Bang (14 page)

“Well, Ford, I'm gonna give it to you straight. We don't have him yet.”

Jack pulls out a chair and sits down heavily at the kitchen table. “I see.” Mari is hovering behind his left elbow like a Halloween specter, looking expectant. Jackson shakes his head and her face falls. “Well, what do you have?” he asks Joe.

Joe sighs. “A lot of leads, actually. We brought the parents in, for starters. Nice couple from Stockbridge, absolutely mortified when the cavalry showed up at their door. Say he fell off the rails in college, some sad story about going off his meds, who the fuck knows. The kid has their car, which is a plus. We've got an APB out, plus a pretty good lead that he's heading out of state. He blew a toll down by Sheffield.”

Jack swallows. “Sheffield, huh?” he says, tracing a whorl in the tabletop. It's a square brick of a thing that Meredith made while she was in recovery the second time around, five maple beams for the table, four for the legs. Terry got a rocking chair that doesn't rock. “You gonna have to call in the troopers?” Mari is creeping around the table to sit opposite him, lifting the chair off the linoleum so it doesn't squeak.

“Not sure,” Joe says. “I hope to fuck not, but we're gonna do whatever we gotta do. We're gonna get him, you hear me?”

Yeah. Jack hears just fine. “Sure. Thanks for calling me, man,” he tells Joe.

“It's nothing,” he says to Mari once he's hung up the phone and set it down on the table, rubbing hard at the bristly back of his neck. It gets cold, is a thing he forgot about shaving his head. He guesses he should have remembered.

“Nothing what?” Mari asks, still sitting across from him. She's pulled the T-shirt down over her knees like a little kid. “Hm?” she prods, when he doesn't answer. “Jack, nothing what?”

“Nothing, they don't have him,” Jack says, and there's an edge in his voice he immediately regrets because of the way her eyes narrow and go a little wary. “Sorry,” he says, then explains the rest of it. Mari listens carefully.

“You want me to go home?” she asks when he's finished, fussing with the hem of the T-shirt and not sounding bossy at all. God, it's tenuous, this thing between them. “You wanna be by yourself, or—”

“No.” That's the last thing he wants, actually, to be alone with his fucking thoughts all night. “Come on, stick around, we'll watch six episodes of
Law and Order
in a row or something, it'll be great.”

“Romantic,” Mari comments, rolling her eyes at him, but in the end that's exactly what they do, criticizing the fictional police work and kissing through all the commercial breaks. “We'll get him,” she promises quietly, breath warm and damp against his ear. “Hey. I swear to you. Jack.” She nudges the side of his face with her nose, insistent. “You believe me?”

On screen Benson and Stabler are fighting over a witness, both of them stalking away. “Yeah,” Jack says finally. “Of course I do.”

Mari falls asleep with her head in his lap, breathing peacefully. Jackson stays awake a long time.

Chapter Nine

They don't get Carlson the following day, though, or even the day after that. By the end of the week the whole precinct is walking around in a state of suspended animation, like the moment just before a sneeze. Mari thinks Jackson might jump out of his skin.

“It's okay,” she murmurs Saturday morning, early, Sonya with Andre and Mari with her hand on Jack's broad chest, his heart hammering a million times a minute underneath her worried palm. Whatever the nightmare was, it was bad. It's still dark outside, black sky pressed against the windows of his bedroom. “Jack, hey hey hey. It's me.”

“Hi, me,” Jack mumbles, sitting up tiredly. “It's okay,” he says when Mari makes to follow him out of bed. “I'm just gonna take a leak.”

Mari bites her lip. “Sure,” she says. Only then he's gone for a whole lot longer, quiet footsteps like he's pacing around the apartment. When he finally comes back to bed, dawn is breaking. Mari presses her eyes closed and pretends to be asleep.

Work is a nightmare. Leo has them doing roundup of unpaid traffic tickets, knocking on doors and interrupting Saturday morning pancakes. Keeping them away from the search, Mari guesses. It isn't hard; the manpower assigned to Carlson has been chipped down to the detectives, Sara Piper and Fitzgerald, everyone else back on regular rotation. Mari tries not to notice Jackson noticing during roll assignments.

“Traffic violations on a weekend,” is all he says on the way out to the cruiser. “We're gonna be popular.”

He's not kidding. Every person who answers the door is wearing less clothing than the last, it feels like, with state of undress being inversely proportional to how calm they are when confronted with the prospect of driving down to the station. “I'm sorry, sir, but there's a bench warrant,” Mari informs a man who answers the door in a robe. He's holding a sippy cup that reads
MY DADDY LOVES ME
. “We have to bring you in.”

“Don't forget your credit card, man!” Jackson calls as the guy shuffles forlornly back inside to put on some pants. He's in an obnoxious mood, Jackson, sulky and brash by turns. “These are some hefty fines!” He gets a glare over the shoulder for his troubles.

Mari rolls her eyes as the door shuts. “Stop. We're annoying enough.”

Jack shrugs. His nose and cheeks are red in the wind, GB baseball cap pulled way down like a trucker or those dumb white kids who sag their pants. “Just don't wanna make two trips,” he says, fingering the pack of smokes in his shirt pocket. Already he's lit up twice between trips. Mari hasn't bothered to remind him it's against the rules.

Traffic roundup basically means they're acting as glorified couriers, delivering people to the precinct where they turn themselves in and schedule a court date. Outstanding bench warrants generally resolve easy enough, a next-day court appearance and settling up on the underlying fine plus bail. But people hate being dragged in.

“Are you sure it's five hundred dollars, Officer?” someone's grandmother asks on their third house call.

Mari grits her teeth. This job really knows how to make you feel like an asshole some days. “I'm sure,” she says.

After work, all she wants to do is drink or fuck or zone out in front of the TV with someone to rub her feet, but Jackson turns down her invitation to come over for dinner. Mari tries not to feel disappointed about that. “Your loss,” she tells him, faking a smile she doesn't feel, exactly. His mood swings are hard to weather. “I'm making organic mac and cheese and chicken nuggets.”

It kind of works, at least. Jackson grins back, glancing over his shoulder to make sure nobody's coming down the hallway before he presses a warm, friendly kiss against her mouth. “Tempting,” he says, lacing his fingers through Mari's and squeezing. “But I think I'm just going to crash.”

“Okay,” Mari says, trying not to worry about what exactly that means for him—if he's going to brood or get drunk and chain smoke alone in his apartment, if maybe he's just had enough of her for one day. Instead she goes home, and she and Sonya have a Girl Party, a tradition Mari thought up out of desperation when Andre first moved out: dinner with a bunch of Sonya's dolls lined up side by side around the table, followed by ice cream sundaes, a long bath with extra bubbles, and getting to fall asleep in Mama's bed. It started as a one-time surprise but since then Mari's sprung it on Sonya intermittently, whenever it seems like either one of them needs a boost. While Jack was in the hospital, they had Girl Parties more often than not.

“So hey, baby girl, we need to figure out your Halloween costume,” Mari says now, crouched by the side of the bathtub while Sonya splashes happily away. The holiday's next week, and when pressed, Sone has cycled through princess, cat and Iron Man, but has yet to commit to one once and for all. “We'll go shopping tomorrow, sound good? Find something for you to trick-or-treat in?”

Sonya nods seriously, shaping herself a voluminous Santa Claus beard out of bubbles. “Can my friend Jackson come trick-or-treating?” she asks.

Mari blinks, heart filling with love and terror simultaneously—
my friend Jackson
, oh. She knows for a fact that last week Sonya asked Andre if he was coming to Halloween and received a gentle no. “We can ask him,” she answers with caution, reaching for the Minnie Mouse washcloth hanging over the faucet. “Come here, baby girl, let me do your back.”

Sonya doesn't mention it again before bed but Mari can't stop thinking about it, flipping through a year-old
New Yorker
in bed an hour later while her daughter snores quietly beside her. God in heaven, how selfish has she been?

Three times, she almost calls Andre, her thumb hovering over the speed dial for his cell. It feels like the worst, most dishonest brand of parenting, insinuating her new…whatever Jackson is, into her kid's life without so much as a discussion. In the end she just flops back onto the mattress and reads through the political comics that were topical twelve months ago, too tired to commit to an article.

“Am I a good mom?” she asks Patricia after breakfast in the morning, feeling needy. Sonya is in the TV room watching Dora teach American children Spanish, which is probably the most culture she's been exposed to since she started pre-K. “¡Cuidado!” she shouts delightedly before Dora even gives the prompt. “¡Swiper, no robes!”

“That's right! Swiper, no swiping!” Dora says in stubborn English.

Patricia looks unmoved by Mari's worrying. “What kind of question is that, am I a good mother?” She tsks, shaking out her newspaper.

“Just asking.” Mari loads the breakfast plates into the dishwasher sulkily. Today was Sunday pancakes, a tradition that Andre started when Sone was a baby and Mari has made a good faith effort to keep alive. She read a
Divorce and Your Child
book back at the beginning of the summer that said maintaining routine helps. “It's just Halloween. It's the first holiday since Andre and I broke up.”

That makes Patricia glance up. “You need me to make a costume or something?”

“No. Maybe.” She shrugs. “But Andre won't be there.”

“Andre won't be—” Patricia folds up her newspaper and switches to Spanish. “Marisol, the past two Halloweens I've taken that child trick-or-treating while Andre and you worked. It's not as if this is some sudden change. Cálmate, mi vida, my goodness.”

Mari blows out a breath. “I am calm,” she insists. Then, “Okay. You're right.”

“It's gonna be fine,” Patricia says, going back to her paper. “It's a holiday about candy, for God's sakes. Come back and talk to me at Christmas.”

That afternoon she drives out to the big costume warehouse in Pittsfield with Sonya, who is still weighing the relative merits of each costume from her car seat. A cat has a tail and ears, she tells Mari, but Iron Man has a mask. And princesses, apparently, have wands.

“Do you mean a fairy?” Mari asks, turning onto the highway. But Sonya says no, because fairies have no dragons.

This is the first year she's been old enough to state a preference. Last year Andre and Mari turned her into a hastily constructed bunny via a glue gun and a pair of too-small sweatpants, then sent her off with a pillowcase and the instructions to be polite and compliment everyone's decorations. According to Patricia, she cried when Mrs. Blackmun up the street asked her to waggle her tail.

“We only have a few minutes,” Mari warns her as they pull up. “So choose fast.”

“Maybe a fox,” Sonya says, then proceeds to fall in love with a midriff-baring Princess Jasmine outfit that Mari thinks is both too cold and too racist. The girl modeling it on the box is a conspicuously tanned white girl wearing a bindi.

“If that's what the kid wants,” Andre says when she calls for his opinion. He's at work, preparing an operating room for a double mastectomy. He tells Mari stuff like that now, chatty, congenial details about his life. It makes her feel even guiltier about bringing Jackson around on the sly. “One little brown girl dressing up as another isn't the end of the world.”

“None of the white Disney princesses ever had to seduce the bad guy,” Mari says and hangs up the phone. Then she buys a flesh-colored shirt to go underneath the costume. Predictably, they only come in beige.

She waits until work to broach the subject with Jackson, dithering up until the last minute over whether she should extend the offer at all. Finally she blurts it out over paperwork, “Sonyaaskedifyouwanttocometrickortreatingwithus,” followed by a giant slug of her coffee. It feels like she's asking him on a four-course date.

“She did?” Jackson asks once he's translated her mumble, putting down the file folder he's been flipping through, an eviction on Oak Crescent that turned nasty. He looks surprised, and a little skeptical. “Really? Sonya asked?”

“What do you think, I'm making it up?” Mari laughs at him across the desktop, calming down immediately. “You think I'd throw my four-year-old child under the bus for the chance to walk around the neighborhood with you for an hour? I walk around the neighborhood with you for a living, Jackson.”

“Well, sure,” Jackson says, smirking back. “But this would be at
night
.”

“Oh, I see.” Mari makes a face, trying to ignore the way her whole body's pricking up underneath her uniform. God, he makes her act ridiculous. “You're a nerd, you know that?”

“You're a nerd,” Jackson counters, but now he's grinning and oh, Mari's heart does a funny thing inside her chest. “So do I need a costume?”

Which is how Jackson winds up at the de la Espadas a little after sundown on Halloween night, wearing an old running jersey along with his jeans and sneakers. Mari snorts when she opens the door. “You really went all out there, huh, Ford?” she asks.

“Oh, like yours is a full getup.” She's wearing a clingy black turtleneck and a pair of furry cat ears which, weirdly, kind of works for him. The tip of her nose is drawn on eyeliner-black. “Anyway, wait,” he says, pulling a bright red sweatband out of his pocket and snapping it in place on his forehead. “There, now it's complete.”

“Mm-hmm.” Mari's grinning, her straight white teeth and how smooth and pretty her skin is. Jackson leans down and plants a kiss on her mouth. “Hi.”

In the living room Sonya is dolled up in full Disney regalia. Patty is watching
Rear Window
on TV. “Make sure you get Milk Duds,” she tells them before they go, kissing Sonya on her ponytailed head and walking them to the front door, where a giant bowl of fun-size M&M packets sits awaiting other trick-or-treaters. “Milk Duds are what I like.”

“Thanks for inviting me, Sone,” Jackson tells her as they head down the front walkway. There are jack-o-lanterns grinning on front stoops all up and down the block. The house across the street has set up a Styrofoam graveyard on their lawn, cotton batting stretched through the trees to look like spiderwebs. He guesses when it comes to raising children, Mari's block isn't so bad. “I like your costume.”

“Mama says Jasmine would have saved herself if Aladdin hadn't gotten his act together,” Sonya reports solemnly, pumpkin-shaped bucket banging against her tiny knees as she walks. Then, before Jackson can answer, “We watched
Aladdin
when I puked.”

Jackson nods. “Yeah we did,” he says, like they're recounting some great adventure they had together. “You're not gonna puke tonight, are you? Too much candy?”

Sonya finds that hysterical. “Noooooo,” she says, giggling with a ferocity that makes Jackson feel like a million bucks. He had no idea the comedic approval of the Nick Jr. set could be so gratifying.

“Good,” he says. They walk a few more steps before he decides to try his luck again. “So does that mean I get to eat all your candy?”

“Nooooooo.” Sonya laughs, running ahead of them along the crooked sidewalk. Then she whirls dramatically around on one foot to look at him. “Only the kind with nuts!”

“She's showing off,” Mari notes as they stop in front of a tidy little craftsman set back from the road a ways, wide porch and sloping roof. There's smoke coming out to the chimney and everything, like something out of a storybook.

“Well,” Jackson points out, “so am I.”

Mari looks like she's about to reply, but Sonya's demanding their undivided attention. “Jackson,” she orders, hands planted on her little-girl hips, “come with me!”

Jackson snorts. “I see I'm at the beck and call of all the de la Espada women,” he murmurs to Mari, who only smirks.

“We both like to flirt with you, is all.”

“Oh, is that it?” Jack grins at her, at how hot she looks in her dumb costume and how much he likes being out here with her in the chilly autumn air. “Come on, small fry,” he tells Sonya, holding out his hand.