Bang (2 page)

Mari nods. “Okay.” From her face, Jackson can tell she's wondering if she's being let off the hook. “Let's do that.”

They park the cruiser in a tow zone and head across the street, Marisol leading the way. Her hair is as short as Sonya's now, a stubby vulnerable tail at the base of her neck. When Jack first met her it was halfway down her back with thick, early aughts blonde streaks. She used to wear it in a lovely, complicated knot.

At the counter, he orders his usual and adds Mari's own without looking back at her, fishing his wallet out of the cargo pocket in his uniform slacks. He should have just bought two coffees this morning like normal. He doesn't want to start shit, or talk about shit, or hash up anything that did or did not happen between them. He just wants to do his job.

“Jack,” Mari protests from behind his shoulder. “Wait, don't pay—”

All of a sudden, Jackson sees red. “No, it's cool, I got it. I owe you for all those times you visited me in the hospital.”

There's a long silence.

Marisol ducks up to the counter, two stainless steel travel mugs in her hands. “No, I mean, I wanted them to put the drinks in these. Since we're always saying…” She trails off, looking lost.

Just as fast as his temper flared, Jackson feels two inches tall. It's Marisol, for fuck's sake. It's Mari. She's his best friend, she's his partner; they know every last one of each other's secrets and scars. At least, Jackson used to think they did. For a second he lets himself remember what she looked like underneath him that night in his apartment last April, the caramel-honey expanse of her skin. He's loved her since he was twenty-two years old. He didn't do anything about it until five months ago. “Right,” he mutters, taking the mugs and setting them on the counter. “Good idea.”

They walk back to the cruiser in silence, a fresh breeze whiffing across the back of Jackson's neck. His coffee tastes like plasticky mug. He puts the car in drive and heads toward their assigned route, not looking at Mari. It's an easy beat today, a welcome-back softball courtesy of Leo, a cluster of high school kids smoking on a playground. Jackson beeps the horn and they scatter like bugs. Outside the sky is a brilliant, aching blue.

“I'm sorry,” Mari says, eyes fixed straight ahead out the windshield.

“Me too,” Jackson says, and they don't talk about it again after that.

The rest of shift feels like a long, slow walk back in time. They grab lunch at a Greek diner that's one of their usual places, chicken gyro for him and an eggplant salad wrap for her, then eat it out in the parking lot, leaning up against the cruiser like always. Jackson lets Mari deal with two requests for directions, trying to get back into the swing of his old life. The gyro tastes like paprika and four months ago. It tastes uncomplicated.

“Glendale is that way,” Marisol says, pointing with one elegant brown wrist. “Church Street becomes Stockbridge before it meets up.”

“Great,” the guy says and gets back into his car without so much as a thank you.

“You're welcome,” Mari calls brightly. Jackson smirks.

In the afternoon they write a couple traffic tickets and call a teenage shoplifter's parents, returning thirty bucks' worth of cosmetics to a smug, whining store clerk. “You're not going to arrest her?” he demands, all but stomping his foot on the linoleum. Jackson claps him on the back and thanks him for his commitment to the judicial process.

“Dumb kid,” Marisol says as they're climbing back into the cruiser. “If I was gonna stroll past the register with a bunch of shit in my hoodie, I'd at least get some super expensive face cream made of, like, human placenta or something.” She pulls at her cheeks with both palms like she's trying to smooth out wrinkles. “Not effing lip gloss and two-dollar eyeliner.”

The girl was Latina, the kid they busted. It always makes Jackson vaguely uncomfortable when that happens. “Sure you would have,” he tells Mari, laughing not because it's particularly funny but because it's so absurd. First of all, Mari has objectively gotten more beautiful the longer he's known her, rounder and steadier and more striking. And second of all, she'd never in a million years take anything that didn't belong to her. She's a rule-follower, Mari. She's the most honest person he knows. She doesn't steal. She doesn't lie. She doesn't cheat.

In any sense of the word.

Jackson remembers the long, long weeks heading into her divorce proceedings, how edgy they were with each other, waiting. Never touching in the cruiser, strictly split bills for lunch and coffee orders, conversations focused on work and work alone. The day of her court date they both rode the desk in silence, filing paperwork and passing highlighters back and forth. At lunch, while Marisol changed into a skirt suit to go before the judge and plead irreconcilable differences, Jackson took a shower in the locker room and beat one out thinking about absolutely nothing at all.

“They were you, obviously,” she said at the bar that night, four drinks down and the papers folded in half and sticking out of her purse. She was still wearing her heels from court. “The irreconcilable differences? They were you.”

“I hear human placenta gets a great black-market rate,” Jackson tells her now, flicking on the turn signal. Mari snorts.

At the end of their shift, they park the cruiser in its designated motor-pool spot and grab their bags out of the back, walking slowly toward the squat cinderblock precinct. “I missed this,” Mari says as they hit the double doors. Then, before Jackson can get his hopes up, “The girl I rode with packed her own lunch.”

“What a bitch.” Jackson remembers when Marisol herself did that, way back when they were rookies. She had these huge Tupperwares full of chicken gumbo and rice, mixed-bean salads that she'd assemble carefully before eating, shaking out little baggies of ingredients one by one. Jackson would find himself watching her darting hands instead of the road.

Mari grins at him, bright and familiar. “You wanna grab a drink?” she says, hesitating where the hallway splits off into the locker rooms, guys on one side and women on the other. A couple years ago she followed Jack right into the men's during a fight over a suspect, getting an eyeful of Punch's twig and berries for her trouble. It took six months for either one of them to live it down. “My mom's got Sonya, I've got time for one or two.”

“I, uh.” Jackson hesitates. He wants to—fuck, of course he wants to, wants to park himself on a stool with his knee pressed against hers underneath the bartop, to fill in all her missing pieces and let her fill in all of his. He wants to never let her out of his sight again. But then he remembers the vacant expanse of the last four months without her, what it's like to know he can't actually count on her at all, and when he opens his mouth what comes out is, “I better not.”

Mari lets him off easy, a nod and a “Yeah, of course,” before brushing her fingers against his wrist and heading into the locker room. The touch burns against Jack's skin the whole ride home, sharper and realer than his actual burn from this morning. He almost turns around twice.

Mari showers at the precinct, squelching in her flip-flops and being careful not to touch the plastic curtain. The locker room facilities are grimy but Mari actually prefers them sometimes, how the water never gets cold here, and there are no four-year-olds sitting on the toilet seat when she gets out. Her hair especially she lingers over. It still surprises her when she runs her fingers through it, the sudden stop six inches before what she's used to. She wonders what Jackson thinks of the cut. Back before Mari got married, he used to yank the end of her braid all the time.

The locker room is filling up with the night shift when she gets out, Sara Piper and the skinny rookie Mari rode with busy changing into their uniforms. “Hey, de la Espada,” Piper calls, yanking on her socks. “Heard your other half is back. Congrats.”

Mari makes herself smile. Sara Piper is the only other non-white cop in the whole department, token black girl to Mari's token brown. They get along. “Yep. Don't have to ride with rooks anymore.” She winks at the girl, Fitzgerald, to show she doesn't mean it. They look younger every year to Marisol, these kids joining the force. Fitzgerald has pimples across her cheeks, hair pinned into a severe bun and fresh piercing holes along the tops of her ears. The regs make you take them out.

“God, I know,” Piper groans without the wink. In two months, she'll be promoted off foot patrol for good, and she makes no secret of the fact that she's looking forward to it. She got her sergeant scores back just last week. “I never want to look at another rookie again.”

Fitzgerald visibly winces. Marisol grins. “The future of our department,” she reminds Piper.

“Yeah, yeah,” Piper gripes, lacing her boots. “I can't wait until I make detective.”

Mari laughs. “You deserve it,” she says sincerely. Piper made all of them help her study, but she went to Marisol the most, insisting Mari was best at quizzing her. Mari didn't mind. After Jackson got shot, she had a lot of time on her hands for endless question-and-answers on when to taser a suspect, what rank you have to be to call in SWAT. She was trying to stay out of her own brain. “Homicide fast track,” she tells Piper now. “Straight to the top.” It's a joke. The Berkshires get about one homicide a year, nearly always vehicular.

“Shut up,” Piper says mildly, yanking her vest into place. “You wish you were me.”

Mari could be, is the thing. She has the seniority and the job experience, plus she could pass the written component of the test no problem. The day after Mari chopped off all her hair, Piper handed her an application for the exam. “Think about it,” she said. “If you're smart, you'll get off the street. Not to mention better hours for your kid.” The papers are still sitting in Mari's glove box, half filled out.

“Okay,” Piper continues now, standing up and clapping her hands together. “Go home, de la Espada. You—” she points at Fitzgerald. “Let's go.”

Marisol sighs. She never did figure out what Piper meant by that, you'll get off the streets if you're smart. Get off them because everyone knows you're a shitty cop who got your partner shot? Because everyone knows you broke up your marriage for him? What?

Mari hangs her towel up and goes home.

She makes it back to the house just in time to feed Sonya dinner and plunk her squirmy body into the bathtub upstairs, getting the latest George update—“He bit Elisabeth today and I think he is going to be 'spelled”—plus two verses of the new Katy Perry song for her troubles. Then they read a bird book in Spanish and Sonya practices her pronunciation. It's important to Mari, that her kid can speak both.

“I love you, Fancy Pants,” Mari says as she's tucking Sonya into her big-girl bed, kissing her on both cheeks and her smooth, sweet-smelling forehead. After Jackson got shot Mari had Sone sleep in the double bed for three solid weeks, her warm durable limbs wrapped around Marisol like a monkey. It was the only way Mari could sleep without nightmares.

“Love you too,” Sonya says.

Back downstairs, Mari finds her purse buzzing on the counter. When she fishes her phone out there's a text message from Jackson, just a terse one-word
goodnight
. She stares at the screen for five solid minutes, trying to figure out how to reply.

See you tomorrow
, she texts back finally. It feels hollow even as she presses down on the keys.

She scrolls up to the last time he texted her, from the hospital two or three days after the shooting.
Where are you?
is all it says.

The one directly before that is jokier:
helloooooo? did you get shot too?? And, like…die?

And the third one from the bottom:
everything hurts, bring back coffee.

It was when he first woke up after surgery, Marisol's pretty sure. It must have been. He woke up, looked around, and when he couldn't find her he assumed she'd been and left, just stepped out for a second for a change of clothes or something to eat.

That she'd never been at all was a possibility that just didn't occur to him.

It isn't strictly true, either. In reality Mari spent any number of sweaty hours parked outside the hospital, stomach turning over and over as she ordered herself out of the car. It was
Jack
up there, lying behind one of the hundreds of windows overlooking the crowded lot, and he was hurt and probably scared, and worst of all he was alone. If ever in her life there'd been a time to get her act together, Mari told herself, it was right the hell now.

But she couldn't.

She couldn't face him.

It was one thing to have failed Jack romantically. It was gross and embarrassing and awful, after all this time, to realize they weren't compatible the way she'd always imagined, but it was something they could conceivably recover from.

But Mari had failed him as a
partner
.

She hadn't had his back, she hadn't protected him. She hadn't done the one thing they'd promised each other over and over for the better part of ten years.

He'd almost
died,
and he knew she'd let it happen.

How could she look him in the eyes after that?

Now Mari feels the sickness of those sessions in her car all over again, the panic and nausea fresh and new. She sets down the phone.

Patricia is in the family room watching reruns,
Law & Order
episodes from the '90s. She likes to keep up a stream of running commentary in Spanish when she's watching cop shows with Mari,
is that right?
and
do you do that, has that ever happened?
The answer is usually no. True to the Berkshires' low homicide rate, Mari's job is traffic stops and noise violations, not murder mystery and gang crime. Until the day Jackson got shot, she had never so much as drawn her weapon. God willing, she'd like to never draw it again.