“We can only hope,” I said. “At least it’s a place to start. Patty, any chance you might have tomorrow off?”
“I’ll take it off,” she said, smiling at me.
I kept my face and heart under control and managed to keep going. “Great, thanks. Would you help me do some research into Valley and Standard Slots. Valley owned the things during the time they were in the Horseshoe. I’m betting they are still stored somewhere.”
“Good thinkin’ again,” Screamer said. “Two-sided attack. Always nice to work with you, Poker Boy. You always got a play.” He stood and dropped too much money on the table for his meal.
“I’ll also check my contacts at the police, see if anything else is going on. You staying at the Horseshoe?”
“I am,” I said.
“I’ll call you at seven in the morning,” Screamer said.
He turned to my sidekick, Patty. “It was wonderful crawling around inside that beautiful head of yours.”
Patty had the common sense to blush and say nothing at Screamer’s beaming smile.
“Samantha,” Screamer said to her, touching her arm gently. “Don’t worry. We’ll find Ben. Try to get some rest. Tomorrow’s going to be a full day.”
“I’ll try,” Samantha said.
“Thanks, Screamer,” I said.
He nodded to me and turned and was out the door. The room almost felt empty without him. Only the three of us, Elvis on the jukebox, and Madge were left in the diner. Screamer had a real presence about him.
“I never thought I’d ever meet the infamous Toledo Moss,” Patty said, still blushing. “I heard my dad talk about him for years. He’s almost a legend around this town.”
“He is at that,” I said, laughing, not mentioning that he was a superhero as well.
Patty stared at me, those brown eyes digging into my very heart, lifting the lid, swishing the blood around. Luckily I am a poker player who has been stared-down by the best in the business. But it’s one thing to stare into the eyes of a player trying to find out your cards, it was another to stare into Patty’s big brown eyes. I hope she never took up poker.
“Yet Toledo Moss deferred to you,” Patty said, smiling slightly. “Why do you think that is?”
I just hoped at that moment my reputation around Las Vegas wasn’t as strong as Screamers, because he had let slip my Poker Boy name a couple of times, and if anyone would have heard of me, then I have no doubt Patty would have as well.
“I’ve got a few years on him is all,” I said, smiling at her.
“Why did you call him Screamer?” Samantha asked, coming to my rescue before Patty managed to peal back every ounce of protection I had with those laser-brown eyes of hers.
“I’m not sure who started it,” I said. “But I’ve heard two reasons why.”
“I only heard one,” Patty said. “I heard that with his special gift of getting inside people’s heads he could put nightmares into a person’s mind until they screamed for him to stop.”
“That’s one,” I said, smiling at Patty. “He did that for the cops on a serial murder case about fifteen years ago. I don’t think he makes it a habit.”
“And the other?” Samantha asked.
“Sexually,” I said, “he knows what a woman wants, what she is feeling, what she is needing, and can give it to her until she screams for him to stop.”
“Oh,” Patty said.
Both women sat there silently, clearly lost in their own thoughts and imaginations.
At that moment I sure wanted Screamer’s superpower, and would have traded two or three of my own to get it.
Chapter Eight
LOOKING FOR A GOD IN ALL THE RIGHT PLACES
FOR A NUMBER OF YEARS, the World Series of Poker has been held mostly in the Horseshoe’s old bingo hall on the second floor, with the cashier just inside the main door, and the tournament sign-up outside to the right in the hallway.
The World Series itself is a series of daily tournaments, with different levels of entry fees, called buy-ins, for each. I had hoped, when I arrived in town, to play in the fifteen hundred dollar buy-in, no-limit hold-em tournament that started tomorrow at noon. But now that I was helping Samantha, I would have to wait for another, later tournament.
The structure of a World Series tournament was fairly simple. You got as many tournament chips as the buy-in, then you played until only one person had all the chips. As you might imagine, that takes time, so for years the first day of every event ended when the final table, meaning the last nine players, was reached, and they started again the next day and finished off. For the last few years, they decided to just play to midnight, and everyone still left with chips came back the next day. Either way, it made for long tournaments, with the big tournament at the end of the five weeks costing ten thousand to buy-in, and lasting five days.
So, when I walked into the tournament room on the second floor of the Horseshoe, I could tell at once that there were still six tables in today’s pot limit two thousand dollar buy-in hold-em tournament back in the far left corner of the room. Fifty or so players sweating to stay alive and make the top twenty to thirty positions that paid out money.
I glanced over at the electronic tournament board. Over three hundred players had started the tournament at noon and there was a first-place prize of almost two hundred thousand. There was nothing like the World Series of Poker for nice paydays. And one of those fifty players was going to pull it in.
All cash.
If I got a chance, I’d go back there later and watch a few hands.
Across the front of the room were live games with different betting limits. There were maybe forty tables of poker going at once, with a lot of people standing around talking and watching games. And across the back left of the room were satellite tournaments, where players played against each other to earn their buy-in into a bigger tournament. At the moment, there were a number of one-table events going on, with the winner on each table taking a full fifteen hundred in buy-in chips.
I liked playing satellites for warm-ups, and sometimes won my way into a big one. I planned this trip to play a bunch of what they called super-satellites until I earned my way into the ten thousand big event a month from now. Better than paying the full ten thousand out of my pocket, and more fun as well.
At first glance around the tournament room, I didn’t see Stan. I didn’t expect to, actually. Gambling Gods, when joining the ranks of the real players, tend to come in different shapes and sizes, and can disguise themselves very well.
“I understand you’re looking for me?” a voice said from behind me as I stood near the cashier’s area.
I turned around to face Stan, his long face smiling at me. He wasn’t in any disguise, and was wearing his normal gray sweater and a baseball hat with no logo. His eyes were a gold and green and seemed to be able to stare right through me.
I hadn’t told a person what I was going to do, yet Stan knew I was looking for him.
Scary. Damn scary.
I kept on my poker face and managed to say, “I am.” I didn’t ask him how he knew. “You have thirty seconds to talk privately?”
“Sure do,” he said, nodding toward the small lobby outside at the top of the escalator.
The lobby was a place where deals were done, mostly between players who had no money, and people who did. The sponsors, as they were called, took a cut of a player’s possible winnings in exchange for buying them into a tournament. Those arrangements were sometimes profitable for both sides, and often allowed a person who couldn’t play top-level poker to ride along on the excitement with a person who could.
I led Stan over to an open spot against the wall. No one seemed to notice either of us, and I wondered if that was Stan blocking out people’s attention, or just the fact that we looked like any two players trying to make a deal, which in essence, we were.
As soon as we got to a place where no one could hear us I asked him point blank, “You know what I’m working on?”
“No contest there,” I said, laughing with him, but not feeling that much at ease.
“And you’re wondering if I have any advice on how to do what you and Screamer are trying to do?”
“Got me read in one,” I said.
Stan nodded, as if thinking about how to play a hand. Then he looked directly at me. “Ghost slots are nasty things. And no one really knows how many of the things there are. They’re always hungry, and they don’t completely exist in the here and now. Some people say they can float through time and across distances, taking their human food with them. Once the human is drained of all energy and essence, they look for another snack.”
That didn’t sound good for Ben, that’s for sure. “Any restrictions on the space or time they can move?”
Stan shrugged. “As far as I know, they can only travel to places where they once existed in real life, like those slots did here in the Horseshoe.”
I nodded. I had figured as much, but it was good to hear him confirm that detail.
He went on. “They drive the God of Slots crazy, let me tell you. She thought she had them under control until this.”
“I’ll bet they get to her,” I said, not feeling hopeful at all. If these things couldn’t be handled by the Gambling Gods, what did a couple of superheroes like me and Screamer think we could do?
“You ever hear of anyone getting loose from them?”
“No,” Stan said.
Then he stopped. I could sense that there was something he wasn’t telling me. It felt odd to be reading the main God of Poker, but that was exactly what I was doing. I was putting a read on Stan.
“So what else is happening, Stan?”
Stan took a deep breath, and for a moment I thought he was going to just shake his head and say nothing. Then he glanced around.
Suddenly everyone froze. It felt as if we had moved between two moments in time.
Almost everyone around us had their mouth open, and the woman sitting at the sign-in table was in the process of adjusting her bra while looking down the hallway to her right.
Not only was everyone stopped like a statue, but Stan had shut off the sound as well, which in a casino can be very disconcerting. Casinos, the places I loved, were never completely quiet. Even in the slowest periods, slot machines made a humming noise, and often called out to customers to come play them, even though there were no customers around.
Every casino I knew had background music. Just the massive numbers of lights in casinos filled the places with a low noise. But now there wasn’t a sound. Stan and I might have well been standing in the middle of the Mojave Desert without a wind.
“Nice trick,” I said to Stan, nodding.
“Didn’t want anyone hearing what I am about to tell you,” Stan said.
“That good, huh?” I said, turning my attention from all the frozen people around me to Stan, suddenly very worried.
“Actually, that bad,” Stan said. “The case you’re working isn’t the only ghost slot snatch. There have been around fifty, maybe a lot more, in the last six or seven days, and today someone got a reporter from the Sun to go stand in a certain spot in the Mirage and watch some slots take a woman.”
“Someone is doing this on purpose?” I asked, just about as stunned and surprised as I had been in years.
“Looks that way,” Stan said.
I made the next jump, to the only logical reason why anyone would be doing this purposely. “They’re trying to kill every casino on the planet.”
Stan nodded.
We both stood there in silence, the poker players and sponsors frozen around us like statues. The ideas that casinos were actually threatened just flat scared me beyond any monster, any killer I had ever faced. Casinos were my home, my place of power, the only reason I got up in the mornings.
Whoever was doing this was threatening me directly.
I turned to Stan. “The management has no leads on this?”
Management was what superheroes called the top gods.
“Everyone’s working on it,” Stan said. “I’ve been in two hundred casinos in the last few hours myself, looking for any clue, anything that might be a lead.”
I nodded. If all the casino gods and management gods were on the case, I had no idea how Screamer and I could help. We were just a couple of lowly superheroes. And that thought came right out of my mouth next.
“So what good can I do in all this?”
Stan stared at me, and when the God of Poker stares at you, you know you’ve been studied, read, and put away. Never, in all my memory have I been looked at with that kind of intensity, that kind of focus, even by the best poker players in the world.
“Actually,” Stan said after what seemed like the longest second I have ever survived, “you might be one of our best hopes. Burt told me this morning you were coming, would be working on this, and that I should help you where I can.”
“Now I am really worried,” I said.
“The managers of publicity and security have put a team together as well, a reporter and a cop. You might run into them, so help them if you can as well. All of us are after the same thing.”
“Stopping these things,” I said.
“Exactly,” Stan said. “And soon.”
I took a deep breath, glanced around at all the frozen statues of people filling the lobby at the top of the escalator, then turned back to face Stan.
“You said these ghost slots can move around when hunting, appearing and disappearing like the one I saw on that tape. Right?”
“That’s what we always thought.”
“So how can someone control something that can move like that?”
“You tell us that,” Stan said, “and we’ll know who’s doing this.”
I didn’t really want to ask the next question, but I did. “Can it be another branch of gods, you know, the death and dying ones on some sort of strange crusade.”
Stan shook his head. “No. I was there when Laverne checked with them.”
Calling Lady Luck, the woman in charge of it all, by her first name, shook me. I would never have the courage to do that. Not ever. I wanted to keep playing and winning, and even though poker was a skill game, there was still that element of luck involved, and having the top of the top Herself mad at you would be a very, very bad thing.
“So we’re dealing with someone who somehow has figured out a way to control ghost slots and wants casinos shut down. Some sort of anti-gambling nut-case.”
“That’s one of the main ways we’re following as well. But my suggestion is that you track the slots to where they live here and now. Their base, their nest, their haunt, whatever you want to call it. They have to go somewhere and you never know what you might find. And don’t be afraid to use your Unstuck-In-Time power to follow them if you have to.”
I nodded again, not completely understanding what he meant. I didn’t know I had an Unstuck-In-Time superpower, and I wasn’t sure what it might be, actually. But that was no surprise. Even after twenty years I was still discovering some of my powers.
“You mean I can do this?” I asked, motioning all the people around me. “How?”
“You can,” he said. “When you need it, you’ll know how.”
“Well, thanks, I guess,” I said. “You want me to report in to you.”
“No need. I’ll be following your progress and helping where I can,” he said.
“Thanks, Stan,” I said
“No problem,” he said, smiling at me. “This is something special where we all need to help each other. I’ll still owe you for passing up old Betty for me. Man, you got some will power. I hear she’s about as good in the sack as they come.”
With a laugh and a shake of his head, he turned away and headed back for the big room as everyone around us started moving again, and the noise pounded in like a dam breaking.
I had no doubt that if I followed him in there I wouldn’t be able to spot him again. Gambling Gods could disappear like that.
I headed for the elevator, doing my best to not think about what might have been that Christmas Eve with Betty, and that wonderful skin and perfect body of hers. I had a blind woman’s husband to rescue, the entire casino industry to save, and maybe a new superpower to use. It just wasn’t the right moment for me to be thinking about wild sex.
By the time I had reached my room, I had replaced Betty’s face in my mind with Patty’s wonderful smile, brown hair, raspberry smell, and perfect mole.
But even her wonderful face and the memory of her smell couldn’t keep the images of empty casinos, boarded up and shut down forever, from filling my thoughts.
I’d have to hang up my Poker Boy jacket and hat and go to playing poker in back rooms, bars, and Elk clubs to make a living. It wouldn’t be a bad life, but it wouldn’t be a great one either.
I spent most of the rest of the night on my bed, fully dressed, with my superhero uniform still on, soaking up the energy and thinking.
Chapter Nine
TOO DAMN EARLY
SCREAMER CALLED what seemed like five minutes after I had finally managed to doze off.
Somehow, I got the phone on the second, maybe third ring, and got it to the side of my face without hurting myself. Then, before I mumbled the word “Hello,” he started talking.
“No luck so far, Poker Boy. But I think I got a lead. It’s out in one of the old joints on the highway toward the dam. You want me to follow it?”
“Yeah,” I said, fighting to get my mind focused on what he was saying and not the fading dream of spending a night with a beautiful gambling god.
“Also, this is a lot bigger than we thought,” Screamer said.
That snapped me awake, remembering what Stan had talked to me about, what had kept me laying awake thinking all night.
“What do you know?”
Slots of Saturn: A Poker Boy Novel Page 5