“You look dead,” was Yixing’s greeting when he showed up in the office with coffee.  Minseok was draped over his desk – Jongdae and Sungjong were not yet in – and he certainly felt more or less the way Yixing had pronounced him to look.  “No sleep?”

“Jaera woke up with toothache at three.  We all thought she was going to scream the house down.”

Normally when Minseok or Jongdae came in half asleep, Yixing would poke fun at them and then continue laughing to himself when they woke themselves up with copious amounts of coffee, but this time he seemed to be in a more compassionate frame of mind.

“Do you want to take the day off?”

“No.  My daughter is a savage when she’s in pain and I don’t want to be anywhere near her.”

Yixing laughed.  “Not currently the apple of your eye, huh?”

Minseok scowled at him.  Placing coffee in front of him, Yixing moved over to his own desk.

“The biggest benefit of being a childless bachelor is that the only women in your life are your mother and your sisters, and you mutually abdicate responsibility for each other when you turn eighteen.”

“You’re the reason I’m not a bachelor,” Minseok muttered, dragging the coffee towards him.  Yixing laughed again.

“All right, sleepyhead.  You have a choice for what to do today: desk work, raids or out on the beat.  But no driving.  You’ll be a danger on wheels in this condition.”

Minseok perked up.  “Raids?”

“It’ll probably be a tame one – we’re seizing documents and evidence from somebody involved in a tax evasion case.  I was going to send somebody with the new recruits like Jackson, but we can go.”

“Yeah, let’s,” agreed Minseok, glugging down the rest of his coffee and getting to his feet, looking considerably more awake than he had done.  “I could do with something physical and mindless.”

Yixing snorted.  “That’s assuming we need to break down the door.”

Yixing’s prediction of tame was correct.  The woman whose house they had a warrant for let them in the second they announced their presence, and they were in and out of the building in under thirty minutes with everything they needed.

“Are you sure we have everything?” Jongdae fretted as he drove them back towards the police station.  “It always feels like we’re missing something when it barely takes any time.  Do you reckon she was compliant to throw us off the scent?”

“No,” responded Yixing from the back of the cruiser.  “We have everything, I’m sure of it.”

“Good,” said Jongdae.  “Does anybody want to stop off for a coffee?  I could do with a coffee.”

Both of the others responded with grunts in the affirmative, and Jongdae switched lanes so that they could stop off at a local coffee shop they all liked.  He had barely pulled over before several horns blared and a car zoomed past them at well over the legal speed limit.

“Oh no,” said Minseok, already anticipating what was to come next, but he was too late to do anything about it: gritting his teeth, Jongdae fired up the roof.

“That’s dangerous and illegal driving.  Coffee’ll have to wait, boys.”  He stamped on the accelerator, flooring the pedal so hard that they were all jerked back in their seats.  Yixing yelped.

“Jongdae, what are you doing?”

“Fighting crime!” Jongdae responded cheerfully as the traffic on the roads parted like the Red Sea.  “God, I love car chases!”

“I’m gonna hurl,” Yixing announced.  “Somebody pass me a bag.”

Sungjong, with great delight, commandeered a police cruiser to join them at the coffee shop when they finally made it there two arrests and forty-five minutes later.

“I learnt something new today,” he announced as he slid into their booth, accepting the Americano off Jongdae, who’d ordered for him.  “There are eight different kinds of sirens I can use in a police car to make people get out of my way.”

“Did you use them all?” Jongdae asked.

“By accident.”  It was clear from the gleam in Sungjong’s eye that he wasn’t telling the truth.  “Kim Jongin rang while you were out.”

“I thought we were here for a break?” Yixing asked without lifting his noise out of the documents they’d confiscated.  Minseok cleared his throat loudly.  “What?  This is fun.”

Sungjong caught the eye of the other two and twirled his finger near his forehead.  “Screw loose,” he mouthed at them.  Neither made an effort to contradict him.

“Anyway,” Sungjong went on loud enough for Yixing to have to listen, “Jongin and Kyungsoo will be flying over in a couple of days when their new passports and visas have been processed by the embassies, and Jongin said that Huang Zitao’s already getting on to people to wipe up Sangchu’s operations in China, so we want to make sure we catch and snuff the guy.”

“Arrest, not kill,” Jongdae correct.

Sungjong blushed.  “Sorry.  Old habit.”

Tao was already hard on the job by the time the embassies had finished up Jongin’s and Kyungsoo’s necessary documentation to fly back to Korea.  He’d made the pair of them write witness statements in preparation to be used in court, or just filed as evidenced, and somehow managed to draft in a bilingual lawyer friend of his to translate them both at just a few hours’ notice.  Both of them had also had also been interviewed by a high ranking police commissioner for clearer insight into the case.  Even Jongin wasn’t quite sure where Tao had produced the man from so quickly.

“For a total goof as a young adult, he’s sure sharpened up, hasn’t he?” Jongin observed to Kyungsoo in shock as they watched forensics pile into Tao’s apartment to take away the evidence they’d gathered for investigation.  Amused, Kyungsoo snorted softly to himself and adjusted the headphones over his ears, trying not to lose concentration on surveillance job he was attempting to do.  “I mean, this is terrifyingly organised.”

“He does seem like a completely different person,” he agreed.

The flight back over to South Korea was not a relaxing one.  As they headed down towards Busan, turbulence struck the aircraft and it became evident that they would be landing in a storm.  Jongin typed frantically away on a new tablet he’d convince