Peggy Chambers "Views from the Hammock" site

I’ve been working on the third and final novel set on Sandhill Island. I promise, I’m working on it, (really) and it has taken a while. It is exciting and brings back several of the characters from the other books. Here’s a taste.

Smugglers of Sandhill Island

Sandhill Island III

Peggy Chambers

Prologue

            Cody Brown owed his drug dealer, Joey, a lot of money. He wasn’t even sure how much with interest and everything. But he did know how desperate the situation was.

Cody never had the urge to make an honest living and work hard like his mother, or his sister. That was too much trouble. There were other ways to get money than the daily grind of nine to five. That was for schmucks. And he wasn’t a schmuck. Cody thought his sister had always been the favorite in the family. Maybe she wasn’t, but she did keep her nose to the grindstone. He always told her she was the favorite because she was a girl, Mom liked her best, and so did their Uncle Ralph. He sounded like a snot-nosed kid when he said such things, his uncle told him and suggested he keep that to himself. That made things worse. And now and then in an argument, the favoritism would come up.

            Cody was always in trouble. He ran drugs for a dealer who now wanted his money back. Cody was unsure what had happened to all of the dealer’s money. He had consumed some of the product himself—and maybe shared some with some friends—so sometimes he was short when he took the proceeds to his boss. It wasn’t like he stole the money. Maybe that was what Joey was miffed about. The dealer always told him the excessive debt had to do with the magic of compound interest. Whatever that meant. Joey said he accumulated interest on the unpaid balance. But whatever the problem, it was time to pay up and Cody didn’t have the money.

He worked for Joey by distributing the product to other addicts like himself. He sold most of it. But what did Joey expect. Everyone knew you couldn’t trust an addict with drugs. He felt he had to make sure the product was as good as he told the customers, so a little sampling now and then couldn’t hurt.

Drug dealers knew exactly what they were doing when they turned a normal person into an addict. When the addict was desperate enough to do anything for a fix, the dealer could be relied on to give them a job. They gave them product to sell to someone else, and when they made a profit, the dealer would pay them with a fix for their addiction. It was the simplest form of economics, supply and demand. Not only did it show a profit; it created new demand. As business went, it was brilliant. As humanity went, it was the devil’s work.

Cody couldn’t keep his hand out of the cookie jar. He needed a different job—maybe something legal. But that probably would not happen in his lifetime. He was an addict with an expensive habit. And now he needed money, and he only had one place to get it—from his sister, Mel.

I promise to work faster. I hope to have it finished and to the editor by the beginning of the year. Don’t desert me. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I have enjoyed working on it.

What are you reading/writing/this week? What are your plans for the holidays?