Tripwire (Jack Reacher, #3)

by Lee Child

He had found names did not mean much in the Keys. People just waved and smiled and said hello. They all assumed everybody had something to be private about.

“OK,” he said. “See you later, I guess.” She shook her head. “No you won’t,” she said. “Guys like you never come back. You leave, and you don’t come back.”

He stood by himself on the curb and watched her go. She turned

in front of a hotel bus and was lost to sight. Three months of his life disappeared with her like the haze of her exhaust.

He had bought plenty of clothes in the last two years, because he had developed a habit of buying new stuff instead of washing the old stuff.

It was a defensive habit. It defended him against carrying any kind of a big valise, and it defended him against having to learn the exact techniques of

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Bodyguarding was about defense. Start mixing offense in with it, and neither thing gets done properly.

“Dad always used to say Vietnam changed people. Usually for the worse.”

conscientiously cared for by dutiful parents.

millions of parents who gave up their children to the night and the fog swirling through a ghastly century.

do it once and do it right.

Another of Leon’s rules was hopeless is hopeless and don’t ever pretend it ain’t.

REACHER HAD BEEN named Jack by his father, who was a plain New Hampshire Yankee with an implacable horror of anything fancy.

Don’t worry about why it went wrong. Just damn well put it right.

ask once, ask twice if you must, but for God’s sake don’t ask three times.

if plan A doesn’t work, move on to plan B.

You can’t rely on a .38 to put a man down.

the basis of any scam is show them what they want to see.

something for nothing, that’s a foreign language.