Book Review: 'Nine Dragons' by Michael Connelly
Harry Bosch is a Los Angeles police detective in mid-career, divorced, with a thirteen-year-old daughter living most of the year with her mother in Hong Kong. He has just been assigned to a new robbery/murder case in a mom-and-pop grocery in one of LA’s seedier neighborhoods.
The police sergeant on the scene motions Bosch over to the counter where the dead Chinese proprietor lies, three bullet wounds in his chest, blood on his lips and hand. No blood on his teeth.
His wife had found him when she had brought him his dinner. She speaks only Chinese, and a translator from the LA police Asian Gang Unit is on his way. Someone had removed the disc from the store’s survey camera. Liquor and cigarette displays are intact — nothing missing. Bosch finds a gun under the counter; it has not been fired. Two back-up discs are found near the recorder, dated a week and two weeks ago.
Past midnight now; Bosch takes the discs to study at his office. A week apart, each shows the same customer offering a twenty and getting back a one, a five, a ten, and eleven twenties including the twenty he had given Li. An apparent weekly pay-off. Shown the video David Chu, the Chinese translator, points out the tattoo of a knife on the man’s arm. Chu’s office has a collection of mug shots identifying the man as Bo Jing Chang, a member of a triad, or Chinese criminal gang. Chu has contacts in a Chinese neighborhood who lead him to the man, and he and Bosch tail him as he makes collection rounds, including Li’s son’s upscale grocery in another part of town. Maintaining their watch the next day, they follow him to LAX airport and see him park in a longtime lot and remove a large suitcase from his trunk. Suspecting he is fleeing the country, they arrest him on a murder charge. They don’t yet have proof, but it’s Friday afternoon, and if they don’t jail him until after the judges’ offices close, they will have till Monday to legally charge him.
Within two hours, Bosch gets an anonymous, threatening phone call telling him to “Back off. Chang is not alone.” He also gets an e-mail video from his daughter Maddie in Hong Kong, showing her bound to a chair and gagged. The video shows a hand removing the gag to permit one word, “Dad!” She kicks at the hand and her chair tips over, showing a brief view of a window, before the video ends.
Harry Bosch phones his ex-wife Eleanor. An FBI agent when he met and married her, she is now a valued professional card player for a Macau casino, traveling to work by helicopter daily. Hong Kong is fifteen hours ahead of Pacific Time; she would just be waking up. “Harry?” her voice is alert.
“Eleanor, what’s going on? Where’s Madeline?”
“I don’t know. She didn’t come home from the mall after school Friday… I’ve called her friends and they all claim not to know where she is.” He describes the thirty-second video, leaving nothing out. Eleanor made a high-pitched wail that only a mother could make for a lost daughter. “I’m hanging up and calling the Hong Kong police,” she declares.
“No! If the people who have her find out, we might never get her back. I’m going to have the video analyzed, and I’m coming over. Talk to the casino people. If there is someone you are told you can trust, then make the call. And see if you can get me a gun. I can’t take mine.”
“They put you in prison for guns over here.”
“I know, but you know people from the casino. Get me a gun.”
“I’ll try.”
“We’re going to get her back.”
When Bosch deplanes at Hong Kong, he passes through Immigration and Customs, finds a money exchange window open and exchanges a large part of his savings account into Hong Kong dollars [roughly 7 HK to 1 US dollar]. He finds Eleanor waiting in the reception area. The man with her she introduces as her driver, Sun Yee, who by his watchful attitude and dark glasses appears to be her bodyguard as well, and perhaps more.
Sun Yee knows where to get an illegal gun. He drives them to a slum neighborhood of Hong Kong, parks, enters a building. Comes out ten minutes later, crosses the street to a fast- food noodle shop, emerges with a styrofoam to-go carton which he hands to Bosch. Harry finds a Black Star pistol inside with a sixteen-round magazine. He empties the gun of its bullets, checks the action and trigger several times, reloads.
Still-frames from the video show an open window, the kind that cranks outward, its glass reflecting a wide street below, and the buildings of downtown Hong Kong in the near-distance across water. The street is therefore in Kowloon, across the harbor from Hong Kong itself, and the scene is from a high floor. The wide four-lane street Eleanor identifies as Nathan Road. It’s lined with tall buildings; some have old-fashioned crank-to-open windows, others have air conditioners mounted on the sill. Within two blocks, they identify the random pattern matching their photo, Chungking Mansions, several tacky hotels in a single building. Two elevators, only one working. Two security guards make sure everyone in the waiting line has a room key.
Harry hires a room at an exorbitant price, against Sun Yee’s advice, The three of them get back in the long elevator line. Harry pushes his way into the crowded elevator with Eleanor; Sun Yee must wait for the next trip. On the fifteenth floor they try the door they believe to be hiding Madeline. It opens easily. The room is empty.
Back outside the room, two men at the end of the hall open fire…
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Reviewer’s note: As usual, this is only half the story. I chose this book to review, not only because the author has published twenty-one highly rated novels, but because he vividly portrays the emotional reactions of police, parent, and victim. And still more, because this is a story of kidnapping, not for ransom, nor for revenge, nor for sex, but for a more chilling purpose which, I am told, is becoming more common, both in America and abroad.
The title, Nine Dragons, by the way, is an English rendition of the city’s name, Kowloon.