The syringe was taken from Harrison’s hand.

It was over.

And it had ended not in blood, but in evidence.

There is a phrase I have used, since that night, to describe the difference between the way the story actually ended and the way everyone assumes it must have, and the phrase is this: I let the law do the killing.

Not literally, of course; no one died that night, which was precisely the point.

But what I mean is that I took the enormous, righteous force of what those people had done to me, the murdered driver, the cut brake line, the corrupt doctor, the whispered countdown, all of the fury that such crimes rightly generate in a man, and rather than discharging it myself, through my own hands, in that room, I channeled it entirely into the one instrument built to carry it: the law.