I glanced between them, noting that the woman had pulled out a pen and notepad, ready to take a report. Again, visions of being carted off to a psych ward danced in my head. They even had an ambulance waiting right out front to transport me to crazytown.
A series of knocks pounded against the front door.
“I’ll let them know what’s going on,” muttered the male cop, heading for the front of the house.
I turned to the woman and cleared my throat. “Right. So... like I told the nine-one-one operator, I went out to the shed to get my lawnmower, and when I got close I saw that the padlock had been broken.”
“Was the shackle cut?” asked the woman, pausing in her note taking. “Like, with bolt cutters?”
I shook my head. “No. It had just been... wrenched open, I guess.”
She raised an eyebrow and made another note, but didn’t comment.
“The door was ajar, but only by a few inches,” I continued. “I opened it, and that’s when I saw the guy with the gunshot wound in his chest.”
“Can you describe him?”
More memories shook loose. “Uh... he was a white guy. In his thirties, maybe? Dark hair. Wearing black jeans, a white shirt, and a black leather vest. His eyes were blue...”
She looked up again. “His eyes were open?”
I hesitated. They hadn’t been. “No, they were closed. Maybe I saw them later. Or... maybe I just thought they were blue.”
She suppressed a sigh. “Go on.”
“He was obviously shot through the chest. There was a lot of blood. I felt for his pulse, and put my hand near his mouth and nose to check for breathing. I couldn’t feel anything, so I closed the shed door and put the broken lock back on the latch to keep it shut. Then I ran inside and called the police.”
She nodded, still writing. “And what happened next?”
This would be the tricky part, I knew. “I was waiting in the house for you guys to arrive—I think it had been about seven minutes. I heard pounding coming from the back yard. When I looked out through the patio door, I saw the door of the shed shaking on its hinges. It burst open, and... well... I guess I must have fainted.”
Movement in the back yard caught my eye as I related the last part of my tale, startling me. The second cop was poking around the damaged shed, examining the door and peering into the musty interior. The woman finished writing and lowered the notebook. The edges of her mouth tugged down.
“I see,” she said.
Her colleague finished whatever investigation he’d been doing and came back inside. His gaze raked over me briefly, but when he spoke, it was to his partner.
“There’s traces of blood on the floor of the shed,” he said. “Doesn’t look like nearly enough to have killed someone. Whoever it was must not’ve been in too bad a shape. The workmanship on the shed is shoddy, but it would still have taken a fair bit of strength to tear out the door latch and one of the hinges from the inside.”
The female cop nodded. “She says she thought he was dead, so she locked the shed door and came in here to make the call. She heard pounding, saw the door rattle, and fainted when it burst open.”
Now both of the cops looked sour.
“Am I in trouble?” I asked carefully. “It wasn’t a prank call. I honestly thought he was dead.”
The female cop sighed. “Here’s the thing, Miss Bright. Your supposed gunshot victim might have grounds to press charges against you for felonious restraint. You locked him in a shed, after all.”
“What?” My stomach twisted. “But... he was on my property! Don’t I have grounds for... I don’t know... trespassing or breaking and entering, or something? And—I told you—I thought he was dead! I was trying to protect a crime scene!”
The woman made a quelling gesture with one hand. “Try to stay calm, Miss Bright. The guy’s not here anymore.” She looked at her partner questioningly.
He shrugged. “There are no obvious clues to show which direction he took off in.”
“Okay,” said the female cop. “So the victim is gone, and aside from putting out a notice to local hospitals about any patients presenting with gunshot wounds, we don’t really have a good way to find him, or even identify him.”
“Assuming it even was a gunshot wound at all,” the other cop muttered.
“Basically, unless you want to file an official complaint against him, we’re willing to let this incident slide. You were trying to do the right thing, but you made a mistake. We can just call it an unfortunate lapse of judgment on both sides and move on.” The female cop looked at me hopefully. It was pretty obvious that neither she nor her partner wanted the headache of trying to deal with this little mystery.
“All right,” I said meekly. At this point, all I wanted was for them to be gone, so I could lick my wounds in private. My fingertips strayed once more to the unblemished side of my neck.
After a few more perfunctory questions about my contact information, they left.
“Oh, by the way,” said the male cop. “The lock on your patio door appears to be broken. You should get that fixed. It’s a security risk.”
Gee, you think so? I couldn’t help the sarcastic mental quip.
“I’ll put it on the list, along with my broken shed door,” I muttered.
He gave me another frown—the kind that said he didn’t appreciate having to deal with sarcastic twenty-somethings who locked wounded intruders in sheds and then fainted while waiting for the police. If I were being brutally honest, I couldn’t really blame him for that. I kept my mouth shut, and closed the front door behind them.
Once I’d confirmed that the squad
