Read Online The Golem of Hollywood by Jonathan Kellerman - Free Book Online Page A

do that,” she says. “Don’t ever beg.”
    He flushes red, and his face swells, and he pulls her to him, crushing his lips against hers, his stubble shredding the skin on her chin, his humid chest an animal skin thrown over her. His tongue stabs through her teeth; he would suck the life from her, and she works her hand between their bodies and shoves him back, sending him stumbling into the mud.
    â€œWhat are you doing?” she says.
    â€œI’m sorry,” he says, rising.
    â€œI’m sorry,” he says again, and he throws himself atop her.
    In an instant he has torn her robes off, and she screams and kicks, and they wallow in the sucking, squelching mud. Stones bite her naked back. She pounds his arms, strains at his chin as if to snap his head off, but he slaps her and shakes her and roars his dominance. He will not be denied; she will be his, he will possess her.
    Overhead, dark birds puncture a blazingly clear sky.
    She gropes in the mud for a stone, opens a jagged chasm in his forehead that sheets blood into his eyes. He bays and releases her, clutching at his face, and she wriggles free and runs.
    She runs, naked, maddeningly slowly, her feet sinking into the mud, her limbs gowned in clay. She clears the edge of the field and breaks through a wooded patch and plunges across another field—fallow, muddy, slowing her further—and more woods and then the pasturelands begin. He’s behind her. She can hear his feet slapping the wet ground, and she scrambles, chest burning, up a hillside; she reaches the crest and below sprawls the soft wonderful gentle flock and the frantic spot of the dog and Abel, tall and golden.
    She screams for help and Cain tackles her.
    Down they tumble, grabbing at each other instinctively, turning over and over, again and again slammed against the ground, their mud-covered bodies picking up leaves and twigs and grass, their noses touching, his eyesockets rimmed with blood, his forehead a bloody valley, blood and mud soaking his forelocks.
    At the bottom of the hill they come to a rest, broken and slashed and coughing plant matter. The dog’s barks race over the pasture, and a long shadow enfolds Asham.
    Abel says, “You will be repaid for your wickedness.”
    Cain wipes his mouth. The back of his hand comes away red. He spits. “You know nothing.”
    â€œI know what I see.” Abel tosses down his crook. He kneels, scoops Asham into his arms, and starts to carry her away.
    He has taken five steps when the crook splinters on the back of his skull.
    The earth here is drier, thirstier, unforgiving as Asham falls and cracks her own head against it. Her eyes cloud and her ears dull and her limbs do not work and her tongue lolls like a slug in her mouth; she can do nothing other than watch them struggle. It shouldn’t last long, and it does not. Abel is larger, and stronger, and Cain, brought to his knees, begs for mercy while the sheepdog snaps and snarls.
    What will you tell Mother.
    Such a brazen ploy. So simple. She would never fall for it. But she knows that Abel will, because he, too, is simple, and she watches, immobile, as his anger melts and he extends a hand to his brother and Cain risesup.

CHAPTER EIGHT
    I t was late by the time Jacob finished canvassing the neighborhoods below Castle Court.
    He started at the bottom of the hill and worked his way up. The type of folks who elected to live thirty-plus minutes from the nearest supermarket were also the type of folks who didn’t take kindly to nighttime visits. Those who answered were reluctant to open the door, and those who did hadn’t seen anything. By general consensus, the murder house was an eyesore, abandoned as long as anyone could remember.
    Number 332, the final stop before the road went to dirt, hid behind a high stucco wall bristling with pigeon spikes and brooding CCTV cameras.
    Jacob craned through his car window, cajoling the homeowner over the intercom.