Choke: A Thriller (2 page)

Annabel is warm and cozy under the covers of her Winnie the Pooh bedspread and quilt. 

Her mother, Bonnie, is tucking her in.

“Was that you tapping at my window last night, Pooh?” Annabel asks.

“What did you say, Annabel?” her mother responds.  It’s typical of her seven-year-old to try to stall at bedtime and stay up later.  But Bonnie is tired and ready for bed herself.

“I'm Piglet,” Annabel says.

“Oh.”

“Who are you?”

“Mommy.”

“No, you're Pooh.”

“Oh.”

“Was that you scratching at my window last night, Pooh?”

“Yes.”

“No it wasn't, Mommy.”

“Oh, sorry.  I don't remember...oh, yeah, now I do.  Nighttime Mystery?”

Annabel nods.

Bonnie pauses as she gets into character.

“No, Piglet, it wasn't me,” she says in her lame attempt at imitating Winnie the Pooh.

“Pooh, are there any monsters in the Hundred Acre Wood?”

“No, there aren't any monsters,” Bonnie says.  “Look, it's just tree branches scraping your window.”

“Oh, thank you, Pooh.  I'm a small animal.  Now I can sleep.”

“Good night, Piglet.  I love you.”

“Good night, Pooh.  I love you, too.”

Bonnie kisses Annabel on the head, then goes to her daughter’s window and double-checks the locks.  It’s shut tight and secure.  Bonnie looks out through the glass to see if there are any branches nearby that could have been banging into the window, but there aren’t.

Bonnie pulls the curtains shut, kisses her daughter again, turns the light off and shuts the door.

Vincent takes a seat in the office of his therapist, Dr. Joshua Melahmed.  The space is comfortable and masculine, with overstuffed leather armchairs and lots of natural woodwork.  Degrees in psychology from Stanford and Harvard are hung on the wall.

Vincent studies his friend, mentor, and therapist of twenty years.  Dr. Melahmed is in his late sixties.  He is bald, thin, and very tan, all of which combine to set off his striking gray eyes.  He is a man who clearly has taken care of himself over the years.

Melahmed takes a seat across from Vincent, a pen and notepad in his hand.

Vincent shares with him the story of what happened to him after the Lakers game, when his car went out of control.

“What was your thought process, what was going through your mind?” Melahmed asks Vincent once he’s done telling the story.

“I felt like I was watching everything.  Detached.”

Melahmed writes something in a notepad.  He doesn't say anything, his silence prompting Vincent to continue.

“Maybe I was too preoccupied with keeping the car on the road to think about just shutting the engine off.”  Vincent thinks it might be true, but it sounded a little hollow to him as it came out of his mouth.

“So Rachel was able to think about shutting the car off because she wasn't driving?” his therapist points out.

Vincent raises his eyebrows as if to say,
Could be
.

“Do you really believe that?”

Vincent shrugs his shoulders.  He looks out the window.

“Did the mechanics find out what happened?”

“They ran some tests, but said it was inconclusive.  They said it could have been a computer malfunction, an electrical fire, lots of things.  I asked if they thought it had been tampered with, and they couldn’t say one way or the other.”

Dr. Melahmed scribbles something else in his notebook.

“How are Annabel and Bonnie?”

“They're doing great; I'm going over there later.”

“Annabel's growing up fast, I assume?”

“Yeah, next month it will be five years since the divorce,” Vincent says.  “It's amazing.  She's only seven, but she seems so incredibly grown-up.”

“And Bonnie?”

“Good.  She's got a guy.  An architect.  Sounds serious.”  He didn’t like the guy, but he knew he wasn’t objective.  The thought of another man taking his place pissed him off, yet at the same time Vincent realized he was the one responsible for the split.  He couldn’t have it both ways.

“How does that make you feel?”

“Couldn't be happier,” he lied.

“And you?  Still seeing Rachel?”

“Yeah.”

“Is it getting serious?”

“Josh, you know I said I'll never marry again.”

“A relationship can be serious without marriage, Vince.”

“You know what I meant.”

Melahmed pauses and watches Vincent.  Vincent is momentarily uncomfortable.

“We haven't been seeing eye to eye lately.  Plus, I've sort of started seeing someone else.  But I don't know...I don't want anything long-term, so I try not to give it much serious thought.”

Melahmed nods, then looks up as if a sudden thought occurred to him.

“You know, it occurs to me, how long have we known each other?”

“A long time,” Vincent says.

“I steered you through graduate school.”

“Got me my first job.  You’re Annabel's godfather.”

“You know what's odd?”

“What?”

“You never told me why you became a psychologist.”

Vincent looks momentarily stunned.

“It's true.”

“Oh, come on, you know I've always been interested in–”

“Yeah, yeah, I know all that bullshit.  You're interested in how the mind works.  What makes people tick.  Blah, blah, blah.  What I don't know, what you've never really told me, is the truth, why you really chose to do this for a living.”

Vincent feels himself start to sweat.  He thinks back to how many times he’s encouraged his own clients to open up, to share with what’s bothering them.  All this time, he’s never told Melahmed the truth.  And he sure as hell wasn’t going to start now.

“Why are you bringing this up, now?” he asks.

“I'm curious, and to be honest, a little envious.”

“What?”

“You've got it made - you timed the market perfectly.”

“What are you talking about?” Vincent says.

“You have positioned yourself in the area of peak performance, right?”

“Indeed I have.”

“Well everyone, and I mean everyone, wants to be their best.  I was just thinking that you've got it made, your practice must be incredibly lucrative, you've attracted attention from the media, you're almost as famous as some of your patients.”

“Your point?”

“Why did you specialize in peak performance?  What was it about the field that attracted you to it?  You could've gone into any branch of psychology you wanted - you were the most heavily recruited grad student I'd ever seen.”

Vincent closes his eyes for a moment, sees the nose of the car crashing into the bridge’s guardrail, the sensation of falling, then the cold of the water. 
And Kristin. 

“Vincent?”

Vincent snaps his eyes open and focuses on Melahmed.  Suddenly, he feels angry.  “But why are you asking me now?”

“Why not?”

“Because you think this all has something to do with my panic attack, my choke, when my car went ballistic?”

“Do you?”

Vincent shakes his head and looks out the window.

But he doesn’t answer the question.

A sign above a huge, modern building reads "McCardle National Ice Center."  Next to the letters are the intertwined rings signifying the building as an Olympic training facility.

Vicki Lee, dressed in warm-up clothes, is skating alone on the rink.  She moves with precision, and looks incredibly graceful even in a sweat suit.  Her silky black hair is tied into a ponytail.

Vicki gains speed as she skates the length of the rink.  She gathers herself and leaps high in the air, sending up a shower of ice as she spins in a blurred vision of grace.  She nails the triple Lutz and comes to a dramatic finish with her arms upraised toward the empty bleachers.

Her coach, a burly man named Dave Brazer, applauds.

“Do that and you'll be coming back with some hardware, Vicki,” he says.  “Some serious, yellowish colored hardware.”

Vicki skates to a stop.

“Yeah, if all the skaters from Germany have a mass aneurysm,” she replies.

“That's not the kind of attitude I want to be hearing.”

“I know, Coach, I was just kidding.  The fact is, I've never felt better or stronger.  I feel like I've really turned the corner in the last few months.”

She has a thin line of sweat along her forehead, and she’s breathing heavily, but overall she feels good.

“But you need to get your head straight.  You need to believe that without a shadow of a doubt,” her coach insists.  “I thought you were supposed to be seeing that sports psychologist, to help you stay motivated and positive.”

“I am seeing him,” Vicki says.  She suppresses a chuckle at the double meaning.

“Well, whatever he's doing doesn’t look like it’s helping, to me.”

Vicki smiles, this time unable to resist.

“Quite the contrary, coach.  He’s helping me in a lot of different ways.”  She wanted to add,
and a lot of different positions.

He shrugs.  “All right, let's call it quits for the day.  Tomorrow, I want to start working on your toe-plant.  You're still not nailing it every time.”

“Okay.”

Vicki heads for the locker room.  She hops into the shower, thinking about her routine.  Vicki finishes up, then comes out of the shower and dries off, running the towel vigorously through her dark black hair and over her firmly muscled midsection.

She puts her foot up on one of the wooden benches as she towels her legs, her taut muscles flexing in response to the movement.

The thought of Vincent excites her.  She can’t wait to change and get back to her apartment.  She wants him to come over.  Tonight.

A man carrying a big, oversized duffel bag, a hockey stick, and a pair of ice skates slung over his shoulder enters the main doors of the building.  His head is down and the collar of his coat is turned up.  His face is not visible.

The woman manning the front desk watches him pass.  She’s about to say something but the man clearly knows where he’s going and she figures he’s late for a practice.

The door closes behind the man as he enters a stairwell and the woman goes back to her computer where she’s in the middle of an argument on a political website’s message board.

Vicki shrugs on her sweat-suit jacket and hoists her duffel bag over her shoulder.  She heads for the door, but stops in front of the mirror for a final check of her hair.

The line of sweat is now gone, and she takes a moment to study her face.  Her skin is flawless, her eyes dark, and her lips are thin, but when she adds just the right amount of lipstick they look full enough to be sexy.

She smiles again, and likes how she looks in the reflection.  For awhile, she had been under so much stress with the training and the expectation placed on her that dark circles had appeared under her eyes.  Those are gone now.  Vicki is sleeping better than ever and she knows the reason.

His name is Vincent Keyes.

The man with the duffel bag and hockey stick has paused at the first landing of the stairs going down to the locker rooms.  From beyond the door, he hears the sound of a locker room door banging open and then closed.

At the sound of the noise, the man walks quickly, heading down the stairs.  He reaches the bottom, just as Vicki opens the door.

The man moves toward her and Vicki steps aside to let him pass, but with only a few feet between them, the man suddenly swings the fist that’s holding the handle of the hockey stick.  His blow catches Vicki flush on the jaw, and although the punch is a short one, it is powerful enough to make a bone-crunching sound in the silence of the stairwell.

Vicki drops to the floor.

The man sets down his duffel bag, zips it open, easily lifts Vicki and stuffs her petite body into the oversized bag designed to hold an abundance of hockey gear.  He hoists the bag over his shoulder and walks back up the stairs.

He carries the bag with Vicki inside to his car, pops open the trunk, and throws everything inside.  The duffel bag lands with a loud thud.

The man shuts the trunk, and gets in the driver's seat.

He drives away from the training facility.  Only when he’s back on the main highway does he allow himself to take a deep breath.

Vincent Keyes, driving a new, tan Mercedes, pulls up in front of his ex-wife’s house.  He gets out of the car, walks around the front, and opens the front passenger door for his daughter.

They walk toward the front door where Bonnie waits.

“Mommy, I beat Dad at miniature golf!” Annabel announces.

“Really?” Bonnie says.  “A little girl like you beating the big sports psychologist?”

“I did! I did!”

Bonnie smiles at Vincent.  “What happened?  Did you lose your focus?”

He laughs.  “I was doing fine until that damn windmill.”

“You've got to pretend it isn't there, Dad,” Annabel points out.

“And that big beaver?” Vincent says.  “Are you going to tell me you blocked that out, too?”

“It was a chipmunk.”

“I think it was a beaver.”

“Since when do beavers have stripes?”

“Good point,” Vincent admits, smiling.

He grabs Annabel, picks her up, and starts kissing her neck, and she squirms under the barrage of tickles.

“Annabel, come on in, it's time for dinner,” Bonnie says.

“Dad's taking me to the opera next week.”

“Oh, really?”

“Sure, putt-putt one day, then opera the next,” Vincent says.  “It’s important to be well-rounded.”

“Let's hope there aren't any chipmunks there,” Annabel teases.

Vincent sets his daughter down and she races toward the house.

“See ya' Friday, Bell.”

“Bye Dad.”

Vincent watches her scamper inside the house and when he looks up, he catches Bonnie appraising him.

“You look good, Vincent.”

“You too Bonnie.”

“Yeah, right,” she says, looking down at her worn jeans and sweatshirt.

“You do.  You go easy on the eye, you always have, and don't pretend you don't know it.”

“What, do you want a quickie before you go back to the office?” she says.

“You know I could never say no to you.”

“You could never say no to any halfway-decent-looking woman, that was the problem.”  Her face has taken on an edge, and the humor in her voice is gone.

“Bonnie.”

Behind Bonnie, a man appears.  He is dark-haired with a square jaw and a five o'clock shadow that looks like it's been there since morning.

“Come on honey, the food's getting cold,” he says, then stops.

“Rodney, this is Vincent,” Bonnie says.  “Vincent, this is Rodney.”

“Hi Rodney.”

He starts to move toward the door as if to shake hands, but then Rodney speaks.

“Go on in, Bon,” Rodney says.

“What time are you picking her up on Friday?” she asks Vincent as she puts her hand on the door handle.

“Six-thirty.”

“All right.”

“Go on.  I want to ask Doc about the Lakers this year,” Rodney says.

She looks uncertainly between the men, then goes inside.

Rodney watches, and as soon as he's satisfied that she can't hear, he turns to Vincent.

“I just want you to know that Bonnie and I have something special.”

Vincent looks Rodney in the eye.

“I know you messed around on her all the time you were married, so don't come back trying to be something you're not,” Rodney says.  He has his hands on his hips.

“Let's get something straight, Rodney.  I will never attempt to re-join this family.”

Rodney looks satisfied to hear this.

“Because I'll never leave this family.  I am that girl's father.  And I always will be.”  Vincent pauses.  “Maybe you should take your own advice,” he says.

“What's that?”

“Don't try to be something you're not.  And never will be.”

Vincent walks back to the car and Rodney goes into the house without saying a word.