Chapter Forty-Five
The Harley purred to silence as Ash swung into the curb, black chrome catching the gin joint’s neon in sly, scarlet gleams. Above the doorway, the sign burned its name in crimson letters—Babylon—a wounded heart bleeding across the oily asphalt.
Its glimmer baptized the loiterers in damnation’s palette: rumpots sagging against brick, dealers whispering from the gutter’s mouth, beggars stretching palms like poisonous flowers.
He cut the engine, keys loose between his fingers, attention fixed on the door, on the fever pulsing behind it.
All day he had chased phantoms through Mokasset alleys and Old Town dives, slipping bills into eager fists, coaxing whispers that withered before they touched his ear.
Too early, always too early. The carrion feeders only stirred after dark, and all he’d swallowed was his own frustration.
So he had gone home, refilled Poe’s bowls, savored the rasp of that sandpaper tongue scraping devotion across his knuckles.
A small tenderness, but reassuring. Proof that not everything he touched dissolved into smoke.
Now the night had ripened full. The streets throbbed with breath and sin: engines idling in the rain-slick dark, laughter cracking sharp as glass, the languid moan of a saxophone drifting from the pubs.
The watering hole before him loomed like a shrine to ruin, windows blurred with steam, doorway yawning wide, exhaling perfume and ashes.
Babylon had always been the place for a man to lose himself—or to find exactly what he craved.
If you wanted beauty on the arm or heat against your skin, this was where you came.
Ash wasn’t hunting pleasure tonight, but he knew desire left trails, and trails led to answers.
He swung off the bike, boots shattering his reflection in the puddle, and stepped toward the glow.
The phone buzzed in his pocket. For a second, he thought Rick might have more news, but the screen showed a different name. Tess. Ash half-smiled and thumbed the call open. “Miss me already?”
“You have no idea,” she said over the low murmur of voices, glassware clinking, piano drifting faintly in the background. “The place is a tomb without you. I swear, Vinny’s so dramatic about it, I’m thinking of drowning him in the sink. Says he’s considering therapy.”
Ash struck a match, cupping it against the wind.
The flame brushed his cheekbones as he brought it to the cigarette dangling from his lips.
He started strolling down the street, weaving past a couple arm in arm, smoke trailing behind him.
“Maybe he should get onstage. Put on a tragic hero act for the crowd.”
“Don’t give him ideas. He’s already moping like someone’s died.
Meanwhile, Cody’s decided he’s the headliner now that you’re out.
Struts around like the Eclipse was his personal runway.
” She broke off to yell at someone: “Two minutes, hold your horses!” Then back into the receiver, dry as gin: “And I had to toss some creep who kept asking if you were dancing tonight. Your fan club’s still rabid. ”
Ash moved a little farther from the traffic, leaning on a lamppost as he exhaled. “Rabid ones keep the rent paid. You shouldn’t scold them too much.”
“Yeah, yeah, keep your worshipers. I’ll keep the whiskey flowing.”
He chuckled, the weight in his shoulders easing as he drew another breath of smoke. “See? Always some drama. And they say I’m the trouble.”
“You are,” Tess shot back. “But it’s the kind of trouble I prefer. So please tell me you’re coming back soon. I’m not sure how much longer I can stand this place without you.”
Her words warmed him more than he wanted to admit. He glanced up; Babylon’s sign shone ahead, its crimson haze promising the usual mix of smoke and shadows.
“Soon,” he said, voice softened by something close to contentment. “But not yet.”
“Ash—”
“Gotta go, babe. Got something to do.” He cut the call before she could press him, slipped the phone away, and flicked his cigarette into the gutter. He ground it beneath his heel and walked on toward the bar’s red-lit mouth.
Babylon opened around him in a haze of nicotine and sour perfume, the air a jealous lover clinging to his clothes.
Its lamps cast a bruised glow, amber drowned in scarlet, spilling over cracked leather booths that sagged with the weight of regulars welded to their seats.
The bar’s mirror was smudged with decades of fingerprints, an altar to vanity clouded with ghostly faces.
Somewhere near the jukebox, a clarinet moaned from an old record, unspooling a slow, aching lament.
Ash paused inside, letting his vision adjust, letting the room adjust to him.
The first ripple was always the same: a hitch in the air, like dice stalling mid-roll.
Heads turned, glasses lowered. Some gazes flared with hunger, others with calculation, a few with something like reverence—the familiar gravity of his own orbit.
He felt their stares brushing his skin, light as the ash that drifts from a burning cigarette.
Once, maybe, it might have quickened him.
Now it was just another tolling of the same old bell.
He slid forward through the fug of haze and gin with the languor of a panther who already knows the jungle belongs to it, weaving past shoulders and half-spilled drinks, every step a measured trespass into their lust. Eddie was behind the counter, as usual, polishing a glass with mechanical devotion, his gaze following Ash since he crossed the threshold.
Ash supposed he could start from there, the axis around which everything here spun.
He let the attention linger a moment longer, then slid onto a stool, elbows braced on the counter.
“Busy night?” Ash murmured, the words laced with a half-smile.
Eddie’s mouth twitched at the corner, eyes roaming over him with more than just recognition. “Always is. What can I get you, handsome?”
Ash leaned in, close enough for him to catch the faint heat of tobacco and leather off his clothes. “Actually, I’m looking for two of my buddies—James Cole and Declan Frost. Either of those ring a bell?”
Eddie shook his head with a shrug. “Most guys who come here don’t bother with names. Even if they did, I wouldn’t keep them straight. I serve hundreds every week. They all blur together after a while.” His smile deepened, a shade more personal. “Not you, though. You’re hard to forget.”
Ash slipped his phone from his pocket. Screen flare lit his face, sudden and stark. He turned it toward Eddie—Jimmy’s photo, smiling, careless. “Maybe your memory’s better with faces.”
Eddie studied the picture, brow furrowed, but in the end only shook his head. “Sorry, sweetheart. Nothing.”
Ash flicked his thumb, and Declan Frost’s cold eyes stared from the glass. He’d found his photo online, saved it to his gallery just for this. “What about him?”
Another shrug. “Nope.”
Ash clutched the phone, dismissing him with a faint curve of his mouth. The man was useless. “Thanks anyway, Eddie.”
“Anytime, sugar,” Eddie said, still smiling, as if the refusal itself was another kind of flirtation.
Ash let the bar’s soft music swallow him back into the polyphony of noises, a faint impatience pressing at his ribs, wondering where to dig next.
He rose and slipped from Babylon into the night, smoke still clinging to his jacket with the glances of all those disappointed to see him go.
One strikeout didn’t matter. This game was all persistence, and Calgrave had no shortage of dens to scour.
At the Mirage, with its gilt Corinthian columns rising over cracked vinyl stools, he met Marta, the barmaid, who leaned in with her usual smile that lingered a little too long.
She studied the photos carefully, lips pursed, and finally sighed an apology.
Next came the Boiler Room, thick with sweat and leather, the air steamed to opacity by the press of bodies grinding under red light.
Cal flashed Ash a crooked grin from behind the counter, but knew nothing useful, lust turning to blankness the moment Ash asked his questions.
The Metro came after, where a drag queen crooned low into the mic, torch songs slinking through the smoke, the room tilting toward cabaret.
Ash slid onto a bench at the bar, chatting up Will, who once dated Tess and still greeted him with that soft, faithful gaze of a man who’d never stopped hoping.
Will took his time with the photos, face tight before he passed the phone back with regret. Another no.
Time kept bleeding, each rejection sanding him thinner.
The city’s underbelly had plenty of sins to offer, but none with Frost’s name attached.
Drinks were pressed into his hands, cigarettes lit with trembling fingers, pleasures promised in dark corners.
Sharp suits glittered beneath dim chandeliers, rough hands reached for his hips, honey-sweet voices whispered invitations he declined with practiced ease, but not one of them lit with recognition when he placed the phone before them.
The hunt was becoming mechanical—flirt, flash the screen, read their eyes, move on—but beneath the mask, discouragement gnawed.
The night was burning away, and patience was a currency he was running out of.
The quest that had started with determination now felt like a marathon through quicksand, every step forward met with the city’s indifferent shrug.
By the time weariness began to claw at his edges, he’d hit six joints and had nothing to show for it but sore feet and a throat scraped raw by smoke and liquor.
He thought of Rick, probably neck-deep in warrants and phone calls, piecing the case together with things that actually held up in daylight. Meanwhile, Ash was out here chasing rumors with a borrowed smile and a battery at ten percent. The contrast stung more than he wanted to admit.
Midnight was creeping in. But he’d promised to help, and he meant to keep his word. So, he quaffed the rest of his drink, felt the burn steady him, and pushed away from his stool. Maybe he’d get lucky in the next one.