by Nancy Grace
“I guess she is OK.” Billings grinned.
“Yep. Sure sounds like it!” Finch grinned too, obvious relief flooding his face.
Billings turned to the two sheriffs standing at his elbow. “Guys, work the crowd for witnesses. Order the crossing surveillance video. Get the bus driver’s statement. I’ll get a statement from Hailey later. Thanks.”
“OK. Look, thanks for rushing over . . .” Hailey looked up into his face, mustering a weak smile.
“I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else but here, and, listen, watch out for speeding buses.”
“Very funny,” she said it sarcastically, but delivered it with a smile.
Billings turned and headed back across the street. Hailey watched until he disappeared, blending into all the foot traffic outside the courthouse. She glanced back up at Finch, only to spot a completely dumbfounded look on his face.
“What?” Hailey asked him. “What is it?”
“What’s with him? ‘I wouldn’t want to be anywhere but here’ . . . What does that mean?”
Hailey paused. Looking back toward where he’d melted into the courthouse throng, she murmured, “I don’t know, exactly, what that means.”
She wobbled a little and grabbed the arm he held out.
“Sure you’re OK, Hailey?”
“I’m positive. Thanks for asking that, but you can stop. I promise to let you know if I feel lethargic, dizzy, nauseous, itchy, scratchy, hungry, sweaty, or basically anything else.”
“Always the funny one. Where to?” he asked, stalling just a little to make sure she was stable on her feet.
“The courthouse. Where else?”
“You’re kidding. You get run down by a bus and you want to go back for the afternoon session? Seriously?”
“Technically, I did not get run down by a bus. I fell out into the street in front of a bus, but the bus didn’t hit me. I bumped my own head on the curb . . . and I’m absolutely fine. Nothing and nobody’s going to stop me from hearing Todd Adams’s mom on the stand.”
Finch just stared at her as if she were speaking a foreign language.
“Don’t look at me like that. I’m going back in that courtroom and I’m going right now come hell or high water, Garland Fincher.”
After one more hard look at her, his gaze lingering on the rapidly forming bruises, one on her chin and the other circling the cut above her right eye, he shook his head. And off they went.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
The Feeding Frenzy Thrill was totally awesome. Nearly three hundred snarling, snapping gators jumping over one another, attacking each other, competing for food. Cecil would never forget it as long as he lived . . . the noise, the splashing, the hissing, the insane chomping of giant, lethal jaws. It was gators galore! In fact, he got so close to the gators, he could see long, gooey strings of saliva draping from tooth to tooth inside their huge mouths.
A stern voice kept reverberating in his head as he threw chunk after chunk of raw meat into the murky water. The voice insisted that feeding gators from twenty or thirty feet away on a boarded pier violated every law of nature and, of course, the regs of zoos, parks, and humankind in general.
Rules such as A, Don’t feed alligators. They are mega-carnivores and you, the pathetic, tiny person, are likely to lose an arm at the very least. Plus, feeding them like they’re sheep at a petting zoo makes the gators even bolder, encourages the monster meat-eaters to seek out people, and trains them to associate humans with food.
His head went on . . . and B, Even when not throwing caution to the wind and feeding the leathery monsters, keep your distance! Although gators look slow and awkward, they’re extremely powerful and can move with startling bursts of land speed.
Cecil knew this because he had actually stayed up late the night before to Google how best to escape an alligator on land. Somewhere during the eleven o’clock news last night, he’d read and reread the classic adage that you can always outrun an angry, or hungry, alligator just by running in a zigzag pattern.
Although he was planning on at least two or three dozen awesome selfies portraying himself as a great and fearless outdoorsman, Cecil Snodgrass actually took great comfort in the simple but unbeatable plan to outpace a gator. Run zigzaggedly.
But upon further research, Cecil became agitated to learn the zigzag theory was just a myth. In fact, nobody knew where it came from or how it started. This startling development totally blew Cecil’s escape plan.
Much to his dismay, he learned that gators actually run in a straight line, and zigzags present absolutely no problem for the gnarly beasts. That was certainly a nasty surprise.
But according to everything on the Gator World website and all the signage at the park, he and all the other adventure seekers were 100 percent absolutely and perfectly safe.
But still, there was no getting around it. The American alligator weighs in at around half a ton . . . a honking thousand pounds of nothing but teeth and hide. The gator’s armored body is superbly embedded with bony plates on the back and four short legs with five toes on the front feet and four on the back. They were water beasts all right, and wicked nasty ones at that.
The teeth alone were enough to send a chill down his spine. Eighty fully serrated teeth in all including a freaky extra-large fourth tooth in the gator’s lower jaw that fits perfectly into a socket in the upper jaw and remains invisible when the mouth is closed as opposed to the snaggly ones hanging out over the lips . . . if you could call them lips.
So obviously, no way would Cecil be putting even his pinky toe into the old H2O with a couple of gnarly flesh-eating machines. Gators were much faster swimmers than runners. They could swim at about twenty miles an hour and their attack tactic was to sneak up on prey in the water. The watery Frankenstein fiends, amazingly, were totally silent in water and with their freaky little eyes set on the very top of their heads, they could actually swim while watching what was happening on the surface at the same time.
Because gators have a long, snout-like nose with upward-facing nostrils at the end, they can also stay in the depths for up to one hour. A human wouldn’t have a chance against a gator in the water.
But that’s what made the whole thing so thrilling. Right? It was man vs. gator.
At the very outset, though, Cecil had to make a big decision. What to feed the gators. There were three feeding options: huge trash cans full of dried food, live mice, or raw chicken. He couldn’t help but notice a big sign warning that it’s a serious health hazard to feed the alligators live “animal food items” such as mice, frogs, or snakes.
He also noticed the warning mentioned nothing about having your arm ripped off by a gator’s triangle-shaped teeth. Instead, the concern was more geared toward the possibility of transmitting a harmful disease or parasite from the raw or live food. A severed artery seemed more likely to Cecil Snodgrass, but that’s what the sign said.
There was also alligator food pellets for those less hearty souls too squeamish to feed live mice or raw chicken to snapping alligators. The placard over a huge green trash can full of dry food claimed the hard chunks contained all the vitamins, minerals, and protein necessary for the gators’ immune systems.
As if they needed it. From what Cecil had witnessed on YouTube, the gators’ immune systems seemed just fine.
Taking a look into one of several big scratched-up, white plastic barrels, there were at least 200 live white mice mixed with what looked to be gray rats, all crawling over each other in futile attempts to scamper up and over the sides of the barrels. They all squeaked frantically, clawing at each other in what must be, in their rodent brains, a getaway to freedom.
Cecil went with the raw chicken. He didn’t relish the idea of reaching into a barrel of live mice and throwing them by their tails into the mouths of snapping alligators. The others there for the Feeding Frenzy Thrill didn’t seem to be bothered. Suiting up in long gloves that vaguely resembled oven mitts, several of the men laughed uproariously at the mice
twitching and squirming.
He was no rat lover. Even the thought of all those nasty rodents writhing on top of each other in the plastic bin totally skeeved him out. Still, the idea of them being thrown by their tails into the mouths of chomping gators made Cecil’s stomach churn and he felt hot all over. He had to physically look away from the barrel of mice.
Poor little guys.
So while Cecil loved wild animals, sacrificing live mice, even rats, was not exactly what he had in mind. But when it comes to feeding alligators, was there really any alternative?
Reaching deep into a plastic bin with pale, watery blood trickling in rivulets down the sides, Cecil pulled out a big handful of raw chicken. Although the smell of possibly rancid raw meat permeated the air, he could tell some of it still felt frozen through his own oven mitt thingies.
With the slight breeze on the edge of the boardwalk, he could see the ripples in the water in the sunlight and knew that just beneath the surface, they were waiting. Just feet away from him, they could already smell the raw meat.
Just then, several sets of eyes emerged over the water and instinct kicked in. Cecil Snodgrass, never an athletic child, pulled back his right arm and drew up his left leg like he was Sandy Koufax on the pitcher’s mound at Dodger Stadium. With all his strength, he clutched a handful of raw chicken chunks, oozing blood on the edges, and hurled it, catapulting the pale glob of meat out into the dark water.
At once, two giant gators dove out of the water and toward the raw meat, grappling with each other for a single fistful of frozen chicken thigh. There was no doubt about it, these two bags of leather and teeth had to weigh an even ton each.
A surge of electricity went through his body, replacing the tingling fear that had stuck in his legs and pelvis when he first saw the gators’ eyes rise up from the water. He, Cecil Snodgrass, had the power. Because he, Cecil Snodgrass, had the chicken thighs.
They were the puppets and he was the puppeteer. He spent the next hour and a half lobbing glob after glob of bloody chicken until his right arm ached. When the Feeding Frenzy Thrill was over and all the chicken, and sadly the mice as well, were gone, the gators still circled the boardwalk. The barrels of food were probably just appetizers for these monsters.
Looking down, Cecil saw his own clothes splattered with chicken blood and guts. He went to the edge of the feeding area and rinsed his hands and arms up to the elbow at an outdoor sink area Gator World had wisely constructed. Following a jungle-themed dirt path out of the Feeding Frenzy Thrill area, he couldn’t help but spot the Gator Gift Shop across the way.
Who could resist alligator memorabilia?
Strolling across the paved common area, he saw that it opened up to a food court of sorts sporting gator-on-a-stick trucks, “gator tails” akin to elephant ear pastries consisting of fried dough drenched in sugar and cinnamon, and an ice cream truck. By the time he reached the gift shop, he had eaten one of each. He felt so festive after manipulating ton upon ton of wild gators, he couldn’t stop himself.
A bell tinkled as he opened the glass door to the gift shop. Front and center on display was a wide range of genuine alligator tooth necklaces, obviously made with the real thing. A handwritten sign over the necklaces guaranteed they were in fact real gator teeth. It also claimed the necklaces claimed to possess “real gator bayou voodoo magic.”
Genuine alligator teeth secured on a sturdy leather strap? Seriously? He loved it! Plus, when would he ever see one of these again? He had to have it. Along with the added bonus of obvious good luck.
He browsed through the inevitable . . . hundreds of kids’ items . . . plush gator hoodie hats with iridescent yellow eyes on top, gator T-shirts, baseball hats, snow globes, and posters. But it was the adult section that was the real siren’s call. Stepping through a roped-off line, he inspected all sorts of powders and mixes made from alligator hides and teeth. Weren’t those illegal?
In a long row several shelves high was everything from alligator toilet paper handles to alligator chew toys for cats and dogs. Further down the row were the mysterious cures and antidotes . . . actual alligator blood in vials touted on the label as a new antibiotic for superbugs. One display was several shallow crates of alligator pepper plants in clay pots to cure diarrhea. The shelves were full of medicinal cures . . . alligator pepper to treat diabetes, even alligator pepper oil to treat a host of maladies.
In a refrigerated stand-up cooler Cecil found “Select Florida Alligator Fillet, processed by a needlepoint tenderizer then marinated with Cajun combination spices to enhance the gator’s natural taste!” It was nineteen dollars a pound, ninety-three dollars for five pounds, or one hundred sixty-five dollars for ten pounds of the frozen gator meat. There were even frozen gator-on-a-stick in family value packs. Cecil Snodgrass had no idea there was such a demand.
Looking through a glass door with a bell hanging by a string on the door handle, he spotted dozens of outdoor alligator statues on an adjoining covered patio outside. They had little handwritten placards above them on posts, ranging from “Agitated Alligator” to “Snoozing Gator” to “Big Bite Alligator,” which was portrayed with its huge mouth wide open and all eighty teeth on display. They ranged from $995 to a whopping $1,500. There was also a bronze alligator fountain reduced to $995 situated beside an aquascape floating alligator decoy.
Wow. He’d love to put the Agitated Alligator statue in his own backyard, but on a courthouse salary he couldn’t blow a thousand bucks at the Gator World gift shop.
He kept browsing.
On the next “adult” row, he spied several shelves of alligator-related “performance enhancers” for the bedroom. Some were even labeled triple-X. Ambling along trying to act inconspicuously, Cecil could feel his face getting warm and he knew without looking his neck and cheeks were red.
Creeping up to just barely over the top of the shelves of performance enhancers so just his eyes would show on the other side, he craned to get a look at the store clerk up front, who was wearing a green alligator plush hat and reading a magazine with his back squarely turned on Cecil. Cecil confirmed the guy wasn’t watching him. All sorts of mysterious powders, some claiming to be crushed and—
“All the bedroom aids are 30 percent off!”
Cecil Snodgrass was mortified.
“Hey! You . . . in the back.”
If Cecil was a turtle, his head would be so far under his shell he’d be chewing his tail. Instead of responding to the muleheaded cashier who clearly had no sense of propriety, Cecil looked to the right and the left as if the clerk was clearly addressing someone else. Anyone else . . . anyone other than himself.
Sadly, Cecil Snodgrass was the only shopper browsing the adult section of the Gator Gift Shop.
“Hey . . . Steve Irwin. Did you get that? You in the Crocodile Hunter vest in the back. The bedroom products are marked down. Just so you know.”
Although briefly flattered someone would lump him, Cecil Snodgrass, in with the famed Crocodile Hunter, the words “absolutely mortified” couldn’t possibly do justice to Cecil’s humiliation. Especially when a young and very attractive redhead with two little boys in tow turned to look at him. “Mom, what are bedroom products? Is it a pillow or a night-light?” the older boy addressed his mom, still staring at Cecil.
“Ok, thanks,” Cecil answered feebly. Then he realized the clerk had a closed-circuit camera in front of him, plainly planted catty-corner above the glass entrance door by the front counter. With this revelation, he abruptly ducked out the glass door onto the patio, causing the bell attached to the door to tinkle fairly loudly for a bell its size.
Now caught out on an enclosed patio, Cecil decided there was only one way out—to climb over the fence surrounding the cement alligator statues rather than walk back through the gift shop and possibly bump into the cute redhead who now, there with her two little boys, clearly thought he was a creepy perv.
The fence was some sort of chicken wire strung to wooden poles, each about five to six fe
et apart, and woven into the chicken wire was green plastic so as to appear, Cecil figured, jungle-esque. Or as much as green plastic strips could resemble the flora alongside the Amazon.
It was just barely too tall for him; he couldn’t jump it or crawl over it. Otherwise, he’d risk pulling the whole thing down. Looking around, he got inspiration. From a gator statue.
Trying to appear nonchalant because he’d wisely scoped out another surveillance camera overhead, Cecil sauntered over to the bronze gator fountain creature. He bent down as if he was checking the price and inadvertently saw it was 10 percent off. He briefly considered buying the thing, but the nine hundred dollars or so was reckless spending in Cecil Snodgrass’s book. Plus, he’d have to see the redhead again, which conjured up way too many weird and embarrassing mental images in Cecil’s head.
He gently pulled the surprisingly heavy faux gator across the concrete surface. It made a grating sound that thankfully no one inside would hear and be alerted to his humiliating escape attempt. Just a few more feet . . . and bingo! Stepping up on the gator’s head, he took a mighty leap and . . . he was free!
Tumbling out onto the parking lot behind the Gator Gift Shop, he instinctively reached for his wallet to ensure it was still there and then, fishing in the hidden pocket inside his Steve Irwin vest, his heart thumped . . . his pass wasn’t there!
He’d miss the Croc-N-Gator Night Time Adventure without it! Using both hands, he gave himself a frantic pat down. The Feeding Frenzy Thrill was fun, but it was the Night Time Adventure he was longing for . . . the selfies! You had to be on a special waiting list to be allowed in! The Gator World website said so! Without his certificate, he’d miss the whole thing! And he’d been thinking all afternoon of boasting about it at work.
His mind was racing a million miles a minute when his fingers, on their own accord, reached into yet another “secret” pocket, and there it was. Relief flooded his body before he even unfolded it and gazed lovingly at it. His “golden ticket,” the All-Inclusive Gator World Certificate of Admission! He hadn’t lost it after all.