Gator on the Loose! by Sue Stauffacher Read Free Book Online

moving at all? In Keisha’s experience, when animals were afraid, they stayed very still. If the alligator was under the bushes, he should be happy because the bushes would make him feel protected.
    Wait. It was also very dry under the bushes. Keisha had been under those bushes to get the basketball, the Frisbee and Razi’s Sunday school shoes. Every time she came out from under the bushes, Mama scolded her for getting her clothes dirty.
    That’s why the alligator was moving!
    Under the bushes was very dry. Getting to wet was bigger than being scared. And Keisha knew if the alligator kept going around the house, he would find the very best spot of all for alligators at Carters’ Urban Rescue: the muddy place by the hose.
    Alligators like muddy places. The low place an alligator makes in the sand by digging and rolling is called a wallow. The rains come and fill the wallow with waterand make it a soft and cool place for the alligator to lie when it gets hot.
    If she was right and she had located the alligator, Keisha had a whole new set of questions: How do you catch an alligator if he can sense you coming from every side? What exactly do you catch the alligator with? And if you do manage to catch him, how do you keep him from escaping again before Mama and Daddy come home?
    After four more “this-little-piggy’s” on Paulo’s toes, Keisha had an idea. It looked like this:

    Keisha climbed down off the counter and crept along the wall until she reached the picture window by the table. Yes! The music had turned the corner and was now moving toward her. And it had to pass under the window to get to the hose.
    She ran upstairs, thinking that distracting Razi would be the hardest part of her plan.
    “Oh no! Not another train off the cliff,” Razi was saying as he pushed his engine over the side of the bed.
    “Yes, yes. Here’s the ambulance.” Zeke pushed a red and white wagon toward the pile of crashed engines.
    “Z-Team, I need your belts! And I need you to get the big laundry basket from under the chute in the basement. Put all the dirty laundry on top of the washer. Razi, you go in Mama’s closet and get the flannel sheets. Just lay them out on the floor, okay? We’re going to roll up that alligator like a bug in a rug.”
    “You said it again!” Razi shouted at the top of his lungs. He was already worked up from the train emergencies. “You’re a poet and you didn’t know it!”
    “Yes, I am.” Keisha turned around and ran back downstairs before her little brother could say any more. She had no plan to wrap the alligator in flannel sheets. That would make the little guy drier than healready was. Her plan was to wrap Razi in flannel sheets. Razi loved flannel sheets so much he would not be able to resist wrapping
himself
inside them, which might give her at least three minutes to capture the musical alligator.
    The Z-Team met Keisha in the kitchen. They were panting from running down the stairs and then up from the basement.
    “Can you help me get this window all the way open?” Keisha asked Zack. “Take a deep breath. We have to be quiet.”
    “You better fill us in,” Zack said, “so we aren’t at cross-purposes.”
    Mr. Sanders often said that when Zeke and Zack performed their chores, they were at cross-purposes. Take raking leaves, for example. If Zeke was raking and Zack was jumping in the pile, then the work wasn’t getting done.
    “We have to push together to get this big window all the way open because it sticks. Together, I think we can do it.”
    “That’s clear enough,” Zeke said, taking a position by the left side of the window. He started right in, tugging on the metal handle at the bottom of the frame.
    “Roger that,” Zack said, grabbing the windowsill.
    With one big heave, the window was unstuck and opened wide. Lucky for Keisha, with all the raccoon cubs arriving last week, Daddy hadn’t had a chance to put in the screen yet.
    “Now take off your belts.”
    “What?”