Worth Dying For

Reacher said, "So here's the thing Brett. Either you take your hand off my chest, or I'll take it off your wrist.

Enough, a person might say, if that person lived in the civilized world, the world of movies and television and fair play and decent restraint. But Reacher didn’t live there. He lived in a world where you don’t start fights but you sure as hell finish them, and you don’t lose them either, and he was the inheritor of generations of hard-won wisdom that said the best way to lose them was to assume they were over when they weren’t yet.

He picked up the wrench and broke the guy’s wrist with it, one, and then the other wrist, two, and turned back and did the same to the guy who had held the hammer, three, four. The two men were somebody’s weapons, consciously deployed, and no soldier left an enemy’s abandoned ordnance on the field in working order. The doctor’s wife was watching from the cabin door, all kinds of terror in her face. "What?" Reacher asked her.

Lone women shouldn't stop in the middle of nowhere for giant unkempt strangers with duct tape on their faces.

He looked at the pain and he set himself apart from it. He saw it, examined it, identified it, corralled it. He isolated it. He challenged it. You against me? Dream on, pal. He built borders for it. Then walls. He built walls and forced the pain behind them and then he moved the walls inward, compressing the pain, crushing it, boxing it in, limiting it, beating it.

Never revive a guy who had just pulled a gun on you.

Reacher’s personal rule of thumb was never to revive a guy who had just pulled a gun on him. He was fairly inflexible on the matter.

I’ve got everything I need. That’s the definition of affluence.

slowed a little. Its top was up this time, like a tight little hat. Cold weather,

He said, “Come back,” a little louder. She straightened up. He got the impression she was about to puke. He didn’t want that. Not all over his good clothes. But he licked her ear one more time

yards ahead of him, his gun in his right

delivered hard but with a degree of mercy, in that smashed