"Mom, I told you, I can't pick up Noah from school. I'm at work. I don't get off for another two hours," I said as I stacked boxes in the storeroom. I held my cell phone away from my ear so I didn't have to listen to my mother chewing me out at full volume. I didn't like working at the Git-n-Go gas station, but I needed to keep my job, and that meant not skipping out on shifts even when my family needed me. I was done listening to the nagging. "Bye." Click. I shoved my phone back into my pocket, hoping to avoid a lecture from Mr. Callahan, who threatened unemployment to anyone caught using their phone during a shift.
I heard a chime as the door in the front of the station opened up.
"Can I help you?" I heard Mr. Callahan ask from behind the counter.
It was that fast.
Before I knew what was going on, I heard the deafening plug of a gunshot. My eyes opened wide with terror and darted around the room, looking for something - anything - that I could use to defend myself, but I could find nothing of use. Paralyzed, I stood in the storeroom as I heard someone rummaging around in the front of the store, then a low, grisly grunt and footsteps gradually getting closer. Too close.
Summoning every ounce of nerve I contained, I slowly looked up. An ominous dark figure had instantaneously appeared in the doorframe. Due to the ski mask covering his face, the only feature of this intruder I could make out was a Japanese-style tattoo; that was the last glimpse of him I managed before he grabbed me by the arm and vehemently wrapped a blindfold around my head.
The blunt muzzle of a handgun nudged me in the back of the head.
"Walk."
Detective Danny Williams turned on his heel and started for the tech board in the middle of the Five-0 task force headquarters, followed by Commander McGarrett. "What have we got? What is it this time?" They joined Kono and Chin Ho, who were already typing furiously on computers, organizing evidence.
"We've got what appears to be a hit on the owner of a gas station just outside the city," answered Kono. "But that's not all. He wasn't the only one at the station. Watch," she said, as she pressed play on the computer, and a glitchy black and white surveillance tape showed a stocky but diminutive masked man entering the station through its sliding glass doors. Within seconds, he drew a Beretta from the holder at his waist, aimed, and gunned down the man behind the register.
"No hesitation. Looks like he's been in the business for a while."
The victim slumped to the floor; a pool of blood emerged below him, his open eyes blank and vacant. The intruder wasted no time - he bent down, searching through unseeable items behind the counter and finally picking up a leather purse. Standing up straight, he examined it - alarm washed over his angular face for no longer than a second before he sauntered off to the back of the store and out of sight of the camera.
Moments later, he emerged from the back room, forcing in front of him a blindfolded, dazed girl, no older than 17, and prodding her forward with his handgun.
"Look at his arm," remarked Chin Ho. Barely visible was a dark tattoo of a dragon, winding around his forearm. They looked back to the screen.
The assassin clutched his mask with one hand and wrenched it off of his head. He looked directly into the camera with an air of defiance, his teeth clenched, as if to say, "I dare you. I dare you to contest me." His ghastly, hollow, sunken features bore deeply into the lens of the security camera.
The tape faded with a sputter.
"What - what was that? He just - He looked straight into the camera. Took off his mask and..." mused Danny.
Steve McGarrett looked up. "Maybe he wants us to find him."