Chapter 10 "The Marathon Begins"
A/N: (14 August 2016) "Thank you" is so inadequate for your reviews and encouragements! You truly are the best readers! I want to give you the best possible chapters I can write! You deserve that!
The story is still in the early stages, even though the plotting far surpasses where the writing has gone. That is why I can get the chapters out this fast! Even with a head cold!
Enjoy, and if something strikes you wrong, or jars, or you have any critique or criticism, or you like something and want to say so, feel free. I don't bite!
The usual disclaimer still holds! CBS still owns Hawaii Five-0. I only own the DVDs of the first 5 seasons. (Season 6 DVDs coming out in September!)
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Chapter 10 "The Marathon Begins"
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Danny had noticed in the last half hour that it seemed to be raining outside the box, the steady kind that could last for hours, to judge by the change in the air. The walls and floor had become damp and slick, and the air in the box now had a sour, metallic smell from the dampened rust. It seemed like the rain was going to continue for awhile, so Danny had already noted it on the calendar he was keeping. Now the notebook was on top of the blanket, near to where he was working on the chain link. He had also moved Angel's water bowl to the edge of the blanket, and he had filled it up again, and his own water bottle, so he would not have to move around much on the slick metal floor. The less he moved around, the less dirty his bare feet would become.
As it was, he had realized almost immediately that he would have to help Angel clean her paws and fur, if she got them dirty from wet rust. It could not be healthy for her to ingest rust, so he would use the baby wipes if he had to. Luckily, she did not seem to like stepping on the wet metal, so she was staying on the blanket.
To help keep himself and Angel from getting dirtier than was unavoidable, Danny had spread the blanket out on the floor, which meant one side would now have to stay stained, while hopefully the upward facing side would stay remain relatively clean. He was glad that Angel had stopped batting the ball everywhere and now seemed content to play with her paper ball toy on the blanket. She kept kicking it with her back feet while her front paws held it and her teeth tried to kill it.
Danny stayed focused on the task of scraping the end of the link of chain against the side of the sharp-edged square plate bolted to the floor. Danny also kept himself from touching the damp, staining rust as much as possible. He did not sit on the floor as he worked on the chain, but crouched down. It took focus and concentration to scrape the link of chain while he was balancing essentially on the balls of his feet, on a damp, slick floor. Danny thought his captor was a particularly despicable person before reverting to his mantra, which was "ESCAPE". Likely, his captor had not even thought about the way damp air would make his prison even more uncomfortable, and make his supplies diminish even faster. The cat food was safe enough, in sealed pouches, and the moisture would not bother the peanut butter. But it would possibly get to the crackers. They were not yet opened, so were still safe in their plastic liner, but once he had to break into them, and the raisins, dampness would not be a friend.
Eventually Angel brought the ball back to Danny, who put it inside his notebook. Angel went to lap up some more water, staying on the blanket. Danny had put her water bowl right at the edge of the blanket. Danny reached for his own water bottle and squirted water into his mouth. He had no way to clean the bottle or spout, so he had to avoid touching the surface. He could open the spout by pressing on a thumb lever. Releasing the lever closed it. It held 16 ounces, and this was his third bottle, already carefully noted in the notebook.
Six was ideal for a day, but he admitted to himself that he would probably try to limit his intake to five per day. If he conserved even a little bit of water per day, he could have a superSeal sponge bath even Steve would approve of, using a re-moistened baby wipe. That would be the best he could do. Who knew what other unforeseen circumstances might arise? On general principle now, he would conserve everything.
Angel watched him drink, then trotted to the part of the blanket closest to him and the notebook (held open by the paper ball inside it) and did an almost perfect 'sphinx' pose. He reached out to pet her, then returned to work on the link of chain. Every time he turned to watch Angel, he found her in an ever-changing number of cute sleepy poses. He wished he had a camera!
He kept sawing the link back and forth, noticing that when it heated up from the friction, it got hot enough that it could burn him if he touched the chain. He retrieved the notebook, slipping the paper toy inside his coverall pocket, and used it to fan the chain while he worked, which slowed the rate of heating. Still, there were times when he had to stop and let the link and the side of the metal plate cool. While it did that, he stretched, for it was very cramped bending over working on the chain. He had to keep as healthy as he could, so he didn't waste any time if there was something productive he could do.
Angel decided his stretching was a form of play, so she tried to imitate whatever pose he was in, depending on what he was stretching. If Danny put his arms out in front, so did Angel. If they reached upwards, for he was especially working on his shoulder motions, lest they tighten from the tiny motions of the back and forth, Angel reached upwards, and this looked totally silly and brought a bark of laughter from Danny. He began to do things just to see if the kitten would try to copy him, but she gave up when she could simply not stand on one foot. She rolled, so Danny picked her up and petted her until she purred herself into sleepy kitten bliss.
By then, the chain had cooled enough for Danny to resume work on it, so Angel returned to her blanket and curled into a proper cat circle and fell asleep on top of the notebook, which he extricated carefully.
While she slept, he kept scraping away while fanning, noticing the small progress he had made so far on the link. This was going to take a few days!
It didn't matter. He would keep at it. Escape was a marathon, and he had roughly a month to get out of the box. This was the first mile. He had a long way to go, but he could do it.
He had to do it.
Danny kept working, but he found his mind wandering. Who had locked him in the box, and why? That question troubled him a lot, because he had been a cop for a long time before coming to Hawaii, and had made numerous enemies. He had made many working with Five-0. He began thinking back on old cases, people who might be released from jail or prison in Newark, or anyone from cases in Hawaii. He had been giving no warnings from Newark about pending releases, and things were relatively quiet for the moment in Honolulu. Not that that meant anything, for people slipped through the cracks, and family members took it into their head to get revenge. Gangs had initiations, and cops were preferred targets.
But this was personal. Who had hated him for a long time, and only now gotten around to doing something like this? Logically, someone had been let out of prison and come to take revenge. Someone who knew about drugs, and had access to this box, or who was using one abandoned somewhere unlikely to be noticed.
They had to be particularly vicious, to give him a month's worth of food, not to mention tossing a baby cat in with him -with supplies! It motivated him to try to escape, because he was not going to be the cause of death of an innocent little kitten. Anyone who knew him well at all knew he would figure out a way to escape. The very chain that was supposed to keep him from getting out was what he was going to use to get out.
Still, it all boiled down to not having any idea who specifically would have done this to him, just that it was probably someone he had put in jail in the past, someone just getting out.
He wondered if Steve, Chin, Kono and Abby had any leads on who had taken him, and where he was. He had to assume Steve was alive. He even thought about the possibility he was wrong, that the note was right. But he discarded what the note said as fiction. He would know if Steve were dead. He would simply know, and he did not feel that at all.
When his brother Matty had been killed, he had felt it all along. All the while he was gathering money to ransom him, he had known he was wasting his time. He had known it in his heart. But he had to try, because it was his brother! He had to try. When it turned out he was right, he thought about all the disappointments and hopes destroyed, all the people he had put in danger, and how angry he had been that Matty had done something so stupid, so illegal, that he got himself killed, and left his brother to clean up after him. If Matty had stayed on the right side of the law, he would not have died as he did.
Danny felt very much like Steve was alive. It wasn't wishful thinking. He knew. He and Steve were closer than many brothers, and had an instinctive feel for one another. Over the years, on several occasions when Danny was having problems dealing with a particular issue, Steve would know without being told. How many times had he called Danny in the middle of the night, somehow knowing that his partner had had a nightmare about his brother Matty's death and everything about Marco Reyes, his brother's killer? Or any number of other things? Steve would just know, and Danny's phone would ring in the middle of the night.
And he did the same with Steve. Steve liked to believe he successfully kept his problems to himself, but he was an open book to Danny. A certain lack of expression, a stillness in Steve's gaze, the smallest downward turn of his mouth, a particular way he only held his shoulders when troubled in his inscrutable way, and Danny was on it, alerted and finding which of several tricks he had to use to get Steve to open up.
Steve had no idea some of Danny's rants were diversions, to get Steve to slip up and say what was on his mind without realizing he had dropped the 'bingo' clue, the one that told Danny what he needed to know, and whether to pursue it or let it drop. If it was something about Steve's Dad, Danny would slip a word to Chin, and the two of them would work it out, since that was Chin's territory. But there were a lot of things Steve tried not to talk about, that he should talk about, so Danny would needle him until he hit the spot.
He and Steve did the same thing with Chin, Kono, and now Abby. The group was ohana, family, and they kept closer now that they knew what could happen if they drifted apart, as Lou Grover had caused them to do.
Lou was still a sore subject for Danny. He was hiding a few things concerning Lou, but he had his reasons. He had intended to do some "sharing" after Christmas, but now it looked like it would have to wait quite a little while longer.
He shifted his foot slightly, about ready to take another break to let the chain link cool again. His foot over-slid, however, and his right knee came down hard on the edge of the metal plate, right on the sharpest of the four corners. The corner gouged a nasty, deep furrow next to his knee cap, and from the way it bled, Danny knew what he really needed was stitches and bandages, while what he had was nothing at all except an up-to-date tetanus shot.
He let out a hiss of pain and a very succinct swear word.
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H50 H50 H50 H50
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Steve let out a hiss of pain and a very succinct swear word. "Sorry, Doc. My knee is sore when you press it there."
"Sorry, Steve," murmured Dr. Cornett, checking Steve's knee movement and soreness. "You seem to have developed a bit of tendonitis in your patellar tendon. It is bruised, but not badly. You must have gotten that when you were thrown from the car, but it should ease up soon. Try not to bend your knee to the point of pain, and I would also advise alternately icing and using heat on your knee, just below the kneecap, for twenty minutes at a time, several times a day. And try to remember that, right now, for any number of aches and ouches, that running is not your friend for the time being."
"Can I take any anti-inflammatory meds yet? Or any pain meds? My arm aches quite a bit," admitted Steve as his doc finished writing some notes onto his tablet chart.
Dr. Cornett shook his head sympathetically. "The key labs should be back soon, though. Your organs are fine, but I need to know what drugs were or are in your system, and those tests are tricky, so they take longer. As soon as they are in, I'll be back to discuss them with you and in all probability the nurse will follow with your release papers. I know you … want to get busy on finding Danny without being stuck to the hospital."
Steve let out a long sigh. "I shouldn't complain, really. If things had gone just a little bit differently, we would not even be having this conversation. I'd be next to the non-Danny-body on another of Max's autopsy tables." His shoulders slumped as his left hand fussed with the sling on his right arm. "I need to find him, Doc. I feel he is still alive, but he's in a bad place. Whoever took him doesn't intend for him to survive for long."
Dr. Cornett was silent for a few seconds, checking the labs that had returned. He looked into Steve's eyes. "Uhm. This isn't the most prudent course, but I feel it is warranted. The only reason I'm holding you here is those labs, and so you can rest. But I know you can't rest, under the circumstances. I'll have the nurse prepare your release papers now, but I'll need you back here for an hour or so when I get the toxicology results. In the meantime, don't take any meds, which includes stimulants like caffeine, or depressants like alcohol, which you aren't allowed anyway. Go easy on yourself. You have a lot of bruises that are going to hurt worse tomorrow than they do today." He paused, and asked, worriedly, "Let me know when you find him, okay?"
Steve's face lit with gratitude. "I understand, and I'll follow your instructions. And you bet I'll let you know when we find him. I appreciate this, Doc. I really do."
Cornett nodded, his hazel eyes serious, full of concern. "Give the nurse twenty to thirty minutes, then you're officially sprung." His pager beeped then, and he looked at it. "A STAT ER summons. But I'll have the nurse in with those papers." He pushed out a breath quickly. "Find him. Becca is worried, too." He was heading for the door as he spoke into his pager, in his ER doctor voice. "Dr. Cornett, on my way."
Kono came in, and asked why the doc was in such a rush. Steve answered as he swung his legs over the side of the bed. "He's got an emergency in ER. Kono, do I have clothes? He's springing me early because I need to start working the case to find Danny. We have to find him."
"Let me call Chin and Abby. They can grab your bag in Danny's ….." She had almost said "car". Her throat tightened. "I'll have them swing by your house or the office, whichever is closer to where they are. Where will you want to go first?"
Steve's face was grim. "Danny's house. I need to look at it and see if anything jogs my memory, or looks out of place. Right now I'm going to take a quick shower, before the nurse arrives with my release papers."
Suddenly Steve's phone rang, and he looked at who it was. His face turned ashen, and he looked panicked and sick. "Oh God. It's Grace. What do I tell her?"