Page 26 of Renegade

“Raven? How are you? How’s Miguel?”

“We’re good.” I shot Miguel another look, just as he glanced over. “Hey, listen, the reason I called is because we’d like to come and talk to you for a second if that’d be okay.”

“Uh,sure, but I’m not in the office right now, Raven. We’re down at the Federal building in Westwood.”

I reached out, waving to Miguel to make a U-turn to head back the way we’d come. He immediately began to change lanes. “If it’s no trouble, we’d like just a minute of your time, Mac. I know you’re working but—”

“It’s fine, Raven. The ATF had some business with the FBI, but if you’re already in the neighborhood, please, come by now. We can meet you in the lobby, so just call me when you get here and we’ll come down.”

“Thanks, Mac,” I said, letting out a long, slow breath. “I really appreciate it. It’ll take about ten minutes to get to you.”

“No problem. We’ll be here a bit longer, but I’m looking forward to seeing you. It’s been too long.”

“Thanks, Mac. Thanks so much.” I hung up the phone, relieved as I glanced at Miguel. “Head to the Federal building. The ATF had to do something with him at the FBI, but he has time for some questions.”

Miguel nodded and he reached over, taking my hand as I dropped my phone in a slot in the center console. “I’m gonna confess something here, Raven.”

My heart skipped a beat, but I squeezed his hand encouraging him to tell me whatever was bugging him. “What?”

“If I find out that John’s been working with the CIA this whole time, I don’t know how I’m gonna take that.”

I frowned, looking over at him. His face was set in a grim line as he drove. “What do you mean?”

“If he’s been alive this whole time and hasn’t reached out to any of us because he’s been out of the country somewhere thatit would be dangerous to reach out, I might eventually be okay with it.”

I could see him grinding his teeth as he went on.

“But if it turns out that he had options to come back and chose them over men he called brothers, I’m not going to be able to forgive him.”

“There’s the other option, you know. He might have been held prisoner until now. I know the government sometimes does prisoner exchanges,” I said hopefully. “He might just now be coming home, and if that’s the case…you really should try to find a way to forgive him.” I didn’t want him to suffer with the guilt of not seeking closure in Sutter’s disappearance. I could tell the whole situation was eating him up inside.

He glanced over at me, shaking his head. “He got lost when he was barely twenty-seven years old, Raven. If he was held prisoner by the enemy for over eleven years, he’s going to be too far gone, and I know I’ll never trust him again. Honestly, I don’t know if I can trust him under any circumstances. He hasn’t even reached out to me personally. That man we saw today…that’s the kind of man John could be…heartless…maybe even worse.”

I hesitated because Miguel was right. If enemy combatants had kept Sutter prisoner, tortured him for information, he might have built up such rage over the years, that he’d lost any trace of the man he’d once been. He might have lost any measure of kindness just to survive.

“Have you asked the other men in your unit? Did you call Vonne after you saw Sutter yesterday?”

“Definitely not. I don’t want to do that yet. Let’s get more information first. I want to find out what happened to him…if he’s been working with those CIA fuckers before I call Vonne or any of the others. Two of the men on my team are still activeduty…out of the country on missions, and the other one doesn’t live in L.A.” He paused for just a second, seeming to think something over. When he finally did speak, he sounded very sad. “And to be honest, Raven, I know my reaction to this whole situation was bad…but Vonne’s reaction is gonna be worse.”

“How do you mean?”

He sighed. “About two weeks before the mission where we lost him in the desert, John was injured in a firefight with some…bad folks, and he got hurt. He was limping pretty badly from a bullet wound to the thigh, and Vonne thought he shouldn’t be with us at all out there. Vonne was our medic and trained to spot physical weaknesses.”

“You mean Sutter wasn’t fit for duty?” I asked.

Miguel lifted the palm of his hand and wiggled it back and forth. “He was so-so, not so bad that he couldn’t hide it when we went into the commander’s tent to talk to him, but bad enough that he kept us up at night when he was in pain. I’m pretty sure he asked the base physician who treated his wound to downplay his injury because he didn’t want to be excluded from duty until he was fully healed. John could be very persuasive when he wanted to be.”

“Let me guess. You guys let him get away with that because you didn’t want to tell the base commander he was as bad as he was?”

“Most of us, yeah, that’s the long and the short of it. None of us wanted a little injury to give him a reason to break up the team. But the fact is, Vonne kept telling him he had to bow out of any missions until he healed up completely…that every time he put weight on it, he was in danger of injuring it worse. It was a through and through similar to the one you got when you were shot. But when it got so bad one night that John couldn’t sleepat all, I had to physically hold Vonne back from going to the commander to tell him how injured John really was. We nearly came to blows.”

My eyes widened. “You and Vonne?”

“Yeah. We’d already been told that we were going out the next morning on the mission where John disappeared. Vonne thought he wasn’t healthy enough to risk leading the team and since John was insisting on going anyway, he started yelling that he had to be touched in the head also. We got into a horrible fight and finally, John ordered him not to go to the commander. When Vonne tried to go anyway, I was forced to make a choice. I held him back and almost fought with him myself. After John, Vonne was the man I was closest to in our unit, and I was…completely heartbroken.”

“You did what you thought was right, Miguel. Having to make a choice between your two best friends was a terrible situation.”

He let out a long huff of air. “Maybe,” he said quietly. “And I almost lost my friendship with Vonne. So, you can imagine when we did lose John in that freak sandstorm, both Vonne and I dealt with years of guilt and anger. We both knew he wasn’t fully able to act as team leader, and in the end, we let him go anyway. Hell, maybe the reason I’m so angry at John right now is because he made me feel that way all those years ago. That night, he was the one who nearly broke up our team. Vonne loved him like a brother and to lose him that way sent him into a downward spiral for years.”

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