Twenty-Seven

Sean Keagan sat in a chair the ICU nurses had reluctantly allowed him to put in Liv’s room, near the foot of her bed. There was much eye-rolling when he said he would be occupying it throughout the night.

It wasn’t that he didn’t trust the staff to adequately watch over Liv. It was, as he pointed out to them, the fact that his one-to-one ratio beat their one-to-two, which often slipped to one-to-four due to break times, emergencies, and other situations he had witnessed earlier in the day. Simple arithmetic.

That and what Liv called his Clint Eastwood glare. She had said often that she expected him to say Make my day.

He wouldn’t say that. His intention was not to mimic any tough guy. His persona simply came with the territory. He was orphaned at age twelve and rebellious as a teen despite kind grandparents, who wisely hauled him to counseling until he was eighteen and then backed his desire to enlist. After the military came a stint with the DEA. The rigorous lifestyles of both suited him, giving him discipline and direction.

When at last he had spun out his anger, he began what he referred to as the second half of his life. No bad guys to hunt and take down, no drug cartel business, no surveillance, no informants, no courtrooms, no guns.

Instead, he ran a gym where people exercised for health reasons and kids played basketball. He lived in an innocuous apartment and had a surrogate mother for a landlady. He surfed. He rode with a motorcycle club through deserts and mountains. Life was good.

Still, the persona remained, the air about him rife with some energy that compelled others to see things his way. He knew blood ran through his veins because he had seen it. Sometimes, though, he wondered about its temperature. Liv might say it tended to run on the cool side.

Unless she could see him now, alert at two a.m., watching over her because truthfully, he really did care.

His mouth twitched. He was getting downright sentimental.