Free Louisiana Laydown by Jon Sharpe

broken down inside, this scared of anyone. “What have I gotten myself into here?”
    “A real bad place, Fargo. A real bad place.”

6
    Fargo took the Ovaro to the livery, mentioning Fleur to the owner, who got flustered and turned a shade of red Fargo hadn’t seen since the last time he’d eaten beets. Still, the man ran a decent enough stable, and Fargo felt comfortable leaving his horse and tack there with only minimal questioning.
    The man assured him that someone was on duty at all times. “Day or night, sir,” he said. “Ain’t no one messes with my place. I pay my dues.”
    “And you’ll see to it that he gets his oats?” Fargo asked, hanging his saddle on a rack next to the stall they’d put the Ovaro in.
    “Yes, sir,” the man said, nodding his head like it was on a string. “Once a day, plus fresh hay and water. I’ll watch after him.”
    “Good enough,” Fargo said. He paid the man for a week’s worth, even though he fully intended to be headed back west before then.
    “That’s more than you owe, Mr. Fargo,” the livery man said.
    “I know,” Fargo replied. “I should be back for him within a few days. If I’m happy with his care when I get back, you can keep the rest as a tip.”
    Voice quavering, the man said, “And if you’re not?”
    Fargo’s blue eyes stared hard at the man; then he said, “Then I’ll take my money back—and not in a nice way.” He’d already come to the conclusion that only force, threats of force, and excessive money bought much of anything in this place—three types of currency that he preferred not to use unless necessary.
    “You’ll be happy, Mr. Fargo,” the man said, nodding his head again. “Happy as a gator with chicken bones.”
    Fargo shook his head, then grabbed up the rest of his gear and headed to the hotel, wondering about some of the strange sayings people had in this city. As much as he’d traveled, combing back and forth across the frontier, most of the people he’d run into talked pretty much as he did. The city of New Orleans was a strange place, almost a world of its own, and he’d be glad to leave it behind him.
    He felt even more besieged by the city as he walked its streets now. Maybe it was the convergence of all the historical troubles that had taken place here. The French displacing the Indians, the French ceding control to Spain in a secret and unpopular treaty provision—and little more than a decade later French and German settlers forcing the Spanish governor to flee. And during all this, enormous epidemics of malaria, small-pox, and yellow fever, to name just a few of the terrible medical mishaps that thinned the population again and again.
    Add to this the strange beliefs and cults that entangled so much of daily life in the city. The Cajuns with their swamp tales and myths, and the constant evidence of voodoo, that fevered belief system that merged Roman Catholicism with Haitian black magic. Many of the stores advertised that they sold trinkets of various kinds to combat spells and curses. The shopkeepers would smile ironically about them but deep down you had the sense that on some level at least they believed in these things.
    Say what you wanted about bloody trail towns with all their shoot-outs and boot hills. But however troubled they were, they didn’t dally with zombies and boiling pots of chicken parts meant to bring death to some unsuspecting person halfway across town.
    Fargo had to smile at the thought of all this. He’d always heard about hell. But he’d never believed that he’d actually be able to walk its streets, not in this life, anyway.
    But that was where he was, all right. New Orleans was hell on earth.
    The room Fargo rented at the Bayou wasn’t anything to write home about: a single bed, a cobbled-together wooden dresser with two long drawers topped by a scratched-up mirror, and a pitcher and basin that had once been white, but were now a sort of sooty grayish-brown color. Still, the sheets