“Well, well. He showed up too?”
One of the detectives who’d been staring out the window all night furrowed his brows and grimaced. Hyeonho followed his gaze down to the street below, where a group of flashily dressed young men were chattering away excitedly as they descended underground. A few of them were people Team 4 had encountered before.
“Back entrance. You’ve confirmed all the escape routes, right?”
The detective who’d spotted the person of interest covered his mouth with his hand and radioed in. The reply came back immediately: “Yes, confirmed.” Tension rippled through the room in an instant. Hyeonho swallowed. There were countless false tips out there, but judging by tonight’s atmosphere, this one had a high degree of credibility.
Once they’re in, they go back in — starting with that group of men, familiar faces began gathering in twos and threes. The usual softness in Kang Hyeonho’s eyes hardened.
He needed to gather information that would be useful to Team 1 without getting in Team 4’s way. At the very least, he had to know how far Team 4 had gotten in their own collection — that way, the team chief might be able to request an information share from Team 4 later on.
Determined to pull out any thread he could find on the organization Team 1 had been relentlessly pursuing, Hyeonho’s tightly clenched palms grew damp.
“Let’s move.”
Just past 12:50 AM, the signal came. It had been timed to account for the formality of a birthday party and the window for drug use. The moment the signal dropped, everyone moved fast. Hyeonho descended underground into the bar alongside Team 4’s members.
The interior was dark, with red lighting flashing here and there at intervals. In contrast to the noisy street outside, the music — at a measured, steady rhythm — almost felt subdued. Inside the bar, which resembled something of a cave, Hyeonho snapped his head left and right as he scanned the space.
It felt like too open a space for a spot chosen by people planning to gather and get high. Is there a room in here that could hold a party? Just as Hyeonho’s eyes were sweeping around, a senior detective who had gone in ahead posing as a customer gestured from across the room.
Deep inside the bar, past a narrow corridor that looked like a staff passageway, they came to a small door. Loud music was leaking through from the other side.
The veteran detective who reached the door handle first made eye contact with the line of detectives stretching behind him and gave a nod. The small door was shoved open, and behind it was a surprisingly spacious room. A sharp, acrid smell of cigarette smoke mixed with something that anyone who knew, knew — it drifted past the tip of his nose.
Among that unpleasant smell were people with completely vacant eyes.
“Damn. Jackpot.”
Even with the detectives storming in, the ones high on drugs couldn’t hold up their own limp bodies. They could only mutter incoherent words, half out of it.
As handcuffs were being snapped onto wrists one by one, a prickling sensation at the back of his neck made Hyeonho jerk his head around. A young man who had been slinking away like a rat, eyes darting, trying to quietly retreat and make a run for it — Kang Hyeonho didn’t let him slip and snatched him in an instant.
“Ah, what the fuck, let go.”
Hyeonho restrained the man as he thrashed and struggled, patting him down. Something caught his hand at the waistband of the man’s pants. He slipped his fingers in and pulled out the contents — a small white wrapper, like a candy bag, dropped to the floor with a soft thud.
“As of this moment, you are under arrest on charges of narcotics possession. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say may be used against you as evidence. You have the right to an attorney.”
“Those guys put it in my pocket as a joke! It’s not mine!”
Hyeonho shoved the man hard against the wall and pinned him there with his body. The man kept twisting and writhing, making it difficult to get the cuffs on. After a brief struggle, Hyeonho had the cuffs out and was just about to snap them onto the man’s wrists —
“Sorry. Was I too late?”
Through the open door, a man walked in carrying a large cake box. Hyeonho sucked in a sharp breath. He very nearly went slack and lost his grip on the man currently in his hands.
He recognized him.
It was Do Huiwon — the café part-timer who’d worked so briskly in that small frame of his, the one who had left Kang Hyeonho thoroughly embarrassed.
“I’m telling you, it really wasn’t me!”
Do Huiwon felt like he finally understood what it meant to be absolutely losing his mind. He’d been thinking lately that his life was finally finding something called stability. It wasn’t that kind of life. Huiwon felt like someone was out there watching his life unfold, and the moment things started going smoothly, they’d go — oh right, this is Do Huiwon’s life — and dial up the difficulty.
“So. We’re asking you to give us a few strands of hair and a urine sample.”
The detective sitting across from him already seemed to have decided Huiwon was a drug user — the look he was giving him was laced with contempt. It made him feel genuinely sick. Huiwon glared at the detective once, fighting down the wave of indignation rising in his chest, then looked down at the plastic container that had been pushed toward him. This was the first time he’d ever gone through something like this, and he was scared too.
“I genuinely thought it was cake we were eating.”
Huiwon argued his innocence to a detective who had no intention of listening.
Let’s eat cake. That was how it had started. He really hadn’t known. Cake — he hadn’t known that was the word that group used for drugs.
“Huiwon made it.”
“Hyung!”
It was the spring of the year he turned twenty, not long after. Watching a tall man push open the door to Tesoro and walk in, Huiwon had broken into a wide smile. The man who handed him a large bouquet of flowers was his mentor and star patissier, Choi Dogyeong — the person who had given Huiwon the means to make a living.
Choi Dogyeong went through the cakes displayed in Huiwon’s showcase one by one, checking them in order, and gave sharp feedback on each. He said they were better than the random amateurs in the neighborhood, at least. Huiwon knew better than anyone that from someone as stingy with praise as Dogyeong, that was about as much as he could give.
“Let’s go celebrate Huiwon’s future, shall we?”
The place Dogyeong took Huiwon to was a gay bar in Itaewon called Deep Red. Having just barely turned twenty, Huiwon had poured all of his energy into getting Tesoro off the ground, so the dazzling streets of Itaewon, the uninhibited atmosphere — all of it was unfamiliar, but there was something exciting about being in a brand new environment.
“Hyung, what the — where did you find this one?”
Choi Dogyeong was a star patissier, but he seemed to be something of a celebrity inside Deep Red as well — the moment he stepped through the door, people scattered around the room converged toward him.
The gathered gazes shifted to Huiwon, standing behind Dogyeong. Under the eyes of these polished, glamorous people, Huiwon felt himself shrink a little.
“Where did you find this one?” The words nagged at him. It was something he’d heard often as a child. His eyes had closed slightly without thinking —
“He’s gorgeous.”
The words that followed weren’t what he used to hear as a child. Usually “Where did you find this one?” was followed by “Don’t hang around with kids like that” or “You’re not sending him back right now?” But this time……
“Isn’t he?”
Dogyeong shrugged next to a stunned Huiwon. After turning down the people trying to pull them over to join the fun in his own smooth way, the two of them sat not at a table but at the bar, facing the bartender.
“Huiwon, how much can you drink?”
Drink…….
How much could he handle, anyway. He honestly didn’t know. Having just turned twenty, Huiwon hadn’t had a proper chance to drink. Someone might say, who waits until twenty to have their first drink these days — but to young Huiwon, alcohol had been something to resent. His father used to change the moment he drank. And during his adolescence, there hadn’t been any friends around to drink with him. Huiwon’s circumstances hadn’t exactly allowed for the luxury of drinking and acting out carefree either.
Reading the hesitation in Huiwon’s manner, Dogyeong took over and ordered for him: “Just give us two gin and tonics.”
He took the clear glass that was handed to him and took a sip — sweetness first, then a rush of heat blooming up from inside. Huiwon stared blankly at his glass, thrown off by the unfamiliar sensation, and Dogyeong let out a quiet laugh.
“Look through the menu and try whatever you’re curious about.”
Dogyeong handed the menu over to Huiwon entirely and started nudging him to drink in earnest. There was something interesting about alcohol — sweet on the surface but warming you up from the inside. The mood lifted a little along with the music playing at just the right tempo.
“Dogyeong. Who is he?”
They were in the middle of drinking when three unfamiliar men closed in around them. Dogyeong replied with a cold “None of your business” and didn’t even spare them a glance.
“We just want to hang out, don’t be like that.”
One of the group, his smile not quite matching his words, looked Huiwon up and down. When their eyes met, the man mouthed pretty at him and disappeared.
Something felt off. Since coming here, people kept calling Huiwon pretty. The ones who were far more elaborately dressed up were them. But — had it always been this easy for men to say things like that to other men? It had been happening since he walked in, and he was just now registering what he hadn’t consciously noticed before — he tilted his head in puzzlement.
“This is a gay bar.”
Dogyeong answered Huiwon’s unspoken question.
