(no subject)
Title: Apologia Pro Vita Sua (Chapter 14)
Authors: Scorpions angelinaii, murasaki_plum, nemesis_cry
Characters/Pairings: All (kangteuk, shichul, kihae; potential kyuwook, eunkihae, shihanchul, yeshdong, yewook, minry)
Rating: PG-13 to R
Genre: AU, organized crime, postcyberpunk
Summary: In a world where money and crime go hand and hand, survival is not determined by the fittest, but the ones who will fight to live.
Warnings: violence, swearing, sexual situations
Introduction and Chapter 1 | Chapters 2 & 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5 | Chapter 6 | Chapter 7 | Chapter 8 | Chapter 9 | Chapter 10 | Chapter 11 | Chapter 12 | Chapter 13
Banner by angelinaii
Inhumane, that was the one word that kept coming back from police officers, witnesses and bystanders alike. What murder, Yesung wanted to know, would've qualified as humane? One ordered by top brass judges? Even those were painful and cruel, no matter what the press were told. Perhaps they were deserved. That was the other excuse the press liked to offer. This didn't meet their standards, not by far.
"Twenty years old, daughter of a bank owner," an officer read, rattling off her name and address like it would do any good now. "Manager said she came in with a man, took her usual room and asked to have all calls held."
Yesung frowned, snapping plastic gloves over his hands and rubber slippers over his shoes. In the Bottoms, they were lucky if police didn't contaminate the crime scene in the first few minutes of the investigation. Here, different rules applied. All the more so if the person or persons involved were well connected.
"You said usual room," Yesung noted, assessing the scene without nearing the body just yet. "She came here a lot?"
The officer nodded slowly. "Yeah, few times a week. It's a pocket-money suite." Which was another way of saying it was typical of kids her age to tempt fate until they couldn't anymore and then their parents sued the state, pushed another edict by another don and settled down in their grief with monuments and tombstones to rival a pope's.
But decadent spending of a rich girl or not, the room was intact. No lamps thrown over, no chairs upside down. No wild party in sight. No struggle. Even the bedding was carefully thrown aside, as if this had been a seduction and not a murder. The only blood was on the pillow and sheets around the body, the carpet around the bed clear of all footprints. Her clothes lay in a pile, discarded carelessly over the back of a chair. All but the panties. Yesung wondered if she had undressed herself or been undressed. Had it been slow and then shockingly rough or had she been one of those perfect, glacial beauties, desperate for the first man willing enough to drag her from her pedestal?
Either way, this was the lowest of the low to be drug down to and Yesung couldn't make himself attribute any guilt to girl. No one wanted to die and least of all like this, with her mouth open her legs spread out and and her--
Another officer tapped his shoulder with a put upon sigh. "Sir, the press are asking if this is connected to the Bottoms killings. What should we tell them?"
"Are you kidding me? No comment." Not until they knew more, not even then. "Keep them behind the yellow tape and keep those cameras away from the employees. If they spice up their story even more, we won't be able to tell what's fact and what's fiction."
The decision wasn't his to make but if it got the other cops to give him space, Yesung figured it was just as well. He hadn't been to the other crime scenes, but he had read the reports and he'd heard Eeteuk's account of the prostitute after his visit to the morgue. All of it was enough to connect that murder and this one, but he wasn't going to make that known to his bosses before he warned the gang. One might have paid his salary, but the other had the potential to slice him open with the slightest flick of Henry's wrist. Not only that, but somewhere along the karmic line, he was pretty sure he owed them.
When problems like these showed up, the line between cop and informant tended to blur uncomfortably. Was it the right call to give them a tip or should he do his job instead and put his efforts into catching the perp the old fashioned way?
The old fashioned way blows, Heechul would have told him fondly, the annoying click of a lighter punctuating the words, and Yesung had to agree. Whatever manpower the Judoh police had, Eeteuk's gang had Kyuhyun, not to mention legions of loyal followers who'd sell out their own mothers if the leader asked them. No contest.
Yesung shook his head, returning his thoughts to the present and the tortured victim lying on the bed before him. Walking around the room in silence, his footsteps inevitably led him to her, just as every road would've led him to Rome. He clung to the ridiculous analogy as he forced his gaze down and to the red-tinged sheets.
"The victim's wrists were secured to the headboard," a forensic pathologist explained, for his benefit or her own, Yesung didn't care to ask. "The handcuffs might have been her own. The ankles were free and from the bruising it seems she kicked a lot."
Yesung swallowed thickly at the carnage. A crime like this, fibers, fluids were bound to be found. The thought brought him some comfort with the promise of justice.
"Was she gagged?" he found himself asking, righteous anger turning to bitter morbidity as he forgot his earlier cool-headed assessment.
The pathologist knelt down, turning vacant eyes to face him as she checked the girl's jaw. "No. But she wouldn't have been heard. There's blood on her front teeth. The attacker must've covered her mouth with his hand."
Another nod, his patience giving way to anxiety and the urge to drown the scene in a few beers after hours. "What else?"
"She wasn't raped," the pathologist told him, sounding as disinterested as if discussing pure hypothesis. "Simply bound and operated on. She must have struggled because most of these cuts are inexact." Whoever attacked her, she meant, would have known how to use a scalpel.
Just not an anesthetic.
Yesung licked dry lips and shoved past officers taking photographs of the scene, intent on not losing his lunch in front of colleagues. What the pathologist described as operation was, to him at least, a brutal child's game as he played with a helpless insect. Precision wasn't the word for it, no matter what the report said. Pain, on the other hand, was. Why else would he have opened her stomach and left her to feel every slash of his knife?
Outside in the dark, Yesung leaned his head against the side of a building and tried not to imagine the pain she must've felt, the utter horror. He also tried not to imagine the images that would circulate, the attack politics in the press the following day. It was only too easy to picture the headlines; 'Wealthy Judoh resident: murdered in her bed' would read the best of them, 'Crime of passion,' the worst. And then the character analysis. Who was the girl, how did she get involved in something so dangerous as to leave her dead? How could it be best explained as the victim's fault?
Bullshit, all of it, and no way to stop it from going to print.
Yesung looked up at the sky and reached for his phone out of instinct. He couldn't stop the presses, but he could do the next best thing while his colleagues butted heads over an investigation that would lead nowhere because of their inability to see the bigger picture. Over the neighboring building, something flashed silver for barely a second, effectively drawing his attention before the call went through.
A figure on the rooftop stood slowly before sprinting away.
Henry.
With anyone else, Yesung would've thought he might have dreamed it, but not this time; not with Henry. Slowly, diligently, he pushed his phone back into his pocket and looked over the crowd of reporters and curious, well meaning Judoh citizens. Not something you'd see in the Bottoms, where everyone knew to look the other way and trust Eeteuk's people to keep things working.
For a brief moment, he wondered if the killer was out there, watching from behind the throng amassed in front of the hotel, organs on ice somewhere in the trunk of his car.
Was he just a madman or did he like to savor every murder? Was it impulsive or did he plan and choose her out of a dozen targets? Did he prefer her hair or her lipstick? What was it that brought him out of the Bottoms and into civilization? The thrill of the chase? False confidence?
Nail stubs digging into his palm, Yesung put on new gloves and rubber slippers and walked back inside where he thought he could do some good.
***
Starting out in life as a Bottoms resident wouldn't have been easier for Yesung, so his mother and father made the not so unusual decision to move to the glittering city of Judoh and brave the taxes and controls that exiled the poor south of the barriers. How they managed in those days, Yesung never knew but always suspected might have been the work of the Heaven & Earth people, one way or another. Not that there would have been any shame in that. The school Yesung's mother worked at, the hospital that took his father in as nurse were all funded with mob money. One way or another, they would've been indebted to the gangs.
It wasn't until he joined the Academy that he realized just how far that debt extended.
Law enforcement in Judoh was a tool of the highest bidder, a fact which rapidly affected the training of new recruits. Most didn't question the ambiguous double standards that permeated interrogation techniques and criminal investigations alike. Why would they, when there was hardly an improvement on their paycheck if they bothered to delve any deeper than the surface?
Yesung toed the official line, following regulations and policy to the best of his abilities for the longest he could. It didn't take long for rifts to appear between him and the rest of the force.
Miss A, a minor whose real name they stopped using the moment her body was found half buried in the front lawn of a private girls' only school, should have changed old prejudices and class favoritism. A child was dead, damn it, and surely her parents deserved closure if not retribution. Yesung pushed ahead, struggling to uncover leads despite attempts from his colleagues to dissuade him.
It was his first big case and no one else seemed interested to take it. Not even his superiors who point blank threatened to have him reassigned if he even thought about questioning the H & E dons. No doubt they hoped he'd become scared if they threatened to suspend him, to take away his badge. Yesung dared them. He'd grown up thinking the uniform meant something and he was determined not to abandon that dream, still foolishly believing that the resistance he was met with was simply a sign of the old days, of an old mentality that would be relinquished, with time.
That same mentality pushed him to interrogate the parents of the dead girl and her professors, going as far as to request an audience with the Catholic priest who ran the school. The clergy were the only resistant faction, claiming first that the man in question was too busy, then that he had requested to be reassigned because he felt too strongly affected by what had occurred, but on the whole they were unhelpful. He used the preferred methods in his field: threats, bargaining, false assurance. None yielded any results.
Indirectly, however, they attracted unwelcome attention. A witness called his house and requested that they meet because he had valuable information to deliver. He refused to agree on a location in Judoh, citing the H & E as being involved and thus having reason to want him dead. The Bottoms was the natural solution. Unlike the city, it was also unguarded and devoid of camera surveillance in the most populated areas.
Yesung agreed and sought out to find the church--a holy, safe haven--where they were to meet. He found, quite literally a dump instead, and thanked his lucky stars that his parents had had the presence of spirit to move before he was born. Surely he wouldn't be in this position today if they had stayed.
And perhaps that might not have been such a bad thing, at the end of the day, considering that not being in this position might mean he wouldn't have walked straight into a not-so-carefully laid out trap. Naivety and misplaced trust landed him on devil's door, a revolver thrust into his back the moment he stepped out of the car.
"Right this way, Officer, if you please," a gruff voice requested, muzzle digging into his spine to settle any potential argument on the matter. "World like ours, you ask too many questions, you're liable to find yourself with a bullet in your back. Ain't that a shame?"
Yesung gritted his teeth and felt a fool for not taking backup in the most dangerous place he could've gone. "Because shooting someone in the back is very brave. Are you going to deliver clichés or kill me?"
A brief hesitation, the gun pressing into the back of his neck instead. "Here's how this is going to work: you're going to tell me who called you and I'm going to make it quick and painless. We got an understanding?"
So it hadn't been a set-up, he surmised, realizing instead that his phone line had been tapped--and no one had the resources and time to spend on something as trivial as that besides his own employers. There went his bonus. Pursing his lips, he tried to make light of the betrayal before the adrenaline pumping through his veins left him completely unfocused and useless.
"I'm gonna ask you again," his attacker spat. "Who the fuck rang you last night, huh? Might as well talk now, boy, you're only making it worse for yourself and I got all day to get it out of you."
Yesung pushed his hands into the hood, fingers slippery with sweat. "Sure, I'll tell you," he grinned, looking over his shoulder. "Santa."
The butt of a gun crashed into his cheek, sending him flying back into the car, hardly out of harm's way.
"Think you're gonna get cute with me, huh?" the man huffed and puffed, sounding strangely aggravated, almost as if he'd expected Yesung to lie back and take it--no doubt, he figured, other nosy cops had done it; no doubt it was common practice.
A boot landed in his gut, knocking both wind and blood from his mouth.
"You little bastard, you think you're gonna change the way the world works? Get over yourself, world don't need your help!" He kicked again, aiming for his balls but catching his thigh instead. Not that it hurt any less.
"Go to hell..." he managed to cry out weakly, surprised when the rain of blows promptly ended on command. Above him, the man wobbled on his feet briefly and then collapsed, gun hand limp and useless.
Behind him, a tall youth with a tazer in hand smirked. "I knew I shouldn't have let Heechul handle my props," he sighed, offering a hand. "But you won't arrest me, will you, Officer? Considering I did just save your life."
Yesung ignored the offered help, sitting back against the car and trying to catch his breath. "Who the hell are you?" he glowered, wishing his voice didn't shake quite so much from pain still radiating through his body.
The kid was unfazed, kneeling by him with wide eyes and a smile. "Sungmin. That over there's my boss." He pointed to their left where, in the shadow of the church, a man watched them with his hands folded over his chest. "Said you might need some help," he added, smiling brightly. "Does that hurt?"
Yesung ignored his question, turning his attention to the shadowy figure lingering a safe distance away. "Are you my informer?"
Advancing slowly, the man shook his head. "Sorry to disappoint. We found your friend's car a little way from here. I'm afraid he got to her before he got to you."
Her. Right. He vaguely recalled the voice having been a woman's, not that that was any exceptionally good reason to trust the word of a gang leader. "What's to convince me you didn't kill her yourself?"
Sungmin look affronted. "Don't be ridiculous. Eeteuk never lies."
"What reason would I have to kill a woman about to point the finger at some top brass, upstanding Judoh citizen who also happened to have murdered his underage girlfriend?"
Yesung narrowed his eyes. "You know an awful lot about what she was about to say. Sure you didn't have a nice friendly chat before you decided to play the Good Samaritan?"
Before him, Sungmin stood and moved away, tazer still in hand. His boss took his place.
"You seem like a smart guy. Don't you think that the only reason the H & E would interfere with your investigation would be that one of their own was involved?" Shaking his head to brush dyed light brown hair from his eyes, the man continued: "Considering they own the police and you only used police means, it would've been easy enough to kill two birds with one stone simply by following you to the single witness you had..." His lips curved into a smile. "Unless, of course, she wasn't the only witness, which would explain why they were so gung-ho to get you to tell them her name. So they could silence all other potential whistle-blowers. Am I right so far?"
Yesung wiped blood from his lips, one hand pressing against his ribs to test the pain. Nothing seemed broken, but he'd have to stop by the hospital to make sure. If he even made it out of the Bottoms alive.
"On the money," he nodded, stalling for time. "Would have joined the force if I were you."
The man chuckled. "But you have and you're not me. A most fortunate coincidence because I happen to have an offer for you, Officer."
"Of course you do," Yesung answered grimly, wondering what would happen if he refused.
"No need to sound so dejected. I can get you the witnesses you need to help with your investigation. And I can keep them alive until you find a prosecutor to take the case."
He bristled at the possibility, the space of half an hour barely enough to teach him caution. "How?"
"Let me worry about that. You just keep yourself alive and breathing..."
"Yesung. My name is Yesung."
The man grinned, offering his hand. "I'm Eeteuk. So, we have a deal?"
He glared, but there was no ignoring the lure of that promise. Miss A avenged, justice served and whatever bastard had payed to have him shot today put behind bars where evil belonged. Grudgingly, he seized Eeteuk's hand in his and allowed himself to be dragged back up to his feet. What an unusual and unlikely partnership, he thought, they would be lucky if it lasted the month.
***
Five years on and Yesung was still on the force, still in Eeteuk's pocket and still determined to put the sons of bitches who broke the law behind bars. Regardless of social standing and connections, he just did his job. With a little help from his own, well connected friends. He always took the calls they inevitably left on his cellphone, Kyuhyun's expertize having verified time and time again that he wasn't under any surveillance whatsoever anymore.
"You heard," he noted by way of greeting, familiarity erasing concern about the appropriate way to address a man who could have him killed with a nod of the head, like in ancient times, when feudal law was about the only thing separating man from animal.
"Yes," Eeteuk sighed into the phone. "Any luck on getting us surveillance shots of the attacker?"
"Working on it. There's a pack of hungry wolves pouring over them and trying to pretend they'll catch the killer. It might take me a few hours until they clear out." Until the office was clear and Kyuhyun could break into their system without anyone noticing. Firewalls were a troublesome thing, even hacked, the damn things popped up to alert users.
"Do that. We need those photos to compare. See if it's the same guy."
Yesung arched an eyebrow. "You have any doubt?"
Eeteuk's smile, by comparison, was almost audible. "No. But I want to be sure before I go on a witch hunt."
"Right. Any luck on finding Eunhyuk's hacker?"
"None yet." And if Eeteuk's voice barely wavered before he hung up, Yesung read beyond it. Five years of knowing the man and twice that with his time and experience as a cop and it didn't take a genius to figure out that he was concerned.
Not a good sign, considering Yesung admired the other's resilience in the face of almost daily adversity in a dangerous place where crime and survival generally went hand in hand and where even among his own people there was a healthy dose of touch-and-go nutjobs.
Authors: Scorpions angelinaii, murasaki_plum, nemesis_cry
Characters/Pairings: All (kangteuk, shichul, kihae; potential kyuwook, eunkihae, shihanchul, yeshdong, yewook, minry)
Rating: PG-13 to R
Genre: AU, organized crime, postcyberpunk
Summary: In a world where money and crime go hand and hand, survival is not determined by the fittest, but the ones who will fight to live.
Warnings: violence, swearing, sexual situations
Introduction and Chapter 1 | Chapters 2 & 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5 | Chapter 6 | Chapter 7 | Chapter 8 | Chapter 9 | Chapter 10 | Chapter 11 | Chapter 12 | Chapter 13
Banner by angelinaii
Inhumane, that was the one word that kept coming back from police officers, witnesses and bystanders alike. What murder, Yesung wanted to know, would've qualified as humane? One ordered by top brass judges? Even those were painful and cruel, no matter what the press were told. Perhaps they were deserved. That was the other excuse the press liked to offer. This didn't meet their standards, not by far.
"Twenty years old, daughter of a bank owner," an officer read, rattling off her name and address like it would do any good now. "Manager said she came in with a man, took her usual room and asked to have all calls held."
Yesung frowned, snapping plastic gloves over his hands and rubber slippers over his shoes. In the Bottoms, they were lucky if police didn't contaminate the crime scene in the first few minutes of the investigation. Here, different rules applied. All the more so if the person or persons involved were well connected.
"You said usual room," Yesung noted, assessing the scene without nearing the body just yet. "She came here a lot?"
The officer nodded slowly. "Yeah, few times a week. It's a pocket-money suite." Which was another way of saying it was typical of kids her age to tempt fate until they couldn't anymore and then their parents sued the state, pushed another edict by another don and settled down in their grief with monuments and tombstones to rival a pope's.
But decadent spending of a rich girl or not, the room was intact. No lamps thrown over, no chairs upside down. No wild party in sight. No struggle. Even the bedding was carefully thrown aside, as if this had been a seduction and not a murder. The only blood was on the pillow and sheets around the body, the carpet around the bed clear of all footprints. Her clothes lay in a pile, discarded carelessly over the back of a chair. All but the panties. Yesung wondered if she had undressed herself or been undressed. Had it been slow and then shockingly rough or had she been one of those perfect, glacial beauties, desperate for the first man willing enough to drag her from her pedestal?
Either way, this was the lowest of the low to be drug down to and Yesung couldn't make himself attribute any guilt to girl. No one wanted to die and least of all like this, with her mouth open her legs spread out and and her--
Another officer tapped his shoulder with a put upon sigh. "Sir, the press are asking if this is connected to the Bottoms killings. What should we tell them?"
"Are you kidding me? No comment." Not until they knew more, not even then. "Keep them behind the yellow tape and keep those cameras away from the employees. If they spice up their story even more, we won't be able to tell what's fact and what's fiction."
The decision wasn't his to make but if it got the other cops to give him space, Yesung figured it was just as well. He hadn't been to the other crime scenes, but he had read the reports and he'd heard Eeteuk's account of the prostitute after his visit to the morgue. All of it was enough to connect that murder and this one, but he wasn't going to make that known to his bosses before he warned the gang. One might have paid his salary, but the other had the potential to slice him open with the slightest flick of Henry's wrist. Not only that, but somewhere along the karmic line, he was pretty sure he owed them.
When problems like these showed up, the line between cop and informant tended to blur uncomfortably. Was it the right call to give them a tip or should he do his job instead and put his efforts into catching the perp the old fashioned way?
The old fashioned way blows, Heechul would have told him fondly, the annoying click of a lighter punctuating the words, and Yesung had to agree. Whatever manpower the Judoh police had, Eeteuk's gang had Kyuhyun, not to mention legions of loyal followers who'd sell out their own mothers if the leader asked them. No contest.
Yesung shook his head, returning his thoughts to the present and the tortured victim lying on the bed before him. Walking around the room in silence, his footsteps inevitably led him to her, just as every road would've led him to Rome. He clung to the ridiculous analogy as he forced his gaze down and to the red-tinged sheets.
"The victim's wrists were secured to the headboard," a forensic pathologist explained, for his benefit or her own, Yesung didn't care to ask. "The handcuffs might have been her own. The ankles were free and from the bruising it seems she kicked a lot."
Yesung swallowed thickly at the carnage. A crime like this, fibers, fluids were bound to be found. The thought brought him some comfort with the promise of justice.
"Was she gagged?" he found himself asking, righteous anger turning to bitter morbidity as he forgot his earlier cool-headed assessment.
The pathologist knelt down, turning vacant eyes to face him as she checked the girl's jaw. "No. But she wouldn't have been heard. There's blood on her front teeth. The attacker must've covered her mouth with his hand."
Another nod, his patience giving way to anxiety and the urge to drown the scene in a few beers after hours. "What else?"
"She wasn't raped," the pathologist told him, sounding as disinterested as if discussing pure hypothesis. "Simply bound and operated on. She must have struggled because most of these cuts are inexact." Whoever attacked her, she meant, would have known how to use a scalpel.
Just not an anesthetic.
Yesung licked dry lips and shoved past officers taking photographs of the scene, intent on not losing his lunch in front of colleagues. What the pathologist described as operation was, to him at least, a brutal child's game as he played with a helpless insect. Precision wasn't the word for it, no matter what the report said. Pain, on the other hand, was. Why else would he have opened her stomach and left her to feel every slash of his knife?
Outside in the dark, Yesung leaned his head against the side of a building and tried not to imagine the pain she must've felt, the utter horror. He also tried not to imagine the images that would circulate, the attack politics in the press the following day. It was only too easy to picture the headlines; 'Wealthy Judoh resident: murdered in her bed' would read the best of them, 'Crime of passion,' the worst. And then the character analysis. Who was the girl, how did she get involved in something so dangerous as to leave her dead? How could it be best explained as the victim's fault?
Bullshit, all of it, and no way to stop it from going to print.
Yesung looked up at the sky and reached for his phone out of instinct. He couldn't stop the presses, but he could do the next best thing while his colleagues butted heads over an investigation that would lead nowhere because of their inability to see the bigger picture. Over the neighboring building, something flashed silver for barely a second, effectively drawing his attention before the call went through.
A figure on the rooftop stood slowly before sprinting away.
Henry.
With anyone else, Yesung would've thought he might have dreamed it, but not this time; not with Henry. Slowly, diligently, he pushed his phone back into his pocket and looked over the crowd of reporters and curious, well meaning Judoh citizens. Not something you'd see in the Bottoms, where everyone knew to look the other way and trust Eeteuk's people to keep things working.
For a brief moment, he wondered if the killer was out there, watching from behind the throng amassed in front of the hotel, organs on ice somewhere in the trunk of his car.
Was he just a madman or did he like to savor every murder? Was it impulsive or did he plan and choose her out of a dozen targets? Did he prefer her hair or her lipstick? What was it that brought him out of the Bottoms and into civilization? The thrill of the chase? False confidence?
Nail stubs digging into his palm, Yesung put on new gloves and rubber slippers and walked back inside where he thought he could do some good.
***
Starting out in life as a Bottoms resident wouldn't have been easier for Yesung, so his mother and father made the not so unusual decision to move to the glittering city of Judoh and brave the taxes and controls that exiled the poor south of the barriers. How they managed in those days, Yesung never knew but always suspected might have been the work of the Heaven & Earth people, one way or another. Not that there would have been any shame in that. The school Yesung's mother worked at, the hospital that took his father in as nurse were all funded with mob money. One way or another, they would've been indebted to the gangs.
It wasn't until he joined the Academy that he realized just how far that debt extended.
Law enforcement in Judoh was a tool of the highest bidder, a fact which rapidly affected the training of new recruits. Most didn't question the ambiguous double standards that permeated interrogation techniques and criminal investigations alike. Why would they, when there was hardly an improvement on their paycheck if they bothered to delve any deeper than the surface?
Yesung toed the official line, following regulations and policy to the best of his abilities for the longest he could. It didn't take long for rifts to appear between him and the rest of the force.
Miss A, a minor whose real name they stopped using the moment her body was found half buried in the front lawn of a private girls' only school, should have changed old prejudices and class favoritism. A child was dead, damn it, and surely her parents deserved closure if not retribution. Yesung pushed ahead, struggling to uncover leads despite attempts from his colleagues to dissuade him.
It was his first big case and no one else seemed interested to take it. Not even his superiors who point blank threatened to have him reassigned if he even thought about questioning the H & E dons. No doubt they hoped he'd become scared if they threatened to suspend him, to take away his badge. Yesung dared them. He'd grown up thinking the uniform meant something and he was determined not to abandon that dream, still foolishly believing that the resistance he was met with was simply a sign of the old days, of an old mentality that would be relinquished, with time.
That same mentality pushed him to interrogate the parents of the dead girl and her professors, going as far as to request an audience with the Catholic priest who ran the school. The clergy were the only resistant faction, claiming first that the man in question was too busy, then that he had requested to be reassigned because he felt too strongly affected by what had occurred, but on the whole they were unhelpful. He used the preferred methods in his field: threats, bargaining, false assurance. None yielded any results.
Indirectly, however, they attracted unwelcome attention. A witness called his house and requested that they meet because he had valuable information to deliver. He refused to agree on a location in Judoh, citing the H & E as being involved and thus having reason to want him dead. The Bottoms was the natural solution. Unlike the city, it was also unguarded and devoid of camera surveillance in the most populated areas.
Yesung agreed and sought out to find the church--a holy, safe haven--where they were to meet. He found, quite literally a dump instead, and thanked his lucky stars that his parents had had the presence of spirit to move before he was born. Surely he wouldn't be in this position today if they had stayed.
And perhaps that might not have been such a bad thing, at the end of the day, considering that not being in this position might mean he wouldn't have walked straight into a not-so-carefully laid out trap. Naivety and misplaced trust landed him on devil's door, a revolver thrust into his back the moment he stepped out of the car.
"Right this way, Officer, if you please," a gruff voice requested, muzzle digging into his spine to settle any potential argument on the matter. "World like ours, you ask too many questions, you're liable to find yourself with a bullet in your back. Ain't that a shame?"
Yesung gritted his teeth and felt a fool for not taking backup in the most dangerous place he could've gone. "Because shooting someone in the back is very brave. Are you going to deliver clichés or kill me?"
A brief hesitation, the gun pressing into the back of his neck instead. "Here's how this is going to work: you're going to tell me who called you and I'm going to make it quick and painless. We got an understanding?"
So it hadn't been a set-up, he surmised, realizing instead that his phone line had been tapped--and no one had the resources and time to spend on something as trivial as that besides his own employers. There went his bonus. Pursing his lips, he tried to make light of the betrayal before the adrenaline pumping through his veins left him completely unfocused and useless.
"I'm gonna ask you again," his attacker spat. "Who the fuck rang you last night, huh? Might as well talk now, boy, you're only making it worse for yourself and I got all day to get it out of you."
Yesung pushed his hands into the hood, fingers slippery with sweat. "Sure, I'll tell you," he grinned, looking over his shoulder. "Santa."
The butt of a gun crashed into his cheek, sending him flying back into the car, hardly out of harm's way.
"Think you're gonna get cute with me, huh?" the man huffed and puffed, sounding strangely aggravated, almost as if he'd expected Yesung to lie back and take it--no doubt, he figured, other nosy cops had done it; no doubt it was common practice.
A boot landed in his gut, knocking both wind and blood from his mouth.
"You little bastard, you think you're gonna change the way the world works? Get over yourself, world don't need your help!" He kicked again, aiming for his balls but catching his thigh instead. Not that it hurt any less.
"Go to hell..." he managed to cry out weakly, surprised when the rain of blows promptly ended on command. Above him, the man wobbled on his feet briefly and then collapsed, gun hand limp and useless.
Behind him, a tall youth with a tazer in hand smirked. "I knew I shouldn't have let Heechul handle my props," he sighed, offering a hand. "But you won't arrest me, will you, Officer? Considering I did just save your life."
Yesung ignored the offered help, sitting back against the car and trying to catch his breath. "Who the hell are you?" he glowered, wishing his voice didn't shake quite so much from pain still radiating through his body.
The kid was unfazed, kneeling by him with wide eyes and a smile. "Sungmin. That over there's my boss." He pointed to their left where, in the shadow of the church, a man watched them with his hands folded over his chest. "Said you might need some help," he added, smiling brightly. "Does that hurt?"
Yesung ignored his question, turning his attention to the shadowy figure lingering a safe distance away. "Are you my informer?"
Advancing slowly, the man shook his head. "Sorry to disappoint. We found your friend's car a little way from here. I'm afraid he got to her before he got to you."
Her. Right. He vaguely recalled the voice having been a woman's, not that that was any exceptionally good reason to trust the word of a gang leader. "What's to convince me you didn't kill her yourself?"
Sungmin look affronted. "Don't be ridiculous. Eeteuk never lies."
"What reason would I have to kill a woman about to point the finger at some top brass, upstanding Judoh citizen who also happened to have murdered his underage girlfriend?"
Yesung narrowed his eyes. "You know an awful lot about what she was about to say. Sure you didn't have a nice friendly chat before you decided to play the Good Samaritan?"
Before him, Sungmin stood and moved away, tazer still in hand. His boss took his place.
"You seem like a smart guy. Don't you think that the only reason the H & E would interfere with your investigation would be that one of their own was involved?" Shaking his head to brush dyed light brown hair from his eyes, the man continued: "Considering they own the police and you only used police means, it would've been easy enough to kill two birds with one stone simply by following you to the single witness you had..." His lips curved into a smile. "Unless, of course, she wasn't the only witness, which would explain why they were so gung-ho to get you to tell them her name. So they could silence all other potential whistle-blowers. Am I right so far?"
Yesung wiped blood from his lips, one hand pressing against his ribs to test the pain. Nothing seemed broken, but he'd have to stop by the hospital to make sure. If he even made it out of the Bottoms alive.
"On the money," he nodded, stalling for time. "Would have joined the force if I were you."
The man chuckled. "But you have and you're not me. A most fortunate coincidence because I happen to have an offer for you, Officer."
"Of course you do," Yesung answered grimly, wondering what would happen if he refused.
"No need to sound so dejected. I can get you the witnesses you need to help with your investigation. And I can keep them alive until you find a prosecutor to take the case."
He bristled at the possibility, the space of half an hour barely enough to teach him caution. "How?"
"Let me worry about that. You just keep yourself alive and breathing..."
"Yesung. My name is Yesung."
The man grinned, offering his hand. "I'm Eeteuk. So, we have a deal?"
He glared, but there was no ignoring the lure of that promise. Miss A avenged, justice served and whatever bastard had payed to have him shot today put behind bars where evil belonged. Grudgingly, he seized Eeteuk's hand in his and allowed himself to be dragged back up to his feet. What an unusual and unlikely partnership, he thought, they would be lucky if it lasted the month.
***
Five years on and Yesung was still on the force, still in Eeteuk's pocket and still determined to put the sons of bitches who broke the law behind bars. Regardless of social standing and connections, he just did his job. With a little help from his own, well connected friends. He always took the calls they inevitably left on his cellphone, Kyuhyun's expertize having verified time and time again that he wasn't under any surveillance whatsoever anymore.
"You heard," he noted by way of greeting, familiarity erasing concern about the appropriate way to address a man who could have him killed with a nod of the head, like in ancient times, when feudal law was about the only thing separating man from animal.
"Yes," Eeteuk sighed into the phone. "Any luck on getting us surveillance shots of the attacker?"
"Working on it. There's a pack of hungry wolves pouring over them and trying to pretend they'll catch the killer. It might take me a few hours until they clear out." Until the office was clear and Kyuhyun could break into their system without anyone noticing. Firewalls were a troublesome thing, even hacked, the damn things popped up to alert users.
"Do that. We need those photos to compare. See if it's the same guy."
Yesung arched an eyebrow. "You have any doubt?"
Eeteuk's smile, by comparison, was almost audible. "No. But I want to be sure before I go on a witch hunt."
"Right. Any luck on finding Eunhyuk's hacker?"
"None yet." And if Eeteuk's voice barely wavered before he hung up, Yesung read beyond it. Five years of knowing the man and twice that with his time and experience as a cop and it didn't take a genius to figure out that he was concerned.
Not a good sign, considering Yesung admired the other's resilience in the face of almost daily adversity in a dangerous place where crime and survival generally went hand in hand and where even among his own people there was a healthy dose of touch-and-go nutjobs.