9 Dragons

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
    I n 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