INSIDE MONSTER. THE FUGITIVE.

CHAPTER 47: A PACT WITH THE DEVIL

After the weird reaction SinJu had in his car, a vehicle he asked the driver to stop in an isolated place God knows where at an early morning hour, he asked his employee to take him to another location. Where exactly? To the devil's lair. At least this crossed the driver's mind when he stopped the car in another isolated place.

This new location was so isolated and abandoned that not even ten healthy and well-trained men would have dared to stop by there. Yet, they ventured there with only the two of them, looking for „flog dead horses" as the driver thought when he turned the engine off with a shaking hand. After that, often swallowing hard, he looked at SinJu in the inner mirror, who was in the back seat, somewhere to his right.

SinJu seemed troubled at that moment. He also looked scared, although the driver couldn't understand what could have made him feel like that because, as far as he remembered, he hadn't ever seen Min SinJu looking like a frightened kid about to be beaten in those two years while he'd been working for him. How did the driver realize that? Simple: while he spied on his boss through the inner mirror, he saw him frowning at one point. After that, gnashing his teeth, SinJu untied the tie as though he felt it as a rope wrapped around his throat.

None of them said anything though. They kept silent for minutes in a row, each of them looking at the object that interested him: the driver - at his boss, somehow on the sly, while SinJu looked through the window from his right at the multitude of abandoned buildings that were wet gray after the rain that stopped only a couple of hours before that. Eventually, realizing that only staying there he was wasting his time, SinJu deeply breathed in and, glancing at his employee, he told him, „Wait here! In the car and with the engine on! If I'm not back in about a quarter of an hour and I also don't call you to inform you that I'm fine, call the cops! Did you hear me?"

„Yes, boss!" The driver answered right away, confidently, although he was still shaking inside because of the fear he felt for being there.

The driver's answer and the fear felt in his soul didn't seem like something SinJu cared about. All that mattered to him was the fact that his employee understood the message he tried to send and that he was there, waiting for him, although SinJu was also sure that, in case he had seen the devil, the driver would have hit the pike, taking the car with him and forgetting about his boss. Who would have judged him if this had happened? Nobody. Not even SinJu would have done that, he was sure of this because he was the only one who knew what kind of devil lived in that place, someone even Min SinJu was afraid of.

Nevertheless, SinJu had no other choice than to face the devil that morning. If not, he was sure that the one who summoned him there so urgently would have left him headless. How not to be so when he gave him a headache the night before when he took the devil out of his lair and exposed him in front of others as a monkey at the circus just because he needed someone to clean the mess he made. „A mess that was necessary though," SinJu growled eventually, heading with lazy steps toward the entrance to the abandoned building. „If not, all our plans would have been ruined, just as the work we've done all these years would have been in vain."

Yet... did the „ghost" know that? Did he know how many problems SinJu solved over the years? Did he know how many troubles SinJu avoided him to have all that time? Probably not, because, from what SinJu knew, the „ghost" never cared about this. All he cared about were his plans, wishes, and needs, and not what the others wanted.

Even so, SinJu had to admit one thing: despite the rivalry between them, despite the ghost's cruelty and his caprices, that one had always been loyal to him. He had always been there when SinJu had needed him, particularly for the dirty work. He also took care of their dirty business, from the shadows, sheltering SinJu this way because, if SinJu had openly behaved in that story, the police would have caught them for sure, sending them where they belonged to - „To that hell with bars," as SinJu always said.