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I continued to watch Trent.
“Maybe he’d like a few names and pictures,” Johnson suggested.
“I’d like to contact my lawyer,” I said.
“Nah.” Trent shook his head. “Your lawyer can go fuck himself. I don’t talk to lawyers.”
Any thoughts I had that these guys might have been on the law-abiding side of the feds went out the window. Rinaldo had dealt with the feds plenty of times, but I had always been kept out of sight. He knew any information about me would be dangerous to him, so I was removed from any and all contact. When they were in town, I went underground until they left.
Johnson took some notes down on a pad of paper from the briefcase, and Trent leaned back in his chair and kept up the creepy smile.
“I’ve spent way too much time getting this close to you, Arden,” he said. “There’s no way I’d muddy the conversation with a lot of lawyer bullshit. Your boss always did a good job of keeping you out of sight, but he can’t help you right now. Your lawyer would just be in my way. Besides, lawyers hate it when I rough up their clients.”
He laughed, and Johnson cracked a smile. Trent leaned forward and raised his eyebrows.
“Sometimes I do it just for fun and not because you won’t answer my questions. I just enjoy that shit. Especially when it comes to trumped-up mafia shits who think they’re above and beyond any kind of reckoning, you know? Well, of course you know; you enjoy a little brutality now and again, don’t you?”
I knew it was coming. I didn’t need to watch his hand curl into a fist or follow its movements to my jaw. I couldn’t have moved enough to get out of the way, and with my hands restrained, I couldn’t defend myself, so I took it in silence.
The blow cut the inside of my lip on my teeth, and I dragged my tongue across the wound as I looked back up at Trent and waited for another blow. It came quickly, this time up close to my left eye. My head jerked to the opposite side as a dull throbbing in my temple blurred my vision enough that the next blow to my jaw caught me off guard.
I took a slow breath through my nose, gathered some of the blood in my mouth with my tongue, and spit it out onto the table right in front of Trent. With narrowed eyes, I watched for his next move.
He laughed.
“I suppose you got used to that kind of shit, didn’t you? All that time with a bunch of Jihad-happy insurgents smacking you around. Probably took it up the ass, too, didn’t ya?”
I stayed still though I couldn’t help the rapid flutter of my eyelids at the remark. If I had still been without sleep, I would have been dragged right back there to the desert and probably would have lost my mind for good. Instead, I just swallowed hard, focused on his face, and waited.
“Military hero,” Trent sneered. “What kind of hero gets his entire unit killed but somehow manages to survive himself? Where’s that report, Johnson?”
“Here you are.” Johnson handed Trent a collection of papers held together with a clip.
“Recognize this?” Trent held up the first page, which contained a Marine logo at the top and a CIA stamp on the bottom.
I did recognize it, but I didn’t answer.
“This report is from your interrogation after you were brought back to the U.S. There are a lot of questions about how you managed to survive for so long. Why did they keep you alive, dickhead? Was it because you were converted? Did you lead them to your location and get your unit killed off? Give up the other base running parallel to yours?”
“There was no such evidence,” I snarled back. “There were no charges. I was found in a fucking hole, you asshole! And that was a debriefing, not an interrogation!”
“Finally got a rise out of you, huh?” he smirked.
“Fuck you. No action was taken—no charges.”
Stop it, I told myself. This is what he wants.
“Yeah, yeah,” Trent said as he waved his hand dismissively. “There haven’t been any murder charges brought up against you either, but that doesn’t mean you haven’t been on a killing rampage since you arrived in this city.”
I turned my eyes to the top of the table, refusing to be further engaged. I wasn’t planning on letting him get to me at all, and I definitely couldn’t let him get under my skin again. I had to keep myself prepared for more shit remarks about my capture or the debriefing.
He must have realized I wasn’t going to be further goaded because he finally got to the point.
“Here’s the thing,” Trent said as he leaned forward on his elbows. “I’ve been waiting a long time to actually have something I could use on you that your piece-of-shit boss couldn’t just talk or bribe his way out of it for you, and I finally have it.”
I wasn’t going to let myself be baited into asking what he meant, so I sat there and said nothing as Trent motioned to Johnson’s briefcase. Johnson opened it up and pulled out a stapled set of papers. The very first page had two boxes with images in them resembling a graphic equalizer display. There were rows of vertical bars with smaller horizontal bars going through the middle of them. Both boxes showed the exact same image.
“Do you know what that is?”
