"The places where water comes together with other water. Those places stand out in my mind like holy places."
― Raymond Carver, Where Water Comes Together with Other Water: Poems
--
The newspaper couldn't release the information. Or, they told Jooheon what they knew, which amounted to basically nothing.
"So what's our next step?" Hyunwoo asked with a frown. It had been three hours since they'd talked to Hendy and questioned the ad. He was frustrated by the fact that three whole hours had passed without making any real progress.
Jooheon looked equally frustrated. He'd slammed the phone several times in the past few hours while talking to person after person who was just as unhelpful as all the rest. "Let's assume, for a second, that it's real," he proposed. "What would our best course of action be to locate the kids?"
"Call the number," Hyunwoo said, and Jooheon nodded. He turned to look down at the newspaper ad, which was spread across his desk.
"Can't use this phone, though," he said, giving his desk phone a glare. "I don't want to risk them running the number."
"We can use my cell phone?" Hyunwoo suggested, and Jooheon started to nod before shaking his head.
"We can use it, but not here. They might be able to triangulate our position. If they ping your phone, we don't want the location to show as the police station." He got up abruptly, swinging his jacket off the back of the chair and slipping his arms in. "C'mon, let's drive around for a bit and park in a sketchy neighborhood."
"Thought you'd never ask."
--
Hyunwoo looked to Jooheon, who nodded, and Hyunwoo dialed the number.
"Hello, this is the missing child information line," recited a male of indeterminate age.
"Hi," Hyunwoo said instinctively because it was rude not to greet someone. Jooheon pantomimed slapping his forehead, and Hyunwoo threw a finger up to his lips before clearing his throat. "I, uh, saw your ad in the paper."
"Uh huh," the man said, not sounding particularly interested. Certainly not as interested as someone would be if they were actually looking for missing children. "And?"
"And, I..." Hyunwoo blanked for a moment. Of course they weren't going to ask him directly if he wanted to purchase an illicit service. "I heard about your service from a friend," he continued, shrugging at Jooheon since it was the best excuse he could come up with.
"What friend?" the voice asked, and Hyunwoo looked at Jooheon with wide eyes.
Jooheon waved his hands hurriedly as though to get Hyunwoo to hang up, but Hyunwoo just cleared his throat once more. "Hendy."
Jooheon looked up at the roof of the car as though considering whether that had been a good call, and after a moment, he shrugged.
"All right," the voice replied after a moment, and Hyunwoo had to pull the phone away from his mouth so he could exhale. "Which one did you want?"
The words were phrased so curtly, so carelessly. Hyunwoo pictured in his mind the small pictures of the boys in the newspaper. Fake front or not, he'd kept the clipping with him because it was all he had to document the boys' existence.
But the question was more painful than just that. He hadn't thought about it too much before, but he could really only name one boy. It would look suspicious if he asked for both, wouldn't it? He wasn't sure, but he couldn't afford to get caught, not until he'd found the boys.
Which meant he had to choose.
"The one in the top left of the ad," he said after a moment, referencing Minhyuk. No names had been printed, so that was all the information he could really give without raising suspicion. His heart sank after his mouth released the words though because he felt like he was abandoning Hyungwon, but he'd made the hard decision. Minhyuk was older; he might be able to give Hyunwoo more information that could help them suspend the entire operation.
He'd gone into this chasing two boys, but they weren't the only kids being trafficked.
"Fine, and when?" the man asked impatiently.
"When is he available?" Hyunwoo asked after a moment. He'd never ordered a kid before, he had no idea what the hell to ask or what the procedure was. He'd never even thought the phrase "ordered a kid" would pass through his mind.
"Our regular openings are 12PM, 3PM, 6PM, 9PM, and midnight," he said. "The 9 and 12 are open."
Hyunwoo glanced at the clock. It was a little after four, which meant someone had already booked out the 6:00 opening. Which meant someone was going to rape Minhyuk in two hours.
And there was nothing he could do about it.
"Can I book them both?" Hyunwoo asked abruptly, screwing his eyes shut as though that would make his request less suspicious.
There was a surprised silence before the man on the other end of the line said, "That's fine, but you have to be gone by 2AM. And there's an additional fee if you're booking consecutive slots."
"How much is a slot?"
"Hundred bucks."
Hyunwoo almost coughed.
One hundred dollars...
He made that in around five hours of work.
And that was all that was needed to buy the darkest sin.
"And what's the additional fee?" he forced himself to ask. He felt dizzy. He felt sick. He wanted to throw up. He wanted to drop the phone under his foot and smash it into a thousand bits. But if he didn't finish the call, someone else would book Minhyuk for 9 and 12, and they would hurt him. Just like someone was going to do in two hours.
"Fifty. So, your total will be 250. Cash only."
"Fine," Hyunwoo said. "Where do I show up?"
"I'll send you the details later," he said before the line went dead.
Hyunwoo stared at the phone for a moment before letting it fall from his grasp. It hit the center console, bounced once, and slipped into the gap beside his seat. "Fuck," he mumbled. His eyes burned. He hadn't cried in...he didn't know how long. He'd never been a crier. People around him had cried, and he'd provided a warm shoulder to lean on, but he'd never been the one to cry. And yet somehow he couldn't stop the tears.
"You did good," Jooheon assured him, but Hyunwoo shook his head. The tears were starting to blur his vision, and he rubbed at his eyes with the bases of his palms.
"Good would have been calling before someone already bought the earlier slots," Hyunwoo said, hating how wobbly his voice sounded. But this wasn't sitting okay with him. Maybe it was because he wasn't a seasoned cop, but he didn't care what that made him. The violation of children would never be okay with him. "Good would have been knowing they'd gone missing earlier. Good would have been preventing them from being taken in the first place."
"Hyunwoo-"
Hyunwoo batted away Jooheon's hand, turning to glare at him even as he knew his anger wasn't justified. Not at Jooheon at least. "Those other officers- they didn't notice anything. These kids have been missing for weeks, Jooheon. Being sold five times a day. That's-" His brain ventured to calculate the horrible statistic. "Two weeks, that's fourteen days, five times a day, that's...that's seventy times." He choked on the last word. "They may have been sold as much as seventy times each, Jooheon. That's- that's-"
Hyunwoo scrambled with the car door handle, fumbling with the lock and at last managing to throw the door open. "I'm going to be sick," he muttered before stepping out of the car and bending over, placing his hands on his knees and taking big breaths.
He distantly heard a car door shutting and footsteps as Jooheon hurried around to his side. "Are you okay?" he asked in a low voice.
"No I'm not fucking okay, none of this is fucking okay," Hyunwoo said.
"I know," Jooheon whispered. "It's not."
"Someone is going to violate Minhyuk in two hours," Hyunwoo said. It was easier to say 'violate' than 'rape,' but he meant the same thing.
"I know," Jooheon said, and although Hyunwoo wasn't looking over at him, he thought he heard unsteadiness in Jooheon's tone that mirrored his own.
"And Hyungwon-" The tears came without abandon then. He was the one who had made the call. He'd made the decision he'd thought would best help them save the kids. But all that meant was that he'd chosen to let Hyungwon be violated three times tonight in addition to any earlier instances.
"Maybe no one booked his slots," Jooheon suggested quietly, but it was phrased in a hopeful tone rather than a realistic one.
"Why can't you call up and-"
"I can't," Jooheon said, clearly having already considered the thought earlier. "They'll know all the regular cops. You're new, so you're the only one of us that can pull this off."
"But-"
"Did you ever see The Imitation Game?" Jooheon asked suddenly, and Hyunwoo looked up, confused, his face still wet.
"What?"
"The Imitation Game. It's a movie about Alan Turing and the Enigma machine."
"Now is not the time to talk about fucking movie recommendations-"
"There's a point in the movie where Turing cracks the code," Jooheon interrupted. His eyes were on Hyunwoo's, and they bored into him intently. So, not a movie recommendation. "And he decodes a message that says the enemy will launch their next attack on a certain location. So of course Turing wants to warn those troops so they can be safe." Jooheon paused now that he had Hyunwoo's attention. "But the problem was that they learned of a bigger attack happening at a later date, and if they prevented the first, smaller attack, then the Germans would know that the code had been broken, and they would change the code and plan."
"So?" Hyunwoo asked, even though he thought he already understood Jooheon's point.
"So, he had to make the tough decision to let the smaller group of men die in order to save the larger group," Jooheon said. "Of course he was upset. But pragmatically, it was the better decision."
"So you're telling me that I'm supposed to be okay with sacrificing Hyungwon tonight and Minhyuk at 6:00 in order to save all the kids?" Hyunwoo asked, biting down angrily.
"I'm not saying that it's supposed to somehow be okay. But it's the only choice we can make," Jooheon said, his eyes old and sad. "I'm sorry, Hyunwoo. But if we can do this right, then we're not just saving Hyungwon and Minhyuk, we're saving all those kids, and all the kids who would have come after them." At least until Big Al set up his operation elsewhere, but neither of them wanted to point that out.
Hyunwoo saw Jooheon's point, but he was angry nonetheless. The other kids were just pictures in a newspaper to him. Which sounded horrible, but...Hyungwon and Minhyuk were living, breathing entities. He knew in his mind that each of those other kids had people who loved and missed them, but he had only started down this rabbit hole because of two missing boys.
And now he wasn't allowed to protect the one thing he'd sought to.
Jooheon disappeared for a minute before reappearing with Hyunwoo's cell phone in his palm. "Here," he said quietly, and there was pain in his voice that told Hyunwoo that Jooheon was no less invested in the boys' well-being than he was. "You're going to need this for when he sends the details."
Hyunwoo took the phone without offering any words, and Jooheon went around and got in the car on the driver's side.
Hyunwoo waited another minute before slipping into the passenger seat, and they drove back toward the station in silence.
--
Six o'clock passed with Hyunwoo throwing up in the men's bathroom of a fast food restaurant. Jooheon wouldn't let him return to the station in case his phone was pinged, so he'd been hanging out in a nearby McDonald's trying to look inconspicuous for the past hour and change.
He called Jooheon every fifteen minutes or so for any updates, which meant he got to hear Jooheon swearing every few seconds, accompanied by the angry clicking of keyboard keys. Had he been in the physical station, he would have seen Jooheon typing, deleting and retyping the same words after they were misspelled because his hands were shaking so badly.
Hyunwoo figured that most everyone else had to have gone home since the workday had already ended, but Hyunwoo and Jooheon's work wasn't over yet and wouldn't be for some time.
"Who else is in on this operation?" Hyunwoo asked after the keyboard had silenced.
"A few cops I trust," Jooheon said after a moment.
"You think there's a mole?"
"I'm not saying that," Jooheon said, but he paused. "I'm just saying that I wouldn't be surprised if there's at least one person planted in the station by some unknown third party for information. But I pulled a few guys from homicide and narcotics."
"And they'll be there tonight?"
He felt rather than saw Jooheon's nod. Even if he'd been at his desk in the station, he probably would only be talking to Jooheon through the cubicle wall rather than facing him directly. He was still a little angry at Jooheon for allowing him to make the hard call, but he was angry at himself too because he knew that Jooheon was right, even if he didn't want to admit it. "We'll be covering you. If you see an opportunity for us to move in – and that's after you've verified the location and that there's no immediate danger to the kids – then we'll bust the operation. But we can't risk moving in too soon if the kids could be injured or if they're being held in separate unknown locations."
"I know, I know," Hyunwoo said even though the information was useful. He just needed somebody to be angry at, someone within his reach, and he knew that it was unfair of him to take it out on Jooheon but he did so anyway.
"Hyunwoo..."
"What?" His voice came out sharper than intended, and he sensed Jooheon tense.
"I just...think you're in too deep with this case," Jooheon said in a low voice. "Maybe you should-"
"Should what?" Hyunwoo asked. "Let someone else take over? After they failed to notice two kids who had been missing for weeks?"
"I'm not saying that, I know you need to be involved with the case, but maybe you should talk to-"
"I'm fine," Hyunwoo said. They both knew it was a lie, of course; Hyunwoo had never before had an angry temperament, but Jooheon was right. He'd gotten too close to the case, and he was starting to absorb its darkness. He felt shaky and unsure of himself. If they didn't resolve everything perfectly, he didn't know what he'd do.
"Okay," Jooheon agreed readily, kinder than Hyunwoo deserved given his attitude today. "I just wanted to let you know that we have a really great psychologist on staff – his name is Hoseok, and you could talk to him about how you feel and about the case." A small pause. "And Hyunwoo, there's no shame in that. I've gotten too close to cases before too, and talking with Hoseok really helped. He made me realize that at the end of the day, I'm only human too. And I know...I know there's this misconception that the more you hurt about something, the more of a difference you're making, but that's just not true," Jooheon said. "You can help with a case but not let it consume you."
Hyunwoo was quiet for longer this time before he said, "I'm fine."
"You're not fine, buddy," Jooheon said back quietly. "And no one's asking you to be. But I want you to be okay, and I think talking to Hoseok would help."
"I'll think about it," Hyunwoo finally muttered, realizing that if he didn't agree with Jooheon at some point, he'd never hear the end of it. He didn't want to talk to a psychologist because it seemed ridiculous in his mind, the idea that he could somehow consider himself to be hurting when he knew there were children being raped.
As though Jooheon picked up on his silence, he added, "Pain isn't a competition, Hyunwoo. Pain is relative, not a maximum function. The person who's hurting the most doesn't get to be the only one hurting. Just remember that."
There was a soft hiss from Jooheon's chair as though he'd stood up, and then the call ended.
--
"Ready?"
Hyunwoo did a quick mental inventory. He felt like throwing up, and he was shaking; he wasn't sure if it was fear, anxiety, or adrenaline. Maybe a mix of the three.
"Ready."
Jooheon gave a tight smile, having showed up at the McDonald's after finishing up some desk work. They hadn't talked in the past hour and a half, but when Hyunwoo's phone had dinged with a text message containing only an address from an unknown sender, they'd kicked things into gear.
"Now, once you pull up, they'll probably-"
"Move me to a secondary location, I know," Hyunwoo interrupted, his foot tapping at a quick pace. Maybe the shakiness was due to adrenaline; he felt all of a sudden like he couldn't possibly wait a moment longer.
"We'll keep up," Jooheon promised. "You won't see us if we're doing our job well, but trust that we'll be backing you up. Once you're in position, call me to let me know if our guys are good to move in."
"And if the cell reception is blocked? Or if they take my phone?"
"If you don't get word to us, then we'll hold our position until we hear from you." Jooheon paused, skimming his thumb over his knuckles. "I know you're anxious to get these kids out as soon as possible, but I'm not willing to compromise their lives to do it. I need to know first and foremost that we're clear to move in."
"Got it," Hyunwoo said, grabbing his keys off his desk.
"Hyunwoo?"
"What?" Hyunwoo asked, looking up.
Jooheon's faced rotated through a few complex emotions before he settled on a grimace, the closest he could get to a smile. "Good luck."
Hyunwoo just nodded, not really knowing what to say and still not in a mood to talk. He needed to go, he needed to get there, to find the boys. Every second he lingered in the station was an additional second the boys were being held captive. "You too," he finally said before heading out to the parking lot. As instructed, he pulled out from the lot and drove around for ten minutes in random patterns to make sure he wasn't being tailed, then he set his GPS for the location on his phone.
Twenty minutes later, he pulled into a parking lot on the seedy side of the second district, and as per the text, he rolled down the window and waited.
A few minutes later, a black truck pulled in next to him, and the passenger window of the car rolled down. "Step out of your car and put your hands behind your head," a man instructed, and Hyunwoo swallowed but turned off the engine and did as asked.
He stood in the gap between the two cars and put his hands behind his head, getting the odd feeling that he was about to be arrested. But a second later, he heard a car door slam, and then a pair of hands began patting down his leg.
"Relax," the man snapped.
Hyunwoo had instinctively startled, but he exhaled and held still while he was patted down.
"Turn."
He did so and found himself face-to-face with a wiry but tall man with a shaven head and sunglasses. Not Big Al, clearly, but maybe someone high up in his organization.
"Clear," he called out after a moment to his partner. He stepped back as another man emerged from the vehicle.
"Cash payments only," he said, holding out his hand palm-up.
Not the man he'd heard over the phone, either. Most likely they had one to two people running the phone, and one or two teams like this to collect their payment.
Hyunwoo pulled out two hundreds and a fifty from his pocket and set them in the outstretched hand. Jooheon had given him a wallet for the operation preloaded with a fake driver's license and fake credit card, but he didn't want to expose his false identity to any further scrutiny than necessary. Besides, they'd insisted on cash and the bills were marked, which would hopefully lead to the rest of the operation's finances.
The man grunted and nodded to the taller guy who had patted Hyunwoo down. "Let's go."
"Get in the car," the taller man said, opening the back door to their car, and Hyunwoo swallowed before getting in. He'd known that he'd be moved to a second destination, but it still made him nervous. With his car, he at least had some autonomy, some control. Now that illusion was gone.
The front of the car was cut off from the back in a similar manner to taxi cabs with a small window that was currently closed. The back windows surrounding Hyunwoo were blacked out so he couldn't see anything outside and very little of the interior of the car.
He'd never felt more helpless. All he could do was pray that Jooheon hadn't lied about having his back.
It was another fifteen or twenty minutes before the car came to a stop, and a minute after stopping that his car door was opened.
"Out."
Hyunwoo stepped out, feeling a little nauseous from the movement of the car without the vision of movement to go along with it. He stepped out to find himself in an unfamiliar area of the Tampa suburbs. A quick glance led him to believe that they'd pulled into the alley behind a one-story motel of some sort, but he didn't recognize the location.
"That's Gu," the shorter of the two men said, pointing to a man huddled against the wall of the back alley and squatting on a stack of newspapers. By all accounts, he appeared to be homeless, but Hyunwoo had a feeling that was just as much of an act as their newspaper ad had been. "He'll get you set up. We'll pick you up when your time runs out."
Hyunwoo nodded, and they hopped back in the truck before taking off. Then it was just Hyunwoo and Gu in the alley.
He approached cautiously, not quite sure what to expect, but when the older man grinned at him with a mouthful of misaligned teeth, he grimaced.
"You've come to fuck a kid, ye?" Gu asked cheerily, and Hyunwoo's stomach dropped. A small nod was all he could manage, and Gu cackled to himself. Maybe he really was homeless, but he was in on the take.
"Which one?" Gu asked. Hyunwoo almost answered "Minhyuk" instinctively, which would have blown his cover or at the very least drawn suspicion, but Gu adjusted his sitting position to reveal the ad from the paper.
Wordlessly, Hyunwoo set a finger on Minhyuk's picture, afraid of speaking and blowing the entire operation, and Gu just grinned. "A good choice ye've made." He fished around in his paper change cup before coming up with a small key ring. One key was small and silver, and the second key was larger than the first, made of brass, and had a number seven drawn on it in black marker.
"This is 'im," Gu said, holding out the keys, and Hyunwoo took them, flinching when his finger touched the man's. Gu laughed again, and Hyunwoo quickly withdrew his hand.
"The small key?" Hyunwoo asked, eyes flicking between the key ring and the old man.
"He'll be cuffed to the bed," Gu said, amusement in his eyes. It must have been clear that Hyunwoo had never done this before. "Feel free to get freaky or creative however you want, but he's got to be cuffed back to the bed before you leave or you pay extra."
Hyunwoo just nodded, telling himself that he could throw up again after this was done. If he got sick now, then he'd ruin everything. "Right."
"Have fun," Gu said, and Hyunwoo just turned away, unable to look at him anymore. It didn't matter to him how much they were all respectively involved; anyone who aided in the process of trafficking people – especially children – disgusted him.
He set across the alley, slipped the brass key into the corresponding door, and entered the motel room.
--
published 02/01/21 (mm/dd/yy)
4119 words