Chapter – 15
“You bastard. I told you to lay down some fog, and you set my age to forty?”
[…]
At those words, Chamkkae clamped his mouth shut, and an awkward silence followed.
Then suddenly, a huge burst of laughter exploded.
[Oh! Shit, how’d you figure that out? Kyahaha! I was trying to sell the realism—reaaalism. Who’d believe someone your age is a professor—wait… don’t tell me… that was the password content?]
“Yeah. The magpies were calling me a grandpa.”
[BAHAHAHAHA! AHAHAHA!]
“Hey, stop laughing and connect number 29. Connect me to 29!”
At Yushin’s irritated urging, Chamkkae responded with rapid mouse-clicking sounds.
[Man, this is hilarious. I’ll connect you right now, so teach me how you decrypted it too.]
“I’ll send you a text.”
[Okay. Connecting now.]
A short electronic tone rang out in the in-ear device in his opposite ear.
Chk. Chzzzt.
Then—thump, thump—Cheonga’s rapid heartbeat followed.
Moving as quietly as possible so he could focus on the sound, Yushin pulled out his phone and began typing a message.
“Ignore the numbers and the words.
Those are combinations the two of them agreed on beforehand.”
“There’s no way to crack those right now.”
“Read the Morse code backwards.”
Chamkkae’s reply came immediately.
“Chamkkae: MIAQDSHIANYDNRNATENASDAWRNAUPERE what the hell is this??”
“Idiot. It’s French.”
“Chamkkae: Min Yushin a quarante ans, un grandpere?”
“Yeah. Shut up.”
For a moment, there was no reply from Chamkkae.
He was probably running it through a translator.
Sure enough, the next message was completely drowned in laughter.
“Chamkkae: LMAOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
Min Yushin, 40-year-old grandpa
LMAOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO”
“Chamkkae: Damn though, how did you figure this out?
There weren’t even any French extension symbols.”
“Working at the same company as idiots who can’t figure this out—my life is truly pathetic.”
No further messages came from Chamkkae.
On the other side of the screen, he was probably squinting lazily, flipping the middle finger while cursing. With extremely high probability.
I don’t even need to see it. Transparent bastard.
Yushin frowned slightly and sprawled back onto the sofa in the center of the lab. He closed his eyes and focused on the sounds flowing through his in-ear.
Between the rapid thudding of her heartbeat, Cheonga’s voice surfaced intermittently.
[…It’s… really… I’m nervous… something’s suspicious…!]
Each time her voice cut in, Yushin’s lips slowly curved upward into a faint smile.
“This is ridiculous. Seriously.”
***
Crack.
The sound of a bottle cap opening echoed softly through the quiet lab.
Cheonga tossed two vitamins into her mouth and downed the drink in one gulp.
“Ah.”
It had already been several days since she’d started sneaking into Yushin’s lab every dawn and draining his energy drinks.
No reason to refuse generosity when it’s offered.
Wiping her mouth with the back of her hand, she replayed her phone call with Yeonhee from the public phone booth the night before.
[Unni, just in case, I ran a full sweep of the Integrated Drug Management System. And I found something—one upstream supplier with treatment records at Boksan University Hospital!]
She said it wasn’t just Incheon—junkies from all over the country had received treatment at Boksan University Hospital.
[They were treated twice. Professor Yang Dongjun. And Professor Min Yushin.]
—Then at least one of them has a high chance of being a straw, right?
[Could be both.]
Yeonhee really was competent.
Not only that, but her investigative perspective was broad, and her approach to solving cases meshed perfectly with Cheonga’s.
Thanks to that, Cheonga had been able to narrow down two precise targets within Boksan University Hospital.
I really am lucky. I land right in the rooms of guys who stink this bad, just like that. Heh.
Thinking that, Cheonga slowly surveyed Min Yushin’s filthy lab once again.
“What exactly are you trying to hide that you trash the place like this every single day, mister?”
She tossed the empty energy drink bottle into the trash and headed toward Yang Dongjun’s lab to start her morning cleaning.
To be fair, Yang Dongjun wasn’t exactly neat either.
On the central table sat half-eaten cup noodles and pickled radish. A lab coat hung on the rack, discarded after being worn and removed. Several cups of cold, stale coffee cluttered the desk.
Even so, compared to Min Yushin’s lab, this place was paradise.
And here I am, thinking this is ‘great’.
Cheonga shook her head and rolled up her sleeves. She reached for one of the coffee cups on the desk—
And then stopped.
Her gaze lingered on Yang Dongjun’s desk for a long moment.
What caught her eye was a single sheet of paper, wrinkled with dried coffee stains. It was yesterday afternoon’s outpatient list.
“Uh…?”
Normally, she would’ve passed it by without a second thought.
Having a patient list on a desk wasn’t unusual.
But among the tiny print, one name seized her attention.
XX/XX 10:30 / 900213 / 9002132 / M / Byun Nahoon / cc. Dysphagia
Born February 13, 1990. Name: Byun Nahoon.
Diagnosis: Dysphagia.
Instantly, Cheonga remembered Byun Nahoon’s face—grimacing as he repeatedly swallowed dry saliva.
He was one of the droppers she’d chased back when she was still in narcotics.
“Wait—why the hell is this guy’s name here…?”
She only froze for a few seconds.
Then Cheonga flung the coffee cup aside and bolted out of the lab.
She sprinted down the hallway at full speed.
There was something she needed to confirm—immediately.
Her destination was the general waste collection area behind the hospital.
There was no time to hesitate over how filthy it was.
She pulled gloves from her back pocket, slipped them on, and began tearing through the mountain of trash bags, constantly checking her watch.
The time: 5:30 a.m.
Once the janitors’ morning shift started, this place was always completely empty—around 6:00 a.m. That was when the garbage trucks arrived and hauled everything away.
She had to find the trash bag from Yang Dongjun’s lab before then.
Time was not on her side.
Sweating heavily, she overturned and searched dozens of trash piles—
Then her eyes lit up.
“Found it!”
Dragging out a familiar-looking trash bag, likely from Yang Dongjun’s lab, she hauled it to the side, untied the knot, and began digging through it.
Inside was a massive amount of shredded paper.
She carefully examined each fragment, searching for pieces of Yang Dongjun’s patient records.
The paper had been shredded so finely that even finding complete names was difficult.
“Damn it. He really went to town with the shredder!”
She memorized fragments of text on long, vertical strips, mentally piecing them together with other scraps.
After a long while, she managed to reconstruct several names.
“An Iju. Choi… Eokgyu. Jo Areum….”
Every single one of them was a name she recognized from narcotics investigation records.
“…You bastards.”
Letting out a deep breath, Cheonga clenched the scraps in her hand.
“You were running the line from here?”
***
Ding. Ding.
Ding, ding, ding.
Min Yushin’s phone went berserk just as he entered the hospital’s underground parking lot. He glanced at the caller ID and answered.
Chamkkae’s voice burst from the Bluetooth speakers, half out of breath.
[Boss! Boss! Why aren’t you responding to comms?! This is urgent as hell!]
Keeping his eyes on the rearview mirror, Yushin turned the steering wheel calmly.
“Lower your voice. I’m parking. Bluetooth speaker.”
[This is an emergency!]
Chamkkae’s voice dropped, but the urgency made it sound like he was shouting anyway.
“What, you lose money on crypto?”
[Are you kidding me right now? The meerkat just identified the straw!]
BANG!
Startled, Yushin’s foot slipped off the brake. The car slammed into the wheel stopper with a heavy crash.
As the dull impact echoed through the parking lot, Yushin grabbed the back of his neck.
