Free Fool's Ride (The Jenkins Cycle Book 2) by John L. Monk Page A

Jacob’s victory videos, I knew there was no way I could go toe-to-toe with him in a fair fight.
    Somewhere in the house, Lana was arranging her scalpels and saws, getting ready to do the unthinkable. Unless, of course, the Great Whomever (his name provisionally restored), had brought me back too late.
    One of the peculiar perks of having a perfect memory is I can count things and events from various rides very quickly. Between one gasp from Jacob and a ragged pant from me, I knew exactly how many times I’d died in that terrifying smokestack of death.
    My heart sank. Each death had lasted as many as a few seconds. Strung together, my time away had been close to thirty minutes. Long enough for Lana to have done anything she wanted to the woman on the gurney.
    Jacob gave a last-ditch attempt to break free, and I responded by squeezing with all I had, throwing all my rage and disgust into it—at Ernest and his stupid writing, at Lana’s ugly soul, and at myself, for watching TV with the guys and having fun like I belonged somewhere.
    Moments later, Jacob was limp in my arms. I didn’t know if I’d killed him or not, but he didn’t appear to be breathing. With no time to check, I got up and scanned the room—a home gym with mirrors everywhere, workout machines in the far corner, and wall-to-wall wrestling mats.
    I noticed a black lump over near the door, just to the side. Brian’s gun, in a hip holster. I pulled it out and racked the slide back, sending a shell flying out. That was fine, I’d only need a few, and it had a high-capacity magazine.
    Gun in hand, I rushed through the house hoping for that special moment when I saw something I recognized and stopped being lost. There were no windows in any of the rooms, so I began looking for staircases, figuring I was in a basement. After bursting into an indoor shooting range that smelled of frequent use, I turned back and pretended I’d gone right instead of left after leaving the gym. This took me to a lounge with an enormous bar and a dance floor. On the other side was an opening to a marble staircase leading up.
    It struck me as funny that Lana would buy such an extravagant house. I wondered if it belonged to her dead husband.
    When I got up the stairs, I was standing in the main hall. To the left, I knew I’d find the big foyer with the fountain in the middle. I took that in the direction of the TV room where Brian had fed me sandwiches, then followed the same path that Lana had wheeled me through, eventually arriving at the doors to the torture room and the viewing room. One of them, the closest, held Ernest. Loud death metal howled and screamed from the other.
    I tried the door with the music and found it locked. It seemed solid and strong. Worse, it opened outward, into the hall, so I couldn’t use Brian’s big muscles to smash it in. Rather than doing all that, I knocked loudly and hoped to cut through the music. No reason for her not to open it.
    Lana, however, didn’t answer.
    One thing I wouldn’t do was shoot through the knob, for fear of hitting the woman. So I knocked again, harder, more insistently. I needed that door open, but again nobody answered.
    I ran back to Ernest’s door and opened it up. The death metal intensified, blaring from the speakers Lana had turned on before leaving me trapped there.
    “Brian!” Ernest shouted angrily, a confused expression on his face. “Get me out of this chair, dammit! What’s going on?”
    The woman in the other room was pleading, barely loud enough to make out: “No, please let me go. Please!”
    Ignoring Ernest, I looked through the window and saw Lana consulting a thick book resting on a stainless steel table, her back turned toward me.
    Somehow, the woman on the gurney was free from harm. But Lana had been busy in my time away. Across the woman’s belly and breasts, and at various places along her arms, legs, and face, Lana had drawn surgical lines with a black magic marker.
    Why would