The Bridge (22 page)

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Authors: Solomon Jones

BOOK: The Bridge
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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.
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.”
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.
It was Jocelyn, after all, who had dragged him, kicking and screaming, from his shell during his sophomore year at Penn. It was Jocelyn who had showed him who he was.
They'd met during an annual campus screening of black independent film. He'd come alone, and sat in the far corner of the lecture
hall, hoping to avoid those conversations that invariably came down to background.
He often found himself deflecting questions, changing subjects, hoping to hide where he'd come from. He hadn't learned to celebrate who he was because he'd spent too much of his life trying to rise above it.
That night, as the lights went down in the lecture hall, the first film—an intense short that examined the lives of Africans on a slave ship—shocked most of the audience into silence.
Lynch was silent, too. Not because he was shocked, but because he'd learned that even among his own, it was frowned upon to be too black in the Ivy League. So he never laughed too loud, or smiled too broadly. And when everyone else was silent, he went along with the crowd, holding back who he was for the benefit of the whole.
Jocelyn had no such reservations. She was high-yellow with waist-length dreadlocked hair. She wore African garb that flowed with the perpetual breeze that cooled the tree-lined campus. She laughed loud, hard, and often. And silence just wasn't her style.
She came to the screening late, made an entrance that drew stares from the bourgeois students she loathed, and sat next to Lynch in the corner. When the first short was over, and she'd observed their staid reaction to the stark realities of slavery, she shook her head sadly.
“Most of these folks come from those same people on those ships,” she said, loud enough for some of them to hear. “And yet they come to a little Ivy League university and they feel like they've arrived.”
Lynch had remained silent. He hadn't even looked at her. But from the moment she spoke, he loved her. Not romantically. That would come later. He loved her for giving voice to what he'd always felt, but never had the courage to share. He loved her because she was the only genuine person he'd encountered since moving from the Bridge to the campus.
After the screening, he mustered the courage to ask her to a coffee shop. She accepted. They talked for hours. Or rather, he talked. She just listened.
He told her about his grandmother, and how she'd raised him with harsh words and heavy sticks that forced him into manhood. He told her about the public tongue-lashings and private beatings that took that manhood away.

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