Dean's Stories

The Empty Mummy Murders

A Poker Boy Story

For the second time in his life, Poker Boy finds himself trying to help a woman stalked by the alien-looking Silicon Suckers. He failed the first time and they killed an old girlfriend of his. This time the Silicon Suckers have killed three other women. Can he save her and more importantly help her save herself?

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Published by WMG Publishing

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The Empty Mummy Murders

A Poker Boy Story

Dean Wesley Smith

Copyright © 2011 by Dean Wesley Smith

Cover photo Renier Janse Van Vuuren/Dreamstime

It was a good ten minutes into the conversation over vanilla milkshakes and a side of fries with Scary Mary, as her friends called her and she called herself, before she got to the point.

Scary Mary deserved the name. She had bright red hair tied up tight on the top of her head that was so tight that it pulled the skin of her face and scalp upward. She wore more make-up than a bad rodeo clown, and had breasts that must have arrived at the restaurant a good minute ahead of her.

Her tight red dress, if you could call the small piece of cloth covering her largest assets a dress, I’m sure it didn’t cover her butt when she slid into the leather booth at The Diner. But I didn’t look. In Vegas you saw all types and a long time ago I had learned to not judge a person by their look or a woman by the expanded size of her chest.

Some friend of a friend had given Scary Mary one of my real-world names and told her I might be able to help with her problems.

As Poker Boy, I find people to help in all sorts of ways. Sometimes I find them, sometimes they come to me, sometimes my boss, Stan the God of Poker assigns me the task of helping someone. It never seems to make any sense how I find the people who need saving, but I do. Just as I find the people at poker tables who need me to take their money. It seems to be a natural way of the world.

I had told Scary Mary to meet me at The Diner in downtown Las Vegas. The Diner serves the best milkshakes on the planet and the waitress who is always there is Madge, a superhero in the food service business. The Diner is decorated like a fake 1960s’ diner. I am convinced there were no places in the 1960s that looked anything like The Diner with records stapled on the walls and photos of Elvis, Marilyn, and James Dean on most walls.

But the booths were comfortable and the milkshakes huge and made like old milkshakes from the 1930s. And it was where my team met when we had a job to plan.

It was two in the afternoon. No one but Madge was with us in The Diner and she was working up behind the counter. Scary Mary and I were in a booth near the front door. It was a perfect time to get to the bottom of her problem.

Scary Mary kept looking at me in a worried fashion, so I sort of turned on my “trust-me” power and let it wash over her. I had on my black leather jacket and black fedora-like hat that was my superhero uniform and I could feel the power they gave me drawing from the nearby casinos. It should be more than enough to get Scary Mary to talk.

After a moment she blushed, which looked washed-out next to her blazing-red hair and beside her thick, blue eyeliner and red lipstick.

“You’re not going to believe me and I just don’t know what you can do to help,” she said, her voice deep and throaty.

“Try me,” I said, turning up my “trust-me” power a little and adding a little “empathy” power to it as well. “You would be surprised at what I might be able to do.”

“That’s what my friend in the poker room at the MGM told me. But you just won’t believe me.”

“Let me decide that,” I said.

She signed, looked both directions. “I’m being harassed by aliens.”

“Oh, no,” I said, signing and stirring up my milkshake. This felt like a problem I had had three years before with an old girlfriend. She hadn’t let me help her and she had vanished, more than likely killed.

“I told you that you wouldn’t believe me,” Scary Mary said, clearly disgusted.

“Oh, I believe you,” I said. “The aliens you are seeing have large heads, big eyes, and are gray. Right?”

“Yes, yes,” she said, jumping a little in the booth in excitement and almost knocking over her milkshake with the large extensions on her chest.

I sighed again. “Those aren’t aliens. Those are creatures called Silicon Suckers. And my bet is they are after your breasts.”

Both her hands went to cover a few inches of the mass on her chest, her eyes wide, her mouth open.

Silicon Suckers are the reason the UFO nuts think there are aliens visiting earth. They have big oblong heads with long thin excuses for chins. Their bodies are thin, humanoid, but all gray in color. Their feet are huge and they walk like they are floating through the air without a sound. And they have lived in their caves in deserts for far longer than there have been humans around.

What drives me nuts about them are their huge eyes. They don’t seem to blink and that can just unnerve a guy, even me, a superhero.

They have no smell, but can suck moisture out of an area faster than a hundred dehumidifiers on full blast. And for some stupid reason, of all the people and superheroes and gods that exist, I am the one who has become the go-to guy for dealing with the Silicon Suckers.

I keep wanting to tell people I play poker for a living, I work for Stan, the God of Poker, and I do my best work in casinos helping people who come into poker rooms solve their problems. As far as I know, Silicon Suckers don’t even know what poker is.

Now here I was again, talking to a woman who needed help with the Silicon Suckers. If this trend didn’t stop, I might start being called Silicon Sucker Boy. And I would hate that.

“So what have they been doing?” I asked, dreading the answer.

She still had her hands firmly planted over small areas of her massive breasts.

“What do you mean they might be after my breasts?”

“First tell me what they are doing,” I said, sending as much calming power as I could generate her way. I wasn’t in that good of control of that superpower yet, but by simply trying to calm a person I sometimes could.

She took a deep breath and then nodded. “I first saw them in my parking garage off my apartment out near the airport. They just stood there staring at me.”

“Two of them?”

“Yeah,” she said. “At first I figured them for nutcases from a convention, but they are very skinny and I couldn’t see costumes.

“You’ve seen them more times?”

She nodded. “A couple of dozen times and twice they got into my apartment. Made the place so dry I was afraid it was going to burst into flames.”

“Silicon Suckers live under the desert and take moisture out of the air,” I said, nodding. “Have they tried to touch you?”

“No,” she said, shaking her head and shivering.

I stared into her worried eyes and knew I was way out of my depth. Any question I might have next about changes to her chest would sound bad coming from me. I needed some help.

“Hold on just a minute, would you?” I asked. “I want to call a friend to make sure there haven’t been any other sightings lately.”

She nodded and I motioned for Madge to come over as I stood.

“You interested in a hamburger?” I asked Scary Mary. “On me.”

She nodded and turned to Madge who had heard me. “My normal burger and Patty’s shake and burger as well. I’ll be right back.”

Madge nodded. She would entertain Scary Mary until I got back with Patty. With luck, it would only be a minute.

I stepped outside the door into the warm fall day and then jumped to a spot in front of the MGM Grand main hotel lobby check-in desk. Then before a camera could pick up my sudden appearance, I pulled myself and Patty out of the flow of time.

I loved being able to teleport and even more being able to stop time. Actually, I couldn’t stop time but it looked like I could. I actually just could step between moments in time. And I could take others with me into that moment, which made everyone else look frozen around me.

My girlfriend, Patty Ledgerwood, aka Front Desk Girl, had just finishing checking in a woman with two kids. The woman and the two kids were frozen in place moving away from the counter and Patty was smiling at me.

“Thank you,” she said. “I needed a break.”

“My pleasure,” I said, smiling back. Just seeing Patty always made me smile. She had long brown hair that she had tied back while working. Her wonderful brown eyes were deep enough for me to get lost in and I had many, many times. Today she had on her white blouse and black slacks and a light tan MGM jacket that was the uniform of the day. She looked good in anything, but I was in love with her, so my opinion was clearly not one anyone could trust.

“So what’s happening?”

“I need some help with a woman who’s being visited by Silicon Suckers,” I said.

“Oh, oh,” Patty said. “Does she…?”

“Bigger than I thought possible,” I said, indicating how large Scary Mary’s breasts were.

“And you want me to help you question her about them?”

“I screwed this up once,” I said. “I’d kind of like to get this right if her breasts are the problem.”

Patty knew about my old girlfriend and how she had refused to give back her breast implants made out of silicon from a sacred Silicon Sucker’s burial ground. The Silicon Suckers had eventually removed the breasts through her ass, for some reason the only way they know of to get inside a human body. More than likely it killed her.

Failing to save her always felt like one of my biggest mistakes.

Patty nodded. “Meet me in the hallway down near my car. I’ll be right there.”

I nodded and jumped to that spot while also stepping back into the flow of time. In Vegas a person couldn’t just jump around through space without being careful to not be picked up on cameras. Patty and I had a regular camera dead spot.

It took Patty exactly four minutes to get off work and meet me. Her boss at the MGM Grand knew what she did and that sometimes she just needed some time away. In fact her boss was another superhero working the same area.

I jumped us out of there the moment Patty hit the camera safe area and back to a spot just in front of The Diner.

I lead the way inside, telling Patty what I had ordered her. Madge was just heading back to the kitchen and Scary Mary was sitting nervously in the booth twisting the straw in her milkshake. Clearly Madge had stood and talked with her for a few minutes while I was gone.

I introduced Patty to Scary Mary and then said, “Patty knows all about the Silicon Suckers.”

Patty nodded as Scary Mary sort of beamed behind all the make-up.

“I’ve seen them a number of times,” Patty said. “And even been down in one of their caves they call castles.”

“Wow,” Scary Mary said. “I thought for sure I was going insane.”

“Far from it,” Patty said. “But these creatures are very dangerous and we need to try to figure out what changed for you that started them visiting you.”

“That way we have a chance of stopping them,” I said.

Scary Mary nodded and I hit her again with another wave of my “relax” and “trust-me” super power. She seemed to calm a little more.

Patty, who was sitting beside me in the booth, patted my leg and then leaned toward Scary Mary. “So what day exactly did you first see the Silicon Suckers?”

Scary Mary twisted her face and layered make-up around, clearly trying to think, then said, “May Sixteenth.”

“So, anything major happen the week before that?” Patty asked. “Anything change?”

“I got a new job,” Scary Mary said without hesitation. “Five days before.  I remember because it was May Eleventh, one year from the day exactly that I had my sex change operation and I figured that was a good sign.”

So Scary Mary used to be Scary Martin, but I doubted that was going to have anything to do with this case. Patty clearly didn’t either because she said nothing.  Again, this was Vegas. We had seen most everything.

“What was your new job?” Patty asked.

“Dispatcher,” she said. “Desert High Sand and Gravel. I used to drive truck, but after my operation Ben, the owner said that once I got recovered, he’d find a place for me. And he did.”

“What happened to the previous dispatcher?” I asked, afraid of the answer.

“Sharon? She vanished one day,” Scary Mary said. “No sign of her but her ex-husband was knocking her around at one point so they’re looking at him.”

Patty sighed and looked down.

I would bet anything that the previous dispatcher had been killed by the Silicon Suckers. But it would never be proved. Somewhere, at some point, the trucks that Scary Mary was sending out were doing something to anger the Silicon Suckers. And since she sent them out, they were blaming her. And clearly the woman who had her job ahead of her.

Then Patty asked a question I hadn’t thought of to ask.

“Did other dispatchers disappear besides the Sharon?”

“Joyce,” Scary Mary said. “And there might have been another but I’m not sure.”

Then, suddenly she realized where we were going. “You don’t think that these aliens caused them to vanish?”

Both Patty and I nodded and Scary Mary turned white under all the make-up.

Madge brought the food at that point and it gave me a chance to think. My entire premise that the Silicon Suckers were after Scary Mary’s breasts was now out the window. Most of the time I dealt with the Silicon Suckers because of land problems. They were very, very protective of their land and had negotiated with the Gods, including Lady Luck herself, a compromise that allowed humans to build Las Vegas. But with the recent expansion, there had been many dust-ups lately over land.

This was looking like another one of those. And clearly the Silicon Suckers were warning each dispatcher in their own way, giving them time to stop, then killing them and starting over with a new dispatcher.

Scary Mary had no idea her job was so deadly when she took it.

When Madge put down the wonderful-smelling hamburgers and fries and left, I started to quiz Scary Mary about the business as we ate.

Turns out the company only had one large sand quarry outside of town in the desert. And the first mile of roads from the pit were gravel across desert as well.

Scary Mary’s job was to dispatch the trucks full of gravel or sand from the quarry to different jobs around the city or concrete mixing plants. She had to keep track of forty trucks, but in the boom times the dispatcher had managed over a hundred and had them on the go constantly for two shifts a day. She said she used to drive one of those trucks.

“I need maps of the quarry and the road in and out of it,” I said. “And then compare it to Silicon Sucker lands.”

I took a big bite of my hamburger, then stood. “It won’t take long,” I said.

I headed out the door and the moment I was on the sidewalk and the young couple walking toward Freemont Street had their back turned, I shouted to the air, “Stan. Need help in your office.”

Since I didn’t have an office and I didn’t want Scary Mary to know what I could really do, I figured Stan’s office would be as good as any.

A moment later I found myself in a standard business office and Stan in his normal black slacks and tan shirt stood facing me beside an oak desk with a computer and chair. A couple plants filled the corners and the windows looked out over Vegas from high in the air. Far higher than any office building.

“I got to teach you how to build yourself an office when you need it,” he said, shaking his head.

“I can do this?” I asked, stunned, looking around at the furniture and the fantastic view of the invisible floating office. I had always figured that only the Gods could build offices.

Stan just shook his head in slight disgust and then said, “What do you need?”

I told him which maps I needed and a moment later they appeared in the air, the map of the Silicon Sucker lands floating on one side, the map of the quarry and road on the other.

“You going to tell me why you need these two maps?” he asked.

“Just put them at the same scale and overlay them,” I said. “We just might see why.”

He did, the two maps floating until they merged. The quarry was a long ways from the Silicon Sucker land, but the road was another matter.

“There,” I said, pointing to one area where the rood seemed to touch the Silicon Sucker’s land. “Can you make that larger?”

The road clearly had been laid out to go around a corner of the Silicon Sucker’s land, making a ninety-degree corner.

I was betting that corner had been cut off. And people had been dying because of it.

I glanced around. “Can you put us and this office right over that corner?”

An instant later we were over the corner of the dirt road, floating in the air still inside the office, only now part of the office floor under our feet was invisible.

That felt kind of creepy and cool at the same time.  I really needed to learn how to do all this.

Below, I could still see the old road, but clearly a new one had been constructed a few years back that cut directly across Silicon Sucker land. More than likely the owner just figured it was desert land and no one would care. As we watched floating invisible in an air-conditioned office above, a truck full of gravel powered through the corner leaving a trail of dust.

“Oh, shit,” Stan said.

“The Suckers have been warning and then killing the truck dispatchers,” I said. “Blaming them for sending the trucks across their lands. The newest one came to me because she thought she was seeing aliens.”

“It was worse,” Stand said.

Then something on the old road caught my eye and I could feel my stomach drop. I wished I hadn’t had that bite of hamburger.

“Hang on,” I said and teleported to the old section of road.

The heat of the desert hit me hard and it was a moderately cool day in the fall. I couldn’t imagine how hot it was out here in the summer.

Right square in the middle of the road was a long mound of sand built crosswise to the road. Beside that were two others.

“Oh, don’t tell me,” Stan said beside me.

I eased over and carefully moved a little sand on one pile with my shoe, just enough to uncover the mummified remains of a human hand, drained of all moisture.

“Shit!” Stan said.

All I wanted to do was be sick. I stepped back and tried to take a deep breath of the hot air, but that didn’t help much.

“Where is the woman you are helping now?” Stan asked, also still staring at the three mounds clearly covering three bodies. He was the God of Poker and been around for thousands of years. And I was a superhero. That didn’t mean that we had gotten used to things like this. You could never get used to this kind of thing. Ever.

“She’s with Patty and Madge at The Diner,” I said.

“Let’s go there and figure this out,” Stan said.

“Scary Mary doesn’t know who we are or what we can do,” I said.

Stan shook his head. “She’s going to know now.”

We jumped back to the booth and Scary Mary jumped so hard against the back of the booth, her large breasts just about hit her in the forehead.

Patty looked shocked as I slid in beside her and took a long drink from a glass of water. Stan pulled up a chair and took another glass of water and drank it.

Then he reached across the table and extended his hand. “I’m Stan.”

“Mary,” she said, taking his hand carefully. “People call me Scary Mary. And how did you do that?”

“There’s a reason you came to us for help,” Stan said. “Just trust us.”

She nodded and said nothing, but I could tell she wanted to bolt for the door. Seeing aliens was one thing, seeing two men appear out of thin air was another.

“This has to be bad,” Patty said, “or you wouldn’t have come in like that.”

“Very bad,” I said. Then with Madge listening, I explained about the corner and what we had found on the old unused part of the road.

Mary now looked like she would be sick. “I drove for two of them,” she said. “How is this possible?”

“Silicon Suckers are very, very protective of their land,” I said. “They consider what they have been doing with you a warning to stop sending trucks over their land. They must have done the same thing with the other three.”

“But you said they might be after my breasts,” Scary Mary said.

“My first assumption, but I was wrong,” I said. “I had an old friend who ended up with silicon breast enhancements that were made from a sacred Silicon Sucker burial ground. She wouldn’t give them back, so the Silicon Suckers took them.”

“But the issue this time is the road and that shortcut,” Stan said. “You said you used to drive for this company?”

“Before my operation,” Scary Mary said. “A bunch of drivers built that shortcut across that corner back in the boom times when we were all in such a hurry to do as many loads as possible. God, such a stupid thing to kill three women over.”

“Not to the Silicon Suckers,” Patty said. “All their land is very sacred.”

“Poker Boy,” Stan said, “you deal with the Silicon Suckers more than anyone. Any idea what we need to do now?”

I honestly had no idea. There were three bodies on the old road that the police were going to need to do something with. And more than likely that would be a crime scene for some time. If the trucks kept using that shortcut, Scary Mary wouldn’t live very long.

I turned to Scary Mary who was looking shocked and puzzled, or at least that’s what I thought she was looking under the layers of make-up. Clearly sex-change operations didn’t come with lessons in make-up.

“Is there another way in and out of that quarry?”

“South toward the freeway and then into town past the airport,” she said.

“That’s directly away from Silicon Sucker land,” Stan said, nodding. “I’ll get the police on the bodies and work with Laverne to talk with the Gods of Land Use to get permission to use the road past the Silicon Sucker lands revoked.”

I nodded. Stan would take care of the surface problems. My problem still sat across from me.

“Good luck,” he said. Then with a nod to Scary Mary, he vanished.

“How…how…how…?”

Scary Mary just kept staring at where he had been.

I tried one of my French Fries, but it just no longer tasted good. Somehow I still had to figure out a way to save Scary Mary’s life. We would get the trucks stopped, but I had a hunch Scary Mary had insulted the Silicon Suckers for just too long a time. She would need to apologize or end up dead.

Finally Scary Mary moved her attention from the vanishing Stan to the quiet that rested over the table. She looked at Patty, then at me. “I’m still in danger, aren’t I?”

Patty nodded. “I’m afraid so. But give us a little time. We’ll protect you until we can get something figured out.”

“Think fast,” Madge said as two Silicon Suckers appeared near the door and the air in the restaurant got suddenly very, very dry.

I didn’t know they could teleport. That explained a great deal.

I stood and stepped toward the two alien-looking creatures. Then in their language of clicks and snaps and grunts, I said, “It is an honor to be in the presence of such great beings.”

“Thank you, Poker Boy,” the one on the right said in clear English without seeming to move his lips. “The honor is ours. Today you visited the great scar in our lands.”

“Yes, I did not know about it until today,” I said, having no idea what to say but the truth. “I have become very upset at such an insult to my wonderful friends, the Silicon Suckers. The human vehicles that crossed across your sacred lands and damaged them are being stopped and will not come near your lands again. The humans must retrieve the dead that caused such damage, but then that path near your sacred lands will be closed completely.”

The restaurant was becoming tinder dry and Patty and Scary Mary sat perfectly still in the booth. Madge stood near her counter, also not moving.

“When will this ceremony take place?” the Silicon Sucker asked.

I had no idea what he meant by ceremony, but with that corner being a crime scene, we wouldn’t be able to do anything there anytime soon. I bowed slightly. “May we beg for one half of a moon cycle to prepare and for the humans to finish removing their dead?”

The Silicon Sucker bowed slightly, then said, “Yes, that will be acceptable.”

I had just bought us and Scary Mary two weeks. I hoped that would be enough time.

Then the Silicon Sucker turned and looked at Scary Mary for a moment, then back at me. If they stepped toward her, there would be nothing I could do to stop them that wouldn’t insult them deeply and maybe cause a war between the Gods and Silicon Suckers. So far, in my understanding, there had only been two such wars throughout all time. Both fought over land.

Scary Mary had damaged their land in their minds. No God or Superhero could or would stop them if they wanted to take her.

“Will the human that sent such machines over our land be at the ceremony?”

“She did not understand what she was doing until she understood your warnings and came to me. She is disgusted at her carelessness and is the reason it is stopping now. She will bow in great respect and offer herself and her gifts in hopes the great Silicon Suckers will allow her to live.”

He bowed slightly again and then said, “We will be watching.”

“It was an honor as always,” I said, bowing to them.

Both bowed in return and then vanished.

“Open the door and let some moisture in here,” Madge said after a moment.

I did as I was told and then went back to the booth and drank three glasses of the water that Madge brought.

We had two weeks to save Scary Mary’s life.

* * *

We failed.

That afternoon at The Diner we tried our best to convince Scary Mary to keep her mouth shut about the murders and what she knew. And never say anything about the Silicon Suckers, but it ended up under questioning she didn’t.

Or couldn’t. I never knew.

The murders hit the headlines, of course. When it became known that the corpses had been hollowed out, with most of the insides pulled out of the victims asses, it got even more sensational. The press called them the “Empty Mummy Murders.”

I didn’t want to mention to the press that most mummies were empty.

After the police were done, Stan got the Gods of Land Use to go in and close off and destroy any sign of any road across the Silicon Suckers land, and even had them replant new desert grass and weeds.

Two major rocks were placed at both ends of the old shortcut to make sure no one went out there over the Silicon Sucker land.

And, of course, the road to the crime scene was closed off completely from the quarry to the location of the bodies and also from the highway to the location at the corner.

But Scary Mary just couldn’t keep her mouth shut. She started insisting that it was aliens who had killed the women. And that there were people in The Diner who could appear and disappear.

That sounded totally insane, so the police started investigating her past and her sanity and came up will all sorts of things that didn’t look good besides her make-up.

Scary Mary was tossed into custody not only as a suspect in the murders, but also for other events that happened in her past, including the accidental drowning in a pool of Scary Mary’s first wife when Scary Mary was a he.

Her picture in all its strange made-up glory hit the front page of the newspaper as a primary suspect in the Empty Mummy Murders.

So on the day of the ceremony, Scary Mary could not attend.

I wanted to jump into jail and spring her for the ceremony, but Stan wouldn’t let me. He said we didn’t do things that way.

I did the best I could in the ceremony, leaving offerings of five thermoses of hot chocolate at each end of the now repaired scar in the land. Silicon Suckers treasured hot chocolate as a sacred drug that allowed them to produce more Silicon Suckers. I figured five at each end would show them how serious I thought the scar was.

Denton, the God of Land Use Planning, who was the God who had originally negotiated the settlement of lands around Las Vegas, appeared and begged for the forgiveness of the great beings.

There just wasn’t much else we could do.

No Silicon Suckers showed up, so we left the thermoses sitting in the sand in the desert.

Four days later Scary Mary vanished from her holding cell. Her body was found where the others were found two days earlier. All her organs had all been cleaned out through her ass and her skin was mumified.

Scary Mary became the forth known victim of the Empty Mummy Murderer. Of course, the case was never solved.

I was batting zero-for-two. Two women had come to me for help with the Silicon Suckers and both had been killed. I moped around for a few days until finally Patty got fed up with me and went with me to talk with Stan.

We ended up in another floating office far over the city. The view was stunning, but I noticed Stan had his windows turned so that he couldn’t see in the direction of the quarry.

He was sitting behind a big oak desk with nothing on it. Patty and I dropped down onto the leather couch.

With Patty pushing me on, I mentioned what was bothering me to Stan.

He just shrugged. “Nothing you could do when a person won’t help themselves and just keep their mouth shut.”

“I mentioned that a few times as well,” Patty said, shaking her head. “But he’s determined to feel bad.”

“It feels like crap,” I said. “Even though I couldn’t do anything.”

“Yeah, it does,” Stan said. “But do you win every hand you play at a poker table?”

“Of course not,” I said, almost angry that he had suggested that. “But when I lose a hand there I don’t have someone die.”

“True,” Stan said, “but you win a hell of a lot more than you lose in the saving-people game. And that’s the key to remember.”

“Yeah,” Laverne said, suddenly appearing standing beside Stan behind his desk, “remember the ones you saved.”

Patty and I both jumped to our feet because when Lady Luck appears, you don’t keep slouching on the couch.

Lady Luck went on. “Remember you and your team saved me once. And the entire human race another time. And you’ve even saved a few people from the Silicon Suckers over the last few years, which is more than most have done.”

All I could do was nod. She was right.

“So get over it and get back to work,” she said, smiling at me.

When Lady Luck smiles at you, trust me, you can feel it. And I did. I felt a ton better and was suddenly back thinking again instead of just feeling sorry for myself for losing Scary Mary.

“Stan,” Lady Luck said, “teach Poker Boy how to build himself an office, would you? It’s about time he and his team have one, don’t you think?”

Then she vanished.

Stan laughed and stood from behind his desk. “That’s the first time I have ever heard her give a pep talk.”

“You’re kidding?” I asked, feeling stunned.

“Three thousand years, never seen it happen.”

Suddenly even more of the weight seemed to lift from my shoulders.

Patty gave me a hug and then a big, long kiss.

“Hey, not in my office,” Stan said.

I broke away from Patty just long enough to say, “Then teach me how to build one of my own.” Then I went back to kissing Patty.

“Nag, nag, nag,” Stan said.

—

Bestselling writer Dean Wesley Smith is the author of over ninety novels and hundreds of short stories. Not only has he written for Pocket Book in the Star Trek universe, but he did the only two original Men in Black novels for Bantam Books. He has been an editor and a publisher and is currently writing thrillers under another name.

If you liked “The Empty Mummy Murders,” you might also like these other Poker Boy stories:

The Old Girlfriend of Doom

Sighed the Snake

Luck Be A Lady

Dead Even

Pink Shoes

Daddy is an Undertaker

Fighting the Fuzzy-Wuzzy

Not Salable for Sale

Living Time

There are also two Poker Boy short story collections available in both electronic and trade paperback editions.

Five from the Felt

The Women of the Felt

And coming soon: Poker Boy vs The Silicon Suckers: A Five Story Collection