The Killing Kind by Bryan Smith Read Free Book Online Page A

knifehigher and psyched himself up to bring it down. He imagined how it would feel to slam the heavy blade into living flesh and felt his cock twitch. The sneer became a smile. It would be a fucking rush , that’s what it would be. He pictured himself pulling the blade out and ramming it in over and over, butchering her the way a genuine random psycho would. It was too bad he couldn’t rape her, too. But that would leave DNA evidence and…well, what if he wore a condom?
    Scratch that.
    No condoms in the house.
    Just do it, an inner voice berated him.
    John sucked in a big breath and raised the knife still higher. Then, in that last moment before he would have brought the knife down…he heard something.
    A rustling out in the hallway.
    John turned away from the bed to stare at the closed bedroom door. He held his breath and waited, counting off seconds. Ten. Twenty. Half a minute. He began to let his breath out, sure now that he’d heard nothing. Or maybe just rodents scurrying through the walls. He’d been meaning to set out mousetraps for weeks. Yeah, that could be it.
    Then he heard it again.
    That rustling, closer now.
    He moved a step closer to the door. The sound came again. Quieter, this time. A shuffling rather than a rustling. An attempt at stealth, feet gliding softly over hallway carpet. John clenched his teeth and swallowed hard as genuine fear leaped into his heart. In his mind, he saw himself as he must look and almost laughed. A naked man, intent on murder and possible sexual assault only moments earlier but now paralyzed with fear. Predator turned prey? No. Ridiculous.
    Someone was in the hallway, no doubt.
    But the interloper’s identity was obvious.
    Nancy.
    She was restless, was maybe trying to sneak downstairs fora cookie or some other late-night snack. John grinned. Sudden impulse hurried him to the door. This was too perfect an opportunity to miss. He would take her in the hallway, do it so fast she’d never know what was happening, then return quickly to the bedroom to do Karen. The cops would see that the intruder had stumbled upon Nancy en route to his primary prey. The little snot wouldn’t be around to raise suspicions or cramp his style as he swaggered into a glorious new phase of his life.
    He yanked the door open and charged into the hallway—and collided with a big man in a fringe jacket. The man had long, scraggly gray hair and eyes that conveyed insanity even in the gloom of the hallway. His grin was wide and displayed yellow, crooked teeth. And holy Jesus, but he fucking stank , a stench like something from a backed-up sewer drain. It made John’s eyes water. A blinding terror gripped him before he remembered the knife in his hand.
    He raised it again.
    And was shoved backward into the room, hard , causing him to stumble over his feet and crash into the nightstand next to Karen’s side of the bed. A lamp tumbled off the nightstand and Karen’s stack of paperback romance novels went flying. Struggling for balance, John lurched away from the nightstand. He turned and raised the knife as the big man in the buckskin jacket came into the room, followed by another man. The second man was less stout than the first, wiry, and also had long, filthy hair, but not straight and fine like the other man’s. It was big and bushy. If anything, he stank even worse than his partner.
    Karen awoke with a gasp and sat up straight in bed. “John! What’s going on?” Then she got a glimpse of the intruders and unleashed a shrill scream. “ohmygod! helllllllllp!”
    She rolled to the other side of the bed, tried to get up, and got her feet tangled in the twisted bedsheets. She took atumble off the bed and hit the floor hard, crying out in terror and pain.
    The big man chuckled. “Don’t let her get nowhere, Clyde.”
    “On it.”
    Clyde swaggered past his partner and leered at John. The lean man faked a lunge in his direction and cackled at the girlish shriek this elicited. Then he continued