Damn.
He was cute.
Jiho had to shift his gaze to the TV again. And the guy who was turning his head to follow the other’s eyes was once again wearing that front-row student expression. With his lips pressed together and pulled up, and his bright eyes blinking.
Trying to avoid the excessively attached gaze, Jiho eventually just lowered his head and sighed with a “Puhoo…” sound.
The confident responses from the guy didn’t match Ji Seokhun’s words at all. Ji Seokhun had spoken as if something terrible would happen within 24 hours, but based on Ji Geun-yeong’s answers, it didn’t seem like such a serious matter.
Whose words were right? As his mind became complicated, he felt his chest getting tight as well. He lifted his lowered head and said:
“Anyway. Let’s go out. You need to move around, right?”
At that moment, he caught sight of those bright eyes gleaming with excitement, and Jiho quickly raised his head. Then he stood up abruptly. Hoping the guy hadn’t noticed the strange order of his standing up, he picked up the outer garment he had just taken off.
“I’ll go change my clothes!”
After throwing out these words filled with joy and excitement, the guy scurried into the room, and Kyung Jiho sighed again as he watched him go.
He had an ominous feeling that he had brought home an incredibly troublesome thing.
* * *
First, they went to a mobile phone store. He reactivated one of the phones he had. Of course, not under Ji Geun-yeong’s name but Kyung Jiho’s… or rather, he was about to, but ended up using Park Man-sik’s resident registration number instead. Despite being a police officer, he had no intention whatsoever of dropping bread crumbs for that lewd man who goes around poking his nose everywhere, even if it meant activating a burner phone.
And after driving for about five minutes, they arrived at a place that was quite unexpected from Geun-yeong’s perspective.
[Perfect Body Fitness]
Looking at the sign attached to the second-floor window of the building but unable to understand immediately, Geun-yeong,
“Why here…?”
He started to mutter but stopped and found the answer himself. Then he bit his lower lip in embarrassment. He had said he needed to move around after eating and that he would try to manage his blood sugar well. But that didn’t mean he needed to go to a gym, especially one that seemed to cater primarily to neighborhood ajummas focused on aerobics.
“Not there, here.”
Kyung Jiho grabbed the guy’s head with both hands and lowered it from where he was looking up at the aerobics studio on the second floor. In the direction the man adjusted for him was a sign that read “Boramchan Surgical Clinic.”
Geun-yeong’s expression, which had brightened momentarily, became uncomfortable again.
Of course, it was better than the aerobics studio. Since he had diabetes, he did need to visit a clinic, but the problem was that it wasn’t an internal medicine clinic but a surgical one.
The sign was extremely worn out, and some letters were missing from the characters that had been cut and pasted on it. Looking at the sign that should properly be read as “Boricha Surgical Clinic,” Geun-yeong thought that this man probably didn’t understand the difference between internal medicine and surgery.
To the guy who couldn’t hide his confused expression, Kyung Jiho said:
“You said you wanted to do part-time work.”
“Ah.”
Only then did Geun-yeong’s face relax in understanding. He looked at the man, then back at the sign. The man apparently knew the doctor at this hospital well. It was surprising that a doctor and a gangster would be acquainted.
Is it really surprising?
Since they would get injured from fighting all the time, it might be very natural to have a doctor they knew well.
Anyway, part-time work at a clinic. It was partly welcome but also somewhat disappointing. If not for his current uncertain situation about whether he could continue his studies, he would have been entirely pleased.
While thinking this, the man had already entered the building. Geun-yeong quickened his already hurried steps to follow him.
Boramchan Clinic was located on the first floor of a three-story building. When they pushed through the glass door, there was no one in the waiting room. A man sitting inside the station looking at his phone heard the door open, raised his head to look, widened his eyes, mouth, and nostrils in delight, and stood up quickly to greet them.
“Oh my, Detective Kyung!”
Detective… Kyung?
Geun-yeong’s tense, rigid face went slack with confusion. He wasn’t sure who the person was calling, but incomprehensibly, the man standing in front of him was pulling one hand out of his pants pocket and showing it.
Uh… why?
A line creased between his eyebrows on his blank face. It was deep contemplation about a situation he couldn’t understand at all.
Geun-yeong couldn’t comprehend what he had just heard. But there was no time to ask what it meant, and since he wasn’t in a position to freely interject and ask questions, he had to remain silent.
Though silent, his mind was far from calm. He rapidly shifted his gaze between the man who had raised his hand in greeting and the other man who had already come out from behind the station and was slapping the first man’s arm in delight. While doubting his own hearing, he tried to think of other titles that could sound like “Detective Kyung.” There’s “manager” or “gardener.” But neither seemed to make sense, which made him increasingly confused. Then, “Detective Kyung, why have you been so scarce lately?”
Again. Detective Kyung.
One eyebrow twitched as Geun-yeong’s mind was grinding like rusty gears. In his head, there was a war between the group that doubted his hearing and the group that accepted that the man he had thought was a gangster might actually be a detective, saying “let’s just accept it already.” Meanwhile, the man, who seemed completely comfortable being called that, answered in a tone as nonchalant as his expression:
“I’ve been busy lately catching meth dealers, so I haven’t had a corpse to bring in.”
“Come on, do you have to bring a corpse every time you come here? You could just visit to hang out.”
The man who was slightly shorter than the one being called “Detective Kyung” looked more robust, perhaps due to his build. Despite having closely shaved his mustache and beard, they still appeared blue beyond gray. The man, who seemed to have excessive male hormone secretion, was nevertheless wearing pink clothes both top and bottom.
It wasn’t an unfamiliar outfit to Geun-yeong. It was the work attire worn in operating rooms or emergency rooms. But as far as he knew, those clothes also came in green and gray, yet this was pink. As if trying to match the fresh feeling given by the color of the clothes, the man was trying to make his voice gentle and adding a circular inflection at the end of each sentence out of long habit. He shifted his gaze from the man he had been looking at coquettishly to look over his shoulder, and his eyes widened.
“Who’s this person with you? Is this the meth dealer? Meth dealers are so pretty these days? Hello, pretty one?”
Though he didn’t know what a “meth dealer” was, Geun-yeong bowed deeply.
“Hello.”
“Mmm- ye-es- oh my- and so polite too.”
The man, with a pleased smile, nodded broadly in response to Geun-yeong’s bow that was almost like a ceremonial one.
“Enough of that.”
With just those words, Kyung Jiho cleared the atmosphere and asked:
“Where’s Dr. Baek?”
“He’s doing an autopsy.”
The man tilted his head slightly and brought his lips close to Kyung Jiho’s ear to whisper:
“It’s an old man who collapsed and died from a cerebral infarction, but the second son brought him in while they were preparing the body. He thinks the first daughter-in-law poisoned him.”
Though it was clearly a whisper, Geun-yeong, standing three or four steps away, could hear everything.
“You can go in. You’re like family to us, Detective Kyung.”
Although his words were now spoken in his normal tone after removing his lips from near the ear, there wasn’t much difference in decibels from when he had been whispering.
By the way. It was Detective Kyung again. He definitely hadn’t misheard it as a manager or gardener. It seemed that the man he had thought was a gangster was actually a “detective.”
Now Geun-yeong accepted that he had been under a tremendous misunderstanding. This made his already confused mind slightly dizzy. He wondered if it might be hypoglycemia, but he didn’t have time to worry about that. More than his blood sugar, his curiosity about the man whose true occupation he had just learned was greater.
If he was a detective… did that mean he spent his days beating up robbers and teaching gangsters a lesson? If so, were those injuries from when he got hurt while catching criminals on duty? But wait, if he was a detective, why did he have a dragon tattoo on his upper body…?
It wasn’t just something he’d heard through rumors. He had actually seen it. A very black, vivid, and dynamic large dragon.
Thinking about the dragon made him even more confused, but the man who was supposedly not a gangster but actually a detective turned around and approached Geun-yeong. Noticing why the man was coming toward him, he moved aside next to the door.
The man who turned out to be a detective pushed open the glass door and went back outside the hospital. Even when he thought the man was a gangster, he had followed his instructions well, but now knowing he was a detective, no further consideration was necessary. Geun-yeong immediately followed the man out. From behind, he heard “Bye, pretty boy-” and turned back to bow quickly on his way out.
After leaving the hospital with the man and walking down the corridor of the building, he continued his earlier train of thought. As far as Geun-yeong knew, you couldn’t become a police officer if you had tattoos. This wasn’t some theory he’d picked up somewhere; a police officer who came for career counseling during his second year of high school had told him directly. To become a police officer, you obviously couldn’t have a criminal record, and you couldn’t even have a palm-sized tattoo. They even rejected candidates with cigarette burn marks the size of beans during the physical examination. So if you wanted to become a police officer, you should live cleanly, soundly, and as quietly as possible.
Author: Hyacinthus B
Hyacinthus
