“I don’t see why not,” he said. “But I’d be afraid to do anything unless I was completely sure what I was doing would kick those people out of there.”
“I agree with you there,” I said. “Your friend Harry seems to be the first to have disappeared in there. If you could talk to him, you think the two of you might come up with something?”
“Him on the inside, me out here?” Tech said. “Sure.”
I nodded and turned to look at Johnny.
“I’ll do it,” both Johnny and Geneva said at the exact same moment.
“Do what?” Samantha asked.
“Stick a nickel in that thing and go inside to find Harry,” I said.
“That’s bug-nuts crazy,” Tech said.
“Oh, no,” Samantha said.
Patty just looked pale.
Screamer shook his head.
The silence in the warehouse was smothering.
Chapter Sixteen
CONTACT AT TWENTY-FOUR VOLTS
I STARED AT JOHNNY as he watched through Geneva’s eyes what was happening in the casino with the ghost slots. At one point he had shouted “Get her out of there!”
Then he had laughed and explained to all of us standing there staring at him, worried, that an old woman had sat down at the ghost slots. He said that Patty and Geneva and a cop had managed to stop the woman before she got a coin into the slot. His laughing and shaking his head cut the tension a little in the warehouse among the five of us.
Screamer and I stood next to Johnny, ready to help him in any way we could under the circumstances.
“Geneva’s sitting down at the machine,” he said.
Suddenly he was very serious again and I could hear the worry in his voice and see it on his face. He didn’t like this, and I didn’t much like it either, but it had come to be our best choice.
And our only plan.
Tech was afraid to touch the machine for fear he would do something that would kill all the people inside. He wanted the help of the old guy I was betting had reset the slots in the first place, Harry Timmer. But Harry was inside the slots, and had been from the start. So someone had to go in and talk to old Harry and relay the information out to Tech.
The connection between Geneva and Johnny made one of them a natural for the job. I didn’t like it, but none of us could come up with another way of trying to rescue all those people inside there.
As Geneva said to one of my objections, “You often have to jump into water and endanger yourself to rescue a drowning person.”
She was right. I knew she was right. I just didn’t much like the pool she was jumping into. And neither did anyone else.
“She’s put a coin in and pulled the handle,” Johnny said.
Suddenly he grabbed his head and bent forward, as if he had a bad hangover.
Screamer was about to grab him to hold him up, but I waived him off. Whatever was happening to Geneva and Johnny, I didn’t want Screamer feeling it as well.
Johnny moaned a few seconds later, but remained standing, bent over, his hands grabbing the sides of his head like he was trying to hold his skull together.
Then he screamed.
It was like no scream I could have ever imagined coming from a big, powerful detective. It sounded like a combination of him and Geneva, high and sharp at the same time as low and guttural. It sent chills up my spine.
The scream echoed through the warehouse, then Johnny tipped forward onto his hands and knees on the concrete.
“Help him!” Samantha said.
“Don’t touch him yet,” I said, waiving everyone away. “We need his connection with Geneva clear.”
A moment later the slots shimmered into view, bringing back with them the intense desire to go sit down and just try my luck. But of course, putting a nickel in that slot machine at this point wouldn’t have much luck involved. Just stupidity, which was how I often felt about playing slot machines even when they weren’t ghost slots.
Around us, the gray of the warehouse had changed back to reflected colors and energy from the lights on the machine. Every face, every old slot machine covered in gray dust now had multiple colors as the image of Saturn glowed brighter than any light in the warehouse.
Being careful to not touch any of Johnny’s skin to jeopardize his connection with Geneva, I bent down and he let me help him to his feet.
“What happened?” Screamer asked.
Johnny took a deep breath. “The shock and the pain knocked her out.”
“Shock shouldn’t have been that bad,” Tech said. “Those machines are run on twenty-four volts.”
“You all right?” I asked. I could feel his shoulders shaking a little, but with each passing second he seemed to be gaining control.
He nodded slowly. “I think so, but I’m betting on one hell of a headache.”
“Is Geneva all right?” Samantha asked.
Again he nodded slowly. “I think so. She’s knocked out, but I can still hear her thoughts under her dreams.”
“Okay, now that’s got to be real weird,” Tech said.
I had to agree with Tech on that one. Listening to a person’s dreaming mind must seem like watching a bad psychedelic movie while being very drunk.
“Actually, at the moment, she’s dreaming she’s swimming to the surface of a pool,” Johnny said, his eyes staring off into the distance. “Very peaceful, no panic or worries. Hang on. I see what she’s doing. She’s trying to reach the surface and wake up.”
We all stared at him until he finally nodded and turned to look at me. “She’s all right. She’s awake and she’s in there.”
He pointed to the ghost slot machine.
“Oh, wow, cool,” Tech said. “What’s it look like?”
“White corridors,” Johnny said. “Everything is shades of white, including her clothing, hair and skin. All the colors are gone from everything. She feels normal-sized and very lost in the maze of corridors. Nothing seems to have any corners either, including the corridors. They’re more like round tubes that twist and move off in different directions.”
“I’ll bet she’s in the electrical wiring,” Tech said. “Have her move until she finds a junction area and then describe it.”
“She agreed,” Johnny said.
“Is she meeting some of the others in there?”
“She is,” Johnny said. “And she’s already asking for Harry.”
We all stood silent for a moment watching Johnny, who was with Geneva inside the ghost slots. After a moment, Johnny said, “It’s weird, because I’m in there with her, and she’s out here with me at the same time. It’s helping her stay calm being here through my eyes. Also weird that everyone in there that she meets somehow knows they are inside a machine.”
I had no idea how people trapped as energy inside the wiring of a machine could know where they were. I couldn’t imagine there being windows out of the side of the wiring. But at this point, nothing about ghost slots would surprise me.
“Tech, she’s at an intersection,” Johnny said. “One corridor into a wide triangle area, three corridors out side-by-side.”
Tech seemed to think for a minute, then said, “I’m betting she’s at the electrical junction sending power to the wheels. You need to have her turn around and go back the way she came.”
“You think you might know where Harry is at?” I asked Tech, surprised at how definite he sounded.
“If I was stuck in there, and knew where I was, I’d be at the solenoid on the reel board.”
“Solenoid?” Patty asked as she came back toward us down the rows of dead slot machines. “Sounds like she’s in there and just fine.”
“She is,” I said.
The relief on Patty’s face was clear.
I was very happy to see her back from the casino. I felt more comfortable with her beside me on this problem. It was as if I got a “balance energy” from her, keeping my mind clear. Next time I made the final table of a big tournament, I might ask her to come and watc
h from the stands, just for that energy boost.
“The solenoid is an electric coil used as a control and switching devise,” Tech said. “Its purpose is setting payouts on the machines built in this period. It’s located on what they called the reel board, the electrical panel area that controls the three reels of the machine.”
Patty stopped right beside me as I asked Tech the next logical question. “Is that one of the things that would have had to have been changed to make the machines hit jackpots all the time?”
“The main thing,” Tech said.
“Hang on,” Johnny said, holding his hands up. “Someone Geneva just ran into knows Harry.”
There was a pause as we all waited for Johnny’s next statement. Then he smiled at me. “Says he’s been trying to help Harry figure out a way to escape. He’s taking Geneva to Harry now.”
“Great!” I said.
I turned to Screamer. “I’m going to need you to hook up Tech and Johnny, so Tech can talk directly to Harry. Make sure he gets everything right. Can you do that?”
“Easy,” Screamer said.
“Hang on,” Tech said, “you’re saying that I can talk through Johnny, then through Geneva, to Harry who is inside that machine?”
“Actually, through me first,” Screamer said, smiling at the young guy with all the tattoos.
“A conversation through three heads,” Tech said. “I’m going to be lucky to not need counseling after this is finished.”
I agreed with him on that. Running around in Samantha’s head earlier had left me unsettled. I knew way too many things about her that I wanted to forget. Too much about her dreams, her fights with her husband, her sexual pleasures. And she knew the same stuff about me, which I didn’t really want to think about.
I wasn’t sure how Johnny and Geneva had made a constant connection between them work so quickly over the last day, but after my short romp with Samantha’s mind, I now knew that I didn’t want to see what Patty was thinking, or even know how she felt about me. And I didn’t want her seeing my daydreams about her in the shower and me with a bar of raspberry soap. It was going to be a lot better learning about her slowly, blindly, one question at a time, one nude shower at a time.
More fun, too.
“She’s almost to where Harry is at,” Johnny said.
“Ready?” I asked Screamer.
“As I’ll ever be.”
I motioned for Tech to come over closer to Johnny while Screamer placed himself between the two. Samantha and I and Patty stepped back out of the way.
“Here we go,” Screamer said, winking at me.
Then he reached out and first touched Tech’s arm, right below a tattoo of an eagle, then touched Johnny’s arm.
Tech’s worry left his face as his eyes sort of glazed over. Clearly he wasn’t seeing the aisle of the old slot machine warehouse anymore. He was inside the slots, inside Geneva’s mind.
Screamer looked at me, clearly in his eyes and reported what he was seeing. “Harry’s sitting down in there. He seems very, very tired and old. I think the energy drain caused by the machine is almost too much for him.
“Yeah, it’s me, Harry,” Tech said out loud.
Screamer smiled and sort of rolled his eyes, making it clear to us that he thought it funny that some people had to talk when thinking to another person.
“Don’t ask,” Tech said. “I don’t even understand how this works.”
All of us smiled at that.
“I’ve been feeling that same way,” Samantha whispered to Patty.
“So what did you do?” Tech asked the unseen Harry.
A moment later Tech said, “Oh, shit.”
None of us smiled at that.
Screamer almost whispered to us, “Harry said he was the one that caused this all to happen, and he’s very sorry.”
“You’re kidding?” Tech said. “You know how much pain and worry and fear you’ve caused.”
A long pause followed that.
“So any idea exactly how many people are in here?” Tech asked.
Pause.
“So what’s going to reverse this?”
Nothing for a moment. Screamer seemed to be listening and had stopped reporting to us the other side of the conversation.
“If it’s that easy, how come you haven’t done it before now?” Tech asked.
A very long pause that seemed to make the silence of the warehouse grow in intensity and power.
“Oh,” Tech said.
“Oh, shit,” Screamer said. He looked like he was about to be very sick.
“Impossible,” Johnny said, shaking his head, the look of worry and fear very strong in his face.
“I’ll be back,” Tech said, then pulled his arm away from Screamer and staggered a few paces away.
Screamer let go of Johnny and turned to walk a few paces away.
Johnny just slumped to the concrete floor and put his head in his hands.
I glanced at the very worried look on Patty’s face, then stepped forward toward Tech. “What happened. What was that all about?”
“No problem reversing the process Harry started,” Tech said, staring at the floor without looking up at me. “Harry got sucked into these ghost slots while scrounging in here for parts. He figured he could reconfigure the machines from the inside to spit him back out, but he missed a setting, reversed a few things, and got the machines taking more people on jackpots.”
“So he’s the reason this has all happened?” I asked.
“Yeah, Harry trying to save himself caused all this,” Screamer said, turning back to face me. “No wonder no one could figure out what was going on, or who was behind it.”
Tech nodded. “He’s feeling damn bad about it, too. And he has since figured out how to solve the problem and set the machines from in there to spit out everyone.”
“So why hasn’t he done that?” Samantha asked, moving up beside me. “Why hasn’t he let my Ben out of there?”
“One chair,” Patty said.
I turned and glanced at her, then at the one old wooden chair attached to the front of the Saturn slot machine that held everyone. She was right. Where would the people go?
“One chair,” Screamer said, agreeing. “There are one hundred and three people in that machine right now counting Geneva and Harry. They would all appear in that chair, reformed in their bodies, like coins dropping out of a pay-out chute. About three per second.”
“Not possible,” Samantha said.
“That’s right,” Johnny said from where he sat on the floor. “They would all be killed, their bodies materialized together in a massive pile of flesh and bones.”
“And there’s no way to slow it down?” Samantha demanded.
“There is no setting in the machine that regulates the rate of payout,” Tech said. “Just the amount.”
“So get Harry to set the payout at one,” I said.
Again Tech shook his head. “That’s what Harry has been working on, but again, there are no single unit payouts on this machine, and nothing goes that low in any setting he can find. And if he can’t find it from in there, it doesn’t exist.
“How many is the minimum?” Patty asked.
“Three,” Tech said. “Three, two, one-hundred. It’s not going to matter.
I stared at the single chair in front of the old slot machine and tried to imagine three human bodies appearing there in one second. Tech was right. Three or one hundred. They would all die.
And die horribly.
Chapter Seventeen
TWO SUPERHEROES, NO SOAP
THE SILENCE in the big warehouse became intense as we all were lost in our own thoughts. It was as if we were sitting in a big, neon-lit tomb, the gray and dust of the place pushed back and barely held at bay by the bright colors of the enemy machines.
The pull from the ghost slots was still strong, but I had put the feeling off to one side and was ignoring it, and it seemed the rest were dealing with it as well, although none of us got w
ithin four paces of the things.
Over one hundred people were trapped in that one ghost slot machine, and there was no way to get them out safely. That fact was enough to depress just about anyone. And I couldn’t even imagine how Johnny was feeling. He shared his mind with Geneva, and she was going to die with him inside her head. More than likely it would kill him as well, or do so much damage as to never let him function normally again.
I couldn’t let that happen. There had to be a way to save them. There had to be.
We just had to find it.
I glanced around at the team. Johnny was sitting on the concrete floor. He was the closest to the machine, staring at it, clearly in contact with Geneva.
Samantha sat cross-legged a few feet behind him, her back against a tarp-covered machine.
Screamer was pacing up and down and up and down the aisle, his steps silent on the concrete floor.
Tech had walked twenty feet away and now stood with his back to everyone, not moving.
Patty stood beside me, her beautiful head tipped back as if she were studying something up near the roof of the big warehouse.
I moved over beside Johnny and knelt down. “How long does Geneva think they have in there?”
“Harry’s been in there the longest and he’s very weak,” Johnny said. “There are a few others like him.”
“Thanks,” I said, standing and letting Johnny and Geneva go back to being together in their minds.
Not only was the town about to explode with the news of all the missing people, but if Harry died in there, drained of energy by the machine, there would be no chance at all of any rescue without sending Tech or someone else inside to set the machine.
I moved back over beside Patty and tapped her shoulder. She looked at me with those big brown eyes of hers and I almost forgot that I wanted to talk to her. I indicated that she should follow me toward the warehouse door. She nodded and without a word to any of the others we moved away.
I didn’t exactly know what I wanted to talk to her about. She was a superhero like I was, had been around a lot longer than I had been, and she kept me balanced. If I was going to think out loud about this project, it made sense to think out loud to her. And right now, I really needed to do some out-loud thinking.
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