Conspicuous Secrets

Chapter Fifty-Two

**IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT AT THE END OF THIS CHAPTER**

I woke up with a pounding ache in my head. When I opened my eyes, the room around me was blurry and moving from side-to-side. The first thing my sight focused on was the blood. There was so much blood. I was laying in the floor of the corner store I had walked into and the masked man was nowhere to be seen. The man that had been shot was on the ground beside of me, still and lifeless. There was a pool of red surrounding his head that flashed me back to the night my mother died. No. What do I do? My heart pounded in my chest as I tried to keep nausea in my stomach at bay.

Sitting up, I looked down. My hands were covered in blood, and by the looks of it, it wasn't just my own. There was a cold pistol sitting in the palm of my hand. My breathing sped up and become shallower. The whole right side of my face was wet and I could feel my blood dripping down from my chin, to my neck and reaching my collarbone. I knew I needed help.

At that moment, sirens grew closer from a distance and got louder and louder, making me squeeze my eyes shut at the sharp pains digging through my skull. I knew I had a concussion. Through blurry vision, I watched four police cars speedily pull into the small parking lot. A few seconds later, eight officers raced into the building and raised their guns, pointing every single one of them at me. "Drop the gun!" one of them screamed. I listened and immediately placed the gun on the floor. A woman slowly walked closer to me and kicked the weapon out of my reach.

"I didn't do this," I defended myself, realizing how it looked.

"Put your hands in the air," the woman told me, not lowering her gun. I raised my bloody hands up in surrender.

A man walked around the woman and behind me. He roughly grabbed my arms, pulled them behind my back and then handcuffed my wrists. "I didn't do this," I repeated urgently.

"That's what they all say," the police officer spoke, grabbing my upper arm and leading me out of the building.

"No, I'm serious," I told him. "I didn't kill him. There was another man that was there—he walked in and did this."

The male police officer led me to his vehicle where he opened the back door for me. I teared up and stared at him instead of getting in the car. "I swear this wasn't me. I'm being framed," I said.

"Save it for the judge," he told me.

"Please, just look at the cameras."

The officer I was talking to looked over his shoulder as the female officer approached. "The cameras are destroyed and the tapes are gone," she informed the man.

He turned to me. "I'm not going to lie when I say that you seem sincere. But we found you holding the murder weapon. As of right now, we have to take you into the station," he told me more softly. I nodded, understanding.

"Should we wait until the ambulance gets here?" the woman asked him, looking at the wound on my head. "She might have brain damage."

The man took a step toward me to get a closer look at the injury. "I think she will be fine at least until we get to the station. I'll call Wesley and make sure there's a medic there to check her out."

"Wesley?" I asked. "As in Sheriff Daniel Wesley? I need to talk to him," I told them urgently.

The officer nodded. "You'll get to at the station," he assured me. With that, he gestured me into the backseat of the cop car and I climbed in. He closed the door behind me and then got into the driver's seat while his partner sat in the passenger's.