"We use this thing maybe two, three times a year," Chief Ethan King confided to Gibbs, as if Gibbs was interested in the health status of the Kings Point residents. "Lucky for your boy that we had it running. Getting it ready to tote those pints of blood over to County General."

Right. As if it was okay for the sole ambulance in the entire town of Kings Point to spend even thirty seconds of time not in working order. What if someone had a heart attack, in the middle of town? The hospital alone was forty miles away, and the local clinic had shut down two years ago when the elderly, ought-to-have-been-retired physician passed away, standing at the bedside of one of his patients. Gibbs himself was acting as the senior medical officer on the scene, as the man with the most medical knowledge, most of it picked up here and there.

"Hurry it up," he growled. "You get those damn pints of blood on board now, or you'll be taking 'em yourself." Empty threat; four of the more than fifty pints belonged to McGee, and it was likely that the man would need them back. That blood was going with them if Gibbs himself had to pick up the cooler and throw it in the back with McGee.

Seconds counted. The ambulance had no driver; DiNozzo had been assigned that role, and was sitting behind the wheel, aching to put his foot to the pedal. The medical supplies on board had long ago been used up or expired until the only thing worthy of the medical profession was a half empty tank of oxygen. It would be entirely empty in another thirty minutes, which meant that the only medical treatment that McGee would have after that until arrival at County General would be a couple pairs of terrified eyes, watching him breathe and praying for a straight road to speed over.

Gibbs grabbed hold of the stretcher, doing his part to lift the thing into the back of the ambulance and locking the wheels into place. Abby was already inside, shaking, and Gibbs searched her face anxiously, fearing that he'd perhaps missed something. There was a bruise on one side of her face; if one of the rogue cops had hit her, there would be another murder before the day was out. Abby had already insisted that it had happened during the explosion that had drawn Gibbs to the ancient forensics lab. Gibbs believed her—for now.

Didn't mean that he wasn't going to have her checked out by someone qualified. Gibbs's lab rat had been kidnapped, slammed around, terrified out of her wits; yeah, seeing a doctor who didn't graduate in the bottom half of his or her class was next on the agenda, after which a certain trio of NCIS agents would be returning to Kings Point intent on tracking down the third and fourth members of the kidnapping party. Chief Ethan had Judy King and her nephew Zach in custody. That pair wasn't going anywhere.

There was another pair out there, still waiting to get themselves caught. There was Penny, the evidence clerk. A bit player? Maybe, but her bit was part of the crime that led to the man on the stretcher in the back of the ambulance and the girl beside him with a bruise on her face that meant that she wouldn't be wearing make up for a couple of weeks until the pain went away. The missing Evidence clerk would be explaining herself to a judge in the very near future, if Gibbs had his way.

The other was the second rogue cop, the other nephew of Judy King. The relationships didn't matter at the moment, but it did give insight into how the woman had suborned the two cops into helping her with her crime. There were a lot of family squabbles located smack dab in the middle of Kings Point, and Gibbs didn't want to get in the middle of any of 'em. That his team had been dragged into this one was a matter that he was fixing, and intended to fix on a permanent basis. The first rogue cop, Zach King, had surrendered meekly. It was clear that he regretted his role in the crime. He had gone in willingly, believing that he was righting the wrong done to his cousin Jason, but the other one—Will—was another story. Will hadn't surrendered. Will was running. Why? Gibbs wondered. Why run? It wasn't as though the man was going to be able to go back to his day job on Monday. Committing a federal offense didn't quite jibe with an upstanding police officer in blue.

Let him. It didn't matter how far he ran, Gibbs and his team would find him. Gibbs had already assigned Ziva to the task of tracking down both Will King and Penny Eaton. He didn't need Officer David for the transport of his two wounded chicks, but he did need her to keep the trail from going cold. He only hoped that he would be able to return to Kings Point before something fatal happened to the suspects.

Gibbs hauled himself up into the ambulance behind the stretcher, locking down the stretcher wheels and taking another look to make sure that his junior agent was still breathing. Just what do you think you could do if he wasn't? Breathe for him? Forty miles means at least forty minutes at top speed. You think you could keep him alive for that long, with nothing but a half empty canister of oxygen?

Gibbs locked that thought away where it couldn't get out and choke him. He banged on the side of the truck. "DiNozzo! Get this thing moving!"

"Right, boss." DiNozzo cranked the engine over, and it caught on the first try. Gibbs allowed himself a brief moment of amazement and then thanks that the thing hadn't required a jump start.

They left the small town of Kings Point behind in moments, DiNozzo's foot heavy on the gas pedal. Gibbs could see the buildings vanish, to be replaced by trees and shrubs along the side of the country road, the window in the back of the ambulance not adequate to do more than take an occasional glance. All it would tell them was whether or not they'd reached civilization and County General Hospital. Most passengers didn't care to know anything more than that, and Gibbs counted himself among them.

He had two choices: watch McGee breathe, or debrief his lab rat. Neither choice was attractive, but one had the added advantage that it would bring justice to a richly deserving piece of scum. He shoved his feet against the inner struts of the ambulance for better balance and slid a reassuring arm around the girl.

Abby melted into the proffered comfort, shaking. Gibbs subdued a frown; the girl was still terrified and he suspected that it would take too long for her to move past this slice of life—more, if McGee died because of it. Hear that, McGee? You really want that on your conscience? It's another reason for you to keep breathing.

There was something he could do about it, and it would serve two purposes: put Abby's fears out into the open where they both could examine them, and give Gibbs himself clues as to where Will King might run. "Talk."

"Gibbs?" She turned large and round scared eyes up to him.

"Talk, Abby." Gibbs wasn't going to take no for an answer. They had forty minutes with nothing better to accomplish. "Take it from the top. They got you and McGee coming out of the diner."

"Yeah." The shaking got worse. Not a problem. Gibbs expected it, and he tightened his grip on her. "We weren't expecting it, Gibbs. I mean, they were cops! Nobody expects a couple of cops to jump you and throw you in the back of a squad car!"

"They took McGee down first." It was a logical deduction.

"They hit him, Gibbs! They hit him." Tears finally sprang to Abby's eyes, now that she no longer needed to be brave.

"Not gonna happen again." That was a fact. "They hit you, too?"

She bit her lip. "Yeah."

Gibbs commanded his blood pressure to remain steady. "Which one?"

Shaking. "I…I don't remember. I'm not sure."

Gibbs would find out. He would find out, and the perpetrator would be grateful that he was already behind bars because once he got out… Gibbs deliberately moved on. "They took you to the forensics lab in the cellar of the municipal complex."

"Yeah." Abby took a deep breath. "She wanted me to prove that her son was innocent. Mrs. King, I mean. Gibbs, she made me! She was going to kill McGee!"

"I know that, Abbs." He tightened his hold on her, only half because DiNozzo was swinging the ambulance around a curve on two wheels. "You kept him alive. That was your part of this mess, and you did it. He's still alive."

"But—" Abby couldn't keep her eyes off of the unconscious man strapped to the stretcher before them. With the ambulance rocking back and forth, neither one could see the gentle rising and falling of his chest to indicate that breath still remained within.

"He's alive," Gibbs emphasized quietly, "and he's going to stay that way. Right, Abby?"

Silence. Bitten lip.

He shook her gently. "Right, Abbs?"

"Yes, Gibbs."

"We've even got his blood, along with the other donated pints," Gibbs prodded. The large cooler had been stashed and locked down in one corner of the vehicle. "All they have to do is figure out which ones belong to him, and put them back where they belong."

"Yes, Gibbs."

Something was still wrong. "Abby? Talk to me."

The tremors increased. "Gibbs?"

"What, Abby?"

"Gibbs, Jason King is innocent."

"Innocent?" Of all the things Abby could have told him, that was not high on the list of probabilities. Gibbs had almost forgotten the original case. "Innocent, how?"

"Innocent, like he didn't do it." Abby looked away. "Gibbs, I helped convict an innocent man! Jason King didn't murder Mariah Lovage."

"You didn't convict him," Gibbs told her. "All you did was testify. You punched a hole in his alibi. Did you testify to the truth?"

"Well, of course, Gibbs!" Even through her misery, indignation shone through.

"Then you didn't convict him. Somebody else set him up to take the fall." Gibbs made that a fact, and it felt right. Jason King's mother's instincts were right. Her son was no killer, and Judy King was willing to sacrifice herself to prove it. He'd known since the moment he'd seen her, frightened and determined, with McGee's life in her hands.

It was time to acknowledge that sacrifice. "Give me the evidence, Abby," he commanded quietly.

The scientist surged up in the terrified girl and replaced fear with competence. "Two things, Gibbs." It was almost as if she was lecturing him from the safety of her lab back in D.C. "First, the fingerprint that they found on the murder weapon. It was only a partial, only the guy doing the forensics didn't tell them that. All he said was that it was a fingerprint, and that it matched Jason King. He didn't tell them that it could also match like a few thousand more people in this country alone."

"So you're telling me that he was in on it."

"Right now, I'm not going to go there, Gibbs. Some of the stuff I saw in that lab said that the guy was just really bad at his job. I was a little busy at the time to make the determination of whether it was deliberate." The shakes tried to creep back in. Abby banished them.

Gibbs went back to the original line. "So the fingerprint wouldn't have been enough to convict him, if the Kings Point forensics guy was doing his job right. You said two things. What was the other?"

"The shoeprint." Abby couldn't help herself; she looked at McGee, almost panicking before she saw his chest rise and fall once again, proving that the man was still alive. "Gibbs, McGee picked up on it. He's the one who thought that maybe the other footprints in the photos didn't belong to Jason King."

"Was he right?"

"Yeah. He was. None of the prints fit Jason King's shoe size."

"So Jason King really is innocent," Gibbs mused. "You have any clue as to who's guilty?"

"Somebody with a size thirteen men's shoe."

"So you're talking somebody who's pretty big."

She nodded.

"Abby?" There was something else, and Gibbs wouldn't let her stop. Not yet.

Deep breath. Shudder, and plunge in. "Gibbs, McGee told me another thing to do. All those names that popped up during the partial fingerprint match? There were like, thousands."

"And?"

"Zip codes, Gibbs."

"Zip codes?"

"Zip codes," Abby confirmed. "There were thousands of matches to the partial, but only about a dozen that are in Kings Point and the surrounding towns. Now, something like that wouldn't—or maybe I ought to say shouldn't—be enough for a conviction, but it does narrow down the search. Of those dozen in the surrounding area, I can cut that number down by almost half just by eliminating the women."

"Who does it narrow it down to, Abby?" Gibbs had a funny feeling.

"Gibbs, it could have been someone passing through Kings Point—"

"Abby?" No time for equivocation.

Abby inhaled, and let it out. "Will King."

Gibbs froze. "Will King, who aided and abetted?"

"The one and same." The shaking started up again.

Well, hell. No wonder Will King was running, if he was guilty. No wonder he'd volunteered to help his aunt prove his cousin's innocence. Probably wanted to keep an eye on things, figure out how close to the truth people were getting.

"We'll get him, Abby," he promised. He hated to see the fear on Abby's face. "The murder is old—"

"—and the evidence may not be enough to convict. Not a real forensics investigation."

"A possibility," Gibbs conceded, "but he's now wanted for kidnapping two Federal agents, and there's airtight evidence against him." He glanced at his watch. "Half way there, DiNozzo?" he called out to the cab.

"Just over," came the response. "Maybe fifteen, sixteen miles, if their directions were right—"

Gibbs's cell phone rang, and he looked at the screen before flipping the thing open, noting that it was Ziva. Had she apprehended Will King and Penny Eaton already? Good possibility, although Gibbs almost hoped that she hadn't. A good chase with a fight at the end of it would do wonders to assuage his own feelings of anger. "Ziva?"

"Gibbs? Gibbs, there has been an explosion in the forensics lab. No one was injured, but the evidence has been destroyed. The interior of the lab is ruined."

"On purpose?" This was not good.

"It is too early to tell. I have requested a forensics team from NCIS headquarters to assess the damage and ascertain the cause of the explosion. Director Vance indicated that he would send a team immediately."

"Chief Ethan object?"

"He did. I informed him that since the crime committed was against two NCIS agents, we held jurisdiction. He mentioned calling his local congressman to object, and I invited him to proceed. I believe that such an action would speed any number of resources to our location, including the assistance of the state police to set up roadblocks in the area to prevent the suspect from fleeing."

"Anybody see anything?"

"If they did, they are not yet volunteering the information." Gibbs could hear the barely controlled annoyance in the Mossad officer's voice. He devoutly hoped that she would keep it under control, and wondered if he should have left DiNozzo back in Kings Point and let Ziva drive. The way she drove? Need to get there not just fast but in one piece—

He issued orders. "Rope it off. Have the locals post a man to keep people out. You see what you can do to track down the suspects. The trail is still hot; that's more important right now than the crime scene." Gibbs had all the evidence against Will King that he needed right now, one sitting beside him and the other lying on a stretcher in front of him.

"On it, Gibbs." The line disconnected.

DiNozzo had heard only the lesser half of the cell phone discussion. "Boss?"

"Somebody blew up the crime scene," Gibbs informed him, knowing that Abby beside him was drinking in every word, "and all the evidence from the original case."

"Gibbs! That means that somebody doesn't want Jason King to get cleared."

"You got it, Abby. Little more to this mess than anyone first thought—"

Blam!

The ambulance slued around. DiNozzo cursed, fighting to keep the vehicle upright. Abby screamed, and Gibbs grabbed whatever he could. That included a certain lab rat. The girl already had too many bruises.

"Tire!" DiNozzo yelled.

Not just the tire. Gibbs's ear had caught the echo that told him that the tire hadn't blown due to overuse or shoddy manufacturing techniques.

The tire had been shot with a heavy caliber bullet. Whoever processed the crime scene would find it.

Wasn't going to be Gibbs. Gibbs was going to be going after the perpetrator who caused the heavy caliber bullet to go through the tire.

If he lived through the crash.