front door.
Through the oval, beveled-glass window, he saw the coon still on
duty.
At the kitchen table, Eduardo enjoyed an early dinner of rigatoni and
spicy sausage with thick slabs of heavily buttered Italian bread. He
kept the yellow legal-size tablet beside his plate and, while he ate,
wrote about the intriguing events of the afternoon.
He had almost brought the account up-to-date when a peculiar clicking
noise distracted him. He glanced at the electric stove, then at each
of the two windows to see if something was tapping on the glass.
When he turned in his chair, he saw that a raccoon was in the kitchen
behind him. Sitting on its hindquarters. Staring at him.
He shoved his chair back from the table and got quickly to his feet.
Evidently the animal had entered the room from the hallway. How it had
gotten inside the house in the first place, however, was a mystery.
The clicking he'd heard had been its claws on the pegged-oak floor.
They rattled against the wood again, though it didn't move.
Eduardo realized it was racked by severe shivers. At first he thought
it was frightened of being in the house, feeling threatened and
cornered.
He backed away a couple of steps, giving it space.
The raccoon made a thin mewling sound that was neither a threat nor an
expression of fear, but the unmistakable voice of misery. It was in
pain, injured or ill.
His first reaction was: Rabies.
The .22 pistol lay on the table, as he always kept a weapon close at
hand these days. He picked it up, though he did not want to have to
kill the raccoon in the house.
He saw now that the creature's eyes were protruding unnaturally and
that the fur under them was wet and matted with tears. The small paws
clawed at the air, and the black-ringed tail swished back and forth
furiously across the oak floor. Gagging, the coon dropped off its
haunches, flopped on its side. It twitched convulsively, sides heaving
as it struggled to breathe. Abruptly blood bubbled from its nostrils
and trickled from its ears. After one final spasm that rattled its
claws against the floor again, it lay still, silent.
Dead.
'Dear Jesus,' Eduardo said, and put one trembling hand to his brow to
blot away the sudden dew of perspiration that had sprung up along his
hairline.
The dead raccoon didn't seem as large as either of the sentinels he'd
seen outside, and he didn't think that it looked smaller merely because
death had diminished it. He was pretty sure it was a third individual,
perhaps younger than the other two, or maybe they were males, and this
was a female.
He remembered leaving the kitchen door open when he'd walked around the
house to see if the front and back sentries were the same animal. The
screen door had been closed. But it was light, just a narrow pine
frame and screen. The raccoon might have been able to pry it open wide
