Smith's Monthly #64: Smith's Monthly, #64

By Dean Wesley Smith

This 64th issue of Smith's Monthly contains more than seventy-six thousand words of fiction from USA Today bestselling writer Dean Wesley Smith, including The Slots of Saturn, a Poker Boy novel, in which Poker Boy meets the love of his life and then must save all of gambling, and more than fifty lives, from the evil ghost slots. And not get killed in the process. But first, he forms the team of superheroes and gods that will save the world many times over in the coming years.

So also included is a collection of Dean's Poker Boy stories, Playing a Hunch.

There's more! Four new short stories from some of Dean's most popular series: "Enjoying the Company," a Bryant Street Story; "Passing in Time," a Thunder Mountain time travel story; "Can't Go Home," a Sky Tate story; and "No Firing Squad Yet," a Marble Grant story.

Hours and hours of entertaining reading!

• Language: English
• Publisher: WMG Publishing
• Release date: Aug 30, 2022
• ISBN: 9798215696828

Dean Wesley Smith

Considered one of the most prolific writers working in modern fiction, USA TODAY bestselling writer, Dean Wesley Smith published far over a hundred novels in forty years, and hundreds of short stories across many genres. He currently produces novels in four major series, including the time travel Thunder Mountain novels set in the old west, the galaxy-spanning Seeders Universe series, the urban fantasy Ghost of a Chance series, and the superhero series staring Poker Boy. During his career he also wrote a couple dozen Star Trek novels, the only two original Men in Black novels, Spider-Man and X-Men novels, plus novels set in gaming and television worlds.

Book preview

Smith’s Monthly Issue #64

SMITH’S MONTHLY ISSUE #64

DEAN WESLEY SMITH

WMG Publishing, Inc.

CONTENTS

Introduction

Enjoying The Company

Introduction

Enjoying The Company

Passing In Time

Introduction

Passing In Time

Playing a Hunch

Foreword

Introduction

Leaking Away a Life

Introduction

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

A Reason to Play a Hunch

Introduction

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

The Rude Improbable Presumptive

Introduction

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

The Library of Atlantis

Introduction

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Gods Have History

Introduction

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Can’t Go Home

Introduction

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

No Firing Squad Yet

Introduction

No Firing Squad Yet

The Slots of Saturn

Introduction

1. A Superhero Arrives

2. A Beautiful Woman and Trouble is Found

3. A Side-Kick Joins the Fun

4. One Office, No Windows, No Escape

5. Addiction

6. Another Superhero

7. What Next?

8. Looking for a God in all the Right Places

9. Too Damn Early

10. A Nap and A Search

11. The Return from Hell

12. A Quick Lunch

13. The Bookkeeper

14. The Troops are Gathered

15. A (Sort of) Plan Forms

16. Contact at Twenty-Four Volts

17. Two Superheroes, No Soap

18. The Draining of a Machine

19. No Going Down with the Slot

20. Math Doesn’t Work

21. Death and the Machine

22. A Happy Ending (with Food)

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About the Author

INTRODUCTION

Poker Boy Stories and the Origin Novel

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I am writing more and more Poker Boy stories these days. I had stopped at one point because the covers we were using for them just got too complex and I couldn’t do them.

And weirdly enough, as a writer, that stops me cold on the writing side.

Yeah, I’m strange, but what writer isn’t strange in some way or another?

But after a couple years, we finally gave up on those other covers and started doing covers I can once again do, and so now, slowly, I am back writing Poker Boy stories again.

I first published the Poker Boy origin story, a novel titled The Slots of Saturn, here in these pages in Issue #7 in 2014. Wow, a long time ago.

Poker Boy was still a new superhero, and in this novel he meets Patty for the time. She is another superhero and turns out to be the love of his life going forward.

And all the events in the book take place way before he has most of his powers or even a team.

Yet somehow, he and Patty and a few others help save the world for the first time, something he and his team tend to do often in future adventures.

So, just as I felt last issue with the Jukebox stories, I felt it was time to bring Poker Boy forward in time and let others know how he started.

Poker Boy is my favorite of all my characters. I even wear a black leather jacket and a black Fedora-like hat and I wore them for my entire years of playing professional poker.

I sometimes get asked if Poker Boy is me. I wish. But with any character, created by a writer, there is a lot of me stuffed in that insecure superhero.

—Dean Wesley Smith

August 2022

INTRODUCTION

Paul Tegner’s plan seems simple. Murder his wife, Helen, and bury her in the backyard under the patio. Nothing to it.

But Paul forgot what street he lived on, and how nothing ever works out as planned on Bryant Street.

ENJOYING THE COMPANY

A Bryant Street Story

Paul Tegner dropped the nude body of his wife from his wheelbarrow onto a blue plastic tarp used for painting that he had laid out on the garage floor. She hit with a resounding thud and a crack that was her head hitting the hard concrete.

Paul had used the tarp just a week ago, so some of the paint on it was still sticky and as Helen rolled over from the fall, she got white splotches on her right hip, right boob, and right knee.

Paul just sort of laughed and went to the workbench along the back wall of his garage and opened the can of white paint and slopped some all over Helen, leaving a large splash for her face and hair. She had hated getting dirty and anything sticky would send her into panic attacks.

She wasn’t panicking now. The claw on the back of his hammer to the side of her skull had made sure she would never panic about anything again.

And the woman who had wanted him to make sure everything around their new home on Bryant Street was perfect was now going to live in eternity with white paint all over her naked body. He thought that wonderfully perfect and ironic.

He put the paint can back on the bench and closed it tight, then went to Helen. She was a beautiful woman with a beautiful body, of that there was no doubt. But the beauty had gone no deeper than her skin and the layers of makeup she used every morning.

Underneath the beauty she was cold, calculating, and just flat abusive.

And even more amazing, he had put up with it for five long years. Right up until tonight when he asked for a divorce, she said no one was ever going to divorce her. After all, what would people think?

So she had then gone into her ignoring him routine, as if he was no greater than a slug. So he had simply gone out to his workbench, gotten his carpenter’s claw hammer, and buried the claw part into her skull at least three inches deep.

Instant divorce and no one would ever be the wiser, since no one would know except for what he would tell them.

He carefully wrapped her up, making sure no white paint got on the garage floor.

Then he put layers of duct tape around the tarp to hold it in position.

Then he took another blue painting tarp and opened it on the floor beside her and rolled her over on top of it and did the same thing again, sealing every seam as best he could.

Then he hefted her back into the wheelbarrow and rolled her over against the wall and parked her, putting a couple shovels in the wheelbarrow beside her.

You could never tell there was a body in the big pile of blue tarp. Just looked like some sort of gardening project.

And it was.

Then he turned off the garage light, spent the next hour cleaning up the blood from where he had hit her in her bedroom. They had long ago stopped sleeping in the same room. Seemed he snored.

Then right on time for their normal bedtime, he clicked off the lights and went to bed.

Just as always he got up and made coffee, but this morning, instead of taking a cup into her bedroom because she demanded it, he just sat and read the morning news on his laptop and ate a bagel and drank his coffee. Outside, the day looked like it was going to be a perfect day, temps in the low seventies, all sun.

So about ten, he headed out to the backyard with his shovel and started digging a long trench to the west side of his concrete patio. It was pretty easy digging, since they had had a wet spring. And after a break for lunch, he had the trench a good twenty feet long and about two feet deep.

He had been planning on planting a row of hedge trees and actually had them sitting beside the house on the left.

So he went and got a couple of them and planted two close together in his trench. They were fast-growing and would by next summer provide wonderful, natural shade for the patio.

That was enough for one day, so he went back inside, took a shower, and cooked himself a wonderful steak dinner with fries. And he even allowed himself one beer. He figured he deserved it.

The next morning at ten he was back out in the trench, only this time he went deeper right in the middle, digging a hole down and under the concrete patio. He knew that right at this spot there were no power or water or sewer lines because he had built the patio back when he was married to his first wife, Alice. So he knew he could go down into the ground as far as he wanted.

After a lunch break, he kept working and ended up with a pretty good-sized cave under the patio.

At that point he went into the garage and got his wheelbarrow with Helen’s wrapped-up body and hauled it out to the hole and dumped it in.

Then he got down in the hole with her and made sure she was as far back under the concrete as he could get her, then he filled the hole back in, really packing the dirt up under the concrete over her body.

He even put in four six-foot two-by-four pieces of lumber up against the underside of the concrete to give it more support when her body decomposed and left a hole. Last thing he needed was for Helen to cause a crack in Alice’s perfect concrete patio.

He planted four more of the trees before finally calling it a day and going in for a shower and dinner.

He finished the project by lunch the next day and wow did those trees look great along that side of the patio.

Then he went down to a local nursery and got a bunch of flowering plants and planted the flowers under the trees. That was really going to be beautiful next year for the new tenants to enjoy.

Since Helen had no job and no real friends, no one asked where she had gone. He was ready to tell people who asked that they had decided to divorce and she was traveling. But no one asked, just as no one had asked about Alice, his first wife, either.

Four weeks later, he filed divorce papers and since he was so good at her signature before she had suddenly died, he signed the papers for her.

In the divorce she got everything she had brought into the marriage, which was basically her clothes and an old Buick, which he sold four days later.

He had a lot of family money and in the divorce she laid no claim to his money. Nicest thing she ever did in her entire life. In reality, she had loved spending his money. Hated him, but loved his money and figured she would get it when he died.

Just like Alice. Wow, he really could pick wives. Zero for two so far.

After the no-fault divorce was final, he found himself a place to live downtown and put the house on Bryant Street up for sale. He had been there long enough with Alice and then Helen. He liked the place but he needed to start over.

He sold off all of the furniture and Helen’s clothing, and kept a few of his own tools, including the big claw hammer to remember Helen and a screwdriver to remember April.

The house sold quickly and the new tenants loved the patio and set up a large barbeque right over Helen’s body.

But about a month later he got a call from the new tenant.

Did you ever see anything strange on the patio? the tenant asked.

He said he hadn’t and the tenant went on to tell him how two naked women, one covered in white paint, had been sitting on their patio furniture last night and then just vanished.

Paul just shook his head. Helen was under once side of the patio, Alice the other. Paul offered to the new tenant that if the problem wouldn’t go away, Paul would just buy the place back.

So two months later, Paul Tegner moved back into his home on Bryant Street. This time he decorated the house to his tastes, including a massive television screen filling most of one wall in the living room.

He spent the next month building a higher fence around his entire backyard so no neighbors could see his patio.

Then he put three chairs, a small table near one chair, and a barbeque on the patio.

And every nice evening during the spring, summer, and fall, right after dark, he cooked himself a steak and potato on the grill and had dinner with his previous two wives.

Unlike when they were alive, they didn’t talk.

They didn’t abuse him and belittle him or put him down in any way. They didn’t demand he do things he didn’t want to do. And they also didn’t want to spend his money, which he found perfect.

They just sat there naked, staring at him as he ate.

And even more than he remembered, they were both very attractive women.

Especially silent, dead, and naked.

A situation that could only be found in the backyards and on the patios of Bryant Street.

INTRODUCTION

Andy Neilson noticed the time traveler, Terri Allen, one fine day in the caverns under the Institute.

And seems she noticed him as well. But they missed talking.

And connecting through all of time turns out to be a tough matter. Especially when a trip into the past only takes just over two minutes.

A story of two people, time travelers, finding the other against all odds.

PASSING IN TIME

A Thunder Mountain Story

Andy Neilson didn’t consider himself a stalker, but he guessed he was. He really just wanted to meet and talk with Terri Allen.

Turned out she was stalking him in sort of the same way.

Her base timeline was 2023 and his was 2025, so she had been traveling for two years before he even knew about the cavern and traveling in time.

In two years, she more than likely had traveled for thousands of years in the past. To him, that just made her even more interesting.

She had caught up to him real time, so both of them were now in his timeline. And from what he could tell from her books, they both seemed to be interested in the Pacific Northwest from 1905 to mid-1930 or so. His area of research was on what happened to all the ownerships of the old mines, and how mining in the area stayed barely alive during that period of time.

The Second World War brought some of it back, but hundreds of thousands of mining claims were lost to time.

Her interest and her books focused on the women of the night in the Pacific Northwest, how they lived during that period of time, moved from the cribs to the houses with madams guarding over them.

She seemed intensely focused in her three published books on how most of the women died. Her most recent book also focused on the madams of Portland and Boise.

Andy had no idea why, but she was a riveting writer.

The first time he ever saw her was in passing in the big cavern one afternoon. He had been coming back from a thirty-year trip, only his forty-fourth trip since he had been introduced to the caverns and become a traveler, and she was clearly ready to go out on a trip, heading toward the stairs down to the crystal caverns.

She had looked at him and smiled, her huge green eyes lighting up and he had tipped his trail-dusted hat to her. She was dressed as a woman of money in 1910 or so, with a wide skirt, high boots, and a hat tied under her chin. She was short, not more than about five foot, with bright red hair that cascaded over her shoulders. She walked with a power of someone you didn’t want to mess with.

With his tip of the hat, she smiled even wider, nodded, and then headed down toward the crystals. He headed for the showers and a change into modern clothes. But on the way he asked two other travelers sitting at the big counter in the cavern having lunch who she was.

Terri Allen, one of them said.

That was how he first learned her name.

Since she was going to be gone only a little over two minutes from this timeline, he showered and changed quickly from his dusty trail clothes and into jeans and a sweater, since it was December outside in Boise. He slipped on running shoes and made it back into the main cavern in fifteen minutes. But no sign of her.

In that amount of time she could have taken six or seven trips into the past and hundreds of years could have passed for her.

He waited around a time and then headed back to his Institute condo on the river to deal with his notes from his last trip, and also look up her name. That was when he found her books, ordered them, and read them over the next few days.

All they did was pique his interest in her even more.

But then, to be honest, he mostly forgot about her with his research and during the five hundred years he spent in the past on his next fourteen trips back. It had taken him just two days in real time to make all those trips and he really needed to get his notes together.

So on his last trip, he had spent a lot of time in Boise, mostly doing research on mining claims and ownership of the claims in the county and state buildings. He was doing that to fill in legal details on so much of what he had researched over the last hundreds of years. He had started the trip in 1910, so by 1938, he was over fifty and feeling it. That was another reason to head back so he could get into his twenty-nine year old body.

He loved the fact that any trip into the past just took a little over two minutes in his base time, no matter how long he stayed in the alternate timeline’s past. And he really loved that even if he died of old age, he still only aged just over two minutes.

Since he knew he was planning on staying in Boise for a time, he had bought a small Victorian about halfway out Warm Springs Avenue toward the Institute. He had lived there for years and knew the details of the town. And he knew, but paid no attention to, the large house of ill repute one block off Warm Springs that was rumored to have eight women and a madam and took care of the needs of the most powerful men in the state and city.

He was headed into town in his fairly new Packard when he saw a wreck ahead between a car and a streetcar, so he veered off the block and ended up passing the big house.

A woman sat on the large open porch, drinking a glass of what looked like iced tea to hold off the warm spring weather.

She was small, about his age, and had bright red hair and bright green eyes.

He knew instantly it was Terri Allen, the traveler from the Institute.

He pulled over and stopped and climbed out as she watched him. She had a slight smile on her face, but he doubted she recognized him.

He was wrong.

Well, Terri said, not standing from her rocking chair. Mr. Andy Neilson. You sure have been spending a lot of time with your head buried in those records.

He almost just froze in his tracks. How in the world did she know what he had been doing and his name?

He was dressed as a rich businessman, which in this timeline and time, he was. He had on a fedora-style hat and he tipped it as he gathered himself.

Is it Ms. Allan?

She glanced around, making sure no one could hear her. Then she said, Madam Terri is what I go by here. I wasn’t sure you would remember me. How many years has it been for you?

Since we met in the cavern? he asked. Maybe five hundred. But after we met, I bought all your books and read them. You are tough to forget.

She laughed and nodded. Thank you. Even with the years working on me?

He could see the wrinkles up close, but she had aged beautifully if she was his age at the moment in this timeline.

I asked when I got back from that trip your name as well, she said, smiling, and read your books as well. This is my next trip out after I met you.

Stalking me, huh? I asked, smiling.

No more than you did for me, she said, returning his smile. But I did learn a few years back that you were here. But in my position, not much I dare do to introduce myself.

He laughed at that.

Well, I have to say that studying mining claims, he said, is not at all as interesting as what you are doing.

More interesting, maybe, but clearly not safer. I’m headed back to our time in about an hour. A new group has formed backed by clergy and angry wives that will be paying my fine home a visit tonight. I have already scattered my girls to the wind with enough money each to make it to California or back East and was just enjoying one last beverage.

My timing is perfect, he said.

She nodded. That it is.

I am done in this timeline as well, he said. I just need to close up my house and give my broker the keys to sell it.

Shall we meet in the cavern in an hour? she suggested.

I would love that, he said.

And what date did you leave on this trip? she asked.

About two in the afternoon, Sunday, December tenth.

Four in the afternoon the same day, she said, again giving him that huge smile that lit up those wonderful green eyes he hoped to stare into a lot more. We just barely missed each other again, taking this trip. No more of that. You up for dinner tonight?

His heart damn near beat out of his chest like a high school kid asking out his first date.

I most certainly am, Madam Terri, he said, bowing and tipping his hat to her.

One hour, dear sir, she said, acting very formal, standing.

I am so looking forward to it, he said.

Then he turned and headed for his car while she ducked inside the big house.