Vince put on some gloves and retrieved a bag. Gwen held it open as he lowered in the corpse, then he shook the ants off his hands and put it in a cooler in the back of the truck.

We spent the rest of the morning in charity work. The first task was to run a quick needle exchange. Hepatitis A was a scourge among the south-siders. They knew the drill. Yawning, anxious, they ditched syringes in a purple plastic bin, then Gwen issued a baggie with a fresh needle and cotton swabs. When that was over, we drove around the corners where sex workers gathered, handing out condoms and bottled water, Gwen and Vince chirping, “Courtesy of Common Dreams.”

When we drove by the workers at the Glades, who were on break, Vince leveled a scowl that made them laugh.

I asked the paramedics what they thought about the Rubicon trial.

“Honestly, I don’t pay much attention to it,” Gwen said. She was dabbing her piercing with hydrogen peroxide.

“Me neither,” said Vince. “Only when we’re actually performing a transfusion.”

“And then I’m like, ‘White blood, that’s weird.’ ”

“But if it works, it works,” said Vince. “In Tampa, only the chopper carries blood reserves, so this is pretty awesome as far as I’m concerned. It’s the first ambulance I’ve ever seen fully prepped for emergency transfusions.”

“Why’s it so rare?”

“There’s never enough O-neg to go around,” said Vince, “so it’d be too costly to stock it in a whole fleet of ambulances.”

“And besides,” said Gwen, “you’re usually just a few minutes from the hospital, so you can permit a certain amount of hypotension and focus on driving.”

“The problem is, some of your patients are goners by the time you get there.”

“Right,” said Gwen. “If you’re really bleeding out, the window’s super-small.”

We stopped at a Burger King near the water and took some food to the beach. Pelicans hunted, suspended in the wind. The dogs knew to follow us. Vince always brought along scraps from last night’s dinner, and with every bite he took, he heaved something out to the pack, who scrambled over hot sand to rip it up.

We talked about Quinn, the subject at Ocean General.

“The call came in just after midnight,” Gwen said, munching onion rings, the grease polishing the piercing. “He was unconscious when we got to him. Actually, I thought we were going to pronounce him right there. It’s a certain way the headlights catch flesh sometimes and go straight through—you can tell. But he was breathing. It looked like someone had been putting pressure on the wound, but they’d run off, maybe when they heard us coming.”