CHAPTER 18

Wednesday afternoon, temporary Five-0 offices:

Danny was frustrated.

Not to mention that he had the headache of all headaches. While he could potentially attribute that to caffeine overload, he knew it was just a reaction to the stress. The strain was becoming disturbingly familiar.

As much as he wanted to blame his partner for not taking his concerns seriously, he knew he would have never been able to stop McGarrett from living his life. Especially after everything he had just been through.

Steve McGarrett had always been stubborn, obnoxious even, but Danny knew what lay beneath his friend's tough-guy facade. McGarrett was a man that genuinely knew nothing other than to put himself beneath all others. He was a man that would stop at nothing to protect those closest to him. A man that would willingly take the problems of the world on his shoulders if he thought it would spare others pain.

Danny prowled the small office space in endless circles, his phone clenched tightly in his hand as he waited anxiously for news from Catherine about the Ortiz file. The complete silence and lack of anything to do was driving him mad.

He had spent the last two hours rummaging through Ortiz's background, trying to find anything that would explain how he could have been involved in Steve's disappearance. Aside from the older brother's military background, there was nothing that connected McGarrett and Ortiz. At least, not electronically.

For all Danny knew, Steve could have been best friends with the guy. Not that Steve would ever tell confirm that. The stubborn man hid personal information like a squirrel safeguarded nuts for the winter. His gut told him that while the Ortiz brothers were definitely involved, there was someone else they answered to.

Danny recalled the roses Steve had received in the weeks prior to his disappearance. Instinct told him that was no coincidence. Someone had definitely been watching his partner, following him and waiting for the right moment to make their move.

He threw his body into a chair and rested his chin on his clenched fists. If Steve had just listened to him and taken his advice more seriously…

It was all in the past now. The only thing he could do now was to help find him, but it was hard when they didn't even know who to look for.

The phone in his hand started ringing and Danny answered on the first ring. "Williams," he barked.

"Danny. It's Duke. We've got a situation."

Danny's stomach clenched with fear. He didn't like Duke's tone one bit. "What kind of situation?"

"It's Chin and Kono."

Danny grabbed his keys off the desk and immediately ran out the door, phone held tightly to his ear as Duke relayed the incident to him.

"They were hit by another vehicle on their way back to HPD. There was a shootout and…"

"What, Duke? Are they okay?" Danny asked, hating the desperation that coloured his tone.

"Relatively speaking, they are fine. A bit scraped up but nothing serious. The medics checked them out and cleared them," Duke answered.

Danny blew out a relieved breath. "Okay. Okay. That's good."

"There's something else, Danny."

Danny paused with his hand on the driver's side door and waited for whatever Duke was about to say.

"The suspect is dead."

"How?" Danny asked, although he already suspected the answer to that question.

"Shot in the head."

Danny cursed loudly. It was bad enough that they'd been run off the road, but now a suspect in Five-0's custody had been killed. If tensions between HPD and the taskforce weren't already high enough, then it was about to get ten times worse.

"I've got officers on the scene," Duke relayed.

"Thanks Duke. I'm on my way," Danny answered before he hung up.

As if this day couldn't get any worse.

We have a problem.

The message filled her with anger. She clenched her hand around the phone and seriously contemplated throwing it out the window. Instead, she took a deep, centring breath before dialling.

"Gabe," she said as soon as the phone connected. "I sincerely hope the message I received was an honest mistake."

The man on the other end was quiet for a moment. "I have taken care of it, Becca."

"I'm should hope so. You know what happens when someone doesn't follow the plan, don't you?"

"Yes."

"Good. Besides, I would hate to have to let you go because of a simple mistake. What happened?"

"It's been taken care of," the man on the other end answered.

"You're avoiding the question. What happened?" she growled.

"One of the men involved in the acquisition was picked up by Five-0."

She pulled the phone away from her ear. She wanted to scream. It was too soon. They weren't supposed to get this close. Not yet.

She replaced the device against her ear again. "Did he say anything to the cops?"

"I didn't give him a chance to. He's dead now."

She breathed a sigh of relief. "Make sure you leave no trace and then get back here. We can't take the chance that he may have spilled something." She glanced at the door behind which her lover laid and moved down the hallway before continuing the conversation. "We need to move."

"Give me three hours."

"You can have two," she said as she hung up.

She screamed in frustration and anger. Just when she had everything the way she wanted, the stupid taskforce found a way to mess it all up.

Why didn't they understand that she was only protecting him? He had been on a path of self-destruction until she entered his life. She had known from the first moment she had laid eyes on him that she would be the one to save him from himself.

She would show him how good life could be if he just stopped trying to protect the people he called 'family'. They could never live up to the image of what his aching heart sought. They were unworthy of his devotion.

Those manipulative people had no knowledge of the man they knew as Steve McGarrett. She was the only one that truly understood him. They never cared about him. They only hurt him.

She knew she would be the one to break through his barriers and make him realise he was destined to be with her. He just had to be willing to see it too.

Wednesday afternoon, South Beretania Street:

Kono winced as she flexed her left hand. Pain shot up her arm but it was manageable. She was sitting in the back of an ambulance waiting for the medic to clear her as images of the past twenty minutes flashed before her.

-Flashback-

"CHIN!" she screamed as she saw the bullets tear through the open passenger door.

She raised her head as far as she dared, hoping to catch sight of her cousin. Her need to lay eyes on her cousin was rewarded with an onslaught of metal slugs. Bullets peppered the car and she ducked down before crawling over to the protection of an overturned table near her totalled car.

She checked that her gun was still holstered on her hip; she hadn't had a chance to withdraw the weapon. She unholstered the gun; its weight reassuring in her shaking hands.

She peered over the edge of the wooden table and saw a man approaching her car with a semi-automatic gun in his hands. The dark-eyed man that had run them off the road was inspecting the vehicle.

Kono realised Chin must have exited the vehicle billets started flying, but what about—

BANG!

The sound was loud, more profound in its singularity and closeness. She didn't flinch, but instead rose to her feet, gun raised and then…stood still in shock.

Their suspect lay in a heap against the side of the car; a puddle of blood growing from a hole in his head. Brain matter covered the interior of the car, staining the windows. It wasn't the sight of blood that had Kono unable to move. No, it was the dead, emotionless look in the killer's eyes.

Eyes that she instantly recognised.

The sound of sirens approaching had the man's eyes tearing away from hers darting as he darted off back to the truck and drove away at a speed McGarrett would have been in awe of.

-End flashback-

"Kono?"

The sound of her cousin's voice had her relaxing in an instant. She looked up to see his worried frown. A small white bandage covered the cut on his forehead just above his right eye. He was favouring his right leg; his left was covered in a wide bandage where the stitches he had torn getting out of the car quickly had been replaced.

"You okay?"

Kono nodded when she couldn't open her mouth to speak.

Everything had happened so fast. At first, she'd been terrified that her cousin had been caught by a flying projectile. Now, after assuring herself that he was relatively unscathed, she finally relaxed enough to actually process what had happened.

Their suspect had been killed…murdered. A suspect in their custody, under their protection, had been assassinated before their very eyes. And instead of chasing after the killer, she had frozen. She hadn't done anything except stare into the soulless eyes that had stared back at her.

"Hey, you guys okay?"

She turned her head in the direction of Danny's voice. She sat numbly, letting Chin take over the task of actually answering questions. The flashing of red and blue lights had her zoning out.

"We're okay, Danny. Kono's got a sprained wrist and I tore some of my stitches, but we're fine," Chin replied.

"What happened?" Danny asked, his head swivelling to take in the chaos of the scene.

"We were escorting the suspect back to HPD when we were run off the road by a white truck. As soon as the vehicle stopped moving, we were under fire. I managed to get out and crawl over to the other side of the road where I took cover behind one of the palm trees. We didn't get a chance to get Ortiz out of the car. There were bullets flying everywhere and we couldn't get a shot off. Then he heard sirens and took off in the truck. I didn't get a plate."

"Description of the shooter?" Danny asked, immediately transitioning into cop mode.

"Tall, dark hair, dark eyes. Hispanic," Chin supplied.

"Don't bother getting a sketch artist. I know who it was," Kono surprised herself by answering suddenly. She spotted the identical wide-eyed expressions on her teammate's faces.

"Who?" Chin demanded. Obviously in all the confusion he wasn't able to get a close look at the shooter like she had.

"Gabriel Ortiz," she answered shortly.

"The brother? Are you sure?"

Kono stood up stiffly; the seatbelt had certainly done its job.

She had never been more certain of anything. One look at those dark eyes had been enough to confirm the relationship to their suspect. Samuel Ortiz's brother had killed a member of his own family without hesitation.

"Yeah. I'm positive," she said softly. "And I led Gabriel straight to him."

"It's not your fault Kono," Chin said, placing a soft hand on her shoulder in comfort. "We'll get him."

"I told him to call his brother! How is that not my fault?" she asked before pausing to take a breath. "He was our only lead. How are we supposed to find Steve now?"

"We treat this like any other case and follow the evidence. Ortiz killed his brother for a reason. There has to be something there. Was he able tell you anything?" Danny said, mimicking Steve's no-nonsense attitude.

"He said he was paid by Gabriel to drive the van to the Ko Olina Marina. Gabriel was hired by someone else but Samuel had no idea who. According to the Ortiz, big brother was going to finish the job and then take off for a while," Kono recalled of the conversation they'd had in the auto repair shop.

"Didn't he say something about a girlfriend? Blonde, started with an R?" Chin quizzed.

Kono looked at him incredulously. "Yeah, I recall something about that before a truck became intent on running us off the road!"

Chin ignored her outburst but not before fixing her with a disapproving glare. She knew she had to get a handle on her temper. It wouldn't do them any good right now, especially not when Steve was missing.

Her cousin turned to Danny. "Did you find anything about the brother from Cath yet?"

Danny sighed and ran a hand through his hair. "Still waiting."

It was a waiting game. Kono clenched her fists and the sharp pain in her wrist reminded her that was a bad idea. She was furious. Enraged that her car had been destroyed and angry at herself for letting a killer, one she was now certain was involved in Steve's disappearance, get away. But more than anything, she was disappointed.

They were no closer to finding Steve. After everything that had happened to him, she couldn't stand the thought of more harm being inflicted upon the most selfless man she had ever known.

Steve McGarrett was the kind of person that would seek out immigration papers for a family he had only just met or book a hotel room at a resort with dolphins so his partner's daughter could have a good weekend with the father she saw maybe once a fortnight. He never expected anything in return. He would just do it. All the time.

Then the world, instead of rewarding him, would take his giving nature and literally throw every conceivably horrible thing at him. It wasn't fair! It just…wasn't.

"Let's get back to the office," Danny announced. "Hopefully Catherine will have something by then."

Kono followed behind Chin and Danny, her eyes glued to the ground that still had pieces of glass from her car scattered across the asphalt.

"Hey! Are you just going to leave us with this mess?" a voice called out.

Kono nearly ran into her teammates as they stopped and squared their shoulders. Kono knew without looking that Lieutenant Clarke had arrived on the scene.

"What? McGarrett's gone, so you decide to create your own mayhem in his absence and pray the Governor covers it up?"

A few other HPD officers were standing behind Lieutenant Clarke watching with an eager gleam in their eyes as though they were anticipating a brawl, the outcome of which would win them a goldmine.

"You're all the same. He's tainted you all with his filth. McGarrett's a selfish bastard that only looks out for himself, damn the consequences."

"Kono." She heard the warning in Danny's whispered command. Somehow Danny had sensed her tensing to move. Reluctantly, she bit back her retort and remained behind the two men.

"If you're not careful, you're going to find yourselves in a situation that even the Governor can't save you from," Clarke continued in a scathing tone.

The spike of anger she felt was nothing compared to the desire to smash Clarke's face in. She pushed Danny and Chin aside and got right up in Clarke's face. Despite being significantly taller than her, she knew she could take him in a fight. And how she desperately wanted the chance to do that.

Clarke appeared to be amused by her. "What are you going to do? You know I'm right."

Kono felt her cousin's grip on her bicep and yanked her arm free. "You know what a good cop does, Clarke?"

Clarke looked at her quizzically before crossing his arms over his chest. "I know a good cop wouldn't get a suspect killed on their watch."

There was a general sound of agreement from the surrounding HPD officers.

Kono smiled but otherwise ignored them. "A good cop looks at all the evidence before coming to a conclusion. "You think McGarrett is the problem here? Perhaps you should have looked closer to home."

Clarke took a step closer and growled. "What is that supposed to mean?"

"Did you ever read the autopsy report for Regina Matherson?" Kono was pleased when a confused frown creased the taller man's forehead. "If you had, you would know that she died before her fiancee."

"What does that have to do with anything?" Clarke spat, his face reddening.

"Everything! Your partner was involved with a very dangerous terrorist. He killed Ano Kapule in his cell before we could question him. He set the bombs in the house that nearly killed several us, not to mention several HPD officers. Rogerson put so many people in danger and he paid the ultimate price."

"You are just trying to protect McGarrett. He let Carl die! I knew my partner! He would never—"

"Did you?" Kono challenged. "I mean, did you really know him? Your partner deceived you for months. He kept close watch on all of our cases and fed information back to a terrorist, all while his fiancee was being threatened. He helped orchestrate the kidnapping and torture of the head of Five-0."

"If that's true, then why not just tell us in the first place?" another officer asked.

Kono laughed. Not out of joy, but out of bitter annoyance. "McGarrett made that call."

"Of course he did," Clarke remarked snidely. "So he could create some laughable bedtime story to live with what he did."

"He made that call so that Rogerson could be laid to rest with a clean slate!" Kono yelled, finally saying what should have been said ages ago.

When Clarke didn't say anything back, Kono continued. "If we told anyone, we would have been considered a threat to national security. McGarrett felt it was more important that Carl's name was clear than for everyone to know the truth. So, he let you all think he was a…what did you call him? Oh yeah, a cop killer! All in favour of letting a traitor, a man you worked with every day, rest with a good name."

Kono looked back at Chin and Danny. Chin looked furious, but Danny looked…content? She took a step back from Clarke who had yet to say another word.

"I suggest you think twice next time before you besmirch McGarrett's name. You really have no idea what he's had to go through without you bad mouthing him."

Kono turned on her heel and stalked away from the man, ignoring the whispers from the crowd that had gathered around when the yelling had started.

"You do realise what you've done, right?" Danny asked as he jogged to catch up.

Kono huffed. "Like you wouldn't have done the same thing?"

Kono knew Danny felt exactly the same way about the unjust situation. The Navy had taken charge of the Nazeef situation and they'd all been sworn to secrecy. Clarke's ignorance, however, could only be tolerated for so long.

"Steve's instructions were clear; no one was supposed to know what really happened," Chin scolded.

Kono stopped and turned around to face her cousin. "And look where that got us! We don't have time for petty hurt feelings. Steve is missing! If we don't get HPD on our side, we don't have much chance of finding him."

Danny's lips twitched as he tried to suppress a smile. "You know she's right."

Chin's lips twisted with dislike. Chin was by-the-book and to go against orders was not in his nature. Kono sympathised with her cousin, but she could not stand by as people misjudged McGarrett based on what they thought happened.

The time for avoidance was over. Setting the record straight was just the first step to repairing the taskforce's relationship with HPD.

Now they just had to wait.