Eames had drifted off, as she tended to do in the late afternoon. It had been more than a week since the shooting, and her injuries were healing well. She had recovered quickly. She felt a hand brush the hair off her forehead, and she opened her eyes. Mike Logan grinned at her. "Hey, Eames. This a bad time?"

She rubbed her eyes and sat up straighter, smiling at the two detectives. "Hi, Mike, Carolyn. Is there such a thing as a good time here?" She studied Logan…something was different. "Where's your sling, Mike?"

"I got tired of the damn thing."

Barek shook her head. "He wasn't using it anyway, unless Deakins was around."

Eames understood that. She didn't know a cop that liked to be restricted in any way. "How's the case going?"

"First things first," Logan said as he helped her turn her chair to face them. He let his partner have the other chair and he leaned against it. "It's good to see that smile. How are you doing?"

She leaned back, stretching the kinks out of her back with a small wince. The pain was mostly gone and she could once again cough, laugh and take deep breaths without that searing pain. "I'm ok. It still hurts, but it's getting better. I got lucky that the bullet did so little damage."

Logan nodded and looked at Goren. To his eyes, he still didn't look any better. "You got even luckier that you have him for a partner."

"That's not luck, Mike. I'm glad to have him as my partner."

"How's Goren doing?" Barek asked.

"They say he's improving. Now what's going on with the case?"

Logan said, "I'll tear this bastard apart with my bare hands when we catch him."

"See what I have to deal with?" Barek nodded at her partner. "A loose cannon, fully loaded and gunning for this perp."

Logan frowned. "He struck again, Eames. From another friggin' museum. And again, he vanished into thin air. We found two casings, and that's it. They match the ones we found from the other shooting. He's toying with us." His eyes darted toward Goren. What he didn't tell her was that there had been another body…female, mid-30s, strangled with her kidney removed post-mortem.

"Which museum?"

"The Met."

"How many officers were hit this time?"

"Four. One died."

"And we've got nothing?"

"Pretty much. They've put out orders for everyone to wear armor." He tapped his fingers against the bulletproof vest under his shirt. "Today we interviewed half the museum staff. Tomorrow we get the other half. After talking to all the staff at the natural history museum, this is really getting tedious. I'm not into spending my days trying to extract information from geeks who only want to talk about bones and bugs."

"Oh, come on, Mike. They're not all like that."

"That's true. The geeks I talked to today were all into Da Vinci and Dali."

Eames smiled, glad for once not to be involved with the interviews…although Bobby would have loved it. He would fit right in with the more cerebral museum culture. "Anybody look good?"

Logan grinned. "You should know me by now, Eames. Lots of 'em look good…"

Barek nudged him. "Don't be a pig, Mike."

He chuckled. "So far everyone is squeaky clean. Maybe tomorrow will be better." He looked back at Goren. "He gonna wake up any time soon?"

"I don't know, Mike. The doctors keep telling me he'll be okay, but he still needs help to breathe and time to heal. 'It's only been a week' they keep telling me. And I remind them it's been twelve days."

Barek looked sympathetic. "He was hurt badly, Eames."

"I know." She looked at her partner, laid a hand on his arm. "I know."

Logan laid a hand on his stomach as it rumbled audibly. "We skipped lunch," he explained. "It's been a really long day. We'd better be going."

"Thanks for coming by. Keep me up on the case, will you?"

Barek nodded as she stood up. "We will. You take it easy."

She smiled and waved as the two detectives walked out of the cubicle and left the ICU.

She really did want to be out there chasing down the son of a bitch who had done this to her partner. But she needed to be here even more, by his side, making sure he was still ok. She hated feeling powerless…and that was exactly how she felt when she wasn't right there, listening to the infernal beep of the monitor and the rasp of the respirator. Never in a million years would she have thought a partner, any partner, could come to be so much a part of who she was. When she'd been assigned as his partner, that possibility had seemed even more remote. She'd heard the stories of his eccentricities, his instability. Bobby Goren was a legend among police officers. Everyone feared the legend. And cops often hated what they feared, what they could not understand. No one understood Bobby. No one but her. Even Deakins didn't understand him. The captain respected him, though, and liked him. He trusted Bobby's instinct. But he didn't understand him; he didn't understand them. The difference was…Deakins knew that as a team, they worked. He was proud of his best team. Their solve rate was the highest in the department, so he didn't care how odd Goren seemed or what an odd couple they were. He just knew that Goren and Eames worked, for whatever reason. And if something ain't broke, you don't fix it.