Running Blind (Jack Reacher, #4)

by Lee Child

Then Reacher hit him again. Same elbow. Same side of the head. Same snap. The guy went down like a trapdoor had opened up under his feet.

“Most people in the Army would have sex with anything that moves.”

“Perpetrators of serial homicide used to drive Volkswagen Bugs. Almost all of them.

Now he had a house. And a house is a complicated thing. A big, complicated, physical thing. It started with the basement. The basement was a huge dark space with a concrete floor and concrete walls and floor joists exposed overhead like bones. There were pipes and wires and machines down there. A furnace. Buried outside somewhere was an oil tank. There was a well for the water. Big round pipes ran through the wall to the septic system. It was a complex interdependent machine, and he didn’t know how it worked.

Time and tide wait for no man. The Navy was built on all kinds of bullshit like that.

He guessed she had joined the Army with no very clear idea of why. There’s a definite type of person who takes the same route. Maybe from a large family, comfortable with sharing, good at team sports in school, academically proficient without being a scholar, they just drift toward it. They see it as an extension of what they’ve already known. Probably they don’t see themselves as fighters, but they know for every person who holds a gun the Army offers a hundred other niches where there are trades to be learned and qualifications to be earned.

“It’s OK. For a car. I just don’t like owning things.”

“You’re the only person I know who wants to be homeless,” she said. “Most people try real hard to avoid it.”

A lifetime in the service was like rushing down a narrow corridor, eyes fixed firmly to the front. There was all kinds of enticing stuff off to the sides, which you rushed past and ignored. Now he wanted to take the side trips. He wanted a crazy zigzag, any direction he felt like, any old time he wanted.