PAX 14

“Lee Seongshin. 29 years old. Taken in and raised by a Pachulso couple at age four. Position held within the Pachulso: Pigeon.”

Ahn Yutan recited.

It was no surprise that he had run a background check on me. No, I had assumed he would have, of course. Not just on me, but on the entire Pachulso family.

“I’m younger than you, but did it bother you that I kept talking down to you? Well, I did it because it was worth talking down to you. Not because I had any malice, just because it was warranted. You understand, right?”

What is he even saying?

“Yes.”

“Hey, don’t be like that; you should drop the honorifics starting today, too. Why stand on ceremony between us? You and I are both second-in-commands, and we’ve even looked into every nook and cranny of each other’s secret places.”

You’re the only one who saw into my secret places, nook and cranny.

“My underlings don’t use honorifics with me, either. I told them to speak informally because it’s comfortable. People who have real authority don’t have to push it; it seeps out naturally anyway. So you speak comfortably too. Got it?”

Ahn Yutan patted my back again.

“Yeah.”

“Okay. Then I’ll continue the story we were talking about earlier.”

I wanted to say, ‘Can’t you just shut up?’, but of course, I didn’t say it out loud. Among those who tell you to speak comfortably, there isn’t one who doesn’t get offended when you actually do.

“Where was I? Oh, it’s nothing big, just that you ignored me so much that I gave your boyfriend a little massage. It’s really too much to stand me up after just one date.”

Yonghee isn’t my boyfriend, but correcting that right now isn’t what’s important.

“Stood you up?”

“Yeah. I waited for 30 minutes.”

“Where did you wait 30 minutes? For me?”

“Wow, you’re just going to pretend you have no idea?”

“No…”

I stopped the bike and turned around, but Ahn Yutan signaled for me to keep going by jerking his chin. The gun in his hand was also pointing forward.

I looked ahead again and pedaled.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. You never said anything about meeting up.”

“We were supposed to see each other at the Plaza yesterday afternoon.”

The Plaza building. That, too, is in the slum area.

I racked my memory.

“I never made such a promise.”

“We didn’t make a promise, but I left a message.”

I racked my memory again. A message? Where? In my room? Somewhere on Yonghee’s body?

“Where?”

“If you saw the message giving you 24 hours, you must have seen that one, too. I wrote it somewhere around here.”

At the end of his sentence, something poked the back of my neck, and I flinched. The bike wobbled slightly.

“There… on the back of my neck?”

“Yeah.”

Does he think I’m some kind of owl? How am I supposed to see that, dammit?

“What did I write? ‘3 PM, Plaza Building’. I think I wrote it something like that?”

I wanted to curse so badly that I pressed my upper and lower lips together as tightly as possible. I had barely managed to see that fucked-up message written on my neck, relying on a single mirror.

“But no matter how long I waited, you didn’t show up. I’m not a person who has that much free time, but I sat there for 30 minutes. While my pride was being chipped away. That’s when the conclusion came that this little pigeon bastard had developed some massive balls.”

But is it even true that he wrote such a note? Isn’t he just making forced claims like this now without having written anything?

He certainly looks like the type to do that.

“But as it happens, I already knew who this pigeon bastard’s boyfriend was. Heo Yonghee. Twenty years old. Joined the Pachulso at fourteen. The kind of relationship where he and the pigeon coo every night. Once I stripped him, it turns out our Yonghee had a dick smaller than the Korean male average.”

He knew ‘already’?

Since when? From whom?

“Luckily for you, I’m the type of person who gives people two chances. If you hadn’t shown up today, I was going to have a ‘consultation’ with each person in the Pachulso, one by one, starting with the youngest, every single day. But you saved the Pachulso family’s lives.”

Ahn Yutan patted my back.

“How does it feel to be a hero?”

I cleared my head for a moment.

“There’s no option other than me accepting that request, right?”

“Hey, why say something like that? There are so many options. Accept it, or don’t accept it and stand your ground, or pretend to accept it and then back out and get both your feet cut off, or say you won’t accept it and then crawl while crying that you’ll do it, and so on. The choice is your freedom. Just pick one of your own volition.”

I cleared my head again.

“If I do the job, is that the end of it? Are we done seeing each other?”

“Already dreading the parting, dammit, making my heart flutter.”

Ahn Yutan giggled like a lunatic from behind.

“I’d appreciate a definitive answer that if I do this job, we won’t meet again. And no approaching the pachulbu kids, either.”

Ahn Yutan said nothing.

Between the squeaking of the bike and the occasional clicking of Ahn Yutan’s titanium knees, I strained my ears toward the back to see if any other sounds were being added—like the sound of him adjusting his grip on the gun or the subtle sound of a finger hovering over the trigger.

“I can’t give a definitive answer before the job is finished.”

He’s an annoying guy, as expected.

“Because you have to handle it so perfectly that Ahn Juik can just think of it as a simple accidental death. If Kim Junik dies and Ahn Juik suddenly starts digging into the truth? Then the Pachulso kids’ heads will start getting dug into one by one, too. Literally, digging out what’s inside the skull bone.”

“How do I rule out the possibility that I handle the job perfectly but you lie and make unreasonable demands?”

“Do I look like that kind of guy to you?”

Obviously.

“Oh well, maybe I am. I can’t guarantee that. Depending on what my condition is like at the time, I might suddenly feel like toying with you. I don’t even know myself.”

If I crashed this bike into that tree right now, only I would get hurt, right?

“But so what? Weren’t you thinking that you only had one option anyway? You have to do it regardless, right? There’s no room for you to escape, right? So just trust yourself and do it. Trust yourself and just charge ahead.”

Essentially, he’s right. Once I’m caught in that fucked-up radar… I don’t know why it had to be me, but once I’m caught in it, I have no choice but to do what he tells me.

“Anyway, I’ll try my best, too. If you don’t do it half-heartedly and do your best to finish it cleanly, I’ll try to give you a heart-wrenching farewell. So have some hope and do your absolute best to work your ass off. Even if I act like a mood-swinger sometimes, I’m a fucking rational human being, you know.”

Ahn Yutan, the biggest mood-swinger I’ve ever seen in my life, laughed out loud again by himself. I have to believe those words—the ones I find least trustworthy of anything I’ve ever heard—right now. Whether it’s true or not, I have to do this.

“The deadline.”

“I’ll give you a week. I’m being generous.”

I swallowed a sigh.

“The payment.”

“Right. Money talk can’t be left out.”

Since the conversation seemed to be wrapping up, I steered the bike toward the pond where we first met.

“I’ll give it to you after the job is done. After Ahn Juik definitely concludes it as an accidental death.”

He’s not going to pay me.

It’s clear he’ll use the excuse that Ahn Juik is suspicious to wiggle out of it. And I wouldn’t be able to ask Ahn Juik directly and verify it anyway.

Still, there’s nothing I can do. If I refuse, any one of the pachulbu could end up lying in the Pachulso yard like Yonghee, looking like a smashed watermelon.

The pachulbu never work for free, but even though I belong to the Pachulso, I’m not a pachulbu, so I decided to make an exception for a rule like that. And I decided to think of it as a sacrifice for a greater cause.

As I neared the pond, I saw the white guard sitting in the same spot. The black guard was sitting next to him, too.

Is that gang only those two, or are there more? How many people can he mobilize for the job of kidnapping and beating someone?

I wondered what Ahn Yutan’s ‘backing’ was really like.

And how on earth he planted a spy inside the Pachulso. And how well he and that spy knew each other.

I stopped the bike next to the pond. Ahn Yutan got off the seat and held out his hand.

“The second date was very constructive.”

I looked at his hand, then reached out and shook it.