8. Yoo Dong-cheol the Loan Shark (2)
Night in the back alleys of Bupyeong Station was as thick and filthy as ever.
The clammy dampness left over from the previous day's rain, the boozy reek rolling out of the nearby entertainment district, cheap ad flyers turned to pulp by the rain and pasted across the sidewalk — and, reflected in the puddles pooled over it all, the smeared ghosts of the neon signs.
"Hey, why the hell does this week's collection haul look like this?"
Jo Dae-sik, in his fluorescent training pants, spat a glob of phlegm onto the ground and scrubbed his cigarette out against the wall.
"A few of the flyer kids flaked on us. Said they felt a cold coming on and stayed flat on their backs."
"Agh, you moron. And you just let that slide again? What did I tell you before? Those girls are faking it, every last one of them. You go over there and tell them you'll shave their heads bald, and they'll come out and work on their own."
"But I saw them myself — they were running real fevers, like a hundred and one."
"Fuck, what are we now, UNICEF? Worried about the health of kids running flyers? What, why not send them on vacation while you're at it?"
Right beside him, Kim Chung-hwan — a fat man whose arms were packed wall-to-wall with tattoos — scratched his head.
The two of them were small-time punks who preyed on kids from the flyer-delivery dens and runaway families around Bupyeong Station, lending out money at crushing daily interest.
"Ah, forget it. Make it crystal clear to those flaking bitches — if they don't start working right this fucking second, I'll have word sent around to everyone in the neighborhood."
"Yes, sir."
"What are you doing? Why aren't you moving?"
"N-now? Ah!! Yes, sir!! Getting on it right now!"
Kim Chung-hwan hurriedly fished his smartphone from inside his jacket and began scrolling through his contacts. And that was the exact moment it happened.
Neatly combed-back hair. A crisp blue shirt without a single wrinkle. A pale face that had never met the sun.
It was a look that had no business in a filthy back alley like this — an appearance far better suited to the polished academy district of Sangdong than to anywhere around here.
It was Ba-reum.
"Yoo Dong-cheol."
Jo Dae-sik sprang up from where he stood, brow knitting. Beside him, Kim Chung-hwan's fingers stopped dead on his phone.
"Who the hell are you?"
"You know Yoo Dong-cheol? I hear he's fairly well known around here."
"That's what I'm asking you — who the hell are you?"
"A friend? No. Let's just say an acquaintance of Dong-cheol's friend."
Jo Dae-sik shot Kim Chung-hwan a look.
"You fucking punk. Do you have any idea where you're standing?"
—THUD!!!
It happened in an instant. Kim Chung-hwan, lunging in to seize Ba-reum by the collar, dropped like a sack. The hulk of a man curled up on the ground, unable to manage even a proper scream — just gagging, wheezing.
"Uh... uh?"
Utter bewilderment flooded over the face of Jo Dae-sik, who stood behind him.
"Next."
"M-me?"
"Yeah, you. Why are you looking around like there's anyone else here besides you and me? I'll ask one more time. Yoo Dong-cheol. Do you know him?"
Jo Dae-sik's instincts were screaming that this goody-two-shoes was anything but ordinary. But the instincts of a man who had spent his whole life as a predator, and the habits those years had drilled into him, drowned out the alarm.
"Fuck, you weak little shit. Do you know where this is!! This model-student bastard probably got bullied his whole life and picked up some martial art somewhere. Hey, you fucking bastard. You're dead today."
Dae-sik drew the small butterfly knife he always carried. Then, flipping it open and shut like he was performing a circus act, he did his level best to look dangerous. It was the same principle as a wild cat bristling its fur when it meets an enemy.
"Put the knife down?"
"Why? Finally figuring out something's wrong? You — you son of a bitch?"
"No, it's just that I'm still not great with knives. I don't even know how bad a guy you are yet, and I'd hate for you to die over some careless mistake."
"You son of a bitch. What kind of bullshit is that!!"
Ba-reum moved. Three long strides.
To Dae-sik, watching him head-on, it felt as though the man had teleported.
And then, without breaking stride, a roundhouse kick.
—CRACK
With a sound of something going very wrong, Dae-sik's arm — the one clutching the knife — bent at an angle arms were never meant to bend.
"AAAAAAGH!"
But Ba-reum didn't stop there. Still gripping the broken arm, he snatched Jo Dae-sik by the hair with his free hand just as the man crumpled toward the ground.
To Dae-sik, tears and snot streaming down his face from the monstrous pain, Ba-reum spoke quietly, almost in a whisper.
"Now, this is really the last time. You know Yoo Dong-cheol, don't you?"
"Y-yes! I know him! I know! Director Yoo — right now he should be in Room 804 of the Theme Officetel in front of Bukgwang Plaza."
The shattered bone in his arm. The crushing pressure of the hand knotted in his hair. Everything Jo Dae-sik knew about Yoo Dong-cheol came pouring out of his mouth.
"I swear! It's Wednesday, so today's the day he does the books and runs the collections. So please, just let go of me..."
Ba-reum loosened his grip on Dae-sik's hair.
Off balance, Jo Dae-sik's body tumbled across the ground.
"Still, you haven't lived all that badly. That's what saved you. But from now on, live a little cleaner. Because once every bastard worse than you two is gone, you're next in line."
What on earth was that supposed to mean?
But Jo Dae-sik couldn't manage a reply. More than the words themselves, it was the voice that carried them and the eyes looking down at him — both far, far too cold.
"Room 804, Theme Officetel in front of Bukgwang Plaza."
I'm quite fond of mystery novels.
The pleasure of meticulously layered tricks and tiny clues, of stacking a tower of airtight logic until, at last, the culprit stands revealed.
But that is exactly why I know how meaningless 'deduction' is in the real world. It only holds inside a closed world — and only when the absurd assumption stands that most people behave rationally.
The real world is never like that.
Which is why a real investigation doesn't begin with rigorous logic. It begins with grabbing the most plausible-looking bastard in sight and beating him until something sticks.
In that sense, the man who seemed most suspicious to me was Kim Jin-hwan's friend, Yoo Dong-cheol.
Who did he think he was, being so certain Kim Jin-hwan wasn't the killer? On top of that, suspects are always found close to home, and Yoo Dong-cheol was a piece-of-trash neighborhood thug, same as Jin-hwan. Killing someone and pinning it on a gullible friend? In the real world, that happens any day of the week.
Puddles of water lay scattered here and there along the officetel corridor.
I stood before the gray steel door with its old red digital lock and gave the handle a light turn.
Naturally, it was locked.
Ring the bell?
No — judging by how those thugs had reacted earlier, I doubted that ringing the bell and saying Jin-hwan had sent me would get the door opened willingly.
I wedged my fingers into the narrow gap between the door and its frame, feeling my fingertips catch firm against the steel. Then, without letting go, I hauled the door hard outward — every muscle in my body flexing in a single explosive burst.
—SCREEEECH
The eerie wail of warping steel rolled down the corridor. The thick steel fire door bowed like a drawn bow, and the metal plate of the frame where the lock had caught tore away in one piece.
"Wh-what the hell?"
Yoo Dong-cheol, who had been tapping away at his laptop at the kitchen island deeper inside, shot to his feet in shock. Not empty-handed, of course. A knife — and not the toy butterfly knives Dae-sik's boys carried, but a thick military dagger.
"Yoo Dong-cheol."
"What the fuck do you want!"
"Put that down right now. Unless you want your arm and your neck broken."
The man's eyes darted between me and the fire door I'd torn from its frame. A person ripping a steel door off with his bare hands — an absurd thing to believe even of a man pushing two hundred and twenty pounds, let alone a wiry guy who didn't look like he'd crack a hundred and fifty. Naturally, the situation itself was hard to swallow.
"Fuck. Cut the bullshit!!"
Yoo Dong-cheol slashed wildly at the air from a distance, once, twice.
Even at a glance, it was plain that no one had ever properly trained him.
I sprinted in, shoes still on, and kicked the back of his knife hand.
Not at full strength, of course. The man hadn't been confirmed as the killer yet, and I had no desire to make him a one-armed man ahead of schedule.
—CRUNCH!!
With the sound of something snapping clean through, the thick military dagger dropped to the floor. Yoo Dong-cheol clutched his broken wrist as he toppled backward, crashing noisily into the island table. A chair went over, and a stack of receipts scattered in every direction.
"Wh-who are you? Did Hyeong-won send you? Or Jo Dae-sik? Name your price. I'll pay more, guaranteed."
Looking down at Yoo Dong-cheol babbling whatever his terror produced, I toed the fallen knife across the floor and shoved it under the sofa.
"Kim Jin-hwan."
The trembling running through Yoo Dong-cheol stopped dead.
"Jin-hwan?"
Wariness — and doubt.
"Why, what about Jin-hwan? Don't tell me you think I dumped him and I've been living high on the hog by myself?"
"No, nothing like that. I heard you've been waging a one-man war to clear his name. So I came to help."
"Fuck... This is you coming to help?"
"That's why I told you to drop the knife."
"Then why'd you tear the door off in the first place?"
"Well, I asked around about you outside first, but the responses weren't exactly promising. So I figured it'd be easier to soften you up a little before we talked. Come on, I'll give you a hand — up you get. Let's sit down and talk."
He took my hand.
Nothing surfaced.
"Hm. So it wasn't you."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"Nothing important. So — the real killer. Turn anything up? It's been over two years already."
"Hold on a second. ...Fuck, this hurts like hell."
Yoo Dong-cheol tried moving his right hand for a moment, then gave up and started working his laptop's mouse with his perfectly fine left one.
"First off, Jin-hwan — that poor dumb bastard is absolutely not the killer. Yeah, he made a bit of a name for himself up through middle school. But when I got into this business, the guy decided he wanted to live straight for once and took a delivery job. He was even studying for his high school equivalency exam on the side. And a guy like that suddenly kills a high school girl he barely knows and pours bleach on her body? Total nonsense."
"Right, right — I think so too, so let's move past it. You must have tracked something down yourself. Let's hear about that."
"The thing I found strangest was the police. Sure, evidence against Jin-hwan turned up, but it was never that airtight — and yet they steamrolled every argument that he wasn't the one. You know?"
Yoo Dong-cheol turned the laptop screen toward me.
"So I did a little digging into the detective bastard who handled Jin-hwan's case. Park Min-jae. Violent Crimes Unit 3, Bupyeong Station."
"The detective in charge?"
"Yeah — and last year he got a special promotion."
"What's that?"
"The bastard had barely two years since his last promotion — he was still years short on seniority. Then this video suddenly went up on the internet, and boom, they bumped him up out of turn. Doesn't that strike you as odd?"
The clip Yoo Dong-cheol played was a news segment from one of the general-interest cable channels.
It showed a man draping his own puffer jacket over an old man collapsed on the street, then wrapping him up, hoisting him onto his back, and carrying him away.
"So? Fucking suspicious, right. I've known Park Min-jae since his beat-cop days at the substation, and there is no way he'd do that. The guy was too busy cramming for his promotion exams — he used to brush off half the people who came to the station for help. And now suddenly he's helping a collapsed old man? And it just happens to get caught on CCTV at that picture-perfect angle, and it airs as a heartwarming story? You buy that?"
"I can't exactly call it impossible. Even the worst bastard alive, given a long enough life, wants to do something good once in a while... hold on. Wait — stop it right there."
The face of the uniformed man in the video was strangely, naggingly familiar.
Park Min-jae, Park Min-jae...
"Was that guy, by any chance, stationed seven years ago at the substation near the market back there?"
"Huh? How'd you know that?"
Park Min-jae.
The officer who had taken a little girl — a child who came to him fleeing her parents' fists and society's cruelty — and thrown her right back out onto the streets.
He was the very man who lived in Eun-ji's memories.
— End of Yoo Dong-cheol the Loan Shark (2) —
Author's Note
Thank you!!