Leah had slowed the movement of traffic across the river from Monroe toward West Monroe to a complete stop. She ran hard toward the sound of sirens, hearing them grow louder and louder. Just as she reached the end of the swing bridge, she spotted the Chevrolet Malibu with the four men in it. They had pulled up into the traffic jam, trying to shoulder their way ahead. The traffic had by then grown dense enough that they had come to a complete stop. Now the jam in the right lane looked at least a half mile long, and it was growing.

Leah saw the police cars coming, partly because her vantage on the swing bridge gave her a little extra height. She saw about a half dozen police cars, their lights flashing, stop on the approach to the bridge. Behind the first group of police cars, others stopped at angles to prevent civilian traffic from getting past them into the mess on the bridge.

The police officers in the first set of cars opened their doors and got out, some of them pulling on body armor over their shirts, others lifting the shotguns from their cars, and still others advancing between the cars, carrying only their sidearms.

Leah ducked low and began to make her way across the front ends of the stopped cars toward the Malibu. When a man hung out of his window and yelled something at Leah, she drew her pistol and held it muzzle-upward, took out her ID wallet with her badge in it, and held them up to show him and the other drivers nearby. The noise subsided and she advanced.

The badge and gun and the way Leah moved from car to car, sometimes squatting and other times crouching and running, had convinced the drivers near her that she was a cop. The flashing lights of the dozen or more police cars were now visible to everyone on the bridge, and most could see the armed uniformed cops advancing up the bridge between the lines of cars toward them.

When Leah was only one car length behind the Malibu and two lanes to the left, she could see the faces of the men in the car. She recognized Lee Wolf in the driver’s seat.

She stayed low and ran to the next lane, keeping in the blind spot so Wolf didn’t pick her up in his mirror or his peripheral vision. At the moment he was focused on the rearview mirror, where he could see police officers making their way up the bridge between lanes of stalled cars toward him. He appeared to be talking, giving his companions instructions for ambush-shooting the approaching police officers. Leah approached across the front of the car beside the Malibu.