Free The Bridge by Solomon Jones

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.
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    â€œSix 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.

    â€œSix Command to Dan 25, meet me at Broad and Cecil B. Moore,” the captain said over the radio.
    â€œDan 25, okay,” Wilson said into the handset before turning to Lynch. “You know he’s gonna tear you a new one, right?”
    â€œSomebody 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.
    â€œYou wanna tell me what the hell just happened here?” the captain said.
    â€œWe were just about to take our complainant back to Central, and—”
    The captain walked over to Lynch’s car and looked inside.
    â€œYou had a civilian in your vehicle during a pursuit?” he asked incredulously.
    â€œThat’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.”
    â€œSo you know this complainant.”
    â€œYou could say that.”
    â€œI don’t want to hear that ‘you could say that’ bullshit. Do you know her or not?”
    â€œYes, sir.”
    â€œAre you involved?” the captain asked, allowing the question to linger long enough to make Lynch feel uncomfortable.
    â€œNo, sir.”
    â€œAnd who’s this?” the captain said, nodding toward Wilson.
    â€œDetective Roxanne Wilson, sir,” she said, getting out of the car.
“From Juvenile Aid. Lynch called me this morning to help him out on this.”
    â€œI see,” the captain said, staring at Lynch, who returned the glare for