Michael Connelly - 9 Dragons

This told him that sooner or later the three people below would be coming up to the loft. He looked at the bed. It was a bare mattress on top of a thick box spring sitting on a frame a foot off the ground. He decided it was the only place he could possibly hide and not be discovered. He quickly got down to the floor and shimmied under the bed, his chest scraping on the underside of the box spring. He moved to the center and waited, tracking the apartment tour by the voices.

Finally, the entourage headed up the steps to the loft. Bosch held his breath as the couple moved around the room and both sides of the bed. He waited for someone to sit on the bed but that never happened.

Bosch suddenly felt a vibration in his pocket and realized that he had not muted his phone. Luckily the man showing the apartment was continuing what was probably the sales pitch about how great the place was. His voice covered any notice of the low-level vibration. Bosch quickly worked his hand into his pocket and pulled the phone to see if the call was from his daughter’s phone. He would have to answer such a call, no matter the circumstance.

He reached the phone up into the box spring so he could see it. The call was from Barbara Starkey, the video tech, and Bosch hit the call-decline button. That was a callback he could make later.

Opening the phone to check the call had activated the screen. The dim light illuminated the inside of the box spring and Bosch saw a gun jammed behind one of the wooden slats of the frame.

Bosch’s heart kicked its beat up a notch as he stared at the gun. But he decided not to touch it until the apartment was empty again. He closed the phone and waited. Soon he heard the visitors on the staircase going down. It sounded like they took another quick look around the lower level and then left.

Bosch heard the dead bolt being locked from the outside. He then pushed his way out from under the bed.

After waiting a few moments to make sure the rental party was gone for good, he turned the overhead light back on. He moved back to the bed and pushed the mattress off the box spring, leaning it against the rear wall of the loft. He then raised the box spring and leaned it against the mattress. He looked in at the gun, still held in place by the wood framework.

He still could not see it clearly so he pulled his phone again, opened it and used it as a flashlight by holding it in close to the weapon.

“Damn,” he said out loud.

He was looking for a Glock, the gun with a rectangular firing pin. The gun hidden under Chang’s bed was a Smith & Wesson.

There was nothing here of use to him. Bosch realized that once again he was at ground zero. As if to accentuate this point, a tiny beeping sound came from his watch. He reached to his wrist and turned it off. He had set the alarm earlier so as not to risk missing his flight. It was time for him to head to the airport.

After putting the bed back in place, Bosch turned the light off in the loft and quietly slipped out of the apartment. His plan was to go home first to pick up his passport and lock up his gun. He would not be allowed to carry the weapon into a foreign country without that country’s approval-a process that would take days if not weeks. He didn’t plan to pack any clothes because he didn’t see himself having time to change clothes in Hong Kong. He was on a mission that would begin the moment he stepped off the plane.

He got on the 10 west from Monterey Park and planned on taking the 101 up through Hollywood to his home. He started mulling over a plan for directing police to the gun hidden in Chang’s former apartment but as of now there was no probable cause to hit the place. Still, the gun needed to be found and examined. It was of no use to Bosch in the John Li investigation but that didn’t mean Chang had used it for good deeds and philanthropy. It had been used for triad business and it could very likely lead to something.

As he was taking the 101 north along the edges of the civic center, Bosch remembered the call from Barbara Starkey. He checked for a message on his phone and heard Starkey tell him to call her as soon as possible. It sounded like maybe she had made a break. Bosch hit the callback button.

“Barbara, it’s Harry.”

“Harry, yes, I was hoping to get to you before I go home.”

“You should’ve gone home about three hours ago.”

“Yeah, well, I told you I would look at this thing.”

“Thank you, Barbara. It means a lot. What did you find?”

“A couple things. First of all, I have a printout here that is a little sharper if you want it.”

Bosch was disappointed. It sounded like there wasn’t much more than what he already had and she just wanted to let him know there was a clearer picture of the view out the window of the room where his daughter was held. Sometimes, he had noticed, when somebody did a favor for you, they really wanted you to know it. But he decided he would just make do with what he had. A jog in off the freeway to pick up the picture would take too much time. He had a plane to catch.

“Anything else?” he asked. “I have to get to the airport.”

“Yes, I have a couple other visual and audio identifiers that might help you,” Starkey said.

Bosch paid full attention now.

“What are they?”

“Well, one I think might be a train or a subway. Another is a snippet of conversation that is not Chinese. And the last one I think is a silent helicopter.”

“What do you mean silent? ”

“I mean literally silent. I have a flash reflection in the window of a helicopter going by, but I don’t have any real audio track to go with it.”

Bosch didn’t respond at first. He knew what she was talking about. The Whisper Jet helicopters that the rich and powerful used to move over and around Hong Kong. He had seen them. Commuting by helicopter wasn’t uncommon but he also knew only a few buildings in each district were allowed to operate landing pads on their roofs. One reason his ex-wife chose the building where she lived in Happy Valley was that it had a helicopter pad on the roof. She could get to the casino in Macau in twenty minutes door-to-door instead of the two hours it would take to leave the building, get to the ferry docks, take a boat across the harbor and then cab or walk from the dock to the casino.

“Barbara, I’ll be there in five minutes,” he said.

He exited on Los Angeles Street and headed over to Parker Center. Because of the late hour, Bosch had his pick of spaces in the garage behind the old police headquarters. He parked and then quickly crossed the street and entered through the back door. The elevator up seemed to take forever, and when he walked into the mostly abandoned SID lab, it had actually been seven minutes since he had closed the phone.

“You’re late,” Starkey said.

“Sorry, thanks for waiting.”

“I’m just giving you a hard time. I know you’re on the run, so let’s just look at this thing.”

She pointed to one of her screens where there was a frozen image of the window from the phone video. It was what Bosch had printed out. Starkey put her hands on the dials.

“Okay,” she said. “Keep your eyes up here at the top of the glass reflection. We didn’t see-or hear-this before.”

She turned one dial slowly, reversing the tape. In the murky glass reflection Bosch saw what he had not seen before. Just as the aim of the camera started its swing back toward his daughter, a helicopter moved across the top of the reflection like a ghost. It was a small black craft with some sort of unreadable insignia on its side.

“Now here it is in real time.”

She backed the video up until the camera was focused on Bosch’s daughter and she was kicking at it. Starkey hit a button and it went by in real time. The camera swung toward the window for a split second and then back. Bosch’s eyes registered the window but never the reflection of the city, let alone a passing helicopter.