You Get Full Credit For Being Alive

Chapter Two

The best thing to do for now was to observe. This late at night, everyone coming into the hospital would be coming through the emergency room, which meant that if I staked out a place in the waiting room I'd be there for pretty much everything. At the very least, I might get a first name for S. Bennett out of it.

I didn't want to get called out by whoever was behind the desk, so I needed to look like I belonged. I glanced in the doors, picked out a lady sitting next to a large, ornate fern that blocked the line of sight of the cameras, and went directly to her as soon as I walked in. The nurse behind the desk— the same one who'd been trying to get my information before I hightailed it out of there— glanced up at me but didn't say anything.

The woman seemed surprised that I sat right next to her when there were plenty of empty seats around. "Ah... um." She was about to ask something awkward, and I wanted to head that off.

"I'm sorry," I said softly, keeping my voice pitched low. "It's just I don't like sitting alone in hospitals. It really creeps me out." I smiled shyly at her, and her discomfort melted away.

"It's okay, I understand completely," she said, patting my arm. "I guess I'm here so often that I stopped noticing it after a while. I came with my sister," she continued, eager to share and lessen her burden. The slightest opening could turn the most stoic person into a chatterbox, under the right circumstances. I'd used that inclination a lot, when getting information out of people in my previous line of work.

Of course, sometimes you had to force an opening. With a pair of pliers, occasionally. This lady was much easier. "She lives with me, and her son Kyle has the worst asthma attacks. We have to come in here, like, once a month, so I'm pretty used to it at this point."

I nodded and hummed at the right times, told her lies when I couldn't deflect and eventually let her fall asleep on my shoulder. She was tired, and it gave me a reason to be there. I closed my own eyes and waited, not sleeping, just listening to what was happening and waiting it out. Information would come. It usually did.

I heard the sirens first, growing louder in the distance. Not ambulance sirens, no, this was the steady whoop-whoop-whoop of a cop car. The sirens finally stopped, very close to the ER, and then a man burst through the doors and stalked over to the desk, and I opened my eyes and watched him go. He was tall, broad-shouldered and strong, a fairly handsome guy if you ignored the odd flatness where his nose had been broken and poorly repaired. He wore a wrinkled suit and a trench coat, and he was waving his badge at the nurse behind the desk like it was a gun, aggressive and impatient.

"You've got a cop here," he said with no preamble. "Officer Bennett. I need to see him."

"We did call down to the department," the nurse said slowly, not at all intimidated by the man. "Are you his supervisor?"

"No," the man bit out harshly. "I'm his boyfriend, Detective Peter Janich, and I want to see Shawn now."

Shawn. I hadn't thought of that one. Nice name. This hypermasculine pillar of the community was his boyfriend? I ignored the curl of disappointment in my gut and took the opportunity to examine the detective closer. Shawn had... interesting taste in men. I suppose it wasn't easy to be a gay cop, and dating each other was probably easier in some ways than looking in a wider pool. Still, there was something about Detective Janich that felt off to me. His distress was real, but it wasn't borne out of grief. I knew grieving. This was harsher than that, less personal.

"You can't see him right now, he's still in surgery," the nurse told him.

"Once he's out, then."