Bang Page 16

  So. Mari swallows. “Can’t get any more on book than that,” she says. Not like Mari. Not like dropping your gun with a clatter in a stairwell, not like letting your partner get shot without backup because you couldn’t pass basic training. It was only by the grace of God that the damn thing didn’t go off.

  “Would have been a hell of a lot more on book if he was actually holding a gun,” Piper says matter-of-factly.

  The rest of the ride is silent. When they pull into the call center’s vast, mostly empty parking lot, Piper picks a spot by the building’s back steps just beside where Mari and Jackson smoked that first reconciliatory cigarette weeks ago. Mari feels like the lowest form of rat.

  “Honestly, I think she knew the procedure better than me,” Piper says, getting out of the car. “Fitzgerald, I mean. Fresh off of those academy drills.”

  Mari remembers frantically trying to remember how she was supposed to hold her gun when she and Jack were chasing down Carlson. Drawn but still down is how it’s supposed to go, close to your body. She dropped it when they heard the god-awful squeal of tires coming from upstairs, right after Jack told her to follow him. He didn’t notice Mari fumbling because he was running full tilt toward the noise. “Yeah,” is all she says. For a second she wonders if Piper knows what happened in the parking garage, all these leading statements.

  Not so much, as it turns out. “I was the one who told her to unholster,” Sara tells her, pausing while holding open the door. “As we were in pursuit. Do you think that was wrong?”

  Mari shakes her head mutely, swallowing hard against the bile-sour taste of her own failures. Was that wrong?

  Do you think it was wrong that I dropped my gun and let my partner get shot, then let him cover for me both professionally and personally, Sara?

  “The disciplinary board made some noise about my promotion, is why I’m bringing it up,” Piper continues, oblivious. “Not that I’d ask you to be a character and fitness witness if it came down to it, but. I feel like we kind of came up the ranks together.” She shakes her head like she’s trying to clear it, like this particular conversation is done. “You thought about it anymore, like we talked about?” she asks, changing the subject. “Taking the sergeant exam?”

  Mari blinks. The truth is she hasn’t considered it at all since Jackson’s been back on active duty. Every thought she’s had, work-related or otherwise, has somehow threaded back around to him. This fucking incompetent police department, she remembers him saying. It felt personal then too.

  “No,” she tells Piper, shaking her head. “Not really.” Then, “Of course I’ll be your character and fitness person, Sara.”

  Piper claps her on the back excitedly, hugely, genuinely thankful. Mari stretches her mouth into a smile and they go inside to man phones.

  The next day at roll, Leo announces that everybody is officially enrolled in Back to Basics training. Just as if he’d been reading Mari’s mind.

  “Starting now.” He looks grim. “If GB is going to start being a hotbed of gun crime, then we’re going to be as well-trained as the Chicago fucking PD.” There’s a general murmur of agreement, all of them trying to be good students, all of them feeling a little cowed. Fitzgerald is on paid administrative leave. She still lives at home with her parents.

  Jack is sitting stone-faced across the room.

  Mari catches up with him as they’re headed out to the range; they’re going in groups of four per shift every day this week, the two of them this morning plus Mike Zales and Gordy Punch. They’ve got mandatory PT too, plus a Saturday morning in-service about excessive force.

  “Hey,” she says, feeling awkward and unsure in a way she hasn’t since he got back to work. He looks terrible up close, his skin pale and almost waxy, these deep bluish-gray hollows carved under his eyes. Mari wants to take him home and give him tea, a Tylenol, her bed possibly. She also kind of wants to punch him in his face. “How you doing?”

  Jackson lets out a breath, like she’s stupid for asking. Mari’s hands ball into fists at her side. “Super,” he mutters, brushing past her and sliding into the driver’s seat of the cruiser. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  So. They don’t talk the whole drive over after that.

  The department’s not big enough to warrant its own gun range, and the state-owned facility they share with other Berkshire County municipalities is a low-slung building a couple of exits down Route 7 in Lee, not far from the outlets. Inside it smells like creosote and concrete. Zales and Gordy are screwing around as they fill out their paperwork, badge number and the usual waiver promising not to sue if they accidentally blow their own thumbs off. “Would love to get some practice in with that baby,” Punch says, nodding appreciatively at a massive semi-automatic locked behind glass above the counter. He’s got a cabin up in New Hampshire, Mari knows, hunts deer on holidays.

  “Can we just get this over with, please?” Jack snaps. His body is all rope and steel.

  “Easy,” Mari says quietly. Jackson ignores her. “Let’s go.”

  The attendant, a grizzled-looking middle-aged guy with a ponytail and mutton chops, buzzes them through both sets of double doors and they set themselves up at the row of bays, adjusting their headphones and safety goggles. It’s not crowded, just them and one Statie with a 9mm down at the far end of the row. Mari feels hugely, enormously uneasy, and she’s not sure she could explain exactly why. She glances over at Jackson who’s still loading, not looking back at her. Hits the button to adjust her paper target.

  Mari’s a decent shot, generally, when she can remember to keep her fucking hands on the grip; she fires off a dozen rounds, steady, hitting her vitals way more often than not. The headphones give the whole world a fishbowl quality, just the sound of her own blood pulsing inside her ears. After a few minutes she relaxes into the zone. Finally she stops to reload and that’s when she finally notices him beside her: Jack holding his gun out, back straight, posture perfect.

  He hasn’t taken a single shot.

  Mari slowly lays her gun down on the ledge, pulls off her headphones even though you’re not supposed to do that in here because you could potentially split an eardrum. Tries to think what she’s possibly going to do. He can’t hear her, not with the headphones on. And she’s honestly afraid to touch his arm.

  She waves.

  He’s turning when he pulls the trigger, a full body twist Mari sees in slow motion, torso first, then arms. He’s completely off balance, his body moving on instinct, something deep and primal and closer to a twitch than a conscious movement.

  Then there’s the boom.

  The shot hits way off target, whizzing past the far corner of Mari’s paper cutout. Everyone takes an extra second to turn to look thanks to the headphones, reacting to the sight and not the noise.

  That extra second means no one notices Jackson was swinging around to aim at Mari.

  “Shit,” he whispers, lowering his gun with shaky hands. Mari can’t hear him because her ears are ringing.

  Someone touches her shoulder and Mari turns around to see Zales’s smiling face, laughing and gesturing at the target range. Pathetic, she makes out from his lips. Then he sees her headphones and frowns. Put those back on.

  Mari nods. She puts them back on.

  Now Gordy is looking over too, worried. He asks a question Mari can’t make out but is probably something like, Are you okay? No one is looking at Jackson.

  “I got spooked,” Mari says. She can’t hear herself speak, just feel the vibrations. She hopes her voice isn’t too loud. “Ford, walk me out?”

  Jackson takes the hint.

  “Fuck,” Mari gasps as soon as they’re through the double doors that lead to the parking lot. It’s sunny and November cold outside, wind whipping at her stubby ponytail. There were paper turkeys in the windows when she dropped Sonya at school this morning.

  Jackson shakes his head
, pale as Christmas. He looks like he’s died. “Mari—”

  “Just,” she interrupts. Her mind is careening off in a million different directions, ricocheting off the walls of her skull like so many stray bullets. They both left their guns unattended inside the range, she realizes then, another huge no-no. Incompetent fucking police department, Jesus Christ. “Just don’t talk for a minute, all right?” She rubs her hands over her chilly face, takes a deep breath. “Just don’t say anything.”

  Jackson ignores her. “I’m sorry,” he tells her, then says it again, over and over like a litany. “I’m sorry. Look, you startled me, I was in my own world there for a second, I just—”

  “You were in your own world?” Mari explodes. “Don’t try to bullshit me like that, Jackson, okay, that was not in your own world.” She shakes her head, ears still ringing. “What the hell is going on with you, huh? What was going on in your head?”

  Jack doesn’t answer the question, shaking his head and looking away from her, out at the parking lot, the two cruisers parked neatly side by side like partners on the concrete. It was one of the things that attracted Mari to being a cop in the first place, that order, the certainty of a plan in place and someone by your side to help you execute it.

  “Are you going to tell anyone?” Jack asks instead.

  “I don’t know what the fuck I’m going to do!” Mari snaps.

  Jack blanches. “Are you serious?” he asks, sounding honestly shocked by the idea, and that’s when Mari realizes the implication—that he covered for her, with Leo and even with his family, so now she owes him. She feels all the blood drain out of her limbs.

  That’s different, she wants to tell him. That was not the same thing. She’s in over her head here, both of them are. Mari takes a deep breath, starts over. “Okay,” she says, holding her hands up. “Easy.” She sits down on the curb, too tired to hold herself up all of a sudden. After a moment, Jackson sits down too.

  “Are you really all right?” he asks her quietly. He puts his hand on her shoulder, heavy, and she lets him. “Hey. It’s me, I spooked is all. It’s me.”

  Mari nods. “I know,” she promises. “I’m fine. Are you okay?”

  Jackson nods back. “Yeah,” he says.

  They sit there for a moment, cold seeping up through the seats of their uniform pants. They breathe. The birds have all mostly flown south for the winter but Mari spies one straggler up in the pine trees, a dark outline against the cool blue sky.

  This is good, Mari thinks. This is them calming down.

  At last it feels like they’ve cooled off enough that she says it. “Look,” she tells him, a deep breath in, her voice the only sound in the silence, save the drag of some papery leaves across the road. “I’ve been reading a little about PTSD.”

  Oh, that’s the wrong thing to say to him. Just like that Jackson’s recoiling as if she’d called him a racist or a pedophile, scrambling up to his feet. “What, you think I’m fucking crazy now?” he demands, barking out an angry laugh. “That’s perfect, Mari. That’s really great.”

  “Of course not!” Mari protests, getting up herself, putting a hand out. “Hey hey hey, that’s not what I’m saying. That’s not what I’m saying, I just want to talk about—”

  “You do,” Jack says, and he sounds so, so pissed. “Is that what you’re going to tell Leo? Have him take me off active duty, stick me behind a desk until I’m eligible for my pension?”

  “Of course not,” Mari says, although it’s becoming clearer by the second that she needs to tell somebody. “Come on, hey. I just think if there’s a way for you to be feeling better than how you’re feeling, then—”

  “Has it ever occurred to you that however it is you think I’m feeling, I wouldn’t be feeling that if you’d followed me up the stairs in the parking garage to begin with?”

  Mari squeezes her eyes shut to keep from screaming at the top of her lungs, if only because she thinks she might never, ever stop. “Yeah, Jackson,” she tells him, forcing her voice to stay even. “Every day.”

  But Jack’s hardly listening. “Tell you what,” he says, shoving his hands in his pocket and heading back toward the entrance to the range. “You don’t want to work with me, you think it’s too risky, you don’t have to. I’ll ask Leo for a new partner when we get back.”

  For a moment, Mari thinks she’s misheard him—she hallucinated, she must have. That’s the nuclear option, mutually assured destruction for them both. When she looks at Jack’s face, though, she sees he’s serious. “A—a new partner?” she repeats, standing there stupidly on the concrete.

  But Jackson’s already headed back inside.

  Mari drifts through the rest of the day feeling like she’s wrapped in thick, heavy blankets; how much of that is the shock of Jack’s declaration and how much of that is just the ringing in her head remains unclear. At home she talks Sonya into another Girl Party, but even that old failsafe doesn’t manage to make her feel better.

  “Mama, it’s hot,” Sonya whines, struggling against the hold Mari’s got on her as they’re watching Frozen on the laptop. Mari lets her go right away.

  “Sorry, baby,” she says, feeling her own cheeks flame in humiliation. Comforting herself with a stranglehold on her four-year-old, perfect. She’s winning at life all over these days. Watch Sonya petition Leo for a new mom.

  Once Sone’s down for the count—“I want to sleep in my big-girl bed,” she announces, and Mari doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry—Mari sits at her kitchen table for what feels like it might be hours, trying to figure out what the hell she’s going to do. She can’t talk to Leo, whether or not that’s what Back to Basics Training would advise her. She needs to protect Jack at all costs.

  The problem is, she’s pretty sure the person she needs to protect him from is himself.

  Patty comes in as she’s sitting there blankly, takes one look at her and puts on the kettle. “Tell me,” she says, setting the mug of tea down on the table. The creases in her soft brown face deepen with worry.

  Mari lays her head down on the table like she’s in junior high all over again, despondent at some lunchroom unfairness. “I can’t,” she says.

  “Tonterías,” Patty says, not unkindly. Nonsense. “You can’t tell your family, who can you tell?”

  Mari doesn’t answer, but when Patty puts a palm on her shoulder Mari leans into it. She kisses the back of her hand to say goodnight.

  She thinks of the first day they were partners. She thinks of the first time they ever kissed. She thinks of how red his blood was on the pavement, and she swallows down a small, self-pitying sob.

  She knows who she has to call, she realizes. And she really, really doesn’t want to call him.

  She sits there for a while longer. Finally she picks up the phone.

  “Terry?” she says, squeezing her eyes shut when he answers. “It’s Mari. I need to talk to you about Jack.”

  Chapter Eleven

  I’ll ask Leo for a new partner when we get back.

  Jack knows he’s made a mistake of pretty unimaginable proportions as soon as the words come out of his mouth. But he also knows that it’s a no-take-backs kind of situation, that he’s crossed this line and now they’ll both be planted firmly on either side of it no matter what happens next.

  What happens next: Jack goes back to work and double-checks every single report he’s filed since he was cleared for active duty, making sure his Ts are crossed and his Is are dotted. PTSD, Jesus Christ. If she’s going to throw that kind of horseshit at him—he’s tired, okay, he’s been off his game, maybe, but he’s not crazy—there’s no way he’s about to leave her anything to point to.

  Once he’s satisfied he hasn’t, he goes and talks to Leo.

  The Sarge rolls his eyes to heaven at first, dropping his pen on the desk like the universe is testing him. “What’d you, have a lover’s quarrel?
” he asks. Then he shakes his head. “Fuck, forget I said that. It’s the kind of thing that could get me tossed out on my ass, the climate we’ve got ourselves around here right now.” His heavy brow is furrowed, and he rubs at it with one hand like he’s got an ache there. Jack resists the urge to rub at his own.

  Leo sighs. “You and de la Espada, really? I thought for sure you two would ride together until the day you retired. You can’t try to work it out for a little while, just until things calm down around here?”

  “No, sir,” Jackson tells him evenly. “I don’t think we can.”

  So, by roll the next morning, he’s riding with Punch.

  Punch is about as happy about it as the Sarge was. “What the hell, Ford?” he says as soon as they’re buckled into the cruiser. “Me and Zales got pulled right out of the locker room this morning. For a second I thought my aim was so bad at the range yesterday they were taking me off duty.”

  Punch rides with Zales normally, has ever since Mike came up out of the academy six years ago. Jackson shrugs. “Lucky for you it wasn’t then, huh.”

  Punch frowns. He’s in the passenger seat with a Big Gulp that’s too big for the cupholders wedged between his thighs, looking skeptical and sweaty and very much not like Mari. Jackson realizes that he’s inadvertently continued the tradition of who drives.

  “Sorry,” he tells Punch. “That was—sorry.”

  “Yeah. Listen, all due respect, but don’t joke around with me right now, Ford.” Punch takes a sip of his Gulp, tipping the cup toward Jackson. “You owe me a fucking explanation.”

  Jack flips on his turn signal as the GPS chimes at him to turn left. They’re on duty at the Juvenile Resource Center over in Pittsfield today, watching over the truants and the short-term suspensions and the kids who are too hostile to mainstream. It’s one of Jackson’s favorite assignments, normally. He likes working with teenagers. “I don’t really have an explanation,” he says finally.