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.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 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 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]