Big Easy Bonanza

pregnancy to go full-term. Nearly everything had gone wrong that
could
go wrong, and Bitty had spent the last two months in bed. But it was supposed to be longer than that. The baby was early, a wrinkled and pruny thing, even more so than Henry, but to Bitty’s mind the most gorgeous child ever born, more beautiful than Helen of Troy, after whom she had named her.
    The loss of her, that sudden, disastrous wrench, had been far worse even than this net of despair that enshrouded her now, the cumulative pain of a lifetime. This was a dull, dismal, hopeless misery. Losing her daughter was a sharp stab in the vitals.
    It was worse than anything that had happened in her childhood. And sometimes, as a child, Bitty would think,
Nothing could be worse than this, nothing unless I am taken prisoner by alien forces who rip my eyeballs out and tie me up and let wild animals gnaw on me whenever they’re hungry, biting off little bits of me until I have no fingers or toes or ears.
    When things were that bad she would lie in the dusty dark under her bed. She did not know why she went there, just that it was a good place to think about whether she would like to die or not.

2
    The sheets were torn from Skip’s unfolded sofa, every drawer of her dresser dumped on the floor. The back window was broken. In the kitchen it was the same, only worse—all the drawers dumped and a few glasses smashed for good measure. Skip’s feet crunched on their shards.
    “Shit!” she yelled, loud enough for Jimmy Dee to hear her in his outbuilding. But he wouldn’t be there, he’d still be at work. Frantically, she picked up her lamp, set it back on its table, just to be doing something, to stave off the panic that was rising in her. Whoever had hit her had done this, had gotten into her apartment. She could see how too—by putting up Jimmy Dee’s ladder in the back, maybe wearing workmen’s clothes, and busting out the window with something wrapped in cloth to muffle the noise. The back courtyard was kept locked, but you could climb over the gate if you were bold, and Jimmy Dee kept a ladder in his storeroom, the same one that was still sitting under the window.
    Somebody was trying to show her she wasn’t safe, even in her own apartment. Who? LaBelle or friends of hers? Had Calvin Hogue ratted? But she didn’t even meet him till today and she’d been slugged last night.
    She was starting to lose it, freaking out—she needed to call a friend. But who? Not Jimmy Dee—she’d phoned him once at work and knew he hated it. Steve? No. She wasn’t going to make a habit of being dependent on him.
    She couldn’t file a police report—she wasn’t supposed to be home, she was supposed to be staking out LaBelle’s place.
Shitfire!
    She sat down and began to take deep breaths. As she breathed, became calmer, Marcelle came into her mind. “Oh, Skippy, poor baby,” she would say, and make her warm milk or something. There was something sweet about Marcelle that she’d never noticed before this case. But Marcelle not only wasn’t a real friend, she was a suspect in a murder investigation.
    How about Conrad? Her yuppie brother. Uh-uh. He’d say this was what came of being a cop. He hated her being one not because it was dangerous but because it was blue-collar. Conrad was a snob and a twit.
    The oxygen rush—or whatever you got from deep breaths—was good for only about thirty seconds. The terror was returning, and Skip’s hand was snaking toward the phone. She dialed a number that was becoming increasingly familiar.
    “Get out of there,” said Steve. “Wait for me at the Blacksmith Shop.”
    “But he’s gone.” She was confused. “There’s no one here.”
    “That’s not the point. You’ll get more and more depressed.” He rang off, apparently sure she’d follow orders, and she was more than glad to.
    She went into the dark, damp bar—a genuine one-time blacksmith shop—and ordered a beer despite her concussion, thinking,
May as well, the whole place smells like beer; why fight it?
The beer helped, but it was true what they said—having your house broken into really did feel like a rape. She’d heard it before and thought,
Patooey! Tell that to a real rape victim,
and now she knew what it meant.
    Steve came and held her and took her back upstairs. “Okay,” he said, “do you want to help or do you want to watch?”
    “Watch what?”
    “Watch me clean up.”
    She didn’t feel like moving, was still numb, but she