9 Dragons

already crowded with shopkeepers and customers. Six-foot-wide shop stalls offered everything from watches and cell phones to newspapers of every language and foods of any taste. There was an edgy, gritty feel to the place that left Bosch casually checking his wake every few steps. He wanted to know who was behind him.
    He moved to the center, where he came to an elevator alcove. There was a line fifteen people deep waiting for two elevators, and Bosch noticed that one elevator was open, dark inside and obviously out of commission. There were two security guards at the front of the line, checking to make sure everybody going up had a room key or was with somebody who had a key. Above the door of the one functioning elevator was a video screen that showed its interior. It was crowded to maximum capacity, sardines in a can.
    Bosch was staring at the screen and wondering how he was going to get up to the fourteenth floor when Eleanor and Sun caught up to him. Eleanor roughly grabbed him by the arm.
    “Harry, enough with the one-man army! Don’t run off like that again.”
    Bosch looked at her. It wasn’t anger he saw in her eyes. It was fear. She wanted to be sure she wasn’t without him when she faced whatever there was to face on the fourteenth floor.
    “I just want to keep moving,” Bosch said.
    “Then move with us, not away from us. Are we going up”
    “We need a key to go up.”
    “Then we have to rent a room.”
    “Where do we do that?”
    “I don’t know.”
    Eleanor looked at Sun.
    “We have to go up.”
    That was all she said but the message was transmitted. He nodded and led them away from the alcove and farther into the labyrinth of shop stalls. Soon they came to a row of counters with signs in multiple languages.
    “You rent the room here,” Sun said. “There is more than one hotel here.”
    “You mean in the building” Bosch asked. “More than one”
    “Yes, many. You pick from here.”
    He gestured to the signs on the counters. And Bosch realized that what Sun was saying was that there were multiple hotels within the building, all of them competing for the business of the cut-rate traveler. Some, by virtue of the language on their signs, targeted travelers from specific countries.
    “Ask which one has the fourteenth floor,” he said.
    “There won’t be a fourteenth floor.”
    Bosch realized he was right.
    “Fifteenth, then. Which one has the fifteenth floor?”
    Sun went down the line, asking about the fifteenth floor, until he stopped at the third counter and waved Eleanor and Bosch over.
    “Here.”
    Bosch took in the man behind the counter. He looked like he had been there for forty years. His bell-shaped body seemed form-fitted to the stool he sat on. He was smoking a cigarette attached to a four-inch holder made of carved bone. He didn’t like getting smoke in his eyes.
    “Do you speak English” Bosch asked.
    “Yes, I have English,” the man said tiredly.
    “Good. We want a room on the four-the fifteenth floor.”
    “All of you? One room”
    “Yes, one room.”
    “No, you can’t one room. Only two persons.”
    Bosch realized that he meant the maximum occupancy of each room was two people.
    “Then give me two rooms on fifteen.”
    “You do.”
    The deskman slid a clipboard across the counter. There was a pen attached with a string and under the clip a thin stack of registration forms. Bosch quickly scribbled his name and address and slid the board back across the counter.
    “ID, passport,” the deskman said.
    Bosch pulled his passport and the man checked it. He wrote the number down on a piece of scratch paper and handed it back.
    “How much?” Bosch asked.
    “How long you stay?”
    “Ten minutes.”
    The deskman moved his eyes over all three of them as he considered what Bosch’s answer meant.
    “Come on,” Bosch said impatiently. “How much?”
    He reached into his pocket for his cash.
    “Two hundred American.”
    “I don’t have American. I have Hong Kong dollars.”
    “Two room, one thousand five hundred.”
    Sun stepped forward and put his hand down over Bosch’s money.
    “No, too much.”
    He started speaking quickly and authoritatively to the deskman, refusing to let him take advantage of Bosch. But Harry didn’t care. He cared about momentum, not the money. He peeled fifteen hundred off his roll and threw it on the desk.
    “Keys,” he demanded.
    The deskman disengaged from Sun and swiveled around to the double row of cubbyholes behind