By three in the morning, The Black Asphalt Saloon had thinned out to its skeletal crew — a handful of hard-core club regulars nursing their last bottles in the corner booth, two tired bartenders clearing away the empties with the mechanical efficiency of men who had been performing the same ritual six nights a week for years, and the ambient hum of a jukebox that hadn't worked since the Clinton administration but still glowed faintly in the corner, its dead neon tubes casting a sickly blue wash across the sawdust floor.
The air was thick with the scent of stale beer, commercial floor cleaner, and the lingering ghost of the tobacco smoke that had been building in the saloon's timber walls for three decades. The Budweiser sign above the door had stopped flickering — its transformer had fina
