New Beginning 1076

I was binge watching season three of Fargo when I got the call from my burner phone that hadn't rang in eight months. I kept it behind a skull bookend inside a mahogany bookcase built into my apartment wall. If I pushed the bookcase, I would enter a secret passage that led down to a gothic nightclub, or so I imagined.

I rolled off my sofa and slid across my shiny marble floor to the bookcase. I'd practiced my Risky Business slide for this day too many times. And I just so happened to be wearing an oversized pink oxford shirt with a pair of white cashmere socks.

"At your service," I said into the flip phone, my heart pounding.

"Verity," said the man on the other end. It was my manager Enoch. I pictured what his disguise might be today. A bartender in Paris with a handlebar moustache, a bearded fishmonger in Seattle, and a homeless man chasing birds around a fountain in Rome were new impersonations he'd told me about the last time we spoke. I was never sure if these were for his amusement or business-related.

"Okay. I don't know who might be watching you. Your target is the IN-And-Out on Third."

This is it. I'm going to prove myself worthy.

"Get a Double-Double, inside and out. Got your wig? Hat? Camera? Thermometer? Cash?"

"Oh boy do I!"

"Good. Get there by 12:45. Millions of consumers are counting on you."

I dashed to my car, where I kept my kit. I was no longer Verity Spivak, IT drone. No more. Now I was Verity Spivak, Super Secret Shopper!


Opening: Elizabeth Tudor.....Continuation: Khazar-khum


Notes

P1: "rung," not "rang." 

P2: If I rolled off my sofa I'd end up lying on the floor, not the optimum position from which to go into a Risky Business slide. I would leap off my sofa. But that's me. "Too many times" suggests that something goes wrong. As in: I ate too many cookies, so I puked on my sofa. I'd change "too many" to "a hundred" or "a thousand."

P4: Not clear why Enoch would be in disguise to make a phone call. Then again, it's not clear that any of this is actually happening. That "or so I imagined" at the end of paragraph 1 could mean that the narrator is just lying on the sofa imagining everything. If that's not the case, and there is a skull bookend hiding a phone that rings with Enoch on the other end, I'd get rid of the "or so I imagined," as it leaves me wondering whether to trust anything Verity (if that's even her/his real name) says. 

In the unlikely case that this is all Walter Mitty-type imagination, with the narrator pretending to be an assassin or a spy when she's actually a receptionist, you still should get rid of "or so I imagined," as you want her to be so engrossed in her fantasy that she doesn't let on that she knows it's a fantasy. But you also don't want to carry this far enough to get the reader engrossed in the spy story that doesn't exist. Tricky. If it's all a fantasy, maybe  start in the real world and open chapter 2 with the fantasy.