“I will check in a minute, Marc,” Reggie grumbled as he cut the ties on my ankles and I felt his fingers brush over them. “Ugh, why do you have to be so strong, Cade? You broke the skin.”
“My back hurts,” I muttered, drawing myself into a sitting position. I realized I was still naked, but that didn’t seem important. Walker was gone, far out of my reach, and I didn’t know what I could do about that.
“That’s where they tased you,” Reggie said, and I could hear him wincing. “Twice.”
“Three times,” Marc said with a snort, tapping the panel on the wall and dimming the lights.
I peered up. “When did they stop flashin’ red?”
“Right before the agents came in,” Marc said as he grabbed a pair of pants from the ground and handed them to me gently. “Reggieaccidentallytriggered the alarm when he was attempting to make the system open the doors for us.”
Accidentally, right.
“I guess it was better than you being woken up by the agents coming in,” Reggie muttered as he sat on the edge of the bed, a tablet in his hand. “I mean, maybe.”
“We weren’t sleepin’,” I said, still sitting on the floor, just with pants on now.
“Oh,” Reggie said, looked down at the bed he was sitting on, and sighed. “Oh.”
Marc shook his head. “How are you? And I don’t mean emotionally. I understand that is a loaded question and at the top of the list is misery.”
“And helpless,” I said, crossing my legs and running my finger over the stiff metal of the prosthetic. “Espionage, treason? Can’t be.”
“As far as we could tell, whatever Walker had been doing before he was brought to us got into the wrong hands, or spun out of control,” Marc said with a frown. “It’s hard to say because it was snippets of conversation that were overheard rather than the entire story. Reggie is insistent on doing some research to figure out more, but I’m not sure how much help that’s going to be. I should also point out that every room in this building is fitted with cameras, but several of them are never activated.”
I peered up at the ceiling. “Er…in the rooms, too?”
“Yes,” he said. “Again, they’re left deactivated.”
“Is that legal?”
“It is when it’s covered in the forms you have to read and sign to come to the resort.”
“Right…all that?”
“All that,” Marc said, and the corner of his lips twitched. “Reggie?”
“Patience,” Reggie muttered. “And…yeah, from start to finish, got it all.”
“Excellent,” Marc said. “I don’t know how much it will help, but it’s something.”
I looked between the two of them, confused. “What?”
“Did you think I was going to have the federal government break down the door to our resort, wave their warrant and their egos, and I wouldn’t take measures?” Marc asked, and when he saw I wasn’t following, he smiled. “From the moment I realized we had federal agents breathing down our necks, I made sure Reggie activated all the cameras we might need. That included the ones in my office, the ones in the hallway, and the ones in your room.”
“Er, how, uh…soon before ya came in, did ya turn them on?” I asked, thinking of what had been happening minutes before everything had gone to hell.
“If you’re asking what I think you’re asking, I don’t think what two consenting adults were doing in the privacy of their room is going to be necessary to bring up,” Marc said and then sighed. “And I can’t say I have complete confidence that the footage will do much good. Not on its own. Agent Smith handled the entire affair from top to bottom poorly, but that might not be enough.”
“He’s going to need a lawyer, and I don’t think he or his family have the money for that,” Reggie said, sounding unhappy. “And while we can provide footage, we can’t be seen to offer much more help. The warrant was legal, the arrest was sloppy, but it wasn’t so botched that it could be thrown out or contested easily.”
“Right, a lawyer,” I said, frowning. “I don’t know any of those.”
“They’ll provide him one, but…I suspect he’ll need better than a public defender who is constantly being bombarded with more cases than they know how to deal with,” Marc said with an unhappy expression. “I know it won’t do much good to tell you not to sit around and feel awful about this, but…what are you doing?”
“Where’s my phone?” I asked, heart thundering in my chest as an idea blossomed, and I scrambled around looking for it in the mess the fight had created.
“This one?” Reggie asked, pulling my phone out from under the mattress.
