I floored the gas. The cop looked down at the holster trapping the pistol he couldn’t free, and then up again into my headlights. Mouth open, screaming, he put his left hand across his face, as if blocking out the glare would shield him from the impact.

It didn’t.

The Lada struck the passenger door dead centre – hard enough to pin him between my front bumper and his chassis, but not hard enough to fire the airbags. He coughed a spray of blood on to my windscreen. From deep in his throat came a dreadful shrieking, cutting through the howl of the wind and the throb of the engine.

I opened my door and fell to the road, rolling clear on the frozen ground as the second cop stumbled out into the snow, little Makarov pistol in hand. He spun around and fired high, sending three shots whining well clear of my head.

There were five metres between us. I found my feet and kept low, thrusting forward, hitting him in the guts with my shoulder. His boots slid from under him and he came down on his back, gun arm up, sending more shots into the sky above us. I rolled away and grabbed his right wrist with my left hand, twisting it backwards. Another shot rang out. The awful screaming from the police car stopped abruptly.

I rotated his arm and chopped down with the inside of my right palm. His elbow snapped inward. The pistol fell into the snow, tethered to his belt by an expanding coil of white safety wire. I unclipped it from the butt of the semi-auto and stood up. The policeman was on his knees, left hand scrabbling at the road, right arm dragging limp behind him. He was half begging, half crying, pleading with me not to kill him. I let him go and went back to the patrol car. Through the shattered side window I could see the policeman I’d bribed hanging lifeless. The last stray shot had passed through the Niva’s door frame and hit him in the side of the head. The Makarov’s steel-core rounds punch way above their weight.

I needed to move on, and fast.

I leaned in and removed the keys from the ignition and threw them into the trees beside the junction. Then I fired a shot into the radio receiver. Lying in the passenger footwell was a metal flashlight. I reached in and took it, and then circled around to the nearside. Brain matter and blood clots patterned the snow-covered highway. Though my fingers were slowing with the cold, I did what the cop had failed to do and opened the flap of his holster. I extracted a fully loaded magazine and stuffed it into my pocket with the Makarov I’d already picked up.