9 Dragons

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.
    “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