The Bridge: A Novel

by Solomon Jones

  “I ain’t never liked that li’l piss tail girl anyway,” she said.

  “Why not?”

  “She one o’ them sneaky heifers. Always up in some nigga face. And all the boys I ever seen her with was drug …

  Lily’s voice drifted off. Darnell stood quietly, waiting for her to return to the moment. When she did, it was as if something clicked.

  “I wouldn’t be surprised if Tyreeka know where Kenya at,” she said.

  “Why you say that?”

  “Didn’t you say Kenya was with her last night?”

  “Yeah,” Darnell said. “But when I knocked on her mother door this mornin’, ain’t nobody answer.”

  “Well, I’m goin’ down there now,” Lily said, hurrying toward the door and grabbing Janay’s hand as Darnell followed close behind. “And I betcha a fat man that when I do, I’ll find Kenya.”

  Sonny was on 1-76, driving toward the airport in Dot’s car. He was traveling at the posted speed limit of fifty, watching as other cars flew past him.

  Sonny was in no hurry. He had already made contact with his Dominican connection—a man whose North Philadelphia drug corners paid for the private, guarded villas he’d built outside San Juan.

  The Dominican had made arrangements for Sonny to stay at one of them once he reached Puerto Rico. It was a favor Sonny had earned through their decades-long business relationship.

  But Sonny hated asking favors. And soon, he would no longer need to do so. With the money he’d taken from Judy, and the money he would have electronically transferred from his account, he could buy a private slice of the island. There would be women, young and nubile, who would bow to his every whim, and men whose daily chore would be to arrange his latest fantasy.

  That’s the way it would have worked if Sonny had planned to follow through. But he didn’t, because he’d hurt cops while trying to escape, and they wouldn’t rest until they found him. That reality changed everything.

  Now, he only wanted to use the Dominican’s influence to get him into San Juan. He would stay there for just a day, then decide upon a final destination and leave, telling no one.

  Sonny knew that staying longer was not an option, because it would give the Dominican the opportunity to set him up. Sonny, after all, was in a position of weakness. The police were looking for him, his family was pointing fingers, and he had no backup to speak of. Regardless of their long-term business relationship, the Dominican, like any good hustler, would be loath not to take advantage of Sonny’s vulnerability.

  But Sonny wasn’t going to give the Dominican or anyone else the chance to stick him. At least that’s what he believed before he saw the flashing lights behind him.

  Sonny looked in the rearview mirror and saw the patrol car moving closer. As he watched the car’s dome lights swirl brightly against the pale expanse of morning sky, his mind began to race.

  He had just passed the previous exit—Spring Garden—so he couldn’t try to bolt from the expressway into the maze of West Philadelphia’s streets. He couldn’t turn around because a concrete barrier separated the northbound and southbound lanes. All Sonny could do was hope.

  And at that moment, Sonny’s hope was that the cop was trying to pass him. When Sonny switched from the middle to the far-right lane to give the cop the chance to do so, the cop switched lanes, too.

  His palms began to sweat, causing his hands to slide against the steering wheel. He considered flooring it, but a chase on the expressway was not like a chase on the streets. There were only a few exits, and they could easily be blocked.

  After a moment’s pause, Sonny pulled onto the shoulder of the road. He did so in the hope that Dot hadn’t given his description to police, and that this was just a routine stop. If it was, he knew that he could take care of the cop.

  Sonny tapped the brakes and rolled to a halt. The police car pulled in behind him. When the cop got out, he unsnapped his holster and walked toward Sonny’s car.

  The gesture was ominous. Drivers who saw it slowed as they rode past, craning their necks to look inside the vehicle the cop was approaching.

  Sonny ignored them. Instead, he watched the cop in the rearview mirror and removed his hands from the steering wheel. He knew that backup would arrive soon, which meant that he didn’t have much time.

  Grabbing the backpack, Sonny flung open the passenger door and plunged out of the car.

  “Stop!” the officer shouted, drawing his gun and aiming at the spot where he believed Sonny to be.

  Sonny rolled onto the ground and crawled on his belly, moving toward the back of the car. For a split second, everything around him was still. Then the officer opened fire, and the air was filled with the sound of flying bullets.

  Suddenly, the cars that had slowed to watch the roadside drama were darting away as their drivers raced to avoid the onslaught.

  Bullets punctured Dot’s car, embedded themselves in the asphalt, whizzed past Sonny’s ears. Sonny, still flat on his stomach, folded his arms in front of his head. Then he rolled beneath the car, pulling the backpack with him.

  The officer stopped shooting and began to walk along the rear of the car. Sonny could hear the fall of his feet as he rounded the passenger side and stopped at the back door.

  Sonny looked out from beneath the car at the cop’s boots, which were just inches from his face. He could tell, even as the cop stood still, that his eyes were surveying the space around him, looking for Sonny.

  Just as the cop started to bend to look under the car, Sonny reached out with one hand and pulled the cop’s feet from under him. The cop fell hard, dropping his gun as his head bounced against the ground. Sonny rolled out from beneath the car. The cop tried to rise to his feet. Sonny jumped onto his chest, grabbed his head with both hands, and banged it against the ground. Blood spattered. The cop was still.

  Sonny jumped in the car and peeled away, the spinning wheels spraying the cop’s body with roadside gravel and dirt.

  As he bore left at the fork in the highway, he looked in the mirror and saw the cop’s backup arriving at the scene. Sonny pulled off at the next exit, Twenty-third Street, drove a half block to Twenty-second, turned right, and pulled into an open-air parking lot near a small street called Cherry.

  Swinging the backpack onto his shoulder, Sonny walked out of the lot and cut down a side street toward the river. A few minutes later, when cop cars came flying into the area, Sonny disappeared into the high weeds along the bank of the Schuylkill River.

  By the time they found Dot’s car parked hard against the gate, with its lights on and its engine running, Sonny was gone.

  Dot’s door was ajar when Lynch arrived with Wilson and Daneen.

  She was sitting in the middle of the floor, crying softly, chin on her chest, shoulders sagging under what appeared to be the weight of the world.

  Her television was on, and the slapstick music of the Saturday morning cartoons sharply contrasted with the room’s somber mood.

  “Are you Dorothea Jones?” Lynch asked as he pushed open the door.

  Dot looked up and saw Lynch—a man she vaguely remembered from the Bridge—walking into her apartment with a female detective and another woman.

  Dot’s expression was blank, just like her heart. She had poured out so much of it since Sonny’s tumultuous departure that she wasn’t sure there was anything left.

  “They call me Dot,” she said, wiping her tears with the back of her hand. “Not Dorothea.”

  “Okay, Dot,” Lynch said, ignoring her apparent distress. “I’m going to keep this simple. We know you made the call about Sonny, but we need a little more. We need to know where he went.”

  Dot looked from Lynch to Wilson to Daneen. Their eyes were accusing.

  “I don’t know where he went,” she said. “I told them everything I knew when I called 9-1-1.”

  Wilson, who had been standing by the door, closed it and walked to where Dot was sitting.

  “Well, that’s not enough,” she said.
r />   “Too bad,” Dot said, rolling her eyes at the detective.

  Wilson was inclined to snatch Dot to her feet and shake the answers loose. But then she saw something familiar in Dot’s face. It was defeat, and heartbreak, and betrayal—the kind of all-consuming pain that a woman can only get from a man.

  She tried to play on that.

  “Sonny hurts people,” Wilson said sympathetically. “But I don’t have to tell you that, do I?”

  She paused to give Dot a chance to respond. She didn’t, so Wilson pressed on.

  “He’s still hurting people,” she said. “On our way over here, there was a radio call for an assist. A highway patrolman who spotted Sonny driving your car on the expressway stopped him. Shots were fired. But before backup got there, Sonny bashed the man’s head in and disappeared.”

  “So what you want me to do?” Dot asked, clearly agitated. “He took my car—punched me in my face and took it. I don’t know where he goin’, but wherever it is, I hope to God he stay there.”

  Wilson looked down at her and saw purple marks around her neck. She leaned in for a closer look.

  “Did he do that to you, too?” she asked, pointing to the bruises.

  “He might as well be the one who done it,” Dot said. “It wouldn’t have happened if it wasn’t for him.”

  She turned away from Wilson, and the light from the television reflected against a shining welt near her right eye.

  “Whole lot o’ things would be different if it wasn’t for him,” she said, her eyes as far away as her voice.

  “So why are you protecting him?” Lynch asked.

  Dot laughed. It was a bitter sound. “Is that what you think?” she asked in disbelief. “Look at my face, man. Look at it and tell me why the hell I would be protectin’ Sonny.”

  “’Cause you fuckin’ him, that’s why!” Daneen shouted angrily.

  “Wait a minute,” Lynch said, jumping in.

  “No, I’m not waitin’,” Daneen snapped. “I been ridin’ around with y’all all day tryin’ to find my daughter. Sonny know where she at, Dot know where Sonny at. And she gon’ tell me somethin’, or I swear ’fo God, I’ma hurt her.”

  Dot smiled in spite of herself. She was past being afraid of pain. “Oh, it’s funny?” Daneen said, lunging at Dot as Lynch pulled her back.

  “Yeah, it’s funny. It’s funny that you sound just like your aunt.” Lynch and Wilson exchanged puzzled looks.

  “What aunt?” Lynch asked.

  “Judy,” she said. “Sonny woman.”

  “Are you saying you saw Judy this morning?” Lynch asked.

  “She came right after I called 9-1-1,” she said nervously. “I looked out and seen her, but I ain’t recognize her, ’cause she had on this cop uniform. Then when I opened the door, she came in here trippin’. Said she knew all about me and Sonny and started askin’ me all these questions. Then when I ain’t tell her what she wanted to know, she started … Well, anyway, she said somethin’ ’bout Sonny takin’ somethin’ that belonged to her.”

  “Did she say what it was?” Lynch asked.

  “No,” Dot said quietly.

  “But you’re sure she came here looking for Sonny and saying that he took something from her?” Lynch asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “And do you know where she was going when she left?”

  “No, but I—”

  “Thanks Dot,” he said. “You’ve been helpful.”

  As they walked out the door, Lynch relayed Judy’s latest known location to radio.

  After disappearing into the brush along the river, Sonny picked his way through the man-size weeds, hoping to go far enough downstream to avoid the K9 units that would soon join the hunt.

  He made it as far as South Street, where he scrambled up the side of the muddy riverbank, dragging the money-filled backpack behind him.

  Had he known that he was in the very spot where a priestess had only weeks before paid homage to the river goddess Oshun during the yearly Odunde festival, perhaps he would have prayed to her.

  If not to Oshun, then to someone, because there was no way that Sonny would make it out of the city without divine intervention, especially after assaulting two police officers.

  But Sonny wasn’t one to pray. As far as he knew, the only god he needed was strapped to his hip, ready to rain fire and brimstone on anyone who got in his way. But if there was a bigger god than that, and he could help Sonny to San Juan, he would gladly accept the help.

  But as far as he was concerned, he was more deadly than he’d ever seen God or anyone else be. And at that moment, as he jogged along the South Street Bridge, mud-covered and panting, Sonny looked every bit as dangerous as he thought he was.

  His expression was fixed somewhere between madness and fear, his eyes darting nervously about him, searching for a car that would allow him to move faster. When he didn’t find it, he began to run, taking to the street and threading in and out of traffic to the tune of blaring car horns and shouted profanities.

  He ignored it all, running harder as he approached Graduate Hospital on the corner of Nineteenth and South.

  When he reached the hospital’s door, he abruptly stopped and limped into the lobby, with mud and sweat sticking to his clothes like dung. The guard—a young black man who looked uncomfortable in his blue security blazer and clip-on tie—looked up from the television behind the half-moon-shaped security desk.

  “Can I help you?”

  “I’m looking for the emergency room,” Sonny said, wincing as if he was in pain. “I had a little accident down by the South Street Bridge.”

  “So I see,” the guard said, staring at Sonny with increasing curiosity. “Go down the hall, make a left, and follow the signs. You can’t miss it.”

  “Thanks.”

  Sonny walked away, his limp even more pronounced. The guard called after him. “Yo.”

  Sonny stopped and turned around slowly.

  “You look real familiar, man,” the guard said, dragging out his words as he tried to jog his memory. “Seem like I seen you somewhere before.”

  “Probably not,” Sonny said, grabbing his knee. “Lotta people look like me, though. You probably got me confused with somebody else.”

  The guard stared at him a moment longer. “I guess you right,” he said, his eyes dropping to Sonny’s knee. “You better go ’head and get that leg looked at.”

  Sonny turned around and made the left toward the emergency room. A doctor walked past him, greeting him with an absentminded grin. A nurse hurried away from her station with a patient’s chart on a clipboard. An orderly passed by the empty nurses’ station pushing a wheeled cart filled with soiled linen.

  When the orderly turned down a nearby hallway, Sonny followed him. The man opened a locked linen closet and pushed the cart inside. Sonny slipped behind him and grabbed the door before it could close.

  The man turned around, irritated. Taking in Sonny’s disheveled look, he dismissed him as a patient.

  “The emergency room’s that way,” he said, then returned to what he was doing.

  Sonny didn’t respond. He shut the door behind him, reached into his waistband for the gun, and smacked the man on the side of his head with it.

  The man went down, blood seeping from a widening gash near his temple. Sonny reached into the linen the man was sorting, tore a strip of cloth from a sheet, and tied it around his mouth. He tore another strip and tied his hands. Then he bent down until he was just inches from his face.

  “Any clothes in here?”

  The man nodded toward a cart on the other side of the closet. Sonny looked inside and saw what he needed. He stripped quickly, stepping out of his mud-stained clothes and into a clean set of surgical scrubs.

  Sonny placed the gun in the backpack, then stood over the terrified man for half a second—long enough to frighten him into a silence they both understood he should maintain. Sonny left the room, locking the door behind him, leaving the man bleeding on the floor.r />
  Walking quickly through the halls, he followed signs to the parking garage, took the elevator down to the lower level, walked to the darkest corner, and began trying car doors. Within moments, he was inside a black Maxima.

  Breaking the steering column, he reached down and tried to hot-wire the car. There was a spark, and nothing else. Sonny looked at the display to see if the engine or battery indicators were lit. They weren’t, so he felt along the bottom of the dashboard, looking for a kill switch. When he didn’t find one, he tried the wires again. This time, the engine cranked.

  Sonny shot out of the parking space and whipped the car through the underground lot, following signs to the exit. When he found it, the crossbar was down. Sonny considered ramming through, but decided against it, and stopped at the cashier’s booth.

  A bored-looking woman in her midthirties sat twisting a single braid of hair around her thick, brown finger. When she heard the car pull up, she held out her hand without looking at Sonny. He rolled down the window, reached into his bag and offered a twenty-dollar bill.

  “I lost my ticket, so I’m not sure how long I been here,” he said, thrusting the money into her hand. “But I guess this should cover it.”

  The woman started to respond, but fell silent when she glanced at him. From his face, her eyes made their way along the driver’s side door, to the baby’s car seat in the back, and then back to Sonny.

  She had worked in the hospital parking lot for more than a year. She knew who owned the car, and it wasn’t Sonny. When the reality of it struck her, she was suddenly afraid.

  “1-1 might be able to see what time you checked in if you give me your plate number,” she said nervously. “Might save you a couple dollars.”

  “You don’t have to do that.”

  “It’s all right,” she said quickly. “Just give me a second.”

  As she scrambled for a pencil with shaking hands, the phone in her booth rang. She answered, and as she listened to the guard at the front desk tell her that a wanted man was loose in the building—a man he’d seen on the news that very morning—the blood rushed from her face.