Pink Shoes and Hot Chocolate

 

One

 

When you’re a superhero, you don’t often notice pink women’s shoes. I’m usually far too busy saving the world from evil, saving dogs from sure death, or playing professional poker, my day job that pays the bills of being a superhero. Pink shoes rarely come into the picture. In fact, I have no memory of ever thinking about pink shoes before.

Yet there sat a pair of bright pink dress shoes with very long heals on the small pile of brown sand six miles outside of Las Vegas.

The wind was blowing through the sagebrush and rocks and I was having trouble keeping my black, Fedora-like poker hat on my head. The hat was part of my superhero costume, along with my black leather jacket. With the hat and jacket on and a casino nearby, I had more powers than I have had time to explore. Sometimes my powers even surprise me.

But out in the desert, with the wind threatening to take my hat and make me chase it like a playful dog through the rocks, I didn’t feel very powerful. And the pair of women’s pink shoes sitting on the mound didn’t help the issue.

Around me, the very early morning sun was heating up the desert to the point that shortly it would be far too warm for me to wear my black leather jacket even with a wind. The heat was the reason I had headed out of town at five in the morning. I never saw five in the morning normally, except from the night side. Getting up at this frightful hour showed how much I cared about this case. It had taken me only an hour to find the shoes, since I had a hunch exactly where to look.

The pink shoes belonged to Carol Savage, a thin, athletic Keno runner at the Atlantis Hotel and Casino. Carol stood two inches taller than my six-foot height and she was much, much thinner. Not that I’m fat. I’m not. Carol is just thin.

Carol had a smile that could light up a room and her dark green eyes seemed to laugh at everything. I figured she had to have a great life attitude, being a Keno runner. The old joke around the poker world was that Keno was for gamblers who had lost the will to live. Carol radiated life like the sun gave off light. She was a joy to be around, always.

Bernice, the God of Keno, hated that old joke, but of all the Gambling Gods, she was the lowest ranked and only had one superhero like me working under her. That was Carol, also known as SK (Super Keno) to the rest of the Gambling Gods and all the superheroes who worked for them.

Everyone liked SK; Bernice we could all do without.

When Carol went missing, I got the first call to help find her. Every one of the Gambling Gods seemed to know that she and I had been an item five or six years back, working a couple of cases together. That was before I met Front Desk Girl.

I am known as Poker Boy, one of a dozen poker superheroes working under Stan, the God of Poker.

And, of course, we all worked under Laverne, Lady Luck herself. And when Laverne asked Stan to have me search for Carol, what was I going to say? Hell, you don’t turn down Lady Luck if you ever wanted to win another hand of cards.

With one hand I held my hat on my head and with the other I picked up Carol’s pink shoes and studied them. Nothing unusual. She had simply kicked them off and put them on the sand.

I had seen no sign of Carol’s car along the road, or any car parked close by, so either she had hidden it in the desert somewhere or someone had dropped her off here.

I placed the pink shoes back exactly where Carol had left them and studied the flat desert around me, squinting my eyes and trying to draw on what superpowers I had remaining this far from a casino. It wasn’t much, I do have to admit, like a car trying to run on three of six cylinders. I sputtered a lot, but finally found what I was looking for.

There, in plain sight, yet hidden so any normal mortal would never see it, was the opening to the Silicon Suckers city. I had no idea why Carol hadn’t used the main entrance under the Hilton Billboard on Highway 95, but she must have had her reasons. I knew the desert was scattered with entrances to the Silicon Sucker’s city, but I had only found one other besides the main entrance and this one.

Silicon Suckers were a race of intelligent creatures that had lived on Earth far, far longer than mankind. They were secretive and shy at best, and almost impossible to see if they didn’t want to be seen. They inhabited the major deserts of the world, living in cities underground.

Legends of aliens visiting Earth had come about from sightings of Silicon Suckers. They were commonly called The Grays by UFO nuts. They had large heads, large eyes, no chins, and flat ears. Their arms and legs were thinner than Carol’s and they seldom wore clothes. Even without clothes, I couldn’t tell the difference between a female and a male Silicon Sucker, although I was told that the difference was clear if you knew what you were looking for.

With humans I knew. Not a clue with Silicon Suckers and I had no great desire to look.

The Silicon Suckers were a highly ritualized race, and the best way to get on their bad side was to violate one of their customs. Wearing shoes in their city was a major violation. Not bringing them a gift they would like when visiting was another. I had a small thermos of hot chocolate in my jacket pocket as my gift to them. Hot chocolate, for some reason or another, was a major delicacy for them. A thermos-full would be shared by the drop among thousands.

I once watched a Silicon Sucker put a drop of hot chocolate on his snake-like tongue and then just stand there, huge eyes closed, swaying back and forth humming something that sounded a lot like our National Anthem played very, very slowly.

Whatever the Silicon Sucker experienced with the hot chocolate was clearly something I could only imagine, since I didn’t drink and have never taken drugs of any kind.

I just hoped Carol had known enough about the Suckers to bring them something good. I had a hunch, though, she had done something very, very wrong, since after three days missing, her shoes were still here.

Just in case I needed to buy her way out, I had two other thermoses full of hot chocolate in pockets inside my coat.

I took a deep breath, kicked off my old Nike tennis shoes and left them beside Carol’s pink shoes, then headed for the opening between the two rocks. I had been inside the Silicon Sucker’s city near Las Vegas three times over my years as a superhero, and it always made me uncomfortable and itchy. The last time I had been trying to save the life of an old college girlfriend who had been given new breast implants made from the sand of a sacred Silicon Suckers burial site

The Suckers wanted their dead ancestors back; my old girlfriend wasn’t willing to give them back, no matter how much I pleaded or offered to pay for another operation. She was found dead a month later. I seldom like to think how she died, since the myth about alien probes have a basis in the Silicon Suckers’ belief that the only way inside a human body is through the anus.

Those were very large breasts she had. It had to have been painful.