I didn’t realize how much I needed both.
We again went over each name and it was number twenty-two that had come from today.
Penny Smith was her name. She had been widowed the year before at the age of fifty-four and was using gambling with slots to take her mind off her sorrow of losing the man of her life to cancer. I had no idea what she had done when she discovered she was trapped in the past, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.
Screamer said the same thing.
Patty and Sherri said nothing.
Ben seemed to never make a comment on the people whose privacy we were invading.
So we had two after going through twenty-seven people.
We found the next one from this time two groups of nine later. Number forty-two.
She was a widower at thirty-five because her husband had been murdered. Actually, it was clear in her mind that she had murdered him for having an affair on her.
She had gotten all his money, played the grieving widow for a year or so, and then moved to Vegas last year.
“We’ll deal with her after all this is settled,” Screamer said, smiling at me.
I had no doubt he and the police would deal with her just fine. But after seeing the inside of that woman’s evil mind, I wanted to help, or at least watch the police arrest her. She had already been plotting on finding her next rich husband when we stranded her in the past.
Beside me, Patty shuddered. “There is true evil out there, isn’t there?”
I touched her arm and gave her energy to go on.
She smiled at me and said, “Thanks. Not so sure how I got so lucky to find someone like you.”
“Raspberry shampoo,” I said.
Screamer snorted and Patty had the decency to blush.
I had a clear memory of being in lust with Patty right from the first time I saw her. But all these trips into the memories of that time were making the fact that I really had fantasies about her and her raspberry soap in a shower, long before we climbed into that first shower together.
I loved that soap then and now.
“Clear your mind, mister,” she said, softly smacking my arm. “We have work to do.”
And I tried, I really did. But it’s raspberry shampoo, after all.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Just One Small Problem Named Hank
We got through all of the people we rescued from the ghost slots and found eleven.
We were all convinced there were only the eleven. I’m not a betting man, but I would have bet that was it. Of course, we were betting our entire lives and all the lives in this timeline that we were right.
We were also all exhausted, completely and totally.
“All right, Stan,” I said into the air and he appeared.
“Ready for the Bookkeeper’s list?” he asked.
“We are,” I said.
Lady Luck appeared and sat at the end of the table with Stan. She grabbed one of the cold fries and started biting on it.
I had a master list in front of me and Patty, so I said, “Read off your names.”
Lady Luck seemed to have a list as well and was following along.
He did, and I put a check beside each name that agreed with our list.
And then he read the name Hank Carson.
No Hank Carson on our list.
We all looked up at him and he clearly read our expressions.
“Oh, oh,” he said.
“Hank’s on my list as well,” Lady Luck said. “Kronos and I put it together from studying time stream shifts over the last ten years.”
I looked at Patty, then at Ben.
“No Hank Carson came out of the machine,” I said.
Stan nodded and went on with the list. Everything agreed except that one name.
“How many people are between the two names we agree on?” Stan asked.
“Thirteen,” Ben said. “Is Hank Carson a man or a woman?”
“A man,” Lady Luck said.
“Then only four men are candidates,” he said.
I flipped back through my notes to the four he was talking about and looked at them again.
All five of us did the same. I remembered all four men clearly. All had clearly been from 2004.
After a moment I looked up. “We go back. Look for anything out of place, dig deeper into these four.”
Screamer nodded and said, “Ready.”
Sherri took Ben’s hand, Patty put her hand on my leg.
I took Screamer’s hand and Sherri touched his leg.
And once again we were back in front of those damn evil machines.
Concentrate, Ben thought at us.
The first man came out and Screamer pushed him aside. But as he did, Patty slowed down time and we all dove into the poor man’s mind.
After what seemed like far too long inside a stranger’s head and looking into his very personal thoughts and actions, Screamer thought to us, He’s clean.
We went on to the next guy.
Same.
And the next guy.
Same.
And the final guy.
Same.
There was no doubt, all four of them were taken by the slots in 2004.
Screamer broke the connection and we all turned to look at Stan and Lady Luck.
“No Hank Carson?” Stan asked.
“No Hank Carson,” I said.
“Damn it,” Lady Luck said again as she stood. “What the hell is going on here?”
And with that she vanished.
“I hate it when Mom swears,” Sherri said, shaking her head and looking at her notes. “Things tend to turn ugly when that happens.”
I could sure understand that. Never wanted to get Lady Luck mad. Something about that just seemed really, really dangerous.
I looked over at Stan. “How many hours do we have left?”
“Ten,” he said.
Ten hours to save everyone in the world from being trapped in a nasty time loop. No wonder it was strictly against the rules to time travel. This kind of stuff was just far, far too dangerous.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Looking for Hank in All the Wrong Places
The moment Lady Luck vanished, Stan got back onto the phone with the Bookkeeper and gave him the name of Hank Carson. “We need every detail about the guy, right down to his shoe size,” Stan said.
He listened to the Bookkeeper say something for a moment, nodded and then hung up without saying another word.
“He’ll have it all within a half hour,” Stan said, sitting back down at the table.
Around us the sky was starting to darken and now the planes coming into the airport had lights on. Pretty soon, stretched out below my invisible floating office, the lights of Las Vegas would be on and in full glory. Normally, I loved looking at those lights from here, but right now I didn’t feel much like looking at anything except my hands.
Finally, I took a deep breath, put my hand on Patty’s arm, and looked at the group. “So if we didn’t pull Hank Carson out of that machine, why are both Kronos and the Bookkeeper showing that he was there and part of what caused this alternate timeline?”
I looked around at my team. “I’m open for theories or even wild speculation.”
Screamer shrugged. “He got with one of the survivors and discovered information about the future and used it, thus causing Kronos and the Bookkeeper both to pick up the disruptions he caused.”
I nodded. I had figured as much. So if we pulled the others from the past and brought them back to the present, they would never hook up with Hank and thus that would take care of him.
But that was taking a horrible gamble I didn’t want to take.
And it honestly didn’t feel right to me. My little voice I trusted in poker said that wasn’t the right way to go.
“A second option,” Sherri said, “is that he’s some sort of time traveler that used the trips by the Slots of Saturn to cover his tracks from Kronos.”
“There are time trav
elers?” I asked, feeling stunned.
Sherri nodded. “Mostly from the distant future, but Kronos and his teams keep them out of these times for just this reason.”
I glanced at Stan and he was nodding.
“If that’s the case, it’s out of our hands,” I said.
Everyone around the table agreed. If that was the case, that was a problem for Kronos and Laverne.
I looked at everyone. “Any more options, suggestions, or just flat wild theories?”
“The first one seems the most logical,” Ben said.
“But that seems like something that Kronos and the Bookkeeper would have taken into account,” I said. “All of these people will have talked to some people at one point or another.”
“I agree,” Screamer said.
“There’s something we’re missing,” I said.
So once again we all sat there in silence.
At that moment, Madge appeared from the diner with a tray of milkshakes. “I can hear all of you thinking clear downstairs,” she said, “so thought I would bring some thinking food.”
She also had a couple of baskets of hot fries.
I watched as Patty took one, then dropped it and sucked on her thumb.
“Hot out of the fryer,” Madge said. “Sorry, should have warned you.”
Something just dinged at me really hard.
It was that poker sense of mine that dinged like a little alarm bell to tell me I was missing a detail that was right in front of me.
Patty inspected her thumb for a moment, then put it against the cold glass of the vanilla milkshake in front of us.
Again the little dinger in my head dinged again, like an annoying timer I needed to shut off but couldn’t find.
Then it dawned on me what I was seeing.
Patty’s thumb.
Hitchhiker.
Someone hadn’t been taken inside the slot machines, but had hitchhiked back in time on them.
“Thank you, Madge,” I said, sucking on the milkshake so hard it gave me an ice cream headache. “You gave us the answer.”
“I did?” she asked, looking puzzled and everyone else looked at me in the same way.
“Patty,” I said, “show everyone your burnt thumb.”
“It’s not really burnt,” she said.
“Show them,” I said, smiling at her.
She did.
“Now, with your thumb sticking out, make a fist.”
She did.
“Of course,” Stan said, laughing. “Damn it, Poker Boy, how do you make these weird connections?”
“What connections?” Screamer asked. “Missed me.”
Patty was smiling at me and as she did, she stuck out her thumb again over the middle of the table, moving it from left to right as she said, “Going my way, mister?”
“Hitchhiker?” Screamer asked.
Sherri laughed and Ben just nodded.
“We know who we got out of the machine,” I said.
“Not who rode on the back of the machine into the past,” Stan said.
“Exactly,” I said. “I know I never thought of looking around behind those machines.”
“I didn’t either,” Patty said.
“But we have one problem,” Stan said. “We don’t know exactly when he took that trip back. He wasn’t in any of the police reports of those rescued.”
“So he went back with one of the first ones,” Patty said, “and when the machine jumped again, he got out of the warehouse.”
I could feel my stomach tightening up again. Those machines had been operating for almost a week before we got to the warehouse. Hank could have found himself in that warehouse at any point over that week and we wouldn’t know when.
Ben looked at me and said, “We have only ten hours to figure out when he arrived there and get him before he gets out of that warehouse. And then get the other eleven back to our time as well.”
“If that is how he got back there,” Screamer said. “Remember, our first option is the most logical, that he met someone from the future and was influenced by them.”
I shook my head. “That doesn’t feel right. The Bookkeeper would have spotted that. No, I think Hank rode along without meaning to. Not sure why I know that, but just a sense. Now we just have to figure out how.”
And with that, again the silence filled the booth and my office overlooking the beautiful city of Las Vegas as the sun slowly set over the western hills.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Once More into the Nightmare
“So how do we find out when he rode back on the machines?” Sherri asked.
I looked at her and then asked the next logical question. “How could someone ride along and not be in the machine?”
“Touching it from the back,” Screamer said.
Beside me, Patty shook her head. “Slot machines in this modern time are almost impossible to get close to from the back, unless he was a maintenance worker or a slot tech. Sitting in one of the other chairs is the most logical thing to have happened.”
I couldn’t believe I had forgotten that the machine was actually three slot machines.
With three wooden chairs attached.
It was only the machine on the right side that had come alive and had taken all our focus, but the other two machines rode along because it was a three-machine unit.
“Of course,” I said. “We go back again, focus only on the moment the person from this time period was pulled into the machine to see if anyone was sitting next to them.”
“And once we spot him,” Screamer said, “we’ll have a general timeline.”
“I agree,” Ben said. “We can figure out exactly when the two people on either side from that time were pulled through. That should narrow the time down to a few hours.”
“So we go back to the nightmare and inside the heads of the eleven people taken from this time.”
Everyone nodded. But clearly none of them were any happier with the idea than I was.
“I’ll tell Lady Luck what you are doing,” Stan said, and vanished.
Screamer was still sitting in the middle, with Patty on one side and me on the other.
“One more time?” I asked.
“Do we have a choice?” Screamer asked.
“Not that I can think of,” I said.
“Then one more time.”
Again, we scooted together in the booth and all touched so that our minds were all hooked up.
I thought at everyone, Focus at the first person from our time and the moment they were at the machine.
We did just that.
And once again I was back in that warehouse, with the feeling of panic and fear crawling all over me like a nest of spiders. Sherri instantly calmed all of us down.
Thanks, Patti thought.
Again, with Sherri keeping us calm, I could actually think and get out of the panic I felt back ten years ago as we fought to save over a hundred people from those machines.
We were again in slow motion as Patty had slowed time down, and we were back in our own memories. Then the woman from our time slowly appeared, being spit out by the machine like a bad coin, and Screamer pushed her out of the chair.
Patty slowed the moment down even more so that we could see into the poor woman’s mind and see if there happened to be anyone around her that she noticed when she sat at the slots.
No one.
She was the only one in the chairs when the machine took her, and there was no way anyone could get in behind the old slots either, since they were against a wall.
One down, I thought at everyone.
We went through three more people from our time before we found what we were looking for.
The man named Jeffrey Johns, number sixty-four in the list of people we had rescued from the machine. He had just sat down in the chair when the machine was back at Binion’s in this time period.
Suddenly, beside him, another man slid into the left seat.
There was a clear thought of annoyan
ce from Jeffrey because he had been thinking of playing all three slot machines at the same time. Then he was pulled into the machine and into the past.
I got a clear image of the man who sat down in the left chair. Balding head, overweight, Bermuda shorts, and a Hawaiian shirt of loud blues and oranges.
I have a hunch that’s him, I thought at everyone.
We check all eleven, Ben thought clearly.
I agreed.
And we did, and that was the only hitchhiker we found from our time back into the past.
Screamer cut the connection and we all moved back into our positions at the booth. Stan had returned and he and Madge were there, waiting for us to return from the nightmare of the past that we had been exploring in our minds.
“We found him,” I said, smiling.
Ben quickly looked through his notes. “He arrived in 2004 somewhere in an eight-hour-period of time.”
“Great job,” Stan said. “Poker Boy, call the Bookkeeper and see if he can narrow the time down some. I’ll tell Lady Luck so she can work with Kronos.”
Then he vanished.
I grabbed my phone and quickly told the Bookkeeper what we had found and he said simply, “I’ll be back with you in twenty minutes.”
“So how long did that take?” I asked.
I was known for not wearing a watch or being able to keep track of time that well. Yet in this countdown, we had to keep track.
“We have just under nine hours to stop the time loop from setting,” Ben said.
My heart sank and I could feel what energy I had left sort of draining out of me. And as it did, it was as if I could suddenly hear a huge clock ticking.
Just ticking in the distance.
On and on and on.
Slowly getting louder and taunting me with every tick of the clock.
To be continued…
One thousand years in the future, humans live very long lives in domes on the frozen surface. Boredom never poses a threat, but nostalgia does.
When it becomes deadly to focus on the past, teaching nostalgia solves the problem.
USA Today bestselling writer Dean Wesley Smith takes a peak into the final exam of the class called Nostagia 101.
Smith's Monthly #16 Page 4