Michael Connelly - 9 Dragons

Outside one of the entrances an old woman was selling incense sticks and had a bucket fire going. On a folding table next to her were rows of papier-mâché items for sale to be burned. Bosch saw a row of tigers and wondered why a dead ancestor would need a tiger.

“Here,” Sun said.

He held a registration form up for Bosch to read.

“What’s it say?”

“Tuen Mun. We go there.”

It sounded to Bosch like he had said Tin Moon .

“What’s Tin Moon?”

“ Tuen Mun . It is in the New Territories. This man lives there.”

“What’s his name”

“Peng Qingcai.”

Qingcai, Bosch thought. An easy jump to an Americanized name to use with girls at the mall might be Quick. Maybe Peng Qingcai was He’s older brother, the boy Madeline had left the mall with on Friday.

“Does the registration have his age or birth date?”

“No, no age.”

It was a long shot. Bosch had not put his birth date down when he had rented the rooms, and the deskman had only taken his passport number, none of the other particulars of identity.

“The address is there?”

“Yes.”

“Can you find it?”

“Yes, I know this place.”

“Good. Let’s go. How long?”

“It is long time in the car. We go north and then west. It will take one hour or more. The train would be faster.”

Time was at a premium but Bosch knew the car gave them autonomy.

“No,” he said. “Once we find her we’ll need the car.”

Sun nodded his agreement and pulled the car away from the curb. Once they were on their way, Bosch shrugged off his jacket and rolled up his shirtsleeve to take a better look at the knife wound on his arm. It was a two-inch slash on the upper inside of his forearm. Blood was finally clotting in the wound.

Sun looked over at it quickly and then back at the road.

“Who did this to you?”

“The man behind the counter.”

Sun nodded.

“He set us up, Sun Yee. He saw my money and set us up. I was so stupid.”

“It was a mistake.”

He had certainly backed off his angry accusation in the stairwell. But Bosch wasn’t backing off his own assessment. He had gotten Eleanor killed.

“Yeah, but I wasn’t the one who paid for it,” he said.

Bosch pulled the switchblade out of the jacket pocket and reached to the backseat for the blanket. He cut a long strip off the blanket and wrapped it around his arm, tucking the end underneath. He made sure it wasn’t too tight but that it would keep blood from running down his arm.

He rolled his shirtsleeve back down. It was soaked with blood between the elbow and cuff. He pulled his jacket back on. Luckily it was black and the bloodstains weren’t readily noticeable.

As they moved north through Kowloon the urban blight and crowding grew exponentially. It was like any large city, Bosch thought. The further you got from the money, the more gritty and desperate the appearances grew.

“Tell me about Tuen Mun,” he said.

“Very crowded,” Sun said. “Only Chinese. Heavy-duty.”

“Heavy-duty triad?”

“Yes. It is not a good place for your daughter to be.”

Bosch didn’t think it would be. But he saw one thing positive about it. Moving in and hiding a white girl might be hard to do without notice. If Madeline was being held in Tuen Mun, he would find her. They would find her.

In the past five years, Harry Bosch’s only financial contribution to the support of his daughter had been to pay for her trips to Los Angeles, give her spending money from time to time and write an annual check for twelve thousand dollars to cover half her tuition to the exclusive Happy Valley Academy. This last contribution was not the result of any demand by his ex-wife. Eleanor Wish had made a very comfortable living and never once asked Bosch directly or indirectly through legal channels for a dollar of child support. It was Bosch who needed and demanded to be allowed to contribute in some way. Helping to pay for her schooling allowed him wrongly or rightly to feel that he played some sort of integral part in his daughter’s upbringing.

Consequently, he grew to have a paternal involvement in her studies. Whether in person on visits to Hong Kong or early every Sunday morning-for him-on their weekly overseas phone call, Bosch’s routine was to discuss Madeline’s schoolwork and quiz her about her current assignments.

From all of this came an incidental, textbook knowledge of Hong Kong history. He therefore knew that the place he was now heading toward, the New Territories, was not actually new to Hong Kong. The vast geographic zone surrounding the Kowloon peninsula had been added by lease to Hong Kong more than a century ago as a buffer against outside invasion of the British colony. When the lease was up and the sovereignty of all of Hong Kong was transferred from the British back to the People’s Republic of China in 1997, the New Territories remained part of the Special Administrative Region, which allowed Hong Kong to continue to function as one of the world’s centers of capitalism and culture, as a unique place in the world where East meets West.

The NT was vast and primarily rural but with government-built population centers that were densely crowded with the poorest and most uneducated citizens of the SAR. Crime was higher and money scarcer. The lure of the triads was strong. Tuen Mun would be one of these places.

“Many pirates were here when I grew up,” Sun said.

It was the first either he or Bosch had spoken in more than twenty minutes of driving as each man had lapsed into private thoughts. They were just entering the city on a freeway. Bosch saw row after row of tall residential structures that were so plainly uniform and monolithic that he knew they had to be government-built public housing estates. They were surrounded by rolling hills crowded with smaller homes in older neighborhoods. This was no gleaming skyline. It was drab and depressing, a fishing village turned into a massive vertical housing complex.

“What do you mean by that? You’re from Tuen Mun?”

“I grew up here, yes. Until I was the age of twenty-two.”

“Were you in a triad, Sun Yee?”

Sun didn’t answer. He acted like he was too busy engaging the turn signal and making important checks of the mirrors as they exited the freeway.

“I don’t care, you know,” Bosch said. “I only care about one thing.”

Sun nodded.

“We will find her.”

“I know that.”

They had crossed a river and entered a canyon created by the walls of forty-story buildings lining both sides of the street.

“What about the pirates” Bosch asked. “Who were they?”

“Smugglers. They came up the river from the South China Sea. They controlled the river.”

Bosch was wondering if Sun was trying to tell him something by mentioning this.

“What did they smuggle?”

“Everything. They brought in guns and drugs. People.”

“And what did they take out?”

Sun nodded as if Bosch had answered a question rather than asked one.

“What do they smuggle out now ?”

It was a long moment before Sun answered.

“Electronics. American DVDs. Children sometimes. Girls and boys.”

“And where do they go?”

“This depends.”

“On what?”

“What they want them for. Some of it is sex. Some is organs. Many mainlanders buy boys because they have no sons.”

Bosch thought of the wad of toilet paper with the bloodstain on it. Eleanor had jumped to the conclusion that they had injected Madeline, that they had drugged her to better control her. He now realized that they could have extracted rather than injected, that blood-typing would require a withdrawal of blood from a vein with a syringe. The wad could have been a compress to stop the blood after the needle was removed.