McGee approached their teenage witness carefully. The girl's mother had sped to the scene after receiving a call from her daughter, and he was now faced with the task of interviewing the girl under the watchful eye of mommy. The two women were huddled together in the back of an ambulance parked on the street in front of the store - one of two ambulances that had responded to the robbery. There were still tire marks in the frost that showed where another ambulance had parked before whisking Ziva away to the hospital. The remaining ambulance crew, after verifying the deaths of both robbers, had taken up the task of checking the witnesses to make sure no one else had been injured.

The teenager, who gave her name as Carrie MacAllen, had been medically cleared, but when the ambulance crew saw how hard her thin body was shaking, they had insisted she wrap up in a large blanket and stay put inside the warm ambulance while she answered the investigators' questions. The crew was now around the front of the ambulance, checking over Carlita Alfaro; they were accommodating enough to leave McGee and Gibbs to their work.

Even so, McGee didn't exactly look forward to interviewing a teenage girl who looked like he could break her with one harsh word. She probably weighed 90 pounds soaking wet, and against her pale skin, her dark hair, which seemed to have started the day braided into girlish pigtails, only gave her more of a look of fragile innocence. One braid had come loose now, and strands hung down her cheek, matted with dried tears and dust from the floor she'd been lying on during the robbery. Her mother didn't look much more put-together. The woman had obviously been crying along with her daughter, and her hair was in a messy approximation of a ponytail that she must have thrown together on her way to the scene.

As McGee watched, the two women's conversation changed from comforting to heated. "You don't understand," Carrie exclaimed, pulling out of her mother's arms to give her a wounded look. "She saved me! The guy was coming around the corner, and she pushed me out of the way and put herself in my place!" She threw out an arm dramatically, making a bat-like figure with the blanket she had wrapped around herself and almost hitting her mother. "I can't go home until someone tells me if she's ok!" She wrapped the blanket back around herself and looked around for someone who could tell her Ziva's condition. Her gaze fell on McGee, watching from a few feet away. "Are you with the police?" she called to him. "I need to...can you tell me..." A new tear trickled down her face and soaked immediately into the stray lock of hair from her braid. "Is she ok?"

"We..." He sighed. "We don't know yet. She's at the hospital now."

"But she's still alive? For now, at least?" Carrie persisted, leaning forward. She shivered and adjusted the blanket as a gust of cool air blew into the ambulance.

McGee noticed that her hands were shaking, despite the folds of blanket she had them fisted in; she was cold from terror, not from the weather. He hated interviewing victims who hadn't had time to decompress. It rarely yielded anything and it only scared them further. But he had been ordered to talk to her, and he wasn't going back to Gibbs to protest that assignment. So, he talked: "She's alive, yes. Miss MacAllen, I'm Special Agent McGee. I'm with NCIS. I worked - I work - with Ziva."

Carrie blinked. "Ziva?"

She didn't know the name of the woman who'd helped her, he realized. "Ziva David. The woman who shot the robber, that's her name. She's an NCIS agent too."

"Is that why you're investigating this?" asked Mrs. MacAllen, looking up. "Instead of the police?"

"Yes, ma'am. Carrie," he went on, transferring his attention to the teenager, "I'd like to ask you some questions about what happened this morning. Do you think you're up to that?" He wiggled his notepad at her hopefully.

Carrie shifted her weight on the ambulance seat, swallowed, and nodded. "Yes." Her voice faltered and she cleared her throat and tried again: "Yes. I want to help. Please."

"Carrie..." her mother said quietly, putting an arm back around her daughter's shoulders, "we don't have to do this now. You can -"

"No!" She turned on her mother with a fierce expression. "She might not even live, and she hid me from them! I want to help her! And this will help her!" When Mrs. MacAllen, obviously thinking better of her attempts to protect her child, held up her hands in surrender, Carrie looked back to McGee. "They're heroes, you know. Her and Danny Weiss."

"Is that the guy who shot the man who shot Ziva?"

Carrie nodded. "He lives in the same building as me. They're both heroes!" she said again, as if she expected him to disagree with her.

McGee nodded and flipped his notepad open, trying to keep his impatience in check. He needed to know facts, not hear vague statements about how heroic anyone was. But the poor girl was still shaking; he couldn't very well tell her to skip past the marveling and move on to the actual specifics of what had happened. The most guidance he would be able to get away with was some gently-pointed questions, so he tried one of those: "Carrie, what were you doing when the robbers came in?" he rushed to squeeze in now before she started talking again.

Carrie blinked at him, her train of thought derailed. "I was looking for something for breakfast. I was standing by the rack of cereals - you know, the ones that come in those plastic cups, so you can pour milk right inside?"

McGee nodded.

"Well, I was trying to decide between raisin bran or corn pops, and then there was this loud bang when they pushed open the door, and Mrs. Alfaro screamed, and I looked up. And there were these two big guys -"

"The guys whose bodies are in the store now?" he prompted.

"Yeah, them. I mean, at least I guess so, I haven't looked at their faces now. It's..." She shuddered and rubbed at her eyes with the heel of one hand. "The mess in there, and I...I had no idea people's heads blew up like that when they got shot, they don't do that in GTA, at least not so messy, and I just...I had no idea. I don't want to look at them now. I don't have to look at them now, do I?"

"No," McGee assured her, shaking his head. "Tell me what Agent David did when the robbers came in."

She thought about that, then turned up her hands. "I don't know. I didn't see her. I mean, she was doing something with coffee, I think, but I wasn't paying attention. I was focused on my cereal, and then on the guys who were showing the guns." She sighed, screwing up her face apologetically. "I didn't see her until she started waving at me."

"Waving?"

"Yeah, like this." The teenager demonstrated, flattening her hand and waving it up and down, parallel to the ground. "Like, 'get down! get down!', you know?"

He nodded again, eyes on his notepad. "And did you do what she said?"

Eyes wide, Carrie nodded vehemently. "I hit the ground so fast, I think I scared her! I thought maybe if I - I mean..." She bit her lip. "I kind of instinctively thought that if I made myself look smaller, they wouldn't see me even if they looked back there. But then I had my head down and I couldn't see, so I was just listening, but when you can't see...everything you hear is suddenly really horrible and scary. And so I kept trying to see without actually picking up my head, but that didn't..." She shrugged. "Didn't really work, you know?"

"Yep." She was on a roll now; he wasn't going to distract her with any more words than necessary.

"So then I heard footsteps, and I -" She broke off, her throat working as if she was trying to stave off the need to vomit. Her mother patted her hand comfortingly and after a few seconds, Carrie finally seemed able to swallow. "I don't even know how to explain how scared I was. Because I knew that the only people walking around were the people who shouldn't be walking around, you know, it's not like they were going to let Mrs. Alfaro wander around the store while they were holding guns on her!" She tightened the blanket around her shoulders at the memory. "And I was starting to look up, but then the next thing I knew she - Agent David, you said is her name? - she put her foot on my shoulder and, like, kicked me over to the next aisle, so I was out of sight of the guy who came looking for us."

"Looking for who?" McGee asked, looking up.

"Oh." She looked confused. "You know, for other people in the store. I guess they didn't want us calling 9-1-1 or anything."

McGee thought about that. She could be guessing correctly; on the other hand, he needed to rule out the possibility that the robbers had been looking for an associate, or a particular victim. "So he didn't look like they wanted anyone in particular?"

Carrie shook her head. "I don't...think so? No, I don't know," she admitted with a shake of her head. "I mean, it wasn't like either of them said anyone's name or anything, and I couldn't really see well by that point even when I looked up, because I was behind the shelf. But it makes sense, right? That they would want to make sure no one was hiding in the store, calling the police?" She shrugged. "I don't know why else they would have come back there - all the money was in the cash register up front, not back by where we were."

"Well, did he say anything, anything at all, once he got back there?" he pressed.

"Nothing important," she replied immediately, then paused to give more thought to her hasty answer. "I mean, at least I don't think it was important. He said something about how he found us, and he called the other guy over, and..." She closed her eyes, remembering, and flinched. "And then they started shooting at each other."

"The robbers?"

"No. I mean yes. I mean, the woman - Agent David - shot the one guy, and then his friend, he shot her." Her voice dried up there, and she hiccuped.

McGee offered her the bottle of water that was sitting by her feet, and she gladly took it and drank a large mouthful. "Did you see them shoot each other?" he asked after she had swallowed and set the bottle down on the seat.

"Not exactly. I didn't see her shoot him. I didn't know it was going to happen, and I was still hiding. But then when I heard the sound - the gunshot - and she started yelling, I thought maybe she had things under control. And I looked around the corner of the shelf and I -" She drew in a choking breath, then let it out on a sob. "I looked just in time to see him shoot her," she said, covering her face with shaking hands.

He watched her cry, unsure whether to try to continue questioning her or not. Her mother was directing an exquisitely clear back off look at him, but he couldn't just leave this interview unfinished. He needed to know what had happened next - had Ziva simply gone down without a fight? Had she shot one or both of the robbers again before losing consciousness? Or was what the young Hill staffer had babbled true - had he somehow managed to shoot two armed men, despite no evident weapons training? "Carrie," he finally said gently, touching her arm to get her attention. "This is very important, ok? I need you to tell me what you saw after Agent David was shot."

She lifted a pathetic, tear-stained face to look at him. Her inexpertly-applied eye makeup now ringed her eyes where she had been rubbing at them. "I..." Her breathing hitched. "I don't know what I saw! I don't know if I saw anything! I think I hid again - they were shooting guns at each other! I was so...so afraid!" she wailed, disgusted at herself for her instinctive actions. "I was scared and I hid and I didn't see anything that means anything!"

He wasn't going to get anything else out of her, he realized. She was frustrated, he was frustrated, and his questions now were only making things worse.

Reluctantly, he backed off.

"Ok, Carrie. That's ok. We can come back to it another time. Why don't you and your mom head home." He looked up at her mother, whose face had softened now that her daughter was no longer under what felt like an attack. "We'll need to speak to her again, ma'am."

"I know." The woman nodded and wrapped her arm tighter around her daughter. "But...tomorrow. Please."

Stifling his frustration, McGee nodded and watched the pair go. Then, when they were out of sight, he spiked his notepad into the ground and gave vent to what he had been holding back since the girl had started crying: "Goddamnit!"

"Hey," said a sharp voice from behind him. He turned to see Gibbs pointing down at the notepad. "This ain't the Super Bowl. Pick that thing up."

Sighing, McGee did as ordered. "Sorry, Boss," he said, as he grabbed the pad off the ground. "It's just - I didn't get anything good out of the girl, and for all we know Ziva's dying, and -"

Gibbs slapped him on the back of the head as he made to stand up again, and if McGee's reflexes hadn't already been attuned to head-slaps, he would have fallen over instead of just lurching forward and then catching himself. Then Gibbs surprised him: "I know," he said quietly, making McGee, who had just started to straighten up again, stop halfway and stare at him. "But this isn't the time. Do your cursing once we're clear of the scene. Hell, I might join you then."

McGee, who had reached up to rub his sore head, dropped his hand and swallowed. The last time Gibbs had spoken to him that tolerantly, it had been pouring rain outside and Caitlin Todd's body had been in the morgue. "She's dead, isn't she?"

Gibbs blinked. "What?"

"You're..." He gestured helplessly. "You're being too nice. It's like when Kate - oof!" he broke off as that earned him another whack to the head.

"She's not dead," Gibbs said firmly, lowering his hand. "She's not gonna be dead. Ziva follows my orders, and I did not give her permission to be dead. You got that, McGee?"

"Yeah. Yeah, Boss." Busying himself with flipping the pages in his now-dusty notepad, McGee nodded. "I've got it."

"Good. Now, go do photos while I interview the cashier."

"Yes, Boss."