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“Jack? Jack?! Jack!"
He said her name over and over again, his tone shifting from impatience, to confusion, to concern, to outright terror with each repetition. He dropped the file he’d been showing to Fornell and was striding toward the door he’d picked just a few minutes earlier. Her name became an incantation, a prayer to keep her safe until he could reach her.
He hadn't noticed Fornell was beside him in the truck until he was being shouted at to slow down or at least put both hands on the wheel. He didn’t ease his foot off the gas pedal, but he dropped his cell onto the seat and took a two handed death grip on the steering wheel.
“She’s not answering Tobias,” he said through gritted teeth.
“I got that, with the 50 times you said her name.”
The speedometer inched higher. “Watch the speed, McQueen!” Tobias buckled his seatbelt as his neighbours’ houses blurred by and Gibbs sped through a stop sign.
“It’s Sloane, she’s no china tea cup.”
“I know.”
“So…”
“So?”
Tobias, laughing, tried to lighten the mood: “Oh no, don’t tell me… you dog, you’ve been busy while you were avoiding me!”
Grumbling, Gibbs said, “It’s not the time Tobias. You wanna talk, you can call my team.”
“And tell them you have a thing for Sloane?”
“You wanna shut up or get outta my truck?”
“You’d have to slow down for that to happen.”
Gibbs’s silence was a challenge to Fornell’s claim.
Fornell sized up the serious stare Gibbs was giving the road and the asphalt they were flying over. Not willing to risk the epic road rash of being tossed out of the moving vehicle — when they’d only just made up — he gave in and let Gibbs silently stew. The sound of the truck’s taxed engine made a better conversationalist than Gibbs on most days anyway.
“All right, all right, I’m calling McGee and…”
“Tell him to meet us at Jessica Shaeffer’s address.” Gibbs took a corner at top speed.
Fornell did a double take. “Hicks’s lawyer? That’s the friend Jack was with?” He grabbed the panic handle above the passenger window. “What are you waiting for? Step on it, Gibbs!”
The rest of the drive was made in silence, in deference to the tense mood inside the truck cab. It should’ve taken close to half an hour to get from Fornell’s place in Arlington to Shaeffer’s in south Maryland, but Gibbs pulled up to the scene in under 15 minutes.
They were met with the flashing lights of first responders, smoke billowing from a blown out car, none of which calmed Gibbs as he maneuvered his truck as close as possible. He pulled up along the curb and his headlights bounced off her Mini; to see it intact dulled the sharpest part of his fear. Never had be been so happy to see that sorry excuse for a vehicle. Still, images of plastic shrapnel, remnants of tail lights and bumpers embedded in Jack’s charred flesh bit at his heels as he jumped out of the truck, once again forgetting about Fornell.
Gibbs flashed his badge toward someone in a uniform and all but sprinted to the ambulance on the scene, where he could make out a shadowed profile of a woman seated in the back being tended to.
He slowed, and eventually stopped, a few steps away, patient but awkward, listening to Jack’s gravelly voice answer the medic’s questions. He stood there ramrod straight: the opposing needs to let the EMT do their work, and to see for himself that she was okay pulled him taut and held him there. Now that he’d made it to her, he was experiencing something between relief for not having found her being loaded into a body bag and a feeling of uselessness since she was not in need of rescue.
“Hi,” Jack said, turning her voice to Gibbs, after spotting him looming a few yards away.
“I’ll give you a minute,” the medic said saving Gibbs the trouble of asking for it. That the medic was willing to walk away from her should’ve comforted him, but the fear in his gut wouldn’t ease until his own hands confirmed that she was truly all right.
Powered by the force of his exhale, the breath he’d been figuratively holding the whole drive, he was at her side in an instant. Leaning in he grabbed her knees while his eyes catalogued the obvious damage: on her face a gash, split open and bleeding along her beautiful cheekbone, the right side of her forehead marked with abrasions, blood matted hair he pushed back to reveal a gaping wound behind her ear.
“You weren’t answering me.”
“Sorry, that’s against one of your rules isn’t it, being unreachable,” she winced as he touched a tender spot on her cheekbone, “but I was a little busy.”
“Getting almost blown up.”
“Keyword there is almost. I’m fine.”
He ran his hands down her ribcage. She made no indication of pain, but he felt her shaking against his palms.
“You’re not okay.” He grabbed the blanket sitting on the bench beside her and gently placed it over her shoulders. “You’re in shock.”
“I’m better than Jess,” she scoffed bitterly.
“That was Shaeffer’s car?”
Jack confirmed with a nod.
“You know what happened?”
“I remember dialling your number and then…” a deafening bang, a blinding corona of light in her periphery, heat on her back, being thrown off her feet.
“You got knocked out? Hit with something?” His hands framed her face, feeling up her neck and cradling the back of her head. He threw a quick glance back over his shoulder at the nearby medic he’d all but pushed away in his haste to get to her. His eyes searched hers. She did seem okay, though he could hardly believe it. Her eyes weren’t their usual bright and sparkling, but they weren’t dull or confused from concussion. They were hardened in anger, sharp and focused on doing what it took to get the person responsible.
“Only for a second,” she shook her head, her messed up hair getting caught in his fingers. He carefully extracted his hand and stroked her temple with his thumb, moving down along the unmarred side of her face. “Woke up without my boots on, ears ringing, too late to do anything, too late to help Jess.”
“Wouldn’t’a mattered,” Gibbs said, but he knew the feeling all too well. He had been too far away to do any good, his race to get to her a moot endeavour. The harm, minor though it may be, had already been done. The blood in her hair, her scraped skin and torn clothes, a sprint across the District didn’t change any of that. He knew that the second he heard the explosion through the phone, yet still he sped to get to her like it would make some kind of difference. He couldn’t not.
She looked down at her socked feet and the boots sitting beside them. She pulled her feet up onto the bench and sat cross-legged. “Someone brought me my boots,” she said. Gibbs tucked the ends of the blanket around her knees engulfing her in the rough wool blanket instead of his arms, “but I don’t know what happened to my phone.”
“I’ll find it,” he promised her. That was something he could do.
“I didn’t mean to worry you.”
“You didn’t.” His pounding heart rate that was still getting under control called him a liar.
A sentiment that Jack echoed: “Anyone ever tell you you’re a terrible liar?” Despite the shock and her anger, she summoned a small smile for him.
“I am fine,” she repeated. “I could use a shower, and a few bandaids, and then we need to get to work. You need to take control of the scene, this is our case.”
“McGee’s already working on it.” If he wasn’t, he was going to be as soon as Gibbs found him. In the meantime he had to hope Fornell was doing a good enough job of preserving the scene without a badge to back him up. He couldn’t leave her yet, not with his nerves still feeling as raw as Jack’s flesh looked.
He held her hand in his, his thumb tracing the valleys of her knuckles, careful to avoid the open scrapes from where her hands had broken her fall.
He only had a moment to wonder at the fact that she didn’t pull her hand away from him before his phone rang. He let go of her and squinted at the caller ID. “I gotta take this,” he said regretfully. “Should let this guy get you your bandaids, anyway,” he said with a jerk of his head and stepped down.
The medic touched Gibbs on the arm. “She’s going to be okay, you know. She was lucky.”
“Yeah,” Gibbs took a breath and replied with a nod, “I know.”
As he stepped away, he overheard the medic telling Jack that she’d managed to really scare her husband. Gibbs made sure to take the call before he could hear Jack correct him.