Read Online Lord of Death: A Shan Tao Yun Investigation by Eliot Pattison - Free Book Online Page B

toward the metal door that marked the corridor of holding cells, sliding the bucket forward with his foot. The heavy door was locked when he reached it. Suddenly an arm extended past his shoulder with a key. Constable Jin blocked Shan’s passage as the door swung open, gesturing forward a gray haired woman, clutching two empty plastic buckets, who advanced with a businesslike air. The constable stood guard at the door, glaring at Shan as he went through the motions of cleaning a row of benches along the adjacent wall. Moments later the woman reappeared, expressionless, her buckets now filled with stained rags, splinters of wood, and other debris from the interrogation rooms. Jin held the door for Shan, escorted him to the cell at the end of the corridor and opened it.
    “If he takes one step outside this cell,” Jin hissed, “I will shoot you both.”
    The cell, still reeking of blood, vomit, and ammonia, had changed little since Shan left it. The blood soaked pallet had been replaced, the stains scrubbed from the floor, replaced by new ones, the piles of rags had been tossed against the back wall. Only one of the filthy piles was Colonel Tan of the People’s Liberation Army, the dreaded tyrant of Lhadrung County.
    Shan turned and confronted Jin with a silent, expectant gaze.
    “Fuck your mother,” Jin spat, then spun about and retreated to the door at the far end of the corridor.
    Tan, either unconscious or sleeping, was slumped against the wall, his body convulsing every few moments— the aftereffect, Shan well knew, of electroshock. Shan did his best to clean the filthy tin cup at the sink, filled it from a bucket of water and bent to Tan. When he touched the colonel’s shoulder, Tan reacted as if he had been struck, jerking away with a groan, his upper body slowly falling toward the floor, lacking the strength to right itself.
    Shan cradled Tan’s head against his leg and dripped water over his split, bloodied lips. After a moment the colonel reacted with another groan. His eyelids fluttered, struggling to open, then he gave up and lost consciousness. Shan dripped water over his head. Then with a wet rag he wiped the blood from Tan’s face, tied another rag over an oozing wound on his temple, and inspected the bloody ends of his fingers. Shan thought of running to the interrogation room for a medical kit but realized the knobs would raise unwelcome questions when they discovered their prisoner in bandages. Tan’s feet were bare, badly bruised.
    Beating the soles of the feet was a trademark of older interrogators, used widely by the gangs of Red Guards who had terrorized the country a generation earlier. The fingers of Tan’s left hand twitched; on his forearm Shan found the telltale marks of two electrode clamps.
    He found himself murmuring the mani mantra, the prayer for the Compassionate Buddha, as the lamas in his prison had done when they first cleaned his own interrogation wounds, years earlier. Tan’s eyelids fluttered again and stayed open this time, eyes still unseeing. Shan held the cup to his lips and he drank.
    After draining the cup, Tan breathed deeply, rolled his head toward Shan, and recoiled in horror, jerking himself upright, lashing out with a hand to slap Shan’s cheek with surprising force.
    “ You! ” he snarled, and mustered enough strength to kick at Shan, flailing the air with his feet, until he collapsed against the wall again with an agonized groan. He seemed to regard Shan’s presence as a new form of torture.
    “The old lamas taught me a trick,” Shan said in a low, steady voice, “for when the pain gets unbearable. Hold your breath as long as you can and count. When you breathe again, start over. Just focus on breathing and counting.”
    “You have no right!” Tan spat. His voice was hoarse but its fury was unmistakable. His face narrowed in confusion. “How could you possibly know? How could you possibly be here?”
    “Have you forgotten this is where the medical