For Greg, seeing Spike in his bed at the hospital was surreal and heart-wrenching. Spike was always so animated - even when he wasn't pulling a prank or cracking a joke, or picking carpet fibers out of Babycakes's treads, he always had this happy energy, this life, about him. Even when delicately disarming a bomb, where the slightest wrong move would trigger a deadly blast, Spike was rarely silent.
He could still hear Spike's sotto voce mantra of Easy, easy, easy as he went after the bomb under the Lewellen Building.
It was just so wrong to see Michelangelo Scarlatti unmoving and as pale as a wraith in a hospital bed. The stitches and gruesome bruises on his shaved scalp stood out like inky blotches on blank paper. The two NCIS agents politely gave Greg and Mrs. Scarlatti some privacy, excusing themselves to get some coffee.
The ICU doctor offered Spike's mother a kind smile. "I don't want to give you any sort of false hope, but he made it through the night, and the swelling looks like it's going down. We're cautiously optimistic that he'll pull through."
Greg saw her lip trembling with emotion. "Thank you. Thank you, Doctor," she said with a soft, quavering voice. One of her hands gently grasped Spike's, while the other almost clutched at Greg's; he offered her a reassuring squeeze.
Something in his own chest unclenched. It wasn't over yet, but there was light on the horizon.
"We're here, Spike." Greg smiled with only a little tightness, and set his free hand softly on Spike's shoulder. "We're right here."
Little Bobby slouched in the NCIS interrogation room, his feet perched insolently on the table. He lived up to his moniker - he was only about five foot five, all told. Gibbs could have broken him in half with his little finger. His defiant smirk was marred somewhat by the livid, darkening bruises and swelling on his face; someone really had managed to land some good blows on him. It hadn't exactly improved his features, nor his attitude. As Gibbs stalked into the room, he rudely shoved the punk's feet off the table before sitting down opposite him.
Scoffing, Little Bobby sat up and leaned back in his chair. "What, Five-O can't find any way to frame me, so they call in CSI?" he smugly mocked them. He really did have one of those faces. "I'm telling you, me'n Tommy, we didn't do nothing wrong!"
Gibbs folded his hands and fixed a steady gaze on the diminutive criminal and said nothing.
His target squirmed slightly under his relentless stare, but remained uncooperative. "Yo, what's this all about, anyway? I told those cops I'd never seen that stuff before! Why are CSI dudes interrogating me, anyway? I didn't do nothing!"
Right on cue, Tony entered the interrogation room and dramatically dropped the evidence box on the table. The thump jarred Little Bobby, nearly causing him to lose his balance in his chair.
"That's NCIS, not CSI, jack-ass," Tony corrected him nonchalantly.
"Whatever, man," Little Bobby muttered.
"It stands for 'Naval Criminal Investigative Service.' Me, well, I'm just here to give you a little free legal advice. You know, Bobby, like when you try to use someone else's credit card to pay for your trip to the ER, you gotta make sure that the name on the credit card matches the name on the fake ID," DiNozzo advised the punk in a casual, almost sympathetic tone. "I know. It's a bit confusing, all those stolen cards. It's easy to get mixed up: which ones are yours, which ones you stole. But that wasn't even your first mistake that night, Bobby."
Gibbs coolly opened the evidence box and pulled several evidence bags, containing a heavy-duty watch, a cell phone, and a wallet. The wallet was open, revealing an official ID for one Constable Michelangelo Scarlatti of the Toronto Metropolitan Police Department.
Now it was Gibbs's turn to smirk, though there was not even the faintest glint of amusement in his eyes. "If you'd looked at this before you got picked up at the hospital, even you might have noticed that the man you assaulted and robbed was a cop," he said icily, speaking for the first time.
Their suspect's face ran through a succession of emotions, from confusion to surprise, followed by horror and a pathetic attempt to hide his sudden fear. He wasn't nearly as bright as he thought he was. "Hey, you can't pin that on me! I only found that stuff! I was gonna turn it in to the police before they arrested me!" he protested in a feeble attempt to maintain the unconcerned front. He was already changing his story, and not very well.
"You thought it was a great plan, didn't you, Bobby?" Tony took up the narrative again, still speaking casually. "You and your buddy Tommy would lurk in an alley, wait for someone to pass by, and then he'd pretend to beat you up while you called for help. A Good Samaritan gets lured down the alley to save you, only to have the tables turned when you hit him on the head with a pipe. While he's out cold, you two rob him. Only things didn't exactly go according to plan this time, did they?" DiNozzo continued as he circled the table. "The guy who came to your 'rescue'? A Canadian SWAT officer."
"Constable Michelangelo Scarlatti." Reaching into the evidence box, Gibbs pulled out Scarlatti's photo and set it on the table. In full uniform and at the peak of health, the officer with his cheerful smile barely resembled the pallid form they had pulled from the dumpster and now lay clinging to life in a hospital bed.
"And he actually broke Tommy's nose before you managed to knock him out!" Tony winced in false sympathy. "Ouch. That must've hurt. And your night only got worse from there. A second person saw you and tried to intervene."
"And you killed him," Gibbs concluded, locking the criminal with eyes like shards of ice.
"What?" Little Bobby angrily objected as he jumped violently to his feet. "I didn't kill nobody!"
"Sit. Down," ordered Gibbs coldly. The suspect froze under his gaze and slowly fell back into the chair, swallowing tensely. Gibbs took another photo from the box and placed it next to Scarlatti's. Little Bobby's face turned slightly green at the sight of the bloody body, and the empty, clouded eyes staring at nothing.
"Not so easy to look at your handiwork in daylight, is it? His name was Seaman Julio Ramirez," Gibbs said, placing Ramirez's file photo next to the crime scene photo. "He was a Navy computer technician from California. He wanted to be a cop one day, so when he saw you and Cassidy throwing a body into a dumpster, he did exactly the same thing that Constable Scarlatti did. He tried to do the right thing. And you killed him for it."
Little Bobby's lips twisted, and his throat bobbed nervously. "Look, CSI dude, I told you, I didn't kill nobody. All I know is that me and Tom, we were walking down the alley, and this dude here attacked us for no reason! He was crazy, man! So we were only defending ourselves, you see? But we didn't kill nobody! Look at this!" He pointed at his banged-up face as evidence. There was, however, no sympathy for him to find in either of the two agents. "That's what this dude did to me! He assaulted us, man! But we didn't kill him! The dude was alive and screaming bloody murder when we split," he babbled anxiously.
"Bobby, Bobby, Bobby. You left him with a subdural haematoma," Tony chuckled with fake friendliness, a wide but empty smile on his face. "He might've been on his feet when you and your buddy Tommy ran away, but, you see, he was already bleeding on his brain from some lucky blow to his skull. Despite that, he still might've survived if he'd gotten to a hospital right away. He probably passed out almost immediately after you left him there, but he couldn't've called for help anyway because you'd smashed his phone against the wall."
"He was left to die in an alley three thousand miles from home, just a few feet from the man he was trying to help. A man you dumped like garbage!" Gibbs yelled, smacking his hand down on Scarlatti's photo on the table.
"You can't prove none of this!" Little Bobby licked his lips, his eyes darting about as he tried to find some avenue for escape.
Gibbs pulled the length of pipe out of the box and slammed it down on the table next to the wallet. Little Bobby visibly flinched in his chair. "Your prints on the weapon used to assault Constable Scarlatti," Gibbs stated harshly. "How could they get there if you were just minding your own business?"
"I don't know, man! We go through that alley a lot! Maybe, maybe I-I-I touched it sometime, you know? We didn't smack no cop, and we didn't whack that crazy dude!" Little Bobby protested.
But his voice caught in his throat when Gibbs held up one more item, gleaming in the pale light. The bold inscription on the wristband was now as plain as day, standing out in accusation.
"This belongs to Constable Scarlatti." His voice was quiet again, but full of menace, as he leaned towards Little Bobby. "It's a keepsake to remember one of his teammates killed in the line of duty. But when we found it, it was in Seaman Ramirez's hand. You took it along with everything else you stole from Scarlatti. You probably couldn't hock it for more than a few bucks anyway, but some people, people like you, well, you can't resist anything shiny." He smiled all the friendliness of a shark closing for the kill. "You stole it while Scarlatti was unconscious, but then Ramirez showed up, and he managed to grab it back."
The suspect shrugged, desperate for some way, any way to wriggle out of the hole in which he was trapped. "Maybe he stole it from the other guy!" he suggested. "He was crazy, man!"
"Oh, did we forget to mention the best bit?" DiNozzo clapped a hand on Little Bobby's shoulder, making him jump in surprise. "Before we collected your sorry ass from D.C. Metro, my buddies Tim and Ziva, they spent most of the night back at that alley. But let me tell you," he waggled a finger at the suspect, "they thought it was worth it when they discovered the brand-spanking-new security camera on the building across the street facing the alley."
"Smile, Bobby - you're on Candid Camera." Gibbs's eyes coldly nailed the suspect where he sat. They had him.
The diminutive criminal folded his arms defensively. It was a useless gesture. He was well and truly caught, and the terrible realization was just starting to sink in. "Yo, I want my lawyer now, man."
"Yeah. Thought you might," Gibbs replied.