Bang Read online

  “Of course you don’t.” Punch frowns harder. “Then look, at least tell me one thing. Is this permanent?”

  Jackson deflates. He imagines how it would have felt if someone’s personal drama had taken him off assignment with Mari, two, three years ago. When they first got partnered together he lived in constant fear that a routine rotation shuffle would whisk her away from him, like she was a shiny new penny he found on the ground. “I don’t know,” he tells Punch honestly. All at once he feels like a dickhead, and he doesn’t know how to stop.

  Punch thinks about that. “I like the sub shop on Huntington for lunch,” he announces after a minute. Jack nods.

  It should be an easy-enough shift. Before they head to the Center, Jack drives the cruiser past the alleyway on First between Office Interiors and Maria’s European Delights, flipping on the siren and slowing to a crawl. A handful of kids scatter like pigeons taking flight, pouring out from under the brick archway and breaking into a run.

  “Yo, is that Emile?” asks a boy in a Bruins cap, peering into the cruiser on his way past. When he sees Punch his hands come up, palms out. “Shit man, my bad. I need glasses.”

  Jack had been reaching for his belt. He tells himself he was just reaching for the radio, in case they needed to call for backup. “Who’s Emile?” He can taste the fear like he’s sucking on a mouthful of nails.

  The kid smiles. His ears are the only young-looking thing about him, red with cold and sticking straight out from his scalp. “My buddy made uniform last week, thought he was fucking with me. You officers have a nice day.” He waves.

  “Didn’t know they hung out here,” Punch says. “Good thinking.”

  Jack forces himself to swallow. “Yeah. Sometimes they go to class after a drive-by. Mostly not.”

  The Center is a big brick building with white trim. From the outside it looks like a house or a mansion, but inside it’s institution gray. It used to house the old Berkshire County Jail. Jack’s been here a hundred times before, knows the guards and the admin staff all by name. There’s literally zero to get worked up about, but by the time he parks the cruiser his heart’s hammering away inside his chest again, sweaty palms slipping on the steering wheel. Jack swallows thickly, pulling in a breath that’s louder than he means.

  “You all right, Ford?” Punch asks, glancing at him sidelong with a look on his face like he’s wondering what the hell he’s managed to get himself into. Jack nods and mumbles something about heartburn.

  A new partner was supposed to rectify his fucking problems, wasn’t it?

  So why the hell does he still feel like this?

  He gets through the afternoon somehow, playing a game of pickup basketball with a couple of mouthy repeat shoplifters and managing to break up a fight that erupts on the landing before it escalates to violence. “Use your brain right now,” Jackson urges one of them quietly, the same low calm voice he’s heard Mari use with Sonya when she’s melting down, and it must translate cause the same kid throws Jack a high five before he and Punch leave the Center at five.

  That last bit feels like a little victory, at least, something he can wrap his hands around and hold onto. He wants to tell Mari about it, but he doesn’t know what he’d say. Still, by the time he clocks out at the end of shift there’s a strange, welcome looseness in his chest and his shoulders; he thinks he’ll open a beer and grill a steak, maybe, see what he’s got in the freezer.

  When he pulls the Volks up to the curb in front of his building, though, he finds his brother sitting on the front steps.

  “Fucking freezing,” Terry tells him, standing up as Jack approaches and jamming his hands into the pockets of his hoodie. Jack hasn’t seen him since the night of their father’s birthday. “Was wondering when you were going to show.”

  “Was at work,” Jack says, though he gets the feeling Terry already knows that. He’s back on his guard all of a sudden, though he couldn’t say exactly why. “Everything okay?”

  Terry nods. “Everything’s fine,” he says. “Was in the neighborhood, is all. Was going to text you, but figured I’d just come over. You gonna invite me in?”

  “In the neighborhood,” Jack repeats dubiously. He unlocks his front door and waves Terry ahead of him into the lobby. “All right, what did Meredith say?”

  “That you were a giant fucking weirdo on the phone.” Terry clomps up the stairs to the third floor. “Plus Mom’s worried. Did you know she had to hear about that kid from one of her staff? Some fucking ninth-grade science teacher was listening to the news over his lunch break. Comes right up to her and says, ‘Mrs. Ford, I think you might want to call your son.’” He stands aside for Jackson to unlock the condo door. “Scared her shitless, Jack.”

  Jackson grimaces, juggling his keys and his bag. “Like I told Mer, I wasn’t even there when it happened.” He flicks on the lights. “Can I grab you a beer?”

  Terry follows him into the kitchen, picking up the Mounds bar Mari brought over on Halloween and juggling it in one hand. “You could have called,” he says. He’s two years younger and right now Jack can see him actively trying to shoulder the big-brother persona, pulling on Meredith’s bossy voice, shrugging into their dad’s crossed-arm pose. “It would have made everything a lot easier.”

  Jack plunks a beer down on the counter in front of him. “Well jeez, Terry, I guess I’m just not that interested in making things easier for other people right now.” He rubs at his bristly neck. “Seriously, who sent you, Meredith or Mom? Because if it’s Mom, I’ll come up next weekend, but if it’s Mer, tell her to fuck off and talk to me herself.”

  Terry sets down the Mounds bar. “Marisol called me,” he says.

  Jack’s hand slips while opening his beer, the bottle opener jamming into his thumb. “What the fuck?” he asks, sucking at the cut as it starts to bleed. His tongue tastes like copper blood and panic.

  Terry raises his hands. “No, I’m glad she did. I’m glad she kept me in the loop on this.” Like Mari is Jack’s first-grade teacher or his pediatrician, like she’s one of the adults who gets together to talk about Jack’s performance in homeroom or his growth chart. “She’s fucking worried about you, man.”

  “And you listened to her?” Jesus, Jack was worried she’d go to Sarge, but his brother is even worse. “Since when do you care what she says?”

  “Since it’s stuff about you!” Terry explodes. “Jesus Christ, Jack, what happened at the range the other day, huh? She said you totally freaked out on her. Did you actually ask your boss for a new partner?”

  “What’d she do, fucking tattle on me?” Jack demands, his whole body going hot and red. His hand is still bleeding—he caught the fleshy part, and it stings.

  “She thinks you need help, buddy,” Terry tells him, taking a step closer. “And honestly, I’m starting to think she’s right. Look, I don’t know what’s going to between you guys, but—”

  “She tell you about that too?” Jack snaps.

  “No!” Terry says. It’s a weird reversal of their last conversation, Terry defending Mari while Jack goes on the attack. “God, Jack, calm the fuck down.” He nods in Jack’s direction, how he still doesn’t have the beer cracked. “Your hand okay? You want me to do that?”

  “You calm the fuck down,” Jack tells him. “And no, thanks, I can open a damn beer bottle.” He’s having a hell of a time of it though, actually, the way the damn thing keeps slipping. There’s blood on the glass from his hand. “Shit.”

  “Listen,” Terry says, “let’s start this over, I already messed it up. I’m not like Mom or Mer, I suck at feelings talk.” He laughs a little. “All right? I just wanna make sure you’re okay.”

  “I’m fine,” Jack tells him, but he knows there’s an edge in his voice. What he can’t seem to do is get it under control. “We don’t need to have a feelings talk. Mari doesn’t know what she’s talking about. She has no business g
oing to you guys behind my back, although frankly it just fits, and Jesus fucking Christ what the fuck is wrong with this thing?” The opener clatters into the sink.

  “Easy,” Terry tells him, taking another step in Jack’s direction. “You’re acting a little nuts, bro.”

  “I got shot three fucking times!” Jack shouts, and throws his beer bottle clear across the room. It shatters against the far wall beside the window. For a moment the room is absolutely graveyard silent.

  “Okay,” Terry says. He has his hands up. “Let’s just—sit down, bud.”

  “Don’t call me bud,” Jack spits. “You aren’t Dad.”

  Terry just stares at him. His hands are still raised, like Jack pulled a weapon on him.

  Jack sits.

  It’s the fear in Ter’s face more than anything that shakes him out of it. His hand is still bleeding, thin, watery blood that streams down his wrist to stain the cuff of his henley, but Jack makes himself look away from it. He hasn’t cut himself since the shooting. He didn’t realize it would feel like this.

  “Jack.” Terry sits down across from him and it’s exactly like two nights ago with Mari, I’ve been reading a little about PTSD. Jack Googled the symptoms after she left. Depression and intense guilt were two of them, but Jack doesn’t feel guilty at all.

  “Okay,” Terry says, more to himself than Jack. He picks up his beer and he takes a long pull, practically a chug. Then he pulls out a pack of cigs. “I don’t get it,” he tells Jack, lighting up. “Isn’t it better now that he’s dead?”

  Jack shrugs. Because it’s not, of course, it’s worse, and he doesn’t know why. Lately he spends a lot of time picturing blowing Carlson’s head off and feeling disgusted with himself. The story was picked up by a few national news stations earlier today, officer-involved shooting, unarmed victim. He reckons the rookie is lucky no one has mentioned the word revenge yet.

  “Didn’t they have you talk to someone?” Terry fumbles over the words, a pained look on his face like he’s embarrassed for both of them. “Like, to get recertified or whatever.”

  “Yeah.” GB shares a police-specific shrink with a couple of the other local departments, a nice woman named Monique who sat Jack down and said Well, this is a first for both of us, I bet. She asked him how he was feeling and had him talk through what he remembered of the shooting. It turned out to be easy. Her office was calm and bright with a bubbling fish tank, and Jack told her all the bits and pieces he could grab hold of. She pronounced him remarkably grounded and told him to call if anything changed.

  Jack hasn’t called.

  “Here,” he says, holding out his hand to Terry. “Wrap this for me, okay? I can’t look at the blood.”

  Terry nods. “Sure thing.” He goes into the bathroom, comes out with an ancient box of Band-Aids and a wet wad of toilet paper. Jack looks at the puddle of beer on the floor instead of at his hand. “C’mere,” Terry says like he’s a school nurse and Jack’s a clumsy third-grader who hurt himself at recess, wiping the blood off, ripping open the wrapper and peeling the backing off the strip. “I’m gonna ask Arielle to marry me,” Terry says conversationally, pressing the thing onto Jack’s palm with surprising gentleness. It’s the closest they’ve been to each other in a long time. “This probably isn’t the best time to tell you that, but.”

  “You are?” Jack looks up at him, momentarily distracted. He thinks of his brother’s girlfriend’s pretty, easygoing face. “No shit. Congratulations, man.”

  “Well, she hasn’t said yes yet.” Terry crinkles up the wrapper in his fist, smiling a little. Jack feels a weird, twisting pang of loneliness deep inside his chest. “But you gotta get your shit together, if you’re gonna be my best man.”

  “I gotta do something,” Jack says, an almost joking tone in his voice—it feels like Terry’s lightening the mood for him, letting him off the hook somehow, like a gift—but when he looks up again, his brother isn’t smiling.

  “Yeah, bud,” he says, looking Jack straight in the eyes. “You do.”

  Mari spends Saturday cleaning out her closet and the baby’s, tossing everything that’s stretched out or stained or doesn’t fit into giant lawn and leaf bags on the floor. It’s the first time she’s had the house to herself since she doesn’t even remember when—Sonya’s with Andre for the weekend, and Patty’s on an overnight retreat with her church group—and she knows she probably ought to be doing something involving bubble baths or bonbons or at the very least alcohol, but the closets are what presented themselves this morning, and the closets are where she’s at.

  For the most part it’s mindless, soothing work. She throws out a mateless men’s sock that belonged to Andre. She dusts the upper shelves. She looks through Sonya’s baby box, spending a moment fingering the tiny christening cap and the birth announcement. She tries on some old jeans.

  After a lunch of cold cuts eaten over the sink, she finishes the closets and starts in on the bureaus. Both her and Sonya’s underwear drawers could use some updating, but Mari doesn’t know if she has the energy for shopping. Pawing through her few pieces of lingerie makes her sad in an empty sort of way, like her sheer lace bras and the garters she wore under her wedding dress have no purpose now. Which is strange. Andre’s the only one who’s ever seen half the stuff, and even after the divorce she didn’t have this reaction. She guesses because she was banking on moving on to Jackson, hopping to the next lily pad in the pond, etcetera.

  God, she’s gross. She thinks about what he said on Halloween, Are we too late? She wonders what she’d have done if Jackson had broken his decade-long dating streak even for a second, if he had asked her out in those first five years, those first five months, those first five minutes when she was twenty-two years old and over the moon for him. She thinks things probably would have turned out very different.

  Or maybe not. Maybe they would have broken up a year later and never spoken to each other again.

  She does Sonya’s drawers next, fishing out all of last year’s stuff that’s too short or too tight in the belly. Sone needs a bigger bureau, something with more than three drawers that isn’t covered in sponge-stamped ladybugs, but Mari hasn’t gotten around to it yet. The closet in here still has builder-grade doors too, these flimsy aluminum-vinyl things that slide on a track and wobble strangely if you knock them with an elbow. Mari always meant to replace them. Like she meant to replace the stove, and the fridge, and maybe the countertops, like she meant to finish the basement and put in a playroom. She scrubs a tired hand through her hair. It’s getting longer now, almost long enough for a real braid.

  The landline rings when she’s sorting the lawn and leaf bags into TRASH or DONATE piles. “Hello?” Mari says, imagining either a telemarketer or her mother. Everyone else would call her cell.

  “Hi, uh. Is Marisol there?”

  “Speaking,” she answers, even as she realizes who’s calling. It takes a second for her mouth to catch up with her brain, which is pushing out bright, flashing emergency signals like a pinball machine on TILT. She sets down the lawn and leaf bag slowly.

  “Sorry, you just, you sounded like Patty and I didn’t want to— Hi.” There’s a pause at the other end of the line. “It’s Jack.”

  “Hi,” Mari says. Her tongue is stuck to the roof of her mouth.

  “You weren’t answering your phone,” he explains. “I didn’t want to just show up.”

  “Show up?” They haven’t spoken since that day outside the range, a week and a half ago now. Mari has been trying to get used to riding with Mike Zales, who is nice enough but too polite, like being partnered with a woman requires a special breed of chivalry. He always lets her drive. She was hoping for Piper, but she’s on desk duty until they sort out the thing with Fitzgerald.

  “Yeah.” Jackson sounds nervous. “I think I need to do this in person.”

  Jesus, does he want to break up with her officially?
Finally report her for fucking up in the parking garage? Spring some other horrible unknown on her? “Okay,” she says slowly, this low roll of dread in her stomach. She guesses she shouldn’t be surprised by their capacity to hurt one another by now. “I’m home, so.”

  “Okay,” Jack echoes. “I can be there in twenty minutes?”

  Mari jumps in the shower while she waits for him, pulls on a clean pair of jeans and, at the very last second, a satiny purple bra she’d forgotten she had until this morning. It’s just, if he’s going to tell her to get lost once and for all, Mari doesn’t want to be wearing sad granny underwear when it happens. She’s combing her fingers through her still-damp hair when he rings the bell.

  “I want to marry you,” he says, when she opens it.

  “You—” Mari blinks at him, standing there on her doorstep. She just imagined that, she must have. “What?”

  “Like, not right this minute,” Jackson says, shaking his head. “Not even this year. But, like, eventually. I want to. I’ve always wanted to, you know that. I want to be the kind of person you’d marry.”

  “I.” Mari takes a step back, so he’ll come into the foyer. He’s letting cold air in the house. He’s wearing his corduroy jacket with the soft sheepskin lining, his face sharp and red from the November wind. “Jackson.”

  “I’m not that person yet, though,” Jack tells her, eyes on hers as she shuts the storm door. “I’m fucked-up.”

  He doesn’t look like he’s lost it, Mari notes, staring up at him in confusion. He actually looks more lucid—more like the Jackson she thinks of him as being—than she’s seen him in weeks. “You are?”

  “You know I am,” Jack says, shrugging a little. “You said it yourself.”

  Mari crosses her arms. “Well this is one messed-up marriage proposal, I’ll tell you that much.” It comes out rougher than she means it to, this fake Latina tough-girl bullshit she has no claim to, as a human raised in Western fucking Massachusetts. Her entire graduating class was white. “I’m sorry,” she says, running a hand through her hair. “Look, take off your jacket, okay? Let’s sit down for this.”