5. Jin
Monroe Ross leads a tediously boring life.
Not that I find it surprising. I took one look at her in the alleyway outside Club Gongshi and knew she was the model citizen.
She was the good girl prototype. A perfect, law-abiding goodie two shoes.
But it’s even worse than I thought.
Three days of observation confirm what I had already guessed about her in that alley: she doesn’t belong in this tough, cruel world.
I learn her habits and routines easily. All the necessary details about her.
She lives in a modest apartment in Seomyeon, known for its centralized location and urban feel. Her building is a concrete structure that’s been around longer than she’s been alive, with protruding windows and AC units attached to the wall.
You need an entry code to gain access… which is so easy to bypass, every resident in the building should be concerned.
Monroe leaves each morning at 7:48 a.m. She dresses similarly, in long skirts and blouses.
Sometimes a dress that’s tasteful but conservative considering she works with school children.
Her hair changes more unpredictably, some days her curls are accentuated by a headband, other days simply pulled into a big puff.
I notice one reoccurring theme among the three days—she wears a stack of bracelets on her left wrist. Most clashing with the rest of her outfit, but it’s as if she has no other choice.
She’s trying to hide the mark.
Little does she know, there is nowhere she can run that I can’t find her. Where she can escape the Baekho Pa’s influence.
I wait until she’s gone before I gain access to her place and install a few strategically positioned cameras for closer monitoring.
Devices so small, they make coins look large.
They’ll provide me a twenty-four hour feed of what goes on inside her apartment, both video and audio.
No one is any wiser as I slip out of her apartment and stroll toward the elevator.
When she returns later that evening, she doesn’t suspect a thing. I watch from afar as she toes out of her flats and shrugs the tote bag she’s carrying off her shoulder.
She stretches with her arms high in the air, the arced position showing off the true shape of her body. It often gets lost under the cardigans and long skirts she wears.
There’s no use denying she has a nice figure—her torso is trim and flat but her hips feminine and round in shape, legs long for her petite height. Both her breasts and ass offer handfuls of supple, plump flesh. Just enough curves to be dangerous.
But nothing will distract me from what I have to do. Not even an attractive woman like Monroe.
At 7:48 a.m. on day four of my surveillance, she leaves her apartment carrying a canvas tote bag with an English quote printed in bright bold letters on the side: “It’s a good day to read a book.”
Pathetic.
Monroe walks three blocks and then hops on the subway.
Five stops later, she emerges from the Suyeong station, where she walks the rest of the way to the school.
I remain at a distance, watching her cross through the school gates. She kneels to help a small girl with the laces on her shoe and then guides her inside. The girl seems at ease around her.
So do the children in her class. She teaches fourth graders how to read, write, and speak English.
It seems she has a naturally nurturing spirit.
The way she smiles at her students makes my stomach twist.
But my head is full of derisive thoughts. Judgments over how pitiful and mundane her life is.
No wonder she was so terrified in the alley. She’s nothing more than a skittish rabbit in a world of ferocious tigers that will consume her whole.
At lunch she’s polite with coworkers, Korean and expat teachers alike, but she seems relieved when she has a moment to sit in the corner and enjoy her food alone. A small plastic container of rice and dumplings. Occasionally, she checks her phone.
Monroe doesn’t have many people in her life she’s close with.
She speaks to her mother twice a week. Kelly Daly is the only real friend she’s made since moving to South Korea. The night she stumbled into the alley, she was coming from a date.
Otherwise, she’s single and alone.
Old photos from her social media reveal she once was in a very serious relationship with a man named Elijah Turner. He’s dead now.
Monroe moved to South Korea a year later.
After school, she walks briskly, making a couple stops on the way home. She picks up some groceries at E-Mart across from the subway station and then some fried chicken from a little family-owned restaurant next door.
On Friday, I’m bored. I’ve gathered all I need, ensuring there’s nothing else about Monroe Ross that I need to know before following the Baekho-je’s command.
I’ll be doing it in her home. It’ll afford privacy and the isolated means to end it quick. A simple slit to the throat and she’ll be dead. I’ll have some of my men do the cleanup and disposal.
The tiger marks on my collarbone have barely healed from the other night.
Do-shik will be adding another once I’m through with the stupid girl.
For the first time, as the school semester ends and she’s relieved of classes for the summer, she deviates from her schedule.
In the afternoon she takes the subway and gets off two stops earlier than she usually would.
Intrigued, I follow distantly behind her.
I read the sign before it occurs to me where she’s going—Haneul Children’s Home.
An orphanage.
Monroe enters the building, her silhouette briefly framed by the frosted glass on the doors. The neighborhood is quiet and discreet, a good location for children without the protection of their parents. The rush of the city feels far away despite the fact we’re still very much in Busan.
After a few minutes, the light flickers on in a second floor window. Monroe appears again, taking a seat as a group of small children gather around her. They settle down on a plastic mat with their undivided attention set on her.
She smiles, her lips moving and her hands holding up a brightly colored children’s book.
…she’s volunteering at the orphanage, reading to small children.
Like her students at the school, the orphans seem to love her. They giggle and eagerly participate every time she prompts them with a question.
Two books later, one of the caretakers comes to collect the children. Story time is over.
The kids obediently file out of the room with only one boy staying behind. He’s the only one out of the group who seems upset, rubbing at his eye.
I recognize the sadness on his face. It’s more than typical childish ailments, like a skinned knee or scary dream.
This boy is deep in grief over his family.
Monroe notices as a few tears slip down his cheek, and she pulls him into a gentle hug. Her lips move, likely providing some kind of comfort. It seems to help the boy, whose whole body is tense and stiff.
It’s almost like looking into the past.
I was that boy once.
“Eomma,” I cried for days. For weeks, begging to see my mother again.
I was so young that I didn’t understand what had happened. I didn’t grasp the permanence of death, or the fact that people don’t come back once they die.
The orphanage I stayed in was just like this. Drab and gray on the outside and isolating and lonely on the inside.
The caretakers had their hands full looking after forty children at any given time. Nobody paid attention to little runt Jin-tae and his cries for his Eomma. I was one of many.
A kid who belonged to no one anymore. No other family wanted me. None of them ever came to claim me.
I was alone in the world and would be for the rest of my life.
I look at the boy Monroe’s comforting and see my younger self crying ’til I couldn’t breathe and was lightheaded.
There had been no kind stranger who ever visited us and read us stories.
The memory fades when Monroe guides the boy out of the room so he can return to the others. His tears have stopped, though I’m sure the pain is still there.
That never goes away.
Monroe packs her things and leaves shortly after.
I wait for her on the outside, tucking away the binoculars I’ve used to watch.
She’s on the move again, headed back the same way she came. I fall into step with her several paces behind.
Now she’s headed home.
She doesn’t know it yet, but these are the last few hours of her life.
The sky is purpling by the time Monroe arrives at her apartment building. This time of year in Korea, the sun sets minutes after 8 p.m.
The streetlights flicker, casting long shadows over the cracked sidewalk. She doesn’t look behind her once. She punches in the entry code to the front gate and then disappears inside the building.
I give it a second before crossing the street and following in her wake.
The summer air is thick with city smog and traces of the many different dinners being cooked from inside.
I pick up notes of black pepper, garlic, and ginger specifically.
Probably for a dish like Jeyuk Bokkeum, a spicy pork stir fry.
The keypad at the front gate buzzes as it allows me entry.
I slip through before it snicks shut again.
The lobby inside the building is narrow and tiled, more functional than luxury. The walls are a soft beige lined with cork boards that have flyers for maid services and tutor ads pinned to them.
There’s a row of mailboxes toward the back, and what seems to be a utility room.
I’m taking my time as I press the elevator button and wait for it to arrive.
It’ll be a few minutes until Monroe gets her shower started. Her routine is so formulaic, I can predict it down to the minute. The first thing she does when she gets home from work is take off her shoes— and bra —and then plugs in her iPhone to charge.
Then she wanders into the bathroom, flicking on the light and twisting on the shower. Giving it a minute or two to heat up, she strips down and steps into the tub. Her showers last about ten minutes on days she doesn’t wash her hair. On days she does, it extends to about double that.
Enough time for me to slip inside her apartment, catch her off guard in the shower, and slice her throat open. She won’t have a chance to fight back, even if she wants to.
She should be grateful I’m not going to make her suffer. Others would not be so kind.
I never am.
But as useless as she is, any further effort isn’t worth it. It’ll be a relief not to have to bore myself tracking her anymore—and dealing with the tragic memories she made me think of when she visited the orphanage.
The fact that she brought those memories up in my mind has started to make me not only pity her, but resent her. She unknowingly unlocked a part of myself I keep buried deep inside.
No one alive knows my story and how and why I became what I am.
I like to keep it that way.
The elevator doors part on the ninth floor.
I can still pick up notes of her perfume. The same perfume I had noticed on the night in the alley—along with the scent of fear rising from her brown skin.
It’s sweet and light and reminds me of spring.
Perfect for a woman like her.
Once I’m sure she’s probably in the bathroom, I step to her apartment door and stare down at the keypad that unlocks it.
The numbers glow a bright green beneath my fingers. I enter the code I memorized when I followed her home the first evening.
1-8-4-7
Beep.
The characters on the screen switch from green to a severe neon red.
DECLINED
I narrow my eyes and try again.
DECLINED
My fingers twitch. I go slower the third time, pressing the numbers one, eight, four, and seven with slight pauses in between.
DECLINED
The keypad flashes more red lights up at me, beeping for each incorrect guess. The noise is going off so frequently, I begin to question if Monroe will hear it from inside her apartment.
“Yah!” calls a female voice behind me. I hear the scratch of her slippers as she approaches and proceeds to yell at me in Hangugeo. “What do you think you’re doing?”
I turn, thrown off by her abrupt appearance.
No one else was supposed to show up.
For as large as Monroe’s building is, few people are ever around. Most work long hours and turn in for bed early in the evening. Other apartments are empty altogether.
The hallway on her floor is almost always unoccupied, except for when she quickly floats up and down it, coming and going.
The woman who has screamed out at me is barely five feet tall, wrapped in a thick floral housecoat and pale pink slippers with cartoon bears on them. Streaks of gray color her otherwise short black hair.
Most people would look at her and see a harmless little old woman.
Except I’m familiar enough with ajummas like her.
They’re as fierce and ferocious as any man three times their size. As loud and aggressive as can be, and no one dares stop them.
I’m a cold and emotionless captain in the most violent gang in South Korea. I often kill for a living. Yet as she starts toward me and demands to know what I’m doing, for a second I’m stuck on what the hell to say.
“I said,” she rants on, “what are you doing at that girl’s door?”
Her eyes rake over the length of me, making quick judgments of my character by things like the tattoos inking my skin and the leather jacket I’m wearing. Her expression sharpens.
“You her ex-boyfriend?” she demands loudly. “You look like nothing but trouble!”
I still don’t answer, throwing a furtive glance at Monroe’s door.
There’s no way she doesn’t hear the racket, unless she really is already in the shower. Still, a scene in front of her door is the last thing I want.
It’s ruinous for a mission like the one I’m on.
Even harmless rabbits like Monroe will pick up on what’s going on if she catches the man who marked her outside her apartment door.
“I’m Lee Soon-ja, the landlady,” the elder woman says, raising her chin as if there is no foot-long height difference between us. “I know the girl who lives in 9D well. She is sweet and quiet. She works hard and always pays early. I won’t let any troublemakers like you bother her!”
I glance at Monroe’s door, then back to the woman.
The hallway feels tighter now. The window for sneaking into her apartment has closed.
There’s no way this woman is about to leave me alone long enough to sneak inside.
I don’t answer her. I just step away, slowly and quietly at first, and then turn toward the elevator.
It’s still on the same floor, the doors opening at once. I’m stepping inside as I catch pieces of what the landlady mutters under her breath.
Something about “boys with no shame” and “poor foreign girls with no sense”.
The doors close and I ride the elevator down to the ground floor.
Tonight’s plan has been burned to ashes with no chance of succeeding. But I have an order from the Baekho-je to carry out, and I will do so no matter what.
I’ll be back for her, and the next time, she won’t be so lucky.