All Eyes Lead to the Truth | Drive (6x02)
It ended just as it had begun: seeing red.
This morning she was cooking, just like she had every morning they’d been together, and then she got a nosebleed — the first nosebleed he’d ever seen her get in their twenty years of marriage. She tried to smile and reassure him that she was okay, but it was hard to take her word for it when the blood had seeped into her mouth and stained her teeth crimson.
A few hours later, he was staring at her blood oozing down the side of a cop’s window.
Patrick didn’t initially realize that’s what he was looking at. It was like his mind turned the splatter into a Rorschach test out of pure self-preservation. Was it the reflection of the Nevada terrain on the window? Did he burst a blood vessel in his eye? He would have gladly accepted any explanation over the truth.
“Guns down! Guns down!” someone screamed.
“No one has discharged their weapon, sir!” another voice replied.
“Vicky?” he called out, swallowing harshly against the gritty dirt that mixed with the saliva in his mouth.
He found himself missing the cacophony of noise that had been following him for the past few hours. The sickening silence of no one knowing what to say was worse than anything he’d ever heard.
“Help her!” he screamed at the man staring inside the back seat.
The man gently opened the back door and quickly fell to his knees as he tried to keep Vicky’s slumped form from hitting the ground.
From his vantage point, he could see his favorite spot to kiss her was no longer there, only viscera, bone, and red.
“So, want to tell us how this all began, O.J.?”
Patrick kept his gaze steady on the interrogation room table, but in his periphery, he saw the other agent elbow the comedian before clearing his throat.
“We just want to say we’re really sorry about your loss, Patrick.”
“Mr. Crump,” he replied. His voice was hoarse from screaming, but he’d be damned if he took a sip from the bottle of water they’d given him.
Raising his face to meet the stare of the rookie cop, he seethed, “It’s Mr. Crump to you.”
The kid had the decency to look chagrined and nodded politely. “Can you tell us what happened?”
Pointedly, the older cop added, “From the beginning.”
He couldn’t think of anything he wanted to do less, but he was too exhausted to fight anymore. “My wife wasn’t feeling good this morning. Got a nosebleed, then the worst headache I’ve ever seen.”
“What was wrong with her?”
Patrick wrung his hands in frustration, only for it to serve as a reminder that they’d taken his wedding band from him as ‘evidence.’ “My neighbor, Lois, she suffers from these things called cluster headaches. Said it’s the worst pain a human being can experience. I thought that might be what Vicky had, but fifteen minutes after the nosebleed, she looked like she was just… screaming. I’ve never heard anything like that before, so I wanted to take her down the road to Lovelace Medical Center.”
Two sets of eyebrows shot up, but the younger one was the first to comment. “You realize you overshot Lovelace by nearly 100 miles?”
“Keep driving, Patrick! Oh my god, it’s killing me. You have to keep going!”
“...why?” the older partner prodded before taking a swig from his thermos. The movement caused the fluorescent lights to cast a shine on the man’s golden wedding band, and Patrick felt the knife twist deeper.
This oaf of a man got to come to work, fail to prevent another man’s wife from dying, and then go home and lay down with his own like nothing happened. Just another day on the job. Meanwhile, Vicky was dead. Last night they’d watched Leno, she gossiped about some of her coworkers, and he turned in early. He didn’t make last night special because he didn’t know it would be their last night. Then this morning, she died alone and in pain in the back of some pig’s car.
“Where’s my wife?” he seethed.
“Where’s my wife?!” he screamed, slamming his fist down on the table, ignoring how the cuffs bit into his wrists.
“The morgue. We need to investigate her death,” the younger cop explained, raising his hands as if he were trying to approach a wild animal.
Patrick bit the flesh of his inner cheek, trying to hold back tears as he imagined his wife. Vicky was so scared of the dark, and she was so claustrophobic. He didn’t want her to be in one of those metal boxes in the wall. He didn’t want her to be scared.
“Why did you keep driving?” the older man pushed, emphasizing each word pointedly.
“ I don’t want to die. Patrick, help me. I need you.”
“You act like this is the first weird thing to happen around here,” Patrick spat. He couldn’t explain the truth. They’d make a mockery of him. Worse, they’d make a mockery of her.
They’d been normal yesterday. They’d done nothing wrong.
“Don’t!” Patrick screamed. “You spray our food with poison. You pollute our water supply with chemicals. Don’t look at me like I should know what you did to her! I’ve seen it thousands of times over. You think we don’t matter, that we’re expendable. She mattered. Don’t you dare-”
“That’s enough,” the older officer shouted, standing up. He shook his head at the two-way mirror, and sighed “This isn’t going anywhere. Take him back to his cell, let the doctor check him out.”
Patrick didn’t know what they were expecting from him. He didn’t have the answers they were looking for. He didn’t know why she felt better when the car was headed west. He didn’t know why they couldn’t stop.
All he knew was that his wife was dead.
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