New Orleans Noir

face, and gathered her up in a huge embrace.
    “Tee, I—”
    “Shhhh, shhhhh. Don’t say nothing, baby. Whatever it is, we’ll deal with it. I don’t care. We’ll deal with it.”
    “I shot Snowflake.”
    There were so many questions he wanted to ask her. Had anyone seen her? Did anyone follow her? Had it been on the street or in a bar, or where? She had probably used his gun, which meant he could take the rap if it came down to that. Say he did it. Gloria needed a mama more than a daddy. Besides, probably wasn’t nothing going to happen. The cops never spent too much time looking for who shot a known drug dealer. No matter what happened, they would deal with it.
    Tyronne hugged her tighter. “I don’t care. All I care about is you back here with me. Whatever happens, we’ll deal with it. Together.”
    Rita buried her face in Tyronne’s shoulder and did something she had not done since she was fifteen and had a train pulled on her at a party. After that gang rape she had cried.
    She cried and she cried. And she cried.
    It felt good. Rita cried for twelve long minutes, tears rolling out of her eyes big as Cuff. When she finished, Tyronne was still holding her and whispering into her ear, “No matter what happens, we gon’ deal with it. We gon’ deal with it.”
    What started out as tears of pain were now tears of gratitude. Nobody had ever loved her like this before. Nobody. All Rita could do was cry.

THERE SHALL YOUR HEART BE ALSO
    BY BARBARA HAMBLY
    The Swamp
    K entucky Williams owns a Bible?” Benjamin January cast a doubtful glance catty-corner across the trampled muck of the Broadhorn Saloon’s yard to the shabby building’s open back door. The Broadhorn was a substantial building for this part of New Orleans, a neighborhood known quite accurately as the Swamp. Constructed of the lumber from dismantled flatboats, it stood a story-and-a-half tall and boasted not only porches but a privy, though the four whores who worked out of it did so in a line of sheds that straggled away into the trees of the true swamp—the ciprière —beyond. Under the brilliant winter sunlight the bullet-pocked planks and unspeakably puddled weeds looked every bit as grimy and rough-hewn as the establishment’s proprietress, who a few moments before had bellowed out the back door for January to come in: She needed his services.
    “Last night some suck-arse bastard tried to steal my Bible!” she shouted at January.
    “In many ways that’s the most surprising element of last night’s fracas,” remarked January’s friend and fellow musician Hannibal Sefton, fishing in the pocket of his dilapidated frock-coat for a bottle of opium-laced sherry. “It was her uncle’s—another surprise, since I’d always assumed that, like the Athenian hero Erechtheus, she was birthed from the earth itself. It’s in no way a remarkable volume: printed in Philadelphia thirty or forty years ago by a Bible society. The frontier was flooded with them when families started taking up lands in the Mississippi and Alabama territories.”
    He had risen from the bottom step of the ladder he was sitting on when January emerged from the trees. January had reason to approach the Broadhorn cautiously: Even at 9:30 on a Tuesday morning there were men drunk enough to take violent exception to a man of January’s color appearing in the vicinity of white men’s chosen watering holes. January stayed away from the Swamp when he could. Only Hannibal’s note had brought him that morning.
    “I thought myself something might have been hidden in it,” Hannibal went on, as they crossed the goo of the yard to the saloon’s rear door. “Pages cut out to make a hollow, or something of the kind. I can’t imagine anyone in the Broadhorn ever opened the book. But that doesn’t appear to be the case. For whatever reason, the thief was prepared to do murder to get it.”
    January paused on the saloon’s sagging rear porch, trying to see into the impenetrable gloom within. Born a slave, one of the first things he’d learned in early childhood was that there was “buckra territory”—in his case, the front part of his master’s house—where a black child would be thrashed for setting foot. Even after his mulatto mother had been freed and they’d gone to live in New Orleans, he’d still been forbidden to use the front entrance of the house her white protector had given her.
    In the Swamp, it was as much as a black man’s life was worth to go