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Gibbs growled in frustration at his desultory agent. He really didn’t understand why this Palmer guy was on his team. The guy was even more timid than McGee and he’d thought McGee was bad when he first joined.
At least, McGee had brought computer skills to make up for his lack of spine in the field a bit. Gibbs had no idea what this Jimmy brought to the table. The man seemed all over the map and jumped every time Gibbs growled.
Gibbs would much rather have the assistant ME, Tony DiNozzo on his team. Now that guy didn’t flinch when Gibbs yelled. In fact, nothing seemed to phase him. He’d seen both Palmer and McGee lose their lunch over a gruesome crime scene, but DiNozzo would calmly walk in collect the body and leave, seemingly without a care in the world.
Gibbs knew Ducky was proud that he’d managed to get Tony on his team and rightly so. Gibbs had heard that the guy had offers to work at every major agency. He kind of wondered what incentive Ducky had offered that had swayed Tony to work at NCIS.
Gibbs would love to entice Tony onto his team and replace both McGee and Palmer with him. Unfortunately, Tony had turned down all of his attempts. Gibbs glared at McGee and Palmer again as they flinched back from one of their grumpier witnesses as they were trying to get his statement.
The only halfway decent person his team was Kate and she still didn’t recognize her own blindspots, so he couldn’t rely on her. He’d tried to fire all three of them, but Director Morrow wouldn’t let him. He didn’t understand why he was expected to have a four person team when he literally had to do more work with the three of them on his team than when he was working alone.
He really wanted to trade them all in for DiNozzo who not only excelled at his job as assistant ME, but seemed to have an interesting way of looking at crime scenes. Whenever Gibbs got stuck, he’d talk to the assistant ME and somehow he’d end up with a new lead. It was insane. The guy was totally wasted as Ducky’s assistant, but Gibbs was stuck since he couldn’t convince Morrow to let him get new agents and couldn’t convince Tony to join his team.
He couldn’t shake the feeling that this wasn’t the way things were supposed to be. His gut insisted that Tony should be on his team and Palmer should be the assistant ME. Alas, that wasn’t reality and he would have to figure out how to make do with this team that didn’t seem to be improving at all, but wouldn’t quit either. It was quite the confounded conundrum.