The Art of Stirring the Snake from the Grass
The table out front of the convenience store was a road-side one, the kind that had seen too many cheap meals and too many cheap drinks. Song Tan walked up to it in silence, stepping into a circle of laughter just as the hiss of a can of beer being opened cut through the air.
The moment they felt someone approach, the men’s conversation dried up on its own.
Four sturdy men turned their attention to Song Tan alone.
"Good evening. Pardon the interruption."
"...........?"
Taken aback by the sudden politeness, the men glanced at one another.
Song Tan took a wallet from his pocket and flashed his police ID.
"I’m from Annam West Precinct."
At the word detective, the four men uncrossed their legs.
"What brings a detective here, sir...?" one of them asked cautiously, in a rather civilized voice.
"Could I take a look at your identification for a moment?"
The atmosphere around the table tightened at once.
The men exchanged glances, unable to hide their discomfort.
"Our IDs?"
"Yes."
"What is this, barging over here all of a sudden...?"
"We received a report nearby."
"A report about what?"
"Four men assaulted someone and ran."
"What!? That wasn’t us. We haven’t left this spot."
"Then I’ll just need to confirm your identities briefly. It won’t take long, though I do apologize for the inconvenience."
Song Tan had no intention of backing down, and the men’s faces flickered with unease.
"Damn it, we were just enjoying our beer and now this..."
In the end, they rummaged through their pockets and wallets and pulled out their IDs.
Then a man with a short sports cut gave an awkward laugh and said, "Ah, crap, I forgot my ID at home. What do I do now?"
He slid forward a business card instead.
[Guchulmin, Deputy General Manager, Sales Department, Yanggu Construction]
"I’m from out of town. I came here on business, so I must have forgotten to bring it."
Song Tan glanced at the card, then looked back up at him.
"Then could you at least tell me your resident registration number?"
The man’s expression stiffened.
"What?"
"I’ll just run a quick check."
The man’s eyes began to change.
"Why should I?"
The corners of his mouth fell, and his eyes narrowed.
"Look at this shit. You just show up out of nowhere and what, exactly, are you trying to pull? Is being a cop supposed to mean anything?"
"I’m only asking for a brief identity check. Is that worth getting angry over?"
"And why wouldn’t I be angry? You come at people like they’re criminals out of nowhere. And no matter how much of a cop you are, do you really get to demand personal information like that? As far as I know, I can legally refuse."
He sounded like he knew the law at least to some extent.
His tone was calm enough, but there was a sharp edge under it.
"And are you even really a detective? You look way too young for one... Aren’t you some kind of impostor?"
The man swept Song Tan with a half-lidded look.
Then the other three chimed in, as if taking his side.
"It is weird. What kind of detective goes around alone like this?"
"Exactly. I heard there are scammers who pretend to be cops and extort money. Could this be one of them...?"
Then a head suddenly poked out from behind Song Tan.
"What’s taking so long for a simple ID check?"
"Huh."
A massive shadow fell over the convenience-store table.
With the overwhelming presence that came from broad shoulders and a ferocious face, the men’s mouths snapped shut at once.
Lee Joo-seok stood beside Song Tan, glaring down at them.
"We’ve had a string of violent crimes in the district lately, so we’re being forced to do some routine checks. Please cooperate."
The pressure in his voice suggested that if they didn’t cooperate, they might be folded in half on the spot.
The men hurriedly handed over their IDs.
After checking the identities of the three, Lee Joo-seok turned to the man with the sports cut.
"And why aren’t you handing yours over, sir? Didn’t you see your friends do it?"
"No, it’s just that I don’t have it on me..."
"Then tell me your resident registration number."
"But are you really a detective...?"
"If you don’t believe me, shall we go together and confirm it in person?"
"Ah, no, that’s not what I meant."
After hesitating, the man finally opened his mouth with visible reluctance.
"88...0228..."
Lee Joo-seok ran the information through his work phone, frowned, and looked up at the man.
His face was already rough; with that expression added, a weak-hearted person might have had their knees go soft on the spot.
"No matter how I look at it, this face doesn’t match. Are you really Kim Sang-jin?"
Song Tan held up the business card he’d just received.
"You told me you were Guchulmin."
The man, cornered, gave an awkward laugh.
"I changed my name..."
"What do you mean, changed your name and even your surname? You weren’t adopted at this age."
"..........."
The man shut his mouth tight.
An awkward silence hung in the air.
"Looks like this isn’t going to work. We’ll have to go together."
"Why should I? I’m not going. You can’t force an arrest just because I refused an identity check."
"Sounds like you know the law pretty well."
"We live in a world where people get their noses cut off before they even know it, so yeah, you’d better know the law."
"But it seems you know one thing and not two. Didn’t you know that once you give false personal information, forced escort becomes possible?"
The man flinched and hesitated for a moment.
"Haa... Fine. I’ll go. Let’s go, then."
With a resigned sigh, he rose from his seat.
Then, suddenly changing direction, he kicked off the ground and lunged forward.
"Fuck!"
But Song Tan was already in front of him, as if he’d predicted it.
"Get out of my way—!?"
The man reached out to shove Song Tan aside, but—
"Ghk!"
He tripped over Song Tan’s leg and pitched forward in a humiliating tumble.
His knees struck the pavement first, then he rolled across the ground.
Song Tan immediately pressed a knee into his back and snapped cuffs onto his wrists.
Face-down on the ground, the man lifted his head and shouted in a voice raw with rage, "What the hell are you idiots just sitting there staring for? Get these bastards!"
The expressions of the three men who had been sitting so politely all at once hardened.
With a scrape, chairs shoved backward as the three of them sprang to their feet.
"Oh? You want to fight? You know what happens when you mess with a detective?"
"Like hell I do, fucker. We can disappear for a while and that’s that."
Their polite façade gone, the men exposed their ugly temper with no restraint at all.
They took up fighting stances with surprising familiarity, as if they’d learned a thing or two about brawling somewhere along the way.
The first man came at Lee Joo-seok with a swinging punch.
Smack.
Lee Joo-seok slapped the fist aside as casually as if brushing away a mosquito, then swung his own punch.
Thud.
A short, heavy sound.
The man’s fierce momentum turned meaningless as his eyes rolled back and he crumpled on the spot.
The stout man next tried to seize Lee Joo-seok by the collar, but—
"Agh!"
He caught an elbow to the jaw and folded in half, sinking to the ground.
Lee Joo-seok lowered his head and asked in a deep voice, "You want some too?"
At that plain question—
"N-no, sir."
The last man left standing obediently raised both hands.
Clack.
Just like that, Lee Joo-seok neatly wrapped up the situation and looked around.
Before they knew it, onlookers had gathered thick around them.
"Shouldn’t we report this? A gangster’s beating up a detective like that."
"Hey, don’t get involved. If we step in the wrong way, we could get dragged into something filthy too."
At the whispers stabbing into his ears, Lee Joo-seok scowled fiercely.
◇◇◇◆◇◇◇
Interrogation Room, Violent Crimes Team, Annam West Precinct.
Clack.
After finishing the questioning of the four men who had refused identity checks and then tried to flee, Lee Joo-seok stepped out and opened the door.
He abruptly dragged Song Tan up to the rooftop smoking area, lit a cigarette, and snorted in disbelief.
"That four-pack from earlier? They were thugs from the Yongin Dongbaek gang."
"I see."
"What kind of bastards don’t even have a single tattoo on their bodies? Are gangsters from that area all like that?"
Taking a deep drag, Lee Joo-seok slowly exhaled the smoke.
"I asked why they’d rolled into Annam, and they said they’d only been given orders from above, so they didn’t know anything."
"Did they really not know?"
"No way. Would kids these days just mindlessly do whatever someone above them tells them to do?"
He flicked ash from his cigarette and went on, "A little persuasion and they started singing. They’d been told to go around and stir up trouble at the businesses run by the Annam Family Gang."
"Just as expected."
"But the real jackpot is something else."
Lee Joo-seok broke into a grin.
"You know that balding bastard you caught when he tried to run? That guy had special assault, assault, and even fraud on him. There were fourteen separate warrants out on that walking piece of garbage."
Song Tan turned back with a hint of surprise.
"Fourteen?"
"Yeah. There were three arrest warrants alone. Turns out he’d been on the run for five years after stealing someone else’s identity."
Song Tan let out a soft laugh.
"He’s got nerve. Walking around the streets like that."
"He probably had no idea. Who would think a detective would hit him with a routine check at that exact hour?"
Lee Joo-seok removed the cigarette from his mouth and looked at Song Tan.
"How’d you know they were gangsters? They were trying hard not to look like gangsters."
Song Tan answered as if it were nothing at all.
"I just... had a feeling, I suppose."
In truth, he was certain.
From the very beginning, those four men had been conscious of him.
No—more precisely, they had been wary of Lee Joo-seok, who was obviously a violent-crimes detective, even from a distance.
As a former intelligence operative of the Murim Alliance, a man who had survived by reading the room, he’d caught on instantly.
"You got some kind of sixth sense or something?"
"I’m Buddhist. I don’t go to temples, though."
Lee Joo-seok’s brows twisted in confusion.
"Damn, you’re a strange one."
He let it go this time as well.
He’d already learned, time and time again, that his junior partner had his own peculiar ways.
"Anyway, the team leader’s over the moon. Must’ve been getting squeezed hard by the chief. He even went so far as to declare an emergency alert in full force, and now he’s asking why there’s still nothing to show for it."
"That’s good news, at least."
"I’m not sure it is. By now the rumor’s probably already spread, and they’ll have dug themselves into even deeper mouse holes."
Song Tan asked, "Senior, have you ever heard the phrase taecho-gyeongsa?"
The question came out of nowhere, and Lee Joo-seok tilted his head.
"Taecho-gyeongsa... That’s what you say when you do something stupid and scare the snake in the grass, right?"
"Exactly. It means striking the grass and startling the snake. But taecho-gyeongsa isn’t necessarily a mistake."
"What the hell are you talking about all of a sudden?"
"Senior, do you still have your duty uniform? The one you wore when you were assigned to the local precinct."
"My uniform? Well... if I dig around, I’m sure it’s stuffed away somewhere. Why?"
The corner of Song Tan’s mouth lifted.
"Then let’s wipe out the snakes hiding in the grass once and for all."
Lee Joo-seok, unable to make head or tail of what Song Tan was saying, could only tilt his head again.
◇◇◇◆◇◇◇
And so two days passed.
Buzz, buzz—
"No, seriously, I’m telling you, I just came here to hang out!?"
"I quit that life ages ago! I really did! I’m losing my mind here!"
"I’ve only been doing day labor lately, I swear I’m a total reformed man!?"
The Violent Crimes Team 1 office, packed wall to wall with black-clad men, had become even more of a madhouse than the dawn fish market.