Bang Read Online Free PDF Page A

tells the clerk. Jackson stays quiet, taking stock of the guy. White, twenty-five and five eight, five nine tops, with greasy black hair and a painful-looking breakout speckling his chin. Jack commits it all to memory in case he needs to ID the man later out of a photo array. He passed the time at the hospital that way, memorizing the features of everybody walking in and out of his room. Making up for the fact that he’d never be able to ID the shooter, maybe. Neither him nor Mari ever got a good look at the guy’s face.
    â€œThanks.” Mari takes the flimsy key ring with a plastic jingle and slips her hands into Jack’s, towing him back out toward the parking lot. Jackson bets the guy he’s pretending to be right now—a developer, maybe, one of those pseudo-macho jobs where you can wear dark jeans into work and still make bank—Jackson bets that guy wouldn’t let himself be towed.
    Jackson does nothing.
    â€œThat’s our guy, right?” Mari murmurs, tilting her face into his shoulder. A hank of her flyaway hair gets into his mouth as he nods.
    The room’s about as grimy as he expected, chipboard nightstands and a shiny coverlet patterned with a faded pastel swirl. But it’s on the second floor, and when Jackson looks out the window he sees they have a clear view of the office across the litter-strewn blacktop. “We’re in business,” he tells Mari, squinting into the sun.
    â€œI guess we wait awhile, then one of us goes down?” She sits on the bed. “Uses the vending machine in the lobby, then tries to buy? Or—” She breaks off, frowning.
    Jackson shrugs. An airtight plan for conviction it isn’t, but it’s not like they’re trying to bring down a drug kingpin here. “Sure,” he says, flipping on the TV set. “Sounds fine.” This was really a job for two of the rookies, in all honesty. He and Mari are getting a bit old for weed buys.
    â€œOkay.” Mari sighs. “You wanna do it, or should I?”
    Jackson doesn’t looks up from flipping channels. There’s a lot of weather on, some infomercials. “Don’t care.” He flops down in the grimy-looking armchair. “I can, I guess.” He hasn’t done a fake buy in a while. He tries to calculate the largest amount of pot two people can get away with needing. He could always say they were re-upping their supply. He’s torn between leaving immediately, spending as little time in this room as possible, and waiting it out so it’s less suspicious.
    â€œSeriously?” When he turns to look, Mari’s staring at him from the bed, those midnight-dark eyes incredulous. “Fine,” she says, in her crisp voice that means things are actually the opposite. Then, “You won’t even sit next to me anymore, is that the message you’re trying to communicate here?”
    That catches him off guard, both the question and how wounded she sounds as she asks it. “Do you want me to sit next to you?” he asks. He’s so surprised it almost doesn’t come out sounding mean.
    â€œI want—” Mari draws her spine up tight then collapses it back down, breasts swaying with the movement. They bunch in this bra, Jackson can see now, a line across the tops where the fabric cuts into her flesh. Perversely, he’s reminded of how they looked when she was nursing her daughter.
    â€œYou want what?” he asks, not bothering to check the irritation in his voice. This is bullshit; he’s tired of it. They were partners, sure. They were whatever the hell they used to be, and now they’re not. “Huh? You want what, Mari, just spit it out so we can—”
    â€œI want it not to be like this!” Mari explodes. “Jesus, Jack. Do you? Is this really how you want to work together?”
    Jackson had been softening, was ready to say no, of course it wasn’t, but— “Work together? How I