62 pages • 2 hours read
Lee ChildKilling Floor
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1997A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 32-34Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 32 Summary
They reach the barbershop at one in the morning. The older of the two owners answers the door “like he’d been waiting for [them] to knock” (485). Inside, the younger owner leads them upstairs. He says they are not the first people to hide out in their shop, and he had a feeling big trouble was coming to Margrave soon. Finlay tells him they plan to take down Kliner; the man shows him a closet full of all the cash Kliner ever gave them. Reacher, Finlay, and Hubble strategize breaking into the warehouse. Reacher lies to Hubble, saying only Roscoe made a hostage message. He thinks if Hubble heard Charlene like that, his panic would make him useless. Hubble talks them through the layout of the warehouse, and they make their plan of attack. At two-thirty, the older barber tells Reacher someone is there to see him. In the upstairs kitchen, the barber’s sister is waiting. With the barber’s encouragement, Reacher asks the elderly woman about Blind Blake. She used to sing with Blind Blake when he performed in town, and they had a private spot under a tree where they would spend hours singing and talking.
62 years ago, she and Blind Blake were walking through town, and two white people, a man and child, were walking towards them on the same sidewalk. The father was an important man in town. She stepped aside, “like we were supposed to,” but Blind Blake did not see them, and he “crashed” into the child. The boy fell, cut his forehead on a rock, and screamed. The father carried a cane with a large silver knob on top. He beat Blind Blake’s skull with the cane until he was dead. He made her wash the blood off the cane, and he walked away, leaving Blind Blake dead in the street. She hid inside a nearby building until someone else found the body. She never told anyone until Reacher, because he was the first person to ask. She tells Reacher the boy was not hurt that badly, and he “got my poor Blake killed for no reason at all except he was blind and black” (494). Reacher asks more than once who the boy was, and she tells him it was Grover Teale, Margrave’s current mayor.
Chapter 33 Summary
Reacher, Finlay, and Hubble drive back past the police station to get Finlay a weapon. Hubble’s wrecked car is still sitting in the lobby—both front tires blown, gas tank leaking on the floor. Finlay takes a revolver from the armory and finds a box of matches. He sets the police station on fire to create a diversion. They drive to the warehouse; Reacher pockets the water bottle of gasoline and the rest of Finlay’s matches. Just before four o’ clock in the morning, Hubble uses the bolt cutters to cut open the gate. They sneak inside and see Baker patrolling on foot outside. Baker notices the damaged gate, and Reacher quickly hits him hard, knocking him down. Finlay rushes Baker, seizing him by the neck, and chokes him to death. They climb the fire escape and Hubble unlocks the door at the top. It opens into an office where his children are sleeping on the floor. Hubble carries his daughter out, and Finlay follows with his son. Reacher tells Hubble to stay outside with the kids. Finlay comes back, and they begin moving through the warehouse.
Reacher sees Teale and Kliner at the far end of the warehouse, where Roscoe and Charlene are boxing up the money stockpile. Reacher assesses the men’s positions and realizes that if he walks out on the balcony, Roscoe and Charlene will be right in their line of fire. He gives Finlay the matches and plastic bottle of gasoline, and Finlay sets one of the money piles on fire. Teale looks up at the flames, and Reacher shoots him in the head from 100 feet away. Kliner dives for Teale’s shotgun, and as Reacher lines up his shot, Picard staggers through the main doors. Reacher feels time slow down as he aims at Kliner. Kliner raises the shotgun to fire, but Reacher is faster, and the bullet knocks Kliner off his feet. Reacher races to the main floor and runs right into Picard. Finlay shoots Picard six times in the back; Reacher finishes him off with Teale’s shotgun. They lead Roscoe and Charlene outside, and they watch the warehouse burn.
Chapter 34 Summary
Reacher takes Roscoe home. They are exhausted, but their adrenaline is too high to sleep. They talk about the past few days. Picard took Roscoe hostage as soon as they were out of Reacher’s sight. With the Coast Guard blockade ending and Reacher picking off Kliner’s men, she was put to work in the warehouse. Charlene had been working there since Picard picked her up a few days prior. Reacher blames himself: They were inside the warehouse the whole time he was sitting outside surveilling it. When Reacher tells her about his ambush on Kliner’s son and the murder team, he gets the impression she thinks he took things too far. He tells himself he did it for her, for Joe, for Molly Beth, but he wonders if he is projecting his own guilty feelings for “letting” her get captured.
In the morning, Roscoe picks up food from Eno’s. She comes back with news from Finlay: the stationhouse burned down, and so did all four warehouses on the Kliner Industries lot. The debris exploded onto the highway, and state police are involved. The police called the bomb squad because of the explosions, the bomb squad called the FBI in case it is terrorism-related, and the governor called in the National Guard to disperse crowds of people collecting counterfeit bills that were carried away on the wind. Roscoe is excited to be involved in rebuilding Margrave, but Reacher thinks one of the many agencies swooping in will realize his connection to everything, and he will be cooped up in jails while they try (and fail) to squeeze information out of him. Reacher decides to leave Margrave before any official agents know he is even there. He talks it over with Roscoe. She asks him to say, but he will not. He asks her to come with him, but she cannot. They agree to separate.
Reacher asks Roscoe to arrange a funeral for Joe and to spread his ashes in the meadow where the barber’s sister sang with Blind Blake. Roscoe drives Reacher to the bus station in the next town and gives him an envelope. As the bus crosses the state line into Alabama, Reacher opens the envelope and finds the photograph of Joe that Molly Beth carried in her luggage. On the back, Roscoe wrote her phone number, but Reacher already had it memorized.
Chapters 32-34 Analysis
The closing chapters wrap up all the plot’s loose ends, including Reacher’s casual secondary investigation of what really happened to Blind Blake. The inclusion of the barber’s sister allows the reader to feel closure on all fronts as the action winds down, and the truth that Grover Teale was just as manipulative as a child helps the reader feel that his death is justified even though he did not participate in Joe’s murder. Teale initially seemed like he went along with Kliner’s plans because the money was too good to resist, but the sister’s story about how he exaggerated his injury and got Blind Blake killed indicates that he likely knew what he was doing all along. Although it is unclear whether Teale ever personally killed anyone, he enabled Kliner’s operation and sacrificed Margrave so he could get rich. Whether he directly committed a murder or not, he still bears responsibility for many deaths.
The attack on the warehouse is rendered in quick, staccato sentences that include more action verbs than descriptive imagery. The pace of the writing conveys the rising tension and how quickly Reacher must react in this environment. He must simultaneously predict Kliner and Teale’s response times, the angle they will fire at, and what areas their line of fire will cover. Reacher weighs the outcomes in rapid succession even as time feels like it slows down, creating a sense of ever-increasing speed; his mind is working so fast that the rest of the world seems like it moves in slow motion. Before this final confrontation, the reader has only seen Reacher use a handgun in combat a few times, all within relatively close range and in lower-stakes scenarios. Now, however, his target is over 100 feet away, and Reacher proves himself an excellent marksman by shooting Teale directly in the head. The moment reveals yet another of Reacher’s impressive skills, and it seems that even in this fraught scenario, there is nothing he cannot do.
The aftermath of the battle is particularly revealing as to how the town of Margrave will move forward without the Kliner Foundation’s weekly $1,000 grants. The townspeople watch the police station burn to the ground, but none of them seek help. Admittedly, the people they might ordinarily ask for help are all dead, but the fire station is across the street and no one makes an effort to put the fire out. The citizenry watch the symbol of uniformed authority in Margrave burn, and the scene illustrates the neutrality Reacher thought about earlier. The townspeople were invested in protecting the Kliner Foundation because it kept the town afloat, even if it did so through violence and criminal activity. They endured the corruption because Kliner made sure it benefitted them to do so. Now, without Kliner and without the financial security he offered, the citizens of Margrave do not know how to rebuild. For five years, they had Kliner telling them what was good for them, and in his absence they must confront a future for themselves they never envisioned was possible.
Reacher and Roscoe’s relationship ends because the futures they envision are fundamentally at cross-purposes. Reacher does not want to give up his newfound freedom as a wanderer, even though he admits Roscoe would be worth sticking around for. Conversely, Roscoe carries guilt for how rotten Margrave became, and she feels duty-bound to be directly involved in guiding the town toward a new future—even though travelling around the country with Reacher would be fun. For so long, Reacher put other obligations ahead of himself, and now it is Roscoe’s turn to do the same. Reacher can be free to wander, and Roscoe can help free her community.
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By Lee Child
