Page 91 of Out for Blood
MAKE HER CRY AGAIN
HIGHER ON THE SWING
VIP REQUEST PENDING
MONEY RECEIVED
Nausea crashes through me so hard I nearly gag.
Behind me, the music has almost faded all the way out because the sound that takes over is the tinkling of the bells on the jester girl’s costume every time the swing moves.
The sound shreds something inside me.
“You read their requests,” I state, my voice dropping to a lethal register.
“You sat here and turned suffering into entertainment.”
“I was paid!” he rushes out with mounting panic. “I didn’t have a choice!”
I stare at him and realize I genuinely don’t care about his excuses, his fear and about whatever happens to him next.
The knife moves before he can speak again.
I drive it straight through his hand into the folding table while he’s splayed out on his stomach.
His scream howls through the room smothering the carnival music.
Blood splatters across the keyboard, across the glowing chat feed and across my hand.
His entire body convulses violently, trying to yank free while the blade keeps him pinned in place.
And I feel nothing.
Only the cold certainty that men like him deserve to break the same way they break others.
Then I stab him straight through the back of his abdomen, hoping I hit his kidney. I wrench my knife out just as the clown trips backward as I whip my head in his direction.
For the first time since we entered the room, the painted grin slips from his face.
Real fear surfaces underneath the greasepaint.
Tyler moves to the side haltingly; Glock trained directly at the clown’s chest, careful not to scare him into doing something foolish to the girl on the swing. The red carnival lights glint showing the rage simmering behind Tyler’s eyes while thunder drums somewhere outside the warehouse walls.
The clown’s breathing turns labored.
His gloved hands lift slightly but he’s not surrendering, he’s calculating and looking for a way out.
“There’s nowhere for you to go,” Tyler affirms.
The clown bolts anyway.
He lunges for something near the props table and he doesn’t make it.
Tyler fires once.
The suppressed shot punches through the clown’s shoulder and spins him sideways into a stack of circus crates. Rotten wood splinters across the floor while rusted carnival props crash around him in a destructive avalanche of color and dust.
The girl on the swing cries out and the bells on her costume jingle agitatedly as she attempts to lower her feet to the ground.
