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

energy, the way you can feel an electrical current coursing through a heavily insulated power line.
    “Put your wrists behind you,” I said.
    “You’re arresting me? These guys pulled a gun on us. They vandalized my vehicle.”
    But he put his hands behind him just the same. On one hand he wore a high school graduation ring, on the other a gold ring inset with a ruby and the insignia of his fraternity. I snipped the cuffs on each of his wrists and began walking him toward the backseat of my cruiser. Already his manner had changed and I realized he was exactly like all the middle-class kids we run in for possession or DWI. Many of them are the children of physicians and attorneys and prominent businesspeople. When they deal with someone dressed in a suit, or in sports clothes, as I was, someone who represents a form of authority they associate with their parents, their vocabulary becomes sanitized and their manners miraculously reappear. In fact, their degree of humility and cooperation is so impressive, they usually skate on the charges or at worst receive probationary sentences.
    “Watch your head,” I said as I put him in the backseat of the cruiser.
    “Sir, we told you the truth about what happened out there,” he said. “The fat black guy keyed my father’s new paint job. If I had it to do over, I’d just drive away and eat the loss. But that kid with the rag on his head aimed a nine-millimeter at us. Over nothing.”
    “What’s your name?” I asked.
    “Sam Bruxal. But everybody calls me Slim.”
    “You took down Monarch Little, Slim. At gunpoint. That’s impressive. But I’d watch my ass for a while. What’s your last name again?”
    “Bruxal,” he said.
    “Ever hear of a guy by the name of Whitey Bruxal?”
    “That’s my father,” he said, his eyes lifting into mine.
    “From Florida?”
    “That’s right. We moved to Lafayette from Miami five years ago.”
    “Really?” I said, looking at him now with much more interest.
    “Yeah, what’s going on?”
    “I’d like to have a chance to meet your dad.”
    “Oh, you’ll meet him, all right,” Slim replied, then realized he had allowed his manufactured persona to slip. “I mean—”
    “Yeah, I know exactly what you mean, kid,” I said, and rejoined the deputies, one of whom had hooked up Monarch Little and was about to take him to emergency receiving at Iberia General.
    The deputy was a stout, red-haired man with a brush mustache who had been one of the city cops absorbed into the sheriff’s department when the two agencies merged last year. He was a retired NCO and was called “Top” by his colleagues, although he had been a cook in the Marine Corps and never a first sergeant. Top’s admonition about surviving in a bureaucracy was simple: “Make friends with all the clerks and don’t get in the way of a supervisor who wants to be on the links by two p.m.”
    “Let me talk to Monarch a minute, will you, Top?” I said.
    “Take him home to dinner with you,” he replied.
    Monarch was seated in the back of the cruiser, his wrists cuffed in front of him so he could hold a blood-spotted towel to his mouth and nose.
    “You going to make it, Monarch?” I said.
    “I done tole y’all, I tripped on the curb and busted my face. Ain’t filing no charges. Don’t even remember what happened,” he replied.
    Through the back window I saw Helen pull into the parking lot, the reflected image of a giant live oak sliding off her windshield. “You got a history with Slim Bruxal?” I said.
    “Who?”
    “The guy who remodeled your face.”
    “A white guy picked me up after I fell. That the one you talking about?”
    “Cute,” I said.
    But Monarch was no longer looking at me. His eyes were on Helen, who had walked over to the trash barrel where a deputy had just recovered the nine-millimeter dumped by Monarch’s friend. “I’m ready to go to the hospital. I swallowed blood. I t’ink I’m gonna t’row up again,” he said, pressing