Deep Nights

By Steven Sloan

In the harrowing “mean streets” tradition of TV’s Cops, Steven Sloan’s novel is a gritty look at the world of cops assigned the Deep Nights shift where you ride along with Sloan as he faces convenience-store robbers, drunks and other “worst of the worst.” Sloan learns a young girl has been grabbed in a brazen abduction.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Steven Sloan
• Release date: Aug 27, 2010

Steven Sloan

Steven Sloan was born in Canada and grew up in Texas. He learned to fly while still in high school and soon thereafter became a flight instructor. During an aviation downturn, with his instructing opportunities dwindling to nothing, one of his students, a Dallas policeman, suggested he knew where Sloan could find work.Sloan attended the police academy and became a policeman. He worked the interesting, exciting streets for several years but eventually returned to flying. Since that time he's entertained his flying colleagues with tales of his police days.Eventually deciding to write stories based on events he experienced, Sloan's becoming a prolific author of police and aviation stories. His first police story will be published in the fall of 2010 and a second crime novel will soon follow. Sloan's first aviation story is in development with a publishing date to be set soon.Steven Sloan lives in Hong Kong where he continues to fly jets for a Hong Kong airline. For more information visit http://www.stevensloan.net

Book preview

Deep Nights

by

Steven Sloan

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SMASHWORDS EDITION

The Characters and events in this novel are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and unintended by the author.

Cloud Dancer Publishing Ltd.

© 2010 by Steven Sloan

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher.

For information contact:

Cloud Dancer Publishing Ltd.

24-26 Stanley Street, Suite 801

Central, Hong Kong

USA Office

Cloud Dancer Publishing

1901 John McCain Road

Colleyville, Texas 76034

Cover Artist: Anthony Saldutto

email: [e-mail]

Cover Designer/Layout Artist: Juvelin T. Aripal

email: [e-mail]

ISBN 978-1-935735-01-4

LCCN 2010935816

Smashwords Edition License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author's work.

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FOREWORD

Thank you for picking up a copy of my book. I hope you enjoy reading it. You will find Deep Nights is different from a typical crime fiction novel. Here’s why.

The creation of Deep Nights

Not wanting to venture out, I sat in my wife’s Beijing apartment on a dusty and polluted spring day. Browsing the internet, killing time while I waited for her to come home from work, I came across a writing contest called the 3-Day Novel Contest.

What? How can anyone write a novel in three days I asked myself? I’d been working on my first police procedural novel for several months and the story still wasn’t finished. I was intrigued by the thought of writing something on such a tight deadline.

The more I learned about the annual contest, the more fascinated I became. I decided to take up the challenge of writing a complete novel in three days.

The contest was held early in September on the three day Labor Day weekend. Again in Beijing I hunkered down and prepared to write. At the stroke of midnight I began. Most 3-Day novels average around 20,000 words–maybe eighty or so pages. I wasn’t sure I would be able to type that many words in three days let alone put them into an interesting enough form to compete.

Prior to the start of the contest writers are allowed to create only a brief outline of their novel. So I came up with a fictional police story loosely based upon personal experiences and incidents I heard about from other cops. After a bit of work, I had my novel outline. Later, less than half way through the contest I threw it away. The story carried me along, not the other way around. I wrote as fast as I could for three days. With midnight approaching on the last day of the contest I scrambled to put the finishing touches on my story. I met the deadline having written over 20,000 words in three days. Satisfied with the basic story, but without enough time for proofing and correcting my hurried writing, I doubted my entry would win. Victory in the contest was never my main goal. I just wanted to complete a novel by the deadline. Mission accomplished.

I put the story on the shelf for about six months. Other projects occupied my time and I wanted to let Deep Nights settle and age. A few months later I dusted off the manuscript and read it straight through. I still liked the basic story but Deep Nights needed a lot of work. I started on the normal corrections for spelling, punctuation and sentence structure but I faced a more difficult decision.

The hard choice became what did I want Deep Nights to be?

The deadline created a sense of urgency that changed my writing style and story creation. My choice was to turn the tale into a regular novel length piece of genre fiction, matching the current buying patterns of the major publishers or to make a few changes and additions while keeping the same basic story.

In the end I chose the latter. Deep Nights is a bit shorter than a typical crime novel, has fewer characters and sub-plots and doesn’t completely develop the mystery novel angle as thoroughly as many books. In some ways it’s more of an action-adventure novel than a mystery. Deep Nights tells a story as if told by the people involved.

The story was fun to write. I enjoyed creating something in three days and appreciate the different type novel that is the result. I’d like to write a series of similar size stories telling tales of street cops and the people they meet in their day to day adventures. Whether or not Deep Nights and its different style find any success determines the future. If you like the story and want to see more please let me know. If you don’t, I need to know that also. Your interest will determine if there are more similar stories to follow on.

I’m putting the finishing touches on my next crime novel Two Minutes Late. While still a tale about street cops, you’ll find Two Minutes Late more like other mystery novels on the bookstore shelves. I hope to have it finished late this year.

Steven Sloan

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Putting a book together is a difficult process involving a lot more than just writing. I’d like to thank all the people contributing to Deep Nights.

The people at Book Masters in Ohio have been extremely helpful guiding me through the process on my first book. I’d especially like to thank Nathaniel Lanzer who’s been quick to answer my questions and suggest various ways to move the project forward. Barb Graham, Emily Sedlak, and Cindy Harding have also been early contributors. By the time you read this a lot more people at Book Masters will have had a hand in the project and I would especially like to thank the guys on the printing floor who do a great job of putting together very nice books. Thanks also to Atlas Books, my distributor, for getting the book out there.

Closer to home here in Hong Kong I’d like to thank Emily Dickson for her editing help. Tony Frock also contributed greatly to the clarity and correct English usage. Both gave me valuable suggestions that helped to make the book better.

Juvelin Aripal laid out an easy to read book and designed a great cover. She’s also been an enormous help with marketing material and final editing. I have to add an extra thanks to Juve for tolerating a first time author that wasn’t exactly sure of what he wanted.

The cover art design process was fun. I wanted a different type cover suggesting a bit of what’s inside and triggering the potential reader to ask a question–what’s that book about? Anthony Saldutto created the impressive portrait we used for the cover art. Anthony, the portrait hangs in my office and most visitors comment on it. The one’s that appreciate art really like it. Thanks!

Finally, I’d like to thank Yu Yu for designing my simple but efficient web site.

Thanks to all and a final word about character names.

This story is fiction. I took the incidents from things I had knowledge of, but created a fictional story about make-believe characters. I did use some names of real people in my story. The characters in the story aren’t developed from the friends or real people. I just use the names of friends for some of the imaginary characters I create. This generates a little extra buzz for the story and my friends get a minor kick out of seeing their name in print. I do it because it’s fun for me and my friends and if you can’t have a little fun while doing this . . . why do it?

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CHAPTER 1

DISTURBANCE

I cruised aimlessly in my patrol car while the killer broke into the girl’s apartment. On that late summer evening, the sky grew dark to the east. I reached the western city limits, turned north onto Clark Road and witnessed the horizon still glowing dimly with a faint hint of fading sunlight stretching across the plains to the west. The cloudless skies had not displayed a beautiful sunset, but I prefer clear skies anytime I can get them. I continued my unhurried patrol northbound with no particular destination in mind, along the road tracking one of the highest ridges in Dallas County. The road meandered through rolling hills and cedar forests. I smelled the pleasant scent drifting through the open car widow and enjoyed the fresh air. Glancing left a couple of minutes later, the darkness had overtaken the plains stretching westward toward Ft. Worth. 

After wandering north on Clark Road, I turned my police unit right onto Camp Wisdom Road and cruised eastbound up and down the hills near the high school. Watching the late evening traffic I passed many motorists hurrying home to the bedroom community after a long day at work. As soon as they recognized my patrol car, many drivers glanced at their speedometer and reflexively tapped their brakes to make sure they wouldn’t get nailed for speeding.

I chuckled to myself at the reaction of the normal citizens, but still observed every passing car for signs of abnormality. Erratic driving, an expired license plate, an unusual looking driver or a driver not matching the car all keyed a policeman’s instincts.

Radio patrol involves wandering about the assigned district waiting for calls. The more conscientious officers actively patrol in search of the punks, lowlifes and criminals lurking amongst the ordinary citizens. 

One of the reasons people relocated to the suburbs was to avoid inner city crime. However criminals have cars too so crime followed the new residents. It seemed the crime rate accelerated faster than the population.

Many cities just sat by and used normal reactive policing techniques and policies against this ever increasing crime; however, those techniques did little to stem the surging tide of crime. 

Our city or to be more correct our Chief of Police took a more pro-active approach. The Duncan Switch Police Department took pride in performing what we called aggressive patrol. The Chief expected his officers to actively search for suspicious drivers and persons looking like they didn’t belong in the area, and to make it clear to those people that they were being watched. 

Sometimes we would just pull in behind their automobile and follow them for a while. Other times we would use any possible excuse such as a broken tail light, dirty license plate or other minor infraction to stop, identify and question the driver. 

The Chief believed by using this tactic, the criminals would quickly learn they had an increased likelihood of being stopped by the police when they came to Duncan Switch. The Chief hoped aggressive patrol would cause the criminals to make a value decision. He wanted them to target some other city for their criminal activities.

The theory and tactics we used wouldn’t be popular with liberals nor would they be endorsed by the ACLU, but since Duncan Switch only had a population of fifteen thousand residents, we fell pretty far under the radar screen of both the liberal media and the ACLU. 

Part of the ACLU’s beef with aggressive patrol is their claim of racial-profiling. It seemed to the average police officer as if they wanted to outlaw common sense. The latest census had identified Duncan Switch as one of the whitest cities in Texas. So when blacks, Mexican or other minorities drove on anything but a thoroughfare street, common sense would cause one to question the reason why they were in the city. 

Aggressive patrol didn’t mean every black or Mexican entering Duncan Switch caught a stop by the police, but for the most part, you might bet on them receiving a second look from a passing patrolman. Policemen are often cited as lazy donut munching, under educated, dumb asses. I too recognized some laziness in my fellow officers. It manifests itself in them stopping a lot of blacks and Mexicans for minor vehicle violations. It seemed to be a fact, that a large percentage of the cars they stopped had other violations such as suspended driver’s licenses and outstanding traffic warrants. So these lazy cops often found multiple violations on a single traffic stop. 

From the policeman’s standpoint, he just used his instincts to detect a situation in which it seemed likely to find violations, wanted persons or criminals looking for a target. From the ACLU point of view the term instinct meant racial profiling and to them those words meant war. 

I might add we also pulled over a lot of white trash, suburban Moms and businessmen hurrying to work. If you committed a violation in Duncan Switch there was a high percentage probability you would be stopped by the police regardless of your race, gender or station in life. In our mind we didn’t discriminate. 

Luckily for us, the Duncan Switch Chief of Police was skillful in handling or deflecting the few complaints about our patrol tactics and the ACLU so far had never attacked the Duncan Switch Police Department. 

Aggressive patrol is a first-rate tactic, for suburban cities susceptible to roving inner city criminals. This tactic helped keep crime low. As one of our small city’s more assertive police officers, I always kept my eyes open for anyone suspicious, and had no qualms about stopping any car for a check of the occupants. 

As I continued eastbound the first evening stars just began to sparkle in the clear Texas sky. The temperature had been hot during the day but the evening had cooled down and a light refreshing breeze blew across the city. I patrolled the streets with my windows down but kept the air conditioner on. That way I listened to the sounds of the city and still remained comfortable in my patrol car. 

I found the streets busy, but not crowded with traffic. In the late summer, the kids enjoyed their final freedom from school. Summer time meant Little League baseball, cookouts, crowded swimming pools and parks. Everyone tried to cram as much as possible into the long summer days knowing in a couple of week’s school would start, the days would begin to grow shorter and the summer’s extra leisure time would end. I had earlier cruised through Lake Side Park and verified it was filled to capacity with residents enjoying the pleasant summer evening. 

I approached Cedar Ridge Road and glanced at an approaching gold Chevy Impala turning left in front of me. I knew the car and drove just close enough to see the driver. Ben Pearsall, a local tough kid, was driving fast, probably over the speed limit, but I couldn’t say for sure how fast. At least not sure enough for court. Some officers wrote tickets when they thought someone’s speed exceeded the limit. I guess they just estimated the drivers speed. I never wrote a traffic ticket unless I had a legal means of determining their true speed. Clocking the driver’s speed by following him or using a radar gun were the two most common methods of determining actual speed. 

My father often told me; once you start lying, it is a mighty slippery slope. You have to