Baek Moonjong seemed to be thinking the same thing as he spoke in his hoarse voice. Just then, both Bong Tae-gu and Baek Moonjong turned their heads toward the bedroom entrance at the sound of shuffling footsteps.
The kid was standing there with a bird’s nest on top of his head and his swollen eyes half-open. No, he probably thought he had opened them fully, but that’s how they looked. His expression also seemed to be wondering, “Is this a dream or reality?” Unlike the two people who were uncertain while watching the news, Geun-yeong was trying to determine whether his feeling that he had cried his heart out while drunk last night was real or not.
Tae-gu burst out laughing. He felt a tinge of regret that Detective Kyung hadn’t seen this sight; he might have fallen hard for it. Of course, it probably wouldn’t be good for the kid’s mental health, given his mild depression.
While he was amusingly observing the kid with the small bird’s nest on the back of his head and his comical face, there was a buzzing sound, and his stomach tickled. Tae-gu pulled out his phone from the pocket of the pink apron that he had bought for use in this house and had been the only one using ever since. It was a text message.
[Are you up?]
The sender was, as expected from the tickling in his stomach, Detective Kyung. After laughing again at the kid who was now sitting next to Professor Baek Moonjong with an expression remarkably similar to his, like a biological grandson, he replied.
[Yeah. Just now. Come in thirty minutes. Where are you?]
[In front of the house.]
Oh my. He’s impatient.
Tae-gu snorted and glanced up at Geun-yeong. His already puppy-like face now had a blue bruise on one eye, making him look like a real mutt. With his hair sticking out and his eyes all swollen, he somehow looked even more like a puppy.
Should I just tell him to come in now?
He was about to indulge in the mischievous thought of making Kyung Jiho properly go into heat, but he refrained for Geun-yeong’s sake. He was about to type that he should wait while he tells the kid to wash up, when a text came in.
[Come out for a moment.]
Huh?
After turning down the heat under the hangover soup and telling Geun-yeong to wash up before eating, Tae-gu went out to the front of the house.
Despite saying “in front of the house,” there was a car parked in front of the next building, leaving the empty space right in front of the house vacant. And inside, a man was leaning on the steering wheel with both arms, glaring at Tae-gu. Or maybe he was just looking, but that’s how his face appeared.
“Oh geez, why does this guy have such a scary face? Why does Geun-yeong like this style? Is he secretly enjoying masochistic situations?”
Feeling a bit guilty for using the term “enjoying masochistic situations” about someone who had been abused for a long time, Tae-gu cleared his throat and headed toward the car where Kyung Jiho sat glaring.
Noticing the eyes following him, Tae-gu asked as soon as he got into the car,
“Why did you tell me to come out instead of coming in? I told you I put ox bone soup on.”
“I can’t come in right now. I have to go to the prosecutor’s office.”
He needed to deliver the petition that Woo Donghwa and the others had written. And after that, he had to attend the first face-to-face meeting of the joint investigation team, which he had become involved with in exchange for help with this case. Just thinking about it made him feel like cold water had suddenly been poured over his chest, which hadn’t calmed down since last night. Suppressing his not-so-good feelings, Kyung Jiho asked,
“How’s Ji Geun-yeong?”
“Well… his eyes are swollen from crying himself to sleep, and his hair is all over the place, but he’s cute.”
Tae-gu chuckled as he recalled the sight. Jiho didn’t laugh.
“He doesn’t know that you came to see me yesterday, right?”
Tae-gu nodded with a faint smile still on his face. He naturally hadn’t told the kid that he had relayed what the kid had spilled out in his drunken state to Detective Kyung. The kid would surely try to hide somewhere—inside the washing machine, bathtub, or under the sink. Tae-gu laughed again, imagining the kid frantically looking for a place to hide in embarrassment.
But he erased his smile when he heard a sigh from right beside him. He studied the face of the man who was sighing. It was an expression that didn’t suit him at all. Tae-gu, who had instantly wiped the smile off his face, asked,
“What’s up with you? Are you conflicted right now? Are you still weighing whether Geun-yeong will accept you or not? Really? Is that it?”
Tae-gu was quite angry, and when anger set in on his manly face with strong features, it became quite frightening. After staring at that face for a not-so-brief moment, Jiho straightened his head. Looking at his old apartment building where the kid was, he said what he hadn’t said last night.
“The kid… is desperately searching for someone.”
Tae-gu’s face, which had hardened with anger, went blank. His face clearly read “What are you talking about?” but Jiho continued without looking at him.
“He says it’s someone he’s relied on and depended on for 18 years. He told me it’s the person who kept him from giving up on life all this time.”
The memory Ji Geun-yeong had clung to for survival. A boy named Kyung Jiho.
He wished he were that person. “Wished” wasn’t enough. He was jealous of this Kyung Jiho guy who had occupied 18 years of the kid’s life. He had even considered pretending to be that person and acting the part. That’s how desperately he wanted to be that person.
But he wasn’t that person. Setting aside the fact that there was zero probability that he had lived in an orphanage, he had no memory of it at all. The book that was supposedly read to him more than ten times was unfamiliar, and he had no recollection, not even similar memories, of things like a large storage area for earthenware jars or a 50-year-old seolleongtang restaurant.
He wasn’t that person. And the more he compared himself with the person from the kid’s memories, the more insecure he became. His confidence, which wasn’t there to begin with, dropped even further.
“If that person ever shows up, I’ll have to step aside.”
The man lowered his gaze from the house as if he couldn’t bear to look at it anymore and stared at the edge of the steering wheel.
“After making any… kind of… progress with the kid, I feel like it would be harder to step aside.”
This was all news to Tae-gu. He didn’t know that Geun-yeong was looking for someone, and naturally, he didn’t know that Detective Kyung was hesitating because of it. But Geun-yeong had cried because of Detective Kyung, not because of the person he was supposedly looking for. Without having heard the story directly from Geun-yeong, he couldn’t interfere carelessly, but one thing was certain.
“Hesitating because of someone who isn’t even around—that’s not like you, Detective Kyung.”
“What is like me?”
“You say that if you need to catch someone, you’ll do whatever the hell it takes. That’s why they call you ‘Kyung-Jiral’ [Detective Crazy].”
Good grief. Kyung Jiho clicked his tongue and laughed. That’s the case when the person who needs to be caught is a bad guy who wouldn’t matter if he exploded and died while being carelessly grabbed. The kid in that house was someone who shouldn’t be treated that way.
But Tae-gu thought differently.
“If that person Geun-yeong is looking for ever shows up, you can just fight and win, right? Detective Kyung, you’re good at fighting, aren’t you?”
With an expression that seemed to say, “Everything must be so simple for you,” the man glared at Tae-gu, who said,
“Right now, your feelings aren’t the issue. Geun-yeong has been properly hurt by this incident. You know as well as I do that even though he’s pretending to be okay, he’s not. If you want Geun-yeong to live properly and bravely, then handle him in your style. If someone shows up later, you can either fight and win, or if you can’t win, hand him over. Just think about that when the time comes.”
It didn’t matter if Detective Kyung, who seemed like he could be thrown onto bare ground and be fine, got hurt later or not, so he should stop making these uncharacteristic complaints and just solve the problem of the kid who clearly looked like a glass marble that had rolled roughly. Right now.
The nagging continued for a long time after that. Kyung Jiho tried to cut the flow of nagging by saying, “Didn’t you say you put ox bone soup on? I’m going to fall asleep, just go back up now,” but Bong Tae-gu’s mouth, which had properly started, didn’t easily stop. Jiho had to answer several times that he understood what was being said after listening to enough nagging to form a crust on his ears.
Even after answering like that, he couldn’t go up right away. There were urgent matters that needed to be resolved. Those were also for Ji Geun-yeong’s sake and couldn’t be postponed.
Tae-gu willingly let the man go to resolve the immediate tasks. He also thought that for the “Kyung-Jiral” style of pushing forward, the dark night might be better than broad daylight.
As Jiho was about to get out, Tae-gu started to ask if he had ever done it with a man, seemingly about to discuss bedroom matters, but Jiho shoved him away and drove off, heading to the prosecutor’s office as planned.
* * *
Standing in front of one of the prosecutor’s offices in the Criminal Division 3 on the 4th floor of the main building, the man had to stop his hand from turning the doorknob because of the sounds coming from inside.
[Ugh! Ungh!]
The man’s face scrunched up menacingly as he entered with more force than usual, turning the doorknob that had momentarily paused. Two groaning sounds were resonating in the office. He couldn’t turn a blind eye just because they were both men, wondering if they were watching porn to cool off during work. The problem was that it wasn’t the sounds of a man and woman, and the problem was that these weren’t sounds he was hearing for the first time.
“Oh, you’re here!”
The groaning sounds weren’t coming from Prosecutor Jeong, who was raising his hand in greeting. Jiho, who had been heading toward Jeonguk sitting across from him, changed his course and went straight to the clerk sitting at a desk positioned diagonally to the right.
The hands typing stopped, pressured by the intimidating aura of the man approaching with a frightening face. Jiho went behind the desk and, disregarding the man looking up at him askance with a face that didn’t understand what was happening, stared at the monitor.
Sure enough.
The video that he couldn’t bear to watch straight on and ultimately couldn’t finish was playing on the screen. Jiho, who was glaring at the monitor with his eyeballs slanted downward, asked the computer owner:
“What are you doing?”
Author: Hyacinthus B
Hyacinthus
