I want to be clear that I take no particular pride in the deception of the boring title.

It is simply the nature of the work; the people who do it are effective precisely because no one thinks to fear them.

But I will admit that there was a specific, cold satisfaction in sitting beside my wife’s hospital bed, having just been threatened by a man who believed I was a powerless nobody, and knowing that I had spent four years learning to dismantle men just like him, only far more careful than he was.

Roy Prescott had spent twenty-two years as the biggest predator in a small pond, and had never once had to face something larger.