The Bootlegger's Goddaughter Read online

  Copyright © 2017 Melodie Campbell

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Campbell, Melodie, 1955–, author

  The bootlegger’s goddaughter / Melodie Campbell.

  (Rapid Reads)

  Issued also in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-4598-1413-4 (pbk.).—ISBN 978-1-4598-1414-1 (pdf ).—ISBN 978-1-4598-1415-8 (epub)

  I. Title. II. Series: Rapid reads

  PS8605.A54745B66 2017 C813'.6 C2016-904470-X

  C2016-904471-8

  First published in the United States, 2017

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2016950243

  Summary: In this work of crime fiction, Gina works to uncover a bootlegging operation that threatens to jeopardize her wedding. (RL 3.0)

  Orca Book Publishers gratefully acknowledges the support for its publishing programs provided by the following agencies: the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.

  Cover design by Jenn Playford

  Cover photography by iStock.com

  ORCA BOOK PUBLISHERS

  www.orcabook.com

  For Alison and her crow.

  CONTENTS

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ONE

  M y cell phone rang, and it was Nico.

  “Where are you?” he said. His tenor voice was a tad strident.

  “At the corner of King and James. Hold on a sec while I put something down.”

  I was carrying too much, as usual. My arms ached from the weight. I placed the reusable shopping bag I’d been carrying on the sidewalk. Then I tucked my small handbag into the top of it. I leaned back against a storefront window with the phone to my ear, drinking in the winter sun that shone down on my face.

  It was a beautiful December day in Hamilton, also known as The Hammer. You could hardly smell the smog from the steel plants in the distance. The temperature was just above freezing, with no snow in the forecast. Santa might have a bit of trouble with that, but I was happy. My wedding was in three days. I didn’t need crappy weather or anything else to mess with it.

  “What’s up?” I asked my favorite cousin. Nico is a few years younger than me. He owns the interior-design store next door to my jewelry shop.

  “Have you heard about the storm?” he said.

  “What storm?” I looked up into the sky. It was bright blue, and the sun was big and shiny.

  “Not here,” said Nico. “Starting late tomorrow, hitting the eastern seaboard.”

  I hadn’t noticed the skinny young guy until he was right at my side. “Lady, you got a light?” he said.

  My attention slipped from the phone call to his unshaven face. He was wearing dirty jeans and a ragged black band T-shirt. He seemed vaguely familiar. “Sorry, I don’t—hey!”

  Quick as a weasel, the creep grabbed my shopping bag. He turned and ran.

  “Stop!” I yelled. I took off after him, phone still in my hand.

  “Gina, what’s happening?” Nico’s voice sounded far, far away.

  The kid ran fast, whipping around the other walkers on James Street. I followed as quickly as I could in dress boots, which wasn’t fast enough. Why the hell did I wear heels today?

  Down James we both ran, weaving between startled pedestrians. I saw him tangle with a homeless man, spinning him around. I dodged an old lady with a trundle cart and smacked into a younger one pushing an umbrella stroller.

  “Sorry,” I said, untangling myself from her arm. “Sorry.”

  The race continued. I ran past the homeless man, clipping him with my elbow. “Sorry,” I sang out.

  The light turned red in front of us, but my quarry ignored it. He sprinted through the intersection without slowing down. I cursed, slowed and looked left and right for cars before picking up the chase.

  My wraparound coat was wide open now, flowing like a cape behind me. I felt it catch on something, then release. “Oops, sorry,” I mumbled to a lamppost.

  My target swung around a corner and onto a side street. I peeled around the corner after him. He dashed across the street and looked back.

  “Hey!” I yelled again, from my side of the road.

  I could almost see him smile. I leapt out into the street, determined not to lose him.

  Honk!

  “Sorry,” I mumbled to the car that had missed me by inches.

  “Watch where you’re going, moron!” yelled the driver of the car.

  I patted the lid of the trunk with my left hand as I ran by.

  In retrospect, it probably sounded like a smack.

  By this time, the skinny kid was way ahead of me. I vaulted up onto the sidewalk, caught my heel on the curb and lost my balance. Damn! By the time I got upright, he was crossing John Street. No way could I catch up.

  I doubled over, hands on knees for balance, gasping for air.

  He stopped for a moment to look back. Then he raised his arm and waved.

  “That’s not fair!” I yelled after the fleeing figure. “I’m supposed to be the thief around here, dammit.”

  TWO

  I was a tad miffed when Nico picked me up in his little red Beetle half an hour later.

  “What did he steal?” said Nico.

  “Everything,” I said, sliding into the passenger seat. “My wallet, credit cards, Christmas presents. Even my car keys. Shit.” I slammed the door shut. “Thank God I had my cell phone in my hand.”

  This really sucked. I’d wasted a whole day of shopping. I’d also lost a pile of money and the gifts. And now I would have to spend a whole lot of time canceling cards and getting new Id. Right before my wedding and Christmas.

  Not to mention replacing those car keys. “I have another set of keys at the store. Let’s go there first, and I’ll come back for my car later.”

  Nico nodded. He seemed preoccupied. He drove the Beetle down to Cannon, made a left and headed for our shops in Hess Village.

  His silence concerned me. “What’s up, Nico?”

  “Your mom is in New York right now, right?”

  “Yup. She’s doing a little Christmas shopping before flying here for the wedding.” Mom and Phil live in Florida. They stopped off in New York to visit his family before coming up here to be with mine.

  His thin face contorted into a worried frown. “I was talking to Luca. Did you hear me before? There’s a big storm expected along the eastern seaboard. It may affect all flights.”

  I groaned. My mother was flying in on Thursday. “Do they know when it’s going to hit?”

  “It’s just off the Carolina coastline right now. Thing is, it looks like it will be an ice storm.”

  This sounded ominous. But rather fitting news on what was turning out to be a totally crap day.

  ***

  We stopped for espresso and cannoli on the way to Hess Village. After that Nico dropped me off at my store, Ricci Jewelers. Tiff, working alone there this week, was wiping down counters with glass cleaner. I waved a hand as I walked by her toward the back office.

  �
��What are you doing here?” she said, lifting her head.

  “Nothing. Just getting my other set of keys from the desk.” I stood in front of my office. Crap. My locked office.

  “Tiff, can you open the door? I haven’t got my keys.”

  “Sure,” she said. I watched her cross the room. Tiff is Nico’s younger sister, but they don’t look much alike. At least, not since Nico starting bleaching his hair blond. Tiff is big into piercings, whereas Nico avoids any kind of pain. Tiff tends to wear black a lot. Nico likes wild colors. They both use the same black eyeliner though.

  Once in the office, I went immediately to the desk. And stopped. And sighed.

  “Can you unlock the desk too, please?”

  She smiled and moved forward.

  The other keys were exactly where they should be. I snatched them and shut the desk drawer.

  Tiff was still standing there. Something in her manner put me on alert.

  “What’s the matter?”

  She shifted uneasily. “Your aunt Vera called. She said Zia Sophia saw a crow.”

  I groaned. “Not one of her crazy omens.” Zia Sophia is famous in the family. Correction. She is infamous.

  Tiff shrugged. “Just passing it on. She said to tell you.”

  “You know she’s a nutcase, Tiff.”

  “She thinks it has something to do with the wedding.”

  “Oh for—” I used my arms for emphasis. “I’m not having my wedding tainted by crackpot omens from an elderly great-aunt who clearly has reality issues. She doesn’t even live here, for crissake.”

  Zia Sophia has never made it to the “new world.” Her duty is to terrorize the Sicilian end of the family. She takes that role very seriously.

  The first thing you notice about Zia Sophia? Black. Dressed in black from head to toe. She is the only one in the family who still sports the old-widow look. I’ve only met her once, when we visited Sicily over a decade ago. Even then, her face had the look of a wizened apple. I was never a fan of omens, so I kept my distance from her. Tiff was too young to remember much about her. But Nico was terrified of her.

  “You think the distance makes a difference?” Tiff looked relieved.

  “For crissake, Tiff ! She saw a bird in Palermo. How the heck could it bother us here?”

  Honestly. It was silly, but superstitions go back a long way, and they don’t have to make a lot of sense. Crows mean bad luck in our culture. Some even think a crow is a sign that someone is going to die. We have a more liberal interpretation in the family. For us, it usually means that something bad is going to happen.

  Which is sort of redundant, because let’s face it. You don’t need an omen to predict that. Something bad happens to Nico and me on a weekly basis. Not to mention I’d just been robbed.

  But I didn’t need another thing to worry about. I waved to Tiff as I left the store.

  I didn’t have to walk far. The Painted Parrot was right next door. You have to know something about Nico to appreciate the name of his interior-design store. He inherited a parrot from our late great-uncle Seb a few weeks ago. The store is named after the parrot. Pauly isn’t a very nice parrot, although he is colorful. He also uses very colorful language. Pauly is currently doing the country-music circuit with my best friend. Lainy McSwain and the Lonesome Doves now have a demented parrot in their act. Audiences seem to love it. But The Painted Parrot lives on in Steeltown.

  The other thing about Nico is he tends to be a tad eccentric. I already mentioned the eyeliner. And the bleached-blond hair. Today he was wearing burgundy jeans with a slim black turtleneck. Not your standard blue-collar outfit in The Hammer.

  As soon as he saw me, his eyes went wide. “Zia Sophia saw a crow.”

  I sighed. “Know it. Tiff told me.”

  “Do you think—”

  “No, I don’t think, Nico. And neither should you. Omens are ridiculous. We have other things to worry about.” Real things. Like my car, and stolen purse and presents.

  My phone started to sing the theme from The Godfather movie. That was my uncle Sammy’s signature ringtone.

  “Gina, I have something for you. You want to come down to the chicken coop right away.”

  “Um…I don’t actually have my car with me at the moment.”

  “Why don’t you—oh, never mind. Get Nico to bring you. I want to talk to him too.”

  Uh-oh. I clicked off.

  THREE

  Sammy is my favorite uncle. He is also my godfather Vince’s underboss, which means a lot in The Hammer. I love them both. I hate their business. You don’t get to choose your family, as I am fond of reminding my fiancé, Pete.

  I do, however, get to choose my business, which is appraising and selling gemstones. As a rule, I stay way far away from the shady side. Well, I try. In this family, it’s tough.

  The chicken coop is less than ten miles away, so it never takes long to get there. Of course, this time Nico was driving.

  “I don’t understand why you drive so slow.” Damn, I was irritable. Getting mugged by a skinny punk will do that to a girl.

  Nico gripped the wheel in his customary fashion. Like it was a lifeline, and he had just been thrown from the Titanic. “Not everyone is as reckless as you are, Gina.”

  “I’m not reckless,” I said, getting miffed. “Why does everyone say that? I don’t take unnecessary risks.”

  Nico laughed out loud. “I’m making a list.”

  “Don’t even go there,” I warned. Last thing I needed was to be reminded of everything I had done in the past that had gone wrong. We might never make it out of the car.

  Finally, we pulled onto the gravel lane leading to the cottage. Yes, it’s a small two-room cottage, not a chicken coop. Years ago some relative kept chickens there. That and a small bribe will get you a low tax bill.

  The lane wasn’t empty. Sammy’s Mercedes was parked close to the cottage. Nico pulled up right behind it.

  I opened the car door and stepped out.

  “Look at all these deep ruts in the driveway,” I said, trying not to turn an ankle. “What’s been going on here?”

  “Heavy trucks,” said Nico. “I heard something about a big delivery.”

  Yet another thing I didn’t want to know about.

  We both made our way around the side. The sun was still bright, but the lake looked cold. No turquoise color here. The water was deep and dark.

  I reached the screen door and pulled it open.

  “Over here, Gina,” said a voice.

  The room was dim, lit by one light-bulb hanging on a wire from the rafters. Coming in from brilliant sunshine made the blindness worse. I walked in a few steps and stopped to let my eyes adjust.

  “Hi, Uncle Sammy,” said Nico, behind me.

  Sammy grunted. I could see him now, sitting at the wooden table to the side. In this poor lighting, he was a ringer for Woody Allen.

  A little machine the size of a toaster perched on the table in front of him. There were several identical machines on the floor next to him.

  “What’s that?” I said, peering at it.

  “It’s a counterfeit currency finder,” he said. “See? You put a bill under this light, and it will tell you if it’s counterfeit or not.”

  I watched him demonstrate with a twenty-dollar bill.

  “That one’s good. See?”

  I could see that it was good, but I didn’t get the point. “Why do you have all these machines here?”

  “It’s good business, Gina,” said Nico. “Banks pay a lot for these machines. So do small businesses like convenience stores. That way, they don’t get stuck with a lot of fake bills.”

  I still didn’t get it. Last I knew (and much to my regret) we were in the business of printing counterfeit money. Not selling machines to detect it.

  Or were we?

  “Are you still importing that counterfeit Canadian money from Canton?” I said. “I thought we were out of that business, because the quality sucked so bad.”

 
“We are out of that business,” said Sammy. “Besides. We aren’t importing coffins anymore either.”

  The counterfeit money had been hidden in the false bottoms of several imported coffins.

  “Why aren’t we importing coffins—or wait. Do I really want to know?” I was pretty sure I didn’t.

  “The Fly By Night Funeral is currently on hold,” Sammy said. “Larry, the retired embalmer at the nursing home, was apparently demented.”

  “No shit,” said Nico, shaking his head sadly.

  Sammy continued. “He was becoming a problem for the ladies, if you get my drift.”

  “Randy,” said Nico. “Kept hiding in bedrooms and popping out to surprise them.”

  “Minus pajamas,” Sammy added.

  I groaned.

  “So they cut him off Viagra. And then he tried to permanently stiffen his own weenie with—”

  “Enough!” I put both hands over my ears. “Too much information.”

  Sammy gave a satisfied cluck. He usually knows how to make me stop asking questions.

  I did a quick scan of the cabin. Now that my eyes had adjusted to the dimness, I could see something blocking the far wall. “What are those cases over there?” I asked.

  “That’s your wedding champagne,” said Sammy. “The reception hall includes wine for the night. But Vince wanted real French champagne for everyone to toast the bride.”

  “Veuve Clicquot,” I said, taking a closer look at the labels. “Wow. That’s expensive. I’m impressed.”

  “He made a special deal with this importer…actually, you probably don’t want to know this part,” Sammy said.

  He got that right.

  I turned back to find Nico testing a twenty at one of the counterfeit catchers. I was still bothered by those little machines. Why the heck would my family be in the counterfeit-detection business? I mean, how much was the markup on those little machines? Surely not enough to interest the syndicate.

  Thing is, I was trained to “follow the money.” There had to be money in this somehow. Real money.

  Wait a minute. A light came on. Ping! A big humongous floodlight of a light.

  “Holy shit. You’re selling machines that have been fixed so they won’t detect our counterfeit bills,” I said.