The Rum Runner by Christine Marciniak

Author:Christine Marciniak [Marciniak, Christine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: 1920s; Prohibition; Rum Running; Police; Veteran; New Jersey; Fisherman
Publisher: The Wild Rose Press
Published: 2019-11-18T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twelve

The Nagy boys showed up so quickly after school that Hank wondered if they’d even bothered to stop home and tell their mother where they were going. He didn’t want to be the cause of any extra anxiety for Irene. She had enough to worry about.

“Does your mother know where you are?” he asked as they clambered over the gangway into the boat.

“Yes, sir, Captain,” Ernst said in his boyish treble, his dark hair falling into his eyes. “We even changed out of our school clothes. But we ran fast to get here. The more work we can do, the more we can make to help Mama, right?”

“That’s right.” Hank suppressed a smile.

“Should we swab the deck again, Captain, sir?” Kristof, the younger of the two, asked eagerly.

“Well, no. It doesn’t need it again quite yet.” He’d been thinking about what job he could have the two boys do. Obviously, they couldn’t repair the knocking sound in the engine, and he couldn’t have them inspecting the trawlers. “Today I need you to check our nets for holes.”

Kristof frowned, looking at the net on the deck, which obviously was made mostly of holes.

“Extra holes that aren’t supposed to be there,” he clarified, and Kristof nodded.

“What do we do if we find one?” Ernst asked. “Do we fix it?”

“Do you know how?” They might. They were Tomas’s sons, after all.

“Yes sir, Captain,” Ernst answered proudly, and then his face darkened. “I mean Papa showed us how, but we never really did it on our own.”

Of course they hadn’t; they weren’t even ten years old yet.

“When you find a hole, you come and get me and show me how you’d mend it. I’ll let you know if you did it right or not.” He figured he’d have to do most of the mending himself but didn’t mind it.

The rest of the crew took to the Nagy boys right away, treating them like beloved mascots. Before long he noticed Swede sitting by the boys, patiently showing them how to mend the nets. With the boys in good hands, Hank went up to the bridge to organize things for his next trip.

Even as he sorted through charts and polished the brass equipment, he couldn’t get Alice Grady out of his mind. He never should have kissed her the other day; it made him want more, much more. And he couldn’t have it. First of all, Alice deserved a whole man, not someone as beset by demons as he was, and second of all, she was a cop, and he was a rum runner. That was a recipe for disaster if ever there was one. Either he would have to lie to her, or she would have to ignore her duty to the law, if they were going to make things work. He didn’t see either of those things happening.

Why had she come into his life? Only to remind him of the things he couldn’t have? It had been so easy to talk to her.

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