Chapter 26. No Matter How Much You Twist a Chicken’s Neck
While Serin and that punk were talking, I quickly came downstairs and tried to open the building’s front entrance.
The door wouldn’t open.
Come to think of it, I had heard someone rattling the locked door earlier.
The only unlocked entrance was the side door on the right side of the building.
If I ran through the first-floor hallway, opened the right-side door, and immediately changed direction, I could reach the entrance to the parking lot through a fairly short route.
That punk was trying to hand Serin a suspicious-looking black bag.
“Hold it right there!”
When I shouted urgently, Serin nearly jumped out of her skin.
“M-Manager!”
But strangely enough, the punk who had come all the way to the company didn’t look flustered at all.
I quickly looked him over.
His face was rather pretty, but considering he was wearing a leather biker jacket in this weather, he looked like nothing more than some Seocho-dong delinquent.
“Who are you?”
The man answered calmly.
“Four Hodori green-onion chickens.”
“Four Hodori green-onion chickens?”
Only then did the smell of seasoned fried chicken reach my nose.
They said soldiers on a battlefield eventually became unable to smell anything other than gunpowder.
I was apparently in a similar state.
I took the black plastic bag from Serin and checked the contents.
Inside were two fairly heavy boxes of chicken, neatly packed together with containers of pickled radish.
Serin, holding a blue NongHyup card, hesitantly asked,
“S-Should we cancel it? Team Leader 3 gave us the card and told us to buy something to eat. We didn't order this because we wanted to. He said we worked hard at today's performance, so we should eat something. And since we'd get scolded if you and the CEO found out we were eating chicken this late, he told us to keep it secret...”
The NongHyup card had the name [Cheon Gi Hong] printed on it.
So that was why she had been acting so suspiciously?
Come to think of it, the least noticeable route from the dormitory to the parking-lot entrance was to enter through the left-side door of the building, open the main entrance, and dash straight across the parking lot.
The main door hadn't opened, so she'd been forced to go all the way to the door on the right.
“Huh? Oh, no. Why would you cancel it? And why were you trying so hard to keep something like this secret?”
I took Cheon Gi-hong's card and handed it to the punk... no, the delivery rider.
“Charge twice the amount. It's hot outside, and you've worked hard coming all the way here. Fry four more chickens with whatever's left and share them with your friends.”
“Ah, is that really okay?”
Of course it was.
After thinking about Nam Won-su's compensated dating scandal and Japan's underground idols, I'd apparently become far too sensitive.
Sweet little Serin having a secret midnight meeting with some neighborhood thug?
As if.
This was my revenge against Cheon Gi-hong for making me worry for nothing.
Besides, he'd handed his own card to Serin while trying to secretly buy them food.
It wasn't even my money.
I didn't know why Cheon Gi-hong was trying to win Blue Moon's favor, but I felt obligated to show him exactly what happened when he suddenly started doing things he normally never did.
“I should've bought you girls something delicious first. I couldn't because of everything that happened with Anna at the hospital. You're not disappointed, are you?”
After sending the delivery rider away, I talked with Serin as we walked toward the dormitory.
“No. It really is too late to eat right now anyway. We only ordered because Team Leader 3 told us to eat something today. We were planning to save it and have it for lunch tomorrow.”
That's what she said.
But what I heard was:
We planned to secretly take it back and devour everything before sunrise, but you caught us, so we're postponing our feast.
“Why would you do that? Chicken tastes best while it's still hot.”
“Hehe. Then?”
“Then you should eat it now, shouldn't you?”
A blissful smile appeared on Serin's face.
The girls were constantly dieting anyway.
Even if I told them to eat all of it in one sitting, there was too much for them to finish.
Ordering four chickens for four people meant they were apparently planning to take down an entire bird each.
No matter how small the chickens were, that should have been impossible.
...Then again, after remembering how they destroyed that cake, maybe it wasn't so impossible.
Before we reached the dormitory building, I handed the chicken back to Serin.
“Huh? Manager, aren't you going to eat any?”
“No. I don't like chicken. And chicken tastes best when you're eating it in secret. Go inside, don't tell them I caught you, finish it quickly, and get some sleep.”
“Hng... Thank you...”
Serin accepted the chicken with a deeply moved expression, bowed, and ran toward the dormitory.
Back when I was in high school, during mandatory night study sessions, we'd lowered strings from the building to get chicken delivered dozens of times.
Not once had we been caught.
Thinking about it now, the teachers had probably known and simply pretended not to notice.
Even an actual chicken restaurant wouldn't have smelled this strongly.
Of course, I hadn't sent Serin away alone just to let her enjoy the thrill of secretly eating chicken.
The part about me disliking chicken was obviously a lie too.
While walking across the parking lot with Serin, I'd received a message that looked suspiciously like spam.
[Web Message]
[Would you like to see the future?]
[Choice 1. Yes]
[Choice 2. No]
[If no response is entered for five minutes, Choice 1 will automatically be selected.]
As expected.
Spam.
They hadn't appeared for a while, and now I'd received two messages in such a short time.
Things were probably about to become complicated again.
Still, every one of these spam messages had proven useful.
I carefully typed 1 and sent it.
[Title: 7/10]
[Photo Taken: 2022.09.29. 00:18]
“Hmm?”
It was a photograph of the company parking lot.
I compared the timestamp to the current time.
The photo would be taken only three minutes from now.
That threw me off for a moment, but I calmly looked over the parking lot I'd just crossed.
The Starex used by Blue Moon and me stood beside the midsize van used by Team 1.
It was exactly the same scenery as the photograph.
But what was supposed to happen here?
I even opened and closed the car door for no reason while looking for anything strange.
Nothing stood out.
There certainly wasn't anything like a bomb.
At first, I'd only looked for something obviously important.
Then I started considering whether there might be some tiny difference.
One minor oddity was that the van used by Cheon Gi-hong from Team 3 wasn't here.
Our company wasn't the only business using this building, so the parking lot was often full.
When that happened, people usually parked temporarily along the road outside.
It was a legal parking area, by the way.
Still, roadside parking was inconvenient regardless of whether it was legal.
Once employees started leaving and parking spaces opened up, people generally moved their cars inside.
Lazy Cheon Gi-hong rarely bothered doing that, though.
His van was probably parked outside the fence.
I walked out through the parking-lot entrance, where the smell of chicken still lingered, to check.
Cheon Gi-hong's white van wasn't there.
Solis couldn't possibly have a schedule this late.
Dawn schedules were something only top-tier idols had.
Even Blue Moon didn't have dawn schedules yet.
There was no way Solis, who had caused chaos on television, would have one.
Just in case, I looked farther down the road.
In the distance, I saw a white van stopped in front of an intersection with its left turn signal blinking.
If that was three minutes ago, then the van must have quickly slipped past the parking-lot entrance right around the time Serin and I turned around with the chicken.
I immediately got into the Starex and drove out of the parking lot.
The bad feeling I'd had earlier had turned out to be nothing more than an innocent chicken delivery rider.
This time, however, the bad feeling came with information from the spam message.
That meant it had to be important.
Whether Cheon Gi-hong had bought chicken for the members while secretly going out for beef by himself, or whether he had something more serious in mind, I needed to follow him first.
After turning right out of the parking lot, I looked toward the intersection.
The white van had just started making its left turn.
I could catch up easily.
The vehicles might have been slightly different in performance, but I was an excellent driver.
I shifted manually into a higher gear, accelerated, and crossed the intersection before the light changed.
The van quickly grew closer.
The license plate confirmed it.
It was Team 3's van.
I slowed down so I wouldn't stand out and quietly followed Cheon Gi-hong.
Cheon Gi-hong's van drove all over Seoul as if it were on a safari tour.
Following him continuously in the Starex made me too noticeable, so I parked the car and switched to a taxi.
Not long after changing vehicles, he stopped in front of a villa in Sillim and picked up a young girl.
Taekwondo instructors often did something similar.
The differences were that his van wasn't yellow and it was far too late at night.
The unpleasant feeling growing inside me finally became certainty that I was witnessing a crime after the same thing happened several more times.
Every villa he visited was being used as company housing by some entertainment agency.
Cheon Gi-hong was going around meeting idols from one agency after another.
Was he trying to recruit unknown idols from competing agencies?
That would violate industry etiquette, but still...
No.
That made no sense.
Cheon Gi-hong was supposed to be leaving to work as Solis's planner.
There was no way he was suffering through this much trouble in the middle of the night just to recruit skilled idols for Universe.
After stopping at around five different places and picking up several more girls, Cheon Gi-hong headed out of Seoul.
By the time we passed Uijeongbu IC, the taxi meter had already gone past 50,000 won.
Once we entered the expressway toward Pocheon, the driver's face began positively glowing with happiness.
The white van eventually stopped in front of a hotel near the Hantan River.
From the moment we entered the mountain road, the taxi driver had switched off his headlights and followed slowly.
As soon as the white van stopped, he shut off the engine and every electrical system in the taxi.
“You look like you've done this more than once.”
“When you've driven a taxi in Seoul for over twenty years, you end up doing just about anything that can be done with a car. Was it five years ago? Near the women's university in Mia, I once picked up a passenger covered in blood and chased a kidnapper. Then the next evening, the nine o'clock news ran a story about a Seongbuk-gu university-student murder...”
I'd only intended to make a little conversation while waiting for Cheon Gi-hong to do something.
Apparently, the tension he'd felt while following the van disappeared all at once.
The driver began chatting enthusiastically.
I listened with half an ear, paid the fare in advance, and continued watching Cheon Gi-hong.
Cheon Gi-hong got out of the driver's seat and waited for someone.
Soon, a middle-aged man approached and spoke to him.
I quietly got out of the taxi and moved closer.
I knew that face.
And seeing him gave an ugly feeling inside me an even uglier certainty.
Normally, remembering people from your past made you nostalgic or happy.
But starting with Sayaka and now this middle-aged man, everyone from my past only seemed capable of making me uncomfortable.
Maybe that was natural, considering I'd spent so many years working at Pantheon.
I couldn't hear their conversation, but I recognized his face clearly.
Kim Chang-bae.
Director of KBC Production Division 2.
He was especially influential in the entertainment center because variety programs constantly needed celebrities.
Even managers who had nothing to do with Pantheon usually knew about him.
Give him money, give him your body, give him something...
And he'd get you onto his programs.
His nickname, Vending Machine, was actually more famous than his real name, Chang-bae.
Pay the price, receive the reward.
Simple as that.
Come to think of it, even for a division director, it had been strange that he hadn't shown himself at all during the previous episode of Music Bang Bang.
It had even been a Chuseok special.
Had he trusted Seo Hoe-dong that much?
Or had there been a personnel reshuffle since then?
I didn't know how he'd been living lately, but if this bastard was involved, maybe it was time to loosen up my biceps and forearms.
There were far too many people around here who deserved a punch.
After a brief conversation with the Vending Machine, Cheon Gi-hong opened the van.
The idols poured out.
When I saw what they were wearing, I turned toward the taxi in surprise.
I'd already paid, but apparently the driver wanted to watch this interesting situation after coming all the way to Pocheon.
He was still sitting there.
A faint red light from the dashcam was visible near the top of the windshield.
I made a T-shaped gesture to tell him to wait.
From behind the tinted glass, the driver gave me an okay sign.
The idols had been wearing ordinary clothes when they got into the van.
Now they were getting out in skin-tight dresses.
Back in my day, we would have called them skirts short enough to show your ass.
If they were unknown rookies I couldn't even recognize, there was a good chance they'd been pressured into coming here.
Even adults could be surprisingly easy to manipulate when their company pushed them.
The idols followed the director into the hotel.
Cheon Gi-hong pressed his fingers against his temples, released a deep sigh, and put a cigarette in his mouth.
I took out my phone and searched the director's name.
He was still listed as the director of KBC Production Division 2.
Among KBC's recent popular programs he'd participated in producing, the biggest one was Jackpot.
The same Jackpot closely connected to the music chart I'd seen in the spam photograph.
TakeF.
Jackpot; Japan, which had allowed TakeF to receive the future number-one song.
And Kim Chang-bae, the executive CP of both Jackpot and Jackpot; Japan.
At the very least, if the Vending Machine was involved, I now had even more reason to believe none of these connections were clean.
I'd heard plenty of rumors about trainees and unknown celebrities being forced into unfair arrangements with broadcasting officials in areas outside Seoul.
Now I was seeing one with my own eyes.
I'd have to watch longer to know what exactly was being exchanged.
But why weren't these girls from Solis?
And even if they came from other agencies, why had Cheon Gi-hong collected idols from multiple companies instead of just the agency he was supposed to be joining?
It probably wasn't something unrelated to work.
I couldn't think of any ordinary personal benefit Cheon Gi-hong could gain from doing this.
If he'd tried to lure members of Solis or Blue Moon here, that would at least have made some sense.
Even what I was seeing right now was enough to make my blood boil.
But when I imagined that one of the Blue Moon members could have been among those girls, a wave of anger surged up so violently that dizziness struck between my brows.
Then I suddenly remembered the smell of chicken that had filled the company parking lot.
At the time, I'd assumed he'd ordered chicken simply to distract me while taking the company van out.
But I didn't care what Cheon Gi-hong did with the white van.
As long as he didn't ding the door of our Starex, he could turn the van into porridge for all I cared.
He'd probably bought the cheap chicken both to distract me and to win Blue Moon's favor.
And now the reason he'd been trying to win their favor was obvious.
Since I had a rough idea of what kind of business he was running, immediate punishment was necessary.
And if this involved prostitution or sexual exploitation, there was no punishment more terrifying than the law.
The law might move more slowly than my fist.
But when solid evidence existed in a sexual crime, nothing hit harder.
I'll teach you properly that there is no such thing as an eternal secret.
I immediately called 112.
