Heaven Painted as a Christmas Gift

by Smith, Dean Wesley

  “Oh,” Tommy said, sitting back.

  Belle looked at Nancy, who looked stunned and distant. Belle knew that Christmas had been very important to Nancy when she had been young, so this threat was hitting her close to home. Belle had liked Christmas as a kid, but found it annoying mostly as an adult without family.

  “That’s right,” K.J. said. “If we don’t stop this, not only won’t there be a Santa Claus, but there won’t even be a Christmas.”

  “And what’s going to take its place?” Jewel asked.

  “Nothing,” K.J. said. “You see, Poker Boy and his team have saved the entire planet at least a half-dozen times over the last five years.”

  “Seriously?” Tommy asked. “How?”

  K.J. waved his question away. “Long stories for later. But let me just say that without Christmas, Poker Boy would not have come into the superhero world and thus, without Christmas, this world will cease to exist, destroyed because Poker Boy and his team weren’t around to save it over and over and over.”

  “Oh,” Jewel said.

  And now, for the first time since she died yesterday, Belle actually felt afraid.

  She reached over and took Nancy’s hand.

  Touching Nancy, Belle could feel herself calming a little.

  But not much.

  TWENTY

  BELLE AND NANCY quickly packed their things from their room.

  They had walked from the restaurant back over to the hotel deciding they wouldn’t talk about the coming problem until K.J. could explain a lot more about the world to them.

  In fact, he was going to need to explain just about everything.

  “Let’s come back to this hotel when in Boise,” Nancy said as they were leaving the room.

  “I agree,” Belle said. “That shower was wonderful.”

  “Bed wasn’t bad,” Nancy said, smiling and kissing Belle.

  Belle kissed her back, and after a moment Nancy broke them apart. “We start that again and we’ll never meet Jewel and Tommy to catch a flight to Vegas.”

  Belle had to agree, but didn’t want to. She couldn’t believe how much she loved kissing Nancy. And exploring that wonderful body of hers. Every touch felt wonderful, every kiss felt electrifying.

  Belle never imagined she could feel like that with another person, let alone another woman. But it felt perfect and now she couldn’t imagine not being intimate with Nancy.

  And Belle had a hunch that had nothing to do with what had happened to them yesterday. They had been headed in this direction before, and more than likely it was only a matter of time and a few glasses of wine one night before it happened even if they had remained alive.

  Now they didn’t need wine. Belle could barely keep her hands off of Nancy and Nancy seemed to be the same way with her.

  It was wonderful.

  In front of the hotel the four of them managed to pile into the back of a hotel shuttle van heading for the airport. Belle and Nancy got into the very back seat while Jewel and Tommy into the center seat. The live person going to the airport was a gray-haired businessman who sat in the front seat and talked with the driver all the way about the weather and how he was going to miss summer.

  Belle loved how much easier it was as a ghost to climb into a van like this. She didn’t have to worry about bumping her head or hips or anything.

  On the way to the airport, Jewel turned around in the seat so she could see them and gave them some pointers around navigating crowded areas.

  “We do it two ways,” Jewel said. “We either climb inside someone and have them take us.”

  “So everyone is our own personal cab?” Nancy asked and Belle laughed.

  Both Jewel and Tommy both laughed while nodding.

  “Pretty much,” Jewel said. “Watch auras when climbing into someone, though. Black in an aura is a color you want to avoid. Stay with the brighter ones.”

  Belle nodded. That made sense. For a more enjoyable ride, it would be better to be inside a happy and active person where possible.

  “We also just move along the walls,” Jewel said. “Very few live people walk right beside a wall unless forced. And when we run into someone like that, we can always duck through the wall to avoid them.”

  Belle realized that Jewel was right. In crowded places such as airports, people stayed right to the center of the big areas.

  “So problems with walking through people?” Nancy asked.

  “None,” Jewel said. “But every person you walk through or brush, you get their thoughts and memories. Granted, those thoughts and memories fade fast, but walking through the middle of a crowd could really get disconcerting.”

  “You ever tried that?” Belle asked.

  Both Tommy and Jewel shook their heads.

  “Better to ride inside just one person in that case,” Jewel said.

  At the airport, they bailed out of the van and moved quickly off the sidewalk and through the wall of the airport into the ticket area.

  Boise had a very modern, but fairly small airport. A lot of flights out of this airport were private jets, but the airport itself had a good thirty gates.

  Belle was pulling her ghost luggage, as was Nancy, and they moved to a place where they were out of traffic, but could see the departure schedule.

  “Nothing heading directly for Vegas in the next seven hours,” Tommy said, sounding disgusted.

  “You know, this is silly,” Jewel said, shaking her head. “And it’s going to take us two planes and two airports to get to Vegas.”

  “Or waiting seven hours,” Tommy said.

  Belle had no idea what Jewel and Tommy were annoyed about. Boise was a small airport and it just didn’t have that many direct flights to most places. As someone in her office had said about flying from Boise to another city: “You can’t get there from here.”

  So Belle had been expecting this. She glanced at Nancy who just shrugged.

  “K.J.,” Jewel said into the air. “Little help.”

  After breakfast and meeting Lady Luck, K.J. had excused himself and vanished. He was clearly still shaken. Belle was starting to understand that K.J. might be their connection to the powers above them, but he was a very gentle soul who got upset easily.

  K.J. appeared a moment later, still in his blue suit. He looked like he had a little more color to his face than he had an hour before.

  “No direct flight to Vegas in the next seven hours,” Jewel said. “We’re going to waste an entire day just getting home.”

  “Now that’s just stupid,” K.J. said. “What airport doesn’t have a direct flight to Vegas?”

  “This one,” Tommy said.

  Belle and Nancy both laughed.

  “So how about a ride back to the Golden Nugget where you got us from?”

  “You want to leave these two to make their own way there?” K.J. asked, pointing to Belle and Nancy. Then he smiled and winked at them.

  A moment later the five of them were standing out of the way in what looked like a moderate-sized buffet.

  Belle felt instantly comfortable here. The colors were oak and browns and gold. There were lots of empty tables and numbers of booths overlooking through huge windows what appeared to be a large pool a story below. And the smell of ham and bacon and fresh bread was wonderful.

  How could she be hungry? They had only finished that large breakfast just over an hour or so ago.

  “Thank you,” Jewel said, smiling at K.J.

  “Back to meetings,” K.J. said. “Who knew being dead had so many meetings?”

  “Keep us informed,” Tommy said.

  “Oh, trust me,” K.J. said, “you’re going to see a lot of me, just to try to explain the person that you met this morning, let alone try to stop the end of the world.”

  Tommy and Jewel nodded.

  “Get these two settled into a suite here and started on their training,” K.J. said. “I’ll check back in tomorrow over breakfast, right here at nine. I’ll try to explain some of what I know is happenin
g.”

  With that he was gone.

  “Welcome to Las Vegas,” Jewel said, smiling at Belle and Nancy.

  “Best flight I ever had,” Nancy said.

  “Are we going to learn how to do that?” Belle asked. She had no doubt it would be wonderful if she and Nancy could just teleport all over the place when needed.

  “K.J. says we will,” Tommy said. “But he hasn’t taught us how yet.”

  “Maybe we’re supposed to learn to do it on our own,” Belle said.

  Jewel and Tommy just sort of stared at her with that.

  TWENTY-ONE

  THEY GOT TO the big, oak front desk of the Golden Nugget by mostly staying to the edge of the hallways against the walls as they moved through the casino. Jewel managed to only brush a couple people in an area crowded with slot machines. And none of the people she brushed were anything but normal people with normal problems enjoying a few days in Las Vegas.

  Belle brushed two or three people as well and each time had to stop and shake her head. Nancy seemed to be handling the other people’s memories better than Belle, but Jewel could tell that Nancy was still bothered a few times.

  They stood off to one side out of any traffic pattern near one end of the big check-in desk. The desk ran for a good fifty feet filling one wall and at the moment had a good ten employees working terminals behind the counter.

  A line of patrons snaked back and forth in the big lobby between two huge pillars, controlled by thick ropes.

  “I think she’s the supervisor,” Tommy said, pointing to a woman at a terminal at one end of the counter helping a woman with a wide flower-hat and shorts.

  “So what are we going to do?” Belle asked.

  “Big casinos like this one,” Tommy said, “have beautiful suites that are held back in case a large gambler shows up. The suites are never rented out, only comp’d.”

  “The stated price on some of the suites is a thousand dollars a night or more,” Jewel said. “Makes the hotshot gamblers dropping money feel pampered.”

  “Wow,” Belle said. “Who knew?”

  “So I’m going to climb inside that supervisor,” Jewel said, “and get her to hold a comp suite for a few days that you two can use until we find you something better. And I need to hold the suite so no one can ever trace that this supervisor did it because we don’t want to get her in trouble.”

  “Can I watch?” Nancy asked.

  “Sure,” Jewel said. “It would be great learning for you.”

  And since Nancy was so good at computers, this is exactly the kind of thing she needed to be learning.

  “Think the woman can hold three of us?” Belle asked.

  Jewel looked at both Nancy and Belle and shrugged. Since it had only been her and Tommy before, it never occurred to her that three Ghost Agents could occupy one person’s body.

  “Might as well try to find out,” Jewel said, laughing.

  She turned to Tommy. “Want to try to join us as well?”

  Tommy just shook his head and smiled that smile that Jewel loved so much. “No thanks. Three women inside another woman seems a tad beyond my range of kinky.”

  Belle and Nancy laughed and Jewel kissed him. Then she said to him, “Watch the luggage.”

  Jewel turned to Belle and Nancy. “Come on, girls, let’s go see how many people we can pack into a poor desk supervisor.”

  “What am I watching the luggage for?” Tommy said. “Ghost crooks?”

  Jewel glanced back over her shoulder at Tommy as she and Belle and Nancy headed for the front desk of the hotel.

  “No, dear,” Jewel said, giving him a wink. “Just trying to make you feel useful.”

  Tommy stuck his tongue out at her as all three of them laughed and kept walking.

  The three of them went through the front desk and stood off to one side until the moment the supervisor was done with the woman with the big hat. Then Jewel stepped inside the supervisor and made herself smaller.

  The supervisor was named Carrie and was originally from St. Louis, but had moved out here with her boyfriend, who then dropped her and went home. She had decided to stay and really loved her job and the nightlife of Vegas.

  Carrie’s goal was to work her way up in the hotel business and in a year she had made great progress.

  A moment later Nancy joined Jewel inside the supervisor.

  “Make yourself smaller,” Jewel said.

  “Got it,” Nancy said.

  A moment later Belle joined them. “This the right place for the party?”

  Nancy and Jewel laughed.

  “How can I hear you both in here?” Belle asked.

  “K.J. explained to me,” Jewel said, “that we exist on a slightly different plane of existence. So what happens on the other plane, the real world plane, doesn’t bother us. When inside another person, we can interact with the real plane because people have ghost elements as well as everything, but that’s about all.”

  “So we could be standing inside a stone wall,” Belle said, “and be able to hear each other and sense each other like this.”

  “Exactly,” Jewel said.

  Jewel showed Belle and Nancy how to take over the woman’s movements.

  “Is she going to remember any of this?” Nancy asked.

  “Not a bit of it,” Jewel said. She then had the supervisor bring up on her computer the available suites. As Jewel had expected, there were at least ten open, all waiting for major customers to arrive. None of the suites were reserved or even shown to regular guests or the reservations department.

  Jewel knew from the woman’s mind how to reserve those suites and how most reservations for those suites came down from either corporate or the casino floor or the sales departments.

  “Can I try driving?” Nancy asked.

  Jewel knew that both Nancy and Belle could read the same knowledge from the supervisor’s mind, and since both of them were much better at computers and corporations, this was again a great training exercise.

  “I’ll release control of the supervisor’s body,” Jewel said. “Just feel what you want and you should be able to control her.”

  Jewel eased back and Nancy took control as if she had been doing it for a very long time.

  “Perfect,” Jewel said.

  The next thing Jewel knew, the supervisor’s fingers were flying over the keyboard and screens were flashing up and then vanishing.

  “There,” Belle said.

  Nancy stopped. “Perfect.”

  Then again the supervisor’s fingers were flying over the keyboard, and a moment later Nancy said, “Done. Printing keys to hold back in the reserve drawer.”

  Jewel wasn’t sure what Nancy had done, it had all happened so fast. As a doctor, Jewel had been sort of experienced with computers, but only enough to get by with modern medical treatments and getting e-mail and other web activities.

  “So what just happened?” Jewel asked as the supervisor got the two keys, slipped them into an envelope, printed the room number on the envelope and dropped it in a back drawer, tucked in where it would not be noticed easily.

  “I went into corporate,” Nancy said, “untraceable, of course.”

  “Good,” Jewel said.

  “And she found the perfect person to have a room reserved,” Belle said.

  “Actually,” Nancy said, “you spotted it. This casino, as most major corporations, has a sales and banking branch not located in Las Vegas. I had one of the major vice presidents in the corporate division send in this request to hold the room for five days.”

  “The request came from his personal computer,” Belle said, laughing.

  “He’s in Japan at the moment and won’t be back for a week,” Nancy said, “so I made it look like a prank hack just got through is all.”

  Jewel just felt stunned. Together, these two were going to be unstoppable.

  Nancy cleared all evidence from the computer and all trails other than the request coming from corporate. Carrie, the supervisor look
ed like she had done exactly as she should have done.

  “Perfect,” Jewel said. “You two are amazing.”

  “Thanks,” Nancy said.

  “That’s nothing for her,” Belle said. “She’s that good.”

  “And from the sounds of it,” Jewel said, “we may need that good.”

  “Thanks,” Nancy said. “Can I give Carrie our host here a few suggestions on how to move up this corporate ladder a little faster?”

  “By all means,” Jewel said. She showed both Belle and Nancy how to influence future actions of a person and Nancy gave their supervisor host a few suggestions on some information. And Belle gave their host a couple of ways to act in meetings to gain power in corporation settings.

  Jewel just shook her head. None of this stuff was anything she had ever guessed went on. She had been really, really sheltered in her medical education, that was for sure.

  “So let’s go rescue Tommy from all the luggage,” Jewel said, laughing as the two women finished with the supervisor.

  “He had a tough job,” Belle said.

  “But someone had to do it,” Jewel said, laughing as she emerged from the supervisor’s body and smiled at the wonderful man she loved more than anything in any world.

  TWENTY-TWO

  BELLE AND NANCY made their way to their suite in the Rush Tower of the Golden Nugget Hotel pulling their suitcases while Jewel and Tommy headed to their home in the University area about two miles away. Belle had no idea how they had managed to get a home that didn’t always have people coming and going from it, but she would ask them later.

  All four of them were to meet for a late lunch back at the buffet in two hours. So much had happened this morning already, Belle couldn’t believe it was only a little after noon Las Vegas time.

  And she really couldn’t believe that she and Nancy had only been dead for about a day. Belle hadn’t felt bad at all about dying and was enjoying the new freedom of this new existence more than she wanted to admit.

  For some reason, not being upset about her own death bothered her. But not enough to ruin her growing good mood.