The Guard: Campground Stories

Chapter 3

  Charlie looked down at his newly found “Mickey Mouse” wrist-watch, and Mickey’s famous white-gloved hands pointed to three o’clock in the morning. The watch had been a champion find; when he had found it, it was still ticking, and the only thing wrong with it had been a cracked crystal.

  Charlie always liked to be the first one at the dump in the mornings, because he was sure to find the best “treasures” before anyone else could. He had single-handedly turned scavenging into a fine art, knowing what to look for and which garbage trucks delivered the best junk.

  It was no surprise that when truck number fifteen rolled up, Charlie recognized it as being from the prison. As Charlie was turning away to search for more treasures, he caught a flicker of movement out of the corner of his eye. When he turned around, he noticed that three people were climbing out of the back of the garbage truck. “Man, those prison folks’ll throw anything away,” mused Charlie as he watched the figures scamper off into the woods.

  When two police cars pulled into the dump at four o’clock with their lights flashing and sirens blasting, poor Charlie thought he was getting busted for vagrancy, and in sheer panic he dropped the armful of valuables he had collected, and high-tailed it out of there at a full gallop. Even so, one of the officers managed to catch him with a flying tackle that sent both men sailing through a pile of rotten banana peels and eggshells.

  After picking Charlie up off of the ground, the officer apologized and told him that they just wanted to ask him a few questions. When Charlie heard this, he was furious. “You mean I jes lost a whole morning’s worth of treasure for nothing?” he screamed.

  The officers asked him if he had seen anything unusual that morning besides “treasures.” Charlie told them about the three people that someone had thrown away, after a long lecture about the value of the things people threw away.

  At this point, Tom and Steve walked up and found out from Charlie, which way the three suspects had gone. When Charlie had pointed to the woods, Tom and Steve organized a search party with the officers there and they scattered into the woods.

  Tom picked up the trail almost immediately. The suspects had been in a hurry, and had left a trail so obvious it could have been seen from across the dump. Broken branches and footprints led into the woods on the East side of the dump. Tom cursed to himself. This was the direction to town from the dump. The dump was located about ten miles west of town and about two miles north of the prison from which these jackasses had escaped. Between here and town, there were probably twenty to thirty houses. When Tom thought about what these suspects would do to an unsuspecting family, he got the cold sweats. Brief flashes of what he had seen at the prison came to him like photos taken by a crime scene photographer. Tom shivered sub-consciously, and started walking faster through the dense forest.