Nothing to Lose

No, I'm a man with a rule. People leave me alone, I leave them alone. If they don't, I don't.

A person less fortunate than yourself deserves the best you can give. Because of duty, and honor, and service. You understand those words? You should do your job right, and you should do it well, simply because you can, without looking for notice or reward.

I have to warn you. I promised my mother, a long time ago. She said I had to give folks a chance to walk away.

Where are the deputies?' 'On their way up to the first-aid post.' 'What happened to them?' 'I did.

That should be your town motto. It's all I ever hear. Like: New Hampshire, Live Free or Die. It should be: Despair, You Need To Leave Now.

The guy who was standing said, “We don’t want you here.” Reacher said, “You’re confusing me with someone who gives a shit what you want.

Some officers of his acquaintance had barked and yelled and shouted. He had always found it more effective to speak low and quiet, enunciating clearly and precisely as if to an idiot child, bearing down with an icy stare. That way he had found the implied menace to be unmistakable.

Canada's army is three men and a dog. They probably keep their stuff forever.

The line between Hope and Despair was exactly that: a line, in the road,

and hot raw wood. There was a guy behind a counter, in worn blue overalls stained black with dirt. He was

The only opponents Reacher truly feared were small whippy guys with fast hands and sharp blades.

The best defense against knives was distance. The best countermove was entanglement.

A crowd two hundred strong was the largest animal on the face of the earth. The heaviest, the hardest to control, the hardest to stop. The hardest to kill. Big targets, but after-action reports always showed that crowds took much less than one casualty per round fired.

There was nothing in his pockets except paper money and an expired passport and an ATM card and a clip-together toothbrush.

Reacher hated turning back. He liked to press on, dead ahead, whatever.

There were pictures on the walls, all of them dime-store prints of Jesus. In all of them Jesus had blue eyes and wore pale blue robes and had long blond hair and a neat blond beard. He looked more like a Malibu surfer than a Jew from two thousand years ago.

Psychologists figured that the memory center was located in the left brain, and the imagination engine in the right brain. Therefore people unconsciously glanced to the left when they were remembering things, and to the right when they were making stuff up. When

Because deep down to the army a wounded soldier that can’t fight anymore is garbage. So we depend on civilians, and civilians don’t care either.

We’re all atheists. You don’t believe in Zeus or Thor or Neptune or Augustus Caesar or Mars or Venus or Sun Ra. You reject a thousand gods. Why should it bother you if someone else rejects a thousand and one?

There was a four-place table with only three chairs. There were what Reacher’s mother had called “touches.” Dried flowers, bottles of virgin olive oil that would never be used, antique spoons. Reacher’s mother had said such things gave a room personality. Reacher himself had been unsure how anything except a person could have personality. He had been a painfully literal child. But over the years he had come to see what his mother had meant. And Vaughan’s kitchen had personality.

Inside was a ten-digit keypad. A combination lock. One through nine, plus zero, laid out like a telephone. A possible 3,628,800 variants. It

He had seen the herd instinct at work, the anonymity, the removal of inhibition, the implied permissions of collective action. He had seen that an angry crowd was the most dangerous animal on the face of the earth.

stopped. She looked at it like she was having second

Zeno spoke Greek, not Latin, and preferred passive resignation to reckless optimism.