in Reno, but if he was going for Patty when she was still at work, I knew it couldn’t be good.

  I stepped away from the stone pillar and let my poker senses take in everything around me. A few people upset at losing, and one couple went past not happy, headed for the Silver Legacy. I caught part of a conversation about how the guy was angry with his wife flirting with another man. He was telling her so in no uncertain terms. It wasn’t hard to miss, even without extra poker senses.

  But I could sense nothing that would cause Stan to jump us to Reno and into the Eldorado.

  Across from me was a brewpub full of younger patrons laughing and drinking. I’m not sure exactly when I started thinking of adults around age thirty as younger, but I did. Since I have been told that as a superhero, I have basically stopped aging at thirty even though I am over forty, I have no idea how jaded I was going to get by the time I reached one hundred.

  Or two-hundred-plus like Patty. She still hadn’t told me her real age. She just shook her head and said it didn’t matter every time I asked. She didn’t look a day over thirty either, but knowing there might be a few hundred years in age difference sometimes actually bothered me.

  I felt a hand on my shoulder and the calming sense of Patty’s touch. That was one of her super powers and I loved it.

  And her. More than I wanted to admit to myself at times. We just fit together in seemingly every sense.

  I turned around to look into her beautiful brown and very worried eyes. She was still dressed in the uniform of the MGM Grand Hotel front desk. A black skirt, white blouse and MGM dark vest with their hotel emblem on the right side.

  Her long brown hair was pulled back tight as she kept it while working.

  “Any idea what’s going on?”

  I shook my head, keeping my poker senses on full. I didn’t quite have a “Spider-Sense” like Spider-Man did in the comics, but I had a pretty good ability to know when danger was approaching and right now I could feel nothing.

  “Where is Stan?” I asked.

  “He went to get Screamer,” she said.

  “This can’t be good,” I said.

  She nodded.

  A moment later Stan appeared next to the stone column in the dead camera area. Screamer was with him looking just as puzzled.

  Screamer had the ability to touch someone and get into their mind and their thoughts. He didn’t have a distinctive look, more like Stan with the ability to blend into just about anywhere. He usually wore old jeans and a sweatshirt with the UNLV logo on it and tonight was no exception.

  Screamer had gotten his name from his ability to put images into other people’s heads. He often worked for the police and could put images so bad and so real into a suspect’s mind that he could make the most hardened criminal scream. What he did could never stand up in a court, but he had solved a lot of crimes over the years.

  And he had helped this team save the world a few times as well.

  “All right,” Stan said. “Let’s go.”

  He turned toward the short staircase leading down around an ornate fountain and into another section of the Eldorado Hotel and Casino mezzanine level.

  “What are we doing here?” Screamer asked a moment before I could.

  “Going for a drink,” Stan said, his voice almost lost in the sounds of the multiple fountains.

  Patty just shook her head and I followed them, keeping every sense I had on full alert. And that was a lot of senses, so many in fact I hadn’t named them all. But the one right now I was trusting the most was my danger awareness sense.

  And it was flat coming up blank.

  We went past a gift shop, down another short flight of stairs, and toward what looked to be a combination bakery counter, restaurant on the right, and bar in the back on the left, tucked against the wall.

  Suddenly Patty said, “Sherri.”

  Her uniform morphed into a black dress, her hair flowed into a perfect shape around her head, and black high heels replaced her tennis shoes she wore while working.

  All in the space of one step.

  I had no idea she could do that.

  None at all.

  And we’d been together now for a few years. If we survived whatever we were facing, we were going to need to have a talk about her powers.

  “Oh, no,” Screamer said as Stan headed toward the bar past the huge counter full of very tasty-looking pies and cakes and cinnamon rolls coated an inch deep in white frosting. The entire area smelled of fresh bread, making my stomach rumble and me wish I had taken a few more bites of that cold chicken.

  “Come on, Stan, why?” Screamer asked.

  Stan said nothing. Just kept walking.

  Stan reached the bar and pulled up a barstool. Screamer sat on his left, Patty took the spot on his right, and I took the spot next to Patty.

  I could still sense absolutely nothing wrong, but from Patty’s sudden change and Screamer’s comment, they were clearly sensing something I wasn’t.

  And that scared me more than I wanted to admit.

  We sat there in silence with the sounds of the distant casino echoing faintly in the background. It must have only been a few seconds, but it felt like an eternity.

  The bar was a normal wood bar, pretty wide, and even though it looked rustic, it was polished as smooth as glass. We were the only customers sitting at it. There were three empty stools to my right. It felt really, really strange to be sitting at a bar. I just never did this.

  Bottles of varied booze lined the ornate back bar, blocking most of a mirror that made the area seem bigger. The top of the back bar was also a rustic ornate wood as were all the decorations on both sides of it.

  This kind of bar could have been in any one of a thousand places. It actually seemed a little out of place with all the desserts in
a huge counter ten paces behind us. It felt like it belonged more in an Old West saloon in a movie. A long ways from the smell of baking bread and ringing modern slot machines.

  I was about to say something when a door into a back room swung open and a stunning woman emerged carrying a few bottles of vodka. She wore tan slacks, a white short-sleeve blouse, and an apron with the Eldorado Hotel logo on it. Her pitch-black hair was pulled back tight and I caught a glimpse of a dark tattoo on her shoulder and upper arm.

  And she might have been one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen.

  “Hey, Stan,” she said, smiling in a way that could knock down just about anyone with its radiance.

  Now my warning senses were going off and going off strong. If she was sitting across from me in a poker tournament, I would be very, very careful even being in a hand with her. She had power. More than likely she was a superhero or maybe a god.

  But I caught no threat at all of danger from her. Just warnings about her power.

  Stan nodded and didn’t return the smile. “Sherri,” was all he said.

  She put down the bottles, wiped her hands on a white bar towel and slipped a bar napkin in front of Stan.

  “Great seeing you,” she said. “I suppose Mom sent you and your team here.”

  “She did,” Stan said, again nodding.

  “Well, I appreciate you coming,” she said, smiling. “Thanks.”

  I wanted to shout out “Mom?” but then realized the only woman who could order Stan, the God of Poker around, was Laverne, Lady Luck herself. I now had a hunch suddenly who I was facing. I hadn’t known going into a previous mission that Lady Luck had a daughter, so I suppose it shouldn’t surprise me that she had two.

  Or more for all I knew.

  When this was over, I really needed to ask some very pointed questions about the family trees of some of my bosses.

  Sherri put a bar napkin in front of Screamer, the smile turning a little sad on her face.

  “I miss you,” she said.

  He only nodded just slightly, his gaze holding hers.

  She missed him?

  What in the world was going on? If this Sherri was Lady Luck’s daughter, having both Stan and Screamer have strange reactions to her didn’t seem like much of a good start to whatever we were facing here.

  She shrugged and moved to a spot in front of Patty. She slid a napkin in front of her and smiled, the smile actually reaching her eyes. “Patty Ledgerwood I presume. I’ve heard so many good things about you and your work. You look stunning.”

  Patty smiled, blushed, and said nothing.

  Sherri slid a napkin in front of me, her smile turning to something I couldn’t read.

  “So this is the famous Poker Boy I’ve been hearing so much about.”

  I kept my poker face and only nodded slightly.

  She laughed. “You people sure aren’t much for idle conversation, are you?”

  “We’re here,” Stan said, his voice very controlled. “I don’t understand why you are here, or what you need from us.”

  “I work here,” she said, smiling. “I have now for about four years. Moved here from the Atlantis Casino. I worked there for ten years. Remember?”

  She looked at Screamer and he just nodded.

  She went on. “The management here keep offering to make me a bar manager, but I like keeping my hand in the drinks and talking with the customers.”

  Even though Stan had the best poker face that existed, I could tell he was surprised by that. If this was Lady Luck’s daughter, I was surprised as well.

  “And I didn’t ask you to come here,” Sherri said. “That was Mom’s idea. She said you four might be able to help me with my lost riddle.”

  Stan said nothing, Screamer just shook his head, and Patty just smiled softly and stared at her.

  Wow, was there a lot of history between these four. Clearly it had all happened long before I was born. And since Stan had been married to one of Lady Luck’s daughters, more than likely he wasn’t pleased to see this one either. So it looked like this was going to be up to me to figure out what she was talking about.

  “So what’s the riddle that your mom thought we could help you solve?” I asked. “And I assume I am talking with a daughter of Lady Luck. Correct?”

  “Sherri,” she said, giving me that beaming smile that I had no doubt melted some of the icing off a cinnamon role in the case behind me.

  “The Queen of Clubs,” Screamer said, his voice soft.

  “Dear husband,” Sherri said, a slight touch of hurt going to her eyes, even though she kept smiling. “You used to not like anyone calling me that name.”

  I was trying to deal with the fact that Screamer had been married to Lady Luck’s second daughter at one point. Now all I had to do was figure out why Patty had a problem with her and I might have a clue what was happening.

  “So the riddle?” I asked, pulling her attention back to me. “What’s so important about it?”

  “It’s lost,” Sherri said over her shoulder to me as she moved fluidly down the bar to pour some drinks for a waitress that had come up to the waitress station in front of a bar well.

  Sherri seemed to move faster than anyone I had ever seen, yet the waitress never once looked up. After only a moment, which I guessed had something to do with her slipping slightly out of time to do the drinks, she came back toward us wiping her hands on a bar towel. “Can I get any of you a drink?”

  My three teammates sat silently, so I said, “Sure. Bloody Mary mix with no vodka.”

  “Celery?” she asked as she moved to the well again.

  “Nope,” I said.

  As she finished my virgin drink, I studied her. Not one sense of danger, nothing from her, and she wasn’t blocking me in any way. In fact, I wasn’t getting that much sense that she actually had many powers at all, even though I assumed she was a god. Could it be that Lady Luck’s daughter was only a superhero like I was? That didn’t seem possible.

  As she put the drink on my bar napkin and again wiped off her hands, I asked her a simple question. “What’s so important about finding or solving the riddle?”

  “It will lead me to a second key holding the Four Faces of Janus.”

  “Oh,” was all I said.

  Stan just shook his head.

  Screamer sort of snorted in disgust and Patty again didn’t move.

  We had already gone into Elysium, the capital of the ancient race of the Titans, to rescue Sherri’s sister, Helen the Queen of Hearts, who had gone there to get one of the keys that held the Four Faces of Janus.

  Supposedly, legend says that when the four keys are combined, they will open the time lock and allow the Titans to return to their rightful place in time and space. Or something like that. Mythology and facts were sometimes hard to tell apart for me these days. I really, really needed to ask more questions about all this.

  One thing I did know, the Titans’ major city existed in the same location as Las Vegas, only many, many eons in the future. So their coming back to this time would be a pretty large problem that I doubted anyone wanted to face.

  “Are all your sisters looking for a key?” Stan asked.

  “Sure,” Sherri said. “It’s sort of a hobby for all four of us. We’re giving the keys to Mom for safekeeping when we find them. We have no intention of bringing them together, especially after seeing the wonderful city the Titans are living in.”

  “And you four have only found the one key, right?” I asked, trying not to be too stunned at Lady Luck having four daughters. I really, really, really needed to talk with someone about who had been married to whom and who was a child of whom.

  “Just the key that you four helped my sister return with from Elysium,” Sherri said, “although I feel that if I could find the lost riddle, I would be able to retrieve the second one.”

  Her bright smile had now vanished and she was clearly thinking about her problem. And I had zero idea what she was talking about when she said a “l
ost riddle” and my glowering team was sure no help at the moment.

  “How can a riddle be lost?” I asked, slightly fearful I was walking into some trap.

  Sherri just shrugged. “Lost in time, maybe. Never written down. Lots of ways a riddle can be lost.”

  “So it’s just called “The Lost Riddle?” I asked.

  She nodded.

  Now all four of us were just looking at her as she headed back down the bar to the right to serve drinks to another waitress who had arrived at the station there.

  “Someone want to tell me what’s going on?” I asked.

  “I think she’s finally lost it,” Screamer said, shaking his head sadly.

  “She’s fantastically beautiful,” Patty said. “More than I even remember.”

  I stared at my girlfriend for a moment, realizing she hadn’t been mad at Sherri, she had just been in some sort of fan-girl state with her.

  “She’s serious, all right,” Stan said. “And she’s as sharp as she ever was, trust me.”

  “So why do you hate her so much?” I asked Stan.

  He laughed, softly, something I rarely heard him do. “I don’t hate her. My wife, her sister, thought I fell in love with Sherri and caused all sorts of problems that led to me leaving Helen.”

  “You didn’t?” I asked. “Fall in love with Sherri, that is?”

  Again Stan just laughed. “I don’t even really know her, to be honest. And Sherri’s been married to Screamer here for a very long time.”

  “Over two hundred years,” Screamer said.

  “And she left you?” I asked.

  “No, I left her,” he said. “When I acquired this new power and could read all her thoughts every time I touched her. Staying together wasn’t fair to either of us until we figured out how to deal with it all. We never got a divorce. It’s been ten years now.”

  “So you are still married?” Patty asked, looking at Screamer, who nodded.

  “Oh,” was all I could say again. I had been working with this team now for some time and seen the inside of Screamer’s mind more than I wanted to think about, and he had kept all this blocked from me. Clearly he had gotten pretty good at walling off parts of his own thoughts.