THE CASE OF THE WATERMELON PATCH MYSTERY; CHAPTER 9: HANK FINDS A STRANGER IN THE DARK

LAST WEEK: Hank has fallen asleep on the job. So has everyone else. But when Hank is the first to awake, he finds himself kissing someone.

I had just embraced someone in the darkness of night. I had been dreaming about Beulah the Collie and thought it was her. But it wasn't. And then I heard this squeaky voice say, "Oh. Hi. How's it going? I'm not Beulah."

Huh?

A raccoon?

Suddenly and all at once Beulah's voice had changed. Her face had changed. She had pointy little ears and a pointy little nose and a pair of beady little eyes.

And she sure didn't look like someone I wanted to kiss.

I stared at whatever it was and blinked my eyes. "You're not Beulah, and how dare you pretend that you are?"

"Right. Not Beulah. Just me."

"Yeah, but if you're not Beulah, who are you?"

It was Eddy the Rac.

Do you remember Eddy? He'd once been the ranch's pet coon. Slim kept him in a rabbit cage until he got to be such a home-wrecker and a pain in the neck, he opened the cage door and let him go back to the wild.

That was a great day for the ranch. I'd never trusted the little sneak and was delighted to get rid of him. OK, maybe I'd missed him for a little while, but not for long. You never knew what kind of mischief he'd get into next, but you always knew he'd find something.

Well, here he was again, standing before me in the moonlight -- in Sally May's watermelon patch, which just happened to be a very sensitive place for a coon to be standing.

I shook the vapors out of my head and walked around in a circle. While doing this, I continued to study him of the corner of my eye.

"OK, I'm ready to accept your story that you're Eddy the Rac. I guess you ought to know who you are."

"Thanks."

"I don't want to appear unfriendly, Eddy, but ... well, my thought processes are a little scrambled right now."

"Yeah. You were zonked."

"I was not zonked. I might have fallen into a light doze, but I wasn't ... guard dogs never sleep on the job."

"Right. Resting your eyes."

"Something like that, yes. It just happened that my eyes were, uh, very tired."

"Right."

"Extremely tired."

"Uh huh."

"Stinging and burning from all the stress and so forth of ... why are you playing with my ears?" He was running his busy little fingers around my ears. That's typical coon behavior -- busy hands.

"Bored. Listen. Got a deal."

I stared at him in total disbelief. "What? Are you nuts? Listen, bud, I've had enough of your deals to ruin one life, and that's plenty. No more deals, Eddy. In fact, let's cut the small talk and go straight to the bottom line. You have blundered into a high security zone, and a guy like you could sure get himself shot."

"Uh oh."

"Right. See, this is Sally May's watermelon patch. Maybe you didn't know that." I narrowed my eyes and studied his masked face. "Or maybe you did. Hmm, yes. A pattern is beginning to unfold here, and let me go straight to the point, Eddy. I'm here to investigate the murder of 137 watermelons."

"Gosh."

"We have reason to believe that they were murdered by a gang of raccoons."

"Wow."

"Because we found coon tracks all over the place, don't you see."

"Awesome."

"And Eddy, you're a coon, and you're standing in a set of fresh coon tracks, and you're at the scene of the crime. I don't want to scare you, pal, but the weight of evidence is about to fall right smack on top of your head."

I had nabbed my suspect in the watermelon murders.

NEXT CHAPTER: Hank questions the suspect.