AFTERTASTE. | J. JK

SIX.

CHAPTER SIX; TWO CAN KEEP A SECRET IF ONE'S DEAD

It had been a nearly two-hour drive, nearly two hours of a jittery ignorance of what had really happened that had tormented Nam, nearly two hours of suffocating tar and humid morning sew hovering the air and the sideway trees, sun slowly rising and burning the skin of his elbows, propped on the fully opened window.

Nam had insisted in driving, it was cruel the thought of him having to remain sat, with nothing to do but to watch the tarred road or the rare trees for two hours. Baek hadn't minded it that much, the younger man probably looked more tired than Nam, which wasn't particularly difficult because the elder didn't look any different from any other day. Baek, with his tired eyes of a child, had thrown him the keys, slipping out to the other side of the wheel and, had somehow found some comfort, despite the soreness of his neck, on the cold of the glass of the window.

The skies had grown paler, tinges of blue and gray and the rays of light had barely heated up the car, Nam remembered how freezing cold that morning had started, in the confusing amidst of night and day- Baek's car heating was broken. He remembered how he had tortured the corner of his smile, between his anxious teeth, trying over and over to analyze what could had originated the murder, what had he done wrong, the man or Nam himself, to get busted like that?

He would find out though, he would find out what happened after those two hours of hell and humid cold.

Turning left to enter the side road, that prolonged through the pine green wood, it had only taken a few minutes until they arrived to the location where the murder - and, all the other filthy sins- had taken place. It was a shady place, simply put. From the secluded location, in the middle of fucking nowhere, as Baek had pointed it out, to the abandoned, degraded aspect of it all.

It was a kind of a secluded small town that could very much be condensed to only one street. The type of place one should stay away from, for it had this lingering feeling of danger hovering over the small gas station, and the crumbling tavern a few meters away or the 24/7 convenience store on the opposite side, which, ironically enough, was currently closed. The type of place the ones who despair went looking for to drown the last tears of their pain in cheap alcohol and nameless women. The type of place that was rarely tracked on the maps, for the shame was too big to face, making it the perfect location to run away to, without suspicion.

But they could never really escape it, could they? A matter of time, they were aware.

"Don't let them touch anything before I see it, got it?" Nam rolled up the sleeves of his green shirt, the exact same one he had worn yesterday because it had been this one which was at hand when he stormed out of his apartment at 4 am, after receiving the call that tormented his rare sleep. He jumped out of the car, closing the door with a loud thump which very much made Baek jerk in his place, the boy was yet to be really aware of what was happening.

The black-haired man strolled with swift steps towards the crime scene that, meanwhile, had gathered a small crowd of curious people and a few of damage controlling officers from the local station behind the yellow band that circled around the building.

He looked up at the place, any other day, it looked like the standard murky bar in the middle of a small town, near the Gangwon highway, with its flickering red neon lights, half of them already burned out, and its feeling of something being left to die- somedays, a man's dignity, on others, the true sense of self or honesty. However, today was different, for it was a body that had been left to rot within those thin four walls, the thin four walls of an underground brothel.