My entire aim, in the instant his hands closed on me, was the narrowest and most professional one, to end the threat and to do it without doing him any real harm.

And so I used his own force and his own momentum against him, the way I had been trained to a decade ago, and a moment later Gavin was on the floor of my porch, held, controlled, unable to get up or reach for anything, and entirely unhurt.

It was not a beating.

There was no violence in it beyond the minimum required to make a much larger man stop.

It was, if anything, the most restrained thing I did all day.