Hot as Heller (Aster Valley 3)

“Yes, sir. Good luck. And hi, Shawn! Welcome to Aster Valley! Oh, and also?”

“Yeah?” I said around a mouthful of sandwich.

“Bears can get rabies, of course, since they’re warm-blooded. But it’s rare, and there’s no recorded case of a human catching it from one. You should be good. Well… except for the mauling, of course.”

Yes, thank you. Except for the mauling.

The GPS directed me to a very out-of-the-way mountain road I wasn’t familiar with yet. Even though I’d been living and working in Aster Valley for over six months already, there were still plenty of areas I hadn’t had a chance to explore yet.

Thistledown Cove was one of them.

The old mountain cabin homes along the street became fewer and farther between until I got to the end. The road simply stopped in a pile of dusty pine needles and a tangle of downed branches. The gravel driveway to my right sported an old brown truck that looked about as tidy and clean as the pile of debris on the road.

I parked and reached into my glove box.

“Bear spray,” I told the deputy. My utility belt held pepper spray, but bear spray was both stronger and able to deploy over greater distances. I had no intention of getting closer to the bear than I had to.

Shawn nodded, like wild animal calls were just a part of life, and it occurred to me that growing up in Meeker, which wasn’t much bigger than Aster Valley, it probably had been.

It turned out we didn’t need to bother with the bear spray. After following high-pitched yelps and calls for help, we found our way into the cabin’s small, cluttered kitchen where a big, burly man sporting a thick, ragged beard and wide, bugged-out eyes stood on the table clutching one hand to his chest with the other.

“It bit me!” He pointed in the direction of the violent perp.

A fluffy squirrel looked at me and, swear to god, rolled its eyes as if to say, “Yeah, no shit. Drama much?”

I looked back and forth between the squirrel and the mountain man. “The squirrel bit you?”

He nodded rapidly. “Get it out! Get it out!”

“If it bit you, we need to trap it to test it for—”

“Get it out of here oh my god get it out!”

I blinked up at the big guy and wondered if there was substance abuse involved. “Sir, if we don’t have the animal tested, you’ll have to be presumed exposed to rabies. That means—”

He roared, leapt off the table, hopped over a pile of newspapers and empty cardboard boxes, and yanked open the back door before running out of it. The squirrel looked at me for a beat before bolting after him. Shawn and I exchanged a brief, incredulous glance before darting after the squirrel.

Outside, the man was now standing on a picnic table, whimpering and sniffling through tears. “Hurts like a son of a bitch.”

I reached into my pocket and pulled out some gloves before asking to see his hand. Sure enough, there was a tiny bite mark on the meaty part under his thumb that was welling an impressive amount of blood.

“You’re going to have to go in for treatment. I really wish you’d let us trap him.” I peeled off the gloves and called dispatch to give them an update. “The first shot has to be given as soon as possible. Come on. I’ll drive you. Save you the cost of an ambulance ride.”

On the ride to the hospital, I asked the man—turns out his name was Coleman—what had happened.

“You see, it’s like this,” he began, hugging his now bandaged hand to his chest. “I love animals. I do. So, sometimes I like to feed them, you know? Just do a little something nice for my fellow creatures. And I have a raccoon that comes around. I call him Jolly. Well, Jolly is pretty particular about his breakfast foods.”

Why did I ask? This was like the Candy-Corn story all over again.

But in the passenger’s seat, Shawn was nodding along, like picky raccoons named Jolly were all in a day’s work.

“He likes berries, but only if I serve them with something else, like chicken or mice or frogs.”

Welp, that escalated quickly.

“And this morning, I sprinkled some nuts over the top. So, really, it’s my own damned fault. Squirrels like nuts, you know?”

I nodded solemnly. “So it seems.”

He shrugged. “I left the door open because I like to watch and see if Jolly likes his breakfast. We have kind of a… camaraderie, you could say.”

I bit my tongue against pointing out Jolly represented the largest rabies risk to him among his menagerie. No raccoon friendship was worth a fatal rabies infection.

“But then, easy as you please, in comes this jackass squirrel. As if I’d prepared him a meal or something.”

As if. The gall of that wild animal pursuing nourishment. Quelle surprise.