The Tortilla Curtain

predator for every species in existence, including our own. The coyote is not to blame--he is only trying to survive, to make a living, to take advantage of the opportunities available to him. I sit here in the comfort of my air-conditioned office staring at a jar of scat and thinking of all the benefit this animal does us, of the hordes of rats and mice and ground squirrels he culls and the thrill of the wild he gives us all, and yet I can't help thinking too of the missing pets, the trail of suspicion, the next baby left unattended on the patio.__
    _The coyotes keep coming, breeding up to fill in the gaps, moving in where the living is easy. They are cunning, versatile, hungry and unstoppable.__

The Tortilla Curtain

6
    THE DA ROS PLACE WAS A WHITE ELEPHANT. THERE was no way it was going to move in this market, unless at a significantly reduced price, and though the house had cast a spell over Kyra, she was beginning to wonder if it would ever cast the same kind of spell over a qualified buyer. No one had even looked at the place in the past two weeks and the maintenance issue was becoming one big emotional drain. She'd called Westec about the two men she'd encountered on the property and Delaney had insisted on putting in a report with the Sheriff's Department too, but nothing came of it. The Westec people had poked around and found no evidence that the men had been back. They didn't think anyone had been camping there either, at least not recently, though they did find a ring of blackened stone in the scrub at the northwest corner of the property. “But what you got to realize is that could've been there for years,” the security officer explained to her over the phone, “there's just no way of telling.”
    Kyra wasn't satisfied., She warned the gardener to keep an eye out for anything unusual, and of course she was there herself twice a day, opening the place up in the morning and closing it down again at night. Which had become a real chore. She wasn't frightened exactly, not anymore, but every time she turned up the drive her stomach sank--almost as if someone had knocked the wind out of her--and she had to bend forward to the air-conditioning vent and take little gulps of air till her breathing went back to normal. The encounter with those men--those drifters or bums or whatever they were--had shaken her more than she would admit, a whole lot more. She'd always been in command of her life, used to getting her way, trading on her looks and her brains and the kind of preparation that would have prostrated anybody else, man or woman, and she felt the equal of any situation, but that night she saw how empty all of that was.
    She'd been scared. As scared as she'd ever been. If it hadn't been for her quick thinking--the lie about her husband, the fictitious brother, cocktails for god's sake--who knew what might have happened? Of course, it could have been innocent--maybe they were just hikers, as they claimed--but that wasn't the feeling she got. She looked into that man's eyes--the tall one, the one with the hat--and knew that anything could happen.
    She was thinking about that as she wound her way up the road to the Da Ros place, hurrying, a little annoyed at the thought of the burden she'd taken on when she'd jumped at the listing. Now it almost seemed like it was more trouble than it was worth. And tonight of all nights. It was almost seven, she hadn't been home yet, and she'd agreed to help Erna Jardine and Selda Cherrystone canvas the community on the wall issue at eight.
    That was Jack's doing. He'd called her two days after Osbert had been killed, and she was still in a state of shock. To see her puppy taken like that, right before her eyes, and on top of everything else... it had been too much, one of the worst experiences of her life, maybe _the__ worst. And Jordan--he was just a baby and he had to see that? Dr. Reineger had prescribed a sedative and she'd wound up missing a day at the office, and Jordan had gone to his grandmother's for a few days--she just wouldn't let him stay in that house, she couldn't. She was sitting at her desk the next day, feeling woozy, as if her mind and body had been packed away in two separate drawers for the summer, when the phone rang.
    It was Jack. “I heard about your little dog,” he said, “and I'm sorry.”
    She felt herself choking up, the whole scene playing before her eyes for the thousandth time, that slinking vicious thing, the useless fence, and Osbert,