Justice For Sloane Read online

  Justice For Sloane

  (Police and Fire: Operation Alpha)

  Reina Torres

  Contents

  Foreword

  About the book

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Epilogue

  About Reina Torres

  Books by Reina Torres

  More Special Forces: Operation Alpha World Books

  Books by Susan Stoker

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  © 2018 ACES PRESS, LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  No part of this work may be used, stored, reproduced or transmitted without written permission from the publisher except for brief quotations for review purposes as permitted by law.

  This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This book 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 recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, please purchase your own copy.

  Dear Readers,

  Welcome to the Police and Fire: Operation Alpha Fan-Fiction world!

  If you are new to this amazing world, in a nutshell the author wrote a story using one or more of my characters in it. Sometimes that character has a major role in the story, and other times they are only mentioned briefly. This is perfectly legal and allowable because they are going through Aces Press to publish the story.

  This book is entirely the work of the author who wrote it. While I might have assisted with brainstorming and other ideas about which of my characters to use, I didn’t have any part in the process or writing or editing the story.

  I’m proud and excited that so many authors loved my characters enough that they wanted to write them into their own story. Thank you for supporting them, and me!

  READ ON!

  Xoxo

  Susan Stoker

  About the book

  For FBI Agents like Cruz Livingston and Vicente Bravo, their DNA was imprinted with Law and Order. Defending those in danger comes as easily as breathing.

  As a Special Agent for the FBI, Vicente was treated to a front row seat to see how those ‘with’ have an easier shake than those without. Instead of letting it shake his convictions, he’s worked hard to even the odds and make sure that Justice is blind to more than color, it’s also the size of their bank accounts and social status.

  Sloane King ticked all his boxes. Born a Texas Princess with money and beauty to spare, she didn’t want for anything… at least from what he could see. Debutante turned charity maven, everyone sings her praises, until someone wants her dead. Charged with keeping Sloane alive until the threat to her is neutralized, Vincente finds himself up to his neck in contradictions, including how much he wants more than just a few breathless moments with the feisty woman who challenges everything he’s come to believe about the world around him.

  As the search for the source of danger comes to a head, it will take the combined resources of San Antonio’s best first responders to protect and save the woman he’s come to love. Will that be enough?

  Susan Stoker – you have my thanks and lots of aloha for your friendship and your encouragement. Your heroes and heroines are always an inspiration and I hope that I’ve done your world justice. Mahalo-

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to Thuy Phan for her staunch support and sharp eyes. You were a huge help!

  And to Miriam Rivera and her lovely mother, Sanjuanita, for their lovely assist when my Spanish language skills came up wanting.

  Chapter 1

  Walking into the San Antonio FBI Field Office, Special Agent Vicente Bravo stared at the nearly empty room. Director Jack Travis walked into the room and stopped short. “What are you doing back, Bravo?” Taking a step to the side, he looked at his calendar. “You still have a few days of your vacation left.”

  Vicente let out a sigh. “I was tired of the beach.”

  “Tired,” the man’s voice was rough with disbelief, “of the beach.”

  He didn’t know why he’d said the words. It was stupid, but it was close enough to the truth.

  “The noise. My parents six of us. Their parents had a lot of children. And I… well, I can handle them a few at a time, but having them all together for a family reunion sounds great.”

  Holding his hands up in surrender, the Director shook his head. “No need to elaborate. I only have two and they produce enough noise on their own, but I worry about inner ear injury when their friends are over at the house.”

  Vicente tried to hide the instinctive grimace at the thought of a bunch of teenagers that close to him for hours on end. “So, it was easier to tell my family that you needed me back in the office.”

  “Well that works just fine for me, Bravo.”

  Maybe it was the way the director said his name with more than a hint of eager anticipation, or maybe it was the gleaming look in his eye, but either way, Vicente was starting to wonder why he didn’t just stay at the beach, grab a drink and find an umbrella with his name on it for a nice long nap.

  “What do you need?”

  Again, stupid question, but he’d asked it.

  “Come into my office.”

  Vicente followed the director and by habit closed the door behind him. He watched as the computer started up and brought up a browser and then continued on to YouTube.

  “Only the finest in surveillance for the FBI, Boss?”

  That earned him a pointed look. “Want to be the ‘Keeper of the Copier Room,’ Bravo?”

  “No, sir.”

  Leaning over his desk, Director Travis started typing in keywords with his pointer fingers.

  On a different day, Vicente could have ribbed his boss over the ineffective typing method, but he was already in enough warm water. There was no need to jump into the boiling pot beside it.

  “When I find the video, I’ll show you why the office is pretty much a ghost town at the moment but suffice to say that you literally walked in at the perfect moment.

  “You’ve been tracking down fugitives for the last few months, pulling in some great numbers, but I need you to shift to a side branch of the Human Trafficking Task Force for a little bit.”

  “What kind of side branch are you referring to, sir?”

  “Something popped up today and I was coming back to the office to see who I could pull in for a special assignment,” he gave him a big smile. “You’ll be working in connection with the task force, but not in the thick of things, so you won’t have to catch up with anything. What do you know about Sloane King?”

  Vincente felt like someone had shifted gears in their conversation. “Sloane King?”

  Director Travis nodded.

  Ticking off the salient points of what he knew took just a few seconds. “Texas Royalty. Old Money. Socialite. Philanthropist. If there’s a ball or a fundraiser where the wealthy and the glamorous are expected, she’ll be there.”

  He saw the director digest the information and a smile curled his lips.

  That couldn’t be good.

  It was never good.

&n
bsp; “I was asked to find a guard for Sloane. For the next few days at the very least. We have some indication that she may have been targeted in some way by the traffickers and we’ve been asked to assure her safety.”

  Vicente was sure he was suffering from a delayed reaction to heat stroke. That had to be it. He was delusional. Hearing voices.

  And yet, there was his director smiling at him as if he knew exactly what was going on in his head.

  No.

  Not this Special Agent.

  “You want me to spend my next few days doing what?” He gave his boss a look that spoke volumes. A whole encyclopedia. “You want me to babysit a Texas Beauty Queen?”

  Director Travis leaned against his desk, keeping his eyes trained on Vicente’s face. “She’s gorgeous, but as far as I know she doesn’t hold any titles.” A stranger might have thought the director guilty of some deadpan humor, but he was serious about the titles.

  After spending the better part of the last decade in the San Antonio Field Office he knew enough about the director not to challenge him on pageant knowledge. Both Addison Travis and Mary Louise Travis had held the title of Little Miss San Antonio and Miss San Antonio. Their mother Joan had made it all the way to Miss Texas before she married Jack. It was only a matter of time before the girls followed in their mother’s high-heeled footsteps.

  “Maybe I should have said debutante, but you know what I’m saying. Sloane King is a paragon in San Antonio, not to mention someone constantly in the public eye. Who would try to hurt her?”

  Leaning forward in his chair, the director reached for his mouse and clicked on the video he’d queued up.

  Vicente moved closer to the desk and leaned on the edge to watch.

  The dark screen flared white and then settled onto an image. After a strange stuttering of the image the video began to move. After a moment, the image was altered, tightened down by a frame that splashed a headline on the screen.

  TERRIFYING HIGHWAY CHASE

  A local news station’s emergency cut in coverage of the high-speed chase from that morning, leading out of San Antonio. The minivan that the police had been following for miles had already crashed into an embankment when the video cut to the footage and the site was littered with emergency personnel and vehicles.

  It wasn’t hard to find Sloane in the crowd. Her long sable-colored hair was pulled back into a ponytail and she was in the center of a group of women and a few police officers.

  Even with all the rank pins and chevrons decorating over a score of first responders and law enforcement in the area, Sloane looked like she was in control of the situation.

  What galled him was that no one seemed to find that the least bit odd. A young officer standing just off her shoulder was staring at her with an expression that could be construed as more than a hint of idol worship.

  Or worse, bold-faced desire.

  Rookie.

  The footage continued with the overly enthusiastic voice over from the ‘on-the-scene’ reporter and Vicente felt a pinch of irritation between his shoulder blades.

  “…before the first ambulance left the scene, homegrown Texas philanthropist, Sloane King, was onsite organizing help for the victims of what appears to be another sex-trafficking abduction thwarted by law enforcement. What the hell-”

  The already frenetic scene erupted into chaos as gunfire split the air.

  The young police officer at Sloane’s shoulder jerked back and began to drop as another volley split the air and Sloane grabbed at her upper arm.

  The rest of the footage played out before him in slow motion even though the image on the screen continued to play in real time. Sloane should have run like everyone else looking for cover or dropped down to the ground and hidden under anything she could find to try to avoid another hit. Instead, she lowered the officer to the concrete and covered him with her body. Police officers on scene returned fire and closed in around their compatriot, making a shield with their bodies. They had bullet-proof vests.

  Director Travis clicked the PAUSE button and then left the mouse alone on the desk and cleared his throat.

  “Before you even think of trying to pass this off, don’t. It’s your fault for coming back early from your vacation and walking in right after I had my ass handed to me.” He stretched his neck and tugged at his collar. “I just had a call from both the Mayor and the Governor’s offices. They have suggested in the strongest terms that the Task Force extends protection to Miss King.”

  “Protection from?”

  “Whoever shot at her today.”

  “What indication do you have that she was the target? How many other people were injured by the gunfire?”

  “Three,” Director Travis grudgingly admitted. “Besides the police officer, one of the EMTs took a bullet to the leg, and one of the suspects took a bullet to the gut.”

  “It could be as simple as that. Trying to silence one of the suspects before we could interrogate them.” Vicente looked back at the screen at the wall of police officers still visible in the final shot of the video. “There hasn’t been time for an investigation to know the exact target.”

  Director Travis gave him a single nod in answer.

  “Who’s in charge of that? I’d rather be out there looking for the shooter. I’m not one for babysitting socialites.”

  There was a pause before the director spoke again. “We’ve known each other long enough that I’m going to take that as you having a moment and not as an unhealthy dose of insubordination.” Sitting up close to his desk, he set his forearms on the edge. “I want you on this, Bravo. That’s all there is to it.”

  The Director nodded and turned away toward his computer. “You’ll meet up with her at the hospital. Agents Fry and Porter are there at the moment. They’ll join in on the investigation once you’re there.”

  The ‘moment’ Director Travis was speaking about may have gone on longer, but whatever sense of preservation left in Vicente, his love for his job, turned him around on his heel and moved him toward the door.

  He’d keep the princess safe, but if his boss thought he could be called off the search for the shooter, then working together as long as they had, hadn’t taught Jack Travis much about him. Not by a long shot.

  Sloane King laid her head back against the wall and let the world tumble by. The Emergency Floor at Feldspar Hospital was still teeming with people a few hours after the shooting.

  It wasn’t the first time she’d been to the Emergency Room in the course of her work. She’d seen and helped women after all kinds of terrifying and tragic moments in their lives.

  Held hands.

  Soothed crying children.

  Helped family make final arrangements for their loved ones.

  But this was the first time that she was the one getting medical treatment from an injury received during her work. Helping women and children navigate the scariest moments of their lives wasn’t just her vocation, it was a labor of love.

  Shifting on the bench, she winced. The bandage that was put in place at the scene of the accident hadn’t been changed yet, but she’d insisted that the women recovered in that morning’s raid were seen first.

  It should have been the natural progression of things, but she’d recognized one of her uncle’s people in the ER, trying to move her to the front of the line.

  Even after she’d tried to explain that she was happy to wait her turn given the triage priorities they’d received in the field, the staff had been nervous. She didn’t blame them. Glen McKinnon, her father’s closest friend and their almost ‘uncle,’ could get a dog to meow if he set his mind to it, but she’d assured the staff that as the head of the Hopeful Hearts Foundation that was footing the bill for the women brought in during the raid, she was more than capable of and willing to wait her turn.

  Maybe it was just her imagination, but over the last few minutes the din had finally begun to quiet as the police were joined by FBI in clearing the press from inside the hospital.

&n
bsp; She had no idea what time it was, her phone had been lost in the shuffle when gunfire had split the already noisy scene into frightened fragments of the crowd it had been.

  Just a short while ago she’d sat beside the wounded officer’s mother, holding her hand as the doctor came out to give her the prognosis. The bullet had done its damage to his shoulder, but he would survive. It was going to be a long road ahead and mother and son were all the family they had.

  Sloane made sure that his mother had a hotel room near to the hospital for the night and dinner delivered to her from a local restaurant. It was the least she could do for a woman who’d had a close call with losing her son.

  She’d lost family over and over again and remembered how lonely and alone it made her feel. She didn’t want that for anyone else.

  Not when she could do something about it.

  Now, alone in the hallway, Sloane was struggling to fight off the nagging pain in her arm. If someone didn’t call her in to see a doctor soon, she was likely to fall asleep right there.

  She wasn’t big on needles, and cold linoleum floors gave her the creeps, so if she could avoid it, that would be great.

  “Hey, lady.”

  She didn’t have to look to know who it was at the end of the hallway. Hildie Faraday, her sorority sister and best friend, was approaching. The rapid click of her Jimmy Choos was unmistakable in the echo of the hallway.