The Coffin Nails are a Shelf gang of approximately 55 members that has carved out a grimly specific niche: they control the death industry in the lower Shelf. Funerals, body collection, cremation, memorial services, and the disposal of the dead in a tier where the official municipal services don't bother to operate. When someone dies in the deep Shelf, the Coffin Nails show up — sometimes because they're called, sometimes because they heard, sometimes because they were watching.

This is not charity. The Coffin Nails charge for their services: body collection, basic preparation, cremation or burial in one of the improvised cemeteries they maintain in abandoned lots. The prices are lower than what a legitimate funeral service would charge, but they're not free, and the Nails are not above pressuring grieving families into paying more than they can afford. They also make money by stripping valuable augmentations from the dead before cremation (the bereaved rarely know the full inventory of their loved one's hardware) and selling them to the Cutters Guild.

But the Coffin Nails are more than scavengers. They have become, through years of handling the dead, the keepers of the deep Shelf's mortality records — an informal but comprehensive census of who has died, when, how, and where. In a tier where no government agency tracks deaths and no corporate entity cares, the Coffin Nails are the only record that certain people ever existed at all. This gives them an unexpected moral weight that their criminal activities would otherwise deny them.