Page 53 of Last Resort

“Sorry. I keep doing this.”

Ben set the glass aside. “No apology necessary. And it was a nightmare the last time, not a vision. Shit happens. What did you see?”

Erik thought for a moment, trying to focus on the images. “I was lost in a pine forest. Didn’t know where you were. Then I heard someone running and a gun fired. The bullet grazed my arm.”

As he spoke, his right hand came up to cover the place where he’d been wounded. “I hid. I didn’t get to see who was after me. That’s when the vision ended.”

Ben held his hands. “Do you think it was the Pine Barrens?”

“Could be. They’d be close enough that Edwin might have been able to get there to hide his treasure.”

“Well, that’s more than we knew before.”

Erik stared at him. “The Barrens have over a million acres. That’s looking for a needle in a pine forest.”

“Okay, but it’s a direction,” Ben replied. “It makes sense Edwin would hide his loot somewhere that wouldn’t be easy to find and also wouldn’t change much. A building could be sold or torn down. The Barrens are pretty wild, so as long as he could find the spot again, odds were good nothing would have been built or torn up.”

“The code on the poker chips—do you think it’s coordinates?” Erik felt like his brain was slowly coming back online.

“Probably—but they didn’t look like any coordinates I’ve seen, so I bet Edwin encoded them somehow. That’s where Teag comes in. He’ll figure it out.”

Visions usually left Erik wrung out, unlike the jitters he got from other bad dreams. Ben pushed his hair back from his face and tenderly touched his cheek.

“You need your sleep, and there’s nothing to be done right now. Maybe we’ll hear from Teag in the morning.”

Ben pulled Erik down with him, cocooning them in the soft sheets, close enough to warm Erik and calm him with his presence.

“Thanks for putting up with me, even though I’m weird,” Erik mumbled.

Ben pressed a kiss to the back of Erik’s neck. “I like your kind of weird. Go to sleep.”

Erik meant to protest, but he was asleep before he had the chance.

* * *

The next morning, Erik nearly had to shoo Ben out of the apartment to get him to go to work.

“I’m fine. Really. Go. You’ve missed enough work because of this whole situation,” Erik said, sending Ben off with a kiss.

Erik finished his coffee and a piece of peanut butter toast and checked the security cameras for the hallway and the front and back first-floor doors. He breathed a sigh of relief to see the areas empty.

He filled a thermos with the rest of the coffee and locked up, going down early to the store. Susan wasn’t due in for a few minutes, so Erik had time to finish his first round of coffee before he made a fresh pot.

The bag of garbage in the break room was overflowing, a testament to them being off their regular routine. Erik tied it closed and went out the back door. Just as he was about to swing the bag into the dumpster, he heard the click of a gun’s safety.

“Give us what’s in the safe, and you don’t die,” a voice growled behind him.

Erik swung the heavy garbage bag around and to the right, gambling that the gunman wasn’t left-handed. The bag pushed the man’s arm out and away from Erik so that the shot went wild.

A second goon emerged from behind the dumpster as the first man struggled to find his footing. Erik’s prior work with Interpol had included self-defense training since he exposed the crimes of oligarchs and narco lords.

He wheeled, sending the second assailant sprawling with a kick to the groin, then came up with his own gun drawn and squeezed off a shot just as the first man raised his weapon.

Erik’s bullet caught the goon in the shoulder. He backed into the doorway of the shop and slammed his hand against the panic button on the keypad, which set off alarms.

Just in case no one heard the gunshots.

He guessed that if Susan had arrived, she’d had the good sense to stay inside and that the security monitoring service had called the police. The attackers ran off minutes before Chief Hendricks and his deputy roared up in a squad car.

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