Chapter Six

He was soaked to the bone, wet clothes sticking to him like an extra layer of skin as sheets of water pelted him from above. The endless puddle which doubled as his bed had grown deeper since he'd last opened his eyes, reaching almost to his nose now and turning all his extremities blue with cold. Above him the sky was split by a sudden fork of lighting and the ground trembled slightly with the thunder that followed. Still he didn't stir, not a bit, as he waited for that which had woken him, another's approach. Sure enough within moments there came the sloshing of footsteps through water and his hand, curled beneath his chest in the frigid puddle, tightened against the cool metal hidden there.

It was cold in his hands as larger ones forced it there, curling his fingers around it painfully. There was blood before him, soaking the wooden floor, turning it dark, and a figure as wet and dark as the floor. And the larger hands tightened, squeezed down on his and his finger found curved metal and pulled. The shock made his hands fly back into his face, pain seared through every inch of his body but the larger hands grabbed him once more, held him by the neck, by the hair and squeezed once more. And again the shock made him buckle and he fell to the floor, into the blood, the puddle of it which slowly covered him as the figure seemed to melt away before him.

But the puddle was water and cold now, like ice, and the sloshing had stopped all too near. And then there came a hand on his shoulder, a large one, squeezing it, and a voice.

"Callen?"

Ha moved then, rolled as quickly as his frozen body would allow, the gun pointed at the speaker's head then he paused. "Colby? Fuck man, don't do that!" And he dropped the gun into the water beside him and shook his waterlogged hair like a dog. It was only then that the shivers began, first in his arms then his legs then back, neck and head.

Colby was speaking but he didn't hear. They hit a bump and he hunched forward retching and coughing and chocking as blood filed his mouth and trickled down his throat and into his lungs. And he couldn't see, his eyes were rolling and turning everything before them red, like blood, like his blood, everywhere. He retched again and copper bit at his tongue and there came a lurch and he felt himself sliding, falling, head down wedged within some small space. And he whimpered in pain as he was pulled from the position, carried gently and laid on the ground. Still the retching came, and the coughing, more violently than before and hands held him down, pressed him to the pavement as he felt his body convulse and shake. And someone was speaking, far away, far above, and as the darkness took hold the words reached him.

"Dammit Callen, sometimes I hate this job..."

And another bump brought him back and he opened his eyes. His was warm now from the heat in the car but still thoroughly drenched from his puddle of a bed. Out of the car they climbed, he and Colby, and headed together into a Laundromat. Huddled in a straight backed chair he watched as Colby set about dying his sodden clothes then took the seat next to him. There was silence for a moment but as always it didn't last long.

"So here's your choice. You can either explain to me why you were sleeping in an alley during the biggest storm LA's seen these last couple years or you can explain to me why you're carrying a gun."

The choice was not hard.

"Better I shoot them before they shoot me."

"Better still if no one gets shot at all."

Silence again.

"No one does what's best."

Callen sat up abruptly, causing the thin spring mattress beneath him to creak and groan angrily, and blinked a few times as he allowed his eyes to adjust to the dim morning light. As the plain holding cell around him came into focus around him, he sighed and lay back down, running a hand over his day-old stubble and through his hair. He should have known better than to try to sleep, should have known that memories would be waiting for him the moment he closed his eyes and that instead of rest he would find only more dark forgotten corners of his mind. Glancing at his watch, which the cops had kindly allowed him to keep, he calculated that he'd managed just over two hours of sleep, if you could call it that. Really it had been more like two hours of unwanted memories he now had to force back into their corners before they could be seen by anyone else.

Swinging his legs off the bed he rested his arms on his knees and hung his head, thinking. He wasn't sure now that the decision to give his team Colby's name had been a good one. He knew they had already found him, there was no way it would have taken Eric more than a few hours at most, and he wondered what his old friend had given them if he'd given them anything at all. It had been twenty years since they'd last spoken, and he was beginning to wonder what had made him think that Colby would still be willing to stick his neck out for him. After all he had just up and disappeared one day, without ever telling Colby where he was going or that he was okay. It had been for the job, sure, the first big sacrifice, but it had been cold of him all the same, after everything Colby had done for him over the years the least he could have done was find a way to tell him he wasn't dead.

And then there was the question of what Colby had given his team. For so long he'd blocked them out, deflected questions, lied when needed, to keep them from seeing what he really was. Nate would have a field day with the new information, it would be like a psychological smorgasbord for him and there was nothing he could do to stop it. And then there was Sam. Callen knew Sam took things personally and he knew his partner would probably be hurt by the amount of things Callen had kept from him, by the lies he'd been forced to tell him but he hadn't had much of a choice. Your demons are your weakness, in his case weaknesses, and he could have those out for the world to see, not in his line of work.

Ex line of work. There was no way they were letting him back into NCIS after everything got out, no way. He'd be left with nothing, again, uprooted and forced to move on to what he didn't know. Maybe some kind of private investigator, he could do that, or perhaps he could kind a position working with one of those private security firms... In those kinds of jobs they didn't care if you had an arrest record longer than most of the suspects you went after, they didn't care what you'd seen or been forced to do to stay alive.

"I didn't kill him..."

For a few moments he didn't realize that he'd spoken out loud but the moment he did, he shook himself mentally. He couldn't go on thinking like this, he was going to drive himself insane and he couldn't do that, not now, not again. With a deep sigh he lifted his head and stared with renewed determination at the wall across from him. His team, his friends, would help him. They wouldn't leave him to fight this charge alone, he knew they wouldn't. They were good people, all of them, and good friends who had never once left his side, not when cases had gone bad not when he'd been shot and they were told he wouldn't survive, not once. It didn't matter what Colby had given them, they already knew him, despite his best efforts to prevent that he knew they did, and he knew them also and he trusted them.

"This can't be Callen."

Kensi's voice left no room for argument yet Sam knew, as they all did, that the files littering the table in the center of the Ops center were as genuine as you could get. Colby had come through with everything they needed, or at least everything the LAPD had on Callen. Arrest reports covered the table's surface, details and files on his multitude of foster homes were packed into a box in the center, and the full case file and autopsy report for Isaac Harwood's murder lay in a pamphlet nearby. Eric was in the process of downloading the security video from which the photographs Sam was currently holding had come as well as other videos concerning Callen.

"This just can't be him, it just can't be!" Kensi picked up the arrest report and tossed it across the table as though the action would prove her point, "This is wrong, it has to be!"

Sam hoped she was right, wished she was right, but for once his optimistic personality could not allow him to believe it. They all knew Callen had lived a rough life and he at least had always suspected he had been trouble as a youth but never once had he expected him to be as troubled as the files before him would indicate. True he had never asked his partner straight up to tell him anything about his past but he had thought they'd reached a point in their friendship where Callen trusted him enough to at least be honest with him.

"Look I know we don't want to believe this but it makes sense," said Nate, clearly pleading with Kensi to understand, "I mean, if we look at his behaviour... Kensi he's always been troubled, we know that..."

"Whose side are you on Nate?" Kensi asked loudly, "You're making it sound like you think he's guilty, again!"

Sam sighed, he didn't want to listen to his team argue, instead he dropped the photographs back on the table and walked over to Eric who was still typing away on his computer. He didn't really want to see what was on the video, he didn't want to see the iron clad evidence that Callen did in fact have something to do with Isaac Harwood's death but he had to, he couldn't believe it otherwise.

"I'm just about finished downloading the video," said Eric, pulling Sam from his thoughts, "LAPD took it off a VHS so the quality's going to suck but it's all we got."

"Just as long as we can see what they see," Sam sighed.

Eric nodded and resumed his typing. For a few moments Sam focused on that and only that if only to ignore the arguing still going on behind him. Eric seemed to be doing much the same thing and stared in silence at the screen as he worked. After another minute Sam noticed a new sound behind him, the gentle tapping of footsteps approaching.

"What didn't we know?" Hetty asked in a softly, stopping before Sam and gazing up at him.

"A lot," Sam replied sadly, behind him the bickering stopped as Kensi and Nate both turned to listen, "He was arrested nineteen times from the time he was ten until he joined the Army at twenty-one. He was booked for pretty much anything and everything, went to juvie five times and prison once. According to his records from Social Services, he would regularly go missing between foster homes, only turning up again when he was arrested. Those records also show he was expelled from several schools including a private school he was sent to for a month by a foster parent."

Hetty sighed and nodded slowly. "What about the Isaac Harwood case?" she asked.

"According to the files Colby got us his body was discovered about a month ago and LAPD began canvassing the area as soon as they got an approximate for when he died which, according to the coroner would have been between twenty and twenty-five years ago."

"And how did they manage to find a suspect based on that information?" Hetty asked.

"By the looks of things, dumb luck," Kensi replied before Sam had a chance, "The file explains how they already had the video in evidence. Back in 1983 a local business owner sent them the tape because he was shocked by what he saw on it, they kept it around and put two and two together when the body was found."

Hetty looked thoughtful for a moment. "Have we seen the video yet?" she asked.

"We can see it now," Eric announced, looking up from his computer at last, "I just finished downloading it."

"Put it on-screen," Sam ordered.

Eric obeyed and the image of a deserted ally flashed to life on the screen before them. For a few minutes it remained that way, empty growing dark as it was clearly evening. After a moment, however, the grainy image of two young boys came into sight, stumbling down the ally. Both were covered in blood, from head to toe, and it became clear very quickly that Isaac was no longer alive. His eyes were wide open, yet unseeing and he bounced and flailed like a rag doll on Callen's shoulder. Callen himself didn't look much better; he was clearly struggling to stay on his feet, his face twisted in pain. And then, without warning he collapsed in a crumpled heap of flesh and bone and blood.

There was a pause in which nothing moved before Callen finally seemed to gain the strength necessary to pull himself out from under Isaac's dead weight. Sitting next to the body, his head bobbing up and down with every clearly laboured breath Callen reached a shaking hand out and slid the younger boy's eyes closed. But he didn't remove his hand from Isaac's face, instead he began to shake violently and for a full five minutes he just sat there, gripping the other boy's hair desperately and trembling out of control. There must have been some kind of noise right about then for suddenly he looked up and, like a frightened animal, went ridged for a moment before pulling Isaac back over his shoulder and stumbling out of sight down the ally.

There was dead silence in the Ops center as the video concluded. Eric's eyebrows had disappeared into his hair, Kensi had her mouth hanging slightly open, Nate just looked shocked and Hetty had bowed her head as the clip finished.

Sam didn't know what he felt, or what he was supposed to feel. With no idea what else to do he allowed professionalism to take over and turned to Nate. "You need to go talk to Callen again," he said firmly, "We need more answers."