I sort of remember sitting there on the bed after hanging up the phone.
The soft bedspread had looked so inviting.
What would it hurt to just stretch out there and think for a few minutes?
I told myself that.
Just think.
Patty’s call woke me an hour later. It was six minutes before ten in the morning.
“Any luck?” Patty asked without saying hello.
The sound of her voice had me instantly awake. “Yeah, got us an address. I’ll be right down.”
“Meet you in front of the main desk. I’m double-parked so don’t take long.”
She hung up.
I sat there for a moment wondering if I had just dreamt that call, finally convincing myself I hadn’t.
I tossed a handful of water on my face, combed my hair enough so that it wouldn’t look slept on, put on my hat and Poker Boy leather coat, and headed out the door.
By the time I hit the lobby, I was feeling much, much better, and ready for a day of work.
“Good nap?” Patty asked, smiling at me.
I managed to not show I was surprised at the question. “Naps are always good.”
Patty laughed. “You poker players are all alike.”
“A society of nappers, huh?”
“Pro nappers,” she said, still laughing as she led the way out of the casino and into the warm morning air.
I could tell the day was going to be hot again. Considering it was still April, I would wager the high desert was going to be in for a really hot year.
Patty had a new model Honda, which looked a lot like most other mid-sized cars being made. It was the first halfway-plain thing I had seen about her. But even though it was a dull design, the inside of the car was clean, the air conditioning kept me comfortable, and the car had acceleration enough to get through traffic just fine.
Patty drove like a professional, smooth and direct, changing lanes when she needed to, and driving ahead, watching for problems. And she didn’t tailgate. So far, even with a dull, regular car, there was nothing about this woman I didn’t like.
When I gave Patty the address I had gotten from my friend in city hall, she started out what was called the Old Boulder Highway without hesitation. They’ve built a freeway along the same route, but Patty stayed on the old highway, going past the dozens of strip malls, old motels, and small casinos that lined every mile of the old highway.
What people think of as Las Vegas was actually made up of four medium-small cities. There was Las Vegas, North Las Vegas, Henderson, and Boulder City. There were actually a number of other smaller towns as well, but they had been pretty much swallowed by the growth of the other four.
I let Patty focus on her driving while I worked on how we were going to get into the warehouse. We sure couldn’t just tell whoever was guarding the place that we were looking for the home of a ghost slot machine. Never work.
By the time Patty turned off the old highway onto a side road just south of Whitney, which is sometimes called East Las Vegas, I had us a cover story.
She pulled the car into the tumbleweed-covered parking lot of a giant warehouse and put it in park, letting the air-conditioning run on low. She looked at the huge metal building and then turned to me with a smile. “Now what?”
I could see the faded address numbers on the side of the building. It was clear that unless there was a security guard roaming the place, we weren’t going to need a cover story. From the looks of this building, I doubted anyone had been around it for years. The desert sun had taken the metal to a dull gray, and the winds and sand had removed any sign that the place might have been painted at one time in the past.
“We go in, I guess,” I said, shrugging. “And in case anyone stops us, we’re thinking about working on a book about old slot machines, and trying to get an idea what some of them looked like.”
“Good cover story,” she said, nodding. “But I doubt we’re going to need it here. More than likely, we’re going to have to go to the Standard Slots main office and get someone to bring us back and let us in.”
“Yeah,” I said, shoving the door open, “but we should take a look around first.”
I was hoping we wouldn’t have to waste time going to the main office, and with what Stan had told me, I really didn’t want anyone from Standard Slots to know we were even looking around, just in case they were involved with the kidnappings. It never hurt to be careful.
The highway noise from a few blocks over cut through the warm air as we started toward what looked to be a main door. The warehouse had four large, drive-in bay doors and a regular-sized door beside the bay door on the left.
Since I was a good block from the closest casino, I wasn’t sure if my superpowers would work. Sometimes, I had what I called hold-over powers if I had spent a lot of time in a casino right before I needed the power. Spending the night in the Horseshoe might be enough, and having a small casino a block away would be a little help. At least I hoped it would, because I was going to try using a power I very seldom got to use. I called it my Open-Says-Me Power.
It worked like a charm the few times I had had to use it on locked casino doors. I had no idea if it would work on this warehouse door.
“Looks closed up tight,” Patty said. “I’ll bet no one has even checked on this place in six months.”
“True,” I said, shrugging. “But maybe we’ll get lucky.”
I took hold of the door knob and then, focusing my power like I was studying a guy trying to bluff me off a pair of queens, I turned the knob and heard the dead-bolt slide back. I smiled at Patty and opened the door.
The door made a scraping sound on the sidewalk as it opened, and let out cool, musty-smelling air from the dark inside.
“Looks like we got lucky,” Patty said. She was shaking her head and half frowning at me. But I could see amusement in her eyes as well, and maybe a little fondness. Or maybe I just hoped to see the fondness.
“Hello!” I shouted into the warehouse as I stepped into the darkness.
The sound of my shout echoed back at me.
“No one home,” Patty said, moving in to stand beside me, leaving the door open behind us. “Now that’s a surprise.”
“The trick is going to be finding the lights,” I said.
I went left along the wall, Patty moved right. A moment later I heard a few loud clicks from Patty’s direction and the warehouse flooded with light.
“Oh, my,” Patty said, moving over to stand by me as I stared at what stretched out in front of us.
The place looked a lot bigger inside than it did outside, with fourteen aisles big enough to drive a forklift through. And on each side of every aisle, sometimes stacked in crates, were slot machines.
“There have to be thousands in here,” Patty said.
“Easily,” I said. Actually, I figured there were closer to ten thousand different slot machines facing us.
I focused my powers again, concentrating, trying to get any feeling, any of my powers to help me find the slot machines we were looking for.
Suddenly, in front of me, I could see a faint orange glow that sort of led off to the far wall and down that aisle. Superpowers still working fine it seemed. Now I’d have to come up with a name for this power.
“This way,” I said, heading with the glow.
We went along the front of the big closed bay doors and then along the wall, moving past old slot machines covered in dust, some protected by either plastic wraps or tarps. All their lights were dark, their colors faded, covered in dust, or completely gone. Many had holes in their fronts from being cannibalized, many had broken arms and broken displays.
“This is damned creepy,” Patty said.
“That it is,” I said. “I see why they call it a graveyard.”
“No kidding,” Patty said.
Even with the bright overhead lights on, the canyons of old slot machines seemed to radiate old age. Though the old slots had at one time been colorful, their colors didn’t see
m to have made it here. Everything around us was in shades of gray.
I had the feeling as we moved along that we were walking deeper and deeper into the past. And not just because of the age of the machines around us.
It was something else.
Something very real that my Danger-Ahead Superpower was telling me wasn’t good.
The orange glow stopped at a covered bank of slot machines. Under the faded black tarp loomed a shape that looked like the Saturn Slots we had seen in the security footage.
I stopped a few steps away and motioned that Patty should do the same. “Stay here.”
“You think those are the ones?” Patty asked. “How would you know?”
“Just a hunch.”
I moved the last few steps forward, reached up and grabbed the tarp covering the slots. Then with all my strength, I yanked.
The tarp came easily, spreading into a pile in the middle of the aisle, pushing rolling clouds of dust into the air.
I had stepped back beside Patty as I pulled, and then when the slots were exposed, we both stepped back another two steps.
What faced us couldn’t be there, yet it was.
Four Saturn Slots, with four wooden chairs attached, the bright image of the planet and its rings dominating everything. We had found what we were looking for all right.
But there was a problem.
It was turned on.
Every light on the machines was working, the chrome and brass polished and shining, as if it were sitting on a casino floor just waiting for a customer.
I could feel the attraction to sit down, to just play one nickel.
And I had never once put one coin into a slot machine.
Never.
Ever.
I wasn’t a gambler. I was a poker player.
Around us, the gray of the dust-filled warehouse took on colors reflecting from the machine. Every warning alarm I had in my body went off. It was as if by uncovering the thing, we were spreading its power.
“Why would someone leave it plugged in?” Patty asked, her voice almost a whisper.
“I’m fairly certain it’s not plugged into anything that pretends to be electricity,” I said. “It’s getting its power from something else, somewhere else.”
I could feel them tugging us toward them, as if they were saying “What would it hurt to sit down and just play a nickel?”
I took Patty’s arm and pulled her a few staggering steps backward as the lights from the machine got brighter. Clearly, the machines were affecting her as much as they were trying to get to me.
Suddenly, the warehouse was filled with a man’s shout, echoing through the cavernous space.
“Police! Who’s in here?”
“Far aisle on the right side of the door as you come in!” I shouted. “Hurry!”
I figured the police were here for the same reason we were, and I wanted them to see these machines before they vanished, as I had a hunch they were about to do.
I pulled Patty a few more steps backward down the aisle as the machine started to pulse, its colors gaining and then losing intensity.
Behind us, I could hear the running footsteps of the police.
In front of us, the ghost slots were glowing brighter than any slot I had ever seen, filling all the old slots around them with color and light.
Then, as if I was watching a movie, I saw flashes of images flicker around the slots, different people, different casino backgrounds, clearly even different time periods.
The images came faster and faster as the pulses of light from the slot machine got brighter and brighter.
The image of Ben flashed past, the same as we had seen in the Horseshoe’s security cameras.
Then the image of a middle-aged woman, then a young man and his girlfriend together, then more and more, maybe dozens of people, until suddenly the pulsing light stopped.
The Saturn Slots were gone, an empty space remaining in the rows of old slot machines.
The warehouse went back to a dirty gray, washed out by the overhead white lights.
Patty leaned against me. “Oh, my,” she said softly.
I moved my arm around her waist. Having her that close to me felt right, felt nice. I just wished it were for a different reason.
“Holy shit,” a woman said behind us, her voice a hoarse whisper.
I glanced around at a man and woman standing a dozen steps behind us, still staring at where the Saturn Slots had been a moment before.
The man, a Detective I knew named Johnny State, had his gun out, but it was hanging in his hand, looking very useless.
I turned back to look at the empty space where the Saturn Slots had been a moment before.
It was still empty.
The slots were out hunting.
But what happened to the people they took?
Who was controlling such an amazing monster?
And even a better question yet: What were we going to do to stop it?
Chapter Eleven
THE RETURN FROM HELL
JOHNNY AND I had just finished putting the tarp back in place when the energy of the big warehouse started to change again.
I had had a lot of natural powers before becoming Poker Boy, and one of them was the ability to sense when the energy in something was changing. Usually, I used that sense in a poker game, or when someone was starting to get angry. Now I could feel it in the air around us.
I took Johnny by the arm and pulled him away from where we had been staring at the tarp being held up by empty space, moving us and Patty and the woman, Geneva, even farther away down the aisle.
Suddenly bright colors seemed to flash through the gaps in the tarp and the machines were back. I could feel the pull of them, the desire to have someone come to them and sit down.
“Those things are hungry,” Patty said softly as the four of us backed even farther away.
“Let’s go back to the door,” I said, touching Johnny’s arm to get him to move.
As I touched his skin, I got a sense of Geneva with him as well. For a second it was as if there were three of us in the same head.
I let go of Johnny’s arm and glanced at him as we headed away from the machines.
“Weird, huh?” he said, shrugging.
Clearly he knew I had joined them for a moment.
Geneva had her hand on Johnny’s arm. I knew at once it was touch that linked the two of them, and for some reason my touch had linked me with them for a second as well.
“How long?” I asked.
“Since we met yesterday,” Johnny said.
“Doesn’t work without touch?” I asked.
“Not yet,” Johnny said.
We had turned the corner out of the aisle of old slots with the dangerous machines and the pull from them was almost gone.
“What are you two talking about?” Patty asked. “Include the rest of us if you would, please.”
I knew Geneva had understood and been part of Johnny’s side of the conversation, since the two of them were linked. But I doubted they wanted Patty to know, and if they did, they would tell her.
“Oh, sorry,” I said. “Just trying to figure out who could control those monsters back there.”
Geneva laughed. “It’s all right if she knows, since you do, and we are all working together on this.”
All four of us stopped near the front door. It was standing open and the bright light from outside was pouring in, overwhelming the warehouse lights. The inside of the warehouse seemed almost alien compared to the life, the bright light, and the distant traffic outside. I could also feel the warm air flooding in.
Geneva touched Johnny’s arm as she faced Patty. “For some reason, the how or why of which we don’t understand, Detective State and I have a link telepathically when we touch. We discovered this wonderful gift yesterday when we met.”
Johnny was nodding.
Patty stared at Geneva for a moment, then turned to me. “And you knew this how?”
“Got a fla
sh of it when I touched Johnny when steering us away from back there.”
Patty shook her head at me. “You are sure full of surprises.”
“He is at that,” Johnny said, laughing. Then, without giving Patty a chance to ask any questions about what Geneva had told her, he went on. “So what next?”
I shrugged. “We found the machines and now we have more questions than we did before. I’m struggling with someone having the ability to control those things back there, if they are what they appear.”
“And if they aren’t, who’s doing the illusions?” Patty said.
“And why?” Johnny said. “Most of the police department is on this case, tracking anti-gambling groups, religious nut-cases, and anything else they can think of. By now I’m pretty sure that even the Feds are involved, maybe the anti-terrorist bunch as well.”
That all made sense to me. You just can’t have fifty people or more vanish in a week from a city and not stir up everything. It was amazing that it wasn’t all over the television and papers.
“For the moment, we’re the only one’s following these slots, right?”
Johnny nodded. “Geneva was sent to me because someone sent a note to the Sun to have a reporter stand at the Mirage to watch something.”
“So you saw these things take someone?”
“I did,” Geneva said. “The Saturn Slots sort of faded in right over a bank of slots in the Mirage, a middle-aged woman sat down, put in a nickel, and the slots and the woman vanished.”
“Same thing that happened to Ben at the Horseshoe,” Patty said. “We watched it on a security tape that no longer exists.”
Geneva laughed. “We discovered last night that the Mirage’s tape of the area shows nothing, including me standing there.”
“No surprise,” I said. “They are not going to use their own security tapes to condemn their own business.”
“So someone’s directing these things,” Johnny said. “We need to figure out how, or who, or from where?”
My little voice was going off like an alarm bell. This happened all the time when I was about to make a call with a hand in a poker game that was statistically right, yet felt wrong. Once I learned to lay down the hands that my little voice told me to lay down, I started earning a lot more money.
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