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 5-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 5 Summary
Despite Finlay’s belief that Reacher and Hubble are both innocent, Morrison decides that Hubble hired Reacher to commit the murder, and both men are transferred to the nearby Warburton state facility for the weekend. Reacher is angry and calls Finlay a coward for not standing up to Morrison, but Finlay assures him that Roscoe is already looking into both men’s alibis to clear them, and she will work all weekend to get it done. Baker handcuffs Reacher and Hubble, and they board the penitentiary bus waiting outside. As they drive to Warburton, Reacher watches Hubble’s fear intensify. Upon arrival, a corrections officer explains that Reacher and Hubble will be held on the top floor, and the assistant warden, Spivey, will escort them there at ten o’clock. Reacher and Hubble eat in silence. At ten, Spivey arrives and asks which of the two men is Hubble. Spivey leads them upstairs and points them to an empty cell. Reacher soon falls asleep, and he dreams of going to Jamaica with Roscoe.
Chapter 6 Summary
In the morning, Reacher has a conversation with an elderly inmate who is mopping the floor outside their cell. The man keeps laughing, and finally says he has never seen anyone on this floor wearing regular clothes. Reacher learns that Spivey did not put him and Hubble on the holding floor, rather, they are on the same floor with the “lifers.” Reacher immediately begins strategizing ways to survive their situation. He recalls how as a young boy, he and his brother had to fight bullies at every new school in order to achieve “status” and be left alone. Soon, other inmates leave their cells and notice the “fresh meat.” One man, with ripped sleeves and tinted sunglasses, encourages his group to approach the cell. The leader intimidates Hubble into giving up his eyeglasses and his sweater. He breaks Hubble’s glasses, then tries to bully him into performing oral sex on his friends. Reacher intervenes, first by intimidation, then by headbutting the leader and knocking him unconscious. Reacher takes the other man’s sunglasses as reparation. When the group leaves, Hubble confides in Reacher that he’s worried even if he survives prison, he and his family are still in danger: “If I ever tell anybody what’s going on, they said they’ll break into our house…nail me to the wall and cut my balls off…make my wife eat them…they’ll make our children watch and then they’ll do things to them after we’re dead that we’ll never know about” (89).
Chapter 7 Summary
Hubble asks Reacher for advice, to which Reacher responds that if Hubble was told to keep quiet, then he should keep quiet. Hubble asks who Finlay is, since he only knew the previous chief of detectives, a man named Gray. According to Hubble, Gray hung himself in his garage a year ago. Reacher asks Hubble why he confessed to the murder, but Hubble will only say that the dead man and the other word hidden in his shoe, “Pluribus,” are connected to whoever is threatening his family. Hubble confessed that he wanted to go to prison so he could hide and so Finlay wouldn’t investigate him any further. Hubble also hoped that his false confession would show the threat that he can be trusted—he would not spill his guts under pressure. Reacher is impressed by how Hubble managed to hit three birds with one stone, and his curiosity is piqued despite feeling exhausted by the earlier fight.
Hubble follows Reacher to the bathroom, where Reacher puts on the stolen sunglasses and inspects his sore forehead. Five men with swastika tattoos walk in and assess Hubble and Reacher, who recognizes the group as members to the Aryan Brotherhood. The leader points to Reacher, and they attack. Reacher fights them off with ease, doing incredible damage, until men from a rival gang rush in. They say they will claim credit for the brawl, so long as Reacher and Hubble hurry out of sight. Spivey finds them in their cell and rushes them up to the holding floor. Reacher is convinced Spivey set up the attack and put them with the lifers on purpose. What Reacher remains unsure of, however, is why Spivey targeted him at all.
Chapter 8 Summary
Reacher asks Hubble if the murder victim was trying to help. Hubble finally reveals that the murdered man was an investigator he contacted to help get him out of a criminal enterprise and take down the operation in the process. Now that the man is dead, Hubble fears he will never escape. Hubble says the investigator was supposed to meet an inside-man, and he worries the insider is dead, too. Hubble hoped to exploit a “window of vulnerability,” but that window is closing in a week. Reacher coaxes Hubble into revealing that he is a small but crucial part of this tight-knit operation. In the morning, the guard says they are free to go. They walk outside and see two women waiting for them: Hubble’s wife and Roscoe. As Roscoe drives Reacher back into town, she tells him she worked until nearly two in the morning to clear his alibi and process the results of his fingerprint check. Reacher asks if they ran the dead man’s fingerprints again, since it took 14 hours to get the all-clear on his. Roscoe says Baker must have made a mistake on the first scan since it turned up an immediate all-clear, so she resubmitted them. Reacher asks Roscoe to lunch, to thank her for working so hard to help him.
Chapters 5-8 Analysis
Reacher again demonstrates a high level of critical thinking and situational awareness in these chapters. When the first group of inmates tries to bully Hubble into performing oral sex on them, Reacher’s intervention starts with a physical assessment of his opponents, then a momentary review of his own capabilities fighting unarmed. Reacher counts down before headbutting the group’s leader, creating the illusion of an empty threat, which puts the man in a false sense of security, thinking he still has the upper hand. Reacher headbutts the man early, which to some might seem like “cheating,” but Reacher was trained to ignore his inhibitions in a fight. One such inhibition would include any notions of nobility or gentlemanly conduct in a fight, since oftentimes losing a fight could mean losing one’s life. Reacher was trained that the method one uses to achieve victory is unimportant, since winning the fight is all that matters. The reader is introduced to Reacher’s philosophy and training early on in both these prison fight scenes, which outline and establish Reacher’s modus operandi in combat.
The fact that Hubble confides in Reacher about his false confession accomplishes two things for the narrative: first, it introduces an antagonistic presence in the story, since Hubble is motivated by fear of his employer; secondly, it dispels the initial impression of Hubble as a “yuppie” banker ignorantly following his slice of the American Dream. Hubble confessed out of intense fear for his own life and the lives of his wife and children, but he also demonstrates a keen intellect by using his confession to simultaneously hide from his employers, show them that he is not a snitch, and (hopefully) earn their gratitude for spinning Finlay’s investigation in another direction. Hubble’s careful accounting for all possible outcomes of his arrest shows he possesses an intellect capable of keeping up with Reacher’s own.
Reacher constantly processes his surroundings for new information, and he proves adept at drawing reasonable conclusions from the evidence he has, even if that evidence is not comprehensive. He knows something is suspicious about Spivey from the moment he realizes they were put on the wrong floor, and Reacher’s curiosity grows when he realizes that while Hubble was targeted the first time, the second group of men pointed Reacher out specifically. He knows Hubble’s confession was false, and he is therefore innocent, so Reacher presumes the first attack was routine cellblock intimidation, but the second was an assassination attempt. Reacher thinks Spivey set up the attack on someone else’s orders, but he does not know why they would target him. Reacher is an outsider and a murder suspect, but those two things alone are not enough to warrant assassination from where he stands.
What Hubble says about the people threatening him reveals quite a lot, even if he says very little. The description of the torture he would endure at their hands demonstrates a methodology invested in brutality and fear; in cruelty rather than simple killing. The torture also invokes an element of humiliation by castrating him and making his wife swallow the severed testicles. Being nailed to the wall invokes sacrificial imagery, as if the victim is being killed in this manner as a message to further threaten someone who might see the scene later. These details heighten the stakes of the novel and turn up the heat on the mounting tension and uncertainty. Reacher doesn’t know who this new invisible enemy is, but it quickly becomes clear that they are both cruel and efficient. The picture-perfect façade of the town is falling apart and it’s becoming apparent why Reacher did not trust it in the first place.
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