Yu-jin tumbled into the sand trap. Dogs barked in the distance, and blue lights flashed through the pines halfway down the mountain.
She pulled the duffel bag closer, feeling the weight of the money inside.
It didn’t feel like enough. Not for her cousin’s life.
She screwed her eyes shut, trying to banish the image of Kwang-ho’s body. Half of his face had been taken off by the shotgun blast, splattered over the faded Buddhist calendar on the wall.
She opened her eyes and gulped air. She smelled sand on her fingers when she wiped away her tears.
***
Kwang-ho had always been wayward, even as a kid, chafing constantly against authority and fighting over nothing. He dropped out of school after his parents died and loafed around the village, and then signed up for compulsory military service as soon as he was eligible. Everyone in Boar Hollow said it would straighten him out. They were wrong. If anything, he was worse when he came back.
Yu-jin had visited him a couple of days after he returned. He’d been drunk, and she could feel his frustration filling the shabby one-room apartment. Military service, however grueling, had offered an escape from Boar Hollow. Now he was trapped there once more.
Yu-jin understood his frustration – all the young people in the village did – but the intensity of Kwang-ho’s surprised her.
One humid afternoon in July, at the start of the summer vacation, she went to visit him again. His apartment door stood open to admit a cross-breeze. Through it she heard Kwang-ho talking to someone, and stopped outside to listen.
It was Dong-chae. He was her senior in high school, though mentally he hadn’t progressed much beyond the eighth grade. The three of them had been inseparable as children. The villagers had always got a laugh out of seeing the wiry Kwang-ho being trailed by the bulky form of Dong-chae, while the tiny Yu-jin scampered after them.
She was about to go in, but something about Kwang-ho’s voice stopped her. Instead she stayed in the corridor and listened some more.
“It’s as easy as eating cold porridge,” Kwang-ho was saying. “The lookouts are all down the mountain. There’s only three men in the room. I’ll take care of the leader, and you tie up the others.”
“I don’t know.”
“Don’t you want to get out of here, Dong-chae? You can come with me to Seoul if you want. Imagine it, living it up in the big city with all that lovely money in your hand.”
Dong-chae giggled.
“The ajumma next door told her friend she was taking three million won. If twenty people turn up with the same amount there’ll be at least 60 million won laying on the floor for us. That’s thirty each, Dong-chae.”
“Thirty million won?”
“That’s right.”
“I could get a car?”
“Sure.”
“Maybe a Ferrari?”
“Don’t be stupid. You could probably get a Hyundai.”
“A Santa Fe?”
“Sure.”
Yu-jin didn’t wait to hear anymore. She marched straight into the one room and told them she wanted in.
“In on what?” Kwang-ho said, reaching for his cigarettes with feigned nonchalance.
He was sitting on the mattress, the only furnishing in the otherwise bare room. Dong-chae was sitting cross legged on the floor, like an over-sized statue of the baby Buddha.
“You’re going to rob the Go-stop game. I want in.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Kwang-ho said, but his voice betrayed him.
***
Yu-jin stood up and shouldered the bag, then scanned the golf course, making out its undulations in the moonlight. The Evercrest resort loomed to her left, the black towers punctuated by a few lights. There would be guards over there. Best to head right.
She ran over the fairway, head down. She reached a tree line and crouched there, listening. The barking sounded closer. She heard engines too, the sound of cars prowling the countryside.
She backed into the forest, letting the trees envelop her.
***
The Go-stop game was an open secret in her corner of the country. Even the police were said to turn a blind eye for a slice of the profits. The gangsters who ran the game circled through different lodges, often remote ones where the owners were away.
The lodge in Boar Hollow was owned by Grandpa Im, a prickly ex-soldier in his eighties. He’d served in Vietnam, and was said to have left whatever human warmth he’d once possessed in the jungle there. Few tourists visited the lodge. Renting it out for illegal card games was sometimes his only source of income.
On Saturday night, Yu-jin met the others at Kwang-ho’s apartment. They went over the plan once more, then set out around eleven, walking single file up the woodcutter’s track into the mountains. Kwang-ho led the way, with Dong-chae in the middle. Yu-jin brought up the rear, the empty duffel bag slung over her shoulder. A full moon shone overhead, painting the tree tops a ghostly white. Cicadas whirred in the humid night, covering their footfalls.
They walked for an hour, avoiding the main roads where the lookouts were posted, and eventually came up behind the lodge. They could hear the raucous voices of the gamblers before they could see the building. It sounded like a big crowd, maybe even bigger than the twenty people Kwang-ho had predicted.
All the lights in the lodge were on, making the darkness they crept out of seem even deeper.
Kwang-ho went to the corner of the lodge and looked around to the front door.
“No one there,” he whispered.
He pointed to the rear. They nodded, and crept around to the back, and then pulled ski masks from their pockets and put them on.
Kwang-ho put his hand on the sliding door and paused. “You ready?” he said, glancing between Yu-jin and Dong-chae.
Dong-chae held up a roll of duct tape and grinned.
Yu-jin grasped the bag’s strap and nodded.
“OK,” Kwang-ho said, drawing a serrated hunting knife out the sheath attached to his belt. “Let’s go.”
He slid the door open. They entered into a small kitchen, moving carefully around a table in the middle of the room. Then they huddled in the doorway and looked out.
The rest of the lodge was one long hall. A line of green felt mats ran down the middle, with two rows of people sitting either side, facing each other. Not one of them was under fifty. They slapped the black and red cards down on the mats, shouting in hoarse voices. Yu-jin saw the piles of cash beside them.
A bald man sat at the end of the row of mats with his back to them. He was the boss of the operation. Two younger men strode up and down behind the gamblers like prison guards, checking for any cheats.
“Now,” Kwang-ho whispered, and burst from the doorway. He made it to the boss within a few paces and crouched down behind him, the knife to his throat.
“No one move,” he said.
The gamblers all looked up in surprise.
“Any noise and I start stabbing.”
Dong-chae grabbed one of the younger men around the middle in a bear hug and lifted him easily off the floor. He slammed him down on the wax paper floor and quickly taped his wrists together.
The other young man made a move to stop him. “Hold it,” Kwang-ho said, digging the teeth of the knife deeper into the boss’ neck.
Dong-chae stepped over the mat and taped the other man’s wrists together, then pushed him down until he was sitting on the floor.
Kwang-ho looked over his shoulder at Yu-jin and nodded. She stepped out from behind him and started collecting the money on the mats, stuffing it into the duffel bag as quickly as she could. She felt the eyes of the gamblers on her. The men were all frowning, while the women muttered complaints. She was sweating inside her ski mask, adrenaline making her hands tremble.
One woman grabbed her stack of cash before Yu-jin could reach it. She clutched it to her chest, shaking her head, her eyes filled with tears. “No, please.”
Yu-jin glanced back at Kwang-ho. He nodded to Dong-chae, who stepped forward and grabbed the woman by the neck from behind and started lifting her up.
“Hand it over, bitch,” Kwang-ho said. “You were going to lose it anyway.”
The woman carried on shaking her head. Dong-chae tightened his grip on her neck and the woman gasped and thrust the money forward for Yu-jin to take. Dong-chae let go and the woman dropped to the floor and started sobbing.
“No more hold outs,” Kwang-ho said.
Yu-jin collected the rest of the money, moving quickly down the row of mats in a crouch, like someone planting rice. She reached the end of the row and nodded back to Kwang-ho. He stood up and dealt the boss a vicious blow to the side of the head with the butt of the knife. The boss collapsed on the floor, one hand to his head, blood seeping through his fingers.
A door near the back of the lodge opened. Grandpa Im stepped out, an ancient shotgun clasped in his arthritic hands.
It boomed once.
***
Yu-jin made it to the edge of the resort, where a steep slope dropped to a back road. The dogs were definitely closer now, and she could hear people shouting to each other.
She slid on her butt down the slope, branches whipping her face. Finally her feet hit concrete, and she straightened up. She rested for a moment, until an engine growled to her right, getting louder.
She ran across the road and dove behind a bush. Headlights sliced around the corner a second later.
The car crawled past. Someone in the passenger seat had a powerful flashlight, and was shining it into the undergrowth. They were smoking too, blowing out white plumes that writhed in the flashlight’s beam. Yu-jin huddled tight to the earth. The beam of light swept by inches above her head, and then the car was gone, leaving behind the smell of cigarettes and gasoline.
Yu-jin stood up and pushed into the undergrowth, heading away from the road. After a while she came to a track and followed it downhill. The roar of the freeway in the distance grew louder, still busy even at that hour of the morning. She shifted the bag on her shoulder and hurried towards it.
***
Everything was still after the shot, except the gunsmoke curling in the silent room. Then the panic started, the screaming, the running. Dong-chae had run out the front door with everyone else, shoving the elderly gamblers aside in his effort to escape. Yu-jin hoped he’d got away. Deep down though, she knew he’d probably been caught, either by the police or the gangsters.
Yu-jin had been frozen to the spot, her eyes locked on Kwang-ho’s body. In her peripheral vision she saw Grandpa Im pushing himself up from where the shotgun’s recoil had slammed him against the wall. She tore her eyes from Kwang-ho and ran to the back door.
She veered left once outside and ran in blind panic through the undergrowth, stumbling over branches and getting a face full of leaves. She kept running until an almost vertical slope stopped her. There was nowhere else to go, so she scampered up the slope, grabbing at tree roots and saplings for purchase. She made it to the top, and emerged onto the golf course.
Apart from the workers who tended the course, she was almost certainly the first villager to ever set foot in Evercrest since it opened five years before. People had hoped the resort would bring more business to the village, but no one from Evercrest had ever set foot in Boar Hollow either.
She sprinted for the sand trap with the last of her strength and slumped into it.
***
The smell of sand on her fingers triggered a memory, one long buried. It was of her and Kwang-ho playing on Gwangali beach in Busan. He’d been about ten then, and she’d been six or seven. His parents had still been alive, and her parents had still been together. They’d all been happy on that trip, even her father, like he was before her mother left them and the booze hollowed him out.
When she thought about it, that trip might have been the last time any of them were happy.
***
She waited by the driver’s area of the rest-stop food hall, looking through the glass for a face she could trust. She found it at the back of the hall. It belonged to a small guy with a perm, who was slurping noodles from his bowl with an air of satisfaction.
She went outside and waited, standing with her back against a pillar, senses alert. The people following her would check the rest stop eventually.
Ten minutes later, the driver came out and went over to his truck. Yu-jin followed him.
“Excuse me, mister,” she said to his back as he was opening the door to the cab.
He looked round, one eyebrow raised in query.
“Could you give me a ride, please?”
He looked her over, taking in the bag.
“Running away from home, huh?” he said.
She nodded.
“Sorry,” the driver said. “Your parents will be worried. I can’t help you.”
She shook her head. “It’s just my father. He won’t care.”
She remembered when she said goodbye to her father before going to join Kwang-ho. He hadn’t even looked up for his soju glass.
Tears came to her eyes. “Please, mister. I can’t stay here anymore.”
Through the tears she saw the driver’s expression soften.
He sighed. “OK,” he said. “Climb in.”
She climbed into the cab beside him, putting the bag between her feet and looking in the side mirror. The sun was just starting to come up over the mountains, a splash of red on the deep indigo sky. She had no idea how long she had before someone caught up with her, or what would happen when they did. One thing she knew for certain: she would never see Boar Hollow again.
“Where you heading?” the driver asked.
She thought for a moment. Her only plan had been to get away from Boar Hollow, either to Seoul, or somewhere else.
She smelled sand again, saw Kwang-ho playing in the waves.
“Busan,” she said. “I want to go to Busan.”
[Image Credit : Photo by Junseo Jang on Unsplash]
Gavin Kent is a writer of crime and thriller fiction. His work has appeared in Guilty, Pulp Noir and Shotgun Honey. Originally from the UK, he has spent much of his adult life in East Asia, where he’s taught English at universities and tutored everyone from bank managers to Buddhist nuns. He currently lives in South Korea with his wife and son, and is seeking representation for his debut novel.
