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 of 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.”
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.”