AU H50 || Players: Whole Team, MomGarrett, The usual suspects, No Catherine || AU Element(s): McKono, No softies in the Yakuza || Third person POV: heavy on Kono's perspective
RATING || T
PROMPT || via text: "A Colombian necktie for Father's Day... Go!" -Sheldon Monsoon: One of my best friends and an outstanding writer with the sharpest of wits and about the most fertile imagination on planet Earth.
CREDIT || Thanks to SuperSEAL with whom I started running this as a collaboration before, a few posts in, it ran away with me instead. ;-)
There is a happy little song, which hypothesizes that the Man In The Moon smiles because he's in love with the Girl In The World. When the two are in harmony, all living stars agree that planets can be born of their synchronicity. It's a romantic notion, sure, but not a very realistic one. At least not to one of the six and a half billion biped souls trapped against The Girl.
It was true that Kono McGarrett was a bit of a romantic at heart, but she liked facts, cleaved to evidence and truth. And the truth was that she and the moon had spent a lot of time together over the past few years. She had seen so many nights when that buttery, chubby-cheeked orb looked down on paradise with a rotten grin that was much more 'curious meddler' than 'entranced lover.' It reminded her of a menacing child peering over the edge of a cardboard box holding some small wild thing it had captured and planned to poke at for his amusement later on.
A glowing night sky, on its own, had long since ceased to stir fantasy or whimsy in her. Moonlight had played Kono's near constant companion through five years of midnight investigations into the weird, the gruesome, and the just plain wrong. This sweltering July night was no different.
Hazy tentacles of moonlight reached down to grip the outskirts of Honolulu; their thin, luminous fingers kept at bay by the staccato strobe of blue on red. HPD was in full swing. The incandescent white flashes of an investigator's camera interrupted the night like Zeus's bolts, blotting out everything else and pulling momentary bright sheets of blindness over a macabre scene. The crime was murder and Kono, through some stroke of shit luck, was first on the scene from Five-0. There hadn't even been time to set up the obligatory canary crime scene tape yet.
Her legs stretched out before her in long, clean strides as she walked boldly toward the lead officer. She approached him like she belonged there because, well, she did. The horrendous nature of the crime made it Five-0's case. It had been a long time since hostility over jurisdictional turf had met her at a scene. Besides, the reporters hadn't arrived yet. Murder wasn't exactly newsworthy in that part of town. Officials could afford to be a little friendlier when they weren't busy thwarting a mob of rabid reporters with a nightstick and a single fragmented bone of information.
"Whatcha got for me, Pah," Kono asked in a low, pseudo-sleepy voice against the shoulder of the dark officer.
"Bad news. We've got ourselves an official turf war," he replied coolly. His posture and the sigh of resignation that followed said he believed it.
"Buck up, brah," she clapped him on the back with a half smile, "Shift's over at seven."
There was a rosy blush of exasperation that showed even beneath the coco brown of the newly appointed officer's ethnic skin. He hauled in a heavy breath of air, held it, the blew it out in a defeated gust, "You're not nearly as cute as you are pushy, Kono. It's getting easier to see what Duke means about you and too much time with the ol' ball and chain."
The brunette beamed up at his perturbation and waited patiently while she pulled on her black latex gloves.
"Ever heard of a Colombian Necktie?" Pah moved on.
"Throat slit, tongue threaded through the wound? Yeah, why? More of a Miami thing. We don't really see'em here." Kono's eyes were narrowed at the possibility.
Pah cut his eyes, "We do now."
"Ew." Kono looked him over, studied the barely restrained horror that tightened the skin around his black eyes, "Alright. I'll take a look. You call Max yet?"
The dapper young uniform rumbled back, "I called everybody."
Kono only nodded as she slipped around him and flicked the brilliant beam of her flashlight to life on her way down the path to certain gore. It was a narrow gap between a pair of too-close houses in one of the many seedy neighborhoods that dotted the island. The broader the light, the better to see discarded syringes, weapons, and bodies with. She liked to wear boots. Yes, even in July. It was just safer that way.
It was nothing in that area to run across a dirty, barefooted toddler alone on a sidewalk clothed only in a sagging diaper and a Kool-aid smile at two in the morning. Sure enough, a neglected, filthy tyke caught her eye at the other end of the alley-like stretch, just feet from the body. She shined the light out over him. "Shit," she muttered. "Pah?" she called behind her, "Can you get a uniform with this kid? We've got blood matted on... his? feet." She sighed in a sad kind of resignation, "Kid's evidence."
There was a certain amount of courtesy every dead man earned just by virtue of the fact that he couldn't breathe any more; just because someone, somewhere would begin to learn to live without him in the morning. For this reason, Kono squatted as reverently as one could possibly do such a thing and leaned in to inspect the body. It was one of the most heinous, shocking things she'd ever seen.
The scene was nice and secure by the time she heard Chin's familiar baritone echo in the mouth of the alley. He was talking with a blue stripe. Street traffic had come to a standstill. Beyond the easy hum of her cousin's conversation, all Kono heard was homicide; an eery undercurrent of unnatural silence, the energy of fresh death and a dull mix of heavy car doors slamming, low purring, muttering voices (mostly male, all carefully clinical) and heels striking, thudding and shifting tiny bits of rock, glass and broken concrete beneath them.
Every homicide was different. Sometimes she got a wail as a woman recognized someone she knew or there might be a chorus of loud protests, a father, brother or friend in disbelief, but not this time. This time there was only homicide and the high, frail trickle of lyrical pleas as a Spanglish speaking mother implored Officer Pah to release her small son to her. Above it all there arose a singular sonancy she knew better than any other. It was the quick, springy cadence of her husband's stride, heavy boots crunching impatiently toward her.
Oh, and the yammering parrot at his elbow. Yep, that was pretty distinctive too.
Williams was trotting, as he often did, to keep up with McGarrett's longer stride. His palms faced the stars and fanned side to side accenting syllables as he chattered. "All I'm saying is how is it that a guy can be ready to launch a full assault by water at all times," his hands sliced the air as if that somehow made the point tangible, "and not ever be prepared to pay his own tab. Huh? You tell me, how's that possible?"
"I travel light, okay?" Steve offered with a dismissive shrug. "I'll get you next time."
"No. No, you will not get me next time because you never get me. In order to get me... you would have to be carrying a wallet, which you do not do because apparently you're traveling light. So there's no getting me, Steven. There's never any getting me."
"OKAY, I'm sorry I didn't bring my wallet!" The two stopped short ten feet from where Kono crouched over a corpse, looking on with that 'Seriously, guys... right now?' expression of hers.
The Commander stood straight and tall with his hands at his hips, the way a scolding mother hen's might be, and leaning ever so subtly over his partner. His wrists held back the two hemispheres of an army green button down like drapery ties over a grey t-shirt. His wife thought she noticed him pushing out his chest a little, which earned him an eye roll. 'Cause nothing says I apologize like puffing up.
The very tip of Steve's tongue ran between his lips once before he parted them to speak, "Thank you, Danny, okay, for paying my tab. You happy now? We good? 'Cause if you wanna keep bitching I can run across the street and find an ATM right now or we can focus on this crime scene, since we're here. What's it gonna be, huh?"
"Um, no, you can't just run across the street and get me my money because withdrawing cash from and ATM requires a debit card, which you do not have BECAUSE YOU FORGOT YOUR WALLET!"
"Guys!" Kono, who hadn't had a drop all night, was on the back end of a sixteen hour day and wholly unamused by the delay.
There was a brief, goofy kind of pause as Danny stopped and restarted his run-on rant a few times. He gave in with a hand gesture for Steve that said go ahead, but only an idiot would've believed the conversation was over.
As the men joined her, Kono looked up from her spot at the victim's waist, giving Steve a chin-up gesture of acknowledgement and a passing, "Howzit?" Husband and wife or just a couple of investigators hovered around a body, there really wasn't much one could say by way of greeting in the presence of that kind of horror.
Danny sidled up to the body immediately screwing up his face until he resembled Bootles, a skateboarding blonde Shar Pei that surfed concrete down at Waikiki. "Ooo, oh, what is..." His head reared back and he squinted as though looking directly into the carved gore might blind him. "That is just..."
"Sick," she finished soberly.
Fresh from a celebratory stint at the team's favorite post-case watering hole, the guys were conspicuously chewing gum. Smooth, Kono thought just before catching a stomach churning whiff of watermelon, her least favorite flavor. It reminded her of a long night years before filled with Pink Flamingo shooters, a slew of questionable decisions and a banging headache chaser the following morning. She felt just a little green for a split second there. Leave it to her strange island pragmatism to be sturdy in the face of evil's handiwork, but crumble before the power of watermelon Bubble Yum.
Squatting across from her, Five-0's fearless leader looked a little on the haggard side. His five o'clock shadow was looking less 'Sonny Crockett' and more 'Viggo Mortensen between jobs'; you know, when the actor took to sporting his pajamas at award ceremonies... The double stubble thing was a bit on the hippie side for a Naval reservist.
The overwhelmingly bright lights they brought in on nighttime scenes always bleached the abhorrent canvas and everyone and everything surrounding it to their palest, so it wasn't so much a sickly pallor as a nauseated expression that kept her eyes with Steve when he crouched. It was the rarity of the experience. How often did one get to see the king of emotional stuffiness break his steely crime scene composure? Not often enough to ignore it when it popped up.
"You good?" she asked quietly, her eyes darting to either side, as if it were possible that they weren't alone in the cramped space. "'Cause if you've had too much to be here..." No need to finish. The suggestion was enough. If Steve's condition were something more than simple disgust he'd do the right thing. She trusted that.
One cool look answered her question. She gave him plenty of time to check out the gruesome artistry at the neck. She'd already seen the whole show.
"We covered this in Academy, Colombian Necktie." She pointed while she explained, "Medellin Cartel special, slit the neck exactly under the jawline, pull the tongue through the wound. Pretty precision stuff. Max ought'a have a field day with this one."
"I've never heard of anything like this on the islands," he commented.
"Seen it anywhere else in your travels?" she asked, baiting him into her line of thought. "'Cause these aren't street level thug kills. Gang-bangers get bullets. You've gotta' be pretty special to earn this kind of execution and whoever did it knew how. See how clean the lines are under the bone?" Her voice dropped, barely above a whisper, "You can see white."
"No, Central and South America are Team FOUR out of Little Creek. We didn't get a lot of Colombian anything in the desert."
"Yeah, but stoning, I mean stoning had to be a big hit, right?" Danny stood over them, hands in his pockets, and wearing a four-year-old's self-congratulating grin. Crappy jokes were often his way of dealing with horrible, mind-bending shit.
"So wrong, brah," Kono chided and turned back to the work at hand.
"It's hard to say for sure until Max cleans the body, but that looks like two separate cuts to me, a V." She held an imaginary blade in her very real grip and pressed it hard against her throat, "Under the ear, behind the jaw," she sliced downward, "and chin to hinge," she sliced up. "One insertion, two separate cuts. Unless he was drugged, he was moving. It'd be hard to do something this clean on a still target, but a squirmy one..."
"Drugging a man before killing him this way would defeat the point and there are these," Steve indicated the upturned knuckles of the hand between his knees. They were skinned and swollen, the joints of the ring finger and pinky scraped to the white meat.
She looked down. "My side's the same way."
"Yeah, so he struggled not to end up this way," the Commander concluded.
"Swelling says it was within the last couple of hours," she added.
From his higher vantage point, Danny had a fuller view of things. His head cocked to the right as he scrutinized the face and wounds. There was a faint scuffing sound as his weight shifted to his heels, his chest and stomach pushing forward to counterbalance. For Kono, the posture called to mind, Mick Jagger.
"Hey, uh, Steve? This guy look familiar to you?"
Steve sighed quietly, his face angled down as his hazely-blue eyes lifted to meet Kono's stare. "Yeah," he answered matter-of-factly and gestured to a distinctive scar on the back of the victim's hand. It was a light colored raised X with an off centered line of three misshapen dots behind it and one nearer to the fingers. "This is Hiro Noshimuri."