When Going Through Hell, Keep Going

When Going through Hell, keep Going

The coroner flipped back the sheet covering the face, and Starsky had to clench his hands into tight fists to avoid slamming one into the wall just beyond the body.

“Eleasha,” he whispered as Hutch walked in. Pushing past his partner, Starsky dashed out of the crowded ten-dollar-an-hour hotel room and down the stairs to the lobby. He was on the sidewalk before any of the women clustered around the front desk could ask him a question.

He leaned against the wall of the Helborn Hotel—known as plain Hell Hotel to most of the streetwalkers and hookers who made their living taking johns up to one of the rooms for a quick ride. The sky overhead was dark blue black, a paler gray blue cloud floating in the velvet night like that famed scarf that had drifted behind actress Isadora Duncan when she was driving her car and got tangled in the spokes of the wheels. Strangled her to death. In 1927—fifty years ago.

Why could he remember that?

He exhaled, trying to picture Eleasha in life instead of lying on the nasty carpet, eyes rolled up and a thin gash across her throat. Bled out in seconds, the coroner had said.

“Hey.” Hutch came over, bracing himself against the wall, their bodies pressed together from shoulder to thigh.

“Third one in three weeks,” Starsky said, anger, helplessness, and despair crowding his chest with far too much emotion. “What’s the point? Gotten so I don’t wanna know their names anymore, so I don’t…”

“Mourn?” Hutch touched him, palm against Starsky’s belly. “Starsk, even if you didn’t know their names, they’d still be mourned by someone. It matters—and not just because we remember them.”

Hutch’s hand was so warm, even through Starsky’s t-shirt and cotton button-down. In late November, it was getting far too cold to stand outside at night. He glanced across the street at two girls barely old enough to drive, shivering in their thin halter tops, micro mini-skirts and over the knee boots. “I want to take them all home to their parents—and then I think back and know…”

“It’s not so simple.”

“My pop beat the crap outta me for sassing, and hit my mom so hard once he broke her cheekbone. If I’d had a sister…I don’t know what he woulda done.” Starsky turned his head so he wasn’t looking at Hutch or he would have dived in for a long hug. “This is what they all come from. They just want—goodness.”

When they got home. He’d strip down and wait for Hutch to push into him, to vanquish all the pain.

“I know it gets to you, Hutch.” Starsky flexed his fingers, cramped from the tight fists and grabbed Hutch’s sleeve, simply to have something to hold onto. “How’re you hanging on right now? Ester, Ellie, and now Eleasha…”

“Because I have you,” Hutch said softly. “And I want them to know they have us. Someone does care for them, and always will…” He trailed off with a thoughtful frown. “What did you just say?”

“Huh?”

“Ester, Ellie, and Eleasha,” Hutch repeated. “Starsk. Their names all begin with E.”

“So it’s not random,” Starsky concluded, something like hope emerging. “He’s got a system. And knows them personally.”

“We go talk to the girls in there, see who they’ve been with more than once.” Hutch smiled grimly. “We will crack this, I promise.”

FIN