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“Hwang Si-mok, I am kidnapping you,” Han Yeo-jin announced, standing firmly in front of his desk, where he could no longer pretend to ignore her presence.
Si-mok made what she categorized as his “why me, why now” face. In the few times she had seen him since his return to Seoul, Yeo-jin had renewed her study of his different subtle changes in expression, surprised to find several new ones in the mix. This one was standard Si-mok. Eyebrows lifted slightly, gaze direct but somehow mournful. Undeterred by this wordless resistance, Yeo-jin made her case.
“It is almost ten o’clock at night. I’m guessing you haven’t eaten. You haven’t made time to visit me in the past several weeks, so I have to keep seeing you here, and frankly your office depresses me.”
“The investigation has been very busy,” Si-mok said, with what might have passed for indignation in another person’s voice. There was no negating her judgment on his office, however. Piles of files and boxes and thick manila folders blanketed every available surface. The window was obscured by a whiteboard so covered in black and red writing that it was no longer fair to describe it as white.
“I’m taking you to a restaurant—an actual indoor restaurant, where we don’t have to pour water on the food—and you’re going to tell me what you’ve been up to. Not just the special investigation, but, you know, life. Stuff. What you do outside of work. All the gory details.”
“Fine.”
She handed him his coat. He gave his desk a last resigned glance before following her out into the hallway, where she shuddered violently, stuffing her hands deep into her pockets.
“Goodness! Why is it so cold?”
“The janitors turn the central heat off at eight.”
“Aigoo. It’s the dead of winter! How inhospitable. Another reason why you need to leave your office earlier.”
They took her car, which was after all more appropriate to an abduction. To his credit, Si-mok did his best to be a good conversationalist. He had clearly been practicing. The well only went so deep, however; the longer they drove, the less questions he asked, and the more his own answers tended towards the monosyllabic. By the time they reached the bridge he had gone almost completely silent. Sort of like driving a kid home from soccer practice. Yeo-jin gave him a break, gaze roaming the slowed traffic around them for anything to occupy her attention.
Surprisingly, she found something.
“That license plate looks familiar,” she said abruptly, pointing at an otherwise nondescript grey Kia.
“Oh. Really.”
“Detective Jang said…let me check with him.”
Si-mok kept his eyes on the car while Yeo-jin dialed. She put Detective Jang on speakerphone, switching lanes to stay on the Kia’s tail.
“I’m in the car with Hwang Si-mok. I’m sending you my location now. The suspect’s vehicle in that string of Mapo daylight robberies—the license plate ended in 0323, yes?”
“Yes, that’s the one. I’m actually driving close by. See if you can get him to stop, but if not I’ll be waiting on the other side of the bridge.”
“Aigoo, what luck. Do you mind?” she asked Si-mok, which he answered with a blank stare. Yeo-jin rolled the window down, put her lights on, and spoke into the microphone.
“0323, please pull over. 0323. Please pull to the side of the road.”
Surprisingly, to Si-mok at least, the driver complied. Yeo-jin followed suit, tongue between teeth. She leveled a finger at Si-mok before getting out of the car.
“Stay put, Mr. Prosecutor. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
Si-mok stayed put. Yeo-jin took several quick strides to the grey Kia, rapped on the driver’s-side door.
“Turn off the engine, please, sir. Step out of the car,” she said. The occupant, a sullen man in his mid-twenties, opened the door a tiny crack and then protested. “Sir, I just want to ask you a few questions.”
After much mumbling the man shoved the door open, climbed out and stood facing the car, one hand reluctantly raised. Yeo-jin closed the door after him, wary but still anticipating an easy arrest.
Si-mok, watching and frowning from a distance, realized what was going to happen only a fraction of a second before it did.
Without warning the man lashed out with his left fist, catching Yeo-jin in the pit of her stomach. She doubled over with a yelp, made a grab for his sleeve and caught him, but lost her grip as he sprinted away down the bridge. Still grimacing, she lurched forward into a run.
“Hey! Hey!”
Si-mok undid his seatbelt.
Fueled by pure fury, Yeo-jin caught up with the suspect in a respectably short distance and landed a flying kick to his back that sent him sprawling. He came up swinging. She dodged, fumbling for her handcuffs, and dealt him a second kick to the knee. Damn, he was persistent. The man’s next punch was a lucky one. He grazed the side of her face with the first, followed up with a blow that hit her square in the nose, with all of his weight behind it. Yeo-jin staggered, blinded by pain. Her hands jerked inadvertently upward to shield her face. She heard rather than saw Si-mok running towards them, and then the third blow knocked her off balance. Reeling backwards, she hit something hard, and fell over the railing towards the Han.
“Stop!” Si-mok was shouting.
She seemed to fall forever, even though the distance was not particularly long. By the time she reached the surface of the water she had lost all sense of direction.
Si-mok slowed, moving past her after the suspect, but face turned towards the river, suddenly indecisive.
Yeo-jin, gasping, thrashed for a moment and then felt the river pulling her down, crushing her in its grip.
Si-mok skidded to a halt and vaulted—literally vaulted—over the railing and into the water with a tremendous crash. If she hadn’t been actively drowning Yeo-jin would have been furious that this moment hadn’t been memorialized in a video, and prayed fervently for CCTV footage.
“Han-hyeongsanim!”
There was a catch in his voice from the freezing cold. Yeo-jin batted at the water around her, managed to resurface. She heard him splashing noisily towards her, hindered by his shoes and his suit and his body’s natural reaction to what felt like subzero temperatures, and choked up the water in her mouth so she could shout.
“It’s okay! I’m fine! Why did you jump?”
No answer. More water crashing. She felt a hand descend upon her shoulder, digging for a hold on her saturated clothing, and knocked his arm away before he inadvertently pushed her down.
“Don’t grab me, just keep swimming—I think we can get out over there. Oh, aish—”
It was a few hundred meters at least. She struck out with artless but strong strokes, glancing back occasionally to make sure he was following. The cold made her teeth chatter. She tasted blood. It was strange to be surrounded by so much darkness, the water and the black distant buildings and the sky, and the lights on the bridge only a slow, unreachable blur overhead.
“Are you okay? Yes? Come on. Just keep swimming.”
On the riverbank Si-mok coughed up a truly astonishing amount of water. For some reason Yeo-jin had imagined he would be a better swimmer, but he was clearly exhausted, even stunned: stretched out on his stomach on the ground, palms pressed into the concrete. His face was pale beneath his shock of sopping dark hair.
He had aspirated half of the Han, apparently.
“You all right?” Yeo-jin asked, when the sputtering continued past what she would consider a healthy amount of time. Si-mok managed a grunt, took a last few short, sharp, hungry breaths, then rolled over onto his back and lay there panting, his eyes drifting inexorably closed. Yeo-jin leaned forward to rest a moment.
“Aigoo, you scared me. I thought I was going to have to resuscitate you.”
“Why?”
“What?”
“I was never unconscious.”
Si-mok was slurring his words a little. His eyes were still closed.
“Thank you for jumping in,” said Yeo-jin. She saw the corner of his mouth twitch, but his hand was currently covering the rest of his face, so she had too little evidence to decide what this meant. “I mean, you nearly killed us both. But still. It was very…thoughtful?”
The hand went down. Si-mok blinked up at her with his baffled “what you just said makes no rational sense” expression, like an angry baby owlet or someone recently awoken from a deep sleep. She tried and failed to repress the impulse to snort.
“What are you going to do about the suspect,” he asked. Like that. Flatly. No inflection.
“Ugh, that prick. Detective Jang is waiting upriver. I’m going to let him take the win on this one. Aish, it’s cold.” She shivered and drew a deep breath, followed by a long, frosty exhalation. “Come on. Forget a nice restaurant; you and I need dry clothes and some soju.”
“The water already burns like soju.”
“Come on. Up. Up. Before we both freeze to death.”
Yeo-jin put her arm out, snapped her fingers twice when he didn’t take the hint. Si-mok looked at her proffered hand for a few seconds, deciding what it was for and whether or not to take it. Finally he did. Yeo-jin levered him up onto his feet. She held on for a while longer than was strictly necessary, but to her surprise he didn’t protest.
“Can we at least get some soup with it.” Another flat not-question. Yeo-jin heaved a dramatic sigh.
“Sure, yes. Of course.”
“Good. Because so far I don’t enjoy being kidnapped.”
“Aigoo! The nerve! This ridiculous man.”
When he let go and stepped forward she caught a flash of his face in profile, mouth again quirking upwards on one side. This time it was definitely a smile.
-----
Detective Jang caught the suspect at the far end of the bridge, without any further dramatics or unexpected diving practice. A relieved Yeo-jin snagged herself and Si-mok a ride to her car, called her colleagues to let them know she was alive and taking the rest of the night off, and drove to Si-mok’s apartment, which was closer than her own. She had a hot shower that was possibly better than sex and an hour later found herself sitting at yes, a crummy pojangmacha, across from a similarly recovered Si-mok. She was wearing one of his turtlenecks over the police academy tracksuit she had found crumpled at the bottom of her gym bag, and eating like it was her last meal on earth.
“For once I’m glad the ramen is so salty,” she said, slightly muffled, through a mouthful of noodles. “Anything to get rid of the taste of that water.”
Si-mok was once again nonverbal and granite-faced. He ate mechanically, paying little attention to the soju, which Yeo-jin had already taken several unabashed shots of as soon as the bottle arrived.
“Did you kill your phone?” she asked him.
“No.”
“Can you feel all your fingers and toes yet?”
“No. Not quite.”
“You’re mad about something, aren’t you?”
Si-mok lowered his chopsticks and exhaled, looking up and away. “Not mad. Just thinking.”
“About why you jumped in the river after me?”
“Yes. It wasn’t very smart.”
“That’s what made it so amazing. You never do anything that’s not smart.”
“Then I fail to see how this was amazing,” Si-mok replied. “If it was a stupid thing to do.”
“Think about it. You probably knew right away that it wasn’t safe. So what made you do it?”
“You weren’t swimming very well.”
“True. In my defense, I got punched in the face several times.”
Si-mok didn’t find this as funny as she did, but received it with the quiet expressionlessness she had come to associate with acceptance. With no reply apparently forthcoming, Yeo-jin cleared her throat, touched the swelling bruise on her temple, and returned to her food.
“I was worried,” Si-mok said unexpectedly, sounding as if the admission surprised him as much as it did her. “I watched him hit you, and then I couldn’t see you in the water. I was worried about you.”
When she had recovered herself enough to do so, Yeo-jin inclined her head in a brief bow, which embarrassed Si-mok but was the only possible response to what he had just said. Then she hurried to bridge the gap in the conversation again, taking pains to be extra bright and cheerful.
“I think from now on we should make a list of every emotion you find yourself expressing. Here, give me a pen. I’m writing it on this napkin.” She made an experimental doodle at the top of the napkin, then began writing busily, finishing each entry with a flourish. “Let’s start with ‘amused.’ You smiled earlier. It was excellent. Also ‘mad.’ I’ve seen you very mad before. What else?”
“Hungry?” suggested Si-mok, so totally guileless that Yeo-jin felt bad for her initial reaction, which was to choke on her soju.
“I don’t know if that counts as an emotion. Never mind. I’m writing it down.”
“Sad,” Si-mok continued, which sobered her right up. “Confused. And worried, like I said.”
“‘Confused, worried.’ Got it. Hey, that’s six right there. Anything else? Any other happy ones?”
“Happy?” he repeated, as if this were a foreign concept.
“Yes, happy. I’m going to be devastated if we’ve only got one good emotion on here.”
His face did the thing again: his lower lip pushed up in a kind of pout, while his gaze traveled up to the tent ceiling, as if he were searching for inspiration.
“Grateful,” he said finally. Yeo-jin applauded briefly.
“I love it! Yes! What were you grateful for?”
Si-mok lapsed into a renewed silence, but this time he kept his eyes on her. Yeo-jin’s enthusiastic smile froze, then faded, as she realized what he was saying-but-not-saying. It returned in a new form, quieter, more profound.
“Me too,” she said simply, and clinked her glass against his. She wrote down “grateful,” allowed him to change the subject, and, when Hwang Si-mok wasn’t looking, folded up the napkin and slipped it into her pocket.
-----
To: Hwang Si-mok
From: Han Yeo-jin
Subject: THERE WAS CCTV AFTER ALL
<Attachment>
To: Hwang Si-mok
From: Han Yeo-jin
Subject: re: THERE WAS CCTV AFTER ALL
But I promise I won’t tell anyone. 😊
To: Han Yeo-jin
From: Hwang Si-mok
Subject: Tell anyone you want
I don’t see what the big deal is.
-----
Two weeks, one bad head cold, and a lot of ribbing from Detective Jang later, Han Yeo-jin emerged from a homicide trial to find she had three missed calls from Mr. Kim, no voicemails. She found a slightly less bustling corner outside the courtroom and called back, fingers pressed to her ear so she could hear.
“Mr. Kim? Is everything all right?”
“Detective Han!” Mr. Kim sounded slightly more frantic than usual. “Oh, I’m so glad you rang back. I suppose—you haven’t heard yet?”
“I was in a trial. Mr. Kim—”
Other people were talking rapidly in the background where he was, too. Yeo-jin thought she recognized Ms. Choi. Someone was laughing over her right shoulder, much too loud and cavalier for a courthouse. She wanted to find the offender and smack him.
“Mr. Kim, can you speak up?”
“Yes, yes, sorry. It’s Prosecutor Hwang, Han-hyeongsanim. He fainted at work this morning.”
Yeo-jin felt her blood turn to ice. His head, she thought. The stress. Aish.
“Is he –”
“Another clerk told me—right in the lobby of the Prosecutors’ Office, my word—and I thought you would be the best one—”
“Mr. Kim.” Yeo-jin had reverted to officer mode. She rapped out the clerk’s name like a command. “Is he okay? Where is he now?”
Mr. Kim gave the name of the hospital. Yeo-jin jogged to her car, put her siren on, and missed more than one red light on the way there.
In twenty minutes flat, and for the second time in as many weeks, she found herself looking down at Si-mok while he, exhausted, irritated with himself, studiously avoided her gaze. She was relieved to find him conscious, though the IV in his arm was an uncomfortable flashback to the hours after Eun-soo’s death.
“Okay,” Yeo-jin said, arms crossed. “My turn to be worried.”
“There’s no need.”
“Was it your head? The pain came back?”
“No.”
“Really? Are you lying?”
“Yes, really. And no.”
“Then what?”
Si-mok appeared disinclined to tell her. He also knew that she wasn’t going to let it drop. “Pneumonia,” he said finally, clinically, as though talking about someone else. “And an infection.”
“Pneumon—”
Yeo-jin sat down on the edge of the gurney, not fully conscious that she was doing it. Si-mok made a face.
"Aigoo. You did swallow a lot of water.”
“Yes.”
“Pneumonia is serious. Are you in any pain?”
“It hurts here,” he said, indicating the center of his chest. Yeo-jin disguised a ridiculous sudden impulse to tears by reaching out to touch his forehead.
“And you’re burning up!” she said, scandalized. “Hwang Si-mok. If you kill yourself, or become an invalid and get sent back to Namhae, I’m never going to forgive you.”
“Why not?”
It was Yeo-jin’s turn to make a cartoon expression of disapproval. Si-mok settled back against the pillow, looking totally spent.
“I don’t want this to sideline the investigation,” he murmured. “But for the moment, I’m also incapable of getting out of bed, so…”
“You need to rest. I can help you. I’m very good at special investigations.”
“I don’t know if that will be possible.”
“Come on. I know you need someone to keep an eye on Mr. Seo.”
“Two eyes. We’ll see.”
“Well, then, what can I do?” Yeo-jin asked, insistent.
“Don’t fall into any more rivers.”
She punched him. It was the first time she’d heard him make a joke.
“Very funny. I’ll do my best, now that I know you’ll jump in after me.”
“Yes,” said Hwang Si-mok.
-----
To: Han Yeo-jin
From: Hwang Si-mok
Subject: Out of the hospital
<Attachment>
To: Hwang Si-mok
From: Han Yeo-jin
Subject: re: Out of the hospital
Wow, a selfie! You look much better. Although remember, you’re typically supposed to smile.
To: Han Yeo-jin
From: Hwang Si-mok
Subject: re: Out of the hospital
Yes. I remember.
Why did you send flowers to my apartment?
Why did Mr. Kim and Ms. Choi send flowers to my apartment also?
To: Hwang Si-mok
From: Han Yeo-jin
Subject: re: Out of the hospital
Because you’re a hero! :D
No, seriously. Because that’s what friends do. Sort of like jumping into the Han, only less suicidal.
To: Han Yeo-jin
From: Hwang Si-mok
Subject: Thank you for the flowers
Okay.
-----
He might never admit it to Detective Han, but Hwang Si-mok kept a duplicate list of emotions, though on lined notebook paper instead of a napkin. At home, in his pajamas, surrounded by tulips and gerberas, he thought for a while, underlined “grateful” twice, and smiled at the mirror.