Echo Burning (Jack Reacher, #5)

by Lee Child

“I live in a very small

town,” she said. “Echo, south of Pecos, like I told you.

It’s a lonely place. That’s why they ...

It’s from ancient Greek mythology. Echo was a young girl in love with Narcissus. But he loved himself, not her, so she pined ...

There’s a nice headstone, with ‘Robert Clay Allison, 1840–1887’ on it. I’ve seen it. And an inscription. The inscription says, ‘He never killed a man that did not need killing.’

“There’s an old newspaper, too,” she said. “In a glass case. From Kansas

City, I think, with his obituary in it. It says, ‘Certain it is that many of his stern deeds were for the right as he understood that right to be.’”

Sleep when you can, so you won’t need to when you can’t.

That was his rule.

It was worn and faded and crusted with the kind of dirt that shows the staff isn’t all the way committed to excellence.

One advantage of being ex-military was almost any place was serviceable. There was always somewhere worse to compare it with.

So what it amounts to is they’re all picking up their bribes in advance. The law firms and the oil people and the special interests are paying now for future help.

You can get seriously rich, running for judge in Texas. And if you

get elected and do the right things all your years on the bench, you retire straight into some big law partnership and you get asked onto th...

“To our lawyer,” he said. “For proving the great Frenchman Honoré de Balzac wrong when he wrote, ‘Laws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught.’”

No, the rib cage is a sophisticated structure. If it

were rigid, the bones would shatter under any kind of severe blow.

But there’s complex ligament suspension involved at each of the bone terminations, so the cage’s first response is to yield and distort, in o...

“The collarbone is like a circuit breaker. A person falls, and they try to break their fall by throwing out their hand.

Now, if it wasn’t for the collarbone, that force would travel into the neck, and probably break it, causing paralysis. Or into the brain pan, causing unconsciousness, maybe a

chronic comatose state.

But evolution is smart, and it chooses the least ...

The collarbone snaps, thereby dissipating the force. Inconvenient and painful, to be sure...

“Color, clarity, cut and carat,” he said. “The four Cs. That’s what we look for.”

He didn’t speak the whole way. Just fought his usual interior battle about exactly when to give up on a lost cause.

“Star-burst splitting, we call it,” he said.

“Burn rim,” the pathologist said.

“Next thing out is soot. Soft, smudgy black

stuff. So if it was a shot from six or eight inches, we’d see soot smudging on his forehead. Maybe ...

“Next thing out is gunpowder particles,” Reacher said. “Little bits of unburned carbon.

Tattooing, it’s called.

A confession can be retracted anytime. But in practice, I guess if she answered nolo contendere to the grand jury indictment, that would be regarded as a milestone.”

“You know what Ben Franklin once wrote?” Reacher asked. “What?” “ ‘Three can keep a secret, if two of them are dead.’”

It was desert horticulture, with

low spiky plants growing out of raked gravel and crushed stone.