Twelve blocks later, Rita stood in the gloaming looking at Snowflake’s house across the street. Lights were on. A Jeep was in the driveway and a fancy car was parked out front. She knew he was home.
Should she go knock on the door? Should she just stand and wait? Was it safe to just stand on the sidewalk? Maybe he was checking her out right now.
Sheltered by the darkening dusk, Rita simply waited for something to happen. A light shower began. She’d had the presence of mind to bring an umbrella and she raised it above her head. She stood in the rain for twenty-eight minutes, her eyes fastened to Snowflake’s house. Then she saw the door open. He was standing on the porch locking the door.
Rita quickly dashed across the street, holding the umbrella in her left hand and reaching into her dangling purse to pull out the revolver with her right. She had no plan. She was just going to flat-out kill him.
They almost bumped into each other as Snowflake ran toward his BMW. Snowflake had seen the woman running across the street in the rain but had paid her no mind until she was right on top of him.
“Paul Moore, this is for Samuel Deslonde.” Bam. The first shot caught him square in the chest. He had no time to react. The force of the bullet hurled him over the hood of his car. Rita stood over Snowflake and shot him twice more. Bam. Bam. Once in his right side and the other in the back of his right shoulder. He slid off the car, a bleeding heap of inert flesh in the street.
The rain was falling steadily. Rita froze momentarily. Not sure what to do now, she looked around. A few people near the corner were standing under a sweetshop awning, looking at her. She put the warm pistol back in her purse and swiftly walked away. No one said anything to her as she passed.
Rita took the long way home and did not stop until she was standing, wet and distraught but dry-eyed, in their living room. When she came in, Tyronne rose slowly. He had Gloria in his arms, she was sleeping. He gently set her down in the chair and rushed silently over to Rita.
He quickly surveyed her from head to toe, wiped her damp hair back from her 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
Kentucky 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 into a saloon patronized by the white crews of the flatboats and keelboats that came down the river with their cargoes of furs, pigs, and corn. The black prostitutes would be tolerated in most saloons in that insalubrious district that sprawled from the upper end of Girod Street along the back of the town to the canal and the cemeteries. But the only black who was truly able to come and go freely in the Broadhorn was Delly, a sweet-tempered, simpleminded girl of seventeen whose buck teeth, skewed jaw, and prominent facial moles had relegated her to the role of washing cups and doing as much cleaning up as the Broadhorn ever got.
It was Delly who lay on the narrow bed in Kentucky Williams’s room behind the bar. Williams yelled, “Git the hell in here, Ben, what you doin’, wipin’ your goddamn feet?” and January followed her voice into that tiny cubicle, which appeared to do duty as the Broadhorn’s storeroom as well. Williams sat at the foot of the bed, a big-boned white woman wearing what the black whores called a good-time dress, a faded calico mother-hubbard whose front was splashed and blotted now with crusted brown blood. One sleeve was torn and a makeshift bandage, also spotted from a seeping wound underneath, ringed her right forearm. “Gimme your dope, Hannibal,” she added more quietly, holding out her uninjured hand, and Hannibal passed over his bottle of opium-laced sherry without a word.