The Forensics team had been called in and was on their tail, but Steve McGarrett wasn't about to wait and neither were Chin or Kono. Steve barely waited for the engine of his car to shut off before he was dashing into the apartment building where Danny made his home.

Neighbors stared as the trio dashed up the steps, intent on their destination. At the top of the stairs, Steve stopped his team. "Forensics," he warned. "Let's not destroy any evidence."

The corridor to Danny's apartment was empty and bare, without even so much as a stray bag of trash to mar the length of the hall. Even the bulbs in the corridor lights had been replaced; Steve remembered Danny complaining just last week that three had gone out at one time, and that the maintenance people were on Island Time to fix the problem. Kono had giggled at the analogy.

She wasn't giggling now.

"Whatever happened here, there wasn't a struggle," Steve noted. "Even the paint's intact on the wall. Nobody slammed up against it."

"Scratches on the lock."

"Door's unlocked." Kono pushed at the door handle gingerly, using the edge of her tee to prevent smudging any possible fingerprints. She toed the door open, peering inside. "Danny?"

Steve slipped past her, forcing himself to remain calm. No dead bodies on the carpet. No blood. "Danny! Danny, you in here?"

Chin too peered in. "Nothing overturned. Whatever happened, it wasn't violent."

"I don't think he ever walked inside." Steve examined the surroundings, paying particular attention to the door frame. "There's nothing in the kitchen, he didn't throw anything onto the sofa. No food on the counter."

"Nothing in the bedroom." Kono emerged from her own inspection. "The bed's still made, and the alarm clock was never set to get him up for noon. It's still on seven AM." She too looked around, puzzled. "Why? Did whoever it was take him outside the apartment? Why did they leave the door unlocked?"

"Bait," Steve decided grimly. "They knew that Danny would notice the unlocked door, would be focused on the interior of his place. They went in behind him, and took him out."

"They had to have surprised him," Chin agreed. "Otherwise, there would have been gunplay, and someone would have called 911."

"Scenario," Steve said, thinking out loud. "Hanolo—and let's assume that it's him until proven otherwise—Hanolo talks to the lawyers that he arranged with chump change. He decides that without a couple of inconvenient witnesses, the case is going nowhere. So he decides to take out the witnesses."

Chin wasn't so sure. "That's moving awfully fast, even for Hanolo. Wasn't he still dragging his lawyers out of bed at that hour?"

Kono frowned. "Steve, that doesn't make sense. Why Danny? You'd think he'd take a crack at me. I'm the one who saw him with the knife."

Steve had the answer for that. "You never went home last night, Kono."

"What…oh." Her voice trailed off, and she looked entirely too young for Steve McGarrett's conscience at the moment. Why had he ever taken a rookie onto one of the most dangerous assignments on the islands?

Because she's a damn good cop, despite her youth, whispered back a little voice inside. How old were you when you enlisted? Younger than she is now.

Steve shoved away the thoughts that interfered, chief among them the whereabouts of his partner. "He's alive," he said grimly. "If Hanolo intended to have Danny killed, we'd have found the body right here." On the carpet. Blood soaking into the fibers.

Chin seized on that. "So he wants Danny alive. Why?"

"He's trying to frighten me into refusing to testify," Kono realized. "He wants me to think that he'll do the same thing to me."

"He will do the same thing to you, cuz, and worse if you give him the chance," Chin told her. He turned to Steve. "What do we do now? How do we get Danny back?"

"Good question. The next move is up to Hanolo. Or, rather, his people." Steve listened to the noise outside the apartment. "Sounds like Forensics has arrived." He paused. "I'm sending some of them over to your place, Kono. Give them a key; I want them to check it out."

"I'll go with them." Kono started to move.

Steve halted her. "No. I want you back at Headquarters, waiting for the D.A. Chin, you go with her. Take the car. I'll catch a lift from the Forensics guys when I'm done."

"You got it, boss." Chin held out his hand for the keys. "I'll drive."

"Not a chance," Kono butted in. "I'm driving. You're on drugs. Steve, what are you going to be doing?"

"I'm going to check out the neighborhood. See if anyone saw anything." He jerked his head at them. "You two move along. I'll talk to Forensics."

Steve watched them head down the stairs, pausing only briefly to exchange grim hellos with the uniformed Forensics team. He too headed for the lead examiner. "Terry, I want everything you can come up with, no matter how small. Send another team to Kono's place; I think whoever did this wanted her too but didn't realize that she spent the night taking care of Chin."

"You got it, Steve." The forensics team leader motioned to the rest of the squad behind to move in. "You get this bastard, Steve. Danny—I owe him one. A big one."

"You do?" Something else that Steve didn't know about his partner.

"Yeah. He got me this gig. I needed to get out of where I was, and he put in a recommendation for me." The Forensics team leader looked away. "You get him back safe, Steve, no matter what it takes. We'll get you the evidence you need to find him."

"Thanks." There was a story there. Steve resolved that he would find his partner and ask him. You can't ask him if he's dead.

So I won't let him be dead.

He stepped onto the bright street, seeing Kono and Chin across the way, getting into Steve's car.

He saw something else, too: the glint of sunshine on metal.

It could have been anything. It could have been a stray sunbeam bouncing off a streetlamp. It could have been the flicker of a neon light, or the glint of a window pane, or even a shiny gum wrapper dancing down the street ahead of a breeze.

It wasn't. Steve knew it as soon as he saw it. He didn't need to identify the rest in order to yell out a warning.

"Gun!"

Chin heard and reacted. He barreled into his cousin, knocking her to the dusty road.

A bullet smashed through the car window, just behind where Kono's head had been positioned.

Defense. Steve exploded into action. Crossfire, so that his people could get under cover. Steve aimed at the point where the shot had come from, knowing that his handgun didn't have nearly the range it needed to do the job.

Not the point; he needed to give Kono time to pull Chin back behind the vehicle. Steve pulled the trigger three times, sending bullets flying back at the gunman, afraid to look at his people. Chin was rolling on the ground in agony; had he been hit once more? Would this one be fatal? "Kono!" he yelled.

"Go after him!" she yelled back. "I've got him!"

Too late—Steve heard the roar of a 'cycle from the back alley, and knew that it was the gunman. He halted in his tracks, grinding his teeth in frustration. More evidence to sift through, but no Danny Williams. Steve would put Terry and crew onto it in hopes that it would lead somewhere promising but that would have to wait for something more important.

Steve made his long legs carry him to Kono's car, heart in his mouth with fear. "Chin?"

Panting but no fresh blood, and Kono wouldn't be holding her cousin in her arms that way if she thought that he was about to die. "I'm…okay…Steve." Chin hung onto his damaged arm as though afraid it would fall off.

Maybe it would. "I'm calling for an ambulance."

"No," burst out of Chin. "No, we need to get Kono back some place safe," he insisted. "Steve, that gunman was aiming for her! It's her that they want, not me!"

Chin had a point; a very good point. Steve cast a worried glance around their surroundings, threat-assessing automatically. "Yeah," he said slowly. "Yeah, you're right. He was aiming for Kono." He focused on her. "Let's get Chin into the car and back to Headquarters." Let one of the local beat cops try to stop them for driving with a broken window.

"I'm okay, Steve," Chin insisted, trying to put his arm back into its sling and stopping as it told him in no uncertain terms that movement was out of the question. Kono held on tightly to him, clearly wondering what she could do.

Steve hooked his hands underneath Chin's arms, bodily lifting him to his feet—and pausing as Chin realized that standing up was beyond his capabilities. "Get the door, Kono," he ordered, and together the two of them maneuvered the third member of their team into the car, safely off of his feet. Steve scanned the man's face, wondering if he ought to insist that the man head back to the hospital.

No, this time Chin could do without. The lines of pain were etched deep, but nothing that a couple of little white pills with an attitude couldn't handle and it didn't look as though there was any more damage from Chin's heroic dive to save his cousin. All the man needed was some time to get beyond the pain. Kono too stood there, biting her lip, worried about him. Steve, however, needed to get her back to the safety of Headquarters where a stray sniper couldn't get to her.

The facts scurried through Steve's brain as he drove, Kono scanning the exterior for any additional threats. Hanolo had moved fast, faster than Steve could give him credit for. Hanolo was an island boy, a bully, and he'd bullied his way into an illegal fortune, but he wasn't the smartest card in the deck. No, this ploy smacked of someone else pulling the strings, someone else who had as much or more to lose if Hanolo went down.

That meant that Hanolo was fronting for someone. Question was: who?

He'd put Chin on that angle, figuring out what some of the power shifts were among Hawaii's underground. The man could do that sitting down, and right now off his feet was the best position for the man to be in. Steve spared a guilty glance for his team member in the car seat next to him. He should never have allowed the man to come into Headquarters, even with Kono playing chauffeur. Going to a crime scene, to Danny's apartment, had been a worse error in judgment, never mind that Steve McGarrett needed Chin's eyes to ferret out the clues that Steve himself would miss.

"Like you had a choice?" Chin never opened his eyes.

Hell, was the man psychic? "Yeah, I had a choice. I could have sent your ass back home, where it belongs."

Chin didn't move anything except his mouth. "And right about now you'd be scraping Kono up off of the pavement, bro."

He had a point, not that Steve was about to admit it. He caught sight of Kono in the back seat via the rear view mirror, hunched down and staring at the scenery as though the sniper had repositioned himself along the route. That too is a possibility, Steve-my-boy. Let's see, what did the engine of that 'cycle sound like? Kawasaki? Nope; too light. Harley hog, maybe.

There were a lot of parked motorcycles along the road, and each one sent a shiver down Steve's spine. It had been so close for Kono!

And he still had the very realistic possibility of a job opening on his team.

This wasn't the first time he'd gotten the crap beaten out of him, and he didn't like it any better this go around.

To say that Danny Williams hurt was like saying that Steve McGarrett was athletic: accurate but it left out an entire mountain of magnitude. His newest and greatest pain-in-the-ass partner wasn't merely active but took positive joy in doing things the hard way. Not only that, Steve McGarrett usually found a way to drag Danny along for the bumpy and bruised ride.

Danny had once—and once, only—tried to shift position from where Hanolo's boys had dumped him. The resultant discomfort—yeah, he liked that word: discomfort. It made this whole ordeal sound so much less than what it was—the discomfort had left him writhing in agony, and suggested that there were things inside him that were broken and best left in peace to heal.

Mainland haole knew what he was doing. That was the bastard who was running things right now, with Hanolo as his mouthpiece. Cutler, that was the man's name. Come to think of it, Rachel had a cousin named Cutler, flew in for the wedding, and Danny hadn't liked him either. Probably some sort of distant relation. Kono had pegged the haole right from the beginning, seeing him as the only one of Hanolo's crowd that knew what he was doing.

Didn't know where the hell they'd taken him, either. Just some place out of the city. They'd tied him up good, stuck him in the trunk of their car, and drove for like half an hour, maybe longer. It was dawn when they'd stopped, and Danny hadn't had much of chance to look at the scenery outside before they hustled him into this shanty. All he could tell was that the neighbors weren't within earshot. How did he know that? Because he shouted a couple of times, before Cutler and a couple of others broke some more ribs. Nobody came to investigate, and Cutler didn't seem too worried about it.

Damn, he hurt! And what hurt most of all was that—assuming that he made it out of this alive—he wouldn't be able to see his daughter for a couple of weeks. One look at his face and she'd run screaming out of the room, and it would take at least those two weeks to persuade Rachel that allowing Grace to visit him wasn't going to cause irreparable psychological damage. An image of his daughter's face floated in front of his mind's eye like a rope for a drowning man to hang onto, and he held onto it for all he was worth.

Keep safe, Grace. Daddy's coming home. It may take me a little while, but I won't leave you.