The Short Drop Quotes
"If you don’t have anything nice to say, take a big bite and chew slow."
"Little girls need their fathers. Otherwise, they wind up on reality TV."
"My job was to protect Benjamin Lombard, but his family was part of that responsibility. In the simplest analysis, Suzanne vanished on my watch."
"Because you’re Gibson Vaughn. Because he treated you like a son."
"It’ll never be enough. There are no bygones here. His enemies? Enemies for life. And his enemies pay for life. That’s how Benjamin Lombard plays the game."
"We’re not getting Macklin’s endorsement. He’s going to throw in with Fleming."
"To do this job, and to do it well, was to be in constant motion, surrounded by people, ideas, action."
"When else in human history could someone ascend bloodlessly to become the most powerful man in the world?"
"He wasn’t sure why, but a five-star hotel had better air-conditioning than just about anywhere else on earth."
"Time is, so the great man had said, relative."
"The shot wasn’t the hard part. The shot was ten thousand hours of practice, tens of thousands of rounds, and an encyclopedic knowledge of the environment’s effect on ballistics."
"Most people didn’t understand that—what really went into being a sniper. The shot was the easy part. It simply required time, and the will to spend it."
"It wasn’t that it didn’t interest him; it was that it never occurred to him that it should."
"The rifle had taught him his identity. Taught him there was a purpose for his particular gifts."
"Attention being the true purpose of the rifle. The rifle was intended to deliver a message, a warning, its target merely an envelope to be opened."
"Don’t these serial-killer types have a thing for reading about themselves? Don’t they get off on that shit? Or is that just in the movies?"
"We’re a bunch of dummies. Help yourself. We’ll never know."
"So many in the public eye cultivated an image of being normal and down-to-earth, but his wife was the genuine article."
"It’s not the fall that kills you but the abrupt stop."
"You could baffle a helicopter, to a degree, so that it runs quiet if not silent, but what about radar?"
"Voila, Blackhawks that are there but not there."
"The guy helped take down bin Laden and now he can’t even get a job at Burger King."
"It’s a matter of public record what he’d done on that computer."
"By all accounts, the Lombards treated Gibson like family; Duke and Gibson each had their own bedroom at both the senator’s home in Great Falls and his beach house at Pamsrest near the North Carolina border."
"People are rarely as black and white as you sometimes make them out to be."
"Your instincts are very rarely wrong, but we’re not in the field yet."
"She was a very special little girl, and he was a great kid too."
"I don’t believe Gibson Vaughn would knowingly sabotage an effort to find her."
"Gibson Vaughn has endured a great deal in his life and served his country ably."
"Reading bedtime stories over a computer isn’t any way to be a father."
"I’d rather die than see them lose it because of him."
"The hardest part was watching Nicole go dead to him."
"Politics is an ugly picture with a pretty frame."
"You were loyal or you weren’t; it wasn’t something you learned."
"Entitlement breeds laziness, which in turn breeds decline."
"The dead have no rights, or so my lawyers tell me, and rarely rise to defend themselves."
"Don’t be absurd. They’re here for Ms. Dauplaise."
"Not unless you’re into old punk bands. Black Flag?"
"Google’s no substitute for knowing things. Write that down."
"So where does that leave us? Where it leaves us is our man can use the library Wi-Fi anytime, day or night, and doesn’t even need to physically enter the library to do it."
"I’ll get a text message, an e-mail, and a phone call."
"Hope is a cancer. One of two things happens. Either you never learn the truth, in which case it gnaws down to the bone until there's nothing left, or worse, you do, and you go through that windshield at ninety because hope told you it was okay to make the drive without a seat belt."
"Properly situated, he sat himself down in front of his laptop, put in his earbuds, and worked for what proved to be two straight days."
"The brutality of a thing was directly proportional to how often the word 'instantaneous' was used."
"A good rule of thumb, Jenn had found: the brutality of a thing was directly proportional to how often the word 'instantaneous' was used."
"No, she's been dead a long time. I think the doer didn't know who he was grabbing. I think he turned six shades of bitch when he found out he had a senator's daughter."
"The perpetual grimace left Hendricks’s face, and he became honest and serious for a moment."
"Their lives depended on their being incompetent."
"Contrary to the public’s misconception, hacking was not a duel between two fast-typing programming geniuses."
"Computers were only as good as the people operating them, and there was always a weak link."
"I need a cup of coffee," Hendricks muttered grumpily. "Don’t anyone talk to me unless they spot someone wearing an ‘I kidnapped Suzanne Lombard’ T-shirt, all right?"
"What’s he doing?" Hendricks asked. "Besides making my skin crawl? Not a lot," Jenn said.
"What had he allowed himself to be pulled into? How culpable was he?"
"Principles she despised. Principles that had led to unforgivable crimes. But principles nonetheless, and on some base level she could respect their devotion."
"A man like this was already broken. She did not expect to be here long. How much steel could there be in a man so weak he preyed on children?"
"Its rules. She’d known he would be confident about his ability to play it to his advantage."
"There are no rights out here, boy. Where do you think you are?"
"That kind of talk right there, that kind of talk is what makes a short thing go long."
"I swear to Christ, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t know what you’re talking about!"
"In the long run, it never made any difference. The only variable was how long it would take him to realize the same thing."
"He had come to see Jenn and Hendricks as the gods of his life."
"She watched Hendricks walk away in his boxers and Doc Martens to light a cigarette."
"An interrogation room was the greatest acting school ever devised."
"No matter how reprehensible their actions, people always convinced themselves they were justified."
"Who knew what kind of humiliating relationship Tate had with adult women."
"The fact that it required ski masks made him a little sick."
"How far was he willing to let this go if it meant finding out what Tate knew?"
"His body recoiled, and his mouth stretched into a scream as if the light itself burned."
"I need to know what Terrance Musgrove has to do with any of this."
"That’s it. It was against that wall back then. Suze was sitting right there. That chair. That exact chair."
"I’m tired of hiding. Tired of being scared. One way or another, I need this to end."
"Don’t you get it? I couldn’t help her so she called someone who could."
"The brittle hum of the fluorescent lighting made George’s head throb like a cruel dentist was excavating his eyeteeth."
"His throat was tight and dry, his back knotted and bruised."
"George didn’t look too much the worse for wear."
"They stared at each other like two ex-friends who had awkwardly bumped into each other on a street corner."
"I admire a man who takes stock of his failings."
"A man in this line of work needed a better poker face."
"What does someone capable of that look like?"
"Like he was supposed to know what that meant."
"Never ask a question in surprise. You will give yourself away."
"It’s an imperfect world, George. Evelyn understood that."
"You look just like him, you know? Especially the eyes."
"So why do it?" "Some things you just have to do. It’s all about appearances."
"Nobody looks like everybody else. We try but fail. The trick, Gib, is not to look at the center of a man. At the center every man looks the same."
"What does that tell you?" "He doesn’t have many pairs. He probably can’t afford a lot of shoes. He’s hoping no one looks at his feet."
"It means that no one thing reveals a man. Never be so arrogant to think you know a man from just his shoes. But... it’s a start."
"If you don’t answer, I will push the chair away. When you are dead I will go upstairs and I will butcher Linda and Mark Tompkins. I will make the man watch his wife die."
"They will say that you lost your mind, but before you hung yourself, you murdered the Tompkinses—the unfortunate people who bought your father’s house."
"The deranged end to a family tragedy that began more than a decade ago. That will be the epitaph to your life."
"I would do something good with that time instead. I would save Linda and Mark. That would be worthwhile... even if her paintings were lousy."
"The alleged father is not excluded as the biological father of the tested child. Based on testing obtained from analyses of the DNA loci listed, the probability of paternity is 99.9998%."
"Whatever mask he wore to blend in among people ripped loose momentarily; beneath lay something abhorrent. Something ancient and infinitely cruel."
"He was laughing and crying, jagged crests of relief and despair."
"On the morning of the eighth day, being alive no longer seemed like the worst idea he’d ever had."
"He was an old man with the damaged face of an unrepentant alcoholic."
"It was a chair, not a stool, that was kicked over under his feet. His father’s eyes were closed, not open."
"In both photographs, the shoes were placed carefully together and pointed away from the body at an angle. The same angle."
"I think they were in love. Well, Billy was in love with her. I don’t know about Bear."
"What it comes down to is a lie. One elegant, crafty lie. Told so convincingly that no one questioned it."