Bang Read online

  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.

  “You can see him in a little while,” she says evenly. “First I need you to tell me who the other boy was. The one who ran.”

  “Some friend of Rabbit’s, I have no idea.” Janine huffs an angry breath. “He came over last night and they were fighting like a couple of assholes, so I went upstairs to try to sleep. Then I woke up and you all were in my fucking house.”

  Mari grits her teeth. “Janine,” she says, trying to be patient. “I need you to help me out here. You don’t know his name, where he lives, anything that might help me find him?”

  Janine scowls. “I said—”

  “Officer de la Espada.” There’s Jack in the doorway, his face an angry mask. “Can I speak to you outside?”

  Dammit. Mari already knows what he’s going to say, but it’s still a punch to the gut as he confirms it. “Interview’s done,” he tells her tightly, looking as though he’d very much like to put his hand through a wall. “Piper and the rook are on their way down to take over.”

  “She didn’t know anything anyway,” Mari tells him, before realizing that’s entirely the wrong thing to say. “The other kid does, though,” she adds in a rush. And really, it shouldn’t matter whether it’s them taking the statement or someone else. The way Jackson’s acting, you’d think they had no leads at all. “He’s buddies with the shooter.”

  Jackson doesn’t even glance at her. “The other kid, huh? As in the one who was half-dead when we brought him in?”

  Mari swallows. “Yeah. That kid.” She couldn’t feel any guiltier if she let the shooter go free out the window her damn self. By the time they meet up with Piper and her baby rook by the outer doors, she’s sweating underneath her uniform.

  “We’ll do a run at the girl again,” Piper is saying. “Double-check she ain’t lying. You guys should go in and have someone take de la Espada’s statement officially.” She looks up at them. “I have a feeling this is gonna be a big one.” Fitzgerald is taking frantic notes. Mari thinks someone ought to tell her it looks unprofessional.

  “Cop shooting,” Piper adds, shaking her head. “Damn, this boy is going to be sorry when we find him.”

  Mari turns toward Jackson as they walk away. Her tongue feels glued to the roof of her mouth. She opens it to say I’m sorry, or maybe, I trust Piper, but what comes out is, “You want to grab lunch before or after the statement?”

  Jackson shrugs.

  “Now?” she asks. It’s 10:45.

  Jackson shrugs again.

  The walk out to the cruiser is silent. Mari would rather kill herself than ask another question, so she throws the car into gear and heads for the deli they normally stop at after hospital calls, this hole-in-the-wall with grocery basics and rotting fruit but really good turkey pastrami. The bagel from breakfast sloshes in her stomach. She thought they were getting over the shooting and now here it is, popping up again like a disastrous jack-in-the-box. You’re the one who let him go out the window, she thinks. Not everything is my fault.

  She orders for them both, big sloppy sandwiches she already knows she won’t be eating a bite of, throwing in two of the wilted brownies wrapped in plastic by the cash register as a last-ditch apology. She’s reaching for her wallet when Jackson nudges her aside.

  “Can be your boyfriend here, can’t I?” he asks roughly. “Or are we doing our jobs now too?”

  Immediately Mari is so relieved she thinks she could sit down right on the dirty linoleum. When she looks at him he’s got those reddish eyebrows faintly raised. “You could,” she agrees. Then, just above a whisper, because he’s giving her this and she wants to give him something better, or maybe because she wants to show him she’s sorry for messing up, “Or you could take me back to your house for half an hour, be my boyfriend there instead.”

  So, yeah. They never actually get around to the sandwiches.

  Jack’s condo is on the second floor of a trim, neat triple-decker, parquet floors and a breakfast bar with three stools lined up alongside it, off-white walls hung with a bunch of architectural prints of Worcester showing the city’s layout a hundred years ago. There’s a small deck off the kitchen with a grill, plus a table for two. He used to steal Mari’s mom’s recipe for steak marinade to impress all his white, blonde girlfriends.

  “Couch?” Jack asks, biting at the back of her neck above the starchy collar of her uniform. Mari feels her nipples harden, pushing up against three thick layers of cotton. She feels like one of those white girlfriends right now, like she’s stepped into someon
e else’s shoes by accident. For years she wondered if he wasn’t making a move because he didn’t want to date brown.

  She swallows. His mouth feels just a little mean, nipping kisses like a punishment. “Bed,” she says with difficulty.

  They set their radios on his dresser—fuck, they’re going to have to scramble if it turns out there’s a call—and face each other on the carpet. It feels serious between them all of a sudden, solemn and grave.

  “Piper will get a statement,” Mari says. She’s desperate for him to agree with her, or at least nod, but Jackson just looks at her. His gaze is bedrock-steady.

  “If we wanna do this, we gotta hurry,” he says, stepping into her space.

  His voice almost sounds like fucking her is something he could take or leave. “Okay,” Mari agrees, speaking against a suddenly dry mouth. “Yeah. Sure.” He’s so tall, standing close to her like this. He got his hair re-buzzed this week, sharp cheekbones standing out. He hasn’t regained a single pound of the weight he lost. It makes him look permanently hungry, ropy limbs like a teenager.

  “Okay,” Jackson echoes. Then he kisses her and oh, that’s still strange, having Jackson’s tongue in her mouth and hearing the sounds he makes, so intimate it’s almost embarrassing. The back of Mari’s neck heats up. He’s a good kisser, confident, the palms of his hands warm warm warm.

  “Take off your clothes,” Jackson says quietly. His hands are on her back and ass, squeezing in a way that makes Mari really self-conscious of the places she squishes where there’s extra flesh to grab.

  She breathes. It’s intimidating having him watch her undress herself, fumbling as she works the buttons on her stiff blue uniform shirt. She’s got a white tank on underneath, plus one of the sports bras she always wears to work. It’s so tight it leaves angry red grooves in the skin underneath her breasts, but when she glances up at Jackson he’s just staring, lips slightly parted, the faint quickening of his chest as he breathes.