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H50H50H50
Kono hadn’t had the energy or spare time to wrap her brain around how it had gone from zero to shitstorm in less than a minute, but it had and that left her with little to work with. Right, so if she took another mental stock just to make sure she had it all down, she was in the middle of nowhere with an injured partner and criminals of indefinite quantity and armament who wanted to shoot, stab, blow up or otherwise kill them both dead, dead, make die dead. Another day in paradise, she thought, and while the adrenaline junkie in her ate this up with a spoon, the vulnerable softie she thought she hid well was worried as hell. She could do this. She had to do this because, despite Danny’s bravado and admirable almost nonstop string of hushed complaints, she didn’t really know how long he could go without medical care. This was not the place for a wound like that to be left untreated.
She circled quietly at the edges of the clearing and headed upslope, tried not to be distracted by how completely stupid this plan of theirs was. Deep down, Kono knew they had no choice. Deep down, she knew the plan was hers, not theirs. No help was coming for them in time; they were completely cut off and outnumbered. Danny taking out the keiki manuahi that had injured him hadn’t done much to give them any leverage. Injured, hell. Call a gunshot wound a gunshot wound. She winced. The bloody hole in Danny’s side messy and ugly wouldn’t be something she’d forget anytime soon. Or ever, because the bullet had been intended for her. But it was this stupid plan or die, and Kono had no thought of dying herself or letting Danny die today. If she did either of those things, both Steve and Chin would resurrect her and then kill her again anyway. She wanted no part of that.
Truthfully, she was far more worried for Danny than herself. Kono was nothing if not confident in her abilities. She could and did kick ass and take names, on the job, on the waves. It was who she was. That wasn’t the problem with this stupid plan. If this went right, she’d be mostly out of the line of fire. Danny was going to be smack in the middle of it, and he had limited mobility. Once he got into his own position, he wouldn’t be able to retreat. He was totally dependent on this working and that was a heavy load to bear. She refused to let it crush her.
She picked her way carefully to the position she’d earmarked before, both to avoid attracting attention and to avoid setting any of her own traps. There hadn’t been time to do a dry run for any of this. Kono knew she was falling behind schedule getting where she needed to be; she hadn’t come this far unscathed herself, mostly just bruises, some of them deep, and the terrain was unkind. She thought she had calculated for a certain margin of error, having known both of those issues before the fool plan was set in motion.
She was no Steve McGarrett, but for the next however-long-it-took Kono was going to make like she played him on TV.
Six hours earlier
“You need to relax, yeah?” Kono said as she eyed Danny’s white-knuckled grasp on the armrests. “It’s just a little turbulence.”
Danny shot her a look she could only describe as half incredulous and half hehena, the expression in his eyes wild. He actually gaped at her for several moments, mouth worked open and shut and open like a blue-eyed guppy. It was kind of cute.
“Relax? We’re in a damned rattling tin can that could come apart at any second, flying over rough topography and open water, and you want me to relax,” Danny said. His hands released the armrests so that they could wave around. Emphatically. “Have I mentioned that I have deep resentment in my soul for being drafted for this assignment just because my maniac partner put himself on the injured list and your partner has a convenient court appearance?”
“Only a thousand times, brah.”
“Well, I wanted to make sure it was known.”
“Oh, I can assure you, I know. The baggage handler knows. The pilot knows. Everyone in the cabin knows.”
Danny never did anything by halves, so he wouldn’t skimp with the complaints and only give her five hundred of them. Honestly, Kono sometimes had no idea how Steve managed to make it through a day without shoving a sock in Danny’s mouth. She loved Danny and knew he had a wealth of experience she could learn from, but his personality was a lot to take. He could be exhausting as often as he was amusing. The trick was knowing when to tune out and when to pay attention, because sometimes in the midst of those very many words Danny liked to use to say the simplest of things was where to find useful information. The whole flight over had been tune out-able.
“Jeez, that was overkill,” Danny said after a moment, smiling broadly at her. “Did anyone ever tell you that you exaggerate things sometimes?”
“Shut up, you.”
Kono laughed and slugged Danny in the arm. Another thing about Danny was that he knew his own quirks and usually embraced poking at them himself when he was in a comfortable environment. Her own reaction to his self-deprecating accusation might go a long way in explaining how Steve walked around with a perpetually fond look on his face instead of a perpetually annoyed one.
“We’ll be touching down at Hilo International Airport in approximately twenty minutes,” the pilot announced from the cabin. “Flight attendant, prepare for landing.”
The plane was less than half full, as midweek flights often were. She and Danny sat quietly while the solo attendant strolled down the narrow aisle as she collected refuse and made sure everyone was buckled. Kono smiled at her, then smiled wider as the small plane took another jolting dip and Danny’s hands clamped onto the armrests again. For someone with so much outward braggadocio, Danny seemed to be very … trepidatious. She wondered which of the two extremes was closest to the truth, then considered all the ways Danny kicked ass in his own right. She supposed a person could be capable and still cautious and maybe that was a lesson she could take from his book instead of the Steve McGarrett Manual on Why Blowing Shit Up Is Fun.
Eh, fun was mo’ bettah.
“Here you go, sir,” the flight attendant said, suddenly back at their row. “I’ll trade you.”
Earlier in the flight, when Danny was especially vociferous about the tin can quality of the plane, the attendant had supplied him with one of those lavender aromatherapy neck pillows usually reserved for first class passengers. Kono had thought it fairly absurd, but amazingly the volume if not the quantity of Danny’s grumbling did lessen under the lavender’s soothing influence. This fresh pillow was apparently so Danny and therefore all passengers could survive the landing. She watched silently as Danny turned on the charm with the flight attendant, who looked approximately the age of her mother or one of her aunties and carried enough extra weight for Kono to know the woman probably gave fantastically squishy hugs.
“Thank you, Leilani,” Danny said, and batted his eyelashes.
Hand to heart, he’d batted them. Kono rolled her eyes and tried not to snicker when Leilani blushed and gave Danny a smile that took years off of her face. Kono elbowed Danny in the ribs the second Leilani shifted away from them.
“Dog,” she said and waggled her eyebrows.
“Hey, I’m partnered with McGQ. I have to take it where I can get it.”
That was a point. Danny was a handsome man in his own right. The increasingly tailored shirts and trousers accentuated Danny’s considerable attributes, but Steve was, well, Steve. Kono had to side with Danny on that one; Steve was ridiculous on multiple levels. Just because both of them were ohana didn’t mean she didn’t notice these things. She refrained from adding either salt or balm to Danny’s comment, chose instead to think about why they were on the Big Island in the first place as they rolled to the gate and deplaned.
In the last few years the islands had come a long way in fixing the ice problem that plagued them, but there was also still a long way to go. Kono couldn’t remember a time when it wasn’t a problem, not so far out of high school to have forgotten the parties she’d gone to with kids methed out of their minds. Even being shielded by her safe, close circle of Coral Prince friends hadn’t prevented some exposure, and some things weren’t easy to forget. She never understood why anyone would want to make themselves act like someone on meth did, but then she didn’t have firsthand experience with addiction.
A week ago, Five-0 had stumbled on several scattered conversion labs on O’ahu, and by several she meant ten. If it had been fewer, she didn’t know if Five-0 would have been brought in. Even then, if there hadn’t been obvious connections between all of the labs, she and Danny wouldn’t be here looking for the person behind the seemingly massive operation. Busting the persons in charge and shutting down the major lab could allay a relapse of all the hard work the police had done in clean up already.
Once they knew to look, it was only a matter of finding commonalities threading through and linking to each of the conversion labs. All evidence pointed to a major production lab off of O’ahu and an entrepreneur, for lack of a better word, known to the lower end distributors as Luna. None of their slimeballs had ever seen the boss, but two hinted at the Big Island as the place to look. It made sense; there were much broader swaths of unoccupied land here on Hilo, less population density.
Though they had no luggage, a security guard and a more casually dressed man met her and Danny at the carousels. Despite the casual look, a badge poked out from under the loud, loose shirt at the waistband of the second man’s jeans. Kono knew immediately that it had been vital for a native to be part of this trip. The looks Danny was getting made her uncomfortable and a little angry on his behalf, though he seemed to not notice that the word haole was being transmitted loudly via body language. Then he proved her wrong about not noticing it by elbowing her arm and giving her a scant headshake, used his own body language to tell her mentioning it wasn’t worth it.
The thing of it was, though, it was worth it. Danny was worth it, and her anger only increased at the thought he didn’t believe that. Oh, Kono would keep her mouth shut unless it went beyond derisive glances, but she wanted words with Danny at some point. It made her cringe inside to think that a year ago, the first thought in her head upon meeting Danny Williams was the very same thing these two men were thinking right now.
“Detective Williams, Officer Kalakaua?” the man in casual clothes asked. When they nodded, he said, “I’m Detective Bob Nahale, narcotics. Aloha.”
Danny noticed Nahale looked only at Kono when greeting them and he very carefully, specifically did not acknowledge that he did.
“Thanks,” Danny said as they joined the other detective and began walking for the exit. “We appreciate the assistance. I understand there are a number of locations to check out.”
Whatever had Danny backing off of his usual habit of exaggerating his more aggressive tendencies just because he knew it annoyed many laidback islanders, Kono was almost as grateful for it as she was angry that he even had grounds to go on the offensive so often. She and Danny were an odd pair for this assignment – a mainlander and a woman in what was still in many ways a man’s world might not have been the best approach to take. Danny throwing his attitude around would only make it more uncomfortable, so Kono abided Danny’s unspoken wishes and didn’t comment on the obvious slight Nahale had just given. She wondered if they could have waited a day or two to have Chin handle the interisland liaising with her. Probably not.
“Going with the assumption this Luna of yours is the one basing the operation we think is near Hilo, there are three possible locations we’ve been eyeing. When we heard of Five-0’s interest, we modified our investigation assuming you’d take jurisdiction.” Nahale gave them both once overs. “I’m surprised to see just the two of you.”
“Well, you know what they say.” Danny shot Kono a look, again with the silent acknowledgement of the inferred insult. “It takes two to make a thing go right. It takes two to make it out of sight.”
Kono had to bite the inside of her cheek to keep from smiling. She … had not anticipated that from him. As far as she’d ever been able to tell, he was all business with everyone but Five-0. Well, everyone but Steve; he was pretty professional with her and Chin. Now she had this image of him listening to old school hip hop (before her time, but she wasn’t out of touch with the classics) and trying to dance. It made her feel a little giddy.
“Huh?” Nahale said, puzzled.
“Nothing. Never mind. Three locations, you said?”
“Ae, ‘ekolu.” Nahale smiled at Danny’s confused frown.
Kono flashed Danny three fingers and thought it was jerky, if not unexpected, for Nahale to give that kind of smartass reply to Danny’s really very mild snark.
“We don’t have the same manpower here as you do in Honolulu, but we’ve got small teams of uniforms checking out two of the possibilities. I thought we’d handle the third ourselves, if you’re up to it, yeah? In fact, it’ll probably be easier with just the two of you.”
Nahale guided them to an old Jeep Wagoneer and opened the passenger door for Kono.
“What are the chances of catching Luna at one of these places?” Kono asked as she ignored the open door and went for the back seat instead. She also ignored Danny’s smirk as he climbed into the front seat.
Five-0 had obtained pertinent case information from Hilo already, so she and Danny weren’t going into this dark. Still, she had to ask. The case had been filled with gaps; potential leads suddenly vanishing or turning into nothing more than wild goose chases, perps that said one thing one minute and another the next. She’d thought they were grasping straws, but had gone with Chin’s gut that Hilo was where the trail for Luna led. They all had. Her cousin was good at his job.
“I mean, you guys have been working on this for some time, but you don’t have any idea on who’s running things?”
Nahale pursed his lips before trotting to the driver’s seat. He slid in, started the Jeep and pulled away from the curb. He frowned at the stretch of street ahead of him for a moment.
“We’ve known for some time an operation of substantial size was going to need a brain behind it,” Nahale said. “So far, we haven’t been able to find anyone who has anything but vague understanding about how they fit into the machine. Whoever’s in charge seems to be running things completely in the shadows, and doling out workload in a way that the left hand has no idea where the right hand is.”
Danny twisted in the seat to give Kono a glance she couldn’t readily interpret. It seemed suspect to her that Hilo PD knew enough to make those suppositions, but couldn’t find even a hint of the head of the beast. From the sound of it, they weren’t one hundred percent that any of the three locations were actual production labs. Kono was starting to think maybe she and Danny were wasting their time. She wasn’t going to admit that to Danny, for fear of another rant about tin can airplanes or something.
“You really want to check this place out with only three of us?” Danny asked. “If it’s legit, we’re going to need back up.”
“Already thought of that. I’ve got gear for you, and we’ll rendezvous with back up a mile or so before we hit the locale so we can approach quietly. They left before your flight touched down. We might not be big city folk, but we know how to do the job, Detective Williams. We’re not hūpō.”
“I never implied anything of the sort.” Danny gave Kono another look, this one clearly unhappy and frustrated. “I simply thought it would be a good idea to go into this with a plan. You see, I have a partner that loves to go off half-cocked, and no, I don’t mean the lovely and talented Officer Kalakaua. Sometimes she, unfortunately, seems to have similar tendencies, but my partner’s larger than life crazy, okay? I like to make sure everyone’s on the same page in the same book. Sometimes I even like to be in the same paragraph.”
Danny Williams: making friends and influencing people everywhere. Still, he wasn’t wrong, and the uneasy ball Kono had in the pit of her stomach grew larger and more solid. What was it Danny always said? Trust the gut. She had no idea what it was trying to tell her, though.
To her surprise, Nahale burst into laughter and said, “So it’s not just rumors. Commander McGarrett’s a lōlō buggah, eh?”
“Ae,” Danny said, then snorted at Nahale’s surprise. “What, I’m not hūpō, either. I understand the importance of context and use my finely honed detective skills to figure things out from time to time.”
“You might be maikaʻi, Detective Williams.”
“I like to think so, and if we’re going to work together here, please call me Danny and as a courtesy maybe refrain from using any language that isn’t strictly English.”
“Bob, and I can do that. Look, it’s an hour and a half drive at a minimum,” Bob said. “We should have plenty of time to discuss the details, Danny. I’m the lead on this case, so I can assure you, my information is good.”
Okay, now Danny actually was making friends and influencing people. The underlying tension in the vehicle diminished and so did the unease in Kono’s gut. She found herself instead in complete, dazed amazement, again with what she figured was a close approximation of Steve’s fond face on her own.
H50H50H50
Danny crouched next to Kono, ignored the twinge in his knee. He eyed the innocuous structure in front of them, which looked like nothing had disturbed it for years. In Hawai’an jungle time, it might have only been months. Subtropical climates, he had learned since his arrival in one, had a tendency to devour any manmade thing left alone in rapid order. He thought perhaps that was part of the allure of this spot. Anyone who happened upon it would assume it was abandoned, harmless, maybe good for some artistic photography cataloguing the decay of rural America. The problem with that was that there weren’t any other telltale signs of a meth lab nature wouldn’t so easily swallow. Meth manufacturing wreaked havoc on the environment, made for toxic byproducts. There were no signs of that, and no hints of recent foot or vehicular traffic.
That bad feeling was back. Danny had chalked up the initial bumpiness as mainlander/local butting heads, which he was used to and acknowledged he sometimes brought on himself. When he and Bob Nahale had found a tentative truce, he’d relaxed and his brain now started firing double time to make up for it. He knew Kono had felt the same thing as he had and wasn’t surprised when she surreptitiously touched him on the arm now when the feeling came back stronger than ever.
He didn’t know why the alarm bells were sounding quite yet, just that they’d been going off since the information-sharing on the trip here had seemed forced, light and vague. It still didn’t make sense to him that they wouldn’t have made a trip to the station first. When they rendezvoused with four uniforms in tac vests and with heavy arms, the bad feeling ratcheted up despite the official vehicles and gear. He and Kono were flagged on either side by Nahale’s men. Nahale was the only one looking at Danny, the rest of them appeared focused on the building. Just like they should be, but something was not right about them all the same.
“I thought you said this was the most likely site for the lab,” Danny hissed at Nahale.
“Our intel might have been wrong.”
“Might have been? No one’s been out here in months to even gather intel. I realize that as you said Hilo PD doesn’t have all the resources of Five-0 or Honolulu, but… ”
Then it clicked. Sometimes deduction was a cop’s greatest tool and sometimes it was his gut. Danny’s gut knew this was a set up. The only way Nahale wouldn’t have known about this location being completely useless was if he, in fact, actually had known and had wanted to bring them out here. In the middle of nowhere, with no cell reception or familiarity with the geography, he and Kono were sitting ducks. This was going to end up being a message, and a big, bloody one.
“You knew. You knew this was a dead end, didn’t you, Bob?”
Beside him, Kono stiffened. He knew she had to have already been on the same page as he was and the new tenseness was simply her getting into the same paragraph. She might be young, but she was ready for almost anything. Danny’s bad feeling unfortunately thought this might be an almost kind of scenario, something neither of them were ready for.
“Or maybe I should call you Luna.”
“In the flesh,” Nahale said with a shrug. “I really do enjoy you, you know, brah. You’re smart. Obviously not quite smart enough, though. Somehow I should hate you and everything you are, haole, but I don’t. Things that should annoy me amuse me. You’re a puzzle. It’s a shame I have to kill you.”
“Well, at least I can go to my grave knowing a scumsucking dirty cop dirtbag drug pusher thinks I’m amusing. That’s a dream fulfilled, right there.”
Nahale laughed, aggravatingly genuine about it. Danny was going to seriously harm the motherfucker and he was going to enjoy it. Oh, yes.
“I can’t have Five-0 ruining my operation at such a critical juncture. I’ve got a very lucrative expansion in the works.”
Danny flicked his eyes at the enemy and the surrounding heavy forest. He knew that any one member of Five-0 was strong support to have at his side. That didn’t make him regret that it was Kono here with him instead of Steve. Not because Kono couldn’t handle herself, never that. It was … he wanted to fucking kick something. His own ass, primarily, because never once did it occur to him that the hostile-turned-genial Detective Nahale was anything but an unfriendly local he’d won over until he’d led himself and Kono straight into a no-win situation. Even if Nahale had allowed them to arm themselves and vest up, they were outnumbered and currently in an indefensible position. The four men Danny had thought were back up probably weren’t even cops. He didn’t want to believe this level of corruption existed in one department, but he couldn’t rule it out.
“Why don’t you and the lovely Officer Kalakaua stand up?” Nahale continued. “And don’t try anything.”
“You expect us to just stand here and let you shoot us?” Kono asked.
Her voice was angry, but anyone that knew her would have also heard the fear at the same time. And that right there was why Danny regretted that Kono was here. She was tough as hell. He wouldn’t want to spar with her outside of the gym, and he was extremely competent despite choosing not to engage if he didn’t have to. She had an innate strength, but she also hadn’t seen years of action. Even Five-0’s accelerated learning curve couldn’t roughen the edges off her soft heart in such a short time. Any other time he’d be glad for it.
“Well, yes.”
“This isn’t going to work,” Danny said.
He needed time. He needed to delay action as long as possible and the only thing he had was his words and Nahale’s already demonstrated propensity to talk as well. There must be a bad guy tutorial out there that dictated at the denouement of the play, one must reveal everything. And then die.
“You can’t expect to disappear two members of the governor’s task force and not get a manhunt in return. They will come for you with guns blazing.”
“Who’s going to come for me? No one that matters knows who I am. Just you two, and, well, I hate to be repetitive about your fates. The operation will fade for a time till it blows over, then back to business as usual, except now everyone will know not to mess with Luna.”
Nahale was on the HPD payroll, of that Danny was sure. There was no way Nahale could have faked being a cop, no way someone somewhere (Chin) wouldn’t have figured out if he was a fraud. Mild-mannered, modest detective by day, drug runner at night. It was so ludicrous he didn’t even know where to begin unpacking it all in his head.
“You think people won’t get suspicious when we die on your watch and you walk away without a scratch?” Danny asked.
“Oh, no, that’s not how it’s going to go. We are all going to be caught in an ambush. I’ll sustain an ugly but survivable wound, but you two. As I said, I’m sad to say you two will not make it. It’s tragic.”
Fuck, this was so fucking stupid. By giving him and Kono gear, it’d look legitimate at first glance. Nahale had sold the story to them and to Hilo PD, and no one would question his integrity after being shot in the line of duty himself.
“It doesn’t matter. McGarrett will figure it out. Someone, somewhere will talk. He’ll make them talk. One of these guys, even. Cops too? You dickweasels are all cops?” Danny thought he saw derisive looks on some of the mooks’ faces. Not cops. “You’ve backed yourself into a corner whether or not you kill us.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. I’ve been at this for years. You think that’s by accident, that I’m lucky?”
Danny took another furtive look into the trees, wondered how many others were out there, if there was any point in making a break for it. The option was removed from him.
He caught a bare twitch of Nahale’s hand and a second later all he saw was a barrel pointed at Kono. He didn’t think, he just shouted and moved and all hell broke loose around him. He landed in a heap on top of Kono, a burning stitch in his side. He stayed there only a second before he rolled off with his weapon at the ready and already firing. He only had a blink to enjoy the sight of the bastard that had almost killed Kono crumple to the ground. Fucking idiot Nahale had actually given him and Kono loaded weapons. Danny scrambled, grabbed the additional weapon from the dead guy as the forest erupted in noise and activity.
Beside him, Kono was moving herself, all fluid grace and sheer determination. Gunfire came from outside their scuffle. Great, just great. The next few minutes were a riot of punches and near misses as bullets rained all around them. He thought he saw Kono jerk as a shot hit her vest. Shit, shit, run. They had to find cover. If it were just these five they’d have a chance, but with shooters out there? They needed to employ a tactical retreat, as Steve would call it. The pain in Danny’s left side, low down, increased as if in reaction to his What Would Steve Do? moment. Fitting, but he shoved the pain away, no time for it. One man’s tactical retreat was another man’s escape.
“Go, Kono,” Danny shouted.
He followed her. It wasn’t like Kono knew the area any better than he did, but Danny figured she had better instinct just from growing up with all of this goddamned flora. He didn’t know how long they ran, which direction they were headed. He only knew the slap of leaves against his arms and legs and face and that he wasn’t going to maintain a fast pace long. He didn’t need to run a marathon, only long enough to find a spot to recuperate, come up with a plan. Angry shouts and gunshots followed them, but the benefit of all of this goddamned flora was it covered them fairly well.
Danny kept his eyes on the back of Kono’s head as she finally slowed, mimicked her when she stooped low. Hey, he was the senior officer here, but that didn’t mean he was an idiot with ego issues. Kono appeared to be in her element. Belatedly, he realized the gunfire and shouting had faded. Well, at least something was going right.
“I brought us round in a large loop. I think we’re safe for the moment,” Kono whispered. “I haven’t heard them behind us for a while.”
“You okay, sweetheart?” The question was automatic, but sweetheart? Kono would punch him for that. But she didn’t.
“I’m fine, brah. You?”
“Good.”
They were both liars, of course. Danny took quick visual stock of Kono to make sure, and she did seem fine. Shaken, bruised, and scratched but whole and okay. His brain felt a little battered, uncharacteristically sluggish. He chalked it up to relief that Kono was relatively okay. He seemed to be having a hard time recovering from the sprint through the woods. His lungs were on fire, his knee was killing him and the pain in his side wouldn’t quit. He knew they needed to get out of here, though, and he focused on figuring out how. The only way out was the Jeep that had brought them here or the van the other goons had used.
“They’re not gonna take off with us still alive out here. Nahale can’t risk us surviving,” Danny said.
“We need to get back to the vehicles before they do,” Kono said with a nod.
“You took the words out of my mouth.”
Though he knew they should be determining exactly where their escape vehicles were in relation to their current position, Danny took a moment to slump against a tree. The shallow, gasping breaths he took were doing nothing to alleviate the stitch in his side. He had a vague sense of déjà vu when his breath kept hitching no matter how hard he tried to steady it. He was in good shape. A brief jaunt in the woods shouldn’t have debilitated him this much. He pressed a hand against the flaring muscle, regretted it. He removed his hand and stared at the palm. It was covered in slick, deep red, and it was only then he realized.
“Oh,” he said.
“Danny, you okay?”
“I think I –”
The very next thing Danny knew, the urge to sneeze was waking him up. A faint tickling sensation against his face, his nose. He flopped a hand up to get rid of the annoyance, but his limbs were rubbery and a firm grasp halted him. He opened his eyes a crack and found Kono leaning over him, concern marring her features. Beyond her was blurry green and blue and he blinked a few times to clear his cloudy vision. Oh. Right. Rainforest. Shot.
He took a shaky breath and struggled to get himself on his right elbow. He managed it, bit his lip the whole time to keep from crying out. Kono didn’t need that, and they didn’t need him drawing Nahale and his henchmen’s attention. His head spun. He swallowed heavily to keep himself from vomiting. He still had his vest on, out of necessity. It weighed a ton, compressed his lungs even further. Below it on the left, right above the waist of his pants, he saw a wad of cloth, bloody and haphazardly held in place by a slim hand. The cloth was Kono’s shirt. She had her vest on, the straps fastened loosely, but nothing else. Damn.
“I’m okay,” Danny mumbled. “It’s not that bad.”
Kono let out a hysterical, sobbing laugh, but choked it out quickly. She visibly bolstered herself, pulled the concern behind a mask Danny recognized because he’d worn it himself so many times. He had to wonder why anyone bothered. Any cop who’d seen the wrong kind of action could spot that mask a mile away.
“It wouldn’t be if we hadn’t run a couple of miles without tending to it first. I think you lost a lot of blood, Danny.” She looked pale, worn and worried. “A lot.”
“I’ll be all right, Kono.” He raised his left arm, waggled his fingers. “Give me a hand up. We’ve gotta keep moving.”
Truthfully, the last thing in the world Danny wanted to do was get vertical. Whatever adrenaline he’d had from the betrayal and attack by Nahale had long since depleted. It had run out of him along with half his body’s blood, apparently. There was no choice. He doubted very much that Kono would leave him and she couldn’t carry him out, therefore he had to at least try to walk out on his own steam.
Kono pursed her lips and gazed at him sadly for a second. She searched around for something, eyebrows furrowed. Finally, she slid her belt off, looped it around him awkwardly to keep the makeshift bandage in place. No one was ever, ever going to mention that her belt magically fit around him, even at the last notch, and that now he technically was wearing as much of her wardrobe as she was. Once she was satisfied with the first aid job and he had recovered from it, she stood, gathered the weapons they still had and tucked them securely here and there on her person. After she was all sorted, she grabbed his hand and helped ease him off the ground.
It wasn’t a pleasant experience for Danny. For Kono either, he thought. Still, after a minute or two, when he could hear more than the loud burst of static in his ears and see beyond the hazy film lurking at the edges of his vision, he found his legs weren’t too unsteady. Considering.
“I’m putting you in charge of navigation,” Danny said. And everything, really.
They walked where Kono led them, his right arm draped over her shoulder at an angle that reminded him too painfully that she was taller than him. A more accurate description of their travel mode, in any case, was that Kono walked and he staggered. Eventually they both staggered. They staggered for what seemed to Danny like hours and seconds at the same time. He felt like he was in a fog most of the time, his body’s way of telling him he was a moron for not being unconscious in a nice soft bed, hooked up to an IV with drugs. The nice, legal, doctor-regulated kind of drugs, not the kind that bastard Nahale peddled. What kept him going were the barely audible words Kono uttered into his ear, little puffs of encouragement he could only answer with pained gasps about how much this sucked.
It was around the time Danny was certain he was going to hurl whatever was left in his stomach onto Kono’s boots and then pass out that she stopped dead in her tracks and held a finger up to her lips. She tilted her head to one side and listened. To Danny, it seemed quiet. Maybe too quiet.
“I recognize where we are, but if Nahale is as smart as he thinks, he’s probably close, waiting,” Kono said softly. “I’ve felt like I’ve had eyes on me for a while.”
“He knows we’ll go for the cars. Herded us?” Danny tried to say. It came out sounding like something completely foreign, like maybe he’d picked up pidgin all of a sudden. His vision tunneled. “Mabye … sit? A sec.”
Kono eased him down. Once he was no longer being held upright (hadn’t realized how much he had been relying on her), Danny blanked for a bit. He saw Kono chewing her lip, eyes big and slightly watery, and then she faded to grey saying words like “blood loss” and “infection” and “shock”. As much as he wanted to pass out and stay that way, he couldn’t. Danny hissed to full alertness when Kono pressed against his wound. He feebly batted her hands away, only to realize she had barely touched him.
“Danny, we could make a break for the Jeep.”
“Kono, I think you know I couldn’t make a break for anything. They’re out there, aren’t they?”
“Yeah.”
“We can’t let Nahale escape,” Danny said. “You know that.”
Danny was rapidly losing anything like strength, which meant they had to come up with a way to eliminate the threat without knowing how many people with guns there were and where they were, strategically, and do it all fast.
Fantastic.
“I have an idea,” Kono said softly. “You’re not going to like it.”
The McGarrett-style gleam Danny saw in Kono’s eye told him two things: no, he wasn’t going to like it and no matter what it was, it would probably work as long as it didn’t kill them first.
H50H50H50
She circled on the edge of the chosen battlefield for a reason, namely to make sure if this went sideways too early she could distract them from Danny for as long as possible. It was probably a futile gesture, but she didn’t care. Kono would defend Danny to the death, and if he could somehow get to the Jeep while Nahale was busy killing her, she would count that a noble way to go. She had no intention of either of them dying today, but Danny had a little girl to raise. He came first. She smiled, because she knew Danny would rank it the opposite way.
Equal parts anticipation and dread rolled through her, a now familiar dichotomy. Despite the concern that she was moving too slowly, with a cautious eye on the trees surrounding her for Nahale or his hired guns as they also picked their way through the trees, she reached her position without a snag. Something niggled in the back of her exhausted brain about that, but she tried to quell the thought that their trap for Nahale was somehow also a trap for her and Danny. It probably was. They knew Nahale knew she and Danny would try for the vehicles. Kono hoped that he wouldn’t anticipate the few surprises she’d managed to rig around the perimeter of the clearing, though. She only needed to even the playing field, create enough chaos for her and Danny to get into a vehicle and go. She had limited ammunition and had to make every shot count.
Her vantage point was the best available short of scaling a tree, which was impossible and would only make her visible to Nahale if it were. Kono wasn’t about to complain about it not being one hundred percent optimal. So long as Nahale or one of his men didn’t sneak up behind her, which she was pretty sure wasn’t going to happen, she had a decent line of sight on the most of the clearing, van, Jeep and dirt road. That she and Danny had managed to make it back to the cars without a skirmish (or plain getting capped in the head from out of nowhere) was better luck than they could have hoped for. She needed it to hold, just a few more minutes.
She knew beyond a vague inkling that they were coming now. She didn’t know how she knew, she just did, and Danny really needed to be in place within the next minute if this was all going to work even halfway.
“Okay, Danny, time for you to do your thing, brah,” she whispered.
It’d been a solid hour of her prepping the area with frequent checks on him and constant, paranoid looking over her own shoulder. There hadn’t been much time for chitchat. Much as Kono knew it would have been best to keep Danny conscious and talking, the situation simply hadn’t allowed for it. Too many of the times she’d gone back to Danny’s side, he’d been unconscious and the times he hadn’t been he’d been too busy pretending he wasn’t ill with pain and shock to utter more than a word or two.
“Come on, come on.”
It turned out she missed the hell out of Danny’s voice when he was quiet. Talking to herself was of no comfort at all. Worry that the down time had made it so Danny wouldn’t be able to do this mounted with every passing second, followed by worry that Nahale had found him after all and it was already too late.
Finally, though, she saw Danny break cover. Kono frowned. She wasn’t sure the rest period he’d had was going to be enough. She wasn’t sure it was entirely fair to call passing out from blood loss a rest period. Even from a distance, she saw how shaky he was, how he was barely staying upright. Danny was tough, tougher than she’d ever given him credit for before witnessing his force of will in action here. Seeing him now, though sent a jolt of flat-out panic through her. He was paper white and her top (formerly a favorite) was red again with fresh blood. Oh shit, oh fuck, thinking Danny could do this was a big mistake. She almost broke her position.
As Danny reached the back end of the (fake) black police van, though, there came a whooshing sound and a muffled grunt from the left of the clearing. Then another and another from right and far center. Kono smiled. She wished she’d had the luxury of trying some of the other neat tricks McGarrett had been teaching her on their off hours, things Danny would call insane but Steve called essential survival skills in hostile territory, but the warning systems she’d put in place served their purpose. She saw Danny slide down with his back against the van, more of a semi-controlled fall than planned movement. His gun hand was up, as ready for the attack as he could be.
It wasn’t ideal, and the traps sprang too fast, but Kono didn’t have the benefit of thought anymore. She watched three men approach the vehicles. She took aim carefully but quickly, fired on all three in rapid succession and watched all three go down. She pursed her lips, unhappy to have to kill them instead of wounding so they could be brought to justice but she had no choices here. Her opening salvo set off a flurry of activity, as gunshots rang out. She heard the distinct thud of bullets embedding into metal, and saw holes pierce the van wall way too close to Danny.
Danny flinched, but fired a few shots to the right. Kono couldn’t see whom he was aiming at, and a disadvantage of distance, but the ventilation of the van stopped for the moment. As long as the enemy broke cover, she could protect Danny. As long as they stayed like her, hidden, Danny was on his own. She chewed her lip. Had she mentioned how stupid this plan was? Her nerve endings felt like they were on fire. She began her descent back to the clearing, not being as careful as she’d been on ascent but still hyper aware of her surroundings.
She lost sight of Danny this way, but that had always been part of the plan. Kono had to put trust in him over doubt the same way he was doing with her. He had less ammunition than she did and would make every shot count until she was back at his side. All they had to do was draw Nahale out; she’d have just as soon ditched the assholes in the rainforest and come back for them later, but Danny had insisted they had to apprehend Nahale or risk him going to ground. He was, of course, right, but it set her on edge, lessened the thrill she felt at this actually going well, all things considered.
The thrill was short-lived anyway.
The hairs on the back of Kono’s neck stood up a millisecond before she heard a twig snap right behind her. This was almost worst-case scenario; the only thing worse would have been getting shot. She didn’t want to deal with one-on-one combat, but like so much that had gone down today, she had no choice. Before whomever was behind her could shoot her point blank, Kono spun and twisted, legs up in a roundhouse kick. It was Nahale himself. He staggered back a few steps, but didn’t go down. She took advantage of his faltering step, kicked the gun out of his hand.
Nahale didn’t seem distressed to lose his weapon. He laughed, recovered quickly and went instantly on the offensive. Like so many, he underestimated her based on her slim figure. This was, in fact, one of her biggest advantages. Guys like him thought they could take her with sheer brute force, and it was true he had height and weight advantages. He came at her straightforward and clumsy, though. The lack of finesse in his movements made it easier for her to slide away from his fists, dodge his blows and land a few of her own. He threw a left hook, she spun away and landed a foot to his knee. He tried a right uppercut, she ducked and punched him in the kidney.
Kono held her own but frustratingly didn’t make progress against Nahale and she felt her strength depleting fast. The deep bruise on her chest from being shot and the restrictive nature of the vest worked against her, but she could not relent. She continued bobbing and weaving, punching and kicking, until all of a sudden she became aware of something, distracted.
The forest was silent except for her grunts and the occasional thump of a landed punch. Gone were the gunshots. Gone were the shouts of Nahale’s men, to each other, at her and Danny. Gone were the sounds of wildlife. Oh God, Danny. Kono faltered a fraction of a second, and it was all Nahale needed. He landed a blow straight into her breastbone, knocked the breath out of her lungs. His arm snaked around her neck and pulled her back before she could recover enough.
Fuck. Kono squirmed, but already her vision was clouding. Too fast, too soon. She was in a position where brawn would best her and both of them knew it. She was so tired, strung out from the whirlwind of the day. Had it only been a few hours since she and Danny had landed at Hilo? It was surreal, the things that started to float through her head. The exhilaration of catching a wave on the Pipeline. The way Chin’s smile lit up her soul. The taste of her mom’s traditionally made laulau only brought out for special occasions. It was life-flashing-before-eyes stuff, except one thing was not nebulous at all, the regret of not getting her and Danny out of this.
“Aitae,” Nahale panted into her ear as he squeezed his arm against her throat. He clicked his tongue.
Kono stumbled on jelly legs as Nahale half carried her to the vehicles. To Danny, who had to be dead. Quiet it was too quiet, except when the static in her ears started swelling.
“Pua ting, les find yo’wah haole first, yeah?”
It sent a shock of pure rage through Kono, gave her a burst of energy. Maybe she was already dead, but she wasn’t going to make it easy. She dug her heels into the soft earth, choked as Nahale tightened his grip on her neck. She didn’t bother trying to wrest the arm away, but concentrated on coordinating her own arms. One good elbow jab was all she needed and she couldn’t seem to manage even that. Instead, she inched ever closer to passing out, when suddenly the pressure on her neck released a little. The added oxygen made her head spin, but her vision cleared quickly. It was her chance to overpower him, but she blinked and went still rather than continue the fight with Nahale.
There were three men sprawled next to the van. Four, if Danny was included. Three of them were dead. Danny was somehow … not. Kono gasped, for air and at the sight of her friend’s waxy face and the weary dullness in his eyes from where he kneeled by the back tire. The Glock he’d obviously lifted from one of the corpses in his raised, shaky right hand.
“I said, let her go,” Danny said, voice harsh with pain and exhaustion. “You deaf?”
“What’re you going to do, Danny?” Nahale said with far too much humor in his tone, like he was ready to let out another one of those belly laughs of his. “You can barely see straight, I’ll bet. You wanna risk your sweet friend like that?”
“What’s it matter? Either way, she’s dead, right? I accidentally hit her or you choke her out, then you lose your shield. Bonus with that one is that you’re dead too.”
Danny flicked his attention to Kono, met her eyes. The look wasn’t a flash, it was slow and considered and it was telling her something she knew without even knowing. This was what he and Steve did all the time; she got their strange simpatico better now. His lips drew into a thin, white line in a face that was increasingly grey. She wanted to nod but Nahale had her head tilted just high enough her range of motion was limited. She knew what she had to do if this had a prayer of working. The quaking of Danny’s arm grew worse with each passing moment.
She waited until Danny returned his gaze to Nahale and his jaw tightened with resolve, then she went completely limp. It was an old trick, and old tricks usually worked well. Nahale swore and grappled with her, then there was a loud retort of the Glock and Kono fell backwards on top of Nahale. She lay, stunned, for half a second. She heard someone groaning, wasn’t sure it wasn’t herself. Snapping her brain back online, she realized with some shock that she was okay. She rolled to the side, off of Nahale. He had a good-sized hole in his left shoulder, but was already moving for a discarded handgun. Oh, nuh.
Kono scrabbled to her feet and kicked Nahale on the chin. The crunch of her boot on his face was highly satisfactory. Nahale didn’t move after that. She stared at him for a few seconds, then at the aftermath of the gunfight. Six other men, all told, plus the one back at the fake lab. They’d done it. They’d actually taken out eight heavily armed men by themselves. Stunned elation filled her, buoyed her through her muscles beginning to protest again the rollercoaster of adrenaline highs and lows.
“You’re under arrest, asshole,” she said breathlessly to the unconscious man and turned to grin at Danny.
Danny gave her a lopsided smile and said, “Hey, it worked,” before his eyes rolled into the back of his head and he slumped to the ground in a heap.
“Danny.”
Through it all, Kono hadn’t felt the level of fear that iced her veins at that moment. She landed on her knees next to her fallen friend, one hand flying to the gun to remove it from Danny’s limp fingers, the other to clasp his wrist in search of a pulse. It was there. She let out a breath and pulled herself together. They’d won the battle, but she wasn’t sure the war was over quite yet. She reassessed his bullet wound, worried at her lip that he might have picked up an infection already. The blood oozed from the now exposed hole and she wanted to throw up. That was as much a reaction to everything as it was queasiness, she told herself. When she looked back up to his face, she found Danny conscious already, watching her mutely through hooded eyes.
“Hey,” she said. “What do you say we get out of here?”
“Sounds good,” Danny said, voice craggy. “Van. Nahale can go back there. Might have to hotwire it.”
“Don’t worry, brah.” She had to work to keep her tone light. Kono winked at Danny. “Steve’s taught me all kinds of things.”
She wouldn’t be able to say, later, how exactly she’d managed to triage and get Nahale’s heavy ass into the back of the van (after clearing it of arms – the dealing of which was apparently the infamous Luna’s new venture) or how Danny had once again gotten to his feet to clamber into the passenger seat. She wouldn’t recall how she ended driving far too fast, causing Danny far too much pain with every dip in the road she hit, until she could get reception on a cell she’d lifted from a dead guy. Until Danny simply closed his eyes and didn’t open them again no matter how much she yelled at him.
Everything was a giant blur of too many sights, sounds and touches, until there she sat alone and numb and clad in scrubs in a waiting room at Hilo Medical Center. Well, not completely alone. Kono was vaguely aware of a concerned nurse who hovered in and around her space every once in a while, and Hilo’s police chief paying her a personal visit with an air of shocked disbelief that one of his detectives was, in fact, secretly a drug kingpin.
She didn’t care about any of it, her eyes pinned on the door for the doctor’s appearance. She needed to know she hadn’t killed Danny by trying to get him help fast, by pushing him into a gunfight when half his blood had been drained out of him. The pull of shock and exhaustion was strong, but if everything had been a blur, what was clear was that she was not going to succumb until she knew about Danny.
Who she didn’t expect to see walk through the wide, doorless entry to the waiting room instead was Chin Ho Kelly, his eyes dark with worry. Or Steve McGarrett hobbling on crutches right after him with the identical expression on his face.
“Cuz,” Chin said softly.
Kono didn’t care about pretenses or being strong. She leapt to her feet, crossed the room, barreled into her cousin’s arms and held on tight. He whispered vague words into her disgustingly dirty hair, rocked her a little like she was a child. Kono felt Steve’s hand on her shoulder.
“You should be in a bed, Kono.” Chin’s voice was thick, louder now.
“No, I, not yet.”
“Danny, is he … ?” Steve asked, voice low.
“I don’t know.” Kono reluctantly broke from Chin’s embrace. She swiped at her runny nose and sniffed. “I haven’t heard anything.”
“I can help you with that,” someone said from behind their huddled circle. “You’re his family, I presume?”
They turned as one, and Kono’s knees nearly buckled at the expression on the doctor’s face. With Chin on one side and Steve the other, there was no chance of that.
“I’m Doctor Kuoha, I treated Detective Williams.” The doctor was short and lean, his expression grim. “As you know, he sustained a gunshot wound to his lower abdomen which went untreated for a number of hours. There’s infection from that, but I think we’ll get it knocked down in short order. We’re transfusing him due to the extreme blood loss, but all in all, he’s a very lucky man. No major internal damage was done despite the circumstances. Once we get the fever down and the antibiotics do their job, I think he’ll recover nicely.”
There went her legs again. Kono leaned on Chin. Her ears buzzed. Danny was okay. She stared at her cousin, then Steve. She knew they’d tell her if she’d interpreted that wrong. Steve’s eyebrows were doing that weird thing they did.
“Boss,” Kono said. “Did I tell you we caught Luna?”
Then she fainted dead away.
H50H50H50
Danny hated waking up in a hospital, because he always knew he was waking up in a hospital. The mattresses were too thin, the sheets rough with bleach and low thread counts. In the past couple of years, he’d gotten used to all of those things, living like a quasi-transient and all, but hospitals just had a certain atmosphere he could pick up on even if he hadn’t opened his eyes yet. A hush. Also, if he’d ended up flat on his back and hooked up to multiple medical lines, that meant something bad had gone down and who wanted to wake up to shit like that? Not him, thanks. Of course, it beat at least one of the alternatives.
He dozed in that half-awake state for some time, too lazy or possibly too drugged to care. He was still on low doses of the good stuff and even if he weren’t, he tended to sleep a lot when healing. The sound of a finger tapping the screen of one of those confounded tablet things, an occasional sniff, a TV with the volume turned low but still audible were all things that pulled him unwillingly up and out again. The throb in his left side seemed duller, but his head hurt from sleeping awkwardly on this damned bed.
“At twenty-two square miles, it’s the world’s smallest island with a population exceeding one million, a figure it reached by 1880,” the tinny voice of Alex Trebek said.
“What is Manhattan?” Danny mumbled.
None of the Jeopardy! contestants even tried to question the answer and Danny lamented the state of the world for the fact that there he was half asleep and he could beat the pants off of any of them.
“Hey,” someone said.
It hadn’t taken too much mental strain to remember what had happened the first time he had woken up, which was a good sign as far as Danny was concerned. He hated having to have it explained to him; when the pieces didn’t quite fit, it was always like he was listening to a story instead of his own life. Strange, but he guessed it made injury more bearable if he could remember how it had occurred. It was his, he’d earned it, he could own it and not simply suffer through it like someone had randomly assigned it to him as a plot point.
A hand, soft and warm, landed on his forearm. By now, Danny had come to count on it being there the same way he’d counted on it out there in the jungle. She’d been by his side for the better part of his hospital stay. One day mostly dead, two and a half days after that he’d been stuck in this damned bed and for all the moments he remembered, she was always there. He didn’t know if her dedication was healthy. It probably wasn’t, but what he did know was that for the moment she needed to be there and he, well, he owed her his life. She was a tough woman. When it was good and time for her to stop babysitting him, she would.
“Hey,” Kono said again. “You awake?”
“Yup,” Danny said. He cracked his eyes open, reached his left hand up and rubbed at them. “Awake. How long was my nap this time?”
“Only forty-five minutes. You’re doing better, brah.”
She said it like she wasn’t actually convinced yet, and that was a main reason why Danny didn’t have the heart to pull rank and have someone haul her out of there. His memory of Nahale and the happy adventure with fun and games was very real, but it was also very hazy because of the shocked state his body had been in. Kono had lived it in living, bright color and that was probably in some ways worse than leaving pints of blood behind. Danny eyed Kono, happy to see she’d at least taken a shower while he’d Skyped with Grace (which was so not even close to as good as the real deal no matter how the advertisers wanted to sell it) and then promptly settled down for a nap.
“Of course I am,” he said after a bit, waving his left hand dismissively. “I told you it’s not even that bad.”
Whoop, Danny knew the second the words were out of his mouth that they were the wrong things to say. Kono looked horrified. He got it. Out there when they were in the thick of it, Kono had been nothing but competent and tough, but she hadn’t had the detriment of time to think, really, outside of tending to his injury and checking on him. Thinking led to bullshit things like guilt and fear and neither of those had any right existing when a person was running from heavily armed idiots. Frankly, he didn’t think they had any right existing here, either.
“Hey,” he said, pulling his right arm from her touch only so he could shift and grab her hand. “What’s this face you’ve got going on right now?”
They hadn’t talked about what they’d survived together, Danny realized, not even in vague terms. Kono was almost always at his side, a vigilant guardian, but when he wasn’t sleeping he was being prodded and manhandled by various and sundry hospital staff. He thought that by letting her sit with him but not taking the time to address the elephant in the corner he’d done her a disservice. She was strong, but she was human. Well, they were alone now and he couldn’t take that face.
“It’s nothing,” Kono said.
“Liar. Tell me. You okay?” Danny could, if he closed his eyes, picture a bullet thudding into her vest and it made him sick with rage at Nahale. Grateful, too, for the man’s idiot move of arming and protecting both of them when he should have just killed them outright. “Bruise getting any better?”
“Danny, I don’t want to talk about a stupid bruise. You got shot because of me. You wouldn’t be lying there at all if you hadn’t taken that bullet instead of me.”
Danny chewed his lip and stared at her. That was … well, like he said, he got it. He might even feel the same thing if their positions were reversed, but at the end of the day it was a useless thing to feel. He waited for her to sneak a peek at him, then tilted his head to the side and squeezed her hand.
“Yeah, I suppose you could look at it like that. I mean, Jesus, I should have just let you get shot, right?” Danny put no bite in the words. “What was I thinking? From now on, I’m going to let all of my partners get shot right in front of me.”
“That … isn’t what I said.”
“Sure it is.” Danny held up his left hand, index finger high, when Kono looked ready to protest. He could see now, that this little speech should have been done two days ago and that error was on him. “Anh, my turn. The thing of it is, you see, is that I wouldn’t be lying in this bed right now at all if it weren’t for you. I’d be ashes and dust, kid. You cannot go thinking that my taking one was in any way your fault. Nothing good will come of it, and it doesn’t really matter because I’d do it again in a heartbeat.”
“But, even at the end,” Kono said, “Nahale had me, it was you who…”
“No. Now pay attention to me. Knowing our boss and his propensity to get us into ridiculous situations daily, I’m giving you a direct lesson you can employ in the future here. I’m not going to bury this little gem in too many words. And don’t look at me like that. Yes, I know I do that and yes, I know you all think so. I happen to believe words are good and people should know how to use them to full effect.” Danny paused, took a breath. “Okay, anyway. Shit, you people and your guilt complexes, I swear. Instead of manufacturing some cockamamie blame for yourself, think instead about how you kicked ass, took names and saved my damned life, huh?”
Kono blinked at him a few times, her expression one Danny had to admit he loved provoking in people – the stunned fish look when he’d said something far too astute to contradict and in a way that left mortal brains spinning in circles. It faded quickly, though, as a myriad of things flickered in her dark eyes and he could almost see things sliding back into the right places. Those things never should have been knocked askew, and which he chalked up to extreme stress and exhaustion.
“Yeah,” Kono said. Her shoulders straightened, fire lit in her eyes and she nodded. “I did, didn’t I?”
Surprise and no small amount of delight filled Danny. Relief, too. This was the first time Kono looked like herself in days, all piss and vinegar and sass, which somehow only served to make her more gorgeous. It was vaguely sickening, honestly.
“You did, babe. Let me tell you, it was beautiful.”
“Thanks, Danny,” Kono said softly.
Something in the air shifted, settled into a level of comfort that hadn’t quite been there before. Danny flicked his gaze to the TV and silently answered most of the Double Jeopardy! clues before the contestants could, they seemed particularly slow on this episode, all the while holding Kono’s hand. They sat like that for some time, well past the end of the game show. Danny didn’t mind at all, and resisted the urge to close his eyes and take yet another nap.
“So, I’m getting out tomorrow morning,” he said eventually.
Technically, anyway. The wound truly wasn’t that bad, certainly not the worst he’d ever had, and he’d been fever free for twelve straight hours, so Doctor Kuoha had agreed to release him to recuperate under the steady and calming presence of … Steven J. McGarrett. Danny had figured the good doctor might be good at medicine but wasn’t the best judge of character if he’d agreed to that, but he didn’t want to say anything and ruin his chances of getting off the Big Island. He didn’t have much reason to like it, what with being shot and chased through the rainforest and all. He figured once he got home, he could wiggle his way out of McGarrett’s house, because it was unrealistic to think he’d do any actual recovering there.
“Yeah, I know, that’s great. Steve and Chin touched down about half an hour ago. They need to wrap up a few things with the Luna case tomorrow morning,” Kono said, wrinkled her nose at the mention of Luna. That bastard. “We’re all going to fly back together.”
“Oh, joy,” Danny said, deadpan. “You know I cannot wait for that.”
“You might get lucky and Leilani will be working again.” Kono’s eyes twinkled. “You can flirt your way into a neck massage this time.”
“Or you might get to witness the Steve McGarrett Effect in full force and I and everyone within a complete square mile around him will be invisible.”
Kono laughed, but Danny’s brain went back to Nahale. He hadn’t really asked about the case. For once in his career, he didn’t care so much about paperwork or making sure the evidence was airtight. It was his and Kono’s takedown, everyone knew that, but short of briefing Hilo PD about his version of events and ultimately testifying in court, he didn’t need any part of it, didn’t need the closure. Secretly, though, he’d reveled in learning that Nahale had sustained partial loss of motion in his left arm due to the bullet Danny put in his shoulder. He figured there would have to be a massive inquest of the Hilo Police Department, and IA in every department on the islands would be like rabid watchdogs for months, if not years. Damned scumsucking dirty cop dirtbag drug pusher. Even if he wasn’t technically HPD anymore, that sucked for the honest cops, who were the majority.
“I heard you’re staying at Steve’s for a while,” Kono said casually. She tapped the back of Danny’s hand with her fingertips, then released it as if she’d just realized they were holding hands.
“It was a stipulation of my release. I had to choose between two evils.” He shrugged. “McGarrett squeaked by.”
“Oh, come on. He’s not here right now, you can admit that you’re looking forward to it.”
Danny thought of his aggravating partner’s house rules and the fervor in which he did pretty much everything in his life, and he was already exhausted beyond his existing exhaustion. Steve was either going to take care of him to death, or go the other extreme and tell him to suck it up like any Navy SEAL would and that if Danny were strong enough he could recover through pure mental will. There tended to be no middle ground with the guy. It appalled Danny that he wasn’t really bothered by either option, though.
“It won’t completely suck, I suppose,” Danny grumbled. “There are worse things than being stuck as Steve’s houseguest.”
“I knew it,” a voice crowed from the corridor.
Danny heard the telltale shuffle-thump of a person on crutches and closed his eyes tightly. Timing, he hated it because he never had it in the right way.
“I knew you loved me. You all heard it, Danny loves me,” Steve said as he swung into the room. “He can’t wait to stay with me.”
Chin trailed behind, and he had his “you are all weirdoes, why do I put up with you?” expression on in an impressive preemptive mask.
Danny winked at Chin, who quirked an eyebrow and headed to the windowsill for a perch.
“I don’t recall saying that, McGarrett. You’re bearable, that’s all. On a scale of one to ten, you’re probably a four and a half.”
“Ouch. Cold, brah. You’re totally a ten in my book.” Steve clomped to the chair on the opposite side of Danny’s bed to the one Kono currently occupied. His face turned more thoughtful. “Seriously, though, you okay for the trip over? You look a little tired.”
“I am tired, but that’s not stopping me from getting off of this rock,” Danny said. “No way. I expect you’ve got all the pillows floofed and stocked the fridge with actual people food for my arrival.”
“Floofed.”
“Yes, I said floofed, as in to floof to maximum floof levels. Of floofiness.”
“Well, aren’t you the pretty little princess?” Steve said.
“Pret–”
“Ahem.” Chin’s throat clearing was pointed and loud. “Not that it isn’t riveting to listen to you two bicker for hours…”
Kono snickered, did a poor job of hiding it behind her hand.
“…but I was hoping to maybe get the unabridged version of how you and Kono managed to take out seven armed men and capture a major drug player. You know, the stuff that didn’t get in the report.”
“Ah, I’m going to give that one to Kono. She’s the hero of the story,” Danny said.
Kono looked uncomfortable for a fraction of a second, but lost that when she glanced at Danny. She began talking, unusually quiet at first.
Danny fell silent and just watched them all. He saw Steve look at him and then Kono and then back to him throughout the course of the story, could virtually see things clicking away in there, slotting together what not even the words Danny loved so much could express. He saw the pride in Chin’s eyes when Kono described the hand-to-hand with Nahale, then the worry when Kono mentioned how she’d lost the skirmish and finally gratitude at hearing about the lucky shot Danny had taken to bring the guy down. Danny nearly groaned when Steve perked up and actually preened a little when Kono said she’d used techniques she’d learned from him. Like the guy needed any kind of ego boost whatsoever.
Danny’s mind wandered again, probably the drugs or having lived it once or whatever. He was a city boy. He liked the hustle and bustle and concrete, horns blaring and obscenities being shouted for minor transgressions. Sure, he was getting used to the slower pace of island life, was perhaps becoming mellower himself. This was mostly due to people here who were the closest thing to family away from family he’d ever had, these people in the room with him right now. That didn’t mean he didn’t sometimes daydream about Jersey, New York and, hell, the whole Eastern Seaboard. Before Five-0, though, he’d been a miserable fish out of water, ostracized by his fellow officers of the law and he’d worn his otherness like a badge. He was man enough to admit both of those things, and to admit that having his little foster family and Grace made Honolulu a reasonable facsimile of a busy city and O’ahu in general tolerable.
He caught Kono in one of her frequents glances to him as she continued to elaborate on their ordeal, eyes carrying ghosts that would continue to fade with time. Danny rolled his eyes when Steve went over the top enthusiastic at something undoubtedly related to his own insanity. One beaming smile from Kono back at him, and Danny’s heart was fit to burst. He guessed that in the grand scheme, he was a pretty fortunate guy.
Not that he’d ever say that out loud.