Gone Tomorrow

flashback memories of hitting Lila Hoth in the face. The straight left, the crunch of bone and cartilage under my fist. The ruined appearance. The episode replayed constantly in my mind. I didn’t know why. I had just cut her with a knife and later I strangled her, and I could barely remember those acts at all. Maybe hitting women ran counter to my subliminal values. Which was entirely illogical.
    But eventually the images faded and I grew bored with imagining Osama bin Laden having his way with goats. By the time a month had passed I had forgotten all of it. My cut had healed very nicely. The scar was thin and white. The stitches were neat and tiny. My lower body was like a textbook illustration: This one is how it should be done, and that one is how it shouldn’t. But I never forgot how those earlier, clumsier stitches had saved me. What goes around comes around. A benign legacy, from the truck bomb in Beirut, planned and paid for and driven there by persons unknown.

GONE TOMORROW
    A Delacorte Press Book / June 2009
    Published by Bantam Dell
    A Division of Random House, Inc.
    New York, New York
    This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
    All rights reserved.
    Copyright © 2009 by Lee Child
    Delacorte Press is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
    Child, Lee.
    Gone tomorrow: a Jack Reacher novel / Lee Child.
    p. cm.
    eISBN: 978-0-440-33855-0
    1. Reacher, Jack (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Ex–police officers—
    Fiction. 3. New York (N.Y.)—Fiction. 4. Conspiracies—Fiction. I.
    Title.
    PS3553.H4838G66 2009
    813′.54—dc22 2008039207
    www.bantamdell.com
    v3.0