With a curse, Adrian went all holier-than-thou. “I only touch if they ask.”

“What a relief.”

“But you know, reanimation is possible.”

“Not tonight it isn’t. And certainly not in this place.”

“Man, you could suck the fun out of a strip club.”

“Pass.”

Ghosting into the large, clinical room, it was damn obvious why horror movies used morgues for settings. Between the green security lighting, the rolling gurneys, and the drains in the floor, the place was the perfect backdrop for a case of the heebs.

Even though he’d died and gone to heaven and all that crap, his adrenal glands still waved its flag well enough. Then again, the twitches were probably less about the other dead guys and more about the fact that he was going to look his own corpse in the face.

As he headed for the massive refrigerator unit, with its rows of cold flats, he knew exactly what he was doing. When he didn’t kill Isaac on schedule, two things were going to happen: Someone else would and somebody would be sent out looking for Jim.

And that was the reason they were here. His old boss was going to want to make sure Jim had bought the farm, so to speak: Matthias didn’t believe in death certificates, autopsy reports, or photographs because he knew all too well how easy it was to fake that kind of documentation. He also didn’t trust funerals, burial sites, or weeping widows and mothers, because he’d substituted too many bodies one for another over the years. Face-to-face verification was the only way to be sure in his book.

Usually Matthias sent his second in command to do the double-check, but Jim was going to make certain the big man himself was the one to do it in this case. The bastard was hard to flush out of hiding, and Jim needed his own face time with the guy.

The only way to make that happen was to use his own frozen ass as a lure.