So I'm a big dummy. I realized that last month would've been the four year anniversary for this fic! Let me tell you, I cannot believe I've been working on this thing for that long.
Big cheers to Sue2556 for always being willing to gab with me about Five-0!
Fact #168: Trouble has cousins.
Season: 5th Season
Danny just wanted to finish his pizza. It was leftover night, and he still had pizza in his fridge from the previous night from Mo's. He wanted to be in his boxers sitting on his couch watching the game and eating comfort food, but no. No, Steve had wanted to go for a drive and Danny prided himself on being a good friend and accompanied his partner on an aimless drive through town.
Now he stood above an open aquarium tank with several thousand gallons of water below him and who knew what else and two armed gunmen loose in the building, one of which was facing him with his gun drawn and Danny's gun in his other hand.
"Easy there, pal. I don't think you want to go shooting in a building full of glass, huh?" he said.
He could hear the water gently bubbling below the platform he was standing on, but couldn't see much with only the dim moonlights illuminating the aquarium. He didn't want to take his eyes off the gunman, anyway.
"Ugh. You're that New Yorker from Five-0, aren't you?" the guy said.
Danny's hackles flared. "Jersey. I'm from New Jersey. And yes, I'm with Five-0. And if you know about Five-0, you know that we work as a team and that I'm not the only one in here, so put the gun away before McGarrett drops on your head out of the rafters or something."
The man hesitated, his gun hand wavering. Danny held his gaze. He had no clue where Steve was, and it was only the two of them there. For a man who was trained to prepare for every situation, Steve sure went into a lot of things with the attitude of 'how bad can it be?'.
Bad. Very bad.
Danny didn't know why someone would break into an aquarium, never mind why they would be armed when they broke in, but here he was. Alone. Above a shark tank probably.
A muffled gunshot echoed from down below.
The man steadied his aim. "Well, I don't know where McGarrett is, but he ain't here."
Danny ducked down and dove off the platform into the water. His ear burned where the bullet had zipped by frighteningly close. Of course, this was the one guy who didn't shoot him in the bicep.
Cool saltwater stung his eyes and nose, but he dove further into the tank as a series of pops followed him. The gunman missed. If it hadn't been so dark, Danny may have had a heart attack with how close some of the shots felt, but as it was the dimly lit water didn't let him see enough to be worried about that.
What he was worried about was what was in the tank.
A solid mass of flesh bumped his side.
He scaled up his arms and legs protectively. Another mass dodged through his legs. He wrapped a tough length of kelp around his hand to anchor him down, and he waited. Things in the water darted around him, he could sense them and caught a glimpse of silver scales here and there.
His lungs started to burn.
No more shots had been fired at him. The man could be waiting just on the other side of the water, though. If he surfaced, it would be easy to put one right between his eyes. Unless he surfaced on a different side of the tank.
Cautiously, he felt through the stalks of kelp to the rocky back wall of the tank. With scaled and clawed hands, he felt his way along it to the other side of the platform. From what he remembered, the tank was vaguely horseshoe shaped, and where he was currently should have been away from the shooter.
It was now or never.
Warm, moist, salty air had never tasted so good. He stayed close to the rocks as he caught his breath. A burning tingle heated up his right ear. It wasn't ringing, but it sure had been grazed. That's all he needed. He was probably bleeding into a shark tank.
A flashlight blinded him.
"Danny?"
He sighed in relief. "Jeez, Steve, you sure know how to give a guy a scare. Give me a hand, will ya?"
He retracted his scales and claws and grabbed a hold of Steve's hand. His clothes hung heavily on his body as soon as he was on his feet on solid ground. There went yet another pair of loafers.
"If you needed a bath, you could have just taken one at the house."
"Shut up," he said. He glanced around. "Where're Dumb and Dumber?"
Steve gestured for him to follow him, as if Danny would rather stay above the tank. Going home and getting into dry clothes would be ideal, but he would settle for the ground floor of the aquarium, away from open water. The metal stairs and his shoes produced a horrid squelching sound on the way down.
"I winged one guy, but lost track of him when I heard the shots from up there," Steve said. "By the time I got up there, the second guy was gone."
"Great. I'm sopping wet and we have nothing to show for it," he grumbled.
They exited through an employee only door into the deserted main visitor area. Danny glanced back at the floor to ceiling tank he had been in. It was two stories tall with kelp drifting in it. He could see the shapes of big fish swimming through the scattered lights from above, and swore he saw a shark fin cruise through a ribbon of white light.
He looked at an unharmed and completely dry Steve.
"I can't believe you didn't catch your guy."
"At least my guy didn't get my gun and make me jump in a shark tank," Steve said.
"But you're a McGarrett! You don't let the bad guy get away once you've got your laser focus locked on him," Danny said, chopping one hand into his other palm to make his point.
"And you're Danny, you don't swim," Steve snapped.
"Hey, you know I swim, it's just that-"
"You swim for survival, I know."
"What's up with you, huh?" Danny questioned. He combed his hair back with his fingers. It was going to be crusty and wavy when it dried. Man, he needed a shower, since he had been interrupted by Steve's impromptu drive and subsequently their impromptu intervention of an aquarium break in.
Then Steve's sour mood made sense.
"It's about Catherine, isn't it?"
They never did get to talk after dinner last night, and Steve had let Danny fill the silence on the drive tonight.
Steve pressed his lips together. "Later. Duke's here. Hopefully he caught them trying to flee the building."
Danny ignored the stares he got from the officers guarding the entrance of the aquarium. Once upon a time they may have given him crap about falling into a tank, but most of them had learned to keep it to themselves when Five-0 was standing around. Instead, he tuned into Duke's negative report and head shake.
"I'm sorry, Commander, but none of my units saw anyone fleeing on foot or in a vehicle," Duke said.
"That means they're still in the building," Steve said. He turned with his gun drawn.
"Hey, hey, woah! Where do you think you're going by yourself?"
"To get the bad guy."
"Yeah, not by yourself."
"They'll hear you and your squeaky shoes coming from a mile away, Danny," Steve said.
Danny looked down at his ruined loafers. Then looked at the feet of one of the officers standing by the door.
Steve stepped quietly along the hallway, Danny right behind him with his borrowed shoes and gun. Danny had suggested kicking on all the lights, but Steve wanted it dark. He wanted the element of surprise. The way they had gotten the drop on him and Danny in the first place rubbed him the wrong way.
A brief glance at a map near the entrance had told him where the emergency exits and loading bay were. He guessed whatever they were after was in the back offices or where they quarantined new arrivals or sick animals. If they had been here to vandalize, he would have expected cans of spraypaint, not guns, and not the skills to evade an ex-SEAL and seasoned detective.
He gritted his teeth. He had underestimated who would break into an aquarium. His mind had been elsewhere. Thinking about Catherine getting involved with a CIA operation and leaving the country for a while. It was no good pretending she had never been involved in that stuff before. Some of their Navy operations had had CIA involvement, he was sure. Only, he had never imagined his mother had been and was still involved with the CIA.
Perhaps Doris had something to do with Cath taking on the operation.
A wide open metal door greeted them when they rounded the corner.
Danny pressed himself against a wall and Steve pressed up against the opposite wall. At his nod, Danny swept into the room first with him covering his back. This was a loading bay. It still smelled of exhaust from an engine running inside the building. The rolling door was rolled all the way up and the bay was empty.
"I'll Duke and let him know. We need to get access to the security cameras," Danny said and pulled out his phone.
Steve glared at the open door and then back at his partner. His frown deepened. "So your shoes didn't survive but your phone did?"
"Waterproof case, babe. I learned my lesson."
Steve grunted. He lowered his gun to a standby position and walked back into the hallway. While Danny was on the phone with Duke, he checked through any other open doors. The only other door that was open was into a room with large, bare bottom glass tanks and several hundred gallon bins with very few inhabitants. That must have been the quarantine room.
"We need to ask the staff if anything's missing," he said. He holstered his gun.
"Maybe they wanted to take a shark home and put it into their pool," Danny suggested, still on the phone with Duke. Danny waved a hand at no one. "No, we don't know if a shark is missing. We need someone who knows what's supposed to be here and what's not. Can you find out who we need to call?"
Steve went back to the quarantine room while waiting on Duke and Danny to get it figured out. None of the cabinets had been pried open. Files were still neatly stacked on a counter in the back of the room.
His boot squeaked.
He crouched down and touched the concrete floor. Wet. Water droplets led back to an empty quarantine tank with tea colored water and pvc pipe hiding holes. Nothing around the tank gave any hint as to what had been in it, if anything. Whatever it was must have been relatively small, as the tank didn't look bigger than fifty gallons, compared to some of the much larger plastic bins with extensive filtration systems snaking out of them.
Danny stood in the doorway. "Well, Duke said the head marine biologist is on his way over to try to catalog things. What do you think was so important that they decided to break in and then tried to shoot two cops?"
Steve stood up without a word.
Danny nodded. "See, my money's on it being one of those rank smelling oysters we gave the one marine biologist a couple months ago. Maybe someone finally cracked one open and found a Dragon Eye Pearl, and then those guys got word of it and made off with the rest of them, and now those two knuckleheads are rich as kings."
"Doesn't smell in here," he said.
Danny sniffed. "Yeah, well, maybe actual fish people know how to take care of them so they don't stink up the whole office."
Steve bent over the open tea colored water and inhaled.
"Don't do that! What if you snort up some waterborne disease or something, huh?"
"It's not saltwater. It's fresh," he said and straightened up. He pressed his tongue to the roof of his mouth. "Very earthy water."
"Huh. Guess that rules out the oysters, then, doesn't it?" Danny said.
Steve let Danny fill the next ten minutes with more theorizing while HPD seized security footage and they waited on the head marine biologist to show up. When he did show up, he was frazzled and wary looking with a blue polo shirt with the aquarium logo and tan slacks on.
"I never thought I'd see the day armed gunmen broke into the aquarium after hours," he muttered. "Gentlemen. Commander McGarrett and Detective Williams, I'm assuming?"
He shook their hands. "Nigel Short, head marine biologist here at the aquarium. I think you met my partner back in the late spring when you had some interesting oysters."
"Yes, we remember her. That's actually what we were wondering. Could they have been here for the oysters? Thinking they were rare with Dragon Eye Pearls inside of them?" Danny asked.
Nigel ran his hands through his mop of curly hair. "If they were, they missed them by about a month. We shipped them to California for further study."
Steve shook his head. "These guys knew the layout of the place. They would have known the oysters had been moved."
"I guess I better call some of my interns and we can start doing a walk through," Nigel said. "I'm just glad they didn't shoot any of the display tanks. They're actually built to withstand a bullet, but…"
Steve narrowed his eyes as Nigel trailed off and his gaze wandered to behind Steve.
"Did you touch that tank?"
Steve followed his finger to the tank with the tea colored water. "No. This door was open when we swept back here. We haven't touched anything."
"No, no, no, no, no," Nigel murmured and kneeled in front of the tank. He grabbed a net hanging from a bucket underneath the tank's stand and poked at the pvc pipes within the tank. Nothing happened.
"What was in that tank?" Steve questioned.
Nigel looked up at him with wide eyes. "Amazonian River Eels. Thought to be close relatives to the Black Dragon Eel."
Steve's stomach twisted.
Danny threw up a hand. "Why couldn't it have been oysters?"
Next time on "Dragons", there's safety in numbers, even for dragons.
Ehehehehehe, I may be slow, but I've got things going. Sorry about the slowness. I keep saying I hope I'll get back to quicker chapters, but I just don't know. I am excited about these upcoming ones, though, so I hope you are, too.
Thank you for reading and reviewing! I hope I can keep entertaining you guys for as long as I can!