Read Online The Hollow Man by Dan Simmons - Free Book Online Page B

lighted a cigarette and waited another minute before going in with the shower curtain and the chains. The kid had made Tartugian kneel in the shower stall in his private bathroom, just as Don Leoni had instructed. There was no mess that thirty seconds of running the water wouldn’t clean up.
    “What the
fuck
were you doing there, huh? What the
fuck
were you doing out in that fucking swamp at fucking sunrise, huh?” Fucci asked.
    Bremen looked at him. “Fishing,” he said … or thought he said.
    Vanni Fucci just shook his head in disgust and turned the music up. “Fucking civilian.”
    They were passing through a town now, something larger than the few villages in the Everglades that they had passed through before, and Bremen had to shut his eyes at the onslaught of neurobabble. It was especially bad passing the trailer parks, the mobile-home villages, the retirement condominiums. There, the rasp of the thoughts of the elderly struck Bremen’s scoured consciousness with the unpleasant force of listening to an old person next door hawk up his morning’s chestful of phlegm.
    No letter, no phone call. Shawnee just isn’t gonna call till I’m dead.…
    Just a little lump, Marge said. Just last month she said that
.
Just a little lump. Now she’s dead, gone. Just a little lump, she said. And now who am I gonna play mah-jongg with?
    Thursday. It’s Thursday. Thursday is pinochle night at the community center
.
    Not always in words, frequently not in words, the anxieties and sadnesses and surlinesses of old age and frailty and abandonment struck Bremen as the Cadillac moved slowly down the now widened highway. Thursday, he discovered, was pinochle night in most of the trailer parks and condominiums, in this town and the next they traveled through. But hours of daylight and pain and heavy Florida heat lay ahead for so many of these people before the humid coolness of the evening and the safety of the community center. Televisions flickered in a thousand thousand mobile homes and condos, air conditioners hummed, as the retired and discarded rested their bones and waited out the day’s heat in the hopes of another evening with a dwindling circle of friends.
    Bremen saw in a sudden, out-of-context flash of Vanni Fucci’s choppy musings that the thief was angry at God. Terribly angry at God.
    Same fucking day that Nicco …
    His younger brother, Bremen saw, with the same dark hair and dark eyes, but more handsome in a quiet way.
    Same fucking day that Nicco takes his vows, I broke into fucking St. Mary’s and stole the fucking chalice. Same fucking chalice I useta hand Father Damiano when I was a fucking altar boy. Same fucking chalice. Nobody wanted the fucking thing. No fence would touch the fucking thing. Fucking crazy, man … Nicco taking his fucking vows and me wandering the fucking streets of Atlantic City with that fucking chalice in my gym bag. Nobody wanted the fucking thing
. Images of a weeping Vanni Fucci burying the silver cup in a tidal marsh north of the casino strip. Images of Fucci’sarms rising toward the sky, fists clenching, of his thumb between first and middle fingers on both hands.
The fig … fica
 … Bremen understood. Vanni Fucci giving God the fig, the most obscene gesture the young thief knew at the time.
    Fuck you, God. Fuck you up the ass, old man
.
    Bremen blinked and shook his head to escape the neurobabble of the trailer park they were passing. He did not think Vanni Fucci was going to kill him. Not yet. Fucci did not want the aggravation, was already wishing that he’d left this dazed fuck behind on the island. Or had brought Roachclip along. Roachclip woulda whacked this crazy fuck right from the skiff and never looked back.
    Bremen thought of clever strategies. Using what he’d gleaned already, he could start talking to Vanni Fucci, say that he—Bremen—had also been sent south by Don Leoni, that he knew Bert Cappi had whacked Chico Tartugian and—hey!—it was all right