The Guard: Campground Stories

  Chapter 2

  Thirty miles away in his typical suburban home surrounded by a white picket fence, Tom Kincaid, state homicide detective, woke up to the ringing of his bedside telephone. He had always hated having a phone next to his bed, because it never failed to ring when he was making love to his wife, Heather, or when he was sound asleep. As he fumbled for the phone in the dark, he knocked over his alarm clock. Picking the clock up off the floor, he noticed that it was three o’clock in the morning. “This had better be important,” he muttered to himself as he picked up the receiver.

  The voice on the other end of the line sounded frantic, and Tom had to slow him down several times, like switching from 78 rpm’s to 33 rpm’s on an old fashioned record player. After he understood what the other person said, he calmly told the other party that he could be there in a half an hour and not to touch anything until he got there.

  After dressing in the dark, he made a few phone calls, kissed his wife on the forehead, and headed out the door. Tom had been a cop for the last fifteen years, and had worked his way up from Detention Officer, to Patrol Officer, to Detective, and had eventually landed a position in Homicide. Most days he enjoyed the job, but other days, he went home defeated at the end of the day. He had never worked a regular “nine to five” job, and had always worked weird hours, so this wasn’t out of the ordinary for him. Sometimes he felt as if he would have lost his mind if not for the love and support he got from his wife.

  Heather had been a constant source of joy for him, and was always supportive. Even when Tom had a terrible day, Heather had worked her hardest to try to cheer him up. A bad day for a Detention Officer or a Police Officer was much worse than a bad day for an office worker. A bad day for an office worker usually meant that they had been passed up for a promotion, or they lost an important account. A bad day for a Law Enforcement Officer usually ended in bloodshed. Tom had sustained numerous injuries in the line of duty, and the prevailing attitude of the general public was that that was just “part of the job.” These were the same people that Officers were sworn to protect.

  When Tom left his house each day, he made a point of kissing his wife, because he never knew if that was the last time he would see her again. For this same reason, he never let her go to bed mad at him. They had spent many nights up late talking, trying to resolve their problems, because Tom refused to let her go to sleep mad at him.

  Tom’s car was a 1969 Chevrolet Chevelle SS painted midnight blue. It had been seized from a drug dealer who had been transporting twenty kilograms of Cocaine in the trunk, when the Police had stopped him for speeding. The Police Department had been able to keep the car for official use, and Tom had been issued the car. He was allowed to take it home every night, and was given a certain amount of leeway to “tinker with it” as long as he maintained it in good condition. It didn’t look like a Police car, which was advantageous when looking for suspects that were watching for the Police. Tom took good care of the car, primarily because it was the car he had always dreamed of having. It looked normal enough on the outside, but it was anything but ordinary under the hood. This was because Tom had been tinkering with the engine and had used parts from several different cars to give him an edge against the criminals he chased. It now had a COPO (Central Office Production Order) 427cubic inch engine with forged pistons and an oversized camshaft, oversized ports with a supercharger. Tom had also had to put a new rear end in his car after he realized that the standard one wouldn't be able to handle that much torque. Tom had taken it to an abandoned airstrip outside of town and “put it through its paces.” He could go from 0-60 miles per hour in under five seconds, and could run a 10 second quarter mile with the supercharger activated. The Police Department had installed a covert light bar and hidden siren switch in the car, as well as a two-way radio in the trunk with the microphone under the seat.

  Several times in childish, but fulfilling displays of power, he had spun the tires in his driveway. This time he did it more out of necessity than out of need to show off. “Maybe,” he thought after melting the asphalt in his driveway and waking half of the neighborhood with the ten second screech this caused, “I over did it just a bit this time.”

  Tom’s partner, Steve Carlile, lived five miles away on route 65, and it took just under five minutes for Tom to reach Steve’s house with the blue lights on. Steve lived out in the country, so Tom had done most of the work on the car at Steve’s place with Steve’s help.

  As usual, Steve was waiting out front looking at his watch and shaking his head. “Give a guy a race car, and he can’t even make it move. Geez what a slowpoke,” he said. “And cheerful good morning to you, too,” Tom replied. As if in defiance to Steve’s slowpoke cracks, Tom laid so much rubber on the ground it would have made any drag racer envious.

  Steve Carlile was a lanky 6’1” tall with blonde hair and blue eyes, while Tom Kinkaid was a stocky 5’10” tall with brown hair and green eyes. Both men were in their late thirties and both had been on the job for fifteen years or more. Neither of them had children, and Steve was still single, unlike Tom. Steve claimed that he just hadn’t found the right woman yet, but Tom believed that Steve was so set in his ways, that he was scared of committing to one woman. The thought of having someone move into his house and rearrange things seemed to freak him out a little. Steve and Tom got along like brothers more or less, however, they fought less than brothers do. Sometimes, Tom’s wife, Heather would complain that he spent more time with Steve than he did with her. He and Heather had discussed having kids, and both of them wanted children, but the thought of bringing a defenseless baby into this world scared Tom half to death.

  He had discussed this with Steve, who replied “Defenseless? Babies are hardly defenseless! Have you seen what they do to diapers? They are master manipulators. For instance, when they are hungry, they cry in an obnoxious way, so that you have to shut them up or go insane. They keep you up all night just to lower your defenses so you are more susceptible to their subtle mind control.”

  “Wow, you really should be a pro-life counselor,” Tom retorted sarcastically. Steve was as blunt as a sack of doorknobs, but years of living by himself after several failed relationships had made him jaded. Heather had tried to fix Steve up with friends and acquaintances of hers, but when they had showed an interest in him, he had suddenly broken up with them. Steve’s version of these events, of course was slightly different than Heather’s. When Tom had asked Steve about this, Steve had said that the women were suffocating him, and that they were “psycho hose hounds,” that were desperately searching for the emotional security of a long-term relationship, even if they didn’t love the other person. Steve admitted that he might have overreacted when he had suggested that they buy a puppy instead, and had acted like a jerk just to push them away. In his mind, he felt that it was somewhat nobler to leave them when they thought he was a jerk, than if they thought that they had lost a great catch.

  As they sped toward the prison, Tom filled Steve in on the details he had been told over the phone.

  As the trees whistled by, Tom tried to reenact the incident at the prison inside his head. Murder was never an easy subject to deal with, but murder by someone with absolutely no conscious or sense of right or wrong was a particularly hard subject to comprehend.

  When they reached the prison, it looked as if World War III had broken out. Search lights pierced the night, a helicopter hovered overhead, and the riot squat had been called out.

  They were greeted by Lt. John Granger upon arrival, who seemed relieved to see them, He ushered them to the scene, filling them in with a condensed version of the suspects’ background history, and the events of the night.

  The hallway was already taped-off, and after the officer on duty checked their credentials, Tom and Steve entered to find the most grisly murder scene they had ever seen. After taking it all in, they had the fingerprint crew dust for fingerprints. Then, the c
oroner came in and inspected the bodies before hauling them off. Apparently they had been dead since around two o’clock that morning.

  From the bloody fingerprints and a few smudged handprints and footprints, Tom and Steve figured out the general direction the suspects had fled.

  Hazarding a guess, Tom asked Lt. Granger if any vehicles had left since two o’clock that morning. He made a few inquires, and found out that the garbage truck had left at or around 2:30 that morning with a full load.

  Driving to the main gate of the prison, Tom and Steve questioned the guard on duty there about the garbage truck and its pickup schedule. In finding nothing unusual about the pickup, and no irregularities in the schedule, Tom had Steve call dispatch, and request that some available units be sent to the city dump to search the incoming trucks and surrounding area. While Steve was making the call, Tom started the car and the two detectives started following the trail the garbage truck had taken.