Excerpt from

Chapter 2: Odd Jobs

Author's note: The following incident took place in Atlanta, where I was staying for six weeks while participating in a training program for the company I worked for at the time.

One evening after class, a woman I had befriended during the training asked if I would accompany her to the hospital because she needed to have an outpatient procedure. She only had a minor problem with her foot but she didn’t want to go out alone at night.

I said, "Sure, no problem," and we jumped into a cab and went.

We arrived at the hospital in about 10 minutes. After I sat in the lobby for about an hour or so, my friend came out and said she was fine, although she had a noticeable limp. We called a cab and waited. We waited so long, we were about to call for another taxi when one finally arrived. We got in and gave the driver our destination.

He drove and drove, which seemed strange to me because it only took 10 minutes to get to the hospital in the first place. Even stranger, the interstate we needed to be on was visible in the distance. After more than 30 minutes, we were still no closer to the highway, much less to our hotel. It was obvious something was wrong.

We drove some more and the driver finally said, "I don't know where to get on the interstate. I'll only charge you whatever you paid the other taxi to get to the hospital."

I nodded to him, but I was really starting to get nervous. Something wasn't adding up. I started playing

back the beginning of the ride in my mind. He took a long time to even find the hospital and now he couldn't find the onramp. Did he have an ulterior motive? Did he steal the cab? Was he even a cab driver?   

I was suddenly jarred out of my thoughts, because the cab stopped. And it didn't stop just anywhere. We had somehow found our way onto a stretch of the interstate that was dark and under construction. It was pitch black, but I could see about 100 yards ahead because of the cab headlights. In the distance there were pieces of the interstate that looked like they would eventually connect but were still unfinished. The portion of the concrete road we were on just ended abruptly. There were no cars or people anywhere.

The driver then turned to us and said, "I just have to get some cigarettes out of the trunk."

If I was a nervous before, my fear was heading off the charts now. I kept telling myself, "Keep your head;

he's just getting cigarettes." A bigger part of me was screaming inside, "Are you nuts? You know something is wrong here." I had never felt that way before.

The driver stood in front of the trunk for about 60 seconds, but it seemed like an hour to me. I looked out the back window between the trunk lid and the deck to try to see what he was doing. I could only see a sliver of him, but I could tell he was just standing there.

I decided we needed to run, but then I remembered my friend was limping. Running just wasn't an option. Thinking I might be able to drive off with the cab, I leaned over the front seat to see if the keys were on the seat or in the ignition. The driver had taken them with him.

I turned and looked through the back window again and my panic rose as I saw him finally pull something I couldn't see from the trunk. Then, all of a sudden he closed the trunk, got back in and tossed a pack of cigarettes on the front seat. He started the engine and drove us straight to our hotel without saying a word. He never even opened those cigarettes during the silent 10-minute ride. When we arrived, adrenaline was rushing through me so powerfully, I barely used the door to get out of the cab.

I have thought about this episode many times over the years. What really happened that night? Why did he take only a minute to get to the interstate after searching for the onramp for more than half an hour? Why didn't he even open the cigarettes? I knew then and believe to this day that he had something evil in mind and that something convinced him otherwise at the last minute. It wasn't until many years later that I understood why I was spared.