Free The Big Sheep by Robert Kroese

making a beeline for Brian. My legs were rubbery, but they held. I’d done my best to get the blood moving to my extremities, but there was a pretty good chance the sudden movement would cause me to black out. And any second now the pain in my head would register.
    It hit just as I reached Brian, like a grenade exploding at the base of my skull. I was relying on momentum now, coasting on a wave of agony. I brought my right hand back and made a fist. Brian saw it and bobbed to his left, which is what I was counting on.
    Here’s the thing about bodyguards: they weren’t born bodyguards. They did something else first. Most are ex-military or civilian law enforcement. But the really high-paid ones, the ones who work for people like Durham, tend to be heavyweight boxers or wrestlers, for the simple reason that they look impressive. Appearances are important, particularly in Hollywood.
    That isn’t to say Brian was incompetent. I’m sure he was well trained; he could probably hit a dime at twenty-five yards with that Glock .40 on his chest. But he had a weakness, which was that he was at heart a wrestler. You could tell from his neck muscles and the way he walked, his arms hanging in front of him as if he expected any moment to have to drop on all fours. So when a crazy man threw a punch at him, he reacted like a wrestler: bob to the side and try to take advantage of the attacker’s loss of balance. Solid tactic, if this were a wrestling match. It wasn’t.
    Brian grabbed my wrist with his right and twisted hard. It probably would have hurt a lot if I didn’t already have Hiroshima going off between my ears. He slammed me against the wall behind him, grinding my wrist into the middle of my back. Point to Brian. He had me in an unbreakable hold. Unfortunately for Brian, I was now pointing his own gun at his abdomen. I’d wager that until he felt the cold steel of the barrel creeping up under his turtleneck, he’d completely forgotten he even had a gun. I’d slipped it out of its holster with my left while he was focused on my right. Wrestlers.
    It was an incredibly awkward position to be in, my face smashed up against the wall and both of my arms twisted behind my back. But I held the trump card. Brian could break my arm, but I could perforate his colon and possibly paralyze him from the waist down. Hard to make a living as a bodyguard in a wheelchair.
    The only problem with this plan was that I was rapidly losing consciousness. My eyes were watering from the pain in my head, and I could feel my vision darkening around the edges—not that I could see anything with my nose smashed against a wall. I couldn’t feel my fingers, and it was all I could do to keep the gun barrel pressed up against Brian’s belly. My only hope was that Brian’s wrestler brain would finish its cost-benefit analysis of the situation before I collapsed. As an added bonus, I was pretty sure that if I passed out before Brian loosened his grip, he’d rip my arm right out of its socket. So that was a whole new sort of pain to look forward to, if I ever woke up again.
    â€œBrian!” I heard Durham yell. “Get him under control!”
    I’m not sure what he was expecting Brian to do exactly, but Brian was frozen with indecision. Evidently, Durham didn’t realize I had a gun on Brian. I did, didn’t I? I couldn’t feel my hand anymore.
    As my vision blurred, my thoughts did as well. Where was Keane? Hadn’t he been in the room with me? Why wasn’t he helping? We had come here on a case, I seemed to recall. Something about a sheep. Someone was trying to murder a sheep? That didn’t sound right. Where was here , anyway? Some kind of party? It didn’t feel like a party. It was no use; I wasn’t going to be able to make sense of it. I just needed to lie down. Lie down and sleep.
    A moment of blackness, then:
    I was sitting on the floor, my back against the wall, the