Beneath the Surface // Moonsun

Chapter 17

Yongsun POV

Taliah leans her elbows on a couple of maps and smiles a little at the quickly reddening young man working the tourist desk. "Hey there."

He couldn't have been more than eighteen years old, but he looked more along the lines of sixteen with his shaved, JROTC-style haircut and his green polo that fits snugly over his chubby frame. The boy looks nervously between me and Taliah, his young hormones probably overwhelmed.

"Hi. Welcome to P-port Morgan Harbour. My name is Jack and I can assist you with -uh- anything you may need." He stammers out.

"He's cute, isn't he?" Taliah croons.

"The cutest." I smile a bit, trying to play along with what almost feels like pedophilia.

The tourist center is a quaint brick building that, when I saw it, I could only identify as squashed-looking. The front doors open up into a large space with three different sections branching off my means of doorway and staircase: a tourist desk, a coffee shop, and a small branch of a public library on the second floor. It's quiet here.

A couple of businessmen sip their mid-afternoon coffees with the lovely sounds of men yelling and machinery whirring to accompany their drinks. Another man with a glare in his glasses sits with his long legs crossed on the floor in one corner, typing furiously on his lap. I spare him a second glance, surprised by both his attractiveness and him being the only dark-skinned male I've seen here so far.

"How bout you tell me something about this place that no one's ever heard before?" Taliah asks with a bright Chesire grin that pulls up her cheeks.

There's something about Taliah that reminds me so much and so little of Byulyi. Maybe it's the sheer confidence of her that's wrapped up in a pleasant little bow instead of a cocky, insufferable one.

The kid named Jack glances around a bit, cheeks jostling with the movement, before he leans over the counter towards us and whispers underneath his breath, "My Uncle Tom smuggles cocaine through the harbor."

Taliah and I exchange a suspicious glance at each other. It would be strange for this boy to be involved in Lin's Clan and be so open with information. We could be meddling with some other operation entirely.

Jack leans back with a hearty laugh. "You shoulda seen your faces! It's just a story, ma'am."

"I like to believe all the stories are true." Taliah gives the kid a tiny smile laced with venom that, by the nervous scrunching of his face, gets him rethinking his boner.

He shuffles around the papers he screwed up with his chest as his face flushes a dark red. "I - I don't even have an Uncle Tom."

"As much as we'd love to meet said Uncle Tom and, perhaps, inquire about his cabin, I think the cocaine bit is what caught our attention."

I observe the man in the corner glancing up from his laptop for half a second before burrowing his nose into the screen again. This area isn't secure.

Jack squints between the two of us. "You guys cops?"

I'd done no undercover investigative work while a police officer - it required more training than I was willing to do. However, in a situation like this, that extra work might have been useful. Fortunately, it seems that Taliah is a natural liar.

"I'll let you in on a little secret. Secret for a secret, Jack." She nudges her head towards me. "My client here is looking for a nice, quiet base of operations for some international trading."

There he goes again. I catch the man on the floor looking up at us again from the corner of my eye. His head cocks slightly, listening. If we are in the right place, it's highly probable that any one of these people is a part of Lin's Clan.