You Get Full Credit For Being Alive

Chapter Three

I got a job at the hospital. Professional sanitation engineer, that's me. It's not the first time I'd worked as a janitor to get close to a mark, and there was nothing else I was qualified for in a hospital setting. If I was going to keep Shawn safe I needed to be there with him, and there was no way I could just hang around day after day without someone starting to ask questions about who I was. Plus, when I took on a job I performed it to the best of my abilities, no half-assing it. So, I became Jay Jones, just another aimless mid-thirties high school dropout who knew enough to push a mop and broom, and who wouldn't complain about the piss-poor wages they were paying for the privilege. I got the night shift, which was perfect. The ICU was bustling during the day, but at night traffic slowed down to a trickle. If anyone was going to make an attempt on Shawn, it was going to be at night.

Regardless of my good intentions, I did actually have to work for my cover identity, so I bugged Shawn's room, adding a few microphones and audio recorders that I jury-rigged to broadcast to my iPod. I looked like I was listening to the grunge bands of my youth, when actually my ears were filled with the quiet, steady beep... beep... beep of Shawn's heart monitor. I also got to listen in on any conversations the doctors and nurses had, which was nice.

For the first week, Janich came by every night. He'd stay for five minutes, get an update from whoever was working the floor, and leave again. I don't think he ever touched Shawn. I was glad he didn't. Just looking at the detective made me itch for hand sanitizer. After the first week, when there had been no change and doctors were starting to worry about the possibility of pneumonia, and maybe putting Shawn on a ventilator, Janich stopped coming by so often. I, on the other hand, decided to lengthen my visits.

I saw Shawn every shift I worked, which was as many as I could persuade them to give me. Usually I just stayed for a few minutes, but I figured out after a while that this was the wrong approach. The kid was failing to thrive, and who could blame him? No one was talking to him, and he was never touched except for the impersonal physical tasks the nurses performed. So at the beginning of his second week in the hospital, at the end of my shift at six a.m., I slipped into his room, pulled a chair up, and took his hand. His fingers were cold.

"What did I tell you?" I asked mildly, tracing nonsense patterns across the back of his hand. "You've got to fight. This, right now? This is not fighting, Shawn. This is giving up. Pneumonia is a serious illness, and that's the last thing you need on top of all the rest of it." I cupped his fingers in my own and breathed warm air over them, trying to warm him up. "So it's gonna be tough. So you've got a shitty boyfriend who can't be bothered to stay by your side. So what? That's no excuse for being a quitter." I worked my hands up his forearm, rubbing gently and avoiding the IV line. "Tell you what, I'll make you a deal. I'll spend an hour a day with you from here on out, and you stop fucking around and make an effort. What do you say?" I set Shawn's hand down and clasped his shoulder, and waited.

There was a small spike, almost too small to notice, on the heart monitor. I might not have picked it up if I hadn't been listening to his heart for eight hours a day for the past week, but I caught it. I smiled at him. "That's what I'm talking about."

As good as my intentions were I knew it wouldn't be very discreet of me if my janitor persona suddenly started spending time with a patient, so I needed a second cover. I decided to be a volunteer with my "service dog" Della, which would be good socialization time for her and give me a reason to come in during the day.

Becoming another person was all about body language. You didn't need to change the easily visible things so much as change the way you moved, the way you held yourself and the intonation of your voice. Jay Jones was a slumped, stooped guy who looked smaller than me, who wore baseball caps to work and constantly chewed nicotine gum when he couldn't smoke a cigarette, which he smelled of no matter what he was wearing. He wore thick glasses that made the sides of his head appear to contract and turned his eyes small and beady. No one talked to Jay; no one gave a fuck about him, and that was perfect. Reggie Jameson, my bright and happy volunteer persona, was a recently returned army vet who walked with a limp and carried a cane, and who was using his volunteer work with Della as a kind of therapy for himself. He was tall and broad and still wore his dog tags around his neck, not quite ready to put them away yet. He had short, spiky blond hair and a wide smile, and the staff loved him.