Life and death on wheels is their everyday business.

Ambulance driver Guy Murai speeds, lights flashing, sirens wailing, through nine or 10 red lights on Century Boulevard at about 11:30 p.m. Saturday night, but arrives on the scene of the shooting call apparently too late to help.

The narrow residential street in an unincorporated area of the county just south of Inglewood is crowded with Los Angeles County fire trucks and Los Angeles sheriff's cruisers and another Goodhew ambulance is already there, loading the victim into the rear.

But a yellow-jacketed L.A. County paramedic motions the ambulance forward. "Look, there is another one," says Michael Holt, the ambulance attendant "riding shotgun" with Murai.

There, in the grass in between the sidewalk and the street, lies a 20-year-old man, shot through the left knee. County paramedics have wrapped the knee in a white gauze bandage and are taping his leg into a long box, shaped like the boxes long-stem roses come in, to stabilize the leg from foot to the top of his thigh.

Murai and Holt lift the man from the grass to the gurney and wheel the gurney into the back of the ambulance. A sheriff's officer jumps in and questions the man quickly.

"No. Six shots," the young man tells the cop. "A handgun. From the driver's side. No. They just said, '----- you' and started shooting."

While Murai drives to Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Hospital, Holt checks the vital signs of the young man who, despite being shot, is able to ask Holt if he will be able to make a hot date he has the following Thursday. "She likes to dance," the gunshot victim tells Holt.

Holt tells his passenger that the fact that the gauze bandage still is pristine white is a good sign. At the hospital, Holt and Murai wheel the shooting victim out of the ambulance and into an emergency room bed. They get in the ambulance and check with headquarters.

Murai and Holt work for Goodhew Ambulance Service Inc., the oldest, if not the largest, private ambulance company in Los Angeles County.

James Goodhew is believed to have been the first private ambulance operator in Los Angeles County and began servicing hospitals with his horse-drawn ambulance in the late 1800s to early 1900s, says Doug Brown, manager of paramedic services for Goodhew and the company's unofficial historian.

Back then, ambulances were operated by hospitals, Brown says. "Mr. Goodhew could see that maybe one day that hospital may need two ambulances at the same time and the next day not need an ambulance at all. He realized that a private ambulance company had potential," Brown says.

Today, Goodhew Ambulance Service, which is headquartered on Jefferson Boulevard in West Los Angeles, has a fleet of 108 ambulances, and at peak hours 85 are on the road, according to Goodhew officials. The ambulances serve Los Angeles County from the north San Fernando Valley to the Palos Verdes Peninsula, and Goodhew also operates 35 ambulances in Riverside County, Goodhew officials say.

Goodhew employs about 550 people, the majority of whom are ambulance drivers and attendants, who work 10-hour days in four-day workweeks. William Goodhew, son of James, is chairman of the still privately owned corporation, Brown says.

Ambulance drivers and attendants have about 110 hours of medical training and are certified Emergency Medical Technicians, Brown says. Most are young, between 18 and 21 years old when they start out, and they start working at minimum wage, he says.

Walter Howell, president and part owner of Goodhew, declines to reveal company revenues. But he says the company only collects about 55 percent of all fees charged to patients. About 45 percent of all transports do not pay, many because they have no insurance, Howell says.

Ambulance rates are regulated in most cities and counties where Goodhew operates. In the City of Los Angeles, Goodhew charges a basic $141 plus $9.50 a mile, while in L.A. County it's $171 and $9.25 a mile, Goodhew officials say. Goodhew charges passengers between $9.25 and $9.50 a mile, Brown says.

Goodhew is one of five primary providers of emergency 911 service for the County of Los Angeles, which employs a force of paramedics but does not have ambulances to transport patients, said Sharon Holley, ambulance coordinator for the county Department of Health Services. The county paramedics travel around in trucks which are not big enough to roll a bed into, so the paramedics tap private ambulance firms such as Goodhew to transport patients.

As part of its contract, the county pays Goodhew $20,868 a month, Holley says. The money helps to pay for indigent patients the company transports, she says.

Virginia Price Hastings, chief of paramedic and trauma services for the county, says Goodhew "is very good, it's one of the better programs around."

Goodhew employees are more "career-oriented" than workers at some other private ambulance companies and the company consistently meets performance standards on 911 emergency calls, Hastings says. (Under the county contract, the ambulance must arrive on the scene in less than 10 minutes for 90 percent of the calls.)

Although there is a shortage of emergency rooms and trauma centers, there is no shortage of private ambulance service providers, as a number of smaller outfits have sprung up over the years, Hastings says. Some of the other ambulance companies that work for the county "get by by the skin of their teeth," he says.

On recent Friday and Saturday nights, Goodhew allowed a Los Angeles Business Journal reporter and photographer to ride along with two Goodhew crews. The nights' work varied from the high-intensity transporting of the gunshot victim and an apparent heart attack victim to long hours waiting at a centrally located 7-Eleven "on stand-by" for a call.

Murai noted that ambulance drivers know some of the best fast-food places in Los Angeles, "all the little holes in the wall," because they spend so much time waiting for calls. Ambulance drivers don't get full lunch breaks and grab meals while they are waiting, he said.

Increasingly, ambulances have had to wait not only to be called, but also at the hospitals because of a logjam created at county facilities. County hospitals have become overloaded with emergency patients because many private hospitals have closed unprofitable trauma centers, according to Goodhew officials and Hastings.

On one Friday night, the Goodhew crew was stuck at Martin Luther King Memorial Hospital for two hours, as it took two hours to find a bed for an elderly male patient. The ambulance could not leave the man at the hospital until a bed was found. This meant that for two hours another Goodhew ambulance had to cover for the this ambulance until a bed was found for the man at Martin Luther King.

Hastings said that such incidents can cause ambulance companies to miss their 10-minute response performance marks.

But not all calls are to transport patients to hospitals.

That same Friday night, the ambulance was called to Los Angeles International Airport to take a man from the Alitalia Airlines terminal to the Delta Airlines terminal. The man, who was suffering from a brain tumor, was flying from his home in Rome to a hospital in Phoenix for an operation that could save his life, said a relative who was traveling with him.

However, the majority of calls that night involved transporting elderly people from convalescent homes to hospitals. The transports were made Code Two -- no lights or sirens -- and not Code Three.

Murai noted that ambulances only use lights and sirens when they are either transporting a patient in a life-threatening situation or on their way to what could be could be a life-threatening situation. About 50 percent of the time when ambulances go Code Three to the emergency scene, they don't use lights and sirens when later transporting the call to the hospital, because the situation often turns out not to be a life-threatening situation, he said.

Don Baur, Goodhew field supervisor for community relations, said that among the little-known facts about ambulance companies is that only 8 percent of the calls actually involve life-threatening situations. Most of the calls involve transporting elderly, non-critical patients, Goodhew officials said.

People are surprised to find out that about half of all Goodhew ambulance crew members are women.

Many Goodhew and other private ambulance employees go on to become Los Angeles County firefighters-paramedics, notes Hastings, chief of county paramedic services. They make substantially better money, $50,000 a year without overtime as compared to minimum wage for the Goodhew employees, Hastings noted.

Donna Mendoza, 40, a former housewife and mother of two teenagers, became a Goodhew EMT about four years ago, after her divorce, she said. The lifting part of her job was a little challenging at first, Mendoza said, but it has become easier.

She has lifted a 300-pound man out of a bathtub, Mendoza said. She often has to lift the gurney, which by itself weighs about 70 pounds, and the patient in it, up stairs a few times a day.

Mendoza said she likes the variety of the work and helping people. She noted that, for many newcomers to the business, their favorite part of the work is Code Three calls. These people are known in the business as "Code Three junkies," Mendoza said.

What is Holt's favorite part of the job? "I guess I'd have to say excitement. Not knowing what's going to be there when you get there."

Holt, whose mother is a Los Angeles police officer and whose father is a Los Angeles County deputy sheriff, asks to work the South Central Los Angeles area on Friday and Saturday nights from 8 p.m. to 6 a.m., the time and the place for ambulances to catch the most trauma calls -- knifings, shootings, auto accidents.

All three Goodhew ambulance drivers interviewed said they have been emotionally affected by the job, but they have learned to let go of patients once they complete a transport.

One time, and only one time, did Holt try to find out about what happened to a patient. About two years ago Holt was part of a team of paramedics, sheriff's officers and other emergency personnel which responded to a call about a 4-year-old girl who had drowned in a swimming pool in Carson.

"We all got her back and breathing and all of that," Holt said. He transported her to L.A. County-Harbor-UCLA Medical Center. Two days later, Holt went back to see the girl, teddy bear in hand.

He couldn't believe it when the hospital staff told him the child "didn't make it," Holt said.

"I went there looking for her to be OK," he said. After that sad follow-up, "I made a point of never doing that again."