RULE ZERO
Chapter 4
The doors to the Emergency Room entrance slid open and a woman in a dog collar and high-heeled boots shuffled quickly in. She looked quickly left and right and, not seeing any familiar faces, minced up to the counter.
"I'm here to see…" she started to say.
"Fill out the forms and have a seat. We'll call you," the woman behind the desk said without looking up.
Abby Sciuto slammed a hand down on the counter and the woman started and jerked her head up. "Listen, sister," Abby said in a voice incongruously both lilting and cold. "I am Abigail Sciuto of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service and one of my team was brought in here so you damn well better show me where they are. Doctor Donald Mallard."
"Is… is that the attending physician?" the woman stammered.
"That's the patient!" Abby said. Rolling her eyes, she hopped up on the counter, slid across, and pushed the woman aside. Her fingers flew over the keyboard.
"Miss!" a woman in green scrubs protested, rushing up. "You can't…"
Abby stuck a hand, palm first, in the woman's face. "There!" she said, jabbing at the screen. "Mallard, Donald. Trauma room three. Where is it?"
"I don't…" the first woman stammered.
"Where?" Abby demanded.
"Around over there," the second woman said.
Abby straightened and stomped down the hall – as much as anyone could stomp in four inch platform heels.
"Gibbs!" she cried, seeing a familiar face. She ran up to Gibbs and buried her face in his shoulder. "Tell me Ducky's going to be okay," she said, her voice muffled by his shirt. "Tell me everything's going to be all right."
Gibbs kissed the top of her head. "I can't tell you that, Abby."
Abby pulled away and looked up at him, her eyes filling with tears. "Yes you can, Gibbs. If you say it, it'll be true, because you never lie to me."
"No, Abby," Gibbs said. "I can't lie to you."
"Oh Ducky!" Abby cried and buried her head against his shoulder again.
There was the sound of footsteps, and two security guards appeared around the corner. They stopped at seeing Abby in Gibbs arms. Gibbs looked up and them and nodded. They shrugged, turned, and walked away.
"Abbs?" Gibbs asked, pushing her away just enough to look her in the eyes.
"They were giving me the run-around at the front desk so I had to go all Gibbs on them," she explained.
She pulled away and looked around. "Where are Tony and Ziva and McGee? They should be here! Are they alright?"
"They're canvassing the area to try and find the shooter." Gibbs said. He nodded over to a chair where a figure in coveralls was slumped, his head in his hands. "But Palmer's here."
Abby hurried over to the chair next to him and grabbed Palmer's hand. "He's going to be alright, Jimmy," she said.
Palmer looked up. His eyes were red. He blinked at Abby a few times, and then nodded slowly. "He's a tough old bird," he said, his voice cracking. "Did you know that in Malaysia he was once stabbed three times? This is nothing." He looked toward the doors of the operating suite. "This is nothing," he said again, his voice barely a whisper.
"Over here!" Tony called.
Ziva and McGee came jogging over.
"He didn't police his brass," Tony said, pulling out a pen, slipping it in the end of the spent cartridge and holding it up for them to see. The brass casing glinted in the fading light.
"A good sniper always polices the area," Ziva said.
"Unless he's sending a message," Tony said. "Catch me if you can."
"Leonardo DiCaprio," Ziva said.
Tony smiled at her. "How did you…"
McGee held out an evidence bag. "I'll take this to Abby and have her run ballistics on it right away," he said, cutting Tony off.
"Abby's going to be at the hospital," Tony said. "And she's not going to leave until Ducky's out of surgery."
McGee sealed the top of the evidence bag and pulled out a pen to note the relevant details regarding where and when the casing was found to establish the chain of evidence. His movements were oddly mechanical, as if forcing himself to follow a procedure he had done a thousand times without having to think too much about it. He turned to Ziva. "Do you think he's going to be okay?"
Ziva let out a breath and frowned, looking down at the ground.
"So much blood," Tony said, glancing down the hill toward the area where the two NCIS vans were still parked, surrounded by yellow crime scene tape hanging limp, the earlier breeze having died away.
"Look here," Ziva said, suddenly. She knelt down next to the gravestone the shooter had no doubt used as a shooting rest. She lightly touched the ground and pulled some of the grass back. The roots and soil seemed to be stained a dark red. "McGee, get me a shovel and something to put this soil in."
Tony leaned down next to her. "Blood?" he asked.
Ziva lightly touched the sticky red liquid and then raised her fingers up to her nose. She waved them lightly under her nostrils and sniffed. "No," she said. "I have smelled this before." She frowned, calling up the scent from her memory. Suddenly she straightened, recognition dawning on her face. DiNozzo stood reflexively. "Abby's lab," she said. "This," she held her fingers up to Tony, "is Caf-Pow."
"Very good, Sacajawea," Tony said, "what else do those honed Israeli senses tell you?"
Ziva frowned, studying the ground. "Two people," she said. "A shooter and a spotter."
"You can't possibly know…" Tony started.
"See the grass here? Two footprints. One large, one small. A large man and a woman or a small man. And here. This indentation is no doubt from a tripod for a spotting scope."
"It was an ambush," Tony said, looking down the slope.
"Yes," Ziva agreed. "The body was no doubt the bait to lure us here."
"But that means…" McGee started.
"Someone's stalking us," Tony finished for him. He thought back to the bodies. "Someone who knows Gibbs rules." Tony pulled out his phone and dialed Gibbs.
Gibbs's cell phone rang and he stepped around the corner, out of earshot of Abby and Palmer. "Gibbs."
"We found the shooter's perch, boss," DiNozzo said. "It was clearly an ambush."
"Ya think, DiNizzo?" Gibbs said.
"Right, uh. Ziva said there were two people, a shooter and a spotter. Shooter was a man and the spotter was a woman or a small man."
Gibbs frowned. Two people using a classic military sniper model of shooter and spotter. This wasn't some lone wacko. "Anything else?"
"He didn't police his brass. We'll get the shell casings to Abby."
"A good sniper always polices his brass."
"Unless he's sending a message."
Gibbs thought back to his most important kill shot… and the shell he left behind as a message. The shell which caused so much trouble for his team and his family so many years later. The shell Paloma Reynosa had worn around her neck for years.
"There's something else, boss," DiNozzo said, interrupting Gibbs' reverie.
"Yeah? What is it?"
"Caf-Pow."
"What?"
"A big, dark red patch on the ground here next to the shooter's perch that Ziva swears is Caf-Pow."
Gibbs shook his head. That meant something, but he couldn't think straight. Couldn't put it together. "Get a sample to the lab."
"I sent McGee for a shovel," DiNozzo said. "Although I don't think the grounds-keeper's going to like us digging up their grass."
"Do you think I care?" Gibbs snapped, then immediately regretted it. DiNozzo was dealing with the shooting the only way he knew how, by being flippant. 'Rule number 6,' he thought. 'Never apologize.' Instead, he asked, "How much longer?"
"I think we've done all we can here for now," DiNozzo said. "We're losing light. We'll drop the evidence off at Abby's lab and then swing by the hospital." There was a long pause. "Any word?"
"He's still in surgery."
"Yeah, but that's a good thing," DiNozzo insisted. "I mean, if he was going to…" There was a long pause. "I mean, the fact that there's still working on him…" His voice trailed off.
'Means he's not dead yet,' Gibbs silently completed the thought. "Yeah," he replied.
"Right," DiNozzo said, his voice sounding falsely cheerful. "We'll be there in an hour. Forty-five minutes if we let Ziva drive." There was the sound of a 'whap' over the line and Gibbs almost smiled at the mental image of Ziva smacking Tony's arm.
"We'll be here."