They have to put in an appearance at headquarters before they can begin their search. There's no avoiding it. It will certainly look suspicious to show up without Wallis in tow, but they'd rather maintain the illusion that everything is under control than make their partners suspicious by not coming back at all for a currently unknown amount of time. Steve originally thinks this is going to be a simple retrieval that they can knock out of the park before the end of the work day. However, when Kono runs a search for the GPS devices installed in his truck, she doesn't find a signal, meaning the devices were either destroyed or removed from the truck and disabled. She tries to explain this as gently as possible, but Steve still looks horrified at the damage that must have been done to his vehicle.
"What would he have to do get at the GPS?" he asks slowly, as Kono hides behind her tablet in the back seat if her cousin's sedan.
She bites her bottom lip and taps at the screen in front of her. "I won't lie to you, boss. It probably isn't pretty."
They make a quick stop at Kono's Cruz, where they spread her beach towel across the back seat and lower the windows, so the dog can wait in comfort. It also gives them a few minutes to get their story straight, and when they're sure that it's airtight and ready to withstand an interrogation from their partners, they head inside.
When they enter, Chin and Danny are both leaning against the smart table, in the middle of a conversation that hopefully isn't about them. Danny spots them first and stalks over, probably still more than a little sore about being hung up that morning. "What took you so long?"
Kono smiles brightly. "Sorry, brah. We stopped for lunch."
He looks back at Chin before narrowing his eyes at her. "Well?"
"Well, what?"
Danny holds an expectant hand out, pointedly waiting to receive some of the aforementioned lunch. There's an uncomfortable silence that's broken by the sound of Kono slapping him a low five. He looks to Chin for support, but the other man is far too used to Kono stealing his lunch to be too upset about their partners forgetting to bring some back. He shrugs. "Where's Wallis?"
His cousin backs up, partially slides behind her boss, who straightens and subtly clears his throat. "In the car."
"Alone?" Danny asks, staring like he's not sure what to make of that.
"He's cuffed," he says defensively, though he knows that if they did have Wallis in custody, the car thing would be not be the most professional of decisions. "And it's locked."
"Tell me the windows are down. It's like eighty-five degrees out."
Steve brushes past him to the smart table, annoyed that his partner is even trying to tell him how to improperly hold a suspect for questioning. "That rule applies to kids and dogs. Homicide suspects can bake."
"Okay," his partners says slowly, drawing the word out in order to give himself more time to process. "Better question. Why is Wallis still in the car?"
They've prepared for this line of questioning, but it feels like a poor excuse even before he says it. "We've determined that he'll respond to a more...mobile interrogation tactic."
Silence.
Kono flushes red, embarrassed to have any part in the horribly amateur lie they've concocted.
"Can I talk to you for a minute?" Chin asks, gesturing for them to take their conversation to his office, which suits Danny just fine, because he has some questions of his own.
Chin is not buying what they were selling out there, and it shows all over his face. His eyes are cutting into the back of Kono's head, while she fusses with some paperwork on her desk that doesn't actually need to be organized. She can hear him suppressing a chuckle at her expense and realizes that her fidgeting is very transparent, at least for her perceptive cousin, who knows her better than almost anyone else does. Generally, at this point, she'd give up and tell him the truth, but it's not just her secret to keep.
So instead she levels him with her own version of his signature unaffected look and waits for it to have the same effect on him as usually has on her.
Probably, she is going to be waiting for a very long.
To her complete and total shock, it's Chin who cracks first.
"Anything you want to tell me?"
Miniscule head shake. Her cousin smiles, which most people would take as a sign of surrender, but Kono recognizes it for what it is. A change of tactic.
"Okay," he says finally, fixing her with his best impression of her innocent face. "When you start to feel guilty about lying to me, you know where I'll be."
Her phone is on the corner of her desk, so he picks it up and hands it to her. "My number's in there. It's probably under 'Chin Ho'. Or 'favorite cousin'."
"Chin..."
"Or maybe you should try 'cousin that taught me to surf'."
"Cousin..."
"Who didn't arrest you or tell your parents about that time on the north shore when you were seventeen..."
Kono sighs. Hopefully, Steve is having better luck.
The way his partner is staring at him makes Steve want to rethink his initial lie.
"Let me get this straight," Danny says slowly, face still scrunched in confusion. "Chin and Kono...their auntie died?"
"Yeah."
"Again? Didn't they just lose an aunt a couple years back?"
Steve shrugs, paints on an affronted face at how "insensitive" his partner is being. "Death doesn't work like that, Danno," he explains helpfully. "They have a lot of aunties. They can't all be healthy."
"And you need me to stay here...because Chin is distraught?"
"Uh huh."
"And so is Kono?"
A nod.
"And you're going to cheer her up by threatening to throw Wallis from a moving vehicle?"
"On a bridge," Steve adds because details are important for this kind of thing. "I don't know which yet, but yeah." He pauses. "That's the idea."
Danny nods, lost in thought as he observes the two cousins through the glass walls of Chin's office. Both relatives are smiling, as Chin tries to take his younger cousin's phone out of her hand and Kono fights back. They can hear the family resemblance in the two similar chuckles echoing out into the open area of HQ. "Here's the thing, babe. They don't look devastated."
Of course they don't. On the one day that Steve needs them to act sullen and stoic, they're suddenly a slightly more playful version of Abbott and Costello.
"Can you ever really tell with Chin?" he asks weakly. "And Kono's in denial."
"She seems fine to me," Danny says, turning to examine something on the smart table.
The phone slips out of Kono's hand while she's trying to hold it over her cousin's head. It skitters across the floor, hitting the wall with a loud crack. Danny turns in time to see Chin rubbing her shoulder, while Kono buries her head in her hands, muffling what Steve knows to be laughter but could what could definitely pass as sobs. His eyes flit between Kono and the spot on the floor where her phone is leaning against the wall, before softening. "She's really upset, huh?"
Steve nods, gravely.
"Go ahead," his partner says, staring at his other coworkers in sympathy. "Cheer her up. I'll take care of Chin."
When Steve and Kono go to leave, Danny grabs Kono in a tight hug, securing her with a hand in the back of her head. "It's gonna be okay, babe," he promises solemnly. The younger officer blinks over the detective's shoulder and looks to Steve for an explanation. Instead, he grabs her arm and extricates her from his partner's grasp.
"We have to go," he calls over his shoulder, stepping on the back of Kono's heels because she keeps stopping to look back at Danny, who is offering his condolences to a clearly perplexed Chin. "Wallis can only last so long without water."
On that note, they're off again.
Once they're in the parking lot, Kono tosses her keys at him, and he's so surprised that he nearly drops them. Normally, she puts up more of a fight for the driver's seat than either of their other coworkers. Sometimes, Steve is ashamed to admit, things escalate way beyond Rock- Paper-Scissors and the two end up sparring in the parking lot, playfully snatching the keys from each other's hands. In a public place, Kono wins those rounds because bystanders don't see the power in those deceptively scrawny limbs and instead focus on the muscled navy SEAL picking on her. Conclusions are jumped to, and Steve gives in, usually with a scowl as pronounced as Kono's smirk.
But today she gives up. He's preparing to taunt when she crawls into the back seat and let's the dog jump all over her, laughing when he licks the side of her face in excitement.
Of course. He's not just the driver. He's the chauffeur.
"You two cozy enough back there?" he asks, buckling his seat belt. "Want something to drink? I'm here to serve."
Kono grins. "Drive, Jeeves."
The dog barks in agreement.
"Where are we headed?" he asks, glaring at his new nemesis through the rear-view mirror. Kono catches his eyes and rolls her own, apparently unimpressed with the rivalry between man and beast that tried to kill that man. "We could talk to his girlfriend," she suggests. "Wallis may have asked for a place to stay."
"You have an address?"
"Yeah," Kono nods, setting her phone on the center console so he can see the address. "Looked it up while Chin was trying to stare me to death."
Steve lifts the phone to eye level, noting the scuff left on the side from the earlier family feud. "Courtney Hall. Is this the same woman Wallis and our vic were fighting over?"
"No."
Oh. They were going to have to have the your-boyfriend-killed-his-best-friend-over-a-woman -that's-not-you heart to heart then.
Not one of his favorites. "That's gonna be uncomfortable."
Chuckling under her breath, Kono beams. "It gets worse," she offers, which is kind of disturbing considering the way that she's smiling. "The woman they were fighting over was a dancer hired for Wallis's bachelor party."
Oh. An angry bride-to-be that got dumped for a stripper.
"You can go ahead and take the lead on this one."
Courtney Hall has a normal, full-time job that keeps her out of the house for most of the day, so if they want to talk to her, they have to go to the tropical fish store where she works. Even so, they try her address first, just in case Wallace has decided to let himself in and make himself at home, which would be the best thing to happen to either of them all day. Steve parks more than a five minute walk away from the house, ignores Kono's smirk because you can clearly never be too careful when it comes to the safety of your vehicle, and tucks the keys into his back pocket after he locks the door. He wants to shut the windows too, just in case, but Kono will have none of it. Whatever. If Wallis steals her car, he will never let her forget it.
She double checks the address on her phone when they reach the driveway and nods. They're in the right place. This time, they stick together as they circle the house, working silently so as not to alert Wallis to their presence. Again. They've been down one side of the house and around the back before they reach a large bay window that's low to the ground and easy to peer into. In what looks like the dining room, they see movement but don't hear anything.
"You're sure the girlfriend isn't home?" Steve whispers, squinting into the house, where a moving shadow is pacing the hall.
Kono nods. "Positive, boss. You think it's him?"
Hall lives alone, so it's a safe bet. Still, something feels off. He drops a hand to Kono's shoulder, keeping her in place when she tries to move towards the door. She blinks at him, and he nods towards the window, gesturing for her to step back. Eyes wide, she shakes her head furiously. "C'mon, Steve. We can't."
Except they have to if they want to really catch Wallis off guard and hopefully surprise him into submission. Kono stands in front of the window and spreads her arms, bodily protecting the window from harm. Steve lifts an eyebrow because she's half his size and it doesn't seem fair to just move her. But he doesn't have any other choice, so he gently nudges her out of the way until their places are switched and he's in front of the window.
"Cover your face," he orders, waiting until she obeys before he smashes the blunt end of his gun through the window. The glass shatters, an alarm screams, and a disembodied voice erupts from the speaker system, scolding them for the damage caused.
Vacate the premises immediately...law enforcement officials have been notified and dispatched...vacate the premises immediately...
Kono glares, but she only gloats for a moment. Because there's no sense in breaking if you're not going to enter, she accepts his offered arm and allows him to help her into the living room of the house where she waits, gun drawn, for Steve to follow. The didn't hear the door open or close, so Wallis must still be in the house. They split up and set off in opposite directions, eyes peeled for any sign of the earlier movement. There's no obvious sign of their suspect, but he could be hiding, so Steve's not too concerned. He knows what he saw...
"Boss," Kono calls from the dining room. "Get in here. There's something you should see."
He lowers his gun and walks towards her voice, confused because he would have heard her yell if she'd found him, even over the wailing alarm. In the dining room, she's seated in a chair, eyes narrowed and fixed on his forehead as he enters the room. In her lap, a large, black cat nuzzles her knee. "Hey, Steve," she says, scowling dangerously. "Meet Wallis."
"That's not Wallis," he says tiredly.
Her face drops into a false innocent expression. "But it has to be Wallis. Or else, we just overreacted and vandalized this house for no reason."
Insubordination. He doesn't care for it.
"Put the cat down," he grumbles, reaching to nudge it off her lap. "The police are coming, or can't you hear that?"
The cat yowls and swipes at his hand, almost drawing blood. Kono smiles and gently places the animal back on the floor, where it rubs its head against her ankle. Steve scowls, putting a hand on the small of her back to push her out in front of him. "What are you, Dr. Dolittle?"
"It's a gift, brah."
They scramble down the front stairs and sprint the distance back to Kono's Cruz, where the living reminder of the day's other failure is slobbering on the steering wheel.
Steve sighs.
When they're both safely concealed in the car, he slowly urges the Cruz into Courtney Hall's street, where two cruisers are parked in front of the house, lights flashing. There's already an officer inspecting the broken glass on the lawn. He can see that Kono's covered in long, thin scratches from the exposed edges of the glass, and feels the same injuries on his own limbs. Hopefully, there isn't enough blood evidence to put the blame on them...
This is going to make their conversation with Wallis's girlfriend substantially more uncomfortable.
AN: Mostly this was just a chapter to set everything up for the next few updates, so I'm not crazy about it. But I hope you enjoy what's to come...;)