Read Online Bang by Ruby McNally - Free Book Online Page A

you are.” Mari nods. “You’d tell me if you weren’t.” They still aren’t looking at each other. A fat squirrel skitters across the top of the Dumpster, oddly deft. “When you had your psych eval,” she begins softly, her heart ticking like a bomb at the back of her mouth. “Did you—?”
    â€œI said, I didn’t want to talk about it, Mari.” Jackson sighs an irritated sigh. Then, a long beat of taut silence later: “I don’t sleep anymore, for one thing.”
    Mari bites her tongue so hard she tastes copper. “No, huh?” she asks, feeling vaguely like the cigarette is lodged in her throat. They aren’t touching at all but she can feel the heat radiating off him anyway, the fine hair on her arms standing up.
    Jack shakes his head. “I wake up, I don’t know. I dream.”
    â€œAbout what?” Mari asks. Jack doesn’t answer. Mari breathes. Then, because she hasn’t seen him smile in a long time and she misses it, “Bet I could tire you out.”
    Jackson laughs out loud then, a real laugh, so deep it almost bellows. For the first time since she came out here, he looks her full in the face. “Are you flirting with me?” he asks. He says it like it’s the most absurd thing in the world.
    â€œYou wish,” Mari says, shaking her head and smirking a little. “Give me another cigarette.”
    â€œI do wish,” Jack says, reaching into his shirt pocket to pull out the pack. “I do.”

Chapter Four
    Jackson decides the best thing to do is pretend the thing at the call center never happened.
    Let me know how you want to ease into it , Sarge had said when he was first reinstated. We’re gonna do this thing at your pace. And when Jackson’s pace had turned out to be faster than Internal Investigations Division would have liked, Leo had gone to bat for him. Jack owes him a smooth ride.
    It’s under control, he tells himself in the days afterwards. He just got back. He’s allowed to have a few kinks in his system.
    It’s a lucky weekend that week, cop-talk for when your off days line up perfectly with Saturday and Sunday, which makes it hard to worry about much of anything. Patrol officers at GB work six on, two off, so actual weekends don’t happen a lot. Neither do holidays. Right now Jack and Mari are on second watch, eight a.m. to four thirty, the closest you can get to a normal nine-to-five workday. It’s their first pick every year in the shift lottery.
    â€œThink Sarge’ll let us back on second watch this year?” Mari asks as they’re clocking out on Friday. Jack knows she worked nights when he was in the hospital. He’s guessing she’s probably not anxious to do it again.
    He shrugs. Leo isn’t exactly thrilled with the pair of them at the moment. “Maybe. Been three years in a row, though.” The last time they switched was when Gordy Punch broke his leg and they got shuffled to third watch, the bitch shift. Mari complained and complained but Jack secretly loved it, the quiet early morning hours, watching the sun come up on his drive home. He had Mari to himself on their off-days too, when sticking to their busted sleep schedules meant they were the only ones in the world awake. They used to watch late-night TV together over the phone sometimes, hers on mute so the baby and Andre could sleep, Jack supplying the dialogue. Infomercials, mostly. Jack owns a slap-chop now. Mari has a George Foreman Grill and a Thigh Master.
    â€œOur number might finally be up,” he tells her now, heading into the locker room. Mari harrumphs.
    Back in his street clothes, Jack stalls in the doorway of the locker room a moment, debating. He knows Mari’s driving straight home to Sone tonight. They said their goodbyes in the hallway.
    â€œYou coming?” Zales asks him, jerking his thumb toward the parking lot.
    Jack makes a decision.