Michael Connelly - 9 Dragons

“She would be very valuable, wouldn’t she?”

“Yes.”

Bosch closed his eyes. Everything changed. His daughter’s abductors might not be simply holding her until Bosch kicked Chang loose in Los Angeles. They might be preparing to move her or sell her into a netherworld of dark choices from which she would never return. He tried to push the possibilities out of the way. He looked out the side window.

“We have time,” he said, knowing full well he was talking to himself and not to Sun. “Nothing’s happened to her yet. They wouldn’t do anything until they heard from L.A. Even if the plan was never to give her back, they wouldn’t do anything yet.”

Bosch turned to look at Sun and he nodded in agreement.

“We will find her,” he said.

Bosch reached behind his back and pulled out the gun he had taken from one of the men he had killed in the Chungking Mansions. He studied it for the first time and immediately recognized the weapon.

“I think you were right about those guys being Vietnamese,” he said.

Sun looked over at the weapon and then back at the road.

“Please do not shoot the gun in the car,” he said.

Despite everything that had happened, Bosch smiled.

“I won’t. I don’t need to. I already know how to use this one and I doubt the guy was carrying a gun that didn’t work.”

Bosch held the weapon in his left hand and looked down the sight to the floor. He then held it up and studied it again. It was an American-made Colt.45, Model 1911A1. He had carried the exact same gun as a soldier in Vietnam almost forty years before. When his job was to drop down into the tunnels and seek out and kill the enemy.

Bosch ejected the magazine and the extra round from the chamber. He had the maximum eight rounds. He checked the action several times and then started to reload the gun. He stopped when he noticed something scratched into the side of the magazine. He held it up closely to try to read it.

There were initials and numbers hand-etched in the black steel siding of the magazine, but time and use-the loading and reloading of the weapon-had nearly worn them away. Angling the surface for better light, Bosch read JFE Sp4, 27th .

All at once, Bosch remembered the care and protection all tunnel rats had placed in their weapons and ammunition. When all you went down into the black with was your.45, a flashlight and four extra ammo clips, you checked everything twice and then you checked it again. A thousand feet into a line was not where you wanted to find you had a weapon jam, wet ammo or dead batteries. Bosch and his fellow rats marked and hoarded their clips the way surface soldiers guarded their cigarettes and Playboy magazines.

He studied the etching closely. Whoever JFE was, he had been a spec 4 with the 27th Infantry. That meant he could have been a rat. Bosch wondered if the gun he was holding had been left behind in a tunnel somewhere in the Iron Triangle, and whether it had been taken from JFE’s cold, dead hand.

“We are here,” Sun said.

Bosch looked up. Sun had stopped in the middle of the street. There was no traffic behind them. He pointed through the windshield at a government apartment tower so tall that Bosch had to lean down beneath the visor to see its roofline. Open walkways along the front of every floor offered views of the front doors and windows of what must have been three hundred different dwellings. Laundry hung over the walkway railings at different intervals on almost every floor, turning the drab facade of the building into a colorful mosaic that differentiated it from the duplicate buildings on either side of it. A sign in multiple languages over the tunnel-like entrance at center announced incongruously that the place was called Miami Beach Garden Estates.

“The address is on the sixth floor,” Sun said after double-checking the Chungking Mansions registration form.

“Park it and we’ll go up.”

Sun nodded and pulled past the building. At the next intersection he made a U-turn and drove back, pulling to the curb in front of a playground that was surrounded by a ten-foot fence and crowded inside with children and their mothers. Bosch knew he had parked there as an edge against having the car stolen or vandalized while they left it alone.

They got out and walked along the fence line until turning left toward the entrance to the building.

The tunnel was lined on both sides with mailboxes, most of which had popped locks and small graffiti insignias scrawled on them. The passageway led to a bank of elevators where two women holding the hands of small children waited. They paid no mind to Sun and Bosch. A security guard sat behind a tiny counter but never looked up from his newspaper.

Bosch and Sun followed the women onto the elevator. One of the women inserted a key at the bottom of the control board and then pushed two buttons. Before she pulled the key Sun quickly reached over and hit the 6 button.

The first stop was on six. Sun and Bosch moved down the walkway to the third door on the left side of the building. Bosch noticed that against the railing in front of the door of the next apartment down was a small altar with an ash can that was still smoking following a sacrifice to the hungry ghosts. The odor of burnt plastic was in the air.

Bosch took a position to the right of the door where Sun had stopped. He swung his arm back underneath his coat and gripped the handgun but didn’t pull it. He felt the clotted blood in the wound on his arm break free with the movement. He was going to start bleeding again.

Sun looked at him and Bosch nodded that he was ready. Sun knocked on the door and they waited.

No one answered.

He knocked again. This time louder.

They waited again. Bosch glanced out over the playground to the Mercedes and saw that so far it had been left alone.

No one answered.

Sun finally stepped back away from the door.

“What do you wish to do?”

Bosch looked down at the smoking ash can thirty feet away.

“There’s somebody home next door. Let’s ask them if they’ve seen this guy around.”

Sun led the way and knocked on the next door. This time it was opened. A small woman of about sixty peeked out. Sun nodded and smiled and spoke to her in Chinese. Soon the woman relaxed and opened the door a little bit wider. Sun kept talking and soon after that she opened it all the way and stood aside so they could enter.

As Bosch stepped over the threshold Sun whispered to him.

“Five hundred Hong Kong dollars. I promised her.”

“No problem.”

It was a small two-room apartment. The first room served as kitchen, dining room and living room. It was sparely furnished and smelled like hot cooking oil. Bosch peeled five hundred-dollar bills off his roll without taking it out of his pocket. He put the bills under a dish of salt that was on the kitchen table. He then pulled out a chair and sat down.

Sun remained standing and so did the woman. He continued his conversation in Chinese, pointing at Bosch for a moment. Bosch nodded and smiled and acted like he knew what was being said.

Three minutes went by and then Sun broke off the interview so he could summarize for Bosch.

“She is Fengyi Mai. She lives here alone. She said she has not seen Peng Qingcai since yesterday morning. He lives next door with his mother and his younger sister. She has not seen them either. But she heard them yesterday afternoon. Through the wall.”

“How old is Peng Qingcai?”

Sun communicated the question and then translated the response.

“She thinks he is eighteen. He doesn’t go to school anymore.”

“What’s his sister’s name?”

Another back and forth and then Sun reported that the sister’s name was He. But he didn’t pronounce it the way Harry’s daughter had.