Bang Page 15

  “I don’t feel fucking guilty, Mari,” Jack spits, shaking his head in the smoky darkness. “Jesus, I’m pissed. I’m pissed he got himself killed before I could look him in his shit face, I’m pissed he left this earth before having to answer for what he did, if he even fucking did it, and most of all I’m pissed at this fucking incompetent police department, who can’t get it right no matter how many goddamn chances it gets.”

  Mari flinches like he’s hit her—at the fucking incompetent but mostly at the if he even. “He did it,” she says stubbornly, stubbing out her cigarette in the ashtray, trying to convince him or maybe herself. “Jack, come on. Carlson was our guy.”

  It’s the wrong thing to say. “How the fuck do you know?” Jack explodes. “Because you decided maybe you saw him?” He shoves his chair out and stands up. “That holds zero fucking water and you know it, Mari, not without a living suspect to question. The case is closed now, inconclusive. We’ll never know.”

  Mari feels her body filling up with cold terror. “That’s not true.” She shakes her head. “We’ll re-interview the parents, we’ll talk to his friends—”

  “I don’t want to talk to his fucking friends, I want this to not have happened!” Jack stalks to the window, glaring out with an unseeing expression on his sharp, handsome face. At some point he took off his costume too. “Don’t you get that? I want to not have been shot, and I want you not to have disappeared off the face of the planet for four months while I was lying on my back contemplating my own fucking mortality, but I can’t have those things, so instead I want to sit here and smoke my fucking cigarette in peace. Can I have that? Possibly?”

  Mari holds her hands up in surrender. “I’m sorry,” she tells him quietly. God, how many times can she say it, how she can she ever undo what she did? They’re never going to make this work, never. “Of course you can. I’ll go.”

  But Jackson shakes his head again. “No, God, I don’t want you to go,” he says. “I know I’m being an asshole, I just—” He breaks off, scrubbing his free hand over his face. “I’m sorry.”

  “You don’t have to apologize,” Mari tells him, feeling raw as if her whole body has been dragged along the asphalt. His posture has relaxed enough that she feels like she can go to him, though, so she takes two tentative steps forward, puts her hands on his solid shoulders. “It’s okay.” She feels so hugely, achingly guilty.

  Jack lets her get closer, his forehead falling forward against hers in a gesture that feels like a concession. He smells like cigarettes and like Jack. “Do you ever think we waited too long?” he asks out of the blue. “Like, that it’s too late now?”

  That throws Mari off as much as it stings. “Waiting?” she says tentatively, rubbing her nose against Jackson’s collarbone. “That what we were doing?”

  Jackson shrugs. “I guess. You got married.” There’s something simplistic and hard in his voice that makes her spine curl. He’s still holding his cigarette, and he turns his head away to take a drag.

  “Yeah,” she tells him firmly. “I did.” Because Andre wasn’t a quick stop on the way to Jack, he was a person and she loved him and they made a beautiful baby together, and Mari regrets exactly none of those things.

  When Jack exhales, the smoke curls around them like a fog. “You knew I liked you,” he says, and yeah, this time he definitely sounds accusing. “You said so yourself.”

  Mari draws herself up. “You were dating,” she tells him, because oh no, this particular failing she isn’t taking the fall for. “Jack, you were dating someone else literally every second of us knowing each other, and then some. For nine years.” She pulls back and looks at his face, cupping his shoulders in both hands. “One white girl after another. You’d break up eventually, sure, and there would be a couple weeks breather, or a month, and I’d think—”

  “You’d think what?” Jackson interrupts. He’s holding his body away from hers now.

  “I’d think maybe you liked me enough to date me,” Mari says, resigning herself to having this fight too. “But you always found someone else. And I figured maybe not. So yes, I started dating, and yes, I did get married. And you didn’t say a damn thing about any of it.”

  Jackson is silent. “One white girl after another, huh?” he asks finally.

  Mari lets go of him before he can pull away. “Yeah,” she says bitterly. “Really makes a girl feel loved.”

  For a moment she thinks he’s going to yell again, but instead he just sighs. “I’m sorry,” he mutters, and he sounds completely scooped out inside. “I really did want you.”

  Well then, you should have said so, Mari thinks, but she doesn’t say so. “It’s okay,” she tells him, because it’s late and because a kid got shot, and because she wants to have closure on this one thing. He’s relaxed enough that she steps into his space again, circling her arms around his neck.

  “It’s not okay, though,” Jack says. Mari breathes him in for a moment, then slides her hand down his smooth, broad chest until she gets to his waistband, running one finger along the warm seam of his jeans. Right away, Jackson’s entire body tenses right back up.

  “A blowjob is not going to fix this, Mari,” he snaps, sounding so impossibly sick and tired of her. “Can you stop?”

  Mari pulls back like he’s burned her, her entire body flushing with this huge, bottomless shame. “Screw you,” she hisses nastily, something that feels horribly close to tears burning in her throat and sinuses. Because it’s not like he’s wrong, is it? That’s exactly what she’s been doing with him, tonight and ever since he got back—trying to paper over every hideous reality of their hopeless, messed-up relationship with sex.

  It’s been distracting, maybe, but it isn’t a solution.

  What it is, is cheap.

  Mari turns on her heels and grabs her keys off the kitchen table, heads toward the door of the condo. Jackson’s one step behind her in a flash. “Wait,” he growls, grabbing her wrist and yanking. It’s the kind of aggressive, not-usual-Jackson move that would have turned her on past the point of all return twenty-four hours ago, but right now all it does is piss her off.

  “Let the fuck go of me,” she demands, pulling her wrist back and standing her ground. “You’re right, okay? A blowjob isn’t going to fix this. I can’t fix this, I’ve done everything I can think of to get you to forgive me, to get you to trust me again, but you just won’t. You blame me for everything, and I get that it’s entirely possible I deserve most of it, but—”

  “So what, then?” Jackson interrupts, eyes wide and body angry. “All of this, everything we’ve been doing, is so I wouldn’t be mad at you anymore?”

  “No!” Mari insists—because that’s not it, that isn’t it at all, but he’s twisting it all up and making it sound like something awful and premeditated and impossible to recover from. “Everything we’ve been doing is because I fucking love you, Jackson.”

  “Yeah,” Jackson says, his good face twisted so Mari can barely recognize him, a person she knows and a person she doesn’t both at the exact same time. “So you keep telling me.”

  And that—okay then. That is just about enough.

  Mari takes a deep breath, feeling like she’s got shrapnel rattling around inside her rib cage. There’s nowhere else for them to go, not tonight. “Okay,” she says quietly, one hand on the door. “I’ll see you at work, Jackson.”

  “Sure,” Jackson says, holding the door open. He’s the coolest customer Mari’s ever seen. “Whatever. Thanks for coming by.”

  “Yeah,” Mari mutters. “Take care of yourself.”

  She makes it down to the car before she starts to cry.

  Chapter Ten

  Mari’s right that the media’s going to pick up the shooting. What she’s wrong about is it taking a couple of days. There are at least three news vans parked outside the precinct when Jack pulls up the next morning, the NBC affiliate out o
f Boston plus Channel 11, the local Berkshires station that normally covers things like city council ordinances and the local high school basketball team.

  “Is that him?” he hears one of the newsgirls say as he slams the door of the Volkswagon. “Officer Ford?” she calls. “Officer Ford, do you have a minute to talk to us?”

  “Sorry, I can’t,” Jack mutters, ducking his face and keying in through the back door of the station, like maybe he’s the one who committed a crime. His head throbs, a filthy, cigarette-dry taste in his mouth that he tried unsuccessfully to brush out this morning with toothpaste. When he changes into his uniform, the scars on his abdomen look redder and more gruesome than usual.

  You’re being an idiot, he hears Mari tell him, somewhere at the back of his head.

  Jack ignores her.

  And when he sees her at roll, sitting next to a pale, stricken-looking Sara Piper and fussing with the spiral of her notebook like it’s his first day back all over again?

  He ignores her then too.

  Leo has him on desk duty, which Jackson fights tooth and nail. He itches like a heroin addict, wants to be in motion like he wants to breathe air. “Put me on a traffic detail,” he says, and it sounds a lot more like begging than he means it to. “I’ll go write tickets on the Pike, I don’t care.”

  “You think I have a goddamn traffic detail to put you on right now?” Leo fires back, sounding a hair away from pulling out his own service weapon. “I swear to God, Ford, I don’t need to hear it from you on top of everything. Just lay low and answer the phones, will you? Will you do me that favor?”

  Mari’s riding a desk too, at the call center with Piper. Jack wants to punch the wall.

  He spends his morning rocking impatiently back and forth in a lopsided office chair behind the desk at reception, fielding inquiries from every outlet in Massachusetts from the Boston Globe down to the Great Barrington High fucking Flyer, Carlson’s alma mater’s weekly gazette. It’s the first shooting in the Berkshires since his own.

  “Sergeant Leo will be giving a statement at noon,” Jackson repeats over and over in a monotone, a dull pain throbbing behind his sandy, scratchy eyes. He never actually got to sleep last night, twisting in the sheets, replaying his fight with Mari over and over, thinking through every single permutation of how it possibly could have gone down. “It’s not about you,” he wishes he’d told her.

  It’s not, but of course it also is.

  It was never going to work, was what he decided around sunrise, the light creeping up gray and chilly through the blinds in his stuffy bedroom. They tried to pretend they didn’t know that, but they did. At the end of the day there’s just too much history between them, no limit to the number of times they’ve failed each other, a long line of missed chances and fuckups littered behind them. Not everything can be fixed.

  His phone vibrates with unanswered texts from his brother. Joe Bushur offers him a cup of break-room coffee and a hard clap on the back. Jack tries to ignore the high-pitched anxiety clanging through him like a car alarm, his body’s stubborn insistence on fight or flight. Apparently his brain never delivered the memo.

  The kid’s dead, the case is going nowhere. So really there’s no urgency at all.

  They do the press conference on the front steps of the station at lunchtime, Leo plus the Berkshire County Police Commissioner and some media relations woman Jack vaguely remembers talking to while he was in the hospital. He doesn’t have the stomach to watch. Instead he drags himself down to the gym and cranks out a hundred push-ups, then does crunches until every muscle in his body feels like it’s about to peel right off his bones.

  It helps, a little.

  Not that much.

  When he gets home he finds three messages from reporters on his answering machine, plus another on his cell phone, which sure as shit isn’t listed. Jack bets he has some subscription or another to thank for that, one of those fill-in-the-box online forms. He deletes them all, then sits down at his kitchen table and smokes two cigarettes without even unstrapping his go bag from his shoulder. The smoke makes his head swim. All he’s eaten so far today was a pack of Red Vines from the vending machine.

  The phone keeps ringing and ringing, mostly Terry but a few unknowns. Jack finally gives in and picks up when HOME displays across his cell screen, not wanting his mom to worry.

  Turns out it’s Meredith. “The fuck, Jackson,” she says instead of hello. “Fucking pick up your phone, you twerp.”

  When they were little and Meredith was still in a normal weight range for her age, she used to hold Jackson’s head in the toilet. “Sorry.” He stubs out his butt, rubbing the back of his neck. The TV’s yammering in the living room, though he doesn’t remember turning it on. “Here I am.”

  “Were you there?” Mer wants to know. “Jesus, Jackson, did you shoot some kid?”

  “No.” They probably didn’t say much on the news, he realizes. “Jesus, Mer, is that what you guys have been thinking all day?” He thinks about it himself for a second, imagines being the one to blow Carlson’s brains all over the pavement. It feels good in a hollow sort of way. “And it wasn’t some kid, it was the guy who shot me.”

  “Did Mari do it?” is Meredith’s next question.

  “No!” Jackson snaps. “It was a rookie, it was a stupid mistake.” On TV is one of those crime shows where the fake cops solve crimes using mathematical theorems or something. He’s turned away from the set, wondering if Mer will be able to hear him light another cigarette, when the three gunshots ring out of his expensive speakers.

  And just like that, he’s back in the parking garage.

  It was springtime, the wet green smell of things blooming, coming back to life. Jack can feel the hard nut of anxiety in his gut. It was hideously awkward between him and Mari then, had been since the other night in his apartment, this huge empty canyon opening up and cutting off communication. He couldn’t tell what she was thinking. That was the weirdest thing, how the sex had completely wrecked his ability to read her, like she’d installed some kind of virus-blocking software in her brain.

  They didn’t even get a call, was the stupidest part—just strolled right on into the convenience store on Hannaford in search of the pretzel M&Ms they both liked. Jack got all the way over to the counter before he realized something was going on.

  “Police,” he blurted, finally registering the panicked look on the face of the middle-aged store clerk—finally registering the kid with the ski mask and the gun standing in front of the Entenmann’s display—and Mari snapped to attention over by the beverage case, ponytail whipping around her face.

  Carlson didn’t freeze.

  Instead, the kid—and he was one doped-up kid, how the hell did he get past them both like that?—the kid banged through the exit of the convenience store and darted into the multi-story municipal garage next door.

  “Fuck.” The two of them ran in after him, guns clumsily drawn. Mari grabbed her radio and called for backup, suspect is a white male in a ski mask, a hundred forty pounds, armed.

  “Little shit,” she muttered as they paused, breathing hard, at the concrete staircase. “Look, let’s split up. You go up, I’ll go down, we’ll smoke him out.”

  Jack shook his head, glancing around uneasily at the blind spots, the thick cement posts and a million different cars to duck behind. They’d have backup any minute, he figured. He didn’t want to risk her getting hurt.

  So, “Stay with me,” he told her, turning his back to climb the staircase to the second level.

  His mistake was in thinking she had.

  “Jackson?” Meredith is saying now, a note of what’s either concern or annoyance in her familiar voice. She sounds very far away. “Jackson, are you there?”

  Jack glances around and is alarmed to find himself not bleeding to death in the parking garage on Hannaford but in his own apartment, a commercial
for a house-cleaning service tinkling away on TV. A cigarette he has no memory of lighting is burning down to ash between his fingers.

  Jesus Christ, what the fuck is going on with him?

  Jack puts his free hand on the counter to steady himself, sweat prickling under his arms and down his spine inside his thermal. His breath is coming in these girly, hiccuping gasps. “Yeah,” he manages. “Look, I gotta go, though, Mer, I’ll call you later. Tell Mom everything’s fine.”

  He hangs up without waiting for her to say anything else, goes to the tap and gets a drink of water. Puts the glass down so hard it shatters in his hand.

  Mari has no idea what Leo knows about what is or isn’t going on between her and Jackson, but when he pairs her with Piper for call center duty, it’s not like she’s about to complain. At the very least it gives her something to think about besides the complete and total shit-show that is her life at this particular moment. Her chest aches like she pulled a muscle somehow.

  It’s not until the ride over that she finds out Sara requested her. “I couldn’t stand the idea of riding with any of those other morons,” she confides as Mari pulls out of the station parking lot. “I just keep playing it over and over in my mind, you know? Trying to figure out what I could have done differently.”

  Well, Mari certainly knows that feeling. “What happened?” she says, because no one asked her after Jackson. The disciplinary board and International Investigations and the detectives asked, sure, but no one asked just to ask.

  Maybe if they had, Mari would have told someone she dropped her gun.

  Piper shrugs. “Fitzgerald was on book, that’s the thing. She really did everything right. She yelled ‘gun’ and told him to drop it, you know, real movie-cop stuff, getting in stance, letting me circle around to the side to back her. But then he raised his hands—and it wasn’t like hands-up hands either, they were together and gripping something that looked a fuckton lot like a gun. So she discharged her weapon.” Piper shrugs again, like, what can you do. Mari can see her knuckles are white on the wheel. “I saw it was a Taser about a second before she fired, so.”