The captain was laughing with county officials when I walked into that ballroom, and he stopped laughing, because I had not been invited and because the man holding the door for me was the county’s EMS director.
I did not come to embarrass anybody. I came because Sheila Renfro from dispatch called me at home on a Tuesday and said, Curtis, you need to hear what the run sheets say.
Every bag in that station has a number stenciled on the strap and a seal on the drug box, and every seal gets logged when a bag goes out and when it comes back, with the run number, the crew, and the time. I set that system up in 2003 after a state inspection went badly, and I have written in that book every morning at five-forty for twenty-two years.
Bag 4 went out on a standby at the county fairgrounds on a Saturday in September. It came back to the station with a broken seal and never got logged in, because the crew that ran it was not our crew.
It was a mutual aid unit the captain had started using — a private outfit out of Boyd County that he’d been steering our standby work to since June, and if you look at who owns it, it is his brother-in-law, which is not a secret so much as a thing nobody had put on paper next to anything else.
The bag turned up in the back of one of their trucks in October. The morphine and the fentanyl were gone out of it, and that is a matter for the state board and the sheriff and not for me.
What Sheila did was print the CAD records and the seal log side by side and hand them to the EMS director, and the EMS director drove to Ashland himself.
He asked for the microphone at that banquet before the awards started. He said the accusation had been made in front of a crew and would be corrected in front of a room. He read the seal log entries out loud, three of them, in my handwriting.
Then he read one more thing, which I had never seen, and which they had apparently been sitting on since the spring.
It was a letter to the county from a woman in Catlettsburg.
In 1998 my son went through the ice on Hood Creek and the man who went in after him is the one who unlocks your station in the mornings. He has never once let me thank him properly. My son is thirty-four now and has two girls. I am writing this down because he will not tell you himself.
I had to sit down on a folding chair at the back of that ballroom in front of two hundred people, which is not how I pictured any of it.
The captain resigned in November. The county pulled the mutual aid contract and put the standbys back with our crews.
They gave me my radio back at the station, on a Monday, with the crew standing around the coffee pot, which is the only ceremony I ever wanted.
Doors open at five-forty. Tanks checked, stretchers made up, coffee on. Same as always.