Niceville

bitten on the back of his, as he put it, “upper thigh region” while he was carrying Gule, upside down and squalling like a bearcat, to the car—“uncooperative ain’t in it,” said a chastened Beau a while later.
    But when the good-looking typist chick from Lacy’s office had come out to see what the screaming was all about, Beau hadn’t found it in him to tell her he’d been bitten on the ass by the skinny Goth chick now kicking the living daylights out of the backseat of their cruiser.
    So instead he’d mumbled something vague about being “sorta stabbed like,” at which point she’d turned sharply on her spikes and stalked back inside to relay the happy news to Detective Kavanaugh.
    After the initial flurry of talk and countertalk, Beau Norlett availed himself of the facilities in the back of The Probe offices to examine, privately, with the help of the bathroom mirror and a stepladder, the damage done to his “upper thigh region,” which turned out to be a superficial but nasty semicircular wound on his right cheek, now in the process of turning purple.
    But no blood had been drawn, and Beau was in no way anxious to lay any sort of a charge on the girl, for reasons blindingly obvious to all, so Nick let that part slide, trying to keep the grin off his face.
    This being decided, Lemon Featherlight managed to talk Nick into letting him take Brandy Gule back to her walk-up flat over the needleexchange on Bauxite Row, giving Nick his personal word that she’d be available to him anytime he wanted, and that she was really just sort of a harmless stalker chick with a major thing for him and that he was just trying to keep her safe in a kind of older-wiser-brother-feral-wing-nut-Goth-biker-chick arrangement.
    Nick wished him the best of luck with that, and they parted, if not as friends, then as men with a slightly better understanding of each other, and as Nick and Beau rolled the cruiser away from the Miracle Mile, each man had a lot to think about.
    Beau rode shotgun, listing severely to his left in order to keep his right butt cheek elevated, and listened with a glum expression to the lecture Nick felt compelled to give him about safe methods for arresting feral biker chicks with excellent teeth and the will to apply them where they could do the most harm, and what might have happened if he’d slung the girl over his shoulder the
other
way around, her feet hanging down his back, thereby presenting her fangs with a much more sensitive target area than his oversized butt cheeks.
    When Nick was finished, as they were wheeling up Long Reach Boulevard on the eastern side of the Tulip, with the rain slacking off and the skies breaking up and the forested hills of The Chase rising on their right, Tallulah’s Wall looming over all of it, Beau, looking as pale as he could manage, said, “Nick, sir, is there any way we could just sorta … kinda …”
    Nick knew where this was going.
    “I’m sure as shit not telling anyone back at the office that my partner got his entire assal region bitten off by a girl no bigger than a salt shaker, if that’s what’s worrying you.”
    Beau worked this through, emerging at last with the shiny new idea that Nick, in spite of recent shameful events, had just referred to him as “my partner.” This put a glow on him that you could read by in the dark.
    “Thank you, Nick. It won’t happen again.”
    “If it does, I’m getting it on film and it’s going on YouTube. We’re about five minutes from Delia Cotton’s place. You spoke to Missing Persons while I was on the phone to Lacy. What’d you get from them?”
    Beau lost his smile, changing into a concentrated professional frown as he pulled out a fat and brand-new black notepad with the logo of the CID embossed on the front, a bright golden disk.
    He flipped it open, wincing as a sharp left turn through the stone gates of The Chase shifted his weight onto his right butt cheek, then began to read aloud from his notes.
    “Cotton, Delia, DOB 1920—”
    “Beau.”
    “Yes sir.”
    “Just summarize, okay?”
    “Summarize?”
    “Yeah.”
    Beau, disappointed—in a
CSI
frame of mind, he had written it all out in longhand complete with footnotes—reluctantly put his new notebook back into his suit pocket, took a deep breath.
    “Well, mainly she’s all that’s left of the money side of the Cotton family, one of the Founding Four families, eighty-four years old, lives alone at Temple Hill, that’s the name