“Do I look like I give a fuck?” Vincent snapped.

Richey lowered his head and muttered something, then started lacing up his boots again. Sap that I was, I took pity on him.

“Could you use me instead? I just arrived — I’m fresher than Richey.”

Vincent rolled his eyes, then nodded. “Sure. One asshole’s the same as another. Meet me out back three minutes from now.”

“Thanks, man,” Richey said softly as Vincent left.

“No problem. You’d do the same for me, right?”

“Sure.” Richey laughed lamely.

Vincent had calmed down by the time I reported for duty. He tapped the dashboard of a glistening ambulance. “I love these,” he said as I got in, then jammed his foot down. The Troops on the gate only just got it open in time. Their curses trailed us out of Party Central.

“Where are we headed?” I asked, raising my voice to be heard over the blaring sirens Vincent had activated.

“The Fridge,” Vincent replied, taking a corner like a Keystone Kop. He always drove like this when Tasso wasn’t around.

“Dropping someone off?”

“Picking someone up.”

The Fridge was a privately owned morgue, sometimes referred to by brave — but foolish and short-lived — reporters as the Elephant’s Graveyard of the city. It was where The Cardinal’s employees took undesirable corpses, bodies they didn’t want washing up, victims they wished to keep on ice. Sometimes his own men were stuck away there too, if they’d died in suspicious circumstances and required an autopsy. Apparently the best pathologists in the country plied their trade behind the camouflaged walls of the Fridge.

“What’s the deal?” I asked.

Vincent swerved to avoid a necking couple who weren’t paying attention to the road, pounded on the horn, gave them the finger, then looked at me and grinned. “You heard about the girl who got sliced at the Skylight?”

I recalled my conversation with Jerry and Mike. “Yeah.”