Chapter 15

I expected derision. I expected anger. So I wasn’t surprised when the people in the room burst into a mixture of both.

“Who does this guy think he is?”

“Is he a fucking idiot?!”

Han Sungmin looked at me in disbelief. He laughed dryly. “I don’t know who the hell you are, Baek Jaehyun. What makes you think you can just walk in here and say that?”

“I remember him,” chirped the lady on his arm. “He works for Do Hoon-ssi.”

For some reason, that made the rest of them shut up momentarily. “Oh?” Han Sungmin looked at me, examining me more curiously. He broke into a wide grin. “So you must have seen us when I paid the old man a visit. Got a little curious, did you? Came to see us in action, eh?”

I held my silence and just looked back at him dispassionately. One of the men whooped derisively. “Ice cold!”

Han Sungmin fixed me with a glare like he wanted to melt my iciness. He would have to do so much better than that. Taejun would have withered him in an instant. He saw his glare had no effect on me, and sighed. “You must know nothing about the street scene. Why come here instead of the meet?”

“Like you said. I don’t know anything about the street scene. I don’t know where the meet is.” Han Sungmin was the only connection I had to the scene at all. If he sent me off right now, I’d never know where to find any of them ever again.

He scoffed at me. He wrapped his arm around his girl, and turned away, clearly done with my random interruption. “Someone throw this damn clown out.”

One of the men started towards me, cracking his knuckles like he was in some low tier action movie. I looked at him contemptuously. He didn’t like that. He lunged at me with a clumsy punch.

I don’t know what came over me. I’d never been in a fight before. I’d only ever been on the receiving end of beatings. Somehow the image of Taejun’s ferocity and speed with his gun flashed in my mind. I sidestepped the punch (he had started his approach way too far), grabbed his arm, and jerked him forward with his own momentum. As he stumbled past me, I planted my foot on his back. All the rage I felt at my family, Mr. Do included, seemed to rise up within me, waking my blood and my heart. I sent him flying disgracefully. I felt the hairs on my neck prickle as someone else rushed at me. I might have been shorter than Taejun, but I was still taller than average, and certainly taller than the guy rushing me now. I intercepted him before he could reach me, grabbing him by the collar and holding him at length. He stared at me in disbelief and seemed to wilt under my deathly glare, like I had done so many times under my brother’s eyes. Despite watching her comrades fail to take me down, the girl not glued to Sungmin was whooping excitedly at the fight.

All the commotion had turned Han Sungmin back around. “Hey, hey, hey!” The last guy who hadn’t rushed me was just staring in shock. It didn’t seem like he wanted to try anything.

The guy I had kicked in the back was getting up and cursing. “This fucking michin-nom!” He started towards me.

“Give it up,” Han Sungmin advised. “You already look like a damn idiot. He’s just a fucking mechanic.” Despite him saying so, he seemed unable to meet my eyes. I let his guy go, and he stumbled back, looking at me angrily as he rubbed his neck.

“Baek Jaehyun, eh? Fine. If you want to race so badly, you can follow us to the meet. Where’s your car?”

I just glowered at him silently. I didn’t have one.

He seemed exasperated. “Seriously? You don’t have a car? What the hell you going to race with, your legs?” I continued to glower at him and Sungmin decided he had enough. “Fine. Don’t tell me. Freak.”

He climbed into his car, and his girl followed. She seemed amused. As they raced off, she declined to blow me a kiss this time.

“Get out of here and don’t come back,” said the man I had kicked. He was trying to sound commanding, but having just literally kicked his ass a minute ago, his words had little effect on me. I fixed him with a burning look to show him that if I was leaving, it was of my own free will, not because he had tried to make me.

I hadn’t yet made it out of the alley when I heard someone shout. “Lee Seol-hee!”

I turned around to see who was running after me. It was the girl. She walked the last few steps up to me, grinning. She was wearing incredibly tall heels, so the fact that she had been running, even for a short distance, was pretty impressive. Her heels made her only a few inches shorter than me. She leaned towards me and despite myself my heart jumped at her closeness. She was pretty, even more than Sungmin’s girl (who, quite frankly, wore too much makeup). “The meet is at the lot under the west side of New Banpo Bridge,” she whispered, her breath tickling my ear.

She laughed at how stiff I had become with her so close. “You really don’t have a car?” she asked in a teasing voice. I didn’t answer, so she laughed lightly, turned showily, and returned to the garage.

I didn’t know why she had told me, but I was grateful that she had. So at least now I had a second clue to making my in with the racers. I just needed a car.

With my accounts frozen, I had no money to even rent a car, much less buy one. I didn’t know anyone who had a car I could borrow. Actually, Minjae had a clunky old jalopy, but even I knew that that car wouldn’t stand a chance against the modified racing cars, no matter who was behind the wheel. So that left only one option.

Steal one.

The thought should have been inconceivable to me. I had stolen before when I was younger, but never again after the last man who had shown mercy to me and even bought me a meal after he found me. Before then I had felt that what I did was justified, a necessity for my own survival. The mentality returned to me easily. My survival was at stake, after all, and probably even more so than before.

I knew I had the skills to do it. I knew how car alarm systems worked, and I’d fixed enough cars to know how to hot wire one. I just needed to find the right one. Even if I was a decent driver, the racers almost certainly were too. To win I knew I’d need a fast car. I didn’t have a garage, or even the tools and equipment to modify one at the moment. But it was improbable that someone would leave their expensive sports car parked out where someone like me could get their hands on it.

As desperate as I was to try my hand at the race to try to get some money, I knew it was unlikely I’d be able to get a car that night and be able to race with it. Besides, my head was pounding. The lack of sleep I had gotten the night before had been slowly creeping on me over the evening, and now in the quietness of my solitude, it had swelled. I felt woozy and heavy.

I pushed on until I found a small city park. Too tired to even find a bench, I just collapsed under a tree. This time I escaped into unconsciousness before the gruesome memories of the days before could catch up to me.

—-

Sleeping on the grass was a mistake. In the early hours of the morning, I woke up to an intense cold sensation. The sprinkler in the park had come on, and was watering me as well as the grass. Somehow I had managed to sleep through it long enough to get properly drenched. I stumbled out of the splash zone irritably. Well, at least it was somewhat of a bath, I thought grouchily.

In my wet clothes, the cold of the night was even more unbearable. I shivered, at a loss as to what to do. I looked at the sky. It was still dark, and daybreak was probably still a bit aways. My only option then was probably to try the subway station.

The cold, so sharp it was piercing, chased me all the way to the subway station. Thank goodness, it was open. I ran to the bathroom with a sudden idea. A janitor who had been mopping the floor, gaped at me as I rushed in, dripping.

“Is it raining?” he asked as he watched me run the hand dryer over and over, trying to dry my clothes as best as I could without stripping.

“No,” I said.

He didn’t know what to make of that, and just finished his work. As he left he gave me one last confused look. The moment he left, I took off my shirt for better efficiency.

With no money, my only option for food was to get food at a convenience store using my metrocard. Fortunately there was a twenty-four hour one by the station. I never kept much money on my metrocard, so I just got an instant ramyun bowl. There was a hot water dispenser at the store, and I barely waited for it to finish soaking before I dug in. The hot and spicy soup going down felt incredible after being so cold. I was still slightly damp, but the heat in my belly from my hot meal improved my mood considerably. I ignored the cashier’s judgemental look as I filled the bowl up again with hot water.

I considered my next move as I sipped the boiling hot water carefully. My main objective today would be to find a car. Inner Seoul was probably my best bet to find a car. Generally people were wealthier in Inner Seoul and more likely to have a car. I didn’t know if I’d be able to hijack a car in broad daylight, so I’d either have to strike now, or else wait for the evening.

I searched the streets in vain. It had been closer to daybreak than I had estimated, and I hadn’t managed to find a car that would have been suitable, or else was in a place that I dared to try. I had spotted a Hamada Kamaitachi in a locked lot. As much as I would have liked to drive a Hamada, I’d never worked on one and doubted if I could finagle its systems. And it would have been impossible to get it out of the lot. So I had to keep looking.

By noon I had completely lost my nerve. The streets were now bustling with people, and even if I found a car that might be able to race now, I’d never be able to get into one without someone noticing.

I sat glumly on a bench. It looked like I needed to wait until the night. I knew I should probably continue scouting to try to find a target I could strike at when the time was right, but I was a little frustrated and tired.

I watched the crowds of people passing by. I wondered where they were all going, and what challenges and tasks they had ahead of them. I doubted any of them had anything going on even vaguely similar to my situation.

I watched warily as a man in a long dark coat approached. At a distance, I had thought it might be Taejun, but he wasn’t nearly as tall and definitely didn’t have his face. Despite that, there was a certain something about him that did remind me a bit of my older brother and made my hackles raise. He was speaking on the phone to someone. He met my eyes and stopped.

“Wait,” he said to whoever was on the other end of the phone. “Give me a minute.”

I stood up.

“You look just like… hey, what’s your name?” he asked me.

I turned and ran.

The man shouted at me to stop but I definitely did not want to do that. I don’t think he actually chased me, because when I checked backwards a minute later, he was out of sight. I had no doubt that that must have been one of my brother’s coworkers. Since he had used his connections at work to set up my evacuation, at least some of them must know the situation between us. Staying in Inner Seoul, so near to the headquarters of the NIS was dangerous. I might easily run into someone else who was more willing to capture me and drag me back to Taejun.

I decided that I’d go to Outer Seoul, Jungho be damned, at least for the rest of the day. There was probably less of a chance I’d run into any other NIS officers out there. And if Jungho did find me, he was more than welcome to put me out of my misery.

My search in Outer Seoul was even more frustrating. The few cars parked outside in this part of town were older and in much worse condition. Half of them had been slowly corroding in their eternal resting places, and would probably needed a jump start to their battery.

Why was it so damned hard to find a car? At this point, anything would do. I’d find some way to tune it, tools or no. On slow days, I had often helped Mr. Do with his project cars–

Ice water, colder than even the sprinklers last night, seemed to wash over me. Mr. Do sometimes ‘adopted’ run down cars that his customers had given up on. Instead of paying the scrapyard to take them, they brought the car to him for free. He liked to fix them up and tune them up so that they ran like new, and resell them for a nice profit. The latest car he had picked up was a Mitsubishi Eclipse. The same car Han Sungmin had.

I felt numb as I considered it. Strategically, it was the perfect choice. The car was parked in a locked lot when not being worked on, but any tools I needed would be close by, in the garage. I knew where Mr. Do kept his emergency spare key. I could go into the garage, get whatever I needed, and even the set of keys for both the lot and the car. I wouldn’t even need to hotwire the Eclipse.

The thought of stealing from Mr. Do should have been horrifying for me after all he had done for me over the years. But somehow I felt numb and detached. It was undeniable that Mr. Do’s car was the perfect option. He had taken money from me, I thought to myself in justification. He hadn’t paid anything for the Eclipse other than his time fixing it up. I didn’t think about how much he could have possibly sold it for. It was money that didn’t exist yet.

There were two more hours until he closed the shop for the day and left. I settled in to wait.

Despite my earlier nonchalance at the idea of taking the Eclipse, my heart was pounding as I scoped out Mr. Do’s lot. It was late evening and the low sun cast long, menacingly dancing shadows from the young trees swaying in the wind. I could see the black Eclipse, sitting tamely though the slatted chain link fencing of Mr. Do’s locked lot. Razer wire lined the top of the chain link fence to deter climbers. I noted the camera pointed at the entrance that was sealed with a chain and a lock.

Numbness took hold of me again as I determinedly made my way forward. This time of day, Mr. Do was surely making dinner in his home above, or resting after a day’s work. I furtively snuck around to the back and found the spare key, tucked under an old rubber car interior mat. As I stuck the key into the door, my heart felt nothing.

I remembered the camera. I searched into the lockers and found a hoodie someone had left behind to wear later. Perfect. I wiggled into it and flipped the hood over my head. I found a dust mask and put that on too. It wasn’t much, but hopefully it would obscure me enough to make me unrecognizable on the feed.

I gathered up a few tools that would come in handy later on for maintaining the car and put them in a bag I found in a locker. A distant me was surprised that I didn’t hesitate in taking the key for the lot or the keys for the Eclipse. Instead I was more focused on making as little sound as possible. Though it wasn’t likely I’d be heard, I felt Mr. Do’s presence in his home looming above.

I tugged my stolen hood down over my face further as I approached the lot, key in hand. The chain clanked as it dropped free from the lock. I resisted the urge to look up into the camera. Even if I did, I wouldn’t have been able to tell if Mr. Do was looking at me or not.

But now that my presence had been detected, even if unnoticed, by the camera, I felt a need to hurry. I ran to Eclipse, fumbling the key. Its lights flashed as I unlocked it, and I winced, hoping that it hadn’t drawn any attention. I dropped the bag onto the passenger seat and got in.

The hesitation that I hadn’t had at all in the garage suddenly gripped me as I gripped the steering wheel. Though I knew that my time was running out, my heart had suddenly become conflicted again. Something inside me was trying to convince myself that what I was doing was utterly and totally wrong. I laid my head on the steering wheel. Though I hadn’t physically exerted myself, my breath was coming in gasps.

The cold numbness that had covered me the last two days suddenly draped over me again, as if it were a blanket someone had pulled over me quickly. I started the car. It roared into life. Even if I had somehow managed to escape notice until now, the sound now made all of those efforts in vain as it announced my presence there on the lot.

Quickly I maneuvered the car out of its gated lot and onto the pavement. Either the sound of the car starting or some other security measure had alerted Do Hoon, as he was now rushing out of his front door towards my car.

“Stop! Who are you?! Stop! I’m calling the police!” He shouted. Against the throaty growl of the engine, he might as well have been shouting into the wind.

I blew past him out onto the street, into the night that had come at last.