Fools and Money.

Fools and Money.

If 10 years as a fireman had taught me anything it was patience. Don’t rush into anything. Stop and look around at the big picture in front of you. In my profession rushing in means death. You just don’t do it. Rookies are a problem. They’re observant and they ask a lot of questions. For reasons that will reveal themselves later, I don’t like questions.

Night shift as a fireman involves a lot of MVA’s – or motor vehicle accidents in civilian speak. We don’t say car crash or even the word accident. Few of them are accidents. Its 11pm on a cold wet Friday night. There’ll be drunks driving, teenagers showing off in overpowered cars, heads full of amphetamines, and then there’s those we call the innocents. The ones who didn’t see it coming. I don’t feel much at all for the drunks or boy racers. A maimed or killed innocent rips my heart out, every time, but I never share this. At the scene of an MVA its often easy to work out who did what and why. I want to scream at the fools who caused this mess and I want to comfort and cry with the innocents. But we’re professionals so we don’t take sides. We don’t follow-up or read the media or revisit the scene. We’ve no room in our heads for that. I have my own ways of punishing the fools.

It’s now after midnight on a cold wet Friday night. I’m standing in the middle of a busy nameless road extracting a terribly injured woman from the mangled wreck of a car. I look at the child-seat strapped into the back and breathe an audible sigh of relief that there’s no kid here. The woman is in her mid-30’s. I’d say 37. We follow instructions from the paramedics. It’s all very smooth and practised, but I just know she isn’t going to make it. A mobile phone rings somewhere in the car. Someone is wondering where mum is; I suspect they’ll forever wonder where she is. The paramedic cautions his partner that she’s bleeding internally. He asks us to speed up our work.

My officer in charge calls me over to the truck. His instructions are for me to go and talk to the driver of the 2nd car and make sure he’s ok. The paramedics are a little pre-occupied. The driver is a young man of about 18. He’s trying to get back into his car which is upside down in a grassy area about 2 meters off the road. I talk him away from the car and start asking him harmless questions to help me understand if he’s concussed or in shock. Remarkably he seems ok. He’s one who “walked away” which is the common parlance for a miracle. He really wants to get into that car, and I think I know why, but this is for the police, not me. I think I need to take a look in that car. A 2nd ambulance pulls up. I take the driver over to the paramedics. They sit him down while a cop looks on. He’s anxious as hell but he isn’t going anywhere. I go back to the car. I get down on all fours on the far side of the car out of view from anyone in a uniform and look in: Its clean looking. I see a black backpack wedged under the passenger seat. My colleague tells me the woman in the other car just died. Perfect: without hesitation I grab the backpack and look inside and instantly know what I’m looking at and roughly how much its worth. I know this because I had a very different life before the fire department. Without even thinking about it I toss the backpack as hard as I can into the bushes and get back to work.

A couple of days later I’m off duty at the beach and have just enjoyed a long swim. I sit down for coffee and enjoy the view. I pull a black book out of my bag and turn the pages until I find the latest entry. In my ten years of service, I’ve churned through many of these books. The content would likely put me behind bars for years. I look at the entry dated the night the young mother was killed in the MVA: Black bag containing large quantity of white powder and approximately $20,000 in cash. It’s remarkable even to me that I don’t try and hide these books, but I can’t. I tried to years ago, but it just takes away the thrill of it all.

The 36-year-old mum who died maimed and crushed in her family car had three children. The drug dealer who cut her off at high speed…I really don’t care what he had. He didn’t go to prison for dangerous driving; he could have gone to prison for possession of $200,000 worth of cocaine. That’s mine now, he won’t even look for it. He won’t even ask about it. The surviving family of four will grieve the loss of their mum - a working mum - forever. The father though - like many relatives of fatal accidents before him - will forever wonder where the canvas bag left on the front seat of his car containing $220,000 in cash came from. The note in the bag says, “don’t ask any questions”, and I suspect he won’t.

Greg Cole.