More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Reacher hated Alaska Airlines. They put a scripture card on their meal trays.
Ruined his appetite.
The army seemed like a long time ago to Reacher. A different era, a different world. Different rules.
“Life’s a bitch and then you die.”
“The service was like a family. If you were lucky, that is, and we were.”
“Computers,” Neagley said. “Homeland Security and the Patriot Act. They can search hotel registers anytime they want now. This is a police state.”
Reacher sat under an old framed photograph of Raquel Welch. The picture had been taken outside the hotel late in the afternoon and the light was as golden as her skin. The magic hour, photographers called it. Brief, glowing, lovely. Like fame itself, Reacher figured.
But he knew that smell was a physical mechanism that depended on the impact of actual molecules on the nasal lining. Therefore, technically, actual fragments of meat were entering his nostrils.
In daylight, Vegas looked absurd. Inexplicable, trivial, tawdry, revealed, exposed. But at night with the lights full on, it looked like a gorgeous fantasy.
His old team. He could send them to Atlanta and they would come back with the Coke recipe.
Years before, a pedantic
schoolteacher in the Pacific somewhere had explained to Reacher that first comes twilight, and then comes dusk, and then comes night. She had insisted that twilight and dusk were not the same thing.
Molotov cocktails. A crude but effective weapon, invented by Fascists during the
Spanish Civil War, named by Finns during their struggle against the Red Army in 1939, as a taunt toward the Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov. I never knew a tank could burn so long, a Finnish veteran had once recalled.
