The Bridge

by Solomon Jones

  No one could hide in such a place. Not even Sonny. But while Lynch knew that there was no love lost between Sonny and his neighbors, he also knew that very few of them would talk. Lynch had grown from the concrete, too, and he remembered the rules as well as they did.

  He was cursing those rules when an alert tone from the radio broke the silence between him and Wilson. He reached down to adjust the volume just as the dispatcher uttered the name he had been waiting to hear.

  “Flash information on Sonny Williams, black male, fifty-two years, wanted for an assault on a police officer within the last five minutes. Williams is six-foot-two, dark-complexioned, with brown eyes, black hair, and a mustache. He’s wearing a white, short-sleeved shirt, blue jeans, and black sandals. He was last seen on the roof of the East Bridge Housing Project. He made his escape on foot. Direction unknown. Use caution. This male should be considered armed and dangerous. This is KGF-587. The correct time is 8:10 A.M.”

  Lynch flipped on the car’s lights and punched the accelerator to the floor.

  Wilson grabbed the radio and screamed into the handset. “Dan 25, we’re en route, coming north on Eleventh from Spring Garden.”

  “Six-A,” the sergeant said over the radio. “I’m on the roof at this location. I’ve got a neighbor saying she saw that male go out the back of the building heading toward Eleventh Street.”

  After that, dozens of voices exploded over the radio, and it was difficult to understand any of them.

  “Dan 25, we’re on location,” Wilson said, adding her voice to the commotion as Lynch flew past Poplar Street and slowed to a stop at the rear of Judy’s building.

  They were cruising slowly, each of them looking out their respective windows, watching for movement. Lynch didn’t see anything, but Wilson heard a rustling at the rear of an abandoned car they’d just passed.

  She tapped her partner and pointed to the sound, then pulled her gun and leveled it out the window. She had never fired her weapon in the line of duty before, and the thought of it caused her palms to sweat. The gun felt slippery in her hands, so she squeezed the butt and hoped she wouldn’t drop it.

  Her breath began to come faster as Lynch stopped the car. Both of them got out, pointing their guns at a pile of trash in back of the abandoned car.

  There was a sudden movement. Someone stood up and ran toward them. Wilson tightened her finger on the trigger. It was almost too late by the time Lynch realized what was happening.

  “Stop!” he said sharply.

  Daneen pulled up short as she saw the guns pointed in her direction. Wilson let out a heavy sigh as she lowered her gun to her side. All of them looked at each other and tried not to think of what could have been.

  Daneen was the first to speak.

  “Where y’all been?” she said, feigning calm as she reached for the door handle. “I been waitin’ for twenty minutes. Anything coulda happened to Kenya while y’all got me out here wastin’ time. I ain’t—”

  “Shut up, Daneen,” Lynch said, reaching for his car door. “I probably care more about Kenya than you do, and I hardly know her.”

  Daneen got in the car and closed the door. “You don’t know me either, Kevin,” she said quietly. “Not anymore.”

  As they got into the car, Lynch and Daneen locked eyes as Wilson watched them both. When Lynch’s glance turned into a stare, and Daneen turned away red-faced, he quickly dropped his eyes to the floor. For a moment, nothing moved except their thoughts.

  Then something flew toward the curb, ahead and to their left. They swung around to see what it was, and a green Mustang darted out in front of them, its tires screaming against the asphalt.

  Lynch gripped the steering wheel tightly. Then he pounded the pedal into the floor.

  And with that, the chase began.

  Sonny looked in his rearview mirror at the blue Chrysler and instinctively reached for the bag of money he had taken from the roof. Nothing mattered more at that moment than the money. Nothing, that is, except escaping.

  When he looked up from the bag and saw a police car screeching to a halt in front of him, Sonny swerved and skidded, slamming against a parked car. Then he spun the steering wheel furiously, the tires of the Mustang kicking up white smoke as he drove north on Eleventh Street.

  He was going ninety miles per hour as he passed through a neighborhood called Yorktown, with its neat homes and striped awnings welcoming him into its midst. When he looked back again, the Chrysler was closing fast, flying through the residential streets with abandon.

  Sonny didn’t know his pursuer, but he was going to test him. Because catching Sonny would cost at least one life. And Sonny didn’t care to whom that life belonged.

  He spun the wheel suddenly, turning right on Oxford and plunging head-on into the street’s one-way traffic. He dodged one car, then clipped another, causing it to spin out of control. The Chrysler didn’t stop, but stayed close behind Sonny, plunging in and out of the traffic like a needle threading a seam.

  At Tenth, Sonny turned left, barely avoiding an oncoming police car. When he looked back again, the Chrysler was upon him, banging against his bumper, pushing him toward the parked cars along the side of the street in an effort to make him stop.

  Sonny didn’t plan to stop. He found a space between the parked cars, jerked the steering wheel, and took to the sidewalk, skidding to avoid a child on a bike as he approached Montgomery Avenue. He made a hard left there, slammed the accelerator to the floor, and entered yet another of Philadelphia’s one-way streets.

  He looked in his rearview mirror again. The Chrysler was losing ground. He tore his gaze away from the mirror and peered through the windshield. There was a building to his right—Temple University’s police station. He raced past it and onto the dormant campus.

  As he approached Broad Street, a police car skidded to a halt one block ahead of him, blocking Montgomery Avenue. Sonny had a split second to react. He turned to avoid the car and zigzagged through the streets of Temple’s campus. Then he raced through a student parking lot and crossed Diamond Street, blazing past the rear of a large church on the corner. There, he turned right, dodging Susquehanna Avenue’s oncoming traffic before disappearing into a maze of tiny one-way streets.

  When he looked into his rearview mirror again, the blue Chrysler was gone.

  In a few minutes, Sonny would be, too.

  “Six Command,” the captain said over J band—police radio’s main frequency. “Break off the pursuit. I repeat, break it off.”

  A dispatcher repeated the command, and the wailing sirens that had filled the air just moments before petered out and fell silent. In their absence, there was a strange calm, the kind of quiet that rushes into a space that has just played host to devastation.

  The streets of North Philadelphia were accustomed to such silences. They followed every tragedy the neighborhood hosted—from the Columbia Avenue riots to the Ridge Avenue gang wars.

  The chase that had just spilled from Central to North Central Division, with Twenty-sixth District officers joining in from their Girard Avenue headquarters, was devastating. The utter confusion and spotty communication between the officers had made a bad situation worse.

  Two Sixth District officers called into radio to say that they were “involved,” meaning that they had been in auto accidents. At least one child had been injured trying to avoid the speeding cars, and was on her way to Temple Hospital. Sonny had sideswiped two cars and caused two more accidents as drivers had tried to avoid him. A fire engine and a rescue vehicle were on the scene of one of the accidents, prying a man from his car.

  Someone had to answer for all of that. And Lynch knew who that someone would be.

  “Six Command to Dan 25, meet me at Broad and Cecil B. Moore,” the captain said over the radio.

  “Dan 25, okay,” Wilson said into the handset before turning to Lynch. “You know he’s gonna tear you a new one, right?”

  “Somebody need to,” Daneen said from the backseat.

/>   Lynch clenched his teeth and ignored Daneen. Then he drove down Montgomery from Thirteenth—the spot where he’d lost Sonny—and hit Broad Street. Before he even got there, he could see the captain’s face burning crimson against his starched white shirt.

  Lynch parked his car, then got out and walked over to Captain Silas Johnson, the commanding officer of the Sixth District.

  “You wanna tell me what the hell just happened here?” the captain said.

  “We were just about to take our complainant back to Central, and—”

  The captain walked over to Lynch’s car and looked inside.

  “You had a civilian in your vehicle during a pursuit?” he asked incredulously.

  “That’s the complainant, sir,” Lynch said as he walked over to stand beside the captain. “Her name’s Daneen Brown. She called me this morning to tell me her daughter was missing. I thought it would just be a matter of finding the child. But it turned out to be a little more than that.”

  “So you know this complainant.”

  “You could say that.”

  “I don’t want to hear that ‘you could say that’ bullshit. Do you know her or not?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Are you involved?” the captain asked, allowing the question to linger long enough to make Lynch feel uncomfortable.

  “No, sir.”

  “And who’s this?” the captain said, nodding toward Wilson.

  “Detective Roxanne Wilson, sir,” she said, getting out of the car. “From Juvenile Aid. Lynch called me this morning to help him out on this.”

  “I see,” the captain said, staring at Lynch, who returned the glare for a few seconds before looking away.

  “Where’s the child now?” the captain asked him.

  “We don’t know yet, sir. But we’re holding her aunt back at Central. The suspect in the pursuit was the aunt’s boyfriend, Sonny Williams. We have reason to believe that Williams knows where the girl is.”

  “And what reason might that be?”

  “The aunt and a neighbor said he was molesting her.”

  The captain mulled the answer for a few seconds, then pulled Lynch aside, leading him away from his car. Daneen and Wilson looked on for a moment, then turned to watch a news van fly past them.

  The captain shook his head and turned to Lynch.

  “You know, you were going to get your lieutenant’s bar next month,” he said, turning around to watch as the news van disappeared on Oxford Street on its way to the accident scene.

  “Were?” Lynch said, his face etched in confusion.

  The captain paused.

  “You’re the best detective in Central,” he said. “And I don’t want to lose you. But what happens to you is out of my hands now, especially if the guy they’re cutting out of that car on Oxford Street doesn’t make it.”

  “I don’t understand, sir.”

  “I guess you didn’t hear with all the confusion of the chase,” the captain said, searching Lynch’s eyes for comprehension.

  “Hear what?”

  “It’s Judge Baylor in the accident. He was on his way home when your suspect hit his car and it flipped. Rescue’s been on the scene for about ten minutes now. They said it looks like his skull is fractured. He might not make it.”

  Lynch said nothing. But his mind raced as he digested what it would mean if Judge John Baylor were to die because of his decision to chase Sonny.

  Baylor—who’d escaped his hardscrabble upbringing in the Crispus Attucks housing project with a thirst for education that had led him to law school—was a man whose influence went well beyond the bench.

  In the midst of the drug wars that erupted in the late eighties, Baylor trod where even the police dared not to. When gunshots split the night air and dead bodies greeted morning, Baylor stood on corners and showed manhood to gun-toting adolescents by convincing them to lay down their arms.

  When Charmaine and her cousin were shot to death by June on the eve of her testimony at his murder trial, it was Baylor who consoled her family and raised money to pay for proper burials.

  Because of his rare combination of compassion and strength, entire blocks fell silent when his powder-blue Mercedes rounded the corner. When he emerged from the car, the distinctive white Afro that topped his diminutive frame conveyed wisdom even before he spoke. And when he fixed people in his gaze, the coal-black, silver-ringed eyes that peered out from mahogany skin were captivating.

  John Baylor had gained with strength of character what legions of drug dealers had tried to gain with bullets. He’d gained respect. Not just in the black community, but everywhere.

  For conservatives, his rise to the bench was proof that racism did not exist. For liberals, his commitment to equal justice provided hope for change from within the system. And for the poverty-stricken blacks who’d watched him escape the streets and then come back to tame them, he was simply a hero.

  Baylor had been planning to run for district attorney as an independent candidate in the upcoming general election. He was just about ready to resign from the bench, announce his candidacy, and secure endorsements. And with the fund-raising ability of some of his key supporters, he was expected to win easily.

  But none of that mattered now, because Baylor wasn’t going to make it through the night. The judge’s blood and the dashed hopes of an entire community would be on Lynch’s hands.

  As he got into his car and peeled away from the corner with Daneen and Wilson in tow, Lynch knew that the only way to make the impending furor die quickly was to find the man who was really responsible for what had happened to Baylor.

  Lynch had to find Sonny Williams.

  The news van arrived at the accident scene and parked in the midst of neighbors who’d been drawn out of their homes by the loud crash and screaming sirens.

  When Jim Wright stepped out of the van with his receding gray hair and weathered, leathery skin, he knew that it was bad, because no one saw him—a newsman who’d spent the last fifteen years on the air. They only saw the accident and the firefighters working feverishly to free the bleeding victim from the wreck.

  Wright loosened his tie as his cameraman arranged the apparatus they would need to report live from the accident scene. Then Wright removed a notepad from his shirt pocket and reviewed what he’d written on the way.

  Because he’d spent the morning monitoring his police scanner and speaking with department sources, he knew the chase that had critically injured the judge was all about a suspect who’d assaulted a police officer.

  He also knew that the suspect was wanted for questioning in connection with the disappearance of a little girl from the East Bridge Housing Project. Beyond that, he knew nothing. But that was easily remedied.

  Wright walked slowly to the edge of the crowd, scanning faces that were fixed in the slack-jawed expression of shock that people wear when viewing death.

  About twenty feet from Wright, a woman of about thirty was speaking to an officer from the department’s Accident Investigation Division.

  As the woman explained with animated hand gestures how the accident had happened, the officer took copious notes. Wright moved close enough to hear snatches of the conversation, and as she spoke, he took a few notes of his own.

  “Blue unmarked police car … chasing this green Mustang … flying through here … wrong way … hit the car … kept going.”

  The officer asked the woman if the police car had stopped.

  “No,” she said.

  The officer thanked her and said he’d be in touch.

  As the AID officer walked away, Wright pulled out a cell phone, called a police department source, and asked him to run the tag of the wrecked car.

  “Are you sure?” he said into the phone when he received the owner’s name. “And neither the car nor the tag has been reported stolen, right? Okay, thanks.”

  Wright disconnected the call and moved through the crowd until he was standing next to the woman who’d witnessed the accident.
>
  “Excuse me, miss,” Wright said. “Would it be okay if I interviewed you on camera about what you saw here?”

  She looked at Wright, and then at the camera. She shook her head no. And then, without a word, she resumed staring at the car.

  Wright followed her gaze, and for the first time, looked hard at the twisted, powder-blue Mercedes Benz and the bloodied brown face of the man staring out from its shattered windshield. Like the young woman, Wright was at once repulsed and fascinated by the crumpled wreck. He stood for a moment in stunned silence, and decided, in a rare fit of humanity, not to press the woman for an interview.

  As the firefighters worked to split open the roof of the car, Wright turned to his cameraman and nodded. The cameraman hoisted the camera onto his shoulder and Wright worked himself into a space that would allow the wreck to be seen on camera.

  There was a countdown, then an intro, and then they were live.

  “This is Jim Wright, reporting live from Eleventh and Oxford Streets, in the Yorktown section of North Philadelphia, where a police pursuit has ended in tragedy. A car apparently registered to highly respected Common Pleas Court Judge John Baylor—the man widely regarded as Philadelphia’s next district attorney—has been involved in a serious accident. As you can see here around me, neighbors are stunned by what has happened here, and an entire city will most probably follow suit.”

  Wright stood aside as the cameraman zoomed in. “Behind me, firefighters are working to free a man who appears to be the judge.”

  Wright pressed against his earpiece as the anchor asked him a question.

  “Well, Dick, details are sketchy, but the information we have is that the chase involved a suspect who was wanted for investigation in connection with a missing nine-year-old girl at the East Bridge Housing Project in North Philadelphia. When police approached him, he assaulted an officer and fled. There was a high-speed chase, resulting in several accidents, including this one, which has apparently seriously injured one of the most influential jurists this city has seen in a generation. The suspect is still at large, and police aren’t releasing the identity of the missing child.