Jackson’s first morning back on duty after the shooting is crisp and clear and sunny, that bite in the air that tempts fall. A handful of newly dropped leaves crunch under his uniform boots. His gut aches where the bullets passed through.
He stops by his regular grimy coffee place on the far side of Stockbridge, the bell jingling cheerily as he pushes through the door. Right away, it’s clear he won’t be flying under the radar like he hoped.
“Oh my God, hi,” says the barista. She’s a local, a frizzy-haired college kid named Caitlin who Jackson’s known as long as he’s been on the force. “Welcome back, Officer. How you feeling?”
She heard about the shooting, then, obviously. Jackson doesn’t know why he’s surprised. “Never better,” he says, which is the kind of lie people like to hear four months after you get pumped full of rock salt. In reality, he still feels mostly like shit. “You?”
“Great.” She reaches for the stack of paper cups next to the coffeemaker, beaming at him like he’s her own personal Jesus. When it first happened, Jack had no idea being shot in the back would make him so popular—with nurses, with the news, with his own coworkers. He’s still not used to it. “On me today. Same as always, two large, no cream?”
Jackson hesitates. The last time he was here was the day of the shooting, back when there were still Mother’s Day chocolates in the window. He remembers wondering if it would be weird to buy Mari some, like, Hi, sorry the sex sucked, let’s celebrate your kid from another man. Now the whiteboard menu is tricked out with a crude drawing of a pumpkin next to a long list of cinnamon-sugar-type drinks on special. It’s like being a small-time Rip Van Winkle.
“Nah,” he says finally. “Just one today.” He tries to make it sound casual and not as if he just changed his order for the first time in a decade.
Caitlin has the grace not to comment. “Coming right up,” she says. When she sees him start counting out change, she shakes her head. “Really, Officer, I got this one.”
Right. Jackson stuffs the bills back in his wallet, but not before noticing he counted out enough for his regular order. Christ but he’s a sad sack.
“Thanks.” He salutes Caitlin with his single cup. “Have a good one.” On the way out he’s so used to nudging through the jingling door with his hip, hands full, that he actually goes ahead and does it, some kind of bizarre muscle memory kicking in.
Bad idea. The door handle jabs him right in the scar tissue.
“Fuck.” He curls an arm around his gut, immediately sloshing hot coffee all over his hand. “Fuck,” he repeats, wiping it off on his jeans. He and Mari have always hated the shoddy lids at this place. They had been planning to go green this past summer with a pair of reusable mugs.
“You okay?” Caitlin calls from behind the counter.
“Yep,” Jack says, which is definitely a lie. He went cold-turkey on the painkillers two days ago and most of the time the pain is dull and itchy, but right now it feels like he got sucker punched by a cannon ball. “No damage done.” He grabs a handful of napkins on his way out, swearing under his breath.
Welcome back, Officer. Yeah, sure.
The burn turns out to be the worst of his injuries, smarting the whole drive into work. At the precinct, Jackson parks his car in the lot around back and heads through the side door, straight for the locker room. He wants to delay the inevitable as long as possible.
No dice. “Ford!” hollers Mike Zales the second he steps inside, and just like that Jackson’s got the attention of half a dozen police in various states of undress. “Dead man walking, how you been?”
“Oh, you know.” Jackson drops his bag on the bench and accepts their backslaps and catcalls. Gordy Punch, a heavyset guy in his forties, actually gives him a noogie. “Alive.” He’s pretty sure there’s a sour expression on his face. He forces a smile instead, shaking out of Punch’s grip.
It’s not that he isn’t grateful. His parents live over an hour away in Worcester so it was mostly these guys who made sure he had a rotating parade of flowers and chocolates during his hospital stay, flowers and lasagnas once he was recouping at home. But it’s been months now. Jackson is ready to stop being the guy who got shot.
Zales punches his arm on the way out. “Good to have you back, Ford. We missed you.”
“I sure as shit didn’t miss you,” Jack calls after them. Zales flips him a double bird.
He waits ’til the room’s mostly empty before he peels off his street clothes, moving as fast as his broken-ass body will allow. The bullet and surgical scars on his chest and his stomach are easy enough to cover with an undershirt, but the one near his collarbone is harder to hide. He hasn’t worn a tie with his uniform since he was a rookie, way back in ’03, but he does now, buttoning up all the way to the top. He fusses with the clip for a good three minutes before he’s satisfied. By the time his boots are laced, it’s nearly roll call.
He stands in the doorway for a second, staring down at his single cup of coffee. It’s half-full.
Jackson chucks the whole mess in the garbage without taking another sip.
The day Jackson is recertified for duty, Marisol sleeps through her alarm.
“Mama,” Sonya cries at half-past, hoisting herself up onto the big bed and rolling across the mattress in a tangle. “Can I have Fruit Loops? Abuela says no.”
“Well, if Abuela says,” Marisol mumbles, rolling her cheek to the cool half of the pillow. She can smell Sonya’s milky morning breath, her tangle-free conditioner from last night. For a moment they both just lie there, Sonya wiggling to get her legs under the blankets. Then Mari’s eyes fly open. “Shit. What time is it?”
“Seven thirty,” sounds out Sonya, whose reading abilities extend to the digital clock on the nightstand, most board books and the occasional street sign. Then, “You said shit.”
“I did, baby.” Mari stands and hoists her daughter into her arms, kissing the hot skin of one shoulder. Sonya sleeps shirtless because that’s how Andre sleeps, her round, puppy-fat belly poking out. She collects rocks like him too, cheers for the Boston Bruins as much as any four-year-old can. Some days it feels like Marisol never got divorced. “Come on, we gotta hustle now, we’re late.”
“Okay,” Sonya agrees cheerfully, then gets completely distracted by her My Little Ponies the second Mari sets her on her bedroom floor.
Marisol’s mother is down in the kitchen in her flowered nightgown, already baking something with cinnamon and cloves that will likely become dessert for tonight’s dinner. The baking is new, a post-divorce development. “Why didn’t you wake me?” Mari asks.
“Because you’re thirty-three years old and not in high school?” Patricia replies in Spanish, lifting her eyebrows above the plastic frames of her reading glasses. When Patricia first moved in after Mari’s father died, she made it abundantly clear that Mari was a grown-up and that she, Patricia, was ready for her dotage of holding grandbabies and reading true crime novels. That Mari’s failed marriage has interfered with her plans is something of a sore spot. “Hey,” Patricia says, softening. “Isn’t today—?”
Mari really, really doesn’t want to talk about it. “Uh-huh,” she says, dropping a good-morning kiss on Patricia’s cheek and reaching for the coffeepot. “Actually, could you do me a huge favor and get Sone dressed? I gotta shower.”
Patricia nods and wipes her floury hands on a dishtowel. Anything to do with her granddaughter delights her, even if it involves stuffing Sonya’s unruly body into too-small play clothes. As soon as she’s gone, Mari feels seedy and exploitive, a bad mother and daughter in equal amounts. She gulps her coffee and reminds herself to breathe.
She drops Sone off at preschool before speeding toward the station—one advantage of being a cop in this town is that the odds of getting a traffic ticket drop pretty dramatically—making it to roll call just as Sergeant Leo says her name. “Officer de la Espada,” he intones. “Nice of you to join us.”
“Sorry, Sarge,” Marisol says, sliding into the nearest empty chair while still buttoning up her uniform. Her head feels fused to her spinal cord, like if she so much as glances around the room she’ll turn into a pillar of salt. Of all the days to be late. “Here I am.”
The name after hers on the list, alphabetically? Jackson Ford.
“At last our lives can begin,” Leo drawls, turning back to his clipboard. A grin breaks across his face as he notices whose name is next. “Speaking of,” Leo says, looking up, and oh, here they go, Mari really thinks she might be about to barf. “Today I have the pleasure of welcoming back one of our own—”
Two rows over, Joe Bushur raises his fist and hoots. “Jackson.”
That does it. The rest of the Sarge’s words are drowned out by deafening, foot-stamping applause. Mike Zales wolf whistles, Robyn Birk pounds her desk. Mari joins in automatically, clapping like a mechanical doll. She can see him now, Jackson, up in front beside Gordy Punch. She didn’t recognize him from the back at first. He cut his hair army-issue short.
When the noise shows no signs of dying off, Jackson raises his hands. “All right, all right,” he calls. “Don’t anybody hurt themselves.” He turns to face the room as he says it, and for a moment his eyes lock on Marisol’s.
Then he looks away.
So. Mari swallows and tries not to remember how he looked lying on the pavement in the parking garage back at the beginning of the summer, his good solid body torn to pieces right in front of her. Tries not to remember what happened before that, either. She hasn’t seen his face in four months.
“You’ve been missed, Ford,” Sarge says wryly. The whiteboard behind him reads, No Cops Shot In 116 Days.
Roll wraps up quickly after that. Sarge orders them all to come home safe and Mari heads for the back of the room to check the duty board. The past four months she’s been riding with a rookie called Fitzgerald, an Irish girl who keeps her head down and doesn’t ask too many questions.
Today—and of course, of course, she should have been more prepared—today, she’s riding with Jack.
“You and me again, huh?”
She whirls around and there he is, his expression the very theology of indifference. Mother of God, but she missed his face.
“Band’s back together,” he continues flatly. He’s got a swizzle stick from the Coffee Shack in his mouth but no coffee, and a look in his eyes like Mari’s just another chink in the cinderblock.
Mari swallows. They were in the same Academy class, her and Jack. They’ve been partners more or less since they were twenty. That’s ten years of riding eight-hour shifts together, day in, day out, but these past four months have apparently shot that history to hell.
Shot, Mari thinks stupidly, and immediately wants to throw up again.
Really, then, it’s fitting that her first words to him after all this time are: “You cut your hair.”
“Yep.” Jackson rubs his buzzed neck. He hasn’t had a crew cut since before Sonya was born, years and years ago now. Something about it leaves Mari absolutely stricken by his cheekbones. “So did you.”
Marisol touches her own neck, startled. “Oh. Yeah.” Two weeks after the shooting she lopped everything off into a short, unflattering bob, then started sobbing in the salon chair. The stylist thought she was nuts. “Needed a change.”
Jack nods. He’s lost weight too, she notices, conducting a quick hungry inventory of his body. He’s a different shape than she thinks of him as being. Mari gained fifteen pounds, herself, all her jeans gone tight and all her shirts gone slutty. “Looks good,” he says, meaning the hair.
Mari opens her mouth. All her apologies are right there, a snarl of words she’s rehearsed in her head and in front of the mirror, loosely organized around her various transgressions. She fantasized about showing up today and just handing Jackson an itemized list, I am sorry because of A, B, C and D. She thought he might appreciate the efficiency.
“Ready to go?” is what comes out instead.
Jackson makes a face then, the quickest of eye-rolls like he both expected her bullshit and is disappointed by it. “Yup,” he says, turning and heading down the hallway toward the motor pool. He’s wearing his tie, which is odd. “You wanna drive?”
Marisol shakes her head. “It’s your turn,” she says. They’ve switched off every single shift since they were rookies and dying to get behind the wheel of a police cruiser. She was the one who was driving the morning of the shooting, was the one who suggested they stop for a snack at the convenience store to begin with. “I mean, if you want.”
Jackson doesn’t look at her again, just scrawls his name in the log book and picks up the keys. “Sure,” he says over his shoulder, opening the door and striding out into the sunlight. “I want.”
Things Jackson doesn’t ask Marisol in the cruiser, a selected list: why the fuck didn’t she visit him in the hospital, did she miss him while he was pissing into a bag and trying to walk down the hallway without passing out, does she think about that night in his apartment before everything went to hell and if she does, what does she think?
Things he does ask her: “How’s Sone?”
“Good.” Sonya always gets Mari’s best smile, the broad one with all her teeth that inspires men of all ages and ethnicities to walk across bars and agree to traffic stops. Jackson used to be so intimidated by those men, by the way Mari seemed to be a beacon to every non-white dude in Western Mass. “Started pre-K last week. It’s already gotten complicated with a little redheaded boy named George.”
Jackson nods. “Romantic?”
“Antagonistic. George is three and a biter.”
“Incompatible kinks, the death knell of any relationship.” As soon as he says it, Jackson winces, remembering their own incompatibility. “Want to stop for coffee?” he asks quickly, turning up South Street toward the split. There’s a Starbucks around the corner up here they used to frequent if they were feeling too snooty for the Shack. “The good stuff?”
Mari nods. “Okay.” From her face, Jackson can tell she’s wondering if she’s being let off the hook. “Let’s do that.”
They park the cruiser in a tow zone and head across the street, Marisol leading the way. Her hair is as short as Sonya’s now, a stubby vulnerable tail at the base of her neck. When Jack first met her it was halfway down her back with thick, early aughts blonde streaks. She used to wear it in a lovely, complicated knot.
At the counter, he orders his usual and adds Mari’s own without looking back at her, fishing his wallet out of the cargo pocket in his uniform slacks. He should have just bought two coffees this morning like normal. He doesn’t want to start shit, or talk about shit, or hash up anything that did or did not happen between them. He just wants to do his job.
“Jack,” Mari protests from behind his shoulder. “Wait, don’t pay—”
All of a sudden, Jackson sees red. “No, it’s cool, I got it. I owe you for all those times you visited me in the hospital.”
There’s a long silence.
Marisol ducks up to the counter, two stainless steel travel mugs in her hands. “No, I mean, I wanted them to put the drinks in these. Since we’re always saying…” She trails off, looking lost.
Just as fast as his temper flared, Jackson feels two inches tall. It’s Marisol, for fuck’s sake. It’s Mari. She’s his best friend, she’s his partner; they know every last one of each other’s secrets and scars. At least, Jackson used to think they did. For a second he lets himself remember what she looked like underneath him that night in his apartment last April, the caramel-honey expanse of her skin. He’s loved her since he was twenty-two years old. He didn’t do anything about it until five months ago. “Right,” he mutters, taking the mugs and setting them on the counter. “Good idea.”
They walk back to the cruiser in silence, a fresh breeze whiffing across the back of Jackson’s neck. His coffee tastes like plasticky mug. He puts the car in drive and heads toward their assigned route, not looking at Mari. It’s an easy beat today, a welcome-back softball courtesy of Leo, a cluster of high school kids smoking on a playground. Jackson beeps the horn and they scatter like bugs. Outside the sky is a brilliant, aching blue.
“I’m sorry,” Mari says, eyes fixed straight ahead out the windshield.
“Me too,” Jackson says, and they don’t talk about it again after that.
The rest of shift feels like a long, slow walk back in time. They grab lunch at a Greek diner that’s one of their usual places, chicken gyro for him and an eggplant salad wrap for her, then eat it out in the parking lot, leaning up against the cruiser like always. Jackson lets Mari deal with two requests for directions, trying to get back into the swing of his old life. The gyro tastes like paprika and four months ago. It tastes uncomplicated.
“Glendale is that way,” Marisol says, pointing with one elegant brown wrist. “Church Street becomes Stockbridge before it meets up.”
“Great,” the guy says and gets back into his car without so much as a thank you.
“You’re welcome,” Mari calls brightly. Jackson smirks.
In the afternoon they write a couple traffic tickets and call a teenage shoplifter’s parents, returning thirty bucks’ worth of cosmetics to a smug, whining store clerk. “You’re not going to arrest her?” he demands, all but stomping his foot on the linoleum. Jackson claps him on the back and thanks him for his commitment to the judicial process.
“Dumb kid,” Marisol says as they’re climbing back into the cruiser. “If I was gonna stroll past the register with a bunch of shit in my hoodie, I’d at least get some super expensive face cream made of, like, human placenta or something.” She pulls at her cheeks with both palms like she’s trying to smooth out wrinkles. “Not effing lip gloss and two-dollar eyeliner.”
The girl was Latina, the kid they busted. It always makes Jackson vaguely uncomfortable when that happens. “Sure you would have,” he tells Mari, laughing not because it’s particularly funny but because it’s so absurd. First of all, Mari has objectively gotten more beautiful the longer he’s known her, rounder and steadier and more striking. And second of all, she’d never in a million years take anything that didn’t belong to her. She’s a rule-follower, Mari. She’s the most honest person he knows. She doesn’t steal. She doesn’t lie. She doesn’t cheat.
In any sense of the word.
Jackson remembers the long, long weeks heading into her divorce proceedings, how edgy they were with each other, waiting. Never touching in the cruiser, strictly split bills for lunch and coffee orders, conversations focused on work and work alone. The day of her court date they both rode the desk in silence, filing paperwork and passing highlighters back and forth. At lunch, while Marisol changed into a skirt suit to go before the judge and plead irreconcilable differences, Jackson took a shower in the locker room and beat one out thinking about absolutely nothing at all.
“They were you, obviously,” she said at the bar that night, four drinks down and the papers folded in half and sticking out of her purse. She was still wearing her heels from court. “The irreconcilable differences? They were you.”
“I hear human placenta gets a great black-market rate,” Jackson tells her now, flicking on the turn signal. Mari snorts.
At the end of their shift, they park the cruiser in its designated motor-pool spot and grab their bags out of the back, walking slowly toward the squat cinderblock precinct. “I missed this,” Mari says as they hit the double doors. Then, before Jackson can get his hopes up, “The girl I rode with packed her own lunch.”
“What a bitch.” Jackson remembers when Marisol herself did that, way back when they were rookies. She had these huge Tupperwares full of chicken gumbo and rice, mixed-bean salads that she’d assemble carefully before eating, shaking out little baggies of ingredients one by one. Jackson would find himself watching her darting hands instead of the road.
Mari grins at him, bright and familiar. “You wanna grab a drink?” she says, hesitating where the hallway splits off into the locker rooms, guys on one side and women on the other. A couple years ago she followed Jack right into the men’s during a fight over a suspect, getting an eyeful of Punch’s twig and berries for her trouble. It took six months for either one of them to live it down. “My mom’s got Sonya, I’ve got time for one or two.”
“I, uh.” Jackson hesitates. He wants to—fuck, of course he wants to, wants to park himself on a stool with his knee pressed against hers underneath the bartop, to fill in all her missing pieces and let her fill in all of his. He wants to never let her out of his sight again. But then he remembers the vacant expanse of the last four months without her, what it’s like to know he can’t actually count on her at all, and when he opens his mouth what comes out is, “I better not.”
Mari lets him off easy, a nod and a “Yeah, of course,” before brushing her fingers against his wrist and heading into the locker room. The touch burns against Jack’s skin the whole ride home, sharper and realer than his actual burn from this morning. He almost turns around twice.
Mari showers at the precinct, squelching in her flip-flops and being careful not to touch the plastic curtain. The locker room facilities are grimy but Mari actually prefers them sometimes, how the water never gets cold here, and there are no four-year-olds sitting on the toilet seat when she gets out. Her hair especially she lingers over. It still surprises her when she runs her fingers through it, the sudden stop six inches before what she’s used to. She wonders what Jackson thinks of the cut. Back before Mari got married, he used to yank the end of her braid all the time.
The locker room is filling up with the night shift when she gets out, Sara Piper and the skinny rookie Mari rode with busy changing into their uniforms. “Hey, de la Espada,” Piper calls, yanking on her socks. “Heard your other half is back. Congrats.”
Mari makes herself smile. Sara Piper is the only other non-white cop in the whole department, token black girl to Mari’s token brown. They get along. “Yep. Don’t have to ride with rooks anymore.” She winks at the girl, Fitzgerald, to show she doesn’t mean it. They look younger every year to Marisol, these kids joining the force. Fitzgerald has pimples across her cheeks, hair pinned into a severe bun and fresh piercing holes along the tops of her ears. The regs make you take them out.
“God, I know,” Piper groans without the wink. In two months, she’ll be promoted off foot patrol for good, and she makes no secret of the fact that she’s looking forward to it. She got her sergeant scores back just last week. “I never want to look at another rookie again.”
Fitzgerald visibly winces. Marisol grins. “The future of our department,” she reminds Piper.
“Yeah, yeah,” Piper gripes, lacing her boots. “I can’t wait until I make detective.”
Mari laughs. “You deserve it,” she says sincerely. Piper made all of them help her study, but she went to Marisol the most, insisting Mari was best at quizzing her. Mari didn’t mind. After Jackson got shot, she had a lot of time on her hands for endless question-and-answers on when to taser a suspect, what rank you have to be to call in SWAT. She was trying to stay out of her own brain. “Homicide fast track,” she tells Piper now. “Straight to the top.” It’s a joke. The Berkshires get about one homicide a year, nearly always vehicular.
“Shut up,” Piper says mildly, yanking her vest into place. “You wish you were me.”
Mari could be, is the thing. She has the seniority and the job experience, plus she could pass the written component of the test no problem. The day after Mari chopped off all her hair, Piper handed her an application for the exam. “Think about it,” she said. “If you’re smart, you’ll get off the street. Not to mention better hours for your kid.” The papers are still sitting in Mari’s glove box, half filled out.
“Okay,” Piper continues now, standing up and clapping her hands together. “Go home, de la Espada. You—” she points at Fitzgerald. “Let’s go.”
Marisol sighs. She never did figure out what Piper meant by that, you’ll get off the streets if you’re smart. Get off them because everyone knows you’re a shitty cop who got your partner shot? Because everyone knows you broke up your marriage for him? What?
Mari hangs her towel up and goes home.
She makes it back to the house just in time to feed Sonya dinner and plunk her squirmy body into the bathtub upstairs, getting the latest George update—“He bit Elisabeth today and I think he is going to be ’spelled”—plus two verses of the new Katy Perry song for her troubles. Then they read a bird book in Spanish and Sonya practices her pronunciation. It’s important to Mari, that her kid can speak both.
“I love you, Fancy Pants,” Mari says as she’s tucking Sonya into her big-girl bed, kissing her on both cheeks and her smooth, sweet-smelling forehead. After Jackson got shot Mari had Sone sleep in the double bed for three solid weeks, her warm durable limbs wrapped around Marisol like a monkey. It was the only way Mari could sleep without nightmares.
“Love you too,” Sonya says.
Back downstairs, Mari finds her purse buzzing on the counter. When she fishes her phone out there’s a text message from Jackson, just a terse one-word goodnight. She stares at the screen for five solid minutes, trying to figure out how to reply.
See you tomorrow, she texts back finally. It feels hollow even as she presses down on the keys.
She scrolls up to the last time he texted her, from the hospital two or three days after the shooting. Where are you? is all it says.
The one directly before that is jokier: helloooooo? did you get shot too?? And, like…die?
And the third one from the bottom: everything hurts, bring back coffee.
It was when he first woke up after surgery, Marisol’s pretty sure. It must have been. He woke up, looked around, and when he couldn’t find her he assumed she’d been and left, just stepped out for a second for a change of clothes or something to eat.
That she’d never been at all was a possibility that just didn’t occur to him.
It isn’t strictly true, either. In reality Mari spent any number of sweaty hours parked outside the hospital, stomach turning over and over as she ordered herself out of the car. It was Jack up there, lying behind one of the hundreds of windows overlooking the crowded lot, and he was hurt and probably scared, and worst of all he was alone. If ever in her life there’d been a time to get her act together, Mari told herself, it was right the hell now.
But she couldn’t.
She couldn’t face him.
It was one thing to have failed Jack romantically. It was gross and embarrassing and awful, after all this time, to realize they weren’t compatible the way she’d always imagined, but it was something they could conceivably recover from.
But Mari had failed him as a partner.
She hadn’t had his back, she hadn’t protected him. She hadn’t done the one thing they’d promised each other over and over for the better part of ten years.
He’d almost died, and he knew she’d let it happen.
How could she look him in the eyes after that?
Now Mari feels the sickness of those sessions in her car all over again, the panic and nausea fresh and new. She sets down the phone.
Patricia is in the family room watching reruns, Law & Order episodes from the ’90s. She likes to keep up a stream of running commentary in Spanish when she’s watching cop shows with Mari, is that right? and do you do that, has that ever happened? The answer is usually no. True to the Berkshires’ low homicide rate, Mari’s job is traffic stops and noise violations, not murder mystery and gang crime. Until the day Jackson got shot, she had never so much as drawn her weapon. God willing, she’d like to never draw it again.
The next day at work is easier. She and Jackson don’t mention the shooting, and they definitely don’t mention the sex, but they do talk, haltingly, and about more than just work. On Wednesday Mari’s wrist brushes his as they’re settling into the cruiser. On Friday he lets her buy his lunch. By the following Monday she can look at him for ten full seconds without automatically picturing either his blood on that parking garage pavement or the night in his apartment that came before it, the endless awkward silence as she pulled her underwear back on.
Looking at him for eleven seconds, though? That’s a different story entirely.
On Tuesday they’re supposed to spend the day prepping for community outreach at the high school, but Sarge stops them just as roll is breaking up. “Grant, de la Espada,” he shouts from the podium. All around them is the rustle of a dozen cops, the scraping grate of chairs. “Up here.”
Catcalls break out from all corners immediately. It’s the grown-up equivalent of getting summoned to the principal’s office, plus it seems there’s always a certain amount of bonus hilarity when it comes to Mari and Jack. The entire precinct likes to tease them, right down to the 911 dispatchers. Once Sara Piper bought them some flavored lube and a book on reviving dead marriages.
“Oh, quiet down,” Jackson yells back. “Have some respect for your betters.” Since he came back, the guys have been offering to buy him drinks nearly every night. He was in the paper afterwards, HERO COP right there in the headline. Marisol’s mother clipped it out.
“Got a job for you two,” Leo announces once the crowd filters out. “Take a day, two tops. Keep you out of the high school, at least. I know you in particular weren’t thrilled about that assignment, Ford.”
Mari narrows her eyes at Jackson. She didn’t know he cared one way or the other, let alone that he’d spoken to the Sarge about it.
Leo continues, oblivious. “It’s a quick UC op, in and out. We’ve got a bungalow we think is a grow house down near the Super 8 on Housatonic. One of the motel clerks sells a little, dime bags. We just need someone to go in and put in an order for something a bit bigger for the arrest.”
A quick UC op. In and out.
Mari feels her heart drop soundly to her butt. Undercover used to be their thing or whatever, hers and Jackson’s, back before the shooting. It’s not like they ever did anything big or super dangerous—The Wire, Great Barrington is obviously not—but if Leo needed somebody to go sit at a dive bar for a couple of hours on a Friday night, find out where the string of underage DUIs were getting their Long Island iced teas, Jack and Mari were the ones he’d tap to do it. They’re more or less the same age, so they can pass nice and easy for a couple. They’re comfortable with each other.
Or at least they were.
Mari used to like doing the UCs too—anything to break up the monotony of writing tickets at the speed trap near Exit 4—but now the idea of spending even an hour with Jack outside the confines of their starchy blue uniforms makes her want to run fast and far. When she glances over at him, his face confirms the feeling is mutual.
Leo’s still waiting for a response, apparently blessedly unaware anything’s changed. Mari doesn’t know how much people have been gossiping. She signed Jackson’s get well card, after all, even put in her fifteen bucks for the joke IT’S A BOY bouquet Punch organized. Still, someone has to have noticed she was never actually at the hospital.
“Sure,” she says brightly. Her tongue is being corroded by acid guilt. “Absolutely. No problem, Sarge.”
She pictures the sergeant’s application sitting in her glove box again. If she gets promoted, maybe Jackson will get a partner who deserves him.
“You didn’t want to do the schools?” she asks him tentatively on the way back to the lockers. Yesterday he brought her a stale pumpkin scone from the Coffee Shack, and she thought they were on their way to a thaw. “Since when?”
Jack keeps walking a second before he answers, taking them out of the bustle of the bullpen and into the hallway. “I mean. Since now, Mari,” he says, rubbing the back of his neck. His face is tight and annoyed, like possibly this is information she should already be aware of. They used to be able to do that, read each other’s minds.
After another second, he sighs. “Look, I didn’t want to get the question, okay?”
Oh. “Oh.” Mari’s eyes drop to his middle, where his uniform is neatly tucked into his belt. She remembers pulling the shirt free to get at the bullet wound, down on her knees in the parking garage with dispatch telling her to apply pressure. The parking attendant had run over by then, a grandmother with a head wrap who ended up being calmer than Mari was. Mari threw up.
Have you ever been shot?
“Of course,” she tells Jackson. “No, yeah. I wasn’t thinking.” They get that question every single year, together with the favorite opener of high school students everywhere, Have you ever shot anyone? Until recently, Gordy Punch was the only cop in the whole of the Great Barrington Police Department with an answer, and even that was only a story about the time he got spooked as a rookie and unloaded a round into a set of garbage cans. Now, though—
Jackson nods, turning toward the lockers without another word.
Right. Okay, then. Mari squares her shoulders and follows.