‘I think it makes us look like the last sane men alive,’ he said. ‘We executed an abuser of young girls. We executed a hit-and-run driver who killed an innocent boy. We executed a stinking scumbag drug addict who destroyed an old man who fought for our nation’s freedom. And we’re the crazy ones? You protect these scumbags. You hold their coats while they commit their crimes. You worry about their human rights while they’re raping our children.’

‘Shut up now,’ I said. ‘I’m arresting you—’

He kicked me across the room.

One kick, perfectly executed, that caught me high in the midriff with the side of his enormous right foot, whooshing the air out of me as it lifted me off my feet and threw me backwards.

It felt like the first time I had been kicked by someone who really knew what he was doing.

Wozniak crossed the room and pulled me up by the lapels of my wedding suit. I heard the material rip and felt him adjust his grip. I weigh eighty kilos. He tossed me into the centre of the room as if I weighed nothing. My trousers tore across the backside as I hit the ground. I watched him touch one lapel of his jacket.

He brought out an old-fashioned razor blade from behind the lapel. It’s an old bouncer’s trick. If anyone ever grabbed his lapel, they would soon wish they hadn’t.

He started towards me.

I tried to roll away but he was fast for a man that big and then he was directly above me and I saw the razor blade in his right hand and I watched him set himself on the balls of his feet and I could hear someone screaming and it was me and then he came down on top of me like a bomb. As he came down I drove my right fist up into his heart with every scrap of my remaining strength. The air went out of him and he flinched with shock and pain.

But it didn’t stop him.

Shit, I thought. That punch always used to work for me.

He settled his massive weight on top of me, but not exactly the way he’d planned. He had one knee pressed into my chest, the other pinning down my left shoulder, the razor blade still in his right paw, but his body was twisted from the one shot that I had landed.

I had hurt him. He was breathing hard. The sweat rolled off him and dropped onto my face. His free hand pinned down the top of my right arm but there was diminished strength in it.

That’s the thing about big men. They wear themselves out.