Brown Piano | yoonmin [ON HOLD]

Two

°Chopin – Nocturne Op. 48, No. 1°

Jimin

It was only my third day patrolling the roads as a darned traffic officer and I was already hating it. Stopping every car passing by to check the driver's license was beginning to get extremely petty.

Once in a while I would have to argue with rude drivers but that was as about close I would get to excitement in this job.

Kang Junhyeok never left my mind. As romantic as that just sounded, he was the mobster that I had been chasing for the past four months. Just because the higher-ups had told me to lay off, didn't mean I was going to stop finding this guy.

I wasn't going to rest till I put the guy behind bars myself. Due to my suspension from the office, I was unable to access any information that was normally available to me. I had to rely on my assistant Officer Jeon to continue gathering evidence during my absence.

I yawned as I leaned on a tall lamp post. The road before me had been empty for the last hour meaning all I could do was stand there and breathe. I was threateningly close to collapsing on the ground due to the extreme boredom I was going through.

A traffic officer jogged towards me holding two cans of energy drinks. He gave one to me.

"I don't know how you can stand doing this as a regular job," I said.

"It is boring, but I get enough to feed myself so I bear with it." He chuckled before taking a long sip of the drink.

He was young, only a year younger than me. Talking to him was probably what had stopped me from banging my head against the lamp post for fun. He was kind, funny and very pleasing to look at. My cheeks heated at the thought of that. I shook my head and drank the drink. Kang Junhyeok wasn't the only one who had been occupying my mind.

"You should go take a rest now, I will stay here and patrol."

I was about to refuse because I wanted to stay in his company but a sudden yawn escaped my lips. I really did need that break. I walked to the end of the road and turned a corner where there was a little 24 hour shop. I sat on the plastic chair outside and placed my arms on the table in front of me for my head to lean on. I slept instantly.

I woke up two hours later due to my arm slipping off and my head smacking against the table. I wiped the drool from my cheek and popped in a mint to get rid of the taste that the energy drink had left in my mouth.

I made my way back around the block to the traffic officer. I couldn't see him near the lamp post and the road was as empty as it was last time. I furrowed my eyebrows wondering where he could be. Maybe he had already left to go home.

I walked further along the street. Had the lamp post not been spotlighting the path ahead of me, I would've missed the dark crimson colour staining the ground. I followed the red streak until it stopped in front of a large bin.

The detective in me wasn't feeling too positively about this. I took a deep breath in and walked closer to the bin. The grotesque sight I saw made my head snap away instantly.

The young traffic officer's body had been stuffed inside. His face was beyond recognition due to the amount of blood and cuts that had graphically disfigured his once beautiful appearance.

I didn't wait another second to call the police. This was no accident and it had shaken me because it was my first time seeing the result of murder right before my eyes. I knew it wasn't going to be an image that was going to be easy for me to remove from my memories.

Until the police arrived, I stayed alert, darting my eyes around the desolate street. I looked up to count how many cameras there were but there was only one. Due to how lifeless the place was, I doubted there would be any witness so I desperately hoped the camera was going to provide enough footage evidence to find out who the murderer was.

In the back of my mind, I couldn't help but raise suspicions of who the culprit was. My main suspect was Kang Junhyeok. For the past month I had been speculating that he had people following me. He knew about my existance and strong passion to end his mobster career. He must've realised that I indeed posed some degree of threat towards him. It wasn't an absurd idea that he might want to get rid of me.

As expected, the next morning the murder had made headline news. As I walked through the streets, people were watching and gasping at the huge screen on the building. Everyone was horrified that something like that had happened in the local area.

Unsurprisingly, I couldn't fall asleep the night before. I had tried to but woke up instantly after a terrifying dream where I saw the guy underneath the tunnel playing on the piano as usual but then suddenly stopped to look at me with the mutilated face of the traffic officer.

I shivered at the thought of the dream. Instead of going to my fourth day of traffic patrolling, I arrived in front of the police station. I knew my team were working on this case and so I headed to our office.

"What are you doing here?" spoke the annoying Officer Na. I ignored him.

"Have any of you looked at the cctv footage from last night?" 

Officer Jeon perked his head up and gasped at the sight of me. "I'm looking at it right now."

I meandered my way around the desks until I stood behind him. I pulled out a chair to sit next to him so I could get a better view of the computer screen.

"Have you seen anything useful?"

"Let me play you the moment it happened."

He pressed a few buttons on the screen, rewinding it to the moment of the murder. A black car had sped straight towards the traffic officer. He had no time to react as he was thrown across the road. The car ran over his body a couple of times before the driver dressed in all black came out to put him in the bin. He stopped to look at a guy who had just witnessed everything.

He too was dressed in all black and was very familiar. Three red stripes ran down the side of his hoodie. It was the guy from under the tunnel.