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

anyone…?
    Lana shut the book, apparently satisfied with whatever she’d been looking at. Then she put the magic marker down and picked up a scalpel from a tray with a bunch of clamps and odd tools I didn’t recognize. She smiled down at the sobbing woman and waved the scalpel dangerously close to her tear-streaked face. Then, with a sadistic smirk, she traced the scalpel down the woman’s cheek and neck, languidly across her chest, then down and around her exposed belly.
    Lana’s face appeared almost … not motherly, exactly, but enraptured. Fascinated by every scream or shudder or sign of terror she managed to elicit from her victim. She was savoring it, drawing it out like the world’s most demented foreplay.
    “No!” I shouted, but Lana didn’t hear me.
    I didn’t know if the gun had been loaded with hollow-points or not. If not, they’d pass through the window mostly straight, even if I hit it from an angle. Though I could name every head-of-state in the last hundred years, I wasn’t a ballistics expert, or even a ballistics novice. For all I knew, hitting the window with a hollow-point would shoot pieces of metal everywhere, and possibly hit the woman on the gurney.
    “Brian!” Ernest shouted. “What are you doing with that gun? Come help me!”
    When Lana lowered the knife to a point just below the woman’s bellybutton, along one of the black lines, I pointed the gun away from both of them and shot through the glass.
    The glass cracked into a million little pieces. This would have worked out perfectly, but the glass stayed mostly in place except for a three-inch circle where the bullet had passed. Now my view through the window went from a clear view of Lana and the woman to a hazy, fractured view of something tall and black next to something white and horizontal.
    With the window compromised, the death metal blared louder than ever, but not so loud as to occlude the woman’s wails of terror … wait, no, that was Ernest. I couldn’t hear much else through the ringing in my ears from the gunshot.
    Heedless of cutting myself, I bashed the gun hard into the broken glass, widening the hole. When I looked through it, the door was open and Lana was gone.
    The woman’s stomach was bloody.
    No, please!
    I ran into the hall and saw Lana stumbling as fast as her stupid dominatrix boots would carry her. I hesitated, locked between two decisions: try shooting at her or help the woman. Lana glanced back once, and the look on her face wasn’t fearful or shocked. It was hateful, livid, unholy.
    Lana turned the corner, and I went in to check the pregnant woman.
    Her belly had a jagged cut along the side, as if Lana had been startled by the gunshot and jumped. She was bleeding, but not a lot. Trying not to panic, I felt along the cut with my fingers. The scalpel had sunk a quarter inch in one spot, but no farther. She’d need stitches to close it. The bleeding worried me because, slow as it was, I didn’t know if it would stop.
    The woman said something I couldn’t hear over the music, which was driving me nuts. I found the switch on the wall Lana had flipped and turned it off.
    “—don’t kill me!” the woman shouted, too loudly in the now quiet room. “What did I do? Why am I here?”
    I wanted to ask her who brought her here. But with a crazy dominatrix on the loose, I needed to stay focused.
    It didn’t help that Ernest kept yelling, “Jacob! Lana!” and “ Get me out of this fucking chair! ”
    Ignoring Ernest and the crying woman, I glanced around for something to stop the bleeding. There weren’t any bandages in Lana’s surgical tray. From Lana’s warped perspective, I figured, the more blood the better so long as the woman didn’t bleed out and die too soon. Probably what those clamps were for. I didn’t know how to use them without causing more damage, so I took off my shirt, bunched it up, and pressed it against the cut. After holstering the gun, I worked the leather strap holding her