Bang (3 page)

The next day at work is easier. She and Jackson don't mention the shooting, and they definitely don't mention the sex, but they do talk, haltingly, and about more than just work. On Wednesday Mari's wrist brushes his as they're settling into the cruiser. On Friday he lets her buy his lunch. By the following Monday she can look at him for ten full seconds without automatically picturing either his blood on that parking garage pavement or the night in his apartment that came before it, the endless awkward silence as she pulled her underwear back on.

Looking at him for eleven seconds, though? That's a different story entirely.

On Tuesday they're supposed to spend the day prepping for community outreach at the high school, but Sarge stops them just as roll is breaking up. “Grant, de la Espada,” he shouts from the podium. All around them is the rustle of a dozen cops, the scraping grate of chairs. “Up here.”

Catcalls break out from all corners immediately. It's the grown-up equivalent of getting summoned to the principal's office, plus it seems there's always a certain amount of bonus hilarity when it comes to Mari and Jack. The entire precinct likes to tease them, right down to the 911 dispatchers. Once Sara Piper bought them some flavored lube and a book on reviving dead marriages.

“Oh, quiet down,” Jackson yells back. “Have some respect for your betters.” Since he came back, the guys have been offering to buy him drinks nearly every night. He was in the paper afterwards,
HERO COP
right there in the headline. Marisol's mother clipped it out.

“Got a job for you two,” Leo announces once the crowd filters out. “Take a day, two tops. Keep you out of the high school, at least. I know you in particular weren't thrilled about that assignment, Ford.”

Mari narrows her eyes at Jackson. She didn't know he cared one way or the other, let alone that he'd spoken to the Sarge about it.

Leo continues, oblivious. “It's a quick UC op, in and out. We've got a bungalow we think is a grow house down near the Super 8 on Housatonic. One of the motel clerks sells a little, dime bags. We just need someone to go in and put in an order for something a bit bigger for the arrest.”

A quick UC op. In and out.

Mari feels her heart drop soundly to her butt. Undercover used to be their thing or whatever, hers and Jackson's, back before the shooting. It's not like they ever did anything big or super dangerous—
The Wire
, Great Barrington is obviously not—but if Leo needed somebody to go sit at a dive bar for a couple of hours on a Friday night, find out where the string of underage DUIs were getting their Long Island iced teas, Jack and Mari were the ones he'd tap to do it. They're more or less the same age, so they can pass nice and easy for a couple. They're comfortable with each other.

Or at least they were.

Mari used to like doing the UCs too—anything to break up the monotony of writing tickets at the speed trap near Exit 4—but now the idea of spending even an hour with Jack outside the confines of their starchy blue uniforms makes her want to run fast and far. When she glances over at him, his face confirms the feeling is mutual.

Leo's still waiting for a response, apparently blessedly unaware anything's changed. Mari doesn't know how much people have been gossiping. She signed Jackson's get well card, after all, even put in her fifteen bucks for the joke
IT'S A BOY
bouquet Punch organized. Still, someone has to have noticed she was never actually
at
the hospital.

“Sure,” she says brightly. Her tongue is being corroded by acid guilt. “Absolutely. No problem, Sarge.”

She pictures the sergeant's application sitting in her glove box again. If she gets promoted, maybe Jackson will get a partner who deserves him.

“You didn't want to do the schools?” she asks him tentatively on the way back to the lockers. Yesterday he brought her a stale pumpkin scone from the Coffee Shack, and she thought they were on their way to a thaw. “Since when?”

Jack keeps walking a second before he answers, taking them out of the bustle of the bullpen and into the hallway. “I mean. Since now, Mari,” he says, rubbing the back of his neck. His face is tight and annoyed, like possibly this is information she should already be aware of. They used to be able to do that, read each other's minds.

After another second, he sighs. “Look, I didn't want to get the question, okay?”

Oh. “Oh.” Mari's eyes drop to his middle, where his uniform is neatly tucked into his belt. She remembers pulling the shirt free to get at the bullet wound, down on her knees in the parking garage with dispatch telling her to apply pressure. The parking attendant had run over by then, a grandmother with a head wrap who ended up being calmer than Mari was. Mari threw up.

Have you ever been shot?

“Of course,” she tells Jackson. “No, yeah. I wasn't thinking.” They get that question every single year, together with the favorite opener of high school students everywhere,
Have you ever shot anyone?
Until recently, Gordy Punch was the only cop in the whole of the Great Barrington Police Department with an answer, and even that was only a story about the time he got spooked as a rookie and unloaded a round into a set of garbage cans. Now, though—

Jackson nods, turning toward the lockers without another word.

Right. Okay, then. Mari squares her shoulders and follows.

Chapter Two

Jackson changes back into street clothes slowly, unclipping his tie and unbuttoning his uniform shirt. His scars pucker weirdly as he strips off his tank top. The nurses had him on a liquid diet the whole time his gut was healing, eating applesauce and shitting water. It was so bad that Jackson made a promise to himself never to drink another protein shake again. So when Sarge first announced the school outreach program last week and Jack's stomach felt like he was back on the soup and Ensure cleanse, he knew right away he couldn't do it.

I would be more comfortable if I wasn't in the high schools
, he told Leo later that day.
With the news coverage and all.
Mari was off refilling her travel mug, and Jackson found himself swallowing down an odd, chilly sort of panic that she would get back in time to seeing him coming out of Sarge's office. But Leo had nodded immediately.

I'll take care of it,
he said. Afterwards, he shook Jackson's hand.

Jack knows he should have told Mari. If he can't be anything else, if
they
can't be anything else, they should at least be professional. He needs to apologize. He waits for her outside the locker rooms, scuffing his shoe against the linoleum.

“Hey,” he says when she shows. “All set?” He's seen her UC outfit a hundred times before, this slightly ratty sweater number she always yanks at like it itches. Both of them have a change of clothes they keep around for these kinds of things, separate from the stuff they roll out of bed and into work in, a bit fancier. But now he can see that her sweater's tighter than it was the last time they did this, ten, maybe fifteen extra pounds clinging to her boobs and ass and stomach. Too tight for a UC op. Too tight for Jackson's sanity.

Mari nods. “Wish Sarge had given us a heads-up,” she mumbles. She's in jeans too, plus those tall boots that look like she's about to get up on a horse. “Would have done laundry.”

That's Jackson's opening. He could say,
Yeah, sorry I didn't tell you we'd be working this op, turns out I'm terrified of teenagers
, and they could move on like grown-ups. But he doesn't. He thinks of the past four months and bites his lip.

“How you want to play it?” he says instead, tossing her the keys to the crappy green Taurus that is the department's one and only unmarked car. “Should we try to buy together, or…?”

He's headed around to the passenger side, so he can't see her face when she says, “Well, we should probably get a room first, right?”

Jack jerks his head up to gape at her over the roof of the sedan. “What, at the motel?” His voice cracks on the last syllable, like he's fifteen years old and not thirty-fucking-three. He just—that is not what he was expecting. “I—okay, yeah. What's the cover?”

Mari settles herself in the driver's seat, pulling her seatbelt across the front of her body. “It's the middle of the afternoon on a weekday, Jack, I don't know.” She still isn't looking at him. “Affair, I guess.”

Jackson swallows. “Affair.” The word tastes sour. “Sure, why not.”

The Super 8 is Great Barrington's only true chain motel, standing alone in a sea of bed-and-breakfasts. Any closer to the town center and it would have been torn down and paved over with a public park or a coffee shop. As it is, it's been allowed to continue on its dilapidated way, a testament to capitalism and the mid-eighties, all tied up in a squat, U-shaped bow.

Mari leads the way inside, the slightest sway to her generous hips as she opens the door to the lobby. She let her hair down for the occasion, a fact Jackson would have gotten a kick out of any other day; he can see the wave where her ponytail holder was, a smooth dip all the way around. It's so short, this new haircut. When she lowers her head at the front desk, her nape shows.

“One room, please,” she tells the clerk. Jackson stays quiet, taking stock of the guy. White, twenty-five and five eight, five nine tops, with greasy black hair and a painful-looking breakout speckling his chin. Jack commits it all to memory in case he needs to ID the man later out of a photo array. He passed the time at the hospital that way, memorizing the features of everybody walking in and out of his room. Making up for the fact that he'd never be able to ID the shooter, maybe. Neither him nor Mari ever got a good look at the guy's face.

“Thanks.” Mari takes the flimsy key ring with a plastic jingle and slips her hands into Jack's, towing him back out toward the parking lot. Jackson bets the guy he's pretending to be right now—a developer, maybe, one of those pseudo-macho jobs where you can wear dark jeans into work and still make bank—Jackson bets that guy wouldn't let himself be towed.

Jackson does nothing.

“That's our guy, right?” Mari murmurs, tilting her face into his shoulder. A hank of her flyaway hair gets into his mouth as he nods.

The room's about as grimy as he expected, chipboard nightstands and a shiny coverlet patterned with a faded pastel swirl. But it's on the second floor, and when Jackson looks out the window he sees they have a clear view of the office across the litter-strewn blacktop. “We're in business,” he tells Mari, squinting into the sun.

“I guess we wait awhile, then one of us goes down?” She sits on the bed. “Uses the vending machine in the lobby, then tries to buy? Or—” She breaks off, frowning.

Jackson shrugs. An airtight plan for conviction it isn't, but it's not like they're trying to bring down a drug kingpin here. “Sure,” he says, flipping on the TV set. “Sounds fine.” This was really a job for two of the rookies, in all honesty. He and Mari are getting a bit old for weed buys.

“Okay.” Mari sighs. “You wanna do it, or should I?”

Jackson doesn't looks up from flipping channels. There's a lot of weather on, some infomercials. “Don't care.” He flops down in the grimy-looking armchair. “I can, I guess.” He hasn't done a fake buy in a while. He tries to calculate the largest amount of pot two people can get away with needing. He could always say they were re-upping their supply. He's torn between leaving immediately, spending as little time in this room as possible, and waiting it out so it's less suspicious.

“Seriously?” When he turns to look, Mari's staring at him from the bed, those midnight-dark eyes incredulous. “Fine,” she says, in her crisp voice that means things are actually the opposite. Then, “You won't even sit next to me anymore, is that the message you're trying to communicate here?”

That catches him off guard, both the question and how wounded she sounds as she asks it. “Do you
want
me to sit next to you?” he asks. He's so surprised it almost doesn't come out sounding mean.

“I want—” Mari draws her spine up tight then collapses it back down, breasts swaying with the movement. They bunch in this bra, Jackson can see now, a line across the tops where the fabric cuts into her flesh. Perversely, he's reminded of how they looked when she was nursing her daughter.

“You want what?” he asks, not bothering to check the irritation in his voice. This is bullshit; he's tired of it. They were partners, sure. They were whatever the hell they used to be, and now they're not. “Huh? You want what, Mari, just spit it out so we can—”

“I want it not to be like this!” Mari explodes. “Jesus, Jack. Do you? Is this really how you want to work together?”

Jackson had been softening, was ready to say no, of course it wasn't, but— “Work together? How I want to
work
together, Mari? Seriously?”

He can tell from her face she knows exactly what he's getting at. For an entire second, she looks stricken. Then her mouth firms back up into its stubborn frown. “This is our job,” she says, getting up off the bed. “We're at work, we're working. And Leo obviously wants to partner us again, so we'd better figure something out.”

Jackson laughs. That's so Mari, down to her core. Of course that would be her first priority. Suddenly he's on his feet too. “Well, there's an easy enough way to fix that, isn't there?” he hears himself say. He feels nasty and out of control, but also oddly calm. He and Mari are yellers from way back. “Working together.”

Mari pulls up like he slapped her. “For real? You want a new partner, Jack?”

Which—fuck. Of course that's not what he wants. That's the last thing he wants, he fucking loves her, some days it feels like he's hasn't taken a goddamn breath in the last ten years without checking to see if she was breathing too. But he's said it now, and it's out there, and he doesn't know how in the hell he's going to—

That's when Mari launches herself at him.

For one insane second, Jack actually thinks she wants to fight, some twisted version of the hand-to-hand exercises they had to do at the Academy a hundred years ago. He puts his hands up to catch her wrists mid-air just as Mari's mouth crash-lands on his at a rough, artless angle, more like a head-butt than an actual kiss. Their teeth clink together hard enough that Jackson can feel it in the root.

He kisses back.

Right away Mari takes a step backwards toward the mattress, using his hands around her wrists as leverage to pull him on top of her on the bed. She tastes like coffee and Chapstick. Jackson swears. Mari does too but it's a different sort of swearing, an oof as her knee comes up to push at him. Jackson lets go of her wrists right away.

“Mari,” he grunts, scrambling to cup her face and get his weight on his elbows at the same time. She's hot underneath him, a squirming mass. “Mari, hey. Hey, talk to me here.”

But Mari isn't interested in talking. She's biting at his mouth like an extension of the argument, sucking sloppily when she manages to capture his bottom lip, wriggling all over the place so he can't get a grip on her. Jackson swears again, trying to position himself so he isn't lying on her spleen. Finally he gives up and reaches down to rearrange her churning limbs himself, yanking her left knee up. His full weight ends up on her crotch for half a second, and Mari moans. Jackson freezes.

Last time she was silent as a stone the whole way through, like fucking a blow-up doll. She only whimpered once. Jackson remembers because that's what ended him.

“Mari,” he murmurs.

This time, when she bites, Jackson tastes blood.

“Easy,” he says, getting a hand on her chin and licking into her mouth in a way that could conceivably pass for an actual kiss and not some kind of last-ditch guerrilla warfare. Mari makes another sound. Then she's reaching back and yanking at the coverlet, the sheets white and reasonably clean-looking underneath. Jack's heart does a traitorous, hopeful thing inside his chest. This is really happening again, then, this thing he's spent more than four months convincing himself definitely wouldn't. This thing he's wanted and wanted and wanted since he doesn't even really remember when.

“Off,” Mari orders breathlessly, both fists bunching in the starchy fabric of his shirt. Jackson lets her pull it over his head, his undershirt coming off along with it.

“Watch it?” he mutters as she catches an ear. But Mari's not listening. When he turns back to face her, her eyes are locked on his naked, scarred-up chest.

For one long, horrible second, Jackson thinks she's about to cry.

“Hey,” he says, smoothing her hair back off her forehead, tugging at the short, wavy ends. “Mari. Hey. It's me, look at me.”

Mari does. “I'm sorry,” she whispers. She looks cracked open all of a sudden, runny like an egg. “Oh God, Jack, I'm so sorry.”

It sounds like she wants to say more, finally hash everything out in this shitty motel room, the shooting and the sex and the silence, how they blew up their partnership with ruthless efficiency. In all the years he's known her, Jackson's only seen Mari cry a handful of times.

I'm sorry too
, he thinks about telling her. Or even,
It's okay, it wasn't your fault.

But.

He was shot in three places, is the truth of it, stomach, chest and collarbone, and every single one them aches when he moves. He had a collapsed lung, he pissed through a tube for four painful days and hauled himself through physical therapy so grueling that one time he passed out on the table. The nurses kept asking him about next of kin going into surgery. Jackson had them call his parents because he assumed Mari was already waiting.

“Don't,” he mutters quietly, and covers her mouth with his.

Jack kisses like he does everything else in this life, Mari thinks. Focused and purposeful, like somebody who knows what he wants and has a plan for how to get it. It's how he got to the top of their class at the Academy, it's how he convinced his sister to do the inpatient clinic four years ago when she starved herself down to ninety pounds. It's how he healed himself too, Mari imagines, though she guesses he'd be the first person to tell you she wasn't there to watch.

She tips her head back, letting Jack suck at her collarbone. She doesn't realize she's worrying the puckered scar on his chest until he reaches up and pulls her hand away.

“Sorry,” she mouths at the ceiling. Something stops her from saying it out loud.

Things go faster after that, Jackson's hands suddenly under her shirt, rolling up the cheap, pilling fabric. It's old, the sweater, bought a million years ago when Marisol was in her twenties and still going out to bars. There's a staticky whoosh as he drags it over her head and then his mouth is back on hers, biting like she did to him, quick and punishing. He takes her tongue between his teeth and she just lets it happen, lips slack, panting. Someone is shaking, but Mari's not sure who.

“Jack,” she starts to say. But Jack's hands are on his belt, and she stops.

Just like that, he stops too, his body tensing when Mari's does. “Are we—” He touches the plasticky join between her bra cups, hesitating. “Mari.”