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My first run of the night, finally, was from The Grand to Roys. The passengers were from the mainland and the man who road "shotgun" was with Homeland Security. A DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) agent doing the same job, basically, with a different title and chain-of-command.
We were northbound on the dark Pi'ilani Highway (SR-31), near my residence, when the car in front of us suddenly veered left, then right and then pulled to the shoulder. Then both the agent and I saw a man, dressed in brown clothing and sporting a backpack, land on the shoulder, rolling into the dirt. We were past this accident so fast, and the traffic was busy enough to make it too dangerous to try and turn around. It was more practical to keep going and just call 9-1-1. Which is what I did. About a minute later, two MPD cars, going "balls to the wall" passed us headed southbound.
After I made the drop at Roy's I returned to The Grand. Passing the accident scene, there were the two patrol cars parked behind the vehicle that was involved along the east side of the road but the ambulance and firetrucks were on the west side frontage road that parallels the southbound lanes.
Later in the night I spoke to one of the officers and learned that they weren't even sure if the subject had been hit or not. The lady driver said that the man had been walking in the middle of the #2 northbound lane and she thought she had hit him but there was no physical evidence of an impact on her vehicle. When she stopped, the guy begged her not to call the cops because he claimed to have warrants for his arrest. He fled across the highway, to the west, towards my house, and disappeared into the 167 new home construction area just north of where I live.
All the "nighthawks" searched for about a half-hour but never found him.
I guess even idiots have a lucky night on occassion.
Over all it was a strange night. During the first 7 hours (7:00pm to 2:00am) I only had four runs. The next 4 hours (2:00am to 6:00am) brought me 7 runs. While the tips were good, the meter just barely crept over the $100 mark.
To make matters even worse, our cell-phone service shut down just after midnight and Kimo, last nights driver/dispatcher, had to wake the owner up and get a different phone using another carrier. We were out of contact with the public for about an hour. This is not the first time this has happened and following SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) I called the switchboard at The Grand and gave them my personal cell # so we would be able to service them per our contract. During the hour the phones were down we just cruised all the bars, wasting gas, to make ourselves very visible. Crazy Brian lucked out and got a run to The Pride Of Hawaii at Kahului harbor.
I guess the day-shift was pretty miserable yesterday. 5 day drivers held over until almost midnight, trying to make a few extra bucks and screwing the night drivers out of their runs. Feces occurs. Today won't be much better since we only have one pre-scheduled run to the airport at 12:30pm.
"ICE" (smokeable crytal meth) reared it's head again last night. It was a very warm, humid night and our local version of gangbangers made their appearence at the "Triangle" just before bar close. Walking around wearing hooded pullover sweat shirts, with the hoods pulled up to hide their faces. The story I got was not verifiable but apparently they did find a victim(s) in front of Neptunes and caused enough serious injury that the victim(s) had to be transported to the hospital. There were nearly 100 witnesses but, of course, "nobody taw nuttin'".
While not PC, this is how the deputies I worked with handled this kind of problem.
Later.....
Wil
=8^))
"Let's all be careful out there!"
