Chapter 4

Joshua fell to the ground, bleeding from the chest. Tim hit the ground and rolled tail over tea kettle, landed on his back and lay there, stunned. He breathed in and out through his mouth, convincing himself that he was still alive.

Then, water was dripping over him and he saw Gibbs, soaking wet from his trip into the fountain (of course, it would be Gibbs. How could this be any worse for me?), looming over him, looking nothing short of furious.

"You all right, Boss?" Tim asked.

That should have opened the flood gates. It probably would have if Gibbs hadn't had at least a few brain cells devoted to thinking about maintaining NCIS' reputation. Reaming his agent, who had just saved a bunch of people, probably wouldn't look good.

"You, me. The conference room. As soon as we get back, McGee. You skip out. You even think of skipping out, you're through."

I'm not already? Tim wondered, but had sense enough not to say the words aloud.

Gibbs turned and walked away, allowing Tim the luxury of sitting up. What he saw made his heart twist with regret. Joshua was on the ground. There were a couple of officers trying CPR, but it was a lost cause. It probably had been for a long time before this even happened. It was wrong when things ended this way. He ignored Gibbs' glare. He ignored Ziva and Tony ranting at him.

His arm was smarting, but no one seemed to have noticed it and so he didn't worry about it either. Instead, he screwed up his courage to talk to Gibbs once more.

"Boss?"

"What."

"Sarah's all right?"

Gibbs looked at him...still with anger but also with a hint of understanding.

"She looked fine to me."

"Thanks." Tim looked back at the fountain. No blood in there...but too much outside it.

Did I keep the worst from happening? Did I do any good at all? If Gibbs had been negotiating, would he have been able to talk Joshua down without him dying?

It just wasn't fair.

"McGee, you go."

"What?" Tim tore his gaze from the dead man whose blood now stained the ground.

"There are plenty of people here right now. You'll need to be debriefed later but for now, go." Gibbs pointed toward the entrance to the memorial.

Tim followed his pointing finger and nodded. He heard Tony still grumbling and wondered if he should have simply let Joshua shoot him instead. He didn't say anything, however, and left the scene behind him. As he reached the entrance, he heard a shrill voice.

"Timmy! Timmy!"

A blurred shape ran at him and before he knew it he was engulfed in a blanket and a pair of arms.

"Sarah, you all right?" He wrapped his own arms around her, only able to see her dark hair as she buried her head in his shoulder.

"Oh, Tim...I was...I saw you and I thought..."

"I've got you." He tightened his arms around her even as his left arm burned. He didn't care. Sarah was all right. That was all that mattered. "Don't worry, Sarah. Everything's fine."

"Miss, we really need you to come over here now."

Tim looked up and saw an approaching officer.

"She's my sister," he offered by way of explanation.

"I know. She insisted that she had to stay here and see if you were all right," the officer said. "Now, she's seen you and she needs to come with me."

Tim smiled and nodded, gently extricating himself from Sarah's grasp.

"Go on, Sarah. I'm fine. You're fine. I have to go back to NCIS today. Is there someone who can come and get you after?"

Sarah wiped her eyes and nodded. "Yeah. Jeana has a car."

"Okay. If you want, I'll come and get you tonight and we can hang out."

She smiled. "Okay. That sounds good. I'll see you. You're all right?"

"I'm fine. So are you."

He watched the officer lead Sarah away, probably to take her statement and talk to a trauma counselor. His arm began to throb a little but he ignored it. He walked to the edge of the memorial and watched. Ducky had arrived at some point. He wasn't sure when. Time seemed to have all blurred together anyway. He saw Gibbs look over at him and he gulped uncomfortably.

"Hey, you the Navy cop?"

Tim turned away from the memorial.

"Yeah. I'm one of them. The rest of the team is down there."

The man wasn't a police officer. He was probably about the same age as Joshua...and Tim could see that indefinable air of military that career soldiers carried about them. He held out his hand.

"You're the one who talked him down, though, right?"

Tim blinked. This guy looked familiar somehow. He wasn't sure why.

"I tried to."

"Hey, I know he's dead...but...I gotta say that it was probably better like this."

"What?" Tim looked toward the memorial and then back at the man. He was not tall and he seemed older than Tim had thought at first.

"I was down there when he started shooting. Josh...he wouldn't have done that. He'd lost it. I hate to say it but he did. The Josh I knew wouldn't have wanted to hurt anyone for any reason."

"You were one of the hostages?"

"Yeah. Name's Woody...Woodcock, but I go by Woody. I don't think my parents were thinking clearly when they named me."

Tim managed a smile. "I'm sorry."

"Josh...he'd always been a bit off, you could say. He came back and things just didn't work for him. He wasn't right in the head after the Gulf and he refused to do anything about it. We tried to help him out...but it just wasn't enough."

"I could see it. I tried to stop him."

"You know what? You stopped him from killing anyone else. I know Josh. He would have been much worse if he had lived and known that someone died."

"Someone died?"

"Yeah. One of the people we tried to pull out. Didn't make it. It would have killed Josh to know that he'd done that." He sighed. "Anyway...I just wanted to thank you...for saving us...and for helping Josh."

"Yeah. I wish..."

"Yeah. We all do." Woody turned to leave.

Then, it clicked in Tim's brain and he blurted it out before he had time to think. "Are you from Hancock? In Maryland?"

"What?"

"Hancock, Maryland."

"My dad lived there for a long time, ran a gas station."

"I think I met him."

Woody's face turned confused. "I don't know how you could have. My dad died about twenty-five years ago. Armed robbery. Guys burst in and didn't care about an old man minding the till."

"I...I'm really sorry. I could have sworn..." Maybe I've lost my mind.

"It's okay. It's happened once or twice before." He hesitated and then added, "Actually, Josh was one of them who did that. He said almost the same thing. It's how we met. He saw me in the barracks when I was first transferred to his unit. He'd come back off leave and he had filled up his car at my dad's gas station. It's a rundown lot now, no gas there." He laughed. "Josh kept insisting that it was the same guy, but I told him that it couldn't have been. I even took him to the lot on our next leave."

"Just off I-70?"

"Yeah. Josh was trying to tell me that he'd stopped there and it wasn't an empty lot when he'd come." His smile was sad. "Like I said, he was always a bit strange. He never really believed me, you know. ...and you'd think I'd know that my dad was dead."

Tim was lost in his memory of that night and only nodded vaguely.

"Anyway...I'm...I'm sorry that this went down like it did. I never knew what he'd planned."

"Have you made a statement yet?"

"No. I guess I'll need to, huh?"

"Yeah. I'd have you give me your contact information, but I didn't come with my bag."

"I talked with the police already...but I'll do it for NCIS, too, if you need me to."

"Probably will." He looked over and saw Gibbs coming toward him. "Actually, here comes my boss right now. He'll probably want to talk to you if you don't mind."

"I don't mind."

"Boss, this is Woody. He's...he was friends with Joshua."

Gibbs nodded perfunctorily at Tim and his expression was patently one of dismissal. Tim smiled one last time at Woody and chose to go back into the memorial.

"Are you all right, Timothy?" Ducky asked as Tim returned to the scene.

"Fine, Ducky. I wish he'd made it out. He could have."

"Perhaps it was not what he wished."

"Yeah, maybe."

"Maybe Probie should count his lucky stars that he only wanted himself to die," Tony muttered.

Ducky looked at Tony surprise and then back at Tim who simply shrugged it off.

"You were uninjured?"

"Yeah. Just stunned myself after taking him down. Knocked the wind out of me."

"McGee, what were you thinking of when you came down here?" Ziva asked. She was no longer angry, merely asking...although a bit derogatorily.

"I wanted to save Sarah."

"Your sister was here?" Tony asked, surprised enough that he forgot to be nasty.

"Yes. She was one of the hostages." Tim watched as Ducky put Joshua into the body bag. There was a flash of light in his eyes and he looked around, thinking, for just a moment, that he'd seen a woman...in a white dress, standing in the fountain.

"McGee, are you all right?"

"Yeah. I'm fine." There was no one there. Had Joshua seen her as well?

"No thanks to you," Tony said, recovering his ill-humor.

Tim was barely listening. If he had been, he more than likely would have been highly annoyed at Tony, but as it was, he simply tuned him out. His arm was still throbbing, but he was still ignoring it. He didn't care about his arm. It was probably a bullet graze and it was more than likely a flesh wound. Beyond that, he wasn't bothering with it. He could bandage himself up later.

When Gibbs came back to gather them up to return to NCIS, he said nothing to Tim at all and Tim knew that he was just saving it up for a tirade later on. Really, Tim found that he didn't care about that either. There was only one thing on his mind. ...well, two things. Joshua and...

...was she really there? Did I really see her? What about my jacket? ...and the gas station... What's going on?

On the ride back, he was silent, not responding to anything be it questions or rants about his stupidity and how lucky he was that no one else had been killed and on and on. Part of him heard it, but another part was simply drifting through the noise, thinking only of the strange moments that had led to this point.

He didn't even notice when the accusations tapered off and were replaced by worried glances. He just couldn't pull his mind away from what had happened over the weekend...if it had happened at all. By the time they returned to NCIS, even Joshua had faded into the wash of background noise, things that touched on what was important, but weren't.