This is my 41st NCIS Mystery, the First story of my Fifth Season. Belisarius Productions owns 'NCIS'.
The usual legal Disclaimers about making money and taking characters apply. All places and character names are fictional and do not refer to any person living or dead, nor to where they live or work. I only own Rev. Siobhan (O'Mallory) McGee, Apprentice Pathologist Dr. Samantha (Sammy) Sky, Special Agents Kevin Lamb, Lisa DuBois, Janet Levy and other original characters. You can find all my stories listed in order in my Profile.
This story opens on the Tuesday following Labor Day, more than two weeks after Tony DiNozzo was announced as the new SAIC of the Pensacola Field Office and he and his fiancé Jeanne Benoit had moved to Florida.
Rated R or NCis-17
Please Review.

Hit and Run
by JMK758
Chapter One
Everything Changes

Rev. Siobhan McGee leans into the elevator's rear corner and hangs her head, presses every part of her body to limp relaxation, grateful for the few moments silence and solitude. Held up by the walls, she lets the red curtain of her hair tunnel her vision to the dark grey floor and gives serious consideration to dozing right here in the car rather than push the button.

She hadn't ever thought she would miss her albatross, the coke bottle glasses that she'd been saddled with for more than two decades. When she'd had them, when it became this difficult to see, she'd only had to take them off and wipe the lenses. 'What if I were to…? No.' That thought's a little too disgusting.

As it is she cannot control the blinking that's her dead giveaway of fatigue or worse, and she has long ago given up any attempt to argue her attentiveness with Timmy. The more tired she is, the faster and more frequently she blinks so even if she cannot see the instants of darkness she cannot defend or protest against them either.

And Timmy has her nailed each and every time; he needs one glance to start sending her to bed - where this time she truly wants to go.

But while her hair is parted out of the way she does reach up behind her neck and undoes the stud that binds the stiff white collar, pulls the symbol off and undoes the top button that chokes her. At least now her head hangs more comfortably.

She considers pushing off from the corner and pressing the button by the door and realizes, in that portion of her brain that's not snoring, that she (1) has to do it anyway before someone else boards or calls from another floor and (2) the sooner she does it the sooner she can bring life to her mental picture of propping her knees against the foot of the queen bed, hollering 'timber!' and leaving Timmy to drag her up the rest of the way.

Come to think of it, she doesn't care if he does it or not.

x

Because she has to, because a mature adult would do so rather than be caught snoring upright in an elevator car, she raises her left arm to under the red tunnel and almost focuses on her watch. The luminous dials tell her nothing except that the short one is too far to the right of upright. Monday crossed into Tuesday before she started north to Silver Spring but thank God that except for her duties at Enkiss she doesn't have a set schedule on Tuesdays.

There have been times when she's wondered if anything is set in Enkiss, and these past two weeks have sharpened that wonder.

With a sigh of defeat, or accession to the inevitable, she arches her back, pushes off the wall and steps forward to push the 3, knowing so well that the one thing she will never miss is the DC / Silver Spring commute.

As of the day after tomorrow, from Saint Mary the Virgin to Dupont Circle, she can virtually leave her desk and fall into the new apartment.

x

When she opens the apartment door and steps inside it's to too many lights on in the living room at the end of the short hall and in the kitchen to her left and Sarah McGee pushing a newspaper wrapped something into a box on the half counter that separates both rooms.

"Ha-huh-what?" The surprise is enough to push quite a bit of the fugue from her brain. "Sarah?" She'd actually stepped past her before she'd registered the younger woman.

Somewhat more awake now - all the way up to one third - she steps left and back around the counter to hug her sister-in-law. "Hi. How are you?"

"Just fine."

As they pull out of the hug Siobhan senses before she sees Timmy coming from the direction of the bedroom behind her past the living room. She can fight the so revealing blinking for a bit before it gives her away but at this hour there's really no point in trying. "I didn't know you were coming over," she finishes with a partial glare to her absent-minded husband. She could not have made it in from DC any sooner, not with a Hospital Sick Call that took so very, very long, but she feels bad. She'd left from here, he knows where she was but can never know why.

x

She had spent hours this evening at Sibley Memorial with Lisa DuBois and the stay had been draining. A normal hospital visit is measured in minutes, a half hour is high but this one had spanned two hours and she is by no means certain what she has accomplished. It is only through the Grace of God that she will accomplish anything.

For all the time she has known her DuBois' manner had been described by those who know her better as 'Zen-like', unflappable, but now terms like decimated and destroyed come more readily. Where her partner Janet Levy was mercurial, Lisa was as placid as the Buddha - at least she had been. Months ago Janet had been battered by an assault of nauseating savagery but had recovered. Lisa had been shot and the effect has been a cataclysmic decline toward obliteration.

Still, it was the center of both attacks that define the difference. Janet's assault had been intimate, a horrendous sexual nightmare brutal beyond words or thought but she is recovered physically and will, with time and aid, recover in other senses. She has the potential for a normal future. Lisa, shot three times in her uterus, had been so horribly wounded that a radical hysterectomy had been the only option. It had saved her life, but had removed her purpose for living.

For Lisa her future had been defined by her motherhood. No matter what else she would be in her life, everything in her had led her toward the days when she would bring new life into being, the more the better. She'd planned a thousand different futures, everything from one to a dozen children and she would love and cherish them. Motherhood defined her, sustained her, established and guided her life; now a mother is something she will never be.

From the day she'd come out of surgery in Intensive Care and learned her empty future Lisa DuBois had stopped trying to recover from her wounds. It has been three weeks, Siobhan has seen her five times and each time the woman has slipped further away. The determined and dedicated Special Agent, the Zen-like soul, the friend, she finds less and less of that woman each time she visits.

x

"Shav? Shav?"

"Hm, Timmy, what?"

"You zoned out on us."

"Sorry. Must be tired."

"No kidding." Caught out, she cannot deny her fatigue. "But can you talk about it?"

"Timmy, you know better." She so much wants to, but with those words it's dropped.

"I was saying I stopped by to help out a bit."

Siobhan takes in the sealed and stacked cardboard boxes that sit upon the half high room divider and the empty shelves but does notice in time the sealed packs of paper plates and Styrofoam cups set in the corner. They'll have their last meal here tomorrow. Today.

The truck is coming Wednesday morning and when Timmy finishes work the day after tomorrow - after today - he'd better head for Dupont Circle and not set his mental autopilot for Silver Spring.

"I can see that. Thank you."

The younger woman checks her watch and winces. "But I didn't expect to stay so long. Tim."

"I'm sorry. I was in the bedroom."

The bedroom is the final room with things ready for use. The living room is a maze of stacked boxes.

"Well," Sarah grants with a shrug. "It's all good. The sooner you get out, the sooner I get in."

x

Siobhan isn't sure if her brain, which had felt like it was awake, is firing with all neurons yet. Despite her momentary focus on the failed confidential evening, there must still be cotton between some of the synapses for the best she can manage is an inelegant "Huh?"

"I spoke to the Landlord the other day," Timmy says. "Sorry, I forgot."

"You forgot." They hadn't forgotten to discuss their leaving last week.

"We arranged that Sarah will take up the lease at the same rent."

"You forgot."

"And," Sarah declares, "I can get out of that closet and into a place with closets."

"You forgot." But admits it serves her right for letting Timmy handle all of the moving arrangements.

"I'm sorry. It's been a long month."

"It's been a fortnight." Her eyes really ache and to fight to keep them open makes them feel worse. That must be why she's so annoyed.

"A lot of changes going on. It's no big deal."

"It's around this point," Sarah says, "that I simply hit him."

"Thanks. I'm considering it."

"I'll hold him for you."

"Where I'm thinking about hitting him I won't need anyone to hold him."

"Okay, T.M.M.I." She correctly interprets the question in Siobhan's red eyes. "Too much married information."

"No, that's not so."

"Well, what has been going on?" Sarah asks Siobhan, sounding both relieved and anxious. Few can manage the combination. "I know there are, what, seven moves–"

"Eight," Tim says but she'd not talking to him, distinctly in 'Girl Talk' mode.

"Okay, eight, but how'd it happen? You know Tim, he doesn't share unless it's on a circuit diagram."

"All right," Tim says, having had enough. "I'm Sorry. Okay, the short story."

"You'll be sorry," Siobhan assures her.

x

"A bit over two weeks ago Tony DiNozzo, you remember him."

"Only yeah," she says in her 'I haven't been living under a rock' voice. "Special Agent Tommy, your partner, the guy who with Officer Lisa busted me in the Library, Best Man at your wedding. I was there."

"Got promoted to SAIC, that's Special Agent-in-Charge, of Pensacola, proposed to Jeanne Benoit and last week moved with his new fiancé to Florida. That's the first two moves. Immediately before he did, he gave Shav and I an envelope and made us swear not to open it for four days, until after Service that Sunday.

"He sublet us his Condo apartment in Dupont Circle at the same mortgage/rent as we're paying here but with the size of the rooms it's twice the space."

"Super generous." Her tone says 'I know all this. Get to the part I don't know'.

"Actually, since he still owns it, I'll tell you the story of that later, so if Florida doesn't work out he always has a place, but that's not gonna happen, his Florida deal is too sweet, when he finished moving out we started moving in. Wednesday's the final big bulk. That's number three.

"In the meantime, since he offered Special Agent Tina Larsen a job taking over the Document Analysis Section in Pensacola, she made it known her house in Rosemont near Alexandria was available. She left yesterday. Number four. Special Agent Michelle Palmer, who has been campaigning for months for her and Jimmy Palmer, our Deputy Medical Examiner, to move out of their cul-de-sac Georgetown apartment, had snatched it up weeks ago. Ten rooms, she could even designate one her Sanctum Sanctorum for her Wiccan work but I'm not getting into that; two stories, two car garage, picket fence and yard, it was too sweet for a couple with a baby on the way to let slip. That's five."

"Is the baby going to be a witch?"

"I am really not getting into that. Anyway, Special Agent Susan Grady, from Polygraph, has been trying for months to get into a quiet place and away from the baby factory as she calls her thin walled apartment house, so she made a deal with the Palmers and their landlord and between the lot of them, the Larsens, the Palmers and Grady, they did a three way with a Pensacola tangent, sort of like you, we and Tony are doing. So that's six."

"And I make seven."

"Okay." At this point what's one more in the count?

"You NCISers sure have your own ways of doing things."

"Enkissers," Siobhan suggests.

"Enkissers." She looks to her big brother with a smirk. "Does sound better than–"

"Don't say it."

x

"But that's not all the shuffle," Siobhan says. "Tell her." 'Then we can get to bed.'

"Well, before he left that Friday, less than 48 hours after we found out he's been made the Pensacola SAIC, Tony dropped a bomb on everyone– except Gibbs; I suspect the bomb that can ruffle him hasn't been built yet. In addition to Larsen, he also scooped up Ziva David as a Defense Against the Dark Arts Instructor."

"Ha-Huh?" For what she knows of her brother's team, "Wouldn't that be Michelle Palmer?"

"No. Tony decided that they could benefit from the kind of techniques the Mossad teaches their people, the 'kill you nineteen ways with a paper clip' techniques."

"Ow-e-ouch."

"She'll still be an Investigator but that'll be her number two focus until Tony's satisfied his people are all up to snuff."

"On snuffing people out?"

"Could be."

x

"Eight moves in two weeks," her sister-in-law marvels, "no wonder you're so stressed. What are you, down 40%?"

"Nope, only 20% and that's half the reason that I'm stressed. And you should see Abby; she hates change; but after I got bumped up to Senior Field Agent–"

"Congrats again."

"Thank you again. Gibbs has pulled in a former NSA Analyst, Eleanor Bishop, who is driving - me - up - the - wall."

Siobhan shares the fact that "She's gorgeous. "

"Ah, now I get it. His own harem. Three lovely women, including you and Michelle, under him as Very Special Senior Field Agent, you all have to obey every order he gives you."

"That'll be the day. But it's a smorgasbord, or would that be smorgasbroad? A redhead," she says, touching her own locks which actually feel tired, "a brunette and a blonde."

"Ohhhhhh, a Blonde."

"Willowy blonde."

"Thought he likes them curvy."

Siobhan runs her hands from ribs to sides and down to hips. "Believe it. But my husband is known for his eclectic tastes."

"He'd better watch that."

"Don't worry, I have the Last Rites marked in my book beside the bed."

"Will you two be serious?"

"I hardly think so, Cara."

x

"Why is number nine driving you up a wall?" Sarah asks, sounding like she's considering having mercy. At least, Siobhan thinks, it distracts her husband for an instant so she can rub her tearing, stinging eyes. Maybe she should have nodded off in the elevator.

"I don't think she knows the purpose of a desk. She sits where Ziva did but on the floor in front of the desk where she spreads everything out. I've tripped over her three times coming into the bullpen."

"So, are you going to train her to use a desk or is she going to train you to take a wide path to yours?"

Siobhan is faster with the assurance that "My money's on her, but I'll let you know."

"So, you moved over to Tony's desk?"

"Yes, and Michelle switched around the partition from hers to mine, but I'm on hold on whether that was a good idea, because now she faces Gibbs directly."

"Oh boy." Sarah checks her watch. "Well, I'd love to stay to hear more of this musical houses routine but it's getting late. It's been late. It's past late. I'll torture you more this evening."

"I believe you," Tim says, kissing his sister goodbye until the next box and beatdown.

The bedroom has the final items to be boxed for the truck.

Siobhan fights again that urge to cry 'Timmm - berrr' and fall into his arms. Perhaps she can get him to carry her across one final threshold, despite her protest at the Hotel Meritz?

xxx

In the Northwestern quarter of Washington DC, Gil and Arlene Kingman are on the last part of their very early morning walk. In early September, the post midnight temperature has dropped to seventy eight so, too warm to sleep comfortably without a too loud air conditioner, the couple had decided at 2:00 to go for a walk. The prospect of cooler air as the night progressed being remote, the walk extended past three o'clock before the couple completed a long circuit. Now they walk east along the left side of P Street NW on their way home.

"Did you remember to call the painter?"

"Yes, dear," Gil says. Arlene isn't sure it's an agreement or the automatic response of someone who's not listening.

"What did he say?"

"He'll be around at three to look at the rooms, give us an estimate." They'd finally settled on colors for the dining room and master bedroom and have prepared to move onto the guest room overnight if such should be necessary. However, the house has good ventilation from the numerous windows generously placed throughout the two stories.

"I hope he'll be done by the end of the month," Arlene says as they approach 6th Street.

When they reach the Northeast corner of the JFK Recreation Center Gil glances neither right nor left. "It's Monday, he'll be done by the end of the week." He continues off the curb but the light is against them.

Arlene stops. "It's Tues–"

The car from their left slams into Gil and blasts him right and upward. His body lands back upon the hood and windshield and rolls over the car in a series of loud thumps drowned out by Arlene's screams.

He falls off the trunk to the asphalt all the way across the intersection and rolls several yards.

The car never slows.

Arlene's screams drown out the roar of the retreating vehicle as she runs across the intersection toward her husband's still body.

Lights appear in nearby homes while she's still screaming.

A/N: For the reason that sparked so many changes of address, see my Season 2, Episode 6: Pieces.