Page 14 of After the Fade, Vol. 1 (Asheverse: B-Side)

The DuPage Parish Mysteries: Eli’s plans for New Year’s Eve take a turn.

The address was for an unmarked door set into a beaten-down brick building. On one side, it was attached to a crumbling Creole townhouse, and on the other, to a concrete shell of a building that had its doors and windows sealed with plywood. A streetlight at the end of the block provided the only illumination.

I tried to think confident thoughts.

Apparently, it wasn’t working, though, because Dag asked, “Are you sure this is the right address?”

“My phone is sure.”

He frowned as he parked.

This might, technically, have been the French Quarter, but only barely. No tourists thronged the sidewalks. Nobody was doing any kind of thronging anywhere, as far as I could tell. We had this block to ourselves, with only the distant thud of bass as a reminder that the rest of New Orleans was celebrating New Year’s Eve in style.

Dag frowned as he studied the block. He looked—well, perfect, of course. The blazer-and-sweater combo that emphasized the strength of his body. The military-short cut of beautiful gray hair. He fixed me with a look.

“Let me see that invitation.”

“It’s not an invitation, it’s a gift.”

“E.”

“From your parents.”

He held out a hand.

“And they gave it to me,” I said, “not you. You’re lucky I asked you to be my plus one.”

“Lucky you asked me to get murdered with you, you mean.”

“Oh my God, stop. It’s perfectly safe. Plus, you’re going to protect me.”

As we got out of the car, he said, “And who’s going to protect me?”

“I don’t know. We’ll figure that out as we go along.”

The nice thing about being with Dag—one of the nice things—was that he took it all in stride. He didn’t even roll his eyes anymore.

“What’s this place called?” he asked as we walked toward the unmarked door.

It was called The Plundering Hole, but there was no way I was going to tell him that. “I don’t remember.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Dagobert LeBlanc, I don’t like that tone. This is a fancy New Year’s Eve party. It’s exclusive. It was frighteningly expensive. And your parents paid for it as a wonderful, thoughtful gift.”

“For you,” he said drily.

“And I invited you because I’m such a thoughtful partner.”

We made it three more paces before he said, in an unusually stern tone, “What aren’t you telling me?”

The other thing about my wonderful boyfriend? Even though he would disagree, he had been an excellent cop.

“Here we are,” I said.

He gave me another look—a little more pointed, this time—but he still opened the door for me. He is, after all, a gentleman.

Inside, we found ourselves in a small lobby. The walls were a dingy cream color, and a faded mural was traced on the ceiling. Three walk-up windows and a security door were set into the wall ahead of us, and behind one of the windows, an older man with a harness and a walrus mustache and not much else was waiting.

“Eli,” Dag said.

I stepped up to the window. “Hi. We’re here for the New Year’s Eve party.” I slid the tickets through the pass-through.

The man took the tickets, but his eyes were still on me, moving up and down with no attempt to hide it. He scanned the tickets. He was still looking at me. He passed the tickets back and then produced two towels. As he slid them to me, he said, “Once the party starts, we close the front door, and the staff gets to play.”

“Uh…huh.”

“They let me use one of the playrooms exclusive.”

“Thank you,” I said and took the towels.

“I’ll let your buddy watch.”

Sometimes, the best answer is a smile. I think Mary Tyler Moore said that.

“Did he say he has a private playroom?” Dag asked.

I caught his arm and steered him toward the door. A moment later, it buzzed, and we stepped through. “He said a play. Like a one-act play. I think that’s what he meant.”

Dagobert LeBlanc was many things, but he was not an idiot.

A short hallway led us to a locker room without the actual lockers. There was tile. And benches. And a row of showers. A middle-aged guy was standing under the spray, scrubbing his belly. A sign said, ALL PATRONS MUST SHOWER BEFORE USING THE POOLS. To our right, a twink with green hair and press-on nails and a studded codpiece stood at a counter. A sign behind him said COMPLIMENTARY CLOTHING CHECK.

“Eli,” Dag said again, his voice rising.

“It’s optional,” I said breezily. Breezy worked sometimes. I waved to the twink and propelled Dag toward the door on the opposite side of the room.

“Excuse me,” the twink said. “You’ve got to check your clothes here.”

“We’re fine,” I said.

“It’s not optional! Hey!”

“Eli,” Dag snapped. And all of a sudden, he planted himself. It was like he turned to stone. I couldn’t pull him. I couldn’t drag him. I would have had better luck getting that codpiece off the twink (okay, in all fairness, the codpiece probably would have come off fairly easily). With what sounded like an effort to control his volume, Dag said, “Invitation. Now.”

“I told you, it’s not an invitation—”

“Now.” He didn’t shout, but there was no mistaking the authority in his voice.

The twink purred and rubbed his belly against the countertop.

With a sigh, I handed over the flyer that had accompanied the tickets.

“In my defense,” I said in a small voice, “I thought, you know, we could keep our clothes on.”

Dagobert was still reading the flyer.

“And it was so sweet of your parents.”

“My parents,” he said without looking up, “are sex fiends.”

The man under the shower was singing a song about bussy that sounded oddly catchy. He had a lovely baritone.

“And we don’t have any gay friends.” The words exploded out of me in a rush. “And I wanted to go to a fancy New Year’s Eve party. And I know you hate clubs, and I thought maybe this would be, um, more low-key—”

“This,” Dag interrupted. “You thought this would be more low-key?” He read from the flyer. “’Spend your New Year’s Eve at The Plundering Hole with special guest Tommy Ten-Inch.’ You thought that would be more low-key?”

“Well, your mom said—”

“Eli, I honestly will never be able to have sex again if you finish that sentence.”

“Okay, but—”

“Fully stocked private playrooms. That wasn’t a clue?”

My face prickled. My eyes grew hot. I shrugged.

He let out a slow, long breath. Then he said, “I’m wearing that towel the whole time.”

“What?”

“Come on, let’s do this. But I’m not taking off the towel. And I’m not—” His face was on fire. “I’m not sharing you, if you think that’s going to happen. But if you want to go inside, well, that’s okay. We can give it a try.”

I stared at him.

“What?” he asked.

I kept staring.

Dag scowled. “That’s a little rude, you know.”

“I love you so much.”

He did roll his eyes for that.

“Like, so much. More than I could ever tell you. I love you so much that it hurts. It honestly hurts, Dag.”

“That’s very sweet—” He lowered his voice. “—but that man in the shower is listening, and I think he’s, uh, liking it a little too much.” When I still didn’t say anything, he asked, “Do you want to change here, or—”

“Oh God, no. No way. We’re getting out of here right now.”

“I thought you wanted gay friends and a fancy New Year’s Eve—”

“Dagobert, they want us to get naked. And I ate a beignet this week.”

He got that little furrow he gets when I say something he doesn’t like (here’s a shock: it happens more often than you’d think), and he opened his mouth to say something. Before he could, though, the door to the inner portion of the club flew open, and two men stumbled out.

One was tall and muscular, with an athlete’s build, although he was getting a bit of a donut around the middle (hey, who am I to talk?). The other was slender, his hair starting to thin. The bigger guy was frantically re-wrapping his towel, but the elastic band of his boxers (teddy bear print) was still visible.

A slab of beef in a riveted harness stood framed by the doorway. “If you’re not going to take off your clothes, then get the fuck out.”

Then he went back inside and slammed the door behind him.

“Yeah, well, fuck you!” shouted the bigger guy. Yanking the towel tighter, he turned toward the slender man. “Demmy, I am going to kill Jugs.”

“He was trying to be nice,” the smaller man—Demmy, apparently—said. “It was a gift.”

“Some fucking gift! We’re a thousand miles from home, and he’s still finding ways to mess with us.”

“He didn’t—”

“That guy tried to do a half-nelson on my johnson!”

“I honestly have no idea what that means.”

The bigger guy drew himself up to respond, but he stopped and stared at us. “Enjoying the show?”

“Sorry,” Dag said. “We were just leaving.”

“Not really our scene,” I added. “Not when I had a cheat week, I mean.”

The bigger guy was still staring, but Demmy covered a smile. “Come on,” he said in a consoling voice, “we’ll find somewhere else—"

“On New Year’s Eve?” he asked. “Demmy, everywhere’s going to be booked. God, I am going to murder him.”

I glanced at Dag. Dag gave me a crooked eyebrow, and I knew what he was thinking: Gay friends. But then he shrugged.

“Actually,” I said, “we were just going to try this cute little bar we know. It’s a hole in the wall, so I bet we can get a table.” I waited, and when neither of them said anything, I added, “If you want to join us, I mean. It sounds like you’re not from here, and I thought...”

“Is this some kind of foursome thing?” the muscular guy asked.

“Cody,” Demmy said. “They’re just being nice! It’s called southern hospitality.”

“Does southern hospitality come with a foursome?”

“It’s not a foursome,” Dag said—in my opinion, a little more forcefully than necessary.

“But we’re open to the idea,” I said.

“No.” Dag put a hand on my neck, which, weirdly, can communicate a whole hell of a lot. “We’re not.”

For some reason, that made the bigger guy—Cody—grin. He glanced at Demmy, and then he said, “Sure. Why not?”

It only took them a few minutes to collect their clothes and change. While they did, Dag pulled me aside.

“You’re sure about this?”

“They seem nice. And they were so sad about their vacation being ruined.”

He studied me for a moment. His mouth eased into a smile. “You’re such a softy.”

“Plus, I want a foursome.”

“Good God, Eli.”

We headed out together. Nobody said anything, and the silence grew as we walked toward the car. I asked the first question that popped into my head.

“So, what do you guys do for work?”