Electric darkness.........................

     The expresso had been close to perfect, so Reacher went back to the same cafe exactly twenty-four hours later.  Two nights in the same place was unusual for Reacher, but he figured great coffee was worth a change in his routine.  The cafe was on the west side of Sixth Avenue in New York City, in the middle of the block between Bleecker and Houston.  It occupied the ground floor of an undistinguished four-story building.  The upper stories looked like anonymous rental apartments.  The cafe itself looked like a transplant from a back street in Rome.  Inside it had low light and scarred wooden walls and a dented chrome machine as hot and long as a locomotive and a counter.  Outside there was a single line of metal tables on the sidewalk behind a low canvass screen.  Reacher took the same end table he had used the night before and chose the same seat.  He stretched out and got comfortable and tipped his chair up on two legs.  That put his back against the cafe's outside wall and left hims looking east, across the sidewalk and the width of the avenue.  He liked to sit outside in the summer, in New York City.  Especially at night.  He liked the electric darkness and the hot dirty air and the blasts of noise and traffic and the manic barking sirens and the crush of people.  It helped a lonely man feel connected and isolated both at the same time.
-Lee Child,  The Hard Way