New Orleans Noir

guitar player jerked a thumb. “Door’s right back there.”
    Valentin smiled dimly. “I ain’t going anywhere.”
    “Then I’ll take my money and leave.”
    Valentin shook his head slowly and said, “No, you won’t.”
    A silence fell with a dark weight. From the corner, Mr. Roy saw the way McTier’s face changed. He had made his last threat and it hadn’t worked. This time he had only two choices, to run away or stand and fight. Meanwhile, the Creole sat perfectly still, his hands on the table. Mr. Roy hadn’t even seen him blink.
    McTier let out a sudden raw growl as his hand went across his torso to the waist of his trousers. He snapped out a long-barreled Stevens Tip-Up .22 and brought it around at the same moment that Valentin rose abruptly, knocking back his own chair. The bark of the pistol shook the glasses behind the bar and the slug whistled past Valentin’s temple so closely that he felt the wind as it thunked into a wall board behind his head.
    In his arrogance, McTier had packed a single-shot revolver, never dreaming that he’d have to use it. It was a mistake, because now a second pistol cracked, and the guitar player stumbled back in two long strides, as if pulled by a rope. Both his hands came up and the .22 tumbled out of the right one. The hole in his chest was still smoking when his knees crumpled and he collapsed to the floor.
    The last hollow echo died. Now flat on his back, McTier tried to raise himself, then collapsed back, coughed out a ragged breath, and went still as the blood from his chest welled and spread.
    Mr. Roy let out a long, noisy wheeze. Three heads rose up from the cover of the bar and the two men and the young girl edged back into the doorway. The Negro boy who had so ably faded into the wall reappeared, his face cracking into a grin of amazement.
    Twine leaned over the bar to stare down at the body. “Holy Jesus,” he said.
    Valentin lowered the pistol, laid it on the table, and sat back down. He picked up the pint, poured some of McTier’s whiskey into his glass, and drank it down in a long, slow sip. He looked surprised and perhaps baffled, as if he had wandered in from outside.
    Mr. Roy managed to push himself to his feet. “We can take care of it from here on.”
    Valentin, coming to his senses, understood. They would remove McTier’s body and cover the shooting with the police, if they talked about it at all. He also understood that he needed to leave. “Give his guitar to someone who can use it,” he said.
    Mr. Roy nodded his heavy head.
    Valentin walked across the dirty sawdust floor and out onto the banquette, where the young girl’s dark round eyes locked on him with a sort of primitive wonder. She seemed to barely breath as he stepped past her and continued down Evelina Street without looking back. He arrived at the pier just in time to catch the last ferry.

PONY GIRL
    BY LAURA LIPPMAN
    Tremé
    S he was looking for trouble and she was definitely going to find it. What was the girl thinking when she got dressed this morning? When she decided—days, weeks, maybe even months ago—that this was how she wanted to go out on Mardi Gras day? And not just out, but all the way up to Claiborne Avenue and Ernie K. Doe’s, where this kind of costume didn’t play . There were skeletons and Mardi Gras Indians and baby dolls, but it wasn’t a place where you saw a lot of people going for sexy or clever. That kind of thing was for back in the Quarter, maybe outside Café Brasil. It’s hard to find a line to cross on Mardi Gras day, much less cross it, but this girl had gone and done it. In all my years—I was nineteen then, but a hard nineteen—I’d only seen one Mardi Gras sight more disturbing, and that was a white boy who took a magic marker, a thick one, and stuck it through a piercing in his earlobe. Nothing more to his costume than that, a magic marker through his ear, street clothes, and a wild gaze. Even in the middle of a crowd, people granted him some distance, let me tell you.
    The Mardi Gras I’m talking about now, this was three years ago, the year that people were saying that customs mattered , that we had to hold tight to our traditions. Big Chief Tootie Montana was still alive then, and he had called for the skeletons and the baby dolls to make a showing, and there was a pretty good turnout. But it wasn’t true old school, with the skeletons going to people’s houses and waking up children in their beds, telling them to do their