The Bridge: A Novel

by Solomon Jones

  He looked at her, sitting just two feet away, and realized that he still hadn’t managed to get her out of his system. Though their lives had gone in completely opposite directions, they had come together again for Kenya.

  And as the two of them sat in his car, trying to work through the emotions that had always been there, Lynch fingered the scar that he still bore on top of his shaved head—a reminder of his grandmother’s disapproval of Daneen. He knew that he might never truly purge himself of her. And that, more than anything else, frightened him.

  “Kevin, I wanna ask you somethin’,” she said in a whisper.

  He looked at her and felt the lost years pulling at him, even as the thought of his wife and child lingered in the back of his mind. He looked at her, and they were both teenagers again, with a world of endless possibilities in front of them. He looked at her, and she spoke his very thoughts.

  “I need to know what it coulda been like if things was a little bit different,” she said, leaning toward him.

  He looked down at her hand, which was still holding his, and then at her lips moving toward his. The answer to her question spun through his mind like a flash of light. It was a picture of them wrapped around one another in the steamy heat of a long-ago summer. He tried to see if there was anything after that.

  Then his cell phone rang.

  Daneen jumped back. Lynch reached into his pocket for the phone, knowing that he wanted her as much as she did him.

  “Hello?” he said, answering the phone.

  The blood rushed from his face as he listened to the voice on the other end of the line.

  “I’ll be right there,” he said.

  “What is it?” Daneen asked.

  “It’s my wife,” he said, reaching over to open her door. “She’s at the hospital. I have to go.”

  As Daneen stood at the curb and watched him drive away, she knew that there was something to what they’d felt a few seconds before. She wondered if they would ever feel it again.

  The walls of the shooting gallery seemed to close in on them, even as Sonny lay next to Judy, watching the color of night play against her face.

  She’d just fallen asleep, worn-out, no doubt from the stress of two days on the run. Sonny stayed awake on pure will, because he knew that he couldn’t afford the luxury of rest.

  He got up and looked out the window, watching the streets grow thick with the chaos of nightfall in the Badlands. The number of addicts—riding through in cars and walking up to dealers and hustling to get more—seemed to grow with each passing minute. And so did Sonny’s need to get out of the house. He couldn’t stay there any longer. It just wasn’t safe.

  He slipped on the shirt and pants he’d gotten from the Dominican’s house and tucked the gun into his waistband. Then he reached down for Judy, who lay on the mattress, half dressed.

  He caressed her face, and at his touch, she brought her knees up to her chest.

  Sonny was about to shake her awake, but stopped when he heard the sound of a creaking step. He was still for the next minute. When he heard nothing else, the hairs on his neck stood up, because a heroin shooting gallery shouldn’t have been that quiet.

  He reached for Judy again. But this time, it wasn’t the sound of a step that stopped him. It was greed.

  Sonny looked at the backpack at the foot of the bed and thought of the thousands of dollars inside it. The moment he decided that he needed the money more than he needed Judy, all hell broke loose.

  A man burst through the door feetfirst, tumbling into Sonny as Judy came awake with a start. The force of the collision knocked both men against the wall, but Sonny recovered quickly. He snatched the gun from his waistband and in one smooth motion, brought it crashing down on the back of the man’s hooded head, knocking his hunting knife to the floor.

  A second hooded assailant was through the door before the first one fell, squeezing off three rounds that punched holes in the already crumbling wall. Sonny ducked. Judy dived to the floor and landed next to the first man.

  As Sonny prepared to squeeze off a round, Judy came up from the floor with the hunting knife, slicing into the flesh between the second man’s legs. He dropped his gun with a scream and fell to one knee. Sonny stood over him, kicking the gun away.

  The first one got up and tried to attack, but Sonny turned quickly and fired. Blood and bone exploded from his head as the man fell back against the wall, and was still.

  As Judy fastened her clothes, Sonny snatched the bag from the foot of the bed and dragged the one with the knife wound over to the wall, sitting him next to his dead partner.

  He aimed the gun at his head, then reached down and snatched off his hood.

  When they saw his face, both Sonny and Judy knew they’d been betrayed.

  “Who sent you?” Sonny said to one of the guards who’d escorted them from Pablo’s house.

  The man smiled through the pain of his shattered leg.

  “Nobody sent us. Our shift was over at the house. We knew you had a bag full of money, and we came to get it.”

  “So Pablo ain’t know about this?” Sonny said.

  “Pablo would kill me if he did.”

  Sonny straightened his arm.

  “I’ma save him the trouble,” he said.

  The man tried to go for a gun that was tucked in the small of his back, but he didn’t have a chance. Sonny shot him dead with such an easy brutality that, for the first time, Judy was truly afraid.

  She stood frozen until Sonny grabbed her hand, and they made their way down the steps to the front door. The heroin addicts had been evacuated prior to the robbery attempt. That’s why the house was so quiet. The owner was sitting on a stool by the door with his throat slit—a victim of the would-be robbers.

  Judy watched it all and was suddenly overcome with a fit of uncontrollable shaking. She’d seen two men die in front of her, and was standing next to a third dead man whose body was still warm.

  Sonny ignored her and looked out the front window, examining the streets and the rooftops for signs of more men. He didn’t see any, so he turned to Judy.

  “Get up against the wall,” he said as he held the gun at her temple.

  “What you doin’, Sonny? I thought—”

  “I know what you thought, Judy,” he said coldly. “But I told you I can’t love you. I never could. Now get up against the wall.”

  She backed up, looking at him with slack-jawed disbelief.

  He ripped her cotton shirt from her chest and used the cloth to tie her hands as she struggled in vain.

  When he’d finished with her hands, he tied her feet. Then he stood up, panting from the struggle.

  “Good-bye,” he said simply.

  And with that, he walked out of the house, leaving her there in the midst of death, with hurt and anger and fear and betrayal pouring out from her eyes in bitter tears.

  Sonny had no time for such feelings. He walked quickly toward the bustling drug corner of Eighth and Cambria Street, looking for a way out. When he found it, he moved slowly, waiting for the car he’d targeted to stop in traffic. It did, and Sonny reached inside the open window and held the gun at the head of a blond-haired boy whose baseball cap bore the logo of a local university.

  “Get out the car,” he said quietly.

  The boy’s three young passengers looked from Sonny to the driver. Then they looked down at the crack they’d bought two minutes before, and suddenly, the drugs didn’t seem so important.

  “I said get out the car,” Sonny said. “All o’ y’all. Right now. And take them drugs and shit with you.”

  The four of them did as they were told.

  Sonny got into their car and sped toward Germantown Avenue, leaving the students in the middle of Cambria Street, at the mercy of those who would abuse them.

  Hopefully, it would take a while for them to get to the police, Sonny thought as he zoomed toward Center City. That would give him the time he needed to get out of Philadelphia.

  But
now that Pablo’s men had tried to kill him, receiving help from the Dominican was no longer an option.

  He would have to make his escape on his own.

  Chapter Fourteen

  A few minutes after Kevin drove away, Roxanne Wilson pulled up outside the Bridge, spotted Daneen walking toward the building, and called after her.

  “Wait a minute,” she said, getting out of the car and running toward her. “I need to talk to you.”

  Daneen folded her arms in quiet defiance. She had just talked through almost twenty years of bitterness and resentment. She didn’t know if she could talk anymore.

  “Do you have a minute?” Wilson asked as she caught up to her.

  “It depends on what it’s about,” she said.

  “It’s about Kenya,” Wilson said, walking back toward the car. “Take a ride with me.”

  “A ride where?”

  “Nowhere in particular,” Wilson said, stopping. “There’s just a few things I need to go over with you.”

  Daneen hesitated.

  “Come on,” Wilson said, smiling. “It won’t take long.”

  Daneen followed the detective to her car, and the two of them got in and rode slowly through the streets Daneen had walked a thousand times in the last two days.

  “I was doing some reading a little earlier,” Wilson said as she turned the corner at Fairmount Avenue. “Seems there’s a lot to your relationship with your daughter. You want to tell me about it?”

  “Ain’t a whole lot to tell. I had a daughter. I got on drugs. They snatched her from me and gave her to Judy.”

  “That’s a real simple explanation.”

  “Well, what is it you wanna know?” Daneen said, sounding more than a little irritated.

  “Let’s start with why you got on drugs in the first place,” Wilson said, turning north on Sixteenth Street and riding through a pocket of poverty rivaled only by the projects.

  Daneen tried to figure out where to start. Unable to think of a place that would allow her to sum it up easily, she chose to start at the beginning.

  “My mom died when we was real little,” she said softly. “I was, like, five, and Darnell was seven. We ended up movin’ up here with my aunt, ’cause we ain’t really have no place else to go. I guess that’s why I made friends with Kevin, ’cause I knew what it was like for him to have to come here from someplace else.

  “By the time I was maybe thirteen, I was smokin’ weed and drinkin’ beer like everybody else. I guess I was kinda young to be doin’ all that, but it really wasn’t no thing to me. I could take it or leave it.

  “I ain’t really start havin’ a problem ’til I was in my late teens. My body had changed a lot, men started payin’ attention, and my life started gettin’ real complicated.

  “Niggas was runnin’ around sayin’ I was a hoe, sayin’ they slept with me, tryin’ to say all kind o’ shit that wasn’t true. My girlfriends started shyin’ away from me, guys was scared to talk to me, especially the ones I wanted.

  “By the time I did have sex for the first time, it was with some guy from down Eighth Street. I was like, this is it? This what y’all been sweatin’ me for? Shit hurt like hell, it lasted for, like, two minutes, plus the nigga was smellin’ like forties and cigarettes. I’m like, ’Damn, least you coulda slapped on some cologne or somethin’.’”

  Wilson cracked a smile at that. She could relate.

  “By the time crack came out, I guess ’round ’85, I had dropped out o’ high school, and I already had Kenya. Then Tyrone died.”

  “Who was Tyrone?” Wilson asked.

  “He was my boyfriend when I had Kenya.”

  “Was he her father?”

  Daneen smiled ruefully. “No,” she said, growing more comfortable with the truth. “No, he wasn’t.”

  “So where’s her father now?”

  “I’m not sure who her father is,” she said, looking out the window as they passed by the crowd of people who were gathered at Broad and Girard.

  “Well, we don’t have to talk about that now. You were telling me about the drugs.”

  Daneen skipped over all the things she’d told herself she’d forgotten. And she gave Wilson only what she could bear to say.

  “I was just kinda driftin’ after Tyrone died,” she said. “I was workin’ here and there, but mostly I wasn’t doin’ much o’ nothin’.

  “A lot o’ stuff happened, things I still can’t really talk about, but I guess the reality o’ my life just came down on me all at once. But that wasn’t why I started smokin’.

  “At first, it was just, like, somethin’ to do. Judy was sellin’ it, so I tried it. Course I had to sneak and do it. But when I did, I ain’t see what the big deal was. So I tried it again.

  “I guess it was like the fourth time when I finally got this rush that made me feel like I was someplace else. I mean, it was like I was seein’ and hearin’ shit that wasn’t even there. I was feelin’ somethin’ inside me that I had been lookin’ for all the time. Somethin’ that was too good to be true. Turned out that it was.

  “I took Kenya with me all through my addiction, and she seen some things that she really shouldn’ta seen. I did some things I shouldn’ta done, too.”

  “Things like what?” Wilson said.

  There was a long pause as Daneen ran through a litany of offenses in her mind.

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” she said quietly, turning to look out the window again.

  Wilson didn’t press. She drove around the block, stopping in front of the family shelter on Broad Street off of Fairmount Avenue.

  “Let me jog your memory,” she said, pointing at the building. “You lived here for a while, but before that, you lived in an abandoned house. And when they found you there with Kenya, there were bruises all over her body. And that wasn’t the last time. There were two more times after that. When they finally gave Kenya to Judy, you’d been labeled as an abusive mother, and there was no way you were going to get your daughter back.”

  Wilson turned to Daneen and looked her in the eye.

  “I understand disciplining your children, Daneen. I spanked both my sons when they were coming up. But when you take a little child and beat them black-and-blue—when they’ve got bruises up and down their arms and around their neck—there’s something wrong with that.”

  Daneen sat still and said nothing, afraid to look at the detective for fear the truth would show in her eyes.

  “Tell me why you beat your daughter every time she lived with you, Daneen. What was it that made you treat her that way?”

  Daneen’s face filled with sorrow at the memory of what she’d done. She tried to think of an answer, but all the explanations sounded convoluted when she listened to them in her mind.

  “I ain’t sure,” she said as she wrung her hands nervously. “I mean, I guess it was a lot o’ things goin’ on.”

  “You keep saying that. But that’s not telling me anything. What kind of things were going on? Was it the addiction? The homelessness? Or was it something else—something deeper than that?”

  “It was me!” Daneen said, screaming as she turned to Wilson with anger etched on her face. “I ain’t want no baby tyin’ me down, holdin’ me back, and every time I looked at her I thought o’ that. That’s what you wanna hear?

  “How about this? It was my childhood. It was my mother’s fault. I ain’t never know my father. My aunt was mean. Pick one.

  “It was all that shit the therapists tell you it is when you go to rehab, and they sit there and try to pick your life apart when they don’t know nothin’ about you.

  “It was all that, okay? That’s why I beat my daughter.”

  Daneen rolled her eyes and turned slowly, retreating back into herself.

  “I don’t think it was any of that,” Wilson said as she studied Daneen’s face. “I think you regret every time you put your hands on that child. I think it still hurts you to think about it, especially now that she’s missing.”

&
nbsp; She paused. “I came down here to see if we should be looking at you as the main suspect in your daughter’s disappearance, what with your documented record of abuse. But I think now there’s something else I need to ask you—something that’s very important for us to know if we’re ever going to find your daughter.”

  Daneen turned to her and waited.

  “We need to know where her father is,” Wilson said earnestly. “For all we know, her father might have abducted her. Parents do it all the time, Daneen. And if that’s what Kenya’s father did, we need to start looking for him.”

  “Her father ain’t do that.”

  “How do you know?”

  The question threw Daneen for a loop. She hadn’t expected it. “I know ’cause he with Kenya,” she said haltingly. “He in everything she do and say. He in the way she talk. He in her smile. He in her eyes. Maybe that’s why I would get high and beat her like that. Told you that shit made me see things that wasn’t there, and when I smoked it and looked at my daughter, I would see him.”

  Daneen shivered at the pictures in her mind. And then she sighed and admitted the truth she’d always known.

  “I guess when they took her it was the right thing to do,” she said.

  “You told me a few minutes ago that you didn’t know who her father was,” Wilson said firmly. “But if you saw him in your daughter, you obviously do. Now I’m gonna take you down to Central Detectives, and I’m gonna have you make a statement. And before we leave there, I need you to tell me who Kenya’s father is. And I need you to tell me where I can find him.”

  Lynch sped north on Germantown Avenue, from the filthy ghettos of impoverished North Philadelphia to the quiet prosperity of Chestnut Hill.

  He weaved in and out of traffic, expertly navigating the narrow, two-way street, with its slippery trolley tracks and slow buses. And he did it while dodging in and out of oncoming traffic as his heart pounded in his chest.

  The Chestnut Hill Hospital nurse had told him that his wife, Jocelyn, was hemorrhaging and about to undergo surgery.

  The fear was compounded by the guilt he felt over admitting his feelings for Daneen. While his marriage wasn’t perfect, and had been in a steady decline since the loss of their baby six months before, he still belonged to Jocelyn. More important, he still wanted to.