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He liked to sit outside in the summer, in New York City. Especially at night.
It helped a lonely man feel connected and isolated
both at the same time.
Reacher always
arranged the smallest details in his life so he could move on at a split second’s notice.
Cops, he thought. The word snagged in his mind the way a twig on a current catches on a riverbank. It hung up just briefly before spinning clear and floating away.
The workman is worthy of his hire. Says so in the Bible.”
“Do you know what a private military corporation is really for? Fundamentally?” “Fundamentally its purpose is to allow the Pentagon to escape Congressional oversight.”
Reacher had always regretted the switch from the words WALK and DONT WALK. Given the choice, he preferred words to pictograms.
Lauren Pauling’s voice was low and husky, like she had been recovering from laryngitis for the last thirty years. Reacher could have sat and listened to it all day long.
“And you know what?” Reacher said. “His men are mostly a couple of sandwiches short of a picnic, too. They’ve got a psychotic need to be commanded.
“Homeland Security,” Reacher said. “The Patriot Act. There are no rules in America anymore.”
They shouldn’t be allowed to just go, quietly. Someone needs to stand up for them.”
“And they need to be avenged, Pauling. Because it wasn’t their
fight.
Silent cell phones made Reacher nervous. He came from a world where a sudden dive for a pocket was more likely to mean a gun than a phone.
Early evening. Four lanes of traffic, and lovers in the park. Dogs on leashes, tour groups, the bass bark of fire truck horns.
Reacher liked New York more than most places. He liked the casual indifference of it all and the frantic hustle and the total anonymity.
The paper isn’t really paper, as such. It’s mostly linen and cotton fibers. More in common with the shirt on your back than a newspaper. I think it would show up like clothing on an X-ray machine.”
Reacher smiled. Certainly he loved the open road and miles to go
but he loved the crush of the world’s great cities just as much. New York yesterday, London today. Life was good. So far.
“Technically in Old English a grange was a large barn for grain storage. Then later it
became a word for the main building in a gentleman’s arable farm.
He knew from long experience that nobody would try to join him. Nobody ever did. He radiated subliminal stay away signals and sane people obeyed them.
An organic farm doesn’t need a bird scarer. No pesticides means plenty of insects for the birds to eat. They don’t go after the seed.
“You see anything wrong with my teeth?” Taylor asked. “Plenty,” Reacher said. “I’m surprised you can
eat. Maybe that’s why you’re so small.” Taylor said, “I am what I am.”
An MP5 was rated to fire 900 rounds a minute. Fifteen every second.
Audibility decays according to the
inverse square law. Twice the distance, the sound gets four times as quiet. Four times the distance, sixteen times as quiet.
The oldest of all atavistic human fears, buried deep in the primeval lizard brain, still alive a hundred thousand years after leaving the caves: There’s something out there.
And the remorse gene was missing from his DNA. Entirely. It just wasn’t there. Where some men might have retrospectively agonized over justification, he spent
his energy figuring out where best to hide the bodies.
