Nine Dragons

by Michael Connelly

  30

  Bosch walked out of the alley onto Nathan Road and immediately saw the crowd of onlookers gathered to watch the police response to the call inside the Chungking Mansions. Police and fire rescue vehicles were arriving and stopping and causing traffic snarls and confusion. Barricades had not yet been set up, as the arriving officers were probably too busy trying to get up to the fifteenth floor to find out what had happened. Harry was able to join the end of a flow of paramedics carrying a stretcher up the steps and into the first level of the building.

  The commotion and confusion had drawn many of the shopkeepers and customers into a crowd around the elevator alcove. Someone was barking orders at the crowd in Chinese but no one seemed to be reacting. Bosch pushed his way through and got to the rear aisle where the hotel desks were. He saw that the diversion had worked in his favor. The aisle was completely empty.

  When he got to the desk where he had rented the two rooms, he saw that a security gate had been pulled halfway down from the ceiling, indicating the desk was closed. But the man on the stool was there with his back turned while he sat at the rear counter, shoving paperwork into a briefcase. It looked like he was getting ready to leave.

  Without losing momentum Bosch jumped up and slid over the counter and under the gate, smashing into the man on the stool and knocking him to the floor. Bosch jumped on top of him and hit him twice in the face with his fist. The man’s head was on the concrete floor and he absorbed the full impact of the punches.

  “No, please!” he managed to spit out between punches.

  Bosch quickly glanced back over the counter to make sure it was still clear. He then pulled the gun from behind him and pressed the muzzle into the roll of fat below the man’s chin.

  “You got her killed, you motherfucker! And I’m going to kill you.”

  “No, please! Sir, please!”

  “You told them, didn’t you? You told them I had money.”

  “No, I have not.”

  “Don’t fucking lie to me or I’ll kill you right now. You told them!”

  The man lifted his head off the floor.

  “Okay, listen, listen, please. I said nobody to get hurt. You understand? I said nobody to—”

  Bosch pulled the gun back and brought it down hard on the man’s nose. His head snapped back against the concrete. Bosch pushed the barrel into his neck.

  “I don’t care what you said. They killed her, you fuck! Do you understand that?”

  The man was dazed and bleeding, his eyes blinking as he wavered in and out of consciousness. With his right hand, Bosch slapped his cheek.

  “Stay awake. I want you to see it coming.”

  “Please, no…I am very sorry, sir. Please don’t—”

  “Okay, this is what you’re going to do. You want to live, then you tell me who rented room fifteen fourteen on Friday. Fifteen fourteen. You tell me right now.”

  “Okay, I tell you. I show you.”

  “Okay, you show me.”

  Bosch pulled his weight back off him. The man was bleeding from the mouth and nose and Bosch was bleeding from the knuckles of his left hand. He quickly reached up and pulled the security fence all the way down to the counter.

  “Show me. Now.”

  “Okay, it is here.”

  He pointed to the briefcase he had been loading. He reached into it and Bosch raised the gun and pointed it at his head.

  “Easy.”

  The man pulled out a stack of room registration forms. Bosch saw his own on top. He reached over and grabbed it off the stack and crumpled it into the pocket of his coat. All the while he kept his aim on the man.

  “Friday, room fifteen fourteen. Find it.”

  The man put the stack of forms on the back counter and started going through them. Bosch knew he was taking too much time. The police would come any moment to the hotel desks and find them. It had been at least fifteen minutes since the shootings on fifteen. He saw a shelf under the front counter and put the gun there. If the police caught him with it, he’d go to prison, no matter what.

  Looking at the robber’s gun as he placed it down prompted the realization that he had left his ex-wife and the mother of his daughter lying dead and alone up there on fifteen. It put a spear through Bosch’s chest. He closed his eyes for a moment to try to push the thought and vision away.

  “Here it is.”

  Bosch opened his eyes. The man was turning to him from the rear counter. Bosch heard a distinct metal snap. He saw the man’s right arm start to swing around and up from his side and Bosch knew there was a knife before he saw it. In a split-second decision, he chose to block rather than parry the attack. He moved forward and into the man, raising his left forearm to block the knife and driving his right fist toward his attacker’s throat.

  The knife tore through the sleeve of Bosch’s jacket and he felt the blade slice into the inside of his forearm. But that was all the damage he took. His punch to the throat sent the man backwards and he fell on the overturned stool. Bosch dropped on him again, grabbing his knife hand by the wrist and smashing it back repeatedly against the floor until the weapon clattered loose on the concrete.

  Bosch raised himself up while still holding the man down by the throat. He could feel blood sliding down his arm from the wound. He thought again about Eleanor lying dead up on fifteen. Her life and everything taken from her before she could even say a word. Before she could see her daughter safe again.

  Bosch raised his left fist and struck the man viciously in the ribs. He did it again and again, punching body and face, until he was sure most of the man’s ribs and jaw were broken and he’d lapsed into unconsciousness.

  Bosch was winded. He picked up the switchblade and folded it closed and dropped it into his pocket. He moved off the man’s unmoving body and gathered the fallen registration forms. He then got up and shoved them back into the counterman’s briefcase and closed it. He leaned over the counter to look out through the security gate. It was still clear in the aisle, though he could now hear announcements being made through a bullhorn coming from the elevator alcove. He knew that police procedure would have to be to shut the place down and secure it.

  He raised the security gate two feet and then grabbed the gun off the shelf and put it into his rear waistband. He climbed over the counter with the briefcase and slid out. After checking to make sure he had left no blood on the counter, he lowered the gate and walked away.

  As he moved, Bosch held his arm up to check the wound through the rip in his coat sleeve. It looked superficial but it was a bleeder. He pulled his coat sleeve up to bunch it around the wound and absorb the blood. He checked the floor behind him to make sure he wasn’t dripping.

  At the elevator alcove the police were herding everybody out to the street and into a cordoned-off area where they would be held for questioning about what they might have heard or seen. Bosch knew he couldn’t go through that process. He made a U-turn and headed down an aisle toward the other side of the building. He got to an intersection of aisles and caught a glimpse to his left of two men hurrying in a direction away from the police activity.

  Bosch followed, realizing he wasn’t the only one in the building who wouldn’t want to be questioned by the police.

  The two men disappeared into a narrow passageway between two of the now-shuttered shops. Bosch followed.

  The passage led to a staircase down into a basement where there were rows of storage cages for the shopkeepers above, who had such limited public retail space. Bosch followed the men down one aisle and then turned right. He saw them heading toward a glowing red Chinese symbol over a door and knew it had to be an exit. The men pushed through and an alarm sounded. They slammed the door behind them.

  Bosch ran toward the door and pushed through. He found himself in the same pedestrian alley he had been in earlier. He quickly walked out to Nathan Road and looked for Sun and the Mercedes.

  Headlights flashed from half a block away and Bosch saw the car waiting ahead of the
clot of police vehicles parked haphazardly in front of the entrance to Chungking Mansions. Sun pulled away from the curb and cruised up to him. Bosch at first went to the back door but then realized Eleanor wasn’t with them anymore. He got in the front.

  “You took long time,” Sun said.

  “Yeah, let’s get out of here.”

  Sun glanced down at the briefcase with Bosch’s bleeding knuckles wrapped around the handle. He said nothing. He accelerated and headed away from the Chungking Mansions. Bosch turned in his seat to look back. His eyes rose up the building to the floor where they had left Eleanor. Somehow, Bosch had always thought they would grow old together. Their divorce didn’t matter. Other lovers didn’t matter. They’d always had an on-and-off relationship but that didn’t matter either. It had always been in the back of his mind that the separations were what were temporary. In the long run they would be together. Of course, they had Madeline together and that would always be their bond. But he had believed there would be more.

  Now all of that was gone and it was because of the choices he had made. Whether it was because of his case or his momentary lapse in flashing his money didn’t really matter. All roads led back to him and he wasn’t sure how he was going to live with it.

  He leaned forward and put his head in his hands.

  “Sun Yee, I’m sorry…I loved her, too.”

  Sun didn’t respond for a long time and when he spoke, he brought Bosch out of the downward spiral and back into focus.

  “We must find your daughter now. For Eleanor we will do this.”

  Bosch straightened up and nodded. He then leaned forward and pulled the briefcase onto his lap.

  “Pull over when you can. You have to look at this stuff.”

  Sun made several turns and put several blocks between them and Chungking Mansions before pulling to a stop against the curb. They were across the street from a ramshackle market that was crowded with westerners.

  “What’s this place?” Bosch asked.

  “This is the jade market. Very famous for westerners. You will not be noticed here.”

  Bosch nodded. He opened the briefcase and handed Sun the unruly stack of hotel registration forms. There were at least fifty of them. Most had been filled out in Chinese and were unreadable to Bosch.

  “What do I look for?” Sun asked.

  “Date and room number. Friday was the eleventh. We want that and room fifteen fourteen. It’s got to be in that stack.”

  Sun started reading. Bosch watched for a moment and then looked out the window at the jade market. Through the open entry points he saw rows and rows of stalls, old men and women selling their wares under a flimsy roof of plywood and tenting. It was crowded with customers coming and going.

  Bosch thought of the jade monkeys on red twine that he had found in his daughter’s room. She had been here. He wondered if she had come this far from home on her own or with friends, maybe with He and Quick.

  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.

  31

  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 Admin
istrative 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.