Fiction River: Hex in the City (20 page)

My office, actually it’s my team’s office, but everyone calls it my office, floats about five hundred feet above the top floor of MGM Grand Hotel and Casino. It has windows on all four sides, floor-to-ceiling, with a view that was worth more than I wanted to ever imagine.

How it stayed in position was beyond me, even though Stan said I was the one who put it there and kept it there. As far as I was concerned, it stayed in place by some sort of magic I didn’t understand. There were a lot of things in the world of gods and superheroes that I didn’t understand and how my office worked was one of those things.

The office was, of course, invisible, and, as Stan said, out of phase with the real world so that if a plane hit it, the plane would pass right through. I’m sure if that happened, it would give everyone in the office a heart attack. The last thing I wanted was a plane passing through me.

But the office did have a wonderful view of the Strip and the airport and the entire city around it. Patty Ledgerwood (aka Front Desk Girl and my girlfriend and sidekick) and I often came up here at night and sat together and watched the stars and the planes landing and the cars on the Strip and all the bright lights spread out below us. As I said, a view worth more than I can imagine.

I had decorated the office so it looked like an exact replica of the 1960’s diner booth the team used to meet in. The Diner, as the place is called, is in the downtown Vegas area on a side street a block from the Horseshoe Casino and Hotel.

Just as in the Diner downtown, this booth had slick, red seats on three sides. I had added wooden chairs that could be pulled up to the end of the booth and a couple tall, tree-like plants behind the booth to give the place a little less cold feel.

The booth filled most of the room and could seat eight in a pinch.

There were only three ways to get up to the office. I had put a door leading to Patti’s apartment and another door leading to the Diner in downtown Vegas. You step through and you were instantly in the other place. Otherwise you had to teleport.

I could teleport, but besides Stan, the God of Poker and my boss, I was the only one on the team who could. Everyone else either hitched a ride here with me or Stan or used the door from the Diner.

I was told it was rare that a lowly superhero like me could teleport. Or step between instants of time. But I had learned how to do both. I figured if I could learn it, so could other superheroes, like my girlfriend, Patty. She was a superhero working in hotel hospitality area of the Gods.

She was willing to learn, so we had worked on it a few times, so far without luck. But we had time and one of Patty’s superhero traits was extreme patience. She had to have that to put up with me at times. I was a professional poker player, after all.

It had become a habit for the team to have lunch together in my office around the big booth at one in the afternoon. We all liked the view and the companionship. Sometimes being a superhero could get lonely, at least that’s what others told me. As a poker player, I always had people around me. It was part of the job.

And I was lucky enough to be tangled up with Patty.

Screamer and his wife, Terri, were sitting at the table working on burgers and vanilla shakes that Madge from the Diner had brought up. Having the great food and milkshakes from the Diner in downtown Vegas just a step through a door away was a great benefit.

Screamer had been a member of the team since we started. He was a superhero working with the police and could, with a touch, connect minds and be inside another person’s mind. He got his nickname Screamer from making hardened criminals scream in fear from the images he put in their heads.

Terri was Lady Luck’s daughter and a superhero in the beverage side of things. She and Screamer had been separated for a number of years while he got his newly-acquired brain-reading powers under control. Now that they had worked out a way to be together, they never seemed to be apart.

Patty worked at the MGM Grand front desk and was on lunch break, so she still had on her front desk outfit and her long, brown hair pulled back tight. She nibbled at a salad while I worked at a cheeseburger with a huge basket of fries. I had switched away from my standard vanilla milkshake today for a cherry Diet Coke. Patty was mixing my fries with her salad, taking a bite of lettuce, then a fry.

Stan, the God of Poker, and my boss, also had a cheeseburger. He had on his standard tan slacks, tan shirt, and tan vest. He was the most nondescript man I had ever met. You could almost look right at him and not notice him. That made him downright scary on a poker table.

I had just taken a huge bite of my cheeseburger when Laverne, Lady Luck herself, appeared, pulled up a chair, sat at the booth, and grabbed one of my fries. Between her and Patty, I was going to be lucky to get any of them.

Laverne wore her normal gray silk business pants suit and had her hair pulled back tight, giving her face a stark beauty and sternness. She just radiated power and toughness.

And not once being around her did I fail to get nervous. Having Lady Luck herself just come to have lunch with you was a stunning thing I would never get over.

“Hey, Mom,” Terri said, working at her hamburger and leaning against Screamer.

I managed to get most of the ketchup off my chin and nodded to her. Stan just kept working on his cheeseburger.

Madge appeared out of the door from the diner and smiled at Laverne. “Anything I can get for you?”

Madge was the waitress and the owner of the Diner downtown. She was also a superhero in the food and beverage industry and seemed to have been around the world of the gods for a very long time. She was fairly short and clearly overweight and she always wore a dress far, far too tight and too short for someone her size. She had a gruff way about her, but was always willing to help out the team where she could. She knew everyone, which had helped a few times on different assignments we had tackled.

Laverne shook her head. “Thanks, Madge, but we have a problem we need to get started on.”

I swallowed the last of the bite of my cheeseburger I had been chewing on and pushed the rest away. When Laverne came looking for us like this, it meant eating was going to take a back seat very quickly.

Besides, my stomach was already twisting from my sense of looming danger, so putting more food down there wasn’t a good idea at the moment.

“What’s happening?” Stan asked, then took another bite of his cheeseburger.

“All the thirteenth floors are vanishing,” Laverne said, as if she said a statement like that every day.

Then she took another fry.

“No building or hotel in this city has a thirteenth floor,” Terri said, looking puzzled.

“Floor Twelve B or the Fourteenth Floor, whatever they are called,” Laverne said, shrugging. “They are all vanishing. They will still be there, so no building is going to fall down, but the floors will become totally invisible by midnight.”

“The Magician is back,” Madge said, shaking her head and sighing in a way I had never heard before.

“Maybe,” Laverne said, taking one more fry. She gave me that serious stare that scared me down to my very toes. “And if The Magician is behind this in any way, we need to stop him. And quickly.”

At that, she vanished with one of my French fries in her hand.

The stunned silence around the office matched how I felt.

I just wish I had a clue what was happening.

And how she seemed to know something that was going to happen in two days.

And who the hell The Magician was.

Two

Everyone had stopped eating.

Terri was just shaking her head, her long black hair going back and forth around her face.

Madge was frowning, never a good sign when a waitress used to attempting to smile was frowning.

Stan looked angry and Patty looked confused, just as I was feeling.

“Time for milkshakes,” Madge said.

At that moment every bit of food on the table vanished and Madge turned and stepped through the door back to the Diner.

The group had a habit of ordering milkshakes when we were working on a problem. Usually only big problems. So Madge thought this problem big enough for milkshakes and had cleared the table.

Again not a good sign.

I stared at the place on the booth where my French fries had been and kind of wished I had the power to bring them back. And then I wondered where they had gone, and then finally decided I didn’t want to know any of those details. Not at the moment, anyway.

I glanced around at my team, then decided that none of them were going to speak, so it was up to me to be my normal clueless self and ask dumb questions. Sometimes my dumb questions got to the heart of the problem facing us, sometimes they just made me look silly for asking.

I wanted to start with how someone knew what was going to happen two days in the future, but decided on something more basic. “So someone want to give me the background on The Magician?”

“Right now he goes by Nick Scipio,” Stan said without looking up. “He’s been around for longer than anyone knows for certain. The protector and father, basically, of modern magic. Over the centuries he’s taken many names when free, from Dedi in Egypt to Robert-Houdin.”

“Is he a god?” Patty asked.

“He’s an elf,” Stan said.

I moaned. We had dealt a number of times with the elves and trolls and their fights. Because I had caught the one person causing elves and trolls to always battle, I was honored in their hidden casino here in Vegas, but I seldom went there. Just often enough to not insult them by never going there.

“You said something about him being free?” Screamer asked, and Terri nodded beside him, her black hair moving around her face.

“He is sort of locked up in a time cell,” Stan said, “between moments of time, that should make it impossible for him to escape. But he often does. It’s been a good fifty years since his last escape, at least that I heard about.”

“So why make all the 13
th
floors disappear?” I asked.

“You could ask him yourself,” Madge said, appearing from the doorway of the Diner carrying six milkshakes.

Behind her strolled a tall, thin man with black hair covering the tips of his pointed ears. He wore a white frilly shirt like he was on the way to a wedding and a long, black cape. In one hand he carried a cane, but clearly didn’t need it.

“I figured Madge would know where you all met,” he said, his voice low and soothing in an odd way.

He looked around at the view, clearly impressed, then he stopped in front of the booth and bowed slightly. “The Magician at your service. And I want to be very clear that I will have nothing to do with the building floors disappearing in just under two days. But I must admit, it’s a nice bit. I kind of wish I had thought of it.”

He pulled up a chair and sat on it, facing all of us.

“Vanilla as always,” Madge asked, placing the milkshake in front of him and then continuing on with the rest of ours.

“A wonderful memory,” The Magician said. “Now a glass of fine whiskey and a cigar and I would be as happy as can be.”

“Drink your milkshake, Nick,” Madge said, shaking her head and moving off to one side behind the booth. She never sat with us, but often took part in the meetings and it was clear she had no desire to miss this one.

“Good seeing you again, Stan,” The Magician said, as he stirred his milkshake and sipped it.

I stared at Stan, then back at Nick Scipio, The Magician. Clearly they had history. And I was just about to ask what that history was when Lady Luck appeared and scooted into the booth beside her daughter.

“Nick,” she said, nodding.

The Magician bowed slightly. “I am honored, as always.”

“Cut the crap,” Laverne said, “and explain to me what’s happening and how you know about it.”

When Lady Luck gets blunt, things really have to be going wrong. This just looked worse and worse by the moment.

Three

The Magician didn’t let Lady Luck’s brashness even seem to phase him. He took a sip of his milkshake, nodded a thank-you in Madge’s direction, and then turned to face Lady Luck. From my position beside Patty across from Teri and her mother, I could see Nick’s dark eyes. And I watched them closely as he spoke, seeing if I could get a read on him and if he was lying.

“In my little confines,” The Magician said, “which are very comfortable, I might add, I have sometimes been able to see out ahead in time. Not far, and often not that accurately, since the future is always in flux by events of the present. But I did see that in two days all the 13
th
floors of every building in Las Vegas will become invisible. For some reason, all authorities will, at the time, know this will happen and will have all the floors from twelve-up completely evacuated. It will cause a very large event that will be difficult at best to explain away, except as a magician’s illusion gone horribly wrong.”

“I know all that,” Laverne said, waving her hand in dismissal. “So who could actually pull off this kind of illusion?”