Chapter Nine
Mightier than the Sword

Tony and Ziva wait with fading patience, not wanting to get closer at the too small wooden table in Interview Room #2 while Elizabeth McFadden and her lawyer Helena Ameruso review the terms of the documents. If accepted, and if she cooperates, it will result in the Commutation of McFadden's seventy five year sentence to 'Time Served' plus admission into the Witness Protection Program, meaning a new identity and ongoing government protection.

"Okay," Tony says, "you've spent more time on that than some film crews spend on their scripts."

"Patience, kind sir; we're not doing 'Debbie Does Disneyland'," McFadden teases. This is enough to turn Ameruso to business.

"The offer appears acceptable."

"Contingent upon your client's satisfactory cooperation," Ziva says. She's been taken by DiNozzo's silence. Except for one observation, the man role has been more as an observer than his usual 'out front' participation. "The information she provides must have sufficient value before we proceed with this offer."

"This obscenely generous offer," Tony says.

"You people made it," McFadden says. "I was perfectly content to run my operation here."

"Doctor," Ameruso says. To her it must seem like the Psychiatrist is determined to snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory.

"Oh, I'm very happy to cooperate, now." McFadden leans back in her chair. "What do you want to know?"

x

Ziva is mildly surprised when Tony does not take point on this, so after what she hopes is an unnoticeable pause, she says "The hypnotic Compact Disks that you and Samuel Richards distributed through your Practices to Military Spouses, which programmed them to murder their greatest loves, contained a sub-program which compelled your victims to then kill themselves."

Ziva is happy she does not have to use such legalisms as 'alleged', for those crimes have already been proven and are the reason why McFadden is here where she so greatly deserves to be. She is still aggravated with Tim's ploy that started this abomination of 'Justice' and she intends to make this fact painfully clear to him at her first opportunity.

"Some of my best work. So what?"

"Recently two people who were in the process of being brought in for questioning, though they were not the prime movers in the case, committed suicide rather than answer questions."

"Interesting. Of course I made sure the job was done before my people self-terminated."

"Not in all cases."

"Ah, yes, little Timmy McGee and his priestess. Well, we can't have everything work perfectly all the time, can we?"

"Who provided the Compact Disks you and Richards used?"

McFadden says nothing.

Tony leans forward. "If we walk out that door," he says slowly, pointing behind her, "the deal walks with us."

Another long moment of consideration. "All right, I'll tell you." She takes the papers offering her Commutation and the Protection Program, turns them to herself, and looks to the agents. "Got a pen?"

Tony hands his to her, but he never expected her to slam the implement into her own chest. Before anyone can grab her she turns and, obviously in great pain, leaps from her chair and lands chest first onto the floor.

The calls for Medical Aid are very loud, but volume has no effect upon the minutes it takes for help to arrive.

Too late.

xxx

Abby Sciuto opens the front door of her apartment building and, after getting through the vestibule heat lock, starts up the stairs to her third floor apartment, her focus on Monroe Hospital and Sammy. With every step the heat grows, trapped in the stairwell with her because, as usual, Dennis Cuomo on four keeps securing the trap door at the top of the ladder, trapping every calorie of heat that the day has abused the building with. She wishes he would learn that if it had somewhere to go, the heat would not stay here, greatest on his floor which is why he runs three air conditioners in five windows.

The thought of going the extra flight and then climbing the ladder and unlatching the heavy barrier to move it an inch aside is too much. By the time she reaches the first landing and makes the turn to walk to the next flight of creaking stairs, her black tee shirt with the white rib cage and red heart clings to her ribs and grows moister with every breath.

As she puts her foot on the single platform to start her turn up the flight to her apartment the door to her left opens, but she keeps her groan as quiet as she can. Must be polite.

"Hey, Abb," her seventeen year old neighbor, the kid with the radar ears who always knows when she or Sammy are on the stairs, calls.

She looks. "Hey, Pau– Jesus, Put Some Clothes On."

He's standing in the open doorway wearing a pair of red boxers.

"What's wrn, Abb? Ss hot, ain't you?"

"Where are your parents?"

"Out. Wanna come in? I cin giv you somt'in'"

He probably thought that sounded suggestive but even if she were dying, the sight of him like this - and he can't claim the apartment is hot, not with his pants on the living room floor behind him half inverted from stepping out of them just beyond the door - is the most offensive turn-off she can imagine. A no-hold-barred date at one of Sammy's favorite Clubs, even if she were the bindee instead of the binder, would be heavenly by comparison.

She longs to blow off a vast amount of steam, and would if she thought he were mentally capable of being corrected by it, but getting upstairs so she can get to Sammy at the hospital is far more important. Ignoring him, eyes forward and up so she can shut him out, she climbs the stairs as quickly as the escalating heat will allow, so glad that despite the oven she's not wearing a skirt, gets her key into her door lock above the idiot's head and opens the portal.

x

**–telling you Who's on First, What's on Second and I Don't Know's on Third.** Bud Abbott, wearing an antique St. Louis Wolves uniform and a very antique mustache, baseball glove in hand, explains to his shorter, stouter partner in front of a baseball diamond backdrop on the plasma screen to her right across the room.

**You know the fellows' names?** Lou Costello, dressed in his regular clothes with signature bowler hat and holding a bat, asks.

**Yes.**

It's who's on the couch at the opposite wall, legs drawn up inside her double-oversized National's tee shirt, that Abby cares about.

**Well then who's playing First?**

**Yes.**

"Oh. Gee. You're home."

**I mean the fella's name on First Base?**

**Who.**

Sammy looks to her. "I'm home," she assures her, her face and voice solemn.

**The guy on First Base.**

**Who is on First.**

**Well what're you askin' me for?**

**I'm not asking you, I'm telling you. Who is on First.**

"What are you doing here?" she demands over the ignored routine.

"I checked myself out. I couldn't stand to lay in that room one more second."

"Buuuu..."

"Bill drove me home but I wasn't up to his staying. I just wanted to be alone."

x

**Have you got a First Baseman on First?**

**Certainly.**

**Then who's playing First?**

**Absolutely.**

"I mean why didn't you tell me? Why didn't you call me?" 'And why aren't you hysterical?' is her most urgent thought.

Sammy shrugs, the motion vague within the stretched fabric.

**When you pay off the First Baseman every month, who gets the money?**

**Every dollar of it.** Abby walks closer to where she can watch Sammy's doleful face and also stand in the air conditioner's stream. It'll cool and eventually dry her damp tee shirt but her focus is on the blonde woman. This is one of several versions of this classic routine, and every one of them destroys her friend.

**Well why not? The man's entitled to it.**

**Who is?**

**Yes.**

Something is very wrong; she's inclined to think 'wronger than usual', for not only is Sammy detached from what she's hearing, something she never has been able to endure, but she's positively grave.

**Sometimes his wife comes down and collects it.**

**Who's wife?**

**Yes.**

x

The last time Sammy had seen this routine, and Abby can see it's from their DVD, by this point she'd fallen off the couch and lay, helpless with mirth, upon the carpet. Even with her greatest effort she has never fought past Costello's 'I don't even know what I'm talking about!' without being overcome by hysterics. She'd bought the team's Greatest Hits DVD with the hope of hearing their routines through and Abby doubts she's ever managed it.

**What's the guy's name on First Base?**

**What's the guy's name on Second Base.** Sammy turns a little of her attention left to the screen.

**I'm not asking you who's on Second.**

**Who's on First.**

**I don't know.**

Abby, staring at Sammy's solemn face, can stand it no longer.

**He's on Third. We're not talking about him.**

She snatches up the remote control from the couch arm and aims it at the screen.

**How did I get on Third Ba–?**

x

Sammy moves only her eyes to look up at her. "Why did you do that?" she asks so blandly that Abby's lost.

Yet she forces herself. "Honey, what's wrong?" 'Besides everything?'

"I'm just not in the mood," is a long sigh.

"I'm sorry," she sits down, uses her left hand to stroke her friend's back, "but you not being in the mood to laugh is like not being in the mood to breathe." ASAP she is going to get on with Michelle and Dr. Grantwood about depression as a symptom but for now Sammy needs her immediate help - if she can figure out how to give it.

Sammy shakes her head. "I don't know." She sighs and Abby's scared. "I tried 'Wonder Man', I even tried Rowan and Martin." Sammy loves the older comedies, they're absolutely clean and far more hilarious than anything in the 21st Century. It was the days before laugh tracks told you when to laugh; you laughed because it was funny. "Kaye was trying to get the DA's attention while absolutely destroying an Opera but I felt nothing, and Rowan and Martin, I didn't even care."

x

Abby continues rubbing her friend's back through the thin, tightly stretched shirt, feeling only a bra strap, no shirt, thinking as quickly as she can. If the various 'Who's on First?' routines, among others, destroy her, leaving her clutching her aching stomach while trying to relearn how to breathe, Danny Kaye's manic ending to 'Wonder Man' while the poor Prima Donna tried to save the day and the prompter ripped his hair out at Kaye's liberties consistently decimates her. Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In - and they have the second DVD collection, not coincidentally featuring Danny Kaye, bought for a dollar at a Church flea market, each episode an irreverent, nonsensical smack at everything - always requires long pauses for recovery.

She doesn't want to say 'and you checked yourself out of the hospital?', that being a useless recrimination when her friend really needs her, but it blasts within her skull. She tries to push it aside, or at least to quiet the echoes so she can think of what to do.

x

"One thing you've got to do; you've got to get out of here."

"I don't feel like going anywhere." Abby pinches her back, disengages the bra and the straps fly several inches apart. "Abby!"

"Come on, get dressed, we're getting out of here." She stands up, reaches down, grasps her wrist and glances over the black living room with its black shag carpet, black couch, black chairs, black walls, black most things, now even the plasma screen. "Get up and let's go. This place is too grim. I know, I Grimmed it."

She tugs hard enough to stop any protest her friend might make, and when she pulls her up, the stretched sleep tee shirt hanging shapeless from her bared left shoulder, she tugs her toward the coffin room. "Come on, take that thing off. It's Thursday night and we're going Clubbing."

"It's too hot."

"Not yet, but it will be," she promises as she pulls Sky through the short hall and into the rear room.

"Don't feel like Clubbing."

"You will when I get done with you."

x

Though the coffin room is hers and Sammy uses the black leather convertible, their closets are in this room and Abby shamelessly rifles through her friend's, finds the top she's already decided upon. "Come on," she orders, looking back over her shoulder, "get that off."

With a hard sigh Sammy pulls the knee length Nationals shirt up and over her head, lets it drop to the carpet at her bare feet, snatches the two hanging ends of the bra and pulls them behind her back. Abby grabs between the cups even while noticing this is one of hers, yanks the garment off Sammy's chest and arms and completes the motion by flinging it beyond the closed coffin.

"Hey."

"Can't wear a bra with this," she declares and hands her a blue cloth polygon, shorter on the upper part, with long blue strings hanging from each corner. The cloth isn't wide enough to reach halfway along her sides.

"I'm not wearing this outside."

"Well, topless is an option, goes well with handcuffs, but that only means you'll have to leave the party early." She sees Sammy's ready to give her a fight and gives her her 'you'll do as you're told' face.

"Oh, all right."

She ties it firmly, first the two strings behind her neck under her short, pale blonde hair nearly choking her, then yanks the lower strings and secures them behind her back while Abby rummages through the closet and pulls out a scarlet leather miniskirt.

"Oh No." She'd bought it on a dare from her friend Cherry; it's only long enough to hide her crotch by an inch or two and she's only worn it once, that to a 'Meow Mix' party and the fact that only women had been present had not protected her from touches and more, not that she'd minded at all - then. It had accomplished its planned purpose - then. Abby hands it to her and stands with arms folded as she holds the intense red leather to her waist, then to her hips. Yes, the garment hasn't magically elongated since last summer.

"Come on."

"Thank God I don't have any crotchless panties," she mutters as she steps into it.

"I have scissors," earns her a glare.

"You... wouldn't... Dare."

x

Abby turns, bends deep into the closet and comes out with a pair of scarlet slippers with four inch heels. "If you're good, some day when you're dressing to go out with Bill, you'll find every pair you own altered."

"I'll cut the cups from every bra you own and ventilate every one of your tee shirts with nice big rectangles."

"Won't stop me from going to work."

Sammy pulls the red shoes on, admitting they're a good match for the half skirt, and stands straight. She has to balance on her toes and is grateful for the built in support. She'd bought these last year, wore them once and then tossed them into the back of the closet. The heels lift her up to five six, still four inches short of Abby's unenhanced height. "There. Satisfied?"

"No." Abby steps behind her and tugs the strangling halter straps loose, first behind Sammy's neck, then those at her back and reties them five inches looser than the snug fit she'd had. She decides to add petulance, perhaps to say childishness, to the list of symptoms she'll discuss with Grantwood and Michelle.

x

When the scientist is done with the bows, she tugs at the loosened material under Sammy's right arm, satisfied by the quality of the peek. All the woman needs tonight is a moment's carelessness. "There," she says, stepping around front.

"You are such a Bitch."

Abby kisses her cheek. "You're welcome."

"Just for this, I'm making sure you have to sleep in your lab tonight."

"Bon appétit."

Abby strips off her damp ribs and heart tee shirt - in the near hundred degree day she hadn't bothered with a bra - and Sammy, with the first hint of her normal manner, says "You know, lately you're really starting to act the Domme." She forces a half smile. "I kinda like it."