It’s one thing to police your fellow cops and sniff out the rotten apples, but democracy being the shit it is, if I don’t lock the evidence down tight I may as well not even be doing this.
One mistake and they’ll all walk. That’s not happening. Not on my watch.
“Look, Lane, it’s no secret that we don’t get along, but we’re all a team here, and I’d like for you to be one of us. You’re new, you’re a hotshot, and you get the job done—”
“I have no interest in being the new shiny toy for your department. I’m here to do my job and put criminals behind bars, that’s it. You want a new best buddy, go look under another rock.”
It’s not like I’m lying or anything. I am here to catch criminals. Unfortunately, it looks like the criminals are the very men who are supposed to be protecting people.
Part of me had hoped this would be the one time I’d come up empty-handed. I sort of like this place and would like to settle in closer to home. But hey, you can’t have everything you want, can you?
“You’re an asshole, Lane. You won’t get far here with that attitude.”
“Tell me something I don’t already know. We done here or what? I have a job to do.”
“Jesus, get the hell out of here, and stop using Gonzalez to watch your people.”
As if that’s happening. Gonzalez is the one exception I’ve found in this place, and using him to keep an eye on Clara is killing two birds with one stone. I get to know my…the woman is okay, and it keeps the kid out of the shadier side of this place.
I spend the rest of the day playing detective while still handling a caseload that only seems to be piling up higher by the minute. Thank God for my cousin Roman and his skills or we’d be buried beneath a pile of detritus while these bastards keep me too busy to complete the real job.
“That ass still riding you about not being more social?” Roman asks as we leave the station and hit his SUV.
He’s a good cop and not too blinded by loyalty. That’s why I landed here instead of getting one of the bigger jobs this time around. He’d called a few months back with a suspicion that his new precinct was rotten, and my superiors had okayed this op since I had family ties here and a good reason for a “transfer” from farther north.
Roman wants this move to work out for him so he can stay closer to Ma and Dad and his own father, but that’s just not possible if the whole barrel is bad.
So here I am, on a case after almost a year of digging, and the two of us are trying to gather evidence on the drug-smuggling dirty cops in this place.
Some days, like today, I really hate my job and wish I’d never thought of becoming the man who turned on his own. But after what happened to my old partner and the way that things have been going down inside my own family lately, I know that I’m exactly where I need to be.
The thing is, though, that I’m not exactly who I keep telling people I am. For one, I’m still letting my own mother think that I work as some suit in Wyatt’s company, and the rest of them who are “in the know” still think I’m a cop.
I’m really a part of a black ops unit that has been trying to unearth homegrown terrorists. That’s how I got into police work in the first place, as a plant, and now four years later I’m still trying to weed out corruption while simultaneously following leads for my other unit.
Right now I’m digging into this place because if Jace’s intel to my superiors is correct, then the drug running around here is funding a little group of extremists who are intent on ridding our city of anyone thy deem unfit to reside in America.
They’re all crazy, but hey, my job is my job.
I’m an agent who’s not really an agent who just so happens to actually be part of an operation that is so off the books, the only people who know about me are my handlers and the freaking president, himself.
“You heard anything back from Spiro?” I ask, watching the scenery flash by as he drives us towards a new crime scene and yet another case to fill my desk.
“Not yet, bro. But he’ll call me. I know he will after I let it slip that I’m short on cash. These boys can’t help themselves and they’ve been trying to approach me for months now. I’ll be part of this little backwater militia soon enough.”
“I don’t like this, Roman. I don’t trust Dobson or Spiro, and if they even suspect that you’re a rat, they’ll put a bullet in you.”
“Like I’d let them. Look, we’re not getting anywhere here, despite spending the last several months watching these bastards. We need hard evidence, Miah, not supposition and the suspicion that they’re funding their own group of misfits. I’ll get in and start poking around and then we’ll get what we need. And then maybe you can stop being such a dick and finally ask Clara out or something,” he quips, twisting his mouth at me.