Chapter 3

March 2008, Honolulu, Hawaii

Danny had been living in Honolulu for a month now and he still hated having to drop Grace off at school every morning. It wasn't the horrible traffic, or the glare of the sun off the ocean as he drove, nor was it the unholy heat. It was just that some part of him still feared that Rachel would arrive out of nowhere to snatch Grace away from him while she was out of his view at school. He didn't think he could take having his little girl stolen from him. He didn't even like contemplating it. So he didn't. Or at least he tried not to.

The only problem was that he didn't have anything to distract himself with, other than his newest book, the same book that felt like pulling teeth as he wrote it, and his neighbor. Danny wasn't one of the best Detectives in his former prescient for nothing. He knew the man thought he was fishy, that John was spying on him. Danny had known cops like that back in New Jersey. Cops who had been on the force longer than he had been alive, cops who had made enemies who left them constantly looking over their shoulders. That was John McGarrett in a nutshell. It pissed Danny off that John thought he was here to hurt him, that Danny would use his own daughter as a cover to hide some nefarious plot. But Danny understood. He knew that given enough time on the force without Grace there to offer him comfort, he would have eventually turned into John McGarrett.

So Danny gave him some leeway and ignored the spying and the not so well hidden background checks. But today Danny was going to confront John because John bugging his home, bugging Grace's room, crossed the line. It was not acceptable. So Danny dropped Grace off and watched her go inside before turning his car out of the drop off zone in front of the school and back into traffic. With Grace out of the way for eight hours he would be able to confront John on his own terms without having to worry about what would happen to Grace. And if it came right on down to it Danny would willing reveal his secret because he was sure that it was Danny buying the house that got the man's ruff up. It would have peeked Danny's own curiosity if a cop had moved into a house as nice, and expensive, as his new house was.

Trying to decide how to confront John was a concern though. Did he go to John's house, giving the older detective the home field advantage? Or did he invite John into his own home and run the risk of giving John even more access to his home? He didn't like the idea of letting the man into his home after finding the bugs squirreled away in unlikely spots, but he also didn't want to be as comfortable as he would if Danny confronted him in his home. He wanted John on edge to, hopefully, force some answers past his lips. He wanted this resolved before it escalated and Danny was forced to involve the HPD. He didn't want to think of how the HPD would react to a "mainlander" calling in a complaint against one of their own. So far he had only one friend on this God forsaken island, and that was Kailani Kalakaua,his real-estate agent. He wasn't sure he could actually count her even though she had invited Grace and him to her family BBQ this weekend. He was after all one of her clients.

Danny forced his hands to remain on the wheel even though they wanted to push back through his hair in agitation. He was a cop, a father and a responsible driver. He was not going to take his hands off the wheel when he was still getting used to the traffic on the island. He was used to the crazy New Jersey drivers, but Honolulu was a crazy all it's own, and he wasn't willing to tempt fate any further than he already did on a daily basis.

As if thinking about fate brought its attention to him, the blue Honda in the next lane suddenly decided it needed to merge over right this instant and swerved into his lane, nearly taking out the front drivers side of his car. Hitting the brakes and his horn all at once, Danny cursed the other driver out loudly. Ozzy, who had been laying in the back seat, a sad look on his doggy face at leaving Grace behind, gave a panicked bark and jumped to his feet, face plastered to the window to try and see what had riled up his owner. Danny tried to shush him while getting control over his own anger at the near collision.

He wasn't successful.

The two New Jersey natives, one man and one dog, spent the rest of the ride growling at the other drivers. Danny had hoped to be in a better frame of mind when he got home. He didn't want to back his neighbor into a corner while growling at him like a rabid mother Grizzly. That would only make things more difficult. He had hopped to go into this calmly, but that didn't seem to be working.

Danny pulled into his driveway and cut the engine. He sat gripping the steering wheel, breathing deeply in a way that his Mother was always telling him would help. It usually didn't. He had too much of his Father's temper for Lamaze or Yoga breathing to calm him quickly. He would be better off hitting a gym and trying to taking out the heavy punching bags. Only problem there was he hadn't found a gym on the island that he liked yet.

Ozzy whined at him from the back seat, trying to climb into the front and into Danny's lap when Danny didn't immediately open the door to let him out. Danny sighed and helped the old dog into the front, burying his face in Ozzy's neck, breathing in the musky scent of his dog. Ozzy had been with him for years now and was getting old. The Boston Terrier was already 8 years old and Danny wasn't sue how much longer he would last. Not long after the divorce was finalized Danny had witnessed Ozzy having a seizure. Grace and Ozzy had been in the rec room of their little house watching a movie while he was busy in the dinning room filling out paperwork. Grace's terrified screams that day still haunted his nightmares. He didn't think he had ever heard anyone screaming like that outside of a major accident or terrorist event. He had gone running, dropping the pot he had been holding, and when he saw her crouched over Ozzy, too afraid to touch him as his body as it twitched and trashed uncontrollably, as his breathing stopped and his bowls voided, that was almost worse than the sound of her screams. Ozzy had been a part of their family for as long as Grace had been alive. He had, in fact been a congratulations gift from his Mother, who had insisted they have a puppy so they had an idea about what they were getting into with a baby. Danny had loved Ozzy from the first meeting, he had loved the little curly-stubbed tail, the little black diamond shaped spot on his forehead, the little spot like freckles on his belly, and the adorable one-fanged grin as the puppy had squirmed in his arms.

Rachel had thought he was cute too. At least until the first time the puppy had peed on the carpet. Then it seemed she had been over the whole experience.

Ozzy twisted in his grip, leaving a stripe of saliva on his chin as he gave Danny a doggy kiss. His brown eyes seemed to be full of understanding, though Danny was sure he was anthropomorphizing his feelings onto the dog. But it made him feel better to think at least one person here had his back unconditionally and understood what he was feeling. Scratching behind Ozzy's ears, Danny opened the car door, picking Ozzy up and climbing out. Truthfully Ozzy could get out on his own just fine, the car wasn't that high up from the ground, but if he held onto him then Danny didn't have to worry about Ozzy running off into the neighbors yards again.

Ozzy whined and wiggled in his arms, wanting down, but Danny just held on tight and made his way to his front door. His anger was still bubbling just under the surface but, as always, holding onto an animal helped to get him in control. Animals didn't understand your anger wasn't always directed at them, so it forced him to get control and calm down so that he didn't terrorize his own dog.

The front step creaked lightly under his weight, but the yard was otherwise silent. The birds flown away at the first sign of Ozzy in his arms. Juggling his keys around so he could get the house key into the proper grip, Danny took the last few steps across his front lanai to the door. He slipped his key into the lock and walked in, carefully setting Ozzy on the ground as he closed the door. The dog gave a little shake and wandered down the hall towards the living room and the couch he had claimed as his own.

Danny set his keys into the bowl on the side table just in the entry way, before walking further into the house. He had 8 hours until he needed to pick up Grace from school. Eight hours to calm down and confront John. Eight to hopefully find a little peace in his new home.

A creak of a floor board upstairs had Danny freezing in place. He waited, holding his breath, to see if it would happen again. It could just be the old house settling, but it could also be an intruder. He didn't want to call HPD until he was sure. Time seemed to stretch on forever as he waited for any sign that he wasn't alone. His nerves were firing, sending his pulse sky rocketing. When the creak came again, swiftly followed by the almost too quite to hear sound of footsteps upstairs, Danny near jumped out of his skin. He took a deep breath and walked further into the house, carefully looking in the rooms as he went, checking to see if anyone besides whoever was upstairs, was in the house. The rooms were empty save for Ozzy and him. And the dog was already fast asleep in the sun. Glancing back down the hall at the stairs, Danny pulled out his cell and called 9-1-1, quietly giving his address, his name, and that he had an intruder on the upper floor of his house, that he suspected only one perp but did not have visual confirmation on the numbers. The operator calmly advised a nearby unit was being dispatched and recommended he vacate his home. Danny snorted at that and told her he was a Detective from New Jersey, that he could handle this fine on his own but didn't want to step on any toes.

He was honestly a little amused by the surprised quiet on the other end of the line that followed his proclamation. The operator regained her control fairly quickly though and confirmed that a plain clothes Detective Meka Hanamoa was in the area and would be arriving shortly. She, of course, tried to convince him, again, to leave the house. Danny just quietly laughed and told her he had faced worse things than a single, possibly unarmed, thief, before hanging up the phone.

He probably had five, maybe ten minutes, before this Detective Hanamoa arrived.

Carefully he made his way to his office and the gun safe hidden in the storage closet. It wasn't his normal service weapon, but his back-up should do well for now. Hell, if he knew more about what was waiting upstairs he could just take the aluminum baseball bat that was also in the closet. But he didn't know and he wasn't willing to take unnecessary risks when he had Grace to think about. Of course in his head the sound of his Mother's voice was berating him about not leaving leaving the house until back-up arrived was a stupid risk, but Danny ignored the voice as he had been doing since he was sixteen, and moved with the best stealth he could muster, towards the stairs.

He paused on the stairs again, listening, but could only make out the sounds of a single person moving quietly through the rooms upstairs. When the sounds moved further from the stairs he quickly made his way up the last steps.

Peeking around the corner edge of the stairs, Danny checked the open space between the stairs and the upstairs rooms. All was clear.

Taking a deep breath, Danny centered himself, lifted his weapon and moved to his left and the open door into the master bedroom. He could hear a light shuffling, but nothing that would suggest the intruder was moving from one place to another. Inching his way around the door frame, Danny cast a quick glance into the walk in closet and the bathroom, noting both were empty, before darting the the wall separating the closet and the bedroom. Carefully looking around the walls edge he was his intruder standing by his bed, sorting through some of his loose belongings and…

Shit.

Danny silently cursed as he watched the figure flipping through a stack of loose computer paper. He forgot he had brought the latest chapter of his book upstairs with him last night, rather than place it in the desk drawer safe with the other chapters. He had wanted to re-read it to try and figure out where to go and what to fix before he continued on with it. He never showed unfinished drafts to anyone, except his sister Katie. Even then it was only because she would break in when he wasn't home and read it herself if he didn't just hand it over the next time he saw her. But this…this was a stranger who had broken into his home. His hand tightened on the but of his gun, aching to fire off a shot after holding the gun up for so long.

Stepping into the room Danny addressed the intruder in his best Cop Voice. "Hands where I can see them."

The intruder froze, his back still facing Danny, and raised his arms. He wasn't dressed like a burglar. He was in a pair of khakis, flip-flops and a blue plaid shirt.

"Turn around. Slowly," demanded Danny.

As the intruder turned around, Danny found himself a little surprised to realize it was his neighbor, John McGarrett. True the man must have broken in before to plant the bugs, but somehow Danny hadn't really believed he'd do it again. Perhaps that was a folly on his part, giving too much credit to the older detective.

"What do you think you're doing," Danny growled. When John didn't answer right away, Danny felt his temper flair. "I've had enough of this shit, McGarrett. I haven't done jack to you! Why the Hell do you feel the need to treat me like a suspect in a murder investigation? Huh? What on this God forsaken island crawled up your ass and polluted your brain matter with ideas that I am some evil super villain bent on taking over this pineapple infested Hell hole?"

John McGarrett blinked stupidly in shock for a moment, before clearing his throat. "No cop on his own salary could afford to move from New Jersey to Hawaii and buy a house like this."

"Is that it? That's the only reason your staking me out like I'm a mafioso hitman?" Danny lowered his gun but did not holster it. "You are a paranoid son of bitch. You know that? You been watching my house, running background checks on me, talking to my former partners and the Judge from my divorce case. And now you're bugging my home and breaking in? I don't get you! What the ever loving fuck have I done to you? Nothing! I've been a damn good neighbor! But I swear to God -"

"I never bugged your house."

"-if you...What?"

McGarrett looked at him a little confused, then after glancing back at the papers he had been reading, and back to Danny, the confused look turned into worry. "I never bugged your house. This is the first time I've been in it."

"Seriously? That is what you are going with? Who else would bug my house?" Danny glared at the other man, his leg muscles twitching with the need to pace. "You seem to be the only person on this pineapple infested hell hole that seems to have some weird stalker thing going on with me. I have been nothing but pleasant to the people of this island, and to you. Nobody has a reason -"

"Except for you living next to me." A light seemed to click on in McGarrett's brain, causing Danny to pause in his ranting. "You moved in next to me. You are a cop who moved into a mansion next to me. So, anyone watching me would check you out in case you could be a problem. They would have found the same information I did. That you are a divorced cop from New Jersey whose income doesn't seem like it should allow you to buy this house."

"People are watching you," asked Danny. "Of course they are." Sighing Danny gestured to the papers he normally so carefully hide. "You read those?"

"Some." John let the tension in his shoulders relax. "These are how you could buy the house."

"Yeah. I write under a pseudonym. They've been decently successful."

"Fantasy mysteries..." John reached down to gather the papers together when a voice shouted at them from the entry way of the room.

"Nobody move! Hands were I can see them!"

Danny spun about, his hand holding the gun swinging up to point at the threat coming from behind. "Who are you," he demanded.

"I am Detective Hanamoa of the HPD. Drop the gun and put your hands in the air."

"This is my house and I will not lower my weapon until you show me your badge."

Detective Hanamoa glanced at his partner standing behind the short blond haole. When John nodded it was okay, Meka relaxed enough to slowly reach into his pocket and pull out his badge. Flipping it open he showed it to the blond man who gave it a thorough once over before holstering his gun.

"I got a call about an intruder in your home, Mr. Williams," Detective Hanamoa stated.

"Yeah. Turns out it was my neighbor. Everything is fine."

"John?"

"I'm fine, Meka. Danny and I have been talking. Chin and you have been right, I've been a paranoid S.O.B."

Meka smiled warmly, holstering his own weapon. "Glad to see you finally got some sense knocked into you." Turning to face Danny again, Meka held out his hand. "I'm Meka Hanamoa. This jerks newest partner and his voice of reason, common sense and sanity."

Danny snorted. "Looks like you've got your work cut out for you."

"Brah, you have no idea. Glad you convinced him you don't have some secret plot to take over the world."

"God no! Why would I want to do that? I have to deal with enough paper work with both my jobs already." Danny took Meka's hand, shaking it firmly. "He like this all the time?"

"Pretty much."

"Hey," John snapped.

"Brah, it's true. Chin will totally back me up on this."

"Well them," Danny waved the other detectives towards the door. "Why don't we all go downstairs and have a beer. I have feeling I'm gonna need it after this conversation."

- - - H50 - - - H50 - - - H50 - - -

Roberto and I did what all good cops do when faced with a spare moment in the middle of the day - we went looking for a good cafe. Just around the corner on Dennis Street was The Frog & Peach. Not that long ago if you had wanted to eat here you would have had to pay a kid to watch your car for you, even if it was a police cruiser. Even after all these years and a change of hands, the F&P had maintained its status as a Jersey standard-bearer. It wasn't a place Roberto and I stopped at often, since most of day was spent working leads and jumping from one case to the next. But when you had time to actually sit and eat, it was a good place to be. The hulking bar inside was still there same as it had been when you were more likely to find crack pipes on the street than hipsters, even if the food ran more towards American Classic than French now.

Roberto had grown up in the neighborhood and had been the first person to take me here. I may have been skeptical at first, remembering the reputation the neighborhood had had for so long, but the owners and their chef had been more than capable of converting me to they're way of enjoying food. The first meal had impressed me so much that I had taken my ex-wife Elizabeth here for our first date all those years ago.

Roberto led the way to a booth at the back, waving over his favorite waitress and ordering us a drink and the peach carpaccio with duck confit, baby arugula and spiced almonds, before I could even ask for a menu.

"How do you do it," I asked.

"Do what?"

"Continue on like the world is still the same as it was the day before."

I took a long drink of my iced tea and waited. Roberto smiled and sipped his own drink. "Once you cross this particular threshold there is no going back," he said. "All that's left is going forward."

"I just lost my wife to the Vampire Syndicate. My baby girl is showing signs of not being completely a flatscan, and our last assignment together before the move had me see a man throw his 3 month old baby off the roof of his duplex before cutting his face off and jumping off after." I sighed, pushing a hand back through my hair. "If there's a rational reason for that, I want to know. If there's even a slim sliver of a chance he wasn't responsible for his actions, I've got to know. Because that would mean we could stop it from happening again."

"Well then, it looks like our final case together isn't over yet." Roberto smiled and dabbed his napkin at the side of his mouth.

- - - H50 - - - H50 - - - H50 - - -

"You wrote this," asked Meka.

"Yeah." Danny nodded and took a drink from his beer.

"You know," Meka mused. "I think my wife has read this series. The names sound familiar and I swear she was talking with one of her girlfriends about the book and something call Robertill?"

Danny groaned and shook his head. "Robertill is what the fans call their slash pairing of the two main characters when they write fanfiction."

"Slash? Fanfiction," asked John, more than a little confused.

"Fans of the series sometimes write their own stories using these characters, which they post online for other fans to read. This is called fanfiction. Slash is a type of pairing or relationship between characters in fanfiction. By calling the pairing a Slash pairing, the fanfiction author is letting other fans know that the romantic relationship in the fanfiction is of a homosexual nature. And Robertill is the name fans have given the slash pairing of my characters Detective Roberto Alvarez and Detective William Tate."

John whistled. "I'm not sure I'm ever going to understand the younger generation."

Meka laughed and slapped his partner on his back. "You don't have to. It's not like you own a computer, or even use one outside of work."

"Fine. Fine." John waved the problem of slash and fanfiction away. He wasn't likely to have to deal with it in any event. "Anyway, Danny, you said you started writing these books because of your partner?"

"I did. Alberto Gutierrez, was my first partner when I reached Detective status. Some of our first case were, well, they were the things of nightmares. Mafia hits, patricide, and even a serial killer. I was having a hard time dealing with the emotions the cases were triggering in me and he gave me this old leather journal and told me that if I wasn't going to talk about it to him or someone else that I better damn well write out what I was internalizing so that it didn't eat me up."

"How did that journal turn into a series of paranormal mysteries," inquired Meka.

"My younger sister, Katie. She is a nosy little thing. Gets it from our Mom of course." Danny chuckled before standing and walking to a picture hanging on the wall. Carefully he took it down and passed it over to Meka. "She's the tall blond to my left in the picture."

"She's very pretty," Meka said as he handed the picture to John.

"Yeah, she is. Anyway, she was snooping around my apartment one day while I was at work and she found the journal I had started writing in. By this point I had long since changed the way I was writing out my feelings. Instead of it just being a standard diary, I was writing about my cases as if they were fictional stories. Apparently she loved them. So one day she took several of the journals into her office and showed them to her boss."

"Her boss," questioned John.

"She had been working as a editor for a publishing company for about two years by that point. She usually handled fantasy books, but when she brought those in her boss let her be my editor. Hell, she had all the paperwork done and illustrators working on covers before she even told me she had read my journals!" Danny snorted, smiling fondly at the thought. "Definitely our mother's daughter."

John chuckled. "She sounds like a feisty young woman."

"That she is. But she has been a good sister to me. I don't think I would have custody of Grace if it wasn't for her. The judge was waffling back and forth over the matter. He thought I would be the better parent to have custody but he was worried about my income. Rachel made so much more in her job than I did as a cop. Her salary went towards a lot of our bills. Most of mine went to Grace."

"Your ex-wife didn't know about your writing," stated John.

"Got it in one. I was putting most of my money into a savings account for Grace to cover he college funds, some of the rest went into helping my parents fix up their house, and the rest weren't into the original savings account my sister set up for me when she created my pseudonym for the books. I never really thought about it much, so it never really popped into my head to tell Rachel about the account." Danny took another drink of his beer, and leaned back in the chair. "I asked the Judge for an aside in private and gave him the paperwork that Katie had drawn up showing that I was working for her publisher under a pseudonym and that I had more than enough money saved up to raised Grace."

"I see. I was wondering about what you could have told the Judge." Meka smirked at Danny who was chuckling. "Sorry about all that."

"It's no problem. Hell, if I didn't have Grace, I would probably be John in twenty years."

"Hey! No reason to be mean," John said with a weak glare.

The two younger detectives chuckled and for the next half an hour they continued to chat about Danny's time in New Jersey, his family and his move to Oahu. The talk for that time was fairly light hearted but Danny knew it couldn't really stay that way for long. If John and Meka hadn't been the ones to plant the bugs in his home then someone else had had. That needed to be addressed soon. he didn't like the idea of an unknown person monitoring him and Grace. The thought of why someone was watching him caused an icy vise to form around his heart. He had promised to protect Grace the first time he held her in his arms, and he had done his very best to do so every damn day of her life so far. He would not let someone else take her from him, or endanger her. He would not.

"John, earlier you said that someone was watching you," asked Danny.

"I did." john set his beer down, his face suddenly very serious looking. "Several years back, when my boy Steve was just 16, I had been very close to proving that Hiro Noshimura was the head of the Yakuza here in Hawaii. I had nearly all the evidence needed to put him, his brother and several other government officials behind bars. I just needed a bit more evidence to get them beyond doubt when they killed my wife. They had placed a bomb in my car and it just happened one day that she borrowed mine when hers broke down."

"Oh, Jesus," Danny whispered.

"She died because of me. They made sure to let me know that they didn't care if they took out innocents to get me." John swallowed thickly. "The day we put her in the ground I found a note in Steve's room attached to another bomb. This one without a fuse. They were making sure I knew they could get me or my kids any time."

"So you backed off," stated Danny.

"I did. For a while, at least. I sent my kids away to the mainland. My son to my friend Commander Joe White, and my daughter to her Aunt Deb. It near killed me to do so, but I couldn't risk keeping them here in the line of fire."

"I understand. I think I would have done the same to protect Grace. Though it would be hard and I am sure she would hate me -"

"It would still be better for them to be alive and hate you, than dead but loving you," John finished.

"Yeah. It's a hell of a choice, John. I'm sorry you had to make it."

"Me too, Danny. Me too." For a long time John was silent. his mind pulled back into a time that was growing hazy in his memory. A time when his life had been near perfect. A time when he had the love of his kids, and his wife at his side. "I got a letter from an old contact a few years ago. They had found some information that said I could still be in danger from a Chinese boogyman by the name of Wo Fat. They didn't know why, only that he had ties to the Yakuza here in Hawaii."

"You think he's whose watching you, and now me?"

"I do."

"Why?"

"I'm not sure. All I have been able to dig up so far is that he has taken an interest in Hawaii and has been getting his fingers into some very big pots. I had no information on him until he started looking into me. No reason for him to be interested other than checking to see that I hadn't reopened my case against Noshimura."

"But you hadn't."

"Correct."

"I take it that you are working the case again though," asked Danny.

"I am. My kids are grown and capable of protecting themselves. They haven't spoken to me in years, so Noshimura and this Wo Fat fellow should have no reason to go after them now."

"And you think he's watching me to see if he could pull me."

"Pull you," questioned Meka.

"Sorry. English slang. It's usually used to talk about a guy hooking up with a woman. Pulling her out of her group of friends to do so. In his case it would be one of these two trying to hook me and pull me into their organization."

"Ah." Meka nodded and looked back to John, who was also nodding.

"That is exactly what I think."

"So," Danny and John watched each other for several moments. "You want to pull me now too."

"Your help would be great. I don't trust many of the other guys in HPD. I've found too much evidence that the Yakuza has a mole inside. I just haven't been able to find out who yet, and I know that Noshimura has his hooks in Governor Jamison already."

"You want me undercover with whoever approaches me here?"

"No." John looked at his hands, a look of sadness and regret filling his eyes. "The HPD is pushing me to retire this year." Meka looked up startled and was about to interrupt, but John shushed him. "I need someone else inside HPD with Meka to dig up any evidence we can find to get the mole and any other dirty cops that may be working for the Yakuza, Triads, Samoans or this Wo Fat fellow."

"Hmmm." Danny leaned back further in his chair, looking up at his ceiling as his fingers tapped together. "I am a little bored just sitting around here writing, and I don't like the idea of these powerful criminal organizations showing interest in Grace. I became a cop to protect people and I can't just ignore what you've brought to me."

"You'll do it," asked Meka.

"I will. I'll put in my request for a transfer to HPD tomorrow."

John let out a long sigh of relief and leaned forward to grab Danny's hands in his own. "Thank you, Danny. I'll do everything in my power to make sure Grace and you stay safe."

"You better. Otherwise you'll have my Mother to deal with and I doubt even this Wo Fat person could be as terrifying as my Mother in a rage."

AN: For those of you wanting regular updates you can either get them from my LJ page ( ) or my friending me on Facebook under the name Kat Dreamwind.