Wooden Nickels

Book 1: White Lightning series

by Debra Dunbar

Genres: Historical Fantasy; Steampunk

Synopsis

It's 1920's Baltimore. Prohibition. Those who sell and distribute liquor can become rich — or dead if the mob doesn't get their cut. The gangsters have taken over, and in organized crime the one weapon valued more than a Tommy gun is a mage. Welcome to the world of White Lightning.

A moonshine runner.
A mage for the mob.
And more misfortune than a blow-down at the speakeasy.

Hattie Malloy has two goals in life—get the hootch from warehouse to seller, and make sure no one finds out she can conjure illusions. But when her shipment of rum is attacked by pirates on the Chesapeake Bay and she needs to call on the mob for help, those two goals collide. Suddenly the safety of her family and friends rests on her helping a group of gangsters that she wants nothing to do with.

The mob is the only family that time pincher Vincent Calendo has ever known. When his boss Vito says he wants to expand his “stable” of mages, Vincent is tasked with finding unaffiliated, or free, pinchers and bringing them into the fold—willingly or not.

Can Hattie keep her talents a secret from Vincent or will she lose the freedom her parents have sacrificed everything to give her?

Release date: September 18, 2018

Print pages: 360

Sample

Chapter 1

 

Baltimore, May 1926

 

 

Hattie held her breath, tightening her illusion on the bottles of brandy rattling in the back of the old Model T Runabout. A few more blocks and she’d leave the city behind as well as the worry that someone might see, or hear, the very illegal booze in the rear of the truck.

 

Alcoholic beverages weren’t technically banned in Maryland due to the governor declining to enforce prohibition, but getting caught hauling hooch across state lines would land her in jail. And there were plenty of people in the city looking to spot someone heading for the dry states with a shipment and turn them in for a reward.

 

Breathing a sigh of relief, she rounded the last bend in the road leaving Baltimore. The overgrown grass on either side of the Middle Branch was high enough to conceal the truck from anyone’s view except a few stray geese, so she released the illusion and shifted gears.

 

Illusion. Pinching light as it was called. This was her magical specialty, her gift and her curse. Casting an illusion was never what she would’ve called “easy”. There was a physical strain the magic inflicted on her, a cost. And there were dangers if she got caught—dangers far greater than feeling as if her insides were being twisted into a knot.

 

The truck transmission made a horrible grinding noise. “Aye…quiet, you!” she grumbled, a hint of her Irish parents’ accents still haunting her words as she wrestled the vehicle into gear. The Runabout jumped forward, bouncing over a tree branch jutting out onto the dirt road. Hattie yelped, the bottles in the bed of the truck clanking together in a frenzied rattle. Swearing under her breath, she peered over her shoulder to check the six neatly stacked cases of brandy. When Jake was alive, he’d stuff the crates with straw—as much to dull the jolts from the tailbone-torturing back roads leading to the Bay as to offer the clients a convenient means to hide the booze. Sometimes he’d cut the bottoms out of olive oil bottles and sleeve them around the gin and brandy, stamping Medina Oil of Greece on the sides of the crates, just for added protection in case the G-men came around.

 

That was back in the early years of Prohibition, when the Feds were more concerned with spilling the inventories of whole breweries into rivers and muscling down the traffic coming in from Canada. Back when little operations like theirs on the Chesapeake Bay remained unnoticed. Back before the mobs took over.

 

Back before Jake took a slug to the head.

 

Now it was just Hattie, Lizzie, and Raymond.

 

She pulled up to a row of wood-and-tin shacks lined up along the south bank of Curtis Creek, and wrestled the truck into park, waving at the handful of dark-skinned children who lingered by the side of the creek. One boy had a fishing pole angled over the water, kicking his feet as his friends waved back at Hattie from their perch beside the creek. Hattie killed the motor and stepped out of the car, sucking in a lungful of clean springtime air. Clean, in a relative manner of speaking—the aroma along Curtis Creek swam with notes of dead fish and tobacco smoke.

 

She looked toward Baltimore, pulling up her trousers a little as she leaned against the truck door. A plume of dark fog rose from the city, hanging like a ghost, swallowing up the coal dust from the mills and factories to the east. Dead fish and cigar smoke were a bouquet by comparison. Smiling, she turned her back on the dread pall of coal dust. Soon she’d be out on the water, where the air was cooler, cleaner, and filled with freedom.

 

A deep voice boomed from the row of shanties, “You’re early!”

 

Hattie peered over her shoulder to find a tall, thick man in overalls, approaching with a grin. His dark skin glistened with sweat despite the mild, late springtime temperatures, but Raymond always sported a fine sheen of perspiration, even in the winter. That was his furnace, he’d say, chugging away deep inside his broad chest and barrel-wide belly.

 

“Wanted to put some road behind us before the sun was high,” she replied, moving for the driver’s side door.

 

“Uh huh. Anyone sniffin’ around Lizzie’s?”

 

“No.” She shrugged. “I’ve nothing better to do and might as well move the merchandise. It’s doing no one any good gathering dust.”

 

He nodded. “You, uh…want me to drive?”

 

She got the subtext. A white woman driving a black man would raise eyebrows. But Raymond was her friend, the closest thing she’d ever had to a brother. Hattie wasn’t about to bow to what others expected in terms of who should be driving who. Or anything else, for that matter.

 

“I’ll be providin’ a full-service treatment today. You just sit back and contemplate your lot in life while I do the driving.” She shot Raymond a wry smirk. “If you play your cards right, I’ll even let you pilot your own boat,” she added as they climbed into the truck.

 

Raymond released a thunderous laugh that shook Hattie’s chest. “Thank you, kindly!”

 

She coerced the engine of the Runabout into doing its job after about three tries, then hammered the gears into a forward motion as Raymond winced.

 

“How’s the little one?” Hattie asked once they were about a quarter-mile down the riverside road.

 

“A pint-sized terror. How can a little bean like that make so much damn noise?”

 

“Keeping you awake, is he?”

 

Raymond pursed his lips, then answered, “More the missus than myself.”

 

“Hardly seems fair, now.”

 

“That’s what she tells me. Naw, the baby’s a little ball of miracles. Just wish he’d stop that damn cryin’ for a hot second.”

 

Hattie turned onto the crossroad. “Sounds like the colic. Maybe you should try some chamomile and basil.”

 

“The what, now?”

 

“Make a tea of it. Soak it in a rag and let the little one suckle on’t. Calms the stomach and gets the fluids moving in the right direction.”

 

Raymond pivoted in his seat. “Didn’t think you had any brothers or sisters.”

 

The mirth on her face faded. “I don’t. It’s…just something I picked up.”

 

Raymond continued his pivot and spied out the back of the truck at the crates of bottled brandy.

 

“How many you got back there?” he asked.

 

“Six crates.”

 

He shook his head and released a sound, something between a tsk and a grunt that Hattie had learned was his way of communicating polite disappointment.

 

“The truck can handle more than twice that,” he grumbled.

 

“Then they’d overtop the sides of the bed.”

 

“So, tie them down.”

 

Hattie sighed. “That’s not the point, and you know it.”

 

“Old Jake could fit twenty cases. One good run to the Bay. He just took it easy on the clutch, is all.”

 

She snapped, “Aye, and how’d that brilliant scheme work out for him?”

 

Raymond lifted his enormous brow, sending trickles of sweat down the sides of his face. “That’s how it’s gonna be?” he grumbled.

 

“Sorry. It’s just…” She could say that it was harder for her to pinch light inside the city, thanks to all the eyes, all the sounds and smells, all the attention. That it was easier for her to cast an illusion over the back of the truck when all a passerby could see was the top two inches of the crates. That pushing herself too hard in a full-bore light pinch was a fine way to end up passed out and throwing up blood.

 

But none of those reasons passed her lips. Although Raymond was the best friend she had, he didn’t know what she was, or what she could do. And she wanted to keep it that way.

 

Raymond cleared his throat and turned fully forward. “Don’t mind, no how. Money’s in the incomin’ shipment, not the outgoin’. Any word from down the coast?”

 

“Lizzie’s waiting to hear from the Baltimore Crew. Her man on the inside’s got a full dance card, from what she tells me, but he’ll have something for us soon. As long as the good folk up to New York City are thirsty for liquor, and Governor Ritchie keeps our fair state thumbing its nose at Congress, we’ll have business on the Bay. So, don’t you worry about’t.”

 

Driving the truck around the last inlet of Curtis Creek, she headed toward the well-sequestered Winnow’s Slip, a ramshackle wharf running parallel to several boat houses and warehouses, the existence of which never landed on the ledgers of upright, law-abiding citizens. Raymond kept his boat in one of these boat houses, purchased for a handful of coin and barely running. He’d spent months re-decking the craft, rebuilding its engine until it made five knots and better. The boat was an eyesore, an outright shambles, and no one spent more than half a blink considering it.

 

Which was perfect for running hooch up and down the Chesapeake.

 

As the line of tin roofs slipped into view around the bend, Hattie swerved hard right to keep from colliding with a car tear-assing up the lane. Swearing out loud, she laid on the brakes, Raymond reaching a meaty arm across her chest and holding her fast against her seat.

 

Hattie caught her breath and peered out the driver’s side window, ready to release a string of vulgarities fit to curl the bonnet of any Baptist mother, when she spotted the pale, hawk-nosed face of Little Teague.

 

“Watch out,” Raymond grumbled.

 

Gripping the wheel, Hattie sucked in a breath. With gathered calm, she announced, “Aye, Teague Bannon! You’re ready to put one or both of us permanently out of business.”

 

The man ran a sleeve over his forehead as he eyed the two of them. “Sorry,” he muttered. “Launching farther up the Bay today. And you should, too.”

 

One of his associates leaned forward in the passenger seat, the soot on his face pooling away from the eyes, giving the man a ghoulish cast. He was one of Little Teague’s lackeys. Teague had inherited the family business from his father, Big Teague, who’d founded the Solomons Island Boys shortly after Prohibition took hold. They ran barrels into Baltimore from Richmond and the Carolinas—up to three hauls a week. Which made them the most successful rum-runners on the Bay.

 

Which also made them the competition.

 

“What’s got your trousers in a lather, now?” Hattie smirked.

 

Teague leaned out the window, peering over his shoulder toward Winnow’s Slip. “I’m tellin’ you this out of good faith, ’cause there’s more than enough traffic down the coast for the pair of us, and we don’t need no bad blood between our organizations.”

 

“What is it, then?” she pressed. “Spit it out.”

 

Another look over his shoulder. “G-men are all up and down the Slip. Plainclothes, but you can smell them out easy enough.”

 

Hattie’s stomach dropped a few feet. “What, Treasury men?”

 

He nodded. “If you have business today…” he pointed to the bed of her truck, “…I’d take it downstream.”

 

Though the governor of Maryland had decided to ignore the Volstead Act, the Feds still clamped down on anything leaving its borders with zeal. Hattie bit her lip, wondering what had made the law take notice of this tiny wharf in the middle of nowhere. Someone must have tipped them off. And here she’d been about to drive right on in with a truck full of brandy.

 

“Where are you off to, then?” she asked.

 

“North, to Lord Baltimore’s.”

 

She nodded. Lord Baltimore’s Landing was the nearest friendly launch for people in their profession. One could find a boat there for hire, if one had to touch-and-go on account of the Feds. The only other suitable spot within a half day’s drive would be McComb’s well to the south.

 

Hattie forced one of her well-practiced smiles across her lips, and said, “Well, I thank you for your courtesy.”

 

Little Teague waved off her comment. “Just get that ticker turned around and back on the main roads. Winnow’s ain’t safe today.”

 

“I’ll buy you a drink for this later,” Hattie offered as he pulled his torso back into his cab. “Long as I sell these, first.”

 

He gazed at her, his face filling with a mix of interest and conflict. Hattie was never any good at this sort of charm. Feather-smoothing wit was more her strength, especially when words and fists were about to be exchanged. But she knew Little Teague had seen past her trousers and farming shirt, underneath the strawberry-blonde bangs she’d cropped just so they’d hide her eyes. It wasn’t any sort of notice she’d wanted, but if she had it, she’d use it.

 

He nodded twice. “Good luck, Malloy.”

 

Teague gunned his engine, spinning the skinny tires against the loose gravel of the lane.

 

Hattie lingered over her wheel, staring into space.

 

Raymond asked, “You trust that little river rat?”

 

“I don’t see any Feds,” she whispered. “Which means they’re probably there.”

 

“Why today, I wonder?”

 

“Better we find out now than when we’re inbound with a half-dozen barrels from Jamaica.”

 

Raymond chuckled. “True enough. So, if they’re beating feet to Lord’s…”

 

“McComb’s is our only real choice,” she said.

 

“Suits me. I got a friend at McComb’s. Won’t cost Lizzie but maybe a couple fins and a bottle of something older than four months.”

 

She nodded. “McComb’s it is, then.”

 

The ride down the waterside roads was teeth-jarring and slow, and they made terrible time reaching the harbor just north of Annapolis.

 

“Busy day,” Raymond grunted as Hattie eased the truck onto the patch of short grass nearest the boat houses, sidling alongside two of the half-dozen automobiles already gathered.

 

“Looks that way.”

 

They stepped out of the truck and wound their way to the bed.

 

“Your friend easy to find?” she asked.

 

Raymond didn’t answer.

 

Nor did Hattie ask again.

 

They both stood rigid as two men in long coats and dull gray fedoras approached. One of the two had a pen pad in his hand. The other, a ledger. They both were packing heat, holsters slipping into view as their coats flipped wide with their strides.

 

“You steady?” Raymond whispered.

 

“As a boulder. You?”

 

“Pissin’ myself.”

 

The G-men lifted hands in unison to flag them down, though they had little more to do than simply stand there as they approached. The taller of the two Treasury men, a lean man with dark hair, sniffled and cleared his throat.

 

With a cough, he said, “What’s your business here?”

 

Raymond pulled his hands in front of him, crossing them at the wrists, and tucked his head. It was a maneuver Hattie’d seen him execute several times before when face-to-face with any sort of person who might take offense to a colored man with an opinion.

 

“Delivery to the Eastern Shore,” she answered.

 

The shorter of the two, a ruddy faced brute with a double-chin, spat, “Delivering what?”

 

“Oil,” Hattie replied.

 

The tall man peered over the bed of the truck, and with the subtlest of gestures, Hattie pinched the light around the brandy cases. She wasn’t as close to the cases as she’d like to be. Every inch of distance between her and her illusions meant more effort. Which meant more sickness once it was over. It was too late to close in now. Any motion toward those bottles could be construed as ill intent, and might even draw a gun from the G-men’s holsters.

 

The man’s eyes swept up and down the bed of the truck. She could feel his gaze on her illusion, rolling like a ball up and down the fabric of the pinched light. Just as the nausea began to swell inside her guts, the tall man scribbled something on his pad and turned away.

 

“Looks in order,” he declared as he took a step back.

 

Hattie released a breath and waited for the right moment to drop the illusion.

 

“Hang on,” the double-chin blurted. “What kind of oil?”

 

The tall man shook his head a couple times, then turned with a lifted brow.

 

“Olive oil. You know. For cooking?” Hattie told him.

 

Short and ruddy took a step toward the truck, reaching for the crates. Hattie redoubled her light pinch, hoping he didn’t pull the bottle fully out of the crate.

 

He did.

 

Her stomach twisted into a fiery knot as she invested the full weight of her powers onto the illusion, now manifesting it into two dimensions…sight and touch.

 

The short man held the bottle up to the sunlight. His gaze pressed hard into her illusion, sending shocks of pain into her chest. But she maintained focus, ensuring the man saw green glass with golden oil, not an amber bottle of embarrassingly young brandy.

 

He lifted the bottle to his face, giving it a sniff.

 

Three dimensions.

 

Hattie whimpered as the illusion flooded the man’s nostrils with the aroma of olive oil.

 

Don’t taste it. Don’t taste it. That fourth dimension would be too much for her to handle at this distance. She’d pass out. And probably wake up in the hoosegow.

 

The man drew in a second sniff, then a third.