The Boss Is Still Alive
What came back to me was silence.
The youngest sat there dumbstruck, while Jo Gyeong-beom strained to keep his composure.
"……Your boss, you say. Do you even know who the head of Mindo Detective Agency is? It would have been difficult to find out through a search portal."
Jo Gyeong-beom asked, keeping a reasonably straight face.
But my next words shattered even that.
"There'd be no point in looking. The name listed as head of the agency is just a figurehead. The boss I'm talking about is the one in actual charge. The man who also ran Haru Finance. Or, rather…."
Watching him flinch the instant the words Haru Finance left my mouth, I added, "Perhaps I should say, 'the man who used to run it.'"
"You little punk!!!"
The youngest gang member, Hwang Tae-jun, scraped his chair back and shot to his feet before I'd even finished my sentence.
As he grabbed me by the collar, face flushed with rage, Jo Gyeong-beom hurriedly pulled him off.
"How dare you insult our Boss?!!"
"Tae-jun, calm down."
I'd seen the innocent-faced youngest get angry only a handful of times myself, so the sight was genuinely rare.
Well, at least when he blows up, he does it with the size to back it up.
With that thought, I continued evenly.
"I only stated facts. What's insulting about that? He won't care one bit."
"So what you're telling us, Mr. Yoo Seul-ho, is that you know our Boss—our sajang-nim personally? That the names, the office location, even the existence of Haru Finance—all of it came from his own mouth?"
"That's right. I heard it over coffee a while back."
"Don't lie to me."
"A lie?"
As my tone shortened, Jo Gyeong-beom's brow furrowed.
He took a moment to steady his breathing—unlike the kid beside him—before speaking in a measured voice.
"I'll give you credit for trying to make some story you picked up somewhere sound convincing. An actor really is an actor. But I'm not so stupid that I can't smell a lie."
"That's what I figured, but apparently not. You do seem that stupid."
Jo Gyeong-beom didn't take the bait, even with my openly antagonistic provocation.
I'd only thrown the jab hoping to see him snap like the youngest had just done, so it was a bit of a letdown that he didn't bite.
Come to think of it, Gyeong-beom used to bicker and fuss just like the kid when he was young, too.
Watching him put on all these airs of a seasoned senior now that his brain had matured felt strangely surreal.
"Can you prove it wasn't a lie?"
At his razor-sharp voice, I leaned forward.
"Prove it…. Let me ask you one thing first. Why are you so certain I'm lying?"
"The Boss and I were together twenty-four hours a day, every day. He has no personal acquaintances he meets privately outside the organization. Only clients."
Jo Gyeong-beom fixed me with a cold stare.
"Yet in all my time working for Haru Finance, I never once heard the name Yoo Seul-ho. You were never mentioned among our prospective clients either. And now you claim you met him face to face and shared coffee? That man never had that kind of free time to begin with."
"He wasn't entirely without it. He took a break once a year, didn't he?"
"……"
At my words, Jo Gyeong-beom finally showed a crack of emotion.
Looking into eyes that wavered helplessly, I pressed on.
"I met him then. Regularly, once a year. He never gave me a separate phone number, but we'd meet at a set time and a set place, every single year, and talk. He told me everything—everything, down to the last detail."
"Everything like… what?"
"That you, Mr. Jo Gyeong-beom, have a habit of doing a deep-clean of the whole office whenever stress builds up. That Hwang Tae-jun here once smuggled a stray cat into the office claiming he wanted to raise it, and turned the place into a disaster zone. That he found it tiresome how you'd grill him about where he was going and what he was doing every time he took his one vacation a year."
At my words, Hwang Tae-jun bit his lip hard.
Whether it was the detail of the episodes or what, I could feel their suspicion of me steadily melting away.
Nobody in the world knew how I had spent my single vacation a year back in my loan shark days.
As I smoothly produced the rehearsed lies and stacked a few more episodes on top—stories only the Boss could have known—their guard came down completely.
Hwang Tae-jun even welled up with tears, muttering, "Our Boss…." This kid took emotional excess way too far.
"Anyway, a few months ago I woke up in a bed, and I had no memory of myself at all. The man who showed up claiming to be my manager acted like he wanted to beat me, and everyone around me seemed to be out of their minds. My parents included."
Feeling a slow dryness creep into my throat, I went on.
"I needed to know what to watch out for and what to prepare for, and I needed someone to help me. Precisely—someone I could trust to help me. Going through the memories I had left, the Boss was the only person I could rely on. That's why I contacted the agency he'd told me about."
The moment had come to ask the question at last.
Hoo.
A faint tension coiling in my chest, I took a slow breath.
Whatever answer came back to the question I was about to ask, I'd steeled myself not to flinch.
"A few days ago was the day I was supposed to meet him. I went out in the morning and waited all day, but he never showed. He's not the kind of man to forget an appointment, so there's only one answer left, isn't there? Something happened that kept him from coming."
"……"
"Did something happen to the Boss?"
Hwang Tae-jun's eyes brimmed with tears again.
Jo Gyeong-beom beside him wore a stricken expression, then suddenly tilted his head.
"Wait a moment. Didn't you say earlier that he was the boss who 'used to run it'? If you already knew something had happened to him, what was that about?"
"I was testing you. I'd only guessed, but since you flew into a rage, I figured he really had quit. I remembered him saying, when we met last year, that he didn't know how much longer he could keep doing this work."
"……The Boss said that?"
Jo Gyeong-beom squeezed his eyes shut.
When he said nothing more, I pressed him with a hint of impatience.
"Even if he had quit the business, he still would have shown up on the day we were supposed to meet. Honestly, I half expected to see him when I came here today. You told him I was coming, didn't you? He quits the job and doesn't contact you at all?"
"That is…."
Jo Gyeong-beom's voice went hollow, as if the words were caught in his throat.
"The Boss didn't quit. He had an accident. A very serious one."
"……Is he alive?"
The question slipped out, and I found myself tensing despite everything.
I wanted to write off whatever answer came back as none of my business anymore, but honestly, that was easier said than done.
Hoo.
The single second before Jo Gyeong-beom opened his mouth stretched out like an hour.
I realized I was holding my breath, waiting for his answer.
"Yes. He's alive."
"……"
For a moment, my mind went blank.
That was not the answer I'd been bracing for. My original body… is alive?
"But his condition isn't good. He regained consciousness once after the accident, but he lost it again almost the moment his eyes met mine. Like a man who'd given up on living…. The doctors say there's nothing physically wrong. They say it might be that the patient simply lacks the will to wake up again—but that's bullshit. The Boss I know isn't the kind of man who'd do that."
There was raw desperation in Jo Gyeong-beom's voice.
He repeated those last words several times, as if saying them to himself rather than to me.
After only the briefest silence, I spoke straight away.
"Which hospital is he in? Can I go see him now?"
"I'm sorry—now?"
Jo Gyeong-beom blinked.
"Weren't we meeting today for the report on Director Shin Seung-im? That can…"
"The report can wait until I'm back. Or just email it like last time. Let's see the Boss first. Are visiting hours set separately? If you tell me which hospital, I can go on my own another day."
At my eagerness, Jo Gyeong-beom's face softened with visible emotion.
So different from his expression at the start of the meeting, it made me think—this punk really is a soft touch after all.
"He was at OO Hospital at first, but it was difficult for us to visit often, so we moved him. As you know, our line of work is hardly smooth sailing—outside forces could have tried to get close. We couldn't leave the Boss somewhere exposed."
"Where did you move him to?"
At my question, Jo Gyeong-beom and Hwang Tae-jun silently looked upward.
Without thinking, I followed their gaze—and froze.
"……You moved him into this building? A coma patient?"
"We debated it a lot. But there are resident medical staff here with us, and the facilities are equipped on par with a major hospital. Whatever situation arose, we'd be able to respond. Just in case, we even contracted a medical helicopter. With the Boss here, nothing can go wrong."
Ha.
Every word out of his mouth made me feel like I was losing my mind. These lunatics, honestly.
Do you have any idea how much blood, sweat, and tears I poured into keeping this place secure?
I was the one who had paid a fortune to commission this building's design in the first place.
I had bent over backward to keep it airtight—and now, just because the man was a doctor, they'd dragged an outsider in?
Rage flooding up in an instant, I ground my teeth.
"Resident medical staff or not, you can't work someone like a slave without so much as a single vacation. The Boss might never regain consciousness, for all you know—and until then, you're going to let outsiders in and out on vacation grounds? People they could come into contact with while on leave? What on earth were you thinking, handling it this way?"
"Uh, I…"
"And major-hospital-grade facilities? Huh? A medical helicopter? Are you kidding me right now? It's not like money grows on trees. Why on earth would you bring a patient into a building built as office space in the first place? When the audit office came around, did the bribes you paid to keep the kids' mouths shut not count as expenses? The whole thing is bleeding money, and you sunk that much of it into playing nursemaid to the Boss around the clock?? I bet the Boss will be SO touched when he wakes up! If he faints a second time from the shock of this idiocy, well, at least he'll already be lying down!!"
At the torrent I'd fired off without pausing for breath, Jo Gyeong-beom and Hwang Tae-jun stood gaping, mouths hanging open.
As I pressed on, both of them stammered stupidly.
"W-we're sorry—no, wait…. But by that logic, Mr. Yoo Seul-ho being here right now is also a problem…"
"Are you comparing me to a pack of medical staff I can't control?"
"No, that's not…"
The men who'd glared at me like they wanted to devour me at our first meeting were gone; in their place, the same crumpled, wilted kids I'd always seen in my past life mumbled their excuses.
Sensing that anything more would only earn me a sigh, I cut them off.
"Forget it. Let's see the Boss first, then talk. I'll decide whether to lecture you more after."
Too irritated for words, I rose sharply from my seat.
One glance at whatever medical equipment I was about to see and the money thoughts would only make me angrier—I was sure of it.
As I strode toward the front, I caught the youngest behind me chattering to Gyeong-beom—"Hyung-nim, I guess the Boss and Mr. Yoo really didn't get along. The way he talks is identical, identical."—and ignored it.
Honestly, I'd love to knock both their blocks off and go alone.
But to everyone here, I was, at all costs, 'Yoo Seul-ho, visiting this building for the very first time today.'
With what patience I could muster, I followed the two of them toward the fifth floor.
Even after stepping off the elevator, we passed through one door after another, heading ever deeper inside.
"He's in here."
Jo Gyeong-beom spoke in front of a door that was firmly shut.
He gripped the handle and slowly began to apply pressure.