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From The Lost Road to Hope
Chapter 11: Confession without a chance of redemption
We arrived at the scene of the crime, the kid was right, what a mess. When we turned the corner into the room and immediately you could see her head, slumped down with long black hair, looked like she had just visited a beauty shop. Frank entered and kneeled by the tub digging into his bag of tricks. I slowly approached the tub to see the full scene. Her hands were in her lap, there was no water in the tub, just blood. She slit her wrists right below the palm, deep cuts, and the blood in the wounds had already coagulated.
Her hands were clenched into fists, facing up and together, the blade on the tub lip was covered in dried blood. Frank methodically placed all his tools neatly next to his bag; he is one of the most anal
people I have ever met. I continued to take in the scene, she is a beautiful woman, in her late thirties early forties, wearing a yellow summer dress, not warm enough for this type of weather. She had on yellow sandals and there was something in her left hand.
“Remember; don’t touch anything,” Frank commands.
“Got it,” I reply.
I bend over and can see a small beaded bracelet sticking out of the side of her fist. It looks like one of those baby bracelets. I look at her face; the pain from her death is frozen in her expression.
“It looks like she may have bled out completely,” I remark.
“We’ll see,”Frank replies and stands up, “okay detective let me do my thing and I’ll let you know my findings.”
I shake my head and begin to exit.
“What a shame, to have all this and give it up,” he comments, “I guess money really doesn’t buy happiness.”
Frank should really talk less.
I leave and head back down the stairs, meeting Malloy in the living room.
“Very sad,” he begins, “Guy came home to take the wife out for their anniversary and found her dead in the tub.”
I look over at the man, he is still sobbing intensely.
“She was there for a while, he thinks about an hour to an hour and a half,” he continues, “When he found her, he says he just fell to his knees, and leaned on the tub to check her pulse and confirm what was too true to deny.”
“Is that where the blood on his sleeves came from,” I ask?
“Seems so,” Malloy continues, “poor bastard, lost his son and his wife in the same year.”
Malloy’s comment doesn’t register right away.
“What,” I ask, after processing his statement!
“Yah, son died of cancer earlier this year. The husband wanted to try to do something special for his wife to bring back some normalcy to their lives,” Malloy explains, “Looks like he was too late.”
“The guys a cancer doctor,” I ask.
“Yea, a major player at the local hospital runs the entire cancer wing,” Malloy responds.
“Well, Frank is upstairs working with the deceased, you wanna head up there and check on him,” I ask.
“Nah, I know you guys are tight but he creeps me the hell out, I am going to call medic to have them check on the Doc, make sure he is physically alright.” Malloy flips his notepad closed and heads toward the front door, pulling out his cell “I hope I can get a signal.”
“Hey, was there any note,” I call out?
“No, just a text to the Doc,” Malloy responds without looking up from his phone, “it was real basic, it just said, something like, I’m sorry, I just couldn’t go on without him, I love you.”
Malloy exits and I heads back towards the doctor.
He is sitting up in the chair; the channels of his tears deeply stain his weary face. He looks over to me.
“She is the most beautiful woman in the world isn’t she,” he sobs.
I stop and stare at him.
How do I answer that?
Before I can speak one word he continues, “More beautiful than when we first met.” He looks at his sleeves and begins to roll them up, “this is all I have left of her now.”
For the first time, with all the bodies I had encountered, stories I had heard, and crime scenes I had processed, this one got to me. Before it was all too mechanical, disconnected, it had to be, and if you weren’t numb to it you couldn’t do the job. Every case would haunt you, tear at you, and the weight of the dead and remains of the evil that men can do to each other would crush you. As a defensive mechanism, a survival necessity, you had to drown out all the emotion, and reduce everything and everyone down to facts, numbers, and evidence. In essence, you had to turn off your humanity.
I was good at it by now; after all I had served as close to hell as I ever wanted to be. I was a rock. Not this time, though, everything that man was feeling I began to feel with him, I couldn’t control it.
It hit a little too close to home, catching me off guard, and once it started, it couldn’t be stopped.
I slowly walked to him. I’ll never forget the look in his eyes, such loss, and pain. How was he even able to contain it?
“She was my everything,”his words felt like shards of glass tearing at my skin, “She gave me life.”
I stop in front of him.
“How does a man live when the best parts of him are torn away,” he asks?
He wasn’t making a statement; he was truly searching me for an answer and I had none. All I could think about was Sara and Grace, and I broke the one commandment that every cop should never break, thou shalt not empathize. I was suddenly there, in his shoes, his very chair, the weight of his loss crushing my heart. I knelt down beside him.
What could I possibly say to ease his suffering?
“Death hunts its prey without mercy but I think it takes the most joy in the torment of those it leaves behind,” he whispers.
I am frozen; I can feel my eyes moisten. My heart beats faster and faster.
“How can I go on,” his question blasts through me like a mortar round, scorching a gaping hole in my center?
We just stare at each other. There is no answer that will provide the least amount of comfort. Suddenly I feel a hand on my shoulder,
“C’mon Trevor, medic’s here, let’s let them check out the Doc,” Malloy quietly suggests.
I rise to my feet.
All speech has left me.
“Detective do you have a family,” The Doc asks ever so gently?
I struggle to answer and barely squeak out, “Yes.”
He pauses and takes the deepest and slowest breath I have ever witnessed.
“Never, ever, forget, without them, you are just a man alone,” he instructs.
“You’re not alone, Doc,you’re not,” it’s all I can muster as any kind of condolence.
“We are all alone, no matter how hard we try to escape it, it always finds us,” he quickly answers.
He turns from me and finishes rolling up his sleeves.
“C’mon pal,” Malloy pulls me away as the medics brush past us.
I back out without taking my eyes off of him. Never in my life have I seen such a state of desolation and utter loss. Even compared to Boone’s death, this seemed to define all that is tragic. We left the house and the ride back to the station was absolute silence.
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