Hello again my friends. It's time to hear another tale about my adventures in the police force. I got letters from some of you about my last article asking for more. I'm happy to provide you with a good story. As you know, many of these stories I share with my kids and grandkids. Many of the neighborhood children come by often as well.

On with the tale, it was a crisp autumn day the leaves hadn't begun to fall, but you could feel it in the air. Many of the neighborhood kids were walking to school for the first time that year. Their bright cheery faces made me smile. They were happy that they would get to see their friends even more often. The townspeople were also glad that the heat was getting less intense, although they weren't happy about loosing daylight earlier. That day was also the first time I had ever gotten to see the planet Venus in the night sky. It was as lovely as I had heard. I tried taking a photo, but it didn't come out too good.

There was a disturbance near 8 AM. A young girl named Tina in her mid teens had run toward me at incredible speed. She talked very fast, a result of the terror she must have felt. A friend of hers was being held by robbers in our local bakery. They were as well walking to school and her friend got caught up in a truly frightful scenario. There were two of them and were very hungry. I heard later that they were members of "The Sharks".

She lead me to the bakery quickly and I called for back up. Four other police officers arrived minutes later with more to come if we needed them. We tried to negotiate with the felons but to no avail. The situation was getting desperate. They demanded large quantities of food for the young girl's life. While we would have been glad to comply otherwise, but the burger barn wasn't open yet, and the bakery cooking crew hadn't arrived yet, not to mention the lack of a supermarket in the town.

As time passed, the hunger of the robbers visibly affected them. They became more agitated as the minutes passed. With no place to obtain food we couldn't deliver their demands. The minutes passed like hours and I could feel the sweat pouring down my face. As the time passed, Tina got more and more upset. I could feel her pain and wanted desperately for the situation to finish quickly. When there seemed to be no solution in sight, we decided it might be a good idea to try and sneak in the back door of the bakery and rush the robbers catching them off-guard and giving us the upper hand.

We made it to the back door without the buglers noticing. The back door was steel reinforced and worse was not able to be opened from the outside. Our trump card had been beaten and we were out of immediately visible options. But then we had an idea. The fourth member of our team, Justin, had been a fry cook in high school before he joined the force. If we could get access into the burger barn we could get the robbers food. Without calling attention to ourselves, for fear the buglers would do something desperate, myself and Justin made our way to the burger barn and proceeded to open the door. Within minutes he cooked up a storm! Bags of fries and burgers seemed to appear out of nowhere. We quickly made it back and fed the robbers the food we had produced. The young girl was let go and the robbers were quickly apprehended.

Later on, the Burger Barn morning crew arrived to find the mess we had left the owner was visibly upset. When he heard the events that took place, he was happy that we could solve the situation with the aid of his establishment. As I've said many times before, “The world works because most people are of good character”. They could have brought trouble for us for our actions, but instead were happy to help. I thanked them many times.

It was all thanks to an unlikely set of skills that saved the girl's life. We were also able to circumvent any possible violence as well. To those out there who make light of high school jobs, you never know when the skills you learn may come in handy. No serious labor in learning a skill is ever wasted. High school and college are meant to bring about a safe environment to learn not only information, but also useful skills.

I hope you enjoyed this edition of Chief Strong's Adventures, I really enjoyed writing it.