The Hollow Man Read Online Free PDF Page A

up. After a moment he dropped to his side, rolled away from the mess, wiped his chin with a shaking hand, and lay staring up through palm fronds at the sky.
    The sky was a gunmetal gray. Bremen could hear the rasp of distant thoughts and images still echoing through his skull. He remembered a quote that Gail had shown him—something she had dredged up from the sports-writer Jimmy Cannon after she and Bremen had argued about whether prizefighting was a sport or not. “Boxing is a filthy enterprise,” Cannon had written, “and if you stay in it long enough, your mind will become a concert hall where Chinese music never stops playing.”
    Well
, Bremen reflected grimly, barely able to sort out his own thoughts from the distant neurobabble,
my mind’s sure as hell a concert hall. I just wish it was only Chinese music playing
.
    He got to his knees, saw a glint of green water down the slope through the shrubs, rose, and staggered that way. A river or swamp stretched away through dim light. Spanish moss hung from live oak and cypress trees along the shore and more cypress rose from the brackish water. Bremen knelt, skimmed away the crust of green scum from the water, and washed his cheeks and chin. He rinsed his mouth and spat into the algae-choked water.
    There was a house—little more than a shack, actually—under tall trees fifty yards to Bremen’s right. His rented Beretta was parked near the beginnings of a trail that wound through foliage to the sagging structure. The faded pine boards of the shack blended with the shadows there, but Bremen was able to make out signs on the wallfacing the road: LIVE BAIT and GUIDE SERVICE and CABIN RENTALS and VISIT OUR SNAKE EMPORIUM . Bremen moved that way, shuffling along the edge of the river, stream, swamp … whatever that green-and-brown expanse of water was.
    The shack was set up on cement blocks; from beneath it came a loam-rich scent of wet earth. An old Chevy was parked on the far side of the low building, and now Bremen could see a wider lane that ran down from the road. He paused at the screen door. It was dark inside, and despite the signs the place seemed more some hillbilly’s shack than a store. Bremen shrugged and opened the door with a screech.
    “Howdy,” said one of the two men watching from the darkness. The one who spoke had been standing behind a counter; the other sat back amid shadows in the doorway to another room.
    “Hello.” Bremen paused, felt the rush of neurobabble from the two men like the hot breath of some giant creature, and almost staggered outside again before noticing the big, electric cooler. He felt as if he had not drunk anything for days. It was the old kind of cooler with a sliding top, bottles of cold pop resting in half-melted ice. Bremen fished out the first bottle he uncovered, an RC Cola, and went to the counter to pay for it.
    “Fifty cents,” said the standing man. Bremen could see him better now: wrinkled tan slacks, a T-shirt that once had been blue but had been washed to a near gray, rough, reddened face, and blue eyes that
hadn’t
faded looking out from under a nylon cap with a mesh back.
    Bremen fumbled in his pocket and found no change. His wallet was empty. For a second he was sure that he had no money, but then he fished in his gray suitcoat pocket and came out with a roll of bills, all twenties and fifties from the looks of it. Now he remembered going tothe bank the day before and removing the $3,865.71 that had been left in their joint account after mortgage and hospital payments.
    Shit. Another goddamn drug dealer. Prob’ly from Miami
.
    Bremen could hear the standing man’s thoughts as clearly as if they had been spoken, so he replied in words even as he peeled off a twenty-dollar bill and set it on the counter. “Uh-uh,” he rasped, “I’m not a drug dealer.”
    The standing man blinked, set a red hand on the twenty-dollar bill, and blinked again. He cleared his throat. “I didn’t say you was,