Pegasus Descending: A Dave Robicheaux Novel by James Lee Burke Page A

again. “Lose the nine. I tripped on the curb. We was just getting burgers. Don’t know nothing about these motherfuckers here. Don’t got nothing against them,” he said.
    Then he sat down heavily on the white leather seat of his Firebird and vomited on his shoes.
     
    L AST YEAR , for economic reasons, our city police force was subsumed by the sheriff’s office, creating one jurisdiction out of both the city and parish, which meant that all 911 police emergency calls went automatically into the sheriff’s department, regardless if the police emergency had taken place inside or outside the city limits.
    I had just left a mayoral meeting downtown when Helen Soileau called me on my handheld radio. “Where are you?” she said.
    “In the parking lot, behind City Hall,” I replied.
    “There’s a racial beef of some kind going down at McDonald’s. Monarch Little and Bello Lujan’s kid may be involved in it. I’ve got two cars on the way. Can you get down there?”
    “I’m on my way.”
    “One of the black kids may have a gun. Watch your ass, Streak. But get a fire extinguisher on this. Nobody gets hurt out there.”
    I dropped the handheld on the seat of the cruiser I was using and turned into the one-way traffic on East Main, the gray-green arch of live oaks sliding by overhead, then swung around on St. Peter and headed back in the opposite direction, toward the McDonald’s.
    New Iberia is not New Orleans and we do not share its violent history, one that in the past has included a homicide rate equaled only by that of Washington, D.C. Here, whites and people of color work and live side by side. But nonetheless a peculiar kind of racial ill ease still exists in our small city on Bayou Teche. Maybe it’s indicative of the shadow that the pre–civil rights era still casts upon all the states of the old Confederacy. Perhaps we fear our own memories. I think as white people we know deep down inside ourselves the exact nature of the deeds we or our predecessors committed against people of color. I think we know that if our roles were reversed, if we had suffered the same degree of injury that was imposed upon the Negro race, we would not be particularly magnanimous when payback time rolled around. I think we know that in all probability we would cut the throats of the people who had made our lives miserable.
    So we are excessively conscious of manners and protocol in dealing with one another. Unfortunately, we have no control over a rogue cop with a sexual agenda or a closet racist at the post office or a newly elected black official wetting his lips his first night on the city council or a white college kid who thinks he can splatter a gangbanger’s grits on a sidewalk without all of us paying his tab.
    Two uniformed deputies were already on the scene when I reached the McDonald’s, but they obviously had their hands full. A crowd had gathered, and two carloads of Monarch’s friends had pulled to the curb and were forming a phalanx on the sidewalk. A witness evidently had told the deputies that one of the black kids in the Firebird had dumped a semiautomatic in the trash barrel, and the deputies were now trying to search all five kids from the fray for concealed weapons while at the same time keeping an eye on the crowd and Monarch’s newly arrived compatriots.
    But most of the real trouble was coming from only one person—Tony Lujan’s friend. He had been told to lean against the side of the SUV and to spread his feet, but he kept turning around and talking without stop, feeding his own anger, one cheek flecked with blood from Monarch’s mouth.
    I shoved him against the SUV, hard, and kicked his feet wider apart. “We make the rules, podna. Time for you to take Trappist vows,” I said.
    “Take what?” he said.
    “That means shut your face,” I said.
    I motioned the deputy away and began to shake down Tony Lujan’s friend. When I ran my hands down under his arms I could feel his body humming with