Killing Floor

“…you are a murdering outsider bastard. You’ve come down here to my town and you’ve messed up right there on Mr. Kliner’s private property…you’re going to jail…And then you’re going to the chair. And then I’m going to take a dump on your shitty little pauper’s grave.”

Morrison’s hostility toward Reacher comes from a mixture of anger and fear. He is understandably upset that a homicide occurred in “his” town, but he also labels Reacher as an outsider, immediately classifying him as a threat. In a town as isolated as Margrave, it is seldom, if ever, that someone new arrives, and Morrison reacts as if Reacher’s presence is an infection he means to eradicate.

“His operation out there pays us a lot of taxes, does us a lot of good. A lot of revenue and a lot of benefit for the town without a lot of mess, because it’s so far away, right? So we try to take care of it for him.”

Finlay’s description of Kliner’s business foreshadows how deeply the company’s corruption has taken root in Margrave. Kliner Industries and the Foundation financially support the entire city, and the citizenry welcomes the aide without seeing how vulnerable that dependency makes them.

“I’m a thirty-six-year-old unemployed ex-military policeman getting called a vagrant by smug civilian bastards who wouldn’t last five minutes in the world I survived.”

Reacher’s statement indicates a key aspect of his personality: he takes deep personal offence to people’s misunderstanding of himself and his capabilities. The Margrave police routinely underestimate Reacher, and he interprets their comments as deliberate insults. This lays the foundation for why Reacher reacts as he does to Joe’s death: he views his brother as an extension of himself, so any harm to Joe is harm done to him. This quote also emphasizes the deep divide between Reacher and regular citizens, both in the context of his past and his current lifestyle and philosophies.

“I felt like somebody in a kid’s book who falls down a hole. Finds himself in a strange world where everything is different and weird. Like Alice in Wonderland. Did she fall down a hole? Or did she get off a Greyhound in the wrong place?”

Reacher’s alienation is evident in this passage, as he compares his time in Margrave to Alice falling down the rabbit hole into Wonderland. He feels entirely dislocated, as if dropped into a strange world. Margrave is a beautiful city, but Reacher can sense something is not quite right beneath the surface.

“I don’t care who aced any guy anywhere…That’s your problem, not mine.”

Reacher’s dismissal of Finlay’s requests for help investigating the murders indicates how and on what criteria he decides to get involved in someone else’s problems. Right now, he does not care about the murders because none of it affects him personally. He may respect Finlay, and he is starting to like Roscoe, but those early bonds are not enough: he needs a personal stake in the matter.

“I was starting to like her a lot. But probably not enough to stop me getting the hell out of Georgia as soon as I could.”

Reacher recognizes his growing attraction to Roscoe is not substantial enough to make him give up his life as a wanderer. He values his personal freedom more than whatever relationship might be growing between them. While he enjoys the time he spends with her, he stays true to the genre convention of the stranger coming into town, solving their troubles, and leaving before they know he has gone.

“Not much of a town. Not much going on. Took me less than thirty minutes to look over everything the place had to offer. But it was the most immaculate town I had ever seen…The whole place was so tidy it could make you nervous to walk around in case you left a dirty footprint somewhere.”

Margrave is a secluded, picturesque Southern town. Everything is new or newly-updated, but Reacher notices a distinct lack of customers patronizing local businesses, meaning the town’s financial health does not rely on internal commerce. Margrave presents itself as a beautiful, welcoming place, but Reacher is not fooled by the façade.

“You could be walking over a solid glacier. Suddenly the ice would heave and shatter. Some kind of unimaginable stress in the floes. A whole new geography would be forced up…The world all changed in a second.”

Reacher’s reaction to realizing the first murder victim is his older brother, Joe, is a powerful imagistic representation of his grief and shock. In one of the few instances of emotional reflection Reacher has in this novel, the knowledge of Joe’s death up-ends Reacher’s understanding of himself, the world around him, and the situation he stumbled into.

“They’d known there was going to be a lot of blood. They’d brought overshoes. They must have brought overalls. Like the nylon bodysuits they wear in the slaughterhouse. On the killing floor. Big white nylon suits, hooded, the white nylon splashed and smeared with bright red blood.”

In this passage, the significance of the novel’s title becomes clear. The killing floor is part of a slaughterhouse where animals are restrained and killed. In Child’s novel, the killing floor metaphorically represents the site of each gruesome murder, and the stark contrast of red blood on a white protective suit further symbolizes the disparity between Margrave’s pristine image and the corruption that lurks behind it.

“But if it came to it, here was a woman who might get down in the dirt and fight. Maybe a hundred and fifty years ago she would have been on a wagon train heading west. She had enough spirit.”

Reacher’s second impression of Charlene Hubble is more generous than his first. He displays a respectful judgment of women that would feel at home in a western or detective novel. Much like the town’s tension between surface and second-surface, the female characters in the novel also have hidden surfaces that they reveal in times of stress or strife.

“They had made a second fatal mistake. Now they were dead men. I was going to hunt them down and smile at them as they died. Because to attack me was a second attack on Joe.”

After the murder team breaks into Roscoe’s house, Reacher views the trespass against Roscoe as a simultaneous personal attack on himself. If they had come for here, they came for him, too. Because of his strong sense of duty to Joe, he further interprets the attack on him as an additional slight to his brother’s memory.

“It was a very distinctive tree. Dead on one side. Maybe split by lightning.”

The image of the tree by Kliner’s warehouses presents a stark contrast much like previous imagery of red blood on a white vinyl suit, and it continues the image pattern first established by Margrave’s pristine buildings and landscaping. The tree is beautiful and alive on one side but dead and mangled on the other. Reacher suspects a lightning strike caused the fracture, foreshadowing how his own intervention exposes the second-surface in Margrave.

“…the community she’d served was rotten. It was dirty and corrupted. It wasn’t a community. It was a swamp, wallowing in dirty money and blood. I sat and watched her world crumble.”

Roscoe grieves the town she thought she knew. A major part of her identity is her role in Margrave; her position as a police officer and a member of one of the town’s oldest families helps her understand her place in the world. When she realizes the full extent of the corruption in Margrave, Roscoe feels her sense of self shatter and for a moment, the situation seems impossible.

“I had expected to feel better when I had identified the opposing players. But it wasn’t what I expected. It wasn’t me against them, played out against a neutral background. The background wasn’t neutral. The background was the opposition. The whole town was in it. The whole place was bought and paid for. Nobody would be neutral.”

The citizens of Margrave feel a duty to Kliner because of what his Foundation provides to the town. Reacher realizes that much in the same way his duty binds him to Joe, the townspeople’s duty to Kliner will leave him no allies in the community except Roscoe, Finlay, and the Hubbles. Similarly, once the Foundation’s money no longer funds the town, the lack of neutrality also means everyone in the town will suffer the consequences of Kliner’s death.

“The last time I had spoken to Joe face to face was very briefly after our mother’s funeral…I’d just seen him as my older brother. Just seen him as Joe. I hadn’t seen the reality of his life as a senior agent, with hundreds of people under him, trusted by the White House to solve big problems, capable of impressing a smart old bird like Kelstein. I sat there in the armchair and felt bad. I’d lost something I never knew I’d had.”

Despite his strong sense of duty to his brother, Reacher is saddened to realize that he never truly knew Joe or saw him for who he was and what he was capable of. Much in the same way people continually underestimate Reacher by not knowing him, Reacher underestimated his own brother the same way. He is sad to learn from a stranger that there was such an interesting person in his life that he never kept close.

“He should have been made aware of who his opponent was. He should have been made aware of why he had to die. All that noble, man-to-man stuff. But real life wasn’t like that.”

When Reacher kills Kliner’s son, a part of him thinks he ought to uphold some unwritten rule of “proper” conduct in a fight. However, Reacher has his own code of conduct, one he learned from his training as a military policeman. He fights with a brutal efficiency, and any ideas of nobility are not relevant to his main goal: winning.

“I had no idea what I was doing. In the army, some corporal had done my laundry. Took it away, brought it back clean and folded. Since then, I always bought cheap stuff and just junked it.” 

For all of Reacher’s highly specialized skill sets, he does not know how to do his own laundry. After spending so much of the novel displaying near-superhuman strength and intellect, this moment humanizes him in a humorous way. Something like doing one’s own laundry seems like common knowledge for many people, making it another signifier of Reacher’s alienation.

“Kliner was a dead man. He was as dead as a man who has just jumped off a high building. He hadn’t hit the ground yet. But he’d jumped.”

As Reacher and Roscoe’s relationship progresses, he takes even greater personal offence to Kliner’s threat of sexual violence. Reacher’s rage toward Kliner comes from both what he did to Joe and what he may do to Roscoe, but ultimately Reacher now sees Roscoe as an extension of himself—a threat to her is a threat to him, and that is Kliner’s last fatal mistake.

“Maybe it was real, maybe it wasn’t. It would spend just the same. And I wanted to leave her a big tip. Eno was getting a dirty grand a week, but I didn’t know if he was passing much of it on.”

Reacher’s experience in Margrave makes him question how things appear on the surface, so he doubts that Eno shares Kliner’s grant with his staff. Regarding the $100 bill Reacher left as tip, he embraces the possibility that it might be fake because it looks real enough. The distinction between the false surface and real second-surface is of no consequence, and in fact it enables him to extend generosity to a relative stranger.

“He had no bags. He was traveling light. He just glanced around his room and walked out with me. Like he couldn’t believe his life on the road was over. Like he might be going to miss it to a degree.”

Before running away from Margrave, Paul Hubble spoke about how much he loved his life as a wealthy banker. He did not want to leave his family or his home, but as soon as he was forced to run, he embraces life on the road in a way that Reacher admires. Hubble’s movement from one city to the next, carrying nothing but the cash in his pocket, is a direct imitation of how Reacher wanders. Hubble feels the allure of an anonymous life on the road, but ultimately his duty to his family keeps him settled down.

“I had worked my butt off for those bastards. I was good at my job. I had made them a fortune. And they just slung me out like suddenly I was shit on their shoe. And I was scared.”

Hubble’s anger at his former bank employers demonstrates the instability of his idealized life. He had everything the American Dream said he should have in order to be successful and happy, but he was on the verge of losing everything because the bank cut his department to save themselves money. The Dream he worked for, for both himself and for his employer, was not the fixed end-state it seemed. The bank’s self-preservation made Hubble vulnerable, ripe for Kliner to take advantage.

“Kliner’s foundation money…They just keep on throwing it at us. Something wrong with it…Seventy years, people are pissing all over me. Now people are throwing money all over me. Something wrong with that, right?”

Like Reacher, the barbershop owners are able to sense the tension between Margrave’s surface and second-surface. After living in the town for so long and being painfully aware of local attitudes towards people of color, they are immediately suspicious of Kliner’s generosity. Furthermore, they possess a hardline morality that seems rare in Margrave: they stockpiled Kliner’s grant money, refusing to spend a single cent they did not earn themselves.

“…we picked up the glow of the station house burning in front of us. I slowed as we drove past. Burning fiercely. It was going to burn to the ground. Hundreds of people were milling about in a ragged circle, watching it. Nobody was doing anything about it.”

The townspeople gather to watch the police station literally burn to the ground in a scene that eerily mirrors Reacher’s earlier assessment of the town’s inability to be neutral about the Kliner Foundation. Just like the town willfully played ignorant and ignored Kliner’s growing corruption because doing so benefitted them, they now openly refuse to intervene as the police station—the physical representation of how far the corruption spread—is destroyed.