Half an hour later, Ducky, who had been slumped back against the waiting room wall in a near-perfect mirroring of Tony's posture, rolled his head to the side to look at the other man. "I forgot to ask you," he said, breaking the thick silence that had filled the room and startling his companion out of his thoughts. "When you called Jethro, did he give you any indication of how soon they would be finished and able to stop by? I'm sure they're both eager to - what?" he broke off as Tony's face transformed into a look of horror. "Was it something I said?" Worried, he followed as Tony jumped to hit feet. "Anthony!"

Tony stopped halfway across the room and turned back to him. "I forgot to call him." He laughed hoarsely. "There's been no time - one thing after another -" The ugly laughter continued, a sound that set Ducky's teeth on edge. "I didn't want to go too far away in case she . . ."

"That's all right." Ducky patted him on the shoulder, heading off the end of Tony's sentence so he didn't have to say what Ducky knew he didn't want to say. "You've been rather distracted. Why don't you let me speak to him. Go on," he urged, waving Tony back to his seat, "sit back down. I can explain the situation better, anyway. And for god's sake," he added as Tony continued to laugh distractedly, "stop laughing."

Tony didn't seem to have been aware that he was, and he stopped mid-laugh, looking shocked at himself. "I . . ." he began apologetically, then realized he had no idea what to say to explain himself. He could only shake his head, wondering if he was finally losing it.

Deciding that they could both use some time to collect themselves, Ducky retrieved his phone from his pocket and left the room.

"Yeah. Yeah, I got it, Duck. Thanks for the call." Without waiting for a goodbye, Gibbs disconnected the call and dropped his cell phone back into his pocket. He knocked perfunctorily on the outside of the interrogation room door, then let himself in.

"Tell me again how you managed to get her gu- hey, Boss." McGee and the young Hill staffer, who had been absorbed in their mental trip back through the robbery, both looked up with surprise. "What's up?" McGee asked.

"That was Ducky. He's at Bethesda with Tony and Ziva."

"She's alive?" Danny Weiss blurted, eyes wide. "I mean," he explained when McGee and Gibbs directed matching stares at him, "that's great! She looked so bad there on the floor, you know . . ."

When Gibbs didn't immediately offer any response, McGee puffed out his cheeks as he released a deep breath. "Everything going ok there?" he asked, rather proud of how calm he managed to make the question sound.

Gibbs shook his head and pulled out a chair at the table. "She's in surgery," he said, dropping into the seat. "Bleeding in her brain."

"Oh, god." McGee dropped his head into his hands and rubbed his forehead. "Did he say how bad? What are her chances?"

"Later, McGee." Absently, Gibbs glanced at their witness and raised one finger to run it over his eye, where a faint scar from his own brush with a head wound was camouflaged by his eyebrow. "Ducky suggests we wrap this case up and get down there."

McGee swallowed. "Ducky said that?"

"Yeah. Which means we've got work to do." Gibbs made a mental change in gears and turned to Danny. "Tell us again. From the beginning."

The young man sighed and ran a hand through his hair, trying to put it into some semblance of order. It had once been scrupulously styled, but somewhere between running late, being robbed, and shooting two men, his style had lost cohesion. Now, he had one chunk plastered over his ear by what was left of the hair gel he'd put in this morning, and the rest sticking out from his head at various angles. "I went in for breakfast," he began, repeating the story he'd already told them twice. "I was running late, but if I don't grab something to eat before I get to Dirksen - that's the building my office is in," he explained when neither man's face showed recognition of the name, "- then I'm hungry until lunch, because the Senator keeps me running and I don't have a chance to grab anything. So I always stop into the Seventh Street Market, because they're only a block down from my apartment, on the way to the bus. I mean, assuming I don't miss the bus and have to run or catch a cab." He smiled sheepishly. "That's been known to happen. I graduated from college last spring, and I still haven't managed to get the hang of waking up early, so -"

"The store," Gibbs directed, heading off the young man's rambling. "What happened once you were inside?"

"Oh. Um." Danny winced at the obvious displeasure on Gibb's face. "I was running late, as usual. Mrs. Alfaro told me to just go ahead with my food and pay her later -" He stopped, confused, as he realized that he had never gotten a chance to eat his breakfast. "I don't know what happened to the food after that. I guess I must have dropped it somewhere in the store. Uh," he went on, catching his digression before Gibbs could. "I paid her anyway. She said I could catch the bus if I ran, so I was just taking my change back from her when the door opened and these two guys came in."

"Can you describe them?" McGee interrupted.

Danny blinked at him. "Big. Ugly. The guys who are in your morgue now."

"You're sure of that?"

Danny opened his palms on the table, as if to say What more do you want from me? "I shot them. I would think I'd recognize them," he said impatiently.

Gibb's eyes flicked from McGee to Weiss, and he nodded to the young man. "Go on."

"They came in," Danny picked up, directing his attention at the man who asked useful questions instead of the one who asked silly ones. "And they showed us that they had guns in their waistbands." He closed his eyes. "Mrs. Alfaro screamed. One of them jumped over the counter and went after her. He told her to empty the cash register. The other guy stood by the door, making sure no one came in."

"And you . . . what?" Gibbs prompted. "What did you do while this guy was waving a gun in the poor lady's face?"

Looking taken aback at the sudden attack, Danny colored slightly. "I, um . . ." he ventured. "I kind of tripped, and fell over a rack of potato chips. And then I tried to get to the back of the store. To see if anyone else was trapped," he added defiantly before either man could say a word. "Not to hide."

Gibbs shrugged and twirled a finger, indicating he should go on.

"I got back to the coffee prep area, and I saw -" He paused, furrowing his brows. "I don't know think I know her name, actually. Mrs. Alfaro only ever calls her 'Chiquita,' so that's what I think of her as when I see her in there, but I don't think that's - "

"Her name's Ziva," McGee supplied. "Ziva David."

"Ziva," Danny repeated, testing the name out. "Well, I saw Ziva, and then there was a younger girl lying on the floor. I sat down next to Ziva, and then we heard someone else walking around. She reached out and pushed the other girl out of the way. One of the guys came around the corner and saw us, and he called back to his friend, and then he told me to move away from Ziva, so I did that. Um," he added, seeming to feel self-conscious about having admitted to leaving Ziva alone, "I thought they were just going to tie us up or something."

"With their guns?" Gibbs asked with raised eyebrows.

Danny just shrugged.

"Then what?"

"She pulled out a gun really fast - I don't even know where she was hiding it - and she shot the guy in the shoulder. She started yelling at him, and he fell down."

"What did you do?" McGee asked.

Danny blinked. "It all happened really fast. I didn't have time to do anything before - I mean, she was handling it, and I don't think she even cared that I was there. And then I was moving to get up, and suddenly the other guy was there behind her." He swallowed. "He shot her in the head. She dropped, almost right in front of me. I saw her gun, and I -"

"Wait." McGee held up a hand. He pushed a pad of paper across the table toward the other man, then dropped a pencil down next to it. "Can you sketch this? Where you were, where she fell, where the shooter was?"

Danny looked down at the paper, then back up at McGee, before nodding. "Sure. Ok." He lifted the pencil and cautiously started drawing. "I was here - the corner between the coffee bar and the wall," he narrated. "Ziva was about five feet away. The guy she shot was on the ground between her and me." He lifted the pencil off the paper and paused, squinting at his sketch so far. "The other robber, he came up this aisle here." He pointed. "And she was looking down at the one she had shot, so she didn't see him."

"Where was the first guy's gun?" Gibbs broke in, leaning forward to squint at the sketch.

Danny opened his mouth to answer, then stopped. "I," he finally admitted slowly, "um, don't actually know. I didn't see it."

"He didn't drop it when she shot him or anything?" McGee pressed.

He shook his head. "He might have. I was kind of, uh, well I mean my mind was kind of blown at that point. It could have been right there and I wouldn't have noticed."

"Ok." Gibbs tapped the drawing paper. "Bang. Robber Number Two fires at Ziva. One shot?"

Danny nodded.

"And she fell?"

Danny nodded again.

"Show us."

Biting his lip, he sketched in a rough line showing the direction the stick-figure Ziva he'd drawn had fallen. "Toward me. Her knees went out from under her, and she kind of crumpled." He drew a dotted-line Ziva perpendicular to the original one. "Her head was toward me. Maybe two feet away."

"And her gun?"

He looked down at the sketch, thinking. "She lost her grip on it about halfway down. It was going to hit the ground maybe here." He drew an X. "I automatically tried to grab it, and I got it just before it went under the counter."

"Why did you try to catch it?"

Danny stared at him as if the answer was too obvious to bother voicing. "I couldn't let it just slam into the floor! It might have gone off!"

"It can go off when someone catches it, too," Gibbs pointed out. "But you got lucky. You caught it, and it didn't. Then what?"

"I . . ." He wetted his lips thoughtfully. "I guess I was kind of going on instinct. I caught it, and I turned around and I shot the guy who shot her."

"Where?"

"In the . . ." He broke off, shaking his head. "You know, I don't know. I didn't really aim. It didn't occur to me. I just wanted to make him back off, and I figured shooting at him would . . ."

"Would do it?" McGee finished. "Well, it 'did it' in more ways than one. You got him in the middle of the forehead."

Danny's eyes widened. "Is that hard to do?"

"Only if you're not Ziva," Gibbs replied testily. "The second guy went down as soon as the bullet hit him?"

Danny nodded.

"So how'd he get a second hole in his head?" McGee asked.

Danny flushed. "He had a gun," he said insistently. "I didn't want him getting up when I turned my back on him and shooting me! I know maybe police wouldn't think that way, but I . . ." He shook his head. "I was scared, you know?"

"And his buddy?"

"Same."

"He only had a busted arm," Gibbs said. "He was probably conscious. He didn't try to stop you? He didn't even move?"

Danny shrugged. "I guess I moved too fast for him."

The two agents exchanged a look. "What happened next?" McGee asked.

"Mrs. Alfaro came running over - I don't know why," he interrupted himself, "because for all she knew the robbers had shot me and not the other way around - and she grabbed Ziva. She was bleeding. Ziva, I mean. Mrs. Alfaro was trying to stop it, and then the other girl came over and tried to help, and then -" He looked at Gibbs. "You broke the door open and yelled for me to put down the gun. So I did," he finished simply.

"So the robbers shot an armed federal agent," Gibbs summarized skeptically, "and you grabbed her gun before it even hit the ground, and you administered three kill shots. Without aiming." He leaned forward. "Do you have any firearms training, Mr. Weiss?"

Danny's eyes widened. "I've gone hunting a few times, back home. Um. The Senator took me to a range once, right after I was hired. He lent me a revolver." He paused, unsure. "I think it was a revolver. The other one is 'semiautomatic,' right?"

"Revolvers have little spinny things between the trigger and the barrel," Gibbs explained as if to a child, circling one finger in imitation of a spinning cylinder. "You put the bullets into the spinny thing. Did you put the bullets into a spinny thing when the Senator took you shooting, Danny?"

The ingenuous look on Danny's face morphed into a scowl. "Hey, look, I'm trying to help you out here, and I resent you making fun of me. I shot those guys in self-defense. And I saved your friend's life, too. And all I get is you making jokes about how much of an idiot I must be because I don't know guns?" He shook his head, planted his hands on the table, and pushed back his chair. "Am I under arrest? Because if not, I've had the day from hell, and I'd like to go home and try to forget about it."

"Sit down," Gibbs ordered quietly.

"No. If you're going to keep me here, I want a lawyer, and -"

"Sit down!"

Speechless at Gibbs's sudden bellow, Danny obeyed. "I have a right to legal representation, Agent Gibbs. I work for a United States Senator. I know the law. I probably know the law better than you do, and -"

Gibbs ignored him. "You are not under arrest at the moment, Mr. Weiss," he said, leaning back in his chair, "and you are free to go home as long as you don't leave the District while this investigation continues. However," he added when Danny started to speak, "before you are allowed to leave this building, you will be taken down to Forensics. You will give your clothes to Abigail Sciuto there. You will be given a pair of sweats to wear home. You will provide Miss Sciuto with any other samples she requires." He leaned forward again, pinning Danny with a glare. "You will be polite to Miss Sciuto while you allow her to do her work."

"I -"

"Understood?"

Looking rebellious, Danny nevertheless nodded.

"Good. McGee." Gibbs inclined his head, and McGee stood up and crossed to the interview room door.

"This way, Mr. Weiss." McGee opened the door and held it until Danny was over the threshold. "Stay," he ordered, indicating the wall just outside the room, then poked his head back inside. "Boss?" he prompted, waiting for direction.

Gibbs nodded. "When you're done with him, report to Bethesda. Spell Tony."

"You sure, Boss? If there's more we need to -"

Gibbs stood up and walked over to the door. "I'll be there to relieve Ducky later."

McGee nodded and turned to go. "Right."

"McGee."

He turned back around. "Yeah, Boss?"

"I want two of us with her as much as possible. She does not get left alone for so much as a second until we've got this figured out. Got it?"

Understanding now, McGee nodded with more confidence. "Got it, Boss. See you later."

"And McGee -"

Sighing, McGee turned on his heel again to face Gibbs. "Yeah."

Gibbs's face softened. "Tell her we're keeping her chair warm."

McGee smiled faintly and pulled the door closed as he stepped fully into the hallway. "Let's go," he told Danny, and started toward Abby's lab.