Page 12 of Once Upon a Lie

3

Shane

Thursday, September 23

1:30 p.m.

Four days into being a “disgraced ex-detective,” and the fake articles about my career’s demise are still making the rounds.

I’ve barely set the last moving box down in my new living room—located precisely one floor above my new mark, Valentina Cordone, in a high-rise building known as Magnolia Condos—when my phone buzzes for what feels like the hundredth time today.

Dom: ​​My oh my, how the mighty have fallen.​​

His text has a direct link to a news article with the headline, ​​Metro Cop Fired for Misconduct in Active Investigation.​​

Detective Shane Maddox has been terminated after an initial internal affairs review, but Nashville Metro PD has updated they will not release the definitive details of the case until their final review is complete.

The article is vague in its details of why I’ve been fired but not its tone, and I can only imagine the gossip that’s spreading around the station about what a piece of shit I am right now. There’s nothing worse than a dirty cop when you’re a real brother of the blue, and the grainy photo of me outside the precinct they included, coffee in hand, further paints me as a total asshole.

The comments section in the article is, of course, worse, already doing what the internet does best—assuming, speculating, salivating, calling me all sorts of bad names. Ironically enough, it’s exactly what needs to happen, but it doesn’t make me feel any less like I have an intestinal blockage.

My whole life of community service, tarnished to sell an undercover character. The harsh truth is that there will be people who only see this article and never the one that will run when the investigation into the Cordones is over and I’m cleared.

In their minds, Shane Maddox will forever be that dirtbag in the photo.

Unsurprisingly, more texts roll in after Dom’s. Women. Acquaintances. Friends. Anyone who’s ever had contact with me, really. And they all include the link to the article as though I won’t know what the fuck the texts are about.

Laura Lindy: ​​WTF Shane? Tell me this is a joke.​​

Unknown: ​​Wow, Shane. I never pegged you as the bad-boy scandal type. Maybe we should get together again soon?​​

Crew: ​​Dude. This can’t be true, right? I tried to ask Dom, but he wouldn’t give me any details.​​

I scrub a hand over my face. Fuck me.

Stoneface Mike did say they’d “take care of everything,” and damn if he didn’t mean it. Naively, I thought they’d have a harder time convincing everyone.

Though the media scandal is nothing in comparison to the last seventy-two hours I’ve experienced. The CIA and FBI both seem to have perfected the art of making you question your own existence through the confirmation process Mike spoke of, and I’m not 100 percent sure I’m not hallucinating all of this, to be honest.

One minute I was in a beige conference room at Metro PD, and the next, I was being driven around in a tinted-out SUV with two men—that’s how many voices I counted—and a bag over my head. They spoke in riddles about my life and personality, and I did my best to keep up as they peppered me with questions.

“Do you consider yourself persuasive?”

“Would you take a life to save one?”

“Describe what loyalty means to you.”

When they were done, they booted me onto the curb and screamed off, and I still don’t know their names. It wasn’t until I was at home, climbing into my bed after Ubering there from downtown and taking a scalding-hot shower, that I was taken again, this time to a stark mirrored room with a single man and a lie detector. The sun rose and set with me in that room, I swear, and I still can’t figure out how they conned me into holding my piss that long.

The day after that I sat in a room with one chair and no clock. Time moved at a snail’s pace, and I had three interactions with various faces I didn’t recognize that lasted all of three minutes tops.

It wasn’t until yesterday, when I found myself in another tinted Escalade, sitting in an abandoned alleyway, and Mike slid into the back seat, that I knew I was officially on the assignment—Operation Redline, as it were, because of some fancy play on freight slang for maximum speed.

I guess they needed to make damn sure I would be capable of this gig, and while I suppose they did, they also bent the edges of reality to a place where I’m not sure I’ll ever get them straight again.

Mike still hasn’t told me what three-letter agency he actually works for, but my gut says CIA more than ever now. I have zero past CIA interactions to draw from, but I can’t fathom the seventy-two hours I spent with the cast of The Riddler to be the calling card of anyone else.

But hell, for all I know, Mike comes straight from the DOJ and was sent by the president himself. I’ll probably never know the ins and outs of ol’ Mikey’s career, but I do know the man is a strange bird with a bald head, a clean-shaven face, and harsh gray eyes. He doesn’t smile or frown, and I don’t think he’s capable of laughing. He also says shit like You’ll know what you need to know when I ask questions that he doesn’t want to answer and took all of ninety seconds to load encrypted software that looks like a weather widget onto my new phone.