It’s 3 a.m. in Las Vegas. Nephy Acevedo and his colleague are heading south down I-95 toward Henderson when they hear a motorcycle approaching, riding their tail. They switch lanes to let him pass. He sticks behind them in the next lane over, letting off the gas until the roar of his engine fades, then coming up fast, then fading back. No windows in the van. No lights on the bike.

The driver keeps this up until finally Acevedo says, “Okay, this guy’s playing games with us. We might as well pull to the side.” They do, but the bike is gone. They speculate that maybe it was a friend or family member escorting the body. Or a crazy person.

After a few minutes back on the road, the bike returns, pulling up along the driver’s side. Acevedo says that when his partner rolled down the window, the bike disappeared. This time for good.

*****

Acevedo was 21 when he got a call from a friend in a jam. He had to move a body. “There might be a job in it for you, because we can’t keep anybody,” he remembers his friend saying.

He’d never seen a dead body, and superstition was big in Acevedo’s family of Guatemalan and Mayan heritage. Touching the dead is ominous. But he agreed to help. He’d been working casino thrill rides, and business was slow.

The man’s body growled when they wrapped it in a sheet, air releasing from his lungs as they lifted him onto the gurney. It was a hospital pickup. Nothing extreme. But then his friend got a call from the coroner’s office for another pickup. He asked Acevedo to sit in the back of the van in the dark with the body, out of sight. “Sitting with a man who was just alive in the back of a dark van, I’m thinking, There’s more to this. I’m interested.”

Fifteen years later, Acevedo is an official body mover, one of about 30 in the county transporting decedents for mortuaries and the coroner’s office, making pickups anywhere life ends—homes and businesses, churches and government buildings, roads and parks. Three weeks on and three weeks off.

More than 2 million residents live in the Valley, and calls come around the clock. Natural causes, overdoses, car accidents, shootings, domestic violence. If a death happens in someone’s home, the family cleans it up. “From the sidewalk in is the family’s responsibility,” Acevedo says. “With suicides with a gunshot, we take as much of it as we can. Sometimes it might go somewhere they can’t see it.” “It” refers to human tissue and fluids. That’s why attendants suggest a professional cleaning company. “Seeing it is one thing, but the first time you’re holding someone’s brains in your hands, it hits you—this is someone’s thoughts and dreams.”

Clark County Coronor John Fudenberg says that body movers like Acevedo are essential to the machinery of dealing with death. “They’re a very valuable resource for us. These are the guys working in the shadows, they’re doing the heavy lifting. It’s not easy removing a decedent with extensive trauma and putting a decomposed body into a body bag. Their job is very difficult. And it’s a very thankless job.”

While Acevedo has been able to handle it, the friend who initially brought him onboard struggled and finally quit. “He was taking the cases home with him. They were keeping him up at night,” says Acevedo, now in his 30s. “One moment he could be picking up an 80-year-old man, the next minute it could be a 2-year-old that was beaten to death.” The call that finished it, Acevedo says, involved a child being run over by a truck and driven back to the company yard caught in the undercarriage without the driver’s knowledge.

*****

Sitting in the Galleria mall food court, Acevedo is conversational, easygoing, kind and smiling. He believes in an afterlife, that our bodies are vessels for only one leg of the journey. He escorts those vessels. “I treat them with the most respect possible. I still feel good doing it. I can still handle it.”

The work often involves removing a body with the family present, a delicate situation. “I’m always aware of what the family is going to see or think. I try to put myself in their place and see what they’re seeing. I tip my hat to the investigator, the bearer of bad news—that takes a toll. It’s not like TV shows or the news. In reality, there’s more to it. Even a case in the news, if Vegas ever knew the backstory and the pain of the family ...

“A lot of the really emotional cases are the domestic cases. Emotions run high with family. Those have been the goriest, the most unbelievable and the most senseless. They’re usually very gruesome. They’re usually very violent. The wounds are more extensive or repetitive. There are a lot of cases that were so impactful. I won’t forget them. Emotionally and unbelievably.

“In a way you’ve gotta be coldhearted, because if every case you wonder how the family is going to deal with it, you’d never get your work done.”

When Acevedo’s own family arrived here from Central America in 1980 under Reagan administration amnesty, Las Vegas was still a relatively small town. Today, violence is more commonplace than when he took the job in 2000, from shootings to stabbings to rollovers. A network of professionals moves in quickly, including Acevedo. He has seen a child jump on his father’s gurney, and a criminal grieve for his girlfriend who’d been terminally ill and died while he was out buying her a birthday cake. “I talk to [the bodies] in certain cases,” he says. “With a child, I’ll say, ‘Alright buddy, time to go.’”

When asked about his seemingly happy disposition, Acevedo explains, “I’m better off than anyone I’m going to pick up today. It can change like that at any minute.”

*****

Then what? Acevedo thinks the decedents hang around for a while, based on what he says he’s experienced, and connecting back to that night in the van on I-95.

With the motorcycle gone and the two body movers alone on the freeway, Acevedo brought up an option for what happened. During the pickup, they’d seen photographs of the dead man on different Harleys over the decades. There was a leather vest in the room, and the deceased was wearing motorcycle boots with his bedclothes.

“What if this is him?” Acevedo asked. “Maybe this is his last ride.”