Abducted

by Brian Pinkerton

  After Water Tower Place, Anita decided to cross Michigan Avenue to hit the stores on the west side of the street and then head south back to the hotel. Along the way, she hoped to find a small, unromantic restaurant for dinner for one.

  As Anita stood on the corner among a growing throng of stopped pedestrians, waiting for the light to change, a city bus pulled into view. The doors hissed open, a line of people climbed out, and then a line of people climbed aboard. The doors slapped shut, and the bus loudly lurched forward.

  Anita saw the succession of faces in the bus windows roll past her. For a moment, her eyes locked with the sad eyes of a young passenger staring out. A frozen image, like a snapshot, then he was gone.

  A little boy, maybe four years old.

  A little boy with an uncanny resemblance to Tim.

  X

  For a moment, the city of Chicago disappeared. All sights, all sounds left her senses, leaving only the lasting image of the little boy with Tim’s face staring out the bus window.

  It stole her breath away.

  Gradually, traffic noise returned, pedestrians swirled around her, the high-rises and blue sky reappeared. She saw the rear of the bus as it hurtled north on Michigan Avenue. The boy was inside.

  Could it be Tim?

  All logic said no. But the boy’s sad eyes burned into her mind. She knew those eyes.

  Not just the eyes—but the squat little nose, the thin lips, the chin, the straight-as-can-be mop of blond hair…

  Anita knew she had to act fast if she was going to get another look. The bus moved deeper into the congested rush hour traffic. What should I do? she asked herself, followed by the answer.

  Go.

  Anita started running. She headed north after the bus, advancing to the next block. People were in her way everywhere, and she had to find openings, snake her way through them. “Excuse me, excuse me, excuse me!” she shouted. Some of them pulled away, widening a path for her. Others didn’t. She knocked into elbows, shopping bags. More people began to take notice, turning and stopping and staring. They became an irrelevant blur.

  Up ahead, she saw the bus brake for a red light. Anita weaved her way toward it, eyes glued on the traffic signal.

  Don’t change, don’t change.

  As she reached the rear of the bus, the light changed.

  In a roar, the bus heaved forward, and Anita felt a blast of hot exhaust. She stepped into the street. She continued her chase, running alongside the curb.

  “Lady, move!” hollered a bike messenger, draped in padding and reflectors. He zipped around her.

  A car horn blasted so close that she nearly jumped out of her skin.

  The bus was more than a block away now, and her chances of catching up were remote. She was panting, choking on the traffic fumes.

  She saw a taxi slide past her. Immediately she waved and started to chase…but then caught a glimpse of a head in the back seat.

  Anita whirled. She saw another cab approaching, three cars back. She began running south, against the traffic, toward it.

  She caught the cab and grabbed the back door handle, but stopped short of scrambling inside when she realized there was a hunched old man with a cane in the back.

  “Damn!” she cursed. She immediately reexamined the Michigan Avenue traffic.

  Why are all the cabs going in the other direction?

  But then a yellow taxi turned onto Michigan Avenue heading her way. And it appeared empty. About ten yards away she saw a businessman in a silver suit swiftly approach it.

  Anita screamed and waved for the taxi with such hysteria that the businessman, frightened, stopped in his tracks.

  “I’m sorry, it’s an emergency,” she said as she snatched it away from him. She yanked open the door and threw herself into the back seat.

  “Follow that bus!”

  “Bus?”

  Anita tried to catch her breath, coughing between words. “Up ahead…two blocks ahead…you gotta follow that bus, wherever it goes. Please!”

  She looked at the driver: Middle Eastern, perfectly relaxed, sunk in his seat, in no mood to raise his blood pressure. The drone of National Public Radio played at a near-subliminal volume. His name, Raoul, and ID were plastered on the back of his seat.

  He didn’t seem to understand the urgency, so she went into hyperdrive.

  “Raoul—please, please, please—my little boy is on that bus!”

  Without changing his placid demeanor, Raoul pressed hard on the accelerator and the cab shot forward, forcing a walkway of pedestrians to scatter.

  “Thank you!” said Anita. The taxi sharply zigzagged around a pokey Subaru, causing a chain-reaction screech of tires, followed by a symphony of horns.

  He was her hero now. They were gaining ground.

  The taxi was six or seven cars behind the bus. Anita’s eyes remained fixed on it. She could read the route number off the back: 145. Memorize that, she told herself. 145. 145. 145…

  The bus barreled through an intersection as the traffic light turned yellow.

  “Keep going!” shouted Anita.

  Raoul swerved violently to gain a car length, tossing Anita against the side of the cab.

  The light turned red.

  Ignoring the light, the cab sped toward the intersection—then abruptly stopped, tossing Anita into the back of the front seat.

  Red light or not, there was no place to go. Traffic was already streaming across the intersection and a throng of unleashed pedestrians filled the crosswalk.

  “Shit!” said Anita

  Raoul said nothing.

  “If you catch up with that bus,” said Anita, “there’s a lot of money in it for you.” She could see his eyes in the rear view mirror. He wasn’t reacting.

  Am I crazy? she asked herself, watching the faces of normal people with normal lives pass by in front of her, all shapes and sizes and races. Have I lost my mind?

  It had been a long time since her last “episode” where she thought she saw Tim in a crowd. There had been several wild goose chases during those first few months after Tim vanished. But those sightings usually ended with quick confirmation that it was not Tim. And they were children caught out of the corner of her eye, an incomplete glimpse. Not a dead-on look at his face like this. Nothing ever this vivid, this real—

  Green.

  A few people remained in the crosswalk, but an extended horn solo chased them away. The cab accelerated forward. “Keep playing that horn,” Anita told Raoul. “I’ll tip you five dollars every time you hit the horn.”

  The next obstacle was a stopped FedEx truck, lights blinking. The cab raced forward as if it was going to slam into the rear of the truck and then darted around it at the last possible second. Watching through the windshield, Anita felt as though she was inside some kind of kinetic video game.

  Way up ahead, the bus was veering right, heading toward an underpass. “Where’s it going?” asked Anita.

  “Lake Shore Drive,” responded Raoul.

  The taxi followed into the underpass and when it emerged, Anita got a comprehensive view of Chicago at rush hour.

  Lake Shore Drive was a mess of merging traffic, a schizophrenic flow of vehicles moving at different speeds. The lanes were bordered by the party atmosphere of Oak Street Beach on the right and a handsome lineup of upscale residential high-rises on the left. Directly in front of the cab, a sea of nervous brake lights popped on and off. The bus wasn’t going very fast, but it wasn’t getting any closer, either.

  Raoul was stuck behind a woman with Tennessee plates. She was leaning into her windshield, very focused and very slow. Anita wanted to scream “Go around her!” but traffic was so tight, it really wasn’t possible.

  Or was it?

  Raoul jerked the cab right and forced an opening between two cars. Angry horns followed and Raoul clearly didn’t give a damn.

  The cab moved from one bumper-to-bumper lane to another, to another, ultimately achieving very little.

  Anita saw the
bus ahead, accelerating.

  “We can’t lose sight of the bus,” said Anita.

  The traffic started to pick up a little. Raoul darted into the next lane and rushed to the bumper of a Mercedes convertible. Anita studied the traffic patterns like a constantly shifting puzzle to be solved. “Go to the left, go around the minivan, then you can get into the center lane, I think it’s the fastest.”

  Raoul didn’t pay her any attention and followed his own gameplan. When he changed lanes, he didn’t use his signal, so she helped by waving frantically at cars to let them in. Some did; some gave her the finger.

  The traffic continued to increase speed. Anita saw that the cab was hovering near twenty miles per hour, which was progress.

  The bus moved one lane to the right, shoving its way into traffic and succeeding. No one wanted to crash-test their vehicle against the behemoth.

  “The bus—” started Anita.

  “I see it,” answered Raoul.

  Raoul swerved right into an open lane. His timing coincided with a Ford Explorer entering the same lane from the other side. The two vehicles came within inches of colliding. Horns blasted, neither vehicle would surrender the lane, and for a moment Anita was certain there would be an accident, and the bus would be lost forever…

  But then the Explorer retreated, giving the lane to Raoul.

  Raoul accelerated forward and the Explorer disappeared behind them.

  The bus moved into the farthest lane on the right.

  “He’s—” said Anita.

  “I know,” said Raoul.

  A sign ahead announced the exit: Belmont Avenue.

  The traffic slowed down again. A growing number of brake lights spread across the lanes.

  “Go right, go right,” said Anita.

  Raoul and Anita studied the lane for the precise moment to make a move.

  “Now!” screamed Anita.

  The cab shot right and tires screeched all over the place. They were in the same lane as the bus now, heading toward the offramp to Belmont Avenue.

  The traffic slowed, slowed, stopped. Apparently, half of Lake Shore Drive wanted to exit here.

  Anita could deal with the cab not moving, as long as the bus wasn’t moving either. Waves of summer heat rolled in through the windows. Anita could hear car radios blending in the air, hip hop layered with rock layered with…was that the Little River Band?

  After five minutes of excruciating crawling and braking, Anita saw the traffic light that controlled the spill of vehicles onto Belmont. She watched intensely as it turned yellow-red-green, yellow-red-green, admitting about ten cars at a time.

  The bus advanced to the front of the line. There was no doubt that it would make the next light.

  But would the cab?

  For a moment, stopped and going nowhere, Anita considered jumping out of the cab, running up the ramp of traffic, and catching the bus, hammering her fists on its doors.

  The light turned green. The bus made an arching turn left onto Belmont, and she got a good look at its absurdly long length, like two normal buses merged into one.

  The cab advanced with the traffic flow toward Belmont.

  Stay green, stay green, stay green, she prayed.

  The cab got close, very close, and when the light turned yellow, it really didn’t matter because they were reaching the intersection…

  But then the BMW in front of them dutifully stopped. At a fucking yellow light!

  Red now.

  Anita screamed in aggravation.

  The bus disappeared under Lake Shore Drive, heading west. Going, going, gone.

  And, of course, the light took forever to change.

  When the taxi finally headed west on Belmont, the bus was nowhere to be seen.

  “No, no, no,” moaned Anita.

  Traffic slowed again. Pedestrians stepped between cars.

  “We lost it,” said Anita, sinking back in her seat.

  Raoul looked nonplussed. “I know the bus route.”

  She perked up. “You do?”

  When they reached “Lake Shore Drive West”—a road that ran parallel with its namesake—Raoul turned right. They were now in an area of residential high-rises.

  The cab moved steadily, and then Anita caught a glimpse of bus number 145. “I see it up ahead!” she cried.

  The rear bus lights flickered and then the vehicle stopped. As they got closer, Anita could see the bus doors split open. Passengers climbed off, while a few waited to climb on.

  Nobody resembled Tim—he must have still been on board.

  The cab braked, four cars separating it from the bus. Anita opened her door. “I’m getting out here,” she said. “Thank you, Raoul. You are the best. I gotta go.” She left four twenties on the seat.

  Anita ran up the street alongside the curb. She saw the last passenger get onto the bus. She heard the hiss of the bus doors shutting, the growing hum of the engine.

  “STOP!” she screamed.

  Anita threw herself against the bus doors with such force that it created a loud, violent thud.

  She saw the startled face of the driver, a round Grandpa type with a salt-and-pepper mustache. He hesitated, then switched gears and paused the bus from pulling away. He was not happy, but he did open the doors. “Don’t ever do that again,” he muttered.

  “Thanks…Thank you,” said Anita, digging money out of her purse. She didn’t know how much to feed the box, so she gave it all her coins and two crumpled singles. There was no time to waste.

  “Tim?”

  Anita advanced down the long aisle, heart pounding. A sea of faces stared back at her. No one said a word. She examined them carefully.

  Where was the boy who looked like Tim?

  There were a few children, but no one resembling the person she saw in the window. When she reached the back of the bus, she turned around and headed back to the front for one more look.

  This time, she received cold stares. She knew she looked crazy, sweaty hair in her face, still breathing hard.

  “Ma’am, find a seat and sit down!” said the bus driver.

  Anita ignored him. When she was certain she had scrutinized every row, she found an empty seat and sat down.

  She wanted to cry.

  I have lost my sanity, she realized. I am hallucinating. I’m not recovering. I will never recover.

  Maybe it was her own wishful thinking playing tricks on her mind. A relapse into the desperate state she was in shortly after Tim was taken away. Maybe there was no face in that window at all.

  Next to her, a middle-aged woman with a 1960s hairstyle and fake lashes adjusted in her seat to leave more distance between them. The woman focused somewhere out the window.

  A yuppie across the aisle peered at Anita from behind The Wall Street Journal and then quickly buried his eyes back in the paper.

  In the seat in front of Anita, a young black girl in braids had turned to face her. Her large dark eyes watched in rapt attention, as if something was going to happen.

  The little girl’s mother tapped the child’s shoulder. “Amanda, honey, don’t stare. It’s not polite.”

  The girl turned around.

  Don’t stare at the crazy lady.

  Anita leaned her head back and shut her eyes.

  Back at the hotel, she continued to obsess over the feeling that Tim had been on the bus. She couldn’t focus on anything else. The sterile, bland hotel room offered no distractions and only intensified her thoughts.

  She showered. She ordered a room service hamburger and two beers. She flipped through the channels on her TV a few dozen times, watching nothing. Finally, she snapped it off.

  This is madness, she told herself. But identifying it as madness didn’t make it go away.

  The numbers continued to stick in her mind: 145.

  Where had the bus been? Where was it going?

  Anita looked at her laptop, sitting on a desk next to the TV. Well, let’s take a look.

  She plugged in and went online. Sh
e ran a search, found the web site for the Chicago Transit Authority, and navigated her way to the bus schedules.

  She found 145 and scanned its route. There was a map, and then she found an abbreviated list of stops.

  “Holy shit,” she said out loud.

  According to the web site, the bus stopped at the corner of Belmont and West Lake Shore Drive, the inner drive. She had caught up with the bus at Melrose and the inner drive.

  That meant that the bus made a stop during the time that Anita lost sight of it.

  What if the boy got off at the stop?

  Of course, that had to be it! She wasn’t imagining the boy. He did exist. But he was gone by the time she climbed on the bus.

  Anita felt renewed energy.

  Followed by the crushing realization: how am I going to find him now?

  She had two beers in her, she was feeling confident, and it suddenly all made sense: this was a job for the police. It was a child abduction, and the police would help find Tim.

  She tracked down the general number for the Chicago Police Department and quickly made the call.

  “Chicago Police Department,” a male voice answered in a plain, flat tone, as if he was saying “Chicago Pizza Kitchen.”

  “Listen, I know this is going to sound crazy,” she told the voice on the other end. “My son…My son Timothy Sherwood…was kidnapped two years ago in California…you may have heard about it, it was all over the news…his nanny took him…and she killed herself…and they thought she killed him…but today…in a bus on Michigan Avenue, number 145…I saw him in the window.”

  Despite the numerous opportunities offered in her pauses, the voice on the other end wasn’t reacting. This spurred her to continue, which was not a good thing because her story came out in an increasingly fragmented babble. She sounded ridiculous even to her own ears.

  “I need help…” said Anita. “I think I know the stop where he got off…it’s Belmont and West Lake Shore Drive…because I got on the bus after…and he wasn’t there…you see, I was in a taxi… Raoul…the driver…he…we caught up with it.”