HIT

6: mistakes

The drive to Ilsan had been a dead end, but the department had found the Tesla owner, a certain Oh Chanwoo. He was a lawyer at a law firm in Jung-gu, 52, a wife and two children in their teens. So far there was no obvious motive to assume that the man was the next victim, but they could not rule it out, so the colleagues back at the bureau were searching for one.

In the meantime, another team had been dispatched to secretly secure lawyer Oh's safety. That was not much considering the Hawk was not known for killing in close combat, but they could not call the target and tell him that an assumed hitman was on his trail and whether he would please play the bait. No sane person would put themselves in such danger.

And rightly so. Had it been Jimin's place to decide, he would have put the victim under guarded house arrest after identifying them, but Chief Kim did not want to scare the Hawk into vanishing once again. This was a big chance, and no one in their division wanted to mess this up. And so, it was up to Jimin to toughen up and be a proper agent. He had to get into the hitman's life, or someone would die again. At least that was a big motivator.

The problem was, he had no clue how. Today he would bring back the suit, and his only idea was to give the hitman his new mission bank account and then ask digital forensics to trace back the money. But apart from the fact that they needed a warrant for that, it did not prove that they were tailing a killer. It would only do good in case the Hawk had a bank account that was not run under the name Ahn Jaehoon, but apart from that what Jimin could do was amounting to nothing at all.

Of course, the idea of offering himself to the man had crossed his mind at some point, but apart from the fact that he was much too scared to do that and not comfortable at all with giving his body away like this, it would not add up with their history so far. Who would want to sleep with the man who filled them up, then wrapped them in a blanket to stow them in their apartment in order to get a favor, and then crashed their car without remorse? A normal person would see the psychopathy in that and run away the very moment they were free to go, and then they would pretend this never happened and live their happy ever after.

If Jimin ever desired to follow that idea, he would have to be smart about it. But he did not desire to go that far, so it was out of question right now. The department would be happy about any new information they could get on the Hawk, so he would provide them with what he could grab in the passing.

He pushed the bell next to the Ahn Jaehoon tag.

"Yes?" the bored voice cracked through the speaker.

"Here's Jimin. I got your suit," he replied, and the door began to buzz. While he rode the elevator, he rolled his practiced lines through his head.

The Hawk was already standing in his apartment door, dressed in rubber gloves, a pulled-down face mask, a hairband, and an apron, and looked truly bored and offputtingly silly in his cleaning gear.

"Hello," Jimin greeted the man while looking him up and down in disbelief. But of course, even a hitman had to keep his four walls clean.

"Hi." Ahn sniffed and licked his lips. It was such a mundane tick that Jimin was amazed by it.

Awkward silence. Then Jimin remembered what he was here for and handed over the suit hanger. "I'll give you my account for the trans-"

Something was shoved into his hand. When he looked at it, it turned out to be a golden coin in a plastic wrapping. The Hawk had given him an ounce of fucking pure gold. Jimin was shocked.

The door closed in front of his nose.

"Hey," he cried in vain but quickly understood that he had failed. The Hawk had outsmarted him again. "Shit," he whispered angrily and barely refrained from closing his fist around the stupid coin, remembering that it was evidence. A bar of gold had a bank seal and a serial number, so it could be traced back, but a coin was not trackable. He was left with fucking nothing. "Shit," he cursed a second time when he realized that he could not even get fingerprints from this because the damn sly fox had worn rubber gloves. He would not even be surprised if the whole make-up was just for distracting him from the fact that he was wearing those.