Bang (8 page)

Jack feels like the top of his head is about to come off. He can't believe this is what she actually—that she's letting him— “Gotta tell me,” he commands, tightening both of his holds. His cock is leaking in his pants. “Gotta let me know.”

“Yes,” Mari spits, tossing her head against the pillow, short dark hair tangling into a crazy halo. “Yours, yours, wanna be all…” Then, “Oh God, Jack, I'm—”

Jackson feels the pulse under his hand before he fully understands what she's trying to tell him, an odd butterfly flutter that feels like nothing else in the world. He's gripping so hard it feels like he's holding her orgasm in the palm of his hand. “Fuck, Mari.” He'd be worried about hurting her if the pleasure on her face wasn't so totally, mind-bendingly overt. His whole palm is wet.

“There,” he says as she relaxes. “That's a girl.” He wants to tell her how insanely hot she is, to lick his fingers clean or get her to do it for him, but before he's got two words to rub together she's pulling his shirt off and working his belt buckle, yanking his jeans over his hips.

“Say what you want,” she murmurs in his ear, this quiet begging. “Jack. Tell me what you want me to do.”

“Get on the floor,” Jackson blurts.

For a second Mari just stares at him and Jackson panics, terror making it feel like all the water in his body draining out at once. Fuck, she's his work partner. Just because she maybe likes it a little rougher than he would have guessed doesn't mean he can—that she wants—shit. “Only if you want,” he adds immediately.

Mari smiles.

She reaches up to pull a spare elastic off her elegant wrist, gathering her hair into a ponytail.

Then she drops to her knees on his rug.

The silence in the bedroom is so complete Mari can hear her own breathing. She scoots closer until she's kneeling in the blue-black shadow of the bed, trying to get a better look at Jack's face. Her heartbeat is in her throat and between her legs.

“Shit, Mari.” He reaches down and touches her cheek gently, tracing the shape of her mouth. He's sitting on the edge of the bed where Mari left him, jeans around his hips and boxers still in place. When Mari opens her mouth to suck at his thumb, he swears.

“Shit yourself,” Mari murmurs, scraping her teeth over his knuckle. Then, as Jackson's knees start to part expectantly on either side of her, she pulls off and sits back primly on her heels. “Show me.”

Jack's brow furrows. “Mari. What do you—” It takes a minute, but then she can practically see the lightbulb clicking. “Christ, girl, really?” Jackson swears. “Okay.”

He stands, shucking his jeans and boxers. Then one heavy hand is on her head, making a loose fist around the base of her ponytail. “This what you mean?” His other hand is on his cock, pumping lightly. Marisol clutches her own hands together in her lap to keep from reaching for him.

“I think it's what
you
meant,” she says. All her limbs feel noodle-loose, neck included. She wants to rest her forehead on his thigh. She wants to lean up and kiss the bullet scar on his stomach. Instead she squeezes his thighs, letting her mouth fall open just a touch.

“Fuck.” The fist in her hair gets tighter. And then Jackson, her partner Jackson, who she's known for ten years, is feeding his cock into her mouth.

“Marisol.”

Mari hums quietly, sucking until her lips are up against the ring made by his fist. Jack lets go with a quiet
fuck
, the hand around her ponytail loosening for a second as he fumbles with something on the nightstand. Then there's a click, and the room floods with light.

“I just want—” he starts. Mari looks up and he's staring down at her, face flushed and twisted. The bedside lamp is orangey-yellow. “I gotta see.”

Mari likes seeing too. Everything about him is beautiful, the soap-sweat smell of his body and how he's just barely thrusting, the memory of that big hand squeezing between her legs like he was staking a claim. He's tall. Taller still when she's down here on her knees. She wants him to keep going, to pull her hair, wants him to use her a little. She's trying to prove something, maybe, but also it just feels good. Jack's not this aggressive, not normally. At least, Mari didn't think he was.

Did you do this to any of those skinny white girls?
she thinks.

She breathes through her nose and takes him deeper than is totally comfortable, concentrating. It works. “Fuck,” Jack says helplessly. There's a half second where Mari can tell he's totally at her mercy before he recovers, wrapping his hand around the base of her ponytail just as his cock bumps the back of her throat. Mari lifts her lashes with some effort, watching him watching her.

It's worth it. In the end she thinks it's the eye contact as much as anything else that does it for him, though she guesses her wet slippery mouth doesn't hurt. He doesn't ask if it's okay first, and she's glad. The permission is implicit and Mari likes that he knows it, likes knowing him this way on top of everything else.

“Mari.” He pulls her up with two hot hands on her face, sitting down with a thunk on the edge of the bed as she stands. Now Mari is the one towering over him. “Shit. Hi.”

“Hi yourself.” Mari steps between his knees and takes stock, his buzzed head and the sun-bleached hair on his arms. His beard always grows in reddish. Now Mari knows the hair between his legs does too. “So hey,” she starts, swallowing. His scars pucker strangely when his stomach ripples like this. “That was probably the most action this bed's ever seen, huh?”

Jackson doesn't smile. “I meant it, you know,” he says, staring up at her. “What I said.”

Mari feels that squeeze between her legs again, as visceral as if he'd actually reached down.
Mine
. “Oh yeah?”

Jackson nods. His hands are curled around her hips, thumbs petting gently. His skin always looks whitest when it's touching hers. “Yeah.”

Mari licks her dry lips and climbs into his lap, pushing gently at his shoulders until he's flat on his back on the mattress. He looks so good sprawled out that she follows the motion, settling herself on top. “Okay,” she mumbles into his shoulder, feeling shy and greedy. She wonders what happens next. It feels far away, like the consequences aren't really hers but something she's watching from the outside. They can't stay partners and fuck each other at the same time. “Set an alarm,” she commands, curling herself around him like a barnacle. “I don't want your parents to catch me up here in the morning.”

“I'm a grown-ass man, Mari,” Jack says, but he does what she tells him, reaching down and pulling his phone out of his jeans on the floor. “Happy?”

“Yes,” Mari says, and if someone interrogated her for a full day and night she couldn't tell them what it is that makes her add, “I love you.” She has for years, one way or another. It doesn't feel particularly climactic.

She feels Jack freeze for a moment then, all the muscles in his body going rigid and taut. Then he exhales into the dark. “Love you back,” he says. “Go to sleep.”

So. That's how it happens, pretty much. They doze until the alarm goes off the next morning, then eat coffee cake with Bruce and Barb in the kitchen and drive back to Great Barrington with their fingers laced together resting on Jackson's knee. Mari feels like she's in the Twilight Zone.

“So,” Jack says, pulling into her driveway. “Guess I'll see you tomorrow, huh.”

Mari nods. Yesterday's underwear is in her purse along with the empty wafer Tupperware, her jeans scratchy and rough against her bare skin. She feels like she broke curfew. “Uh-huh,” she tells him. She checks the front window before leaning in for a kiss.

Inside, Patricia is sitting at the kitchen table eating a bowl of Sonya's Frosted Flakes and reading the paper. “Morning, mi vida,” she says without looking up. When Mari called last night with the news she was staying over, Patricia remarked mildly that the Fords were suddenly very hospitable again. The way dinner invites dried up after Mari got pregnant was clearly not lost on her.

“Morning,” Mari says tiredly. “Is there coffee?”

“Should be.” And although Mari would not swear to this, Patricia sounds almost gleeful when she adds, “Andre called. He should be dropping Sonya off in ten minutes or so.”

Shit.
Mari runs a hand through her greasy hair. “Great, perfect, thanks. Um, I'm just gonna shower, though, so can you—”

But Patricia shakes her head. “I'm busy,” she announces, shaking out the business section. “He's your ex-husband, Mari. You can say hello yourself.”

Mari sighs. Patricia made no secret of the fact that she disliked living under the same roof as her daughter's failing marriage. She used to take Sonya out on day trips so Mari and Andre could fight.

“Right.” Mari runs her tongue along the back of her fuzzy teeth. This morning she had to make do with her finger and some filched toothpaste from the Fords' upstairs bath. “Yeah. You're right.”

“I know I am.” Patricia gestures at the coffeemaker. “There's still some in the pot.”

But when Andre arrives a few minutes later, Patricia comes to the door too, a wide, benign chaperone. Mari is infinitely grateful.

“Hi, Pat,” Andre says, helping Sonya out of her Dora the Explorer backpack. He starts out in Spanish right away. He was always better about that, and about teaching it to Sonya. “Hey, Mari.”

“Hi, stranger,” Patricia coos, giving him a hug. “How you been? We miss you.”

Mari tries to ignore the
we
. Andre has always been good to Patricia, like the son she never had—
even if you are Mexicano, mi hijo,
Patricia would tell him. When Mari's father died and Mari's first priority had been moving her mother out of the big, empty house they used to share, Andre had understood immediately and instinctively. She still remembers turning to him as they were leaving the gravesite and saying,
We need to buy a place.
He had a realtor lined up within a week.

It's strange to think about that time in her life now, how fast it all happened, her father and the house and Andre down on one knee in the dining room at the fancy inn in Stockbridge, the sense that things were spinning out in unexpected directions without her explicit consent. And through it all there was Jackson waiting for her in the parade room and the cruiser, gone quiet for the first time since Mari had known him. He and Andre didn't like each other, though neither one of them ever said it outright. Jackson certainly never said anything to Mari on the subject except congratulations. At the time, he was dating a tall blonde physical therapist named Cat.

“Did you work last night?” Andre asks now, once Patricia's retreated into the kitchen and Sonya's scurried upstairs to visit the toys she missed in her absence. “That where you were?”

It's not really your business where I was
, Mari thinks and doesn't tell him. Isn't sure if her knee-jerk defensiveness is from guilt or something else. “Nope,” she says evenly after a moment, eyes on Andre's. “Thanks for dropping her off.”

Andre blinks. He's a surgical technician over at Fairview, working to save up for medical school. The first thing Mari loved about him was his hands. “Sure,” he says, nodding slowly. “No problem.”

After he leaves, Mari takes a long bath, her back aching from Jack's creaky old bed, her neck from sleeping curled up around someone new. She's gotten used to sleeping alone these past few months. Sonya's toys are littered around the rim of the tub, the standard all-American duckie and a few water markers that wipe right off the tile. Mari picks one up and writes her name. Then she erases it and pulls the plug.

Chapter Six

Jack's not totally sure what it's going to be like to work with her on Monday, that murmured
I love you
thumping around in his head like a pair of sneakers in a washing machine, but when Mari slides into the seat beside his at roll and smirks at him, he feels like it's probably going to be fine. Zales and Gordy are arguing about last night's Pats game. Sara Piper's cracking her back. He can feel heat radiating right through Mari's uniform and wonders if everyone else can see the lines, like in a cartoon.

“Here,” he says when Leo calls his name, trying not to look at her too much. Everything they're doing is against regs.

Their first call of the day is a domestic in one of the row houses on the far end of town, unraked lawns the size of postage stamps surrounded by rusting chain link. “Neighbor who called it in says they're a couple of tweakers,” radios Punch, who's working dispatch today. “Was a call down there last week too.”

“Nice,” Jackson mutters with a grimace, but when he glances over at Mari he finds she's already looking at him, this tiny cat-smile on her face. At the eye contact, it spreads into a grin.

“What?” he asks.

“I just—this is so weird.” She bites her lip. She has her short hair pinned back in braids and it makes her look young today, like the almost-teenager he started out riding with. “Are you my boyfriend now?” she asks him finally, laughing.

Jack laughs too. It takes a minute to figure out that what he's feeling is relief. “Yeah, de la Espada. I'm your boyfriend now.” He raises his eyebrows. “Why, you want me to hold your gun while you go to the bathroom?”

“Screw you,” Mari says amiably. Then, “Can buy me a beer after shift, if you want.”

“Oh yeah?” Jack has heard her use that tone before on other men,
come and get me
and bossy all at once. He knows how she flirts, even if it's not from personal experience. She's right, this is weird. “I want,” he says, pulling the cruiser up to the end of the gravel driveway. “It's a date.”

The house they've been called to is even more dilapidated than its neighbors, practically listing to one side. The chain link in front of it has been cut open. “Looks quiet,” he remarks, whooping the siren once.
Hello, here we are.

Mari peers out the dashboard window, her expression sliding back into business mode. Jack loves her bad-cop face. She does something with her eyes and forehead and mouth, and suddenly it's like you're looking at a mask. “Let's hope whatever it was blew over,” she says, unbuckling her seatbelt. Then she pauses, hand on the door handle. “You aren't my boyfriend out there, though, okay? We do our jobs?”

Before she was saying
boyfriend
like it was some hilarious joke. Now she sounds serious. “Sure,” Jackson says, suddenly tired. His gut aches from the slow, creaky sit-ups he tried this morning. “We do our jobs.”

They crunch up the walkway together through the drifts of leaves, climb the raggedy porch steps. The sky is that shade of surreal blue that Western Mass only seems to achieve in high summer and early fall. The whole street is quiet, and when Mari knocks, it seems to echo.

“Police! Is everything all right in there?”

No answer. No activity at all that Jackson can hear. There are two frosted panes on either side of the door and he peers through them, trying to see. Mari knocks again.

“Police! We need to confirm everyone's okay.”

That usually works,
we need to confirm
. Not an explicit threat of entry, but close enough for government work. Most people freak out and comply.

Not so much this time.

“Guess I'll go check around back,” Jack says, walking along the porch to peer through the window. “Maybe they got wise and—”

That's when he sees the kid on the floor.

“Got a body!” he calls to Mari, radioing for an ambulance. Then he stands out of the way while she uses her baton to break through one of the already-cracked frosted panes. After she's banged out the sharp edges, she reaches inside to flip the deadbolt, leading the way inside. The house smells like smoke and garbage, an unpleasant dampness in the air.

“Sir,” Mari says, running over to crouch down on the warped hardwood beside the body. “Sir, can you hear me?”

The kid—white, early twenties, dumb Jack Skellington T-shirt—is barely breathing, and otherwise unresponsive. When Jackson leans over for a closer look, his skin is pale and waxy. Mari swears, taking his pulse.

“Gonna clear the house,” Jack tells her, then gets exactly nowhere because just as he turns toward the staircase a second kid appears on the upper landing, sees them and freezes.

“Easy,” Jack says, holding his hands up. “You live here?”

No answer. Mari follows his gaze, and her dark eyes narrow. “Jack,” she says urgently. There's an expression on her face like she's seeing a ghost.

The kid bolts back up the stairs.

“Shit,” Jack says, taking off after him. He catches up as the kid's going for the fire escape, this rickety death-trap-looking thing out a bedroom window upstairs. “What the fuck, dude?” Jack asks, grabbing him by the leg of his dirty jeans as he tries to scrabble across the unmade bed. He can hear the ambulance whooping in the distance.

“Let go,” the kid shouts, kicking wildly. Jack grabs him by his belt loops and hauls him onto the floor.

“Jesus, cool it,” he says, making sure the kid is facedown and unresisting before he reaches for his zip-tie cuffs. Then he stops. “How old are you, dude?” You aren't allowed to restrain minors anymore in Mass, not unless they're under arrest. Mari thinks it's a great law, but Jackson thinks it's more likely to get him punched in the face.

The kid shrugs. It feels like the fight has gone out of him. He's got his cheek pressed against the floor like it's a pillow, eyes closed. A lot of people are like that, once you get them on the ground. Jack sighs.

“Okay. How about you tell me what your buddy took, huh?” He eases up on the knee he has against the kid's back, doing a quick frisk. No weapons or drugs, but no wallet either, nothing with an ID. Jackson scrutinizes the kid's pimply face for an age range. “Help me out here, dude.”

“Is he okay?” the kid mutters. His eyes are still closed.

“I mean, he's breathing,” Jack says, giving up and hauling the kid to his feet. “But he is not in what I would call the peak of health, no. Okay, against the wall.”

The kid complies with that easily enough, putting both palms flat on the peeling wallpaper. Downstairs Jackson can hear the EMTs clumping up the porch steps as Mari calls out her position. Her voice sounds scared. Jack wonders if Skellington stopped breathing.

“Anyone else around?” he asks his friend, doing a second frisk. Better safe than sorry. As soon as the words are out of his mouth, there's a noise on the landing. Jack sticks his head out the door and sees a girl stumbling toward the stairs, clearly high out of her mind. It looks like she's about to do a header right over the railing.

“Got a third one,” he calls to Mari, catching the girl by her arm. There's a flurry of activity behind him, Pimples going for the fire escape again. Jackson swears.

This time he isn't fast enough to catch the kid, who shimmies out the window and starts taking the rickety back stairs two at a time. “Okay then, see ya!” Jack calls, choosing to give up gracefully. He sits the glassy-eyed girl on the bed and radios for backup.

“I might need another ambo,” he tells Punch, looking at the girl. She's got bruises and track marks all up and down her arms. There's been a real drug problem this side of the state in the last couple years. Not as bad as they've got it up in Vermont, maybe, but no picnic either. “Somebody hurt you?” Jack asks her, remembering the noise complaint that brought them out here to begin with. “Huh? Come on, sweetheart, what's your name?”

Mari comes jogging up the stairs then, hair falling out of her ponytail. “Downstairs is clear,” she reports, a little breathlessly. Then, seeing the girl, “Where's the other one?”

Jack tips his head toward the fire escape. “Out the window.”

“He got away?” Mari demands—sounding, in Jack's opinion, a little overly upset about a ten-cent tweaker tottering off unarmed in broad daylight. “Did you radio in a description?”

“I—yeah,” Jack says, getting the impression right away that there's something she isn't telling him. It feels like something with a bunch of legs creeping down the column of his spine. “Why?”

Mari glances from him to the girl, back again. Gives a nearly imperceptible shake of her head. “She need a doctor?” she asks, nodding at the girl.

“Well, she can't give a statement like this.”

“Okay.” Mari tucks her hair behind her ears, heads for the doorway. “Then let's go.”

“Wait,” Jack says, too loudly. Even the girl looks up in alarm. “The fuck is going on, huh?” he asks, voice dropped to just above a whisper. “Mari, hey.”

Mari looks at him for a long moment. Then she blows out a breath. “That kid who just went down the fire escape?” she says. “I think he might have shot you.”

In the end, both the girl and the boy end up in the hospital, outpatient and inpatient respectively. Mari and Jackson are waiting in the hallway for the girl to be discharged. The boy is still totally unconscious. The EMTs who delivered him looked grim.

“I thought you said you didn't get a good look,” Jackson is asking her. His voice keeps rising up to a shout before he yanks it back down, not without some noticeable effort. So far that Mari's counted, they've had this conversation three separate times.

“I didn't,” she says. “I just knew he was white and young.” She doesn't know how to make him understand. He wasn't there for the preliminary interviews after the shooting when Mari got grilled over and over for a description, first by Zales and Sara Piper, who had responded to her call for backup, then by the Sarge, and finally by Internal Investigations. She threw up halfway through that first interview with Zales, a debriefing in the hospital hallway while Jack was in his first round of surgeries. Piper got her a Diet Coke from the vending machine to wash out the taste.

“They didn't even have you do a sketch,” Jackson insists, which is how Mari knows that he pulled his own case file. “They didn't even think—”

Mari shrugs in a way she knows is dismissive. She feels weirdly defensive, like he's accusing her of something. Internal interviewed her for three hours.

“It was
him
, Jack,” she insists. “Hasn't that ever happened to you? I know that's happened to you, I've seen it happen, you get a feeling about something and you can't prove it but—” She shakes her head. “It was him.”

“Well, it would have been nice if you mentioned your sixth sense about the guy before I let him climb out the fucking window!” Jack snaps, voice rising again. Mari notices that he's stopped saying “kid”.

“It would have been nice if you mentioned you needed a hand,” she counters, but there's no heat behind it. She feels terrible about failing him again, this awful hollow dread that reminds her of a story she read once where a man woke up with a hole where his stomach used to be. Then that reminds her of Jack being shot, and then she feels like she might cry so she swallows and mutters, “I'm really sorry,” and just as Jack looks over at her with a stricken expression on his face the swinging door opens and a nurse wearing scrubs printed with hot air balloons announces that they can talk to the girl, if they want.

Mari recovers first. “Thanks,” she says. “Any idea about her parents?”

The nurse just looks at them sourly. “You have ten minutes,” she says. “Then I'm calling DCF.”

Mari sighs. Figures. As a general rule, the nurses here don't exactly love GB police. “Okay listen,” she tells Jackson, pulling him aside. “We're gonna find out who he is, okay? You and me.” She thinks of the kid's face in the stairwell, a riot of pimples and those huge, scared eyes. Hand to God, Mari's first instinct when she saw him standing there, frozen and young, was to draw her weapon, aim at his head, and fire.

“We're gonna get him,” she repeats. “This is our in.” She wonders if the kid in surgery was the van's driver, if maybe even the girl was. Her palms are itching with the need to find out.

“Okay,” Jackson says. But as they're starting into the room, he suddenly stops. “Wait, I can't go in there.” At first Mari thinks he means he's scared, like during that shift at the call center, but his face looks annoyed. “If she says anything at all about the parking garage—”

Ah. “You can't be there to take the statement.” The only reason Mari even knows that rule is from helping Piper study for the sergeant's exam, plus this one time Zales had his golf clubs stolen. Officer-involved crimes are rare at GB. She thinks about it for a second. “Should we wait? Call it in?”

Jack shakes his head. “I'll call it. You start the interview in case she does a runner.”

Mari winces. “Sure.” She digs her notebook out of her back pocket and heads through the swinging door.

The girl sitting up in bed looks skinny and dirty, but otherwise unhurt. Mari can see a bright pink patch on her arm where they swabbed for blood.

“Hi,” Mari says.

“Where's Rabbit?” the girl demands, looking surprisingly defiant for a hundred-pound teenager in a hospital johnny—although actually, considering what Mari knows about addicts, it's not that surprising at all. At the house she said her name is Janine.

“Rabbit your boyfriend?” Mari asks, sitting down in the padded plastic chair beside the bed. “The one who went out the window?”

“Out the—no,” Janine replies, looking at Mari like she's an idiot. “I mean, yes he's my boyfriend, but he's the one you brought in here and these bitches won't let me see him!” She says this last bit loudly, Mari assumes for the benefit of the nurses in the hallway.