It’s Not My Time

397

Starsky is forced to examine the thin line between love and hate.

 

Originally published in Dangerous Lives, Dangerous Visions 5.

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But now the current’s only pulling me down
It’s getting harder to breathe
It won’t be too long till I’ll be going under
Can you save me from this?
—3 Doors Down

 

The sky was a flat, steel gray, as sullen as his mood. The fitful wind did nothing to cut through air so sodden, it felt like he could reach out and wring the wet from it. In the small, trash-strewn park across the street, a bird sat in a half-dead tree, too wilted to even work up the energy to sing.

He lifted the beer bottle from the table by his side and wiped the sweating glass against his forehead. Damn thing wasn’t even cold anymore, and with a disgusted grunt, he tossed it toward the trash can. The shatter and fizz told him he’d missed by a mile.

As he looked down at the photograph album in his lap, he rubbed his chest without thought. It was a habit as deeply ingrained as the one bullet lodged too close to his spine to safely remove.

He flipped the stiff, plastic-covered pages, eyes flitting from one picture to the next like a flighty bee afraid to alight onto any flower in the meadow. The pictures hurt. They hurt far worse than the pull of twisted scars that marked an event more than two years in his past.

Anger smoldered low and hot in his gut. A sudden impulse surged through him; an impulse to tear the album to pieces while snarling his anger to the empty, sullen sky. He only just managed to hold on to his temper and his sanity. He knew that giving into one second’s satisfaction would cause him years of regret.

Instead, he slammed the book closed and tossed it carelessly on the table. Slumping back in the rickety lounge, he closed his eyes and willed, once again, for sleep to come.

***

It took all the strength he had just to get out of bed the next morning. After he’d managed that, he caught his reflection in the mirror and stared at it for what seemed like hours. The man looking back at him through empty eyes wasn’t a man he knew. That man was a spook, a ghost, a rotting carcass that rested uneasily beneath its bed of earth. On the high side of thirty, his body was in better shape than the green rookies just out of the Academy.

But that’s where it ended. Even if you could look past the grisly map of scars that twisted their way across his chest and belly, his face told the story of a life lived too hard, too fast, too close to the edge, and, of late, too filled with grief. It was there in the creases at the corners of his eyes—creases that had once been laugh lines. It was there in the sickly, gray pallor that had replaced a once healthy bronze. There in the sharp planes and shadowed hollows, the scruffy whiskers and the too long, brittle hair threaded through with rare touches of silver. There, especially, in the once vibrant eyes, now as dead and lusterless as those stuffed in the empty sockets of a taxidermist’s paycheck.

The tremor in his hand was pronounced as he reached out to touch this man in the mirror, this soul-twin-stranger, this dead thing that stared back at him through darkened lamps. He didn’t even notice as his hand formed a fist, didn’t feel it as the fist crashed into the glass, splintering the image and killing the stranger for good.

Until the next awakening. Until the next mirror.

***

He arrived at the station bewhiskered and unkempt despite the shower and the shave he’d forced upon himself. Sliding into his chair, he stared at the stack of files beside his typewriter and resisted the strong urge to sweep everything off and onto the floor just to hear the crash. He didn’t let himself look at the empty seat across from him; the seat that had been empty for almost two years. He couldn’t bear to see the ghost that still resided there, looking at him through shuttered, blue eyes, a smirk curling full lips, and a light, soft voice calling out not for you, not for you, not for you in its singsong tenor.

He almost welcomed the sound of the door opening and Dobey’s voice bellowing his name.

***

He slipped into the chair in front of Dobey’s desk, not meeting his Captain’s eyes even though he felt them running over his body like a diamond blade etching steel, judging, categorizing. Cauterizing.

Instead, he plucked bits of rubber from the loosened sole of his sneaker, waiting for the anvil to drop or the hammer to fall. Getting called into Dobey’s office was never a joy, and without a partner to back him up, it felt like he was a condemned man sitting in the dock and Dobey was the judge about to pass sentence.

The silence was the drawn out one between the pull of the lever and the drop of the hatch, and he found himself waiting for the noose to cinch up tight. A broken neck would be a blessing. He guessed he’d just get stuck dancing on the end of the rope as he slowly strangled to death.

Though he felt a trickle of sweat run along one sideburn, he refused to be baited into looking up. Once, he might have, but those days were long past. They both knew he was only marking time until his body grew smart enough to curl up and die properly. Why his Captain even bothered to keep him on the payroll was beyond him. Yeah, he was still a good cop with a good arrest record, but he ran through partners like shit ran through a goose, and his IA file was growing thicker with each passing week.

The bruises on his knuckles never faded, just waxed and waned like the moon. There was always another perp who cracked wise or tried to escape; always another crook ready for his fist to tattoo his personal John Hancock on the point of a chin or side of a jaw.

Just one more hurdle to jump, just one more line to straddle; the thinning one between gainful employment and sleeping in a gutter somewhere, begging for quarters for the rotgut that would separate him from his nightmares.

The sound of Dobey clearing his throat was loud in the otherwise silent room. “You all right?”

That snapped his head up fast. A second later, he regretted it. Instead of the anger he’d been expecting when he walked into the room, deep compassion and what looked like more than a trace of pity had found a home in those dark eyes. He bowed his head again, biting hard at his lip as he continued to pluck the rubber from his sole. Acid burned at his eyes and throat. He was glad his little trip through the looking glass that morning had left him with no time to eat. If it had, whatever food he’d managed to force down would have returned as a stinking mess on the captain’s already dirty carpet.

“I asked you a question, Starsky.”

Scowling, he pulled at the rubber with more force. He couldn’t have plastered a smile, even a fake one, on his face if he tried. So he didn’t bother.

“Fine, Cap’n. Just fine. You got something for me?”

The papers on Dobey’s desk fluttered, stirred by the air currents of his heavy sigh. “I got a call this morning.”

“Oh, yeah?” Starsky asked, trying to sound the least bit interested. “Who from?”

“Abby.”

“Abby who?” he almost asked, before the twin bolts of rage and remembrance would have driven him to his knees had he been standing. Instead they shot through his skull like hot spikes. The world hazed out for a minute, coming back in colors too bright and stinking of grief. He blinked, staring in remote astonishment at a hand that now held the entire sole of his shoe.

A meaty hand landed on his shoulder, and he bolted away, scrabbling off his chair and hitting the floor so hard, he nearly bit his tongue clear though.

The pain was good, though. It was hot, and clean, and cut through the haze like a blade. Before he could get his feet under him, two hands planted themselves under his armpits and hauled him back into the seat. The hands left him. When they returned, it was to shove a paper cup filled with water into his own.

The voice behind him was saying something, but damned if he could make out what it was. He downed the water, almost choking as he forced it past the huge boulder in his throat. Mixed with the blood in his mouth, it tasted rank and almost came back up again. He managed, just, to keep it down.

Dobey’s hand pressed against his forehead, like a mother checking for fever, then came to rest on one shoulder, anchoring him to the chair and, just maybe, to the world beyond it.

Like sifting through the static of a poorly tuned radio station, the captain’s voice came through in fits and starts, mumbling something about “sorry” and “spring it on you like that” and a bunch of other mumbo-jumbo that didn’t mean squat to him. Not anymore.

That part of his life was dead and buried. Damned if he was going to drag the corpse back into the light.

He finally tuned back in in time to hear the words “Hutchinson is missing” come through as clear as a bell. For an instant, he was five years younger and the emotion that simple statement engendered bordered on panic. In the blink of an eye, he was back in the present, nearly swamped by the tide of bitter glee which snuffed the panic stillborn. He gnawed on the bones of that spiteful hatred, sucking the marrow and enjoying the rush. “Good,” he said, lips twisted into something that would have given children nightmares.

“Cut the crap, Starsky,” Dobey bellowed, jerking the comfort of his hand away. “Don’t pretend that you don’t care, because we both know how much you do!”

“Excuse me, Captain,” he bit off succinctly, each word bearing a jagged edge, “but you don’t know squat about anything, so leave it be.”

“The hell I don’t! I’ve seen corpses in the coroner’s office that look better than you do!”

“Thanks, Cap. I’ll be sure to tell Ginny your compliments on her skill.”

Those hands landed on his shoulders again, fingers biting in hard. His body was a ragdoll shaken too roughly and he bit down on his tongue again. Blood and curses flew from his mouth like a lunatic’s spittle until the shaking stopped. The minute it did, he jumped up and bolted for the door, only to be collared from behind and slammed back down into the chair again.

“Listen to me and listen good, Detective! Your partner is missing, and I—”

“Partner?” Starsky growled, stone cold murder in his voice and eyes. “I don’t have a partner.”

The instant of fear in his superior’s eyes made the petty bastard that filled his brain do backflips before the disgust that replaced it left his pride to tuck its tail and slink away, whining.

Black emotion drained out through a thousand bloodless cuts until there was nothing of himself he recognized anymore. Not even the stranger he’d punched out in the mirror that morning.

The world is swallowing me.

He wrapped his arms around himself to keep the shakes from jittering him apart.

Dobey patted awkwardly at his shoulder, then drew away as he took himself back around the desk to his chair. The springs groaned under his weight. Any other time, that would have earned at least a smirk. Now? Nothing.

Swallowing me whole.

“You ready to listen now?”

Spitting blood into a handkerchief that had somehow magically appeared in his hand, Starsky gave an almost frantic nod. He’d listen to anything from anyone if it would keep him from going over the edge.

This is the way the world ends.

“Good. Like I said, Abby called this morning, just before you got in. She said she tried to get you at your place, but you didn’t answer, so she called here.”

Starsky nodded again into the silence just to keep the conversation going.

“She said that Hutchinson had gone missing two weeks ago and she was asking for help.”

This is the way the world ends.

His throat clicked on empty several times before he finally gathered enough breath to ask, “Kidnapped?”

“I called the Oregon State Police. They think it was domestic.”

This is the way the world ends.

A bitter smile twisted his lips briefly, then ran out of the energy needed to sustain it. Yeah, it felt good, damn good, to hear there was trouble in paradise; felt good to an ego desperate to get some of its own back, but it wasn’t enough. Not nearly enough to erase even one second of the past two years of living death that started with a soft goodbye and a gently closed door.

Not with a bang, but a whimper.

Clearly discomfited, Dobey cleared his throat and ploughed on. “The records officer told me they’d received several complaints from Hutchinson’s neighbors. Fighting, they said. The uniforms never made any arrests. They claimed it was just verbal, as far as they could tell.”

Oh, yes, Starsky knew about “just verbal.” He knew all about it. In fact, he could write a book about it, and that book would be bigger than the Bible. Bigger, even, than the Lord of the Rings, a story that Starsky loved and Hutch refused to touch.

Just verbal. What a laugh. The Hutchinson tongue could have qualified as a lethal weapon. God knew Starsky had been cut by it more times than he could count over the years.

It hadn’t been all bad, back when giving as good as you got had been part of their bond, part of their shtick. It was what made them different, made them good. Made them partners.

“Partners,” Starsky muttered, voice as hollow as a well. “What a joke.”

“Starsky!”

He waved the bark away, something within him catching and holding, building a small scaffold cell by cell, from toes to scalp. Perhaps it was being built from the crushed remains of his anger and his self-pride, perhaps something even more primitive than that, but like the coral reefs from which such things are created, the scaffolding, while sharp, was sturdy and strong. It might just be strong enough to hold him up, to set spark to the dimness within, to shove him back toward the land of the light and the living and out from the shadowed corners where he’d dwelt in a morass of ennui and self-derision.

When a certain bit of strength returned to him, he straightened in his chair and rubbed at his chest and shoulders, shooting blackened glares at his Captain for his rough handling, realizing all the while how much he had truly deserved the treatment.

For the first time in a long while, he saw the faint line dividing existence and living, and thought, perhaps, he just might be strong enough to be able to cross that line, from one side to the other, if only to know that he could once again stand up to the things which would threaten to drop him to his knees.

Facing forward had always been his way. Let it be that again. If he failed, so be it. He would fail on his feet. Never again on his knees.

When he finally faced Dobey, his eyes were clear, his jaw firmed, the set of his body speaking of nothing save his determination—for what, he wasn’t sure, but that didn’t matter. Small steps, as Big John used to tell him. Small steps might lead to larger ones, or they might not, but at least he would know. And that, John had said, was most important of all.

Noticing the change, Dobey breathed easier and leaned back in his chair, ignoring the pained metallic squeal as he clasped his hands over his round belly. His expression was much calmed, though wariness lurked in the corners of his eyes.

Starsky cleared his throat. It felt as if he’d chewed on a mouthful of gravel and his voice, when he finally spoke, reflected that. “He’s done this before? Left after a fight?”

Dobey grunted in frustration. “I’m not telling you anything more than what Abby and the cops I talked to told me. But,” he continued, holding up a hand to forestall Starsky’s comment, “I wouldn’t doubt it. It’s Hutchinson’s way, isn’t it?”

Swallowing back what he had meant to say, he instead bowed his head and nodded, remembering all the times when, the more difficult things became, the farther the man who had once been his partner had run. Until that last time, nearly two years ago now, Starsky had always been able to catch him. Hutch hadn’t always wanted to be caught—no way—but he’d always, always allowed himself to be led back, sometimes kicking and screaming, sometimes as docile as a hungry kitten, but always with Starsky’s hand on his arm, leading, guiding, encouraging, and, if needed, forcing.

He always wondered if this particular defense mechanism had been picked up during a childhood that had always been a closed door between them. Not for the first time, he wished he could teleport himself into the Hutchinson household and look those people in the eye just to see if they really were the monsters his mind conjured up each and every time his partner reacted in a way that spoke of a child who had lived with a cloak of fear wrapped tightly around him, suffocating him more each day.

“You’re not gonna wanna hear it,” he tried again after a long silence, “but… why come to me with this?” One hand went up, fingers spread as if ready to catch the invectives Dobey was sure to pitch at him. “Hutch ain’t my partner anymore, Cap’n. He’s his own man now, and that’s just what he is, a man. He’s got a right to run away from home whenever he feels like it and not have someone chasin’ his tail all over the world, you know.”

It felt… weird… sticking up for Hutchinson like that, even in a backhanded sort of way. Almost weird enough to knock his carefully concocted tower askew. The look in Dobey’s eyes mirrored Starsky’s feelings exactly and, grunting something unintelligible even to himself, he looked back down at the hands which were now shredding the bloodied handkerchief.

“I’ve got to say,” Dobey remarked after a moment, “that I can hardly believe I’m talking to the man who came very close to insubordination each time his partner wasn’t much more than five minutes late—when he wasn’t covering for him, that is.”

“I’m not that same man,” he replied, matter of fact. “Neither are you. And sure as hell neither is he.”

“Bull.”

Starsky’s glare could have set alight the piles of folders decorating his captain’s desk had it been tuned just a degree higher.

“You heard me. I know Hutchinson has changed. Only a fool would believe otherwise. I know I have. But you? Starsky, if you told me you’d moved even one minute past the day he left, I wouldn’t believe you.”

Jaws clenched tight, Starsky threw the bloodied rag near the wastebasket, jumped to his feet and made it across the office before Dobey had a chance to move. Blasting the door open, he caught the jamb, froze, and turned, eyes flashing indigo fire. “I just got one thing to say to you, Captain. Keep your goddamned nose the hell outta my business!”

The diplomas and framed pictures rattled on the wall with the force of the slamming door.

Starsky could hear the loosed sigh that followed his exit.

It bothered him not in the least.

***

In the darkness of his apartment, Starsky sat on the couch, the damnable photo album, his badge wallet and his holstered gun all sitting on his lap. The morning’s conversation and his reaction to it played over and over in his head like a record with a scratch in it, circling back and around each moment as if it was happening in the present instead of hours in the past.

Despite his mind’s shying away, his detective’s instincts continued to pick out every word, every action, every reaction for a clue of some sort, even when there weren’t any to be had. Hutchinson was a free man who could go and come as he pleased. He had nothing but a marriage certificate holding him to one place and one person, and Starsky well knew how little that really meant to him in the general scheme of things. If he could walk away so easily from a profession he had sworn his very life on, he could do anything, and with just as little thought in the doing.

Perhaps that’s what hurt most of all. He had thought that he and Hutch were a lock, bound together by some super magnetic force that only death could tear apart. Perhaps not even that.

To realize that a simple change of mind was all it took to separate him from the most important thing in his life made his own life worse than useless. It made it nothing.

No thing.

No one.

No why.

Setting the album and the wallet down, he grasped his holstered gun with both hands, twisting this way and that just to hear the leather groan as its supple flesh pulled against the natural grain. As if looking from outside his body, he watched as his thumb, with casual ease, snapped the holster open. Turning it to one side, he slid the weapon from its confinement until it sat, black, ominous, and dangerous, in the flat of his left palm.

For a moment, just a moment, he stared at it as if it was a thing that he had never before set eyes upon. In that moment, it had no purpose, no reason for being, no reason to be sitting in his hand to be stared at, examined.

But it was only a moment, and then the purpose once again became crystal clear. The step-by-step process of flipping off the safety, lifting the weapon to nuzzle beneath his chin the way Hutch’s cock sometimes had when he was feeling butch, and pulling the trigger seemed as easy as taking a breath; was entirely too easy, and before he knew it, the muzzle was pressed right there.

Rather than the feeling of terror, he felt calm, peaceful, happy almost. The misery and pain, loneliness, depression disappeared in an instant and his finger needed but tiniest breeze to end it all for ever and ever amen.

His eyes widened then, then blinked, quick. As if he was holding a molten hot hunk of steel, he tossed the gun away from him, taking a sizeable chunk of plaster from the far wall as he did so.

Folding in on himself, hands buried in the thick curls of his hair, he moaned the length of which robbed the breath from his lungs.

His home was as dark as his thoughts when he again opened his eyes, and though his stomach was sending up all sorts of warning signals, he ignored them. Instead, he took long, deep breaths through his nose, letting them out just as slowly, until he felt once more in control of himself.

The photo album had somehow come to land at his feet, but he ignored that summons as well. What he had—what they had—was over. It was over the very day he had been accepted back onto the force. The very day Hutchinson had left him, less than an hour later.

Forever.

Going over it again would do nothing more than it had already done. Two years now, and it was finally time to snuff out that final, feeble ember he had once called hope but now knew was insanity, plain and simple.

Starsky had made his choice. Hutchinson had made his. Miracles were non-existent, and to spend two years hoping for one showed him, in an interrogator’s spotlight, just how weak he had become.

If he was going to end it, he was going to end it. His way.

Grabbing the album in one hand, he slipped out onto the deck where the Weber stood, covered in garish red canvas as it always was when barbequing season was over.

Removing the cover, he placed the album somewhat reverently directly on the coals, retrieved the lighter fluid and drenched the interior until the fumes drove him back from the grill. A quick trip inside brought him back with a box of long-stick-matches and a bottle of Scotch that they had splurged on to be opened on the day of their retirement.

Removing his badge and wallet, he made to toss them in as well, but something, some instinct, bade him hold on to them, and so he did.

One strike, two, three, and a soft “woof” of sound announced the conflagration. Gentle heat pressed against the front of his body and pushed him easily away from the danger.

If any proof of his state of mind was needed at that very moment, the thought that slipped in there that it was Hutch’s gentle hands pushing him away from danger did the trick perfectly.

Shaking his head, he unscrewed the bottle of Scotch, lifted it over the ever-increasing flames, tilted the mouth inward, and brought forth a smile that was a combination of all the smiles he had ever shared with his partner, from the very first in the Academy, to the very last when he’d run into the apartment showing off his newly minted badge.

“To us, partner,” he murmured before tipping the bottle back and taking several long swallows. The liquor burned his throat the way the fire burned the photos, and if the tears brought to his eyes at that moment was from both, or neither, it didn’t really matter.

Another long guzzle, and the bottle joined the album on the grill. With one last look, he turned on one heel, opened the porch door, and stepped inside, closing the door behind him, locking it, and drawing the curtains tight.

Then he crossed the room, dropped into bed, and fell asleep, clothes and all.

***

He had no idea what time it was when the phone woke him up, but immediate reaction to middle-of-the-night-calls was an instinct that he could never quell. Groaning at stiffened muscles, he managed to roll over and snatch the receiver off the hook. He slammed it somewhere near the direction of his face. “Starsky.”

In the first minute, he didn’t recognize the voice. In the second, he did. Just about to slam the receiver back down, Abby’s frightened tone let him know that there was yet another instinct he couldn’t bury deep enough with a backhoe. “He’s your husband. You find him. Leave me alone!”

“Starsky! Please! Don’t hang up! I-I think something’s happened to him! Please!”

Slumping back into the twisted sheets, he readjusted the handset and pushed down all the negative emotions he could. “Talk to me, then, and no bullshit. I gotta be up for work in an hour.”

“Starsky… Dave… you’ll never know how so—”

“Quit that and start talking, or I swear, lady, I’ll hang up on you right now.”

“It’s Ken. I know you heard we had a fight, and that’s true. We always fight. Most days, it seems that we don’t do anything but fight. But Starsky, Dave, a month, maybe three weeks ago, he j-just… stopped talking to me. J-just like that, nothing! And then he left. Didn’t even pack anything! Just left! He refused tell me where he was going, or when he’d be back. Didn’t call, didn’t do anything! This is the longest he’s ever been gone! I’m afraid he’s in trouble and I need help! Please?”

“Listen up and listen good, lady. I ain’t in the mood to trade stories about how your husband has been sneaking around on you, got it? You weren’t real sympathetic when he did it to me. Face the fact that it’s over between you two and move on. That’s all I gotta say to you. Goodnight.”

When the phone rang again, he ripped it from the wall and tossed across the room, adding to the mess he’d made with the gun. Swallowing his anger, he punched his pillow a few times, buried his head, and was soon back to sleep.

***

Half-dressed and with a toothbrush sticking out of his mouth, Starsky strode across the room and yanked his front door open, ready to give seven kinds of holy hell to whatever sop had the balls to try and get his attention this early in the morning.

Dobey was probably the only one who would have stopped him, and so it was probably good that it was, indeed, Dobey who stood there, tie askew, the buttons on his suit mismatched, and his hair an outright mess. As soon as the door propped open, he bulled his way through, nearly toppling his detective ass over teakettle as he rolled into the apartment like a tank under full power.

“What the…?”

“On your feet, Detective, and pack your bags. You’re taking a trip!”

Removing the toothbrush from his mouth, Starsky pointed it at Dobey, “You wanna tell me why the hell you’re here before work makin’ commands like you’re an Army General and I’m some kinda grunt?” he demanded. He was very much aware of how he sounded but had little care what might come of his gross insubordination. If the Captain hadn’t fired him yet, he doubted very much this would be the proverbial straw. And if it was, well, he found he didn’t really care about that, either.

“I just got off the phone with Colonel Robert Brennet, Commandant of the Oregon State Police. Abby’s gone missing, too. I talked to him yesterday about getting one of his men back over to the house to go over her story one more time. He sent someone over early this morning. She was gone and the house was in shambles. And before you ask what’s new about that, we both know she was a meticulous housekeeper.” Dobey raised a hand, pointing one finger directly at Starsky’s heart. “I don’t care how much you say you don’t care about him, something stinks out there, and you’re the only one who can figure out what went on before anything else happens. You know it, Starsky. So don’t give me any more of that ‘I don’t care’ bull.”

“Is that an order? Captain? Sir?”

Dobey stared at his detective, jaw unhinged, eyes wide with disbelief. “Starsky—!”

“‘swhat I thought,” Starsky replied, retreating back into the bathroom to wash his mouth out and run a brush through his hair. Returning to the living room, he noticed without surprise that Dobey hadn’t moved an inch.

Closing the distance between them, he stopped less than a foot away and glared into his superior’s eyes. “You know the story. I don’t gotta tell it to you. Twelve years of friendship, partnership, gone. Just like that.” He turned, then turned back, pressing the point of his finger into Dobey’s belly. “After all that shit I put up with just to get back on the job, just to guard his back, he throws it in my face and leaves. No thanks. No goodbye. No nothin’. Just shuts the door and leaves.” Trying very hard not to explode, he took several steps back and pushed both hands against his bookshelf. “And now you want me to play private dick, probably lose the only thing I got left in this world, my goddamned badge, to chase that son of a bitch all over the fucking country just because he’s skipped town and his old lady decided to take off after him? Forget it.”

“Starsky—!”

“Forget it! You’re making me late, and I got some cases I gotta work on. I’ll see you at the station.”

Pushing past the still-frozen man, Starsky pelted down the steps, jumped into his remodeled Torino, and screamed away from the curb, leaving nothing of himself but the smoke slowly dissipating in the humid air.

***

“What do you want?”

Now that, that was a very, very good question. What did he want?

Peeling away from the curb two—or was it three—days ago had had the effect of turning his mind blank. Like walking through a dream world, he did all the right things, said all the right words, pasted on a smile when one was expected, even turned on the old forgotten charm when the situation called for it. He didn’t let his brain think about where it was taking the rest of him, slept when he was tired, drove when he wasn’t. The only thing he didn’t do was eat, which should have told him something was very, very wrong, but in the state he was in, he didn’t even listen to his stomach and its pitiful growls and gurgles.

The thing he didn’t think about most of all was why he’d come in the first place.

“I said… what do you want.”

A warm greeting it wasn’t, but he could only imagine what he looked like right about now. Since his little run-in with the mirror way back when, he didn’t even bother to look whenever he passed one.

Taking great care, he reached into his jacket’s upper pocket and pulled out his badge wallet, letting it swing open eye level with the steel-haired desk sergeant.

“This answer your question?”

The jarhead grunted and switched the toothpick to the other side of his mouth as he squinted at the picture and compared it to the man taking up space in front of his desk. Aside from the curly hair and the basic shape of the face, the two men didn’t even look enough alike to be twins, let identical representations.

“Got anything else?”

“I left my birth certificate in my other jacket. Look, just point me out to your watch commander, buddy, I got things to do.”

He tried to walk by the desk, but the old guy was quicker than he looked. His gnarled fingers managed to grab Starsky’s soiled t-shirt at the neck. The small crowd in the station froze when it ripped wide open, exposing his chest.

Wide eyes switched rapidly from Starsky’s picture to his chest, and he smirked. “Yeah, this kinda ugly doesn’t lie. Now lemme go and get your boss down here now. Hey,” he shouted as the geezer shuffled out from behind his desk, “you owe me a new shirt!”

***

Ten minutes later, he found himself in the lap of luxury which, in this case, was Commandant Brennick’s office with its framed certificates, trophy case, and mass of hanging plants dangling from hooks nearly covering the corkboard ceiling.

Hutch woulda loved this, he thought before rapidly switching his mental voice to mute and easing himself down into one of the plush chairs facing the large, immaculate desk. The shirt he’d been given, green with large O S P across the chest, was several sizes too big but at least it covered the scars and kept him from feeling like some freak in a side-show.

Brennick looked like he belonged on the cover of Policeman’s Quarterly in his resplendent, perfectly pressed blues, every medal polished to a high gloss and tacked on with ruler straightness. Starsky might have been impressed, had he found it within himself to give a shit.

Then again, maybe not. He and Hutch never really were impressed by the high-brow hero-types. Their own medals came in the form of permanent scars, aching muscles, and killer nightmares. The medals people could see weren’t worth the tin they were painted over.

Brennick was also a fiddler. His hands were in constant motion, flipping through this file or that in lieu of having to look across the desk at the man sitting there with steadily thinning patience.

“I didn’t realize he was that Hutchinson,” he said finally.

“You give priority to cases based on how well known the victim is?” Starsky asked in the tone of voice that anyone who knew him would have known to be very wary of.

Muddy hazel eyes finally jumped up to meet his. “No,” came the sour reply. “It’s just….”

“Just nothin’. He’s just another ghost, gone to wherever. Nothing that has to do with you.”

“But—”

“And I’m agreein’ with you,” Starsky continued, hands clasped tightly in his lap. “I’da done the same thing in your shoes. Man’s got a right to go wherever he wants as long as he’s in the clear with the law. And as far as I know, Hutchinson is.”

A raised eyebrow caused Brennick to nod quickly. “Aside from those petty neighbor complaints, he’s clean.”

“And you had your men check over the wife? No marks, no nothin’?”

The Commandant bristled. “Of course I did. I run a tight ship here, Sergeant.”

“Never said you didn’t. But I figure if I’m gonna get shanghaied into doing this, I gotta make sure all the cards are on the table. Anything missing that I should know about?”

“Aside from Hutchinson, and now his wife, no.”

“No clues, letters, missing luggage, nothing?”

“Everything we’ve got is in here,” Brennick replied, pushing a pitifully thin folder in Starsky’s direction and sitting back in his chair, arms folded smugly across his chest.

Ignoring the banty rooster display, Starsky used the tip of his finger to flick open the folder and scanned the scant contents quickly. It was pretty much what he’d expected: petty domestic disputes that, according to witness reports, were instigated by Abby. This didn’t surprise Starsky. For as long as he had known him, Hutch would take a great deal of abuse from a woman he was serious about before lashing back. One only had to think back to the travesty of his marriage to Vanessa to remember that very thing playing out on an almost daily basis.

The only real surprise was that Abby, for all he wanted to hate her, seemed like a much more compatible match than the gorgeous, but devious, Vanessa ever had been. He remembered her as being quite mild mannered with an easygoing sense of humor. Until, of course, Solkin and his gang of pretty boys changed her life.

No one was more stunned on that final day than Starsky when he watched his ex-friend, ex-partner, ex-lover walk down the path and into the waiting arms of the woman he’d sworn had been scared out of the picture forever.

Aside from that, and reports of a house in shambles, there wasn’t much more. The few people they’d managed to interview hadn’t seen or heard anything. Of course they didn’t. When it came to things like this, no one ever heard. No one ever saw. If it didn’t impinge on their right to watch the tube or get laid, it never got noticed.

His anger creeping back, he slammed the folder closed and shoved it back across the desk. “You got the keys?”

“Keys?”

“To the house,” Starsky responded, barely resisting the urge to roll his eyes. “I wanna take a look around, see if there’s anything—”

“I don’t think—”

“Now listen up. I don’t wanna be here any more than you want me here, but I’ve got my orders and my Captain cleared it with your Commissioner, so the keys. Please.”

“But—”

“Now.”

Yanking the desk drawer open, Brennick shoved the keys at Starsky, giving him a glare that would have quelled a lesser man. Starsky simply snatched the keys up and stood, tossing a mock salute that reeked of the insolence he didn’t bother to conceal.

***

The house, when he found it, wasn’t much of a surprise. A tiny cottage in a wooded area was just what he had imagined Hutchinson would go for. The fights must have been pretty loud since the neighbors were quite some distance away on either side.

Both Dobey and the report were right, the place was a mess; tables overturned, dishes smashed, drawers pulled out of desks and cabinets and dumped on the floor. Somebody was definitely looking for something, and Starsky had no choice but to wonder if that somebody had found it.

Feeling like a bit player in a movie of his own life, he found himself walking toward a closet very much like the one, years back, he had opened to find his partner’s holstered gun hanging on its customary hook. And the man who belonged to that gun nowhere to be found.

The hook was there. The gun wasn’t. Neither was the partner.

“This shit got old years ago,” he muttered to himself, wandering away from the closet toward one of the half-opened doors he assumed was either a bathroom or bedroom. “Damned if I know why I’m still doin’ it.”

He couldn’t quite shut off the voice in his head that told him that lying to himself was the worst lie of all. He knew why he was doing it; knew why he’d traveled, half-dead, a thousand miles away from home after flat out refusing, after that little sham funeral he’d thrown just days before.

Whatever he’d had with Hutch wasn’t dying easily. It couldn’t. Nothing that strong could. Not in his heart, anyway. Maybe if he faced the man, maybe if he ended it with one good punch, maybe he could go back home and practice living again. He always was the more physical of the two. Maybe if he did to Hutch’s jaw what Hutch did to his heart, they’d be square and he could come to the end of this shitty journey.

Maybe.

The first door turned out to be the bathroom. Pink and floral. Lots of pink and floral. It even smelled pink. “I woulda left her for this alone,” he grumbled, checking inside the medicine cabinet. All of Hutch’s usual toiletries were gone, and unless he’d gone Grizzly Adams, Starsky was sure his leaving was intentional and voluntary. Kidnappers in his experience didn’t much care how well-groomed their victims were.

The next room was the one he’d been dreading the entire ride up: the bedroom. He really didn’t know what he’d expected, but the sheer…lifelessness…of the room surely wasn’t it.

Like the rest of the house, it was a mess, with closets opened and dressers dumped, but if you took that all away, it seemed like a blank slate. Just a bed. No plants. No funky Indian blankets Hutch liked. No pictures or paintings hanging up on the walls. Nothing to brighten up the room but the one small window opposite the bed.

This room didn’t have any sense of living or loving. It was just a space.

In fact, it looked almost exactly like the spare bedroom they had kept when they’d bought the house together. Just a room with a bed. No personality. No nothing, really. Hell, Starsky’s own living space now, more than two years out from his relationship with Hutch, had more personality than this. And that room was occupied by a man more dead than alive.

Breathing more easily now, he stepped around the clutter—her clothes, mostly; didn’t seem to be much of anything of his in the room—and walked to the other side of the large bed, its mattress pushed halfway off. Sunlight streaming through the opened blinds struck something near his left foot, and he crouched to pick it up.

“Oh…damn.”

It was a much-handled picture of the two of them, fingerprints smudging the gloss. Nothing special, really, but it put everything they were to each other right out there for everyone to see.

The candy machine right outside Dobey’s door was half in view, and Starsky saw himself standing at its corner, head tilted down. Hutch was facing him at an oblique angle, one hand on his wrist, the other gently touching the small of his back. Platinum hair mingled with brown curls as their heads rested against one another, foreheads touching in that gesture of comfort that had always represented the wholeness of “them.”

He couldn’t remember the circumstances behind the photo. He was upset about something, that was obvious. But the look on Hutch’s face….

“Oh, damn…” Blinking quickly, he raised his eyes to the ceiling to keep the tears from falling. “Damn, damn, damn.”

The photo stock crinkled as his fist spasmed. He looked down in horror, and breathed a relieved sigh to see that only one corner was wrinkled. He patted it gently, smoothing it as best he could, then, for some reason only his heart knew, brought it up to his face, as if he could breathe the essence of what they had once been into himself.

It was impossible, of course, but the action gave him a weird sense of comfort anyway. He didn’t question why. Best not to do that, or he’d fall apart here and now, and that would be the end of things for good.

He looked down at the picture for a minute more, torn between leaving it where it was and taking it with him. In the end, he slipped it into the inside breast pocket of his jacket, rationalizing that it didn’t mean anything more than a means to an end—something to show strangers to see if they’d spotted Hutch around the area recently. He knew it was a rationalization. You couldn’t really see the man’s face that well from the angle, but he let himself believe it anyway.

Forcing himself not to go around looking for other bits and pieces of himself hiding in this lifeless place, he instead examined everything through a seasoned detective’s eyes. It was hard, but he managed. The picture in his pocket gave him strength, and he never was one to look gift horses in the mouth. The fact that it was resting right up against his heart wasn’t lost on him, either, but, like he often said, whatever worked, worked.

He’d worry about the rest of it later.

“All right, boy,” he said, low. The sound of his voice in the gravesite quiet of the empty house gave him a little shiver that started at the back of his neck. “Talk to me, Hutch. Tell me where you are.” His eyes were those of the sniper he’d once been, darting here and there, resting on nothing long enough to make an impression, just trying to take it all in as a whole.

That’s the way it worked with him. Hutch was more the thinker, the examiner. Starsky was all quicksilver motion, hopping from bit to bit, picking up a sliver of this, discarding a grain of that, fitting the pieces together into a pixilated puzzle that got clearer the further away from it you stepped.

Then he caught it. Right there. Out of the corner of his eye, seeing it with only the periphery of his vision before snapping back to it and narrowing focus to a laser beam intensity.

The sniper has found his target.

His face didn’t light up, but it loosened, somehow, the chiseled jut of bone and flesh softening just a touch—a foxhole atheist letting his guard down a tiny notch when the snap of a branch was just an owl hunting for a snack and not the enemy he was damn sure was sneaking up behind him. He didn’t have to believe in God just yet.

He stalked over to it, cat-smooth and lethal-quiet, stopping before the small round table by the door to the greenhouse—of course Hutch would have one of those; like Physics, it was a Natural Law—and stared down at it for a long beat.

It was a simple thing, as ordinary as waking up in the morning, but it talked to him. It talked loud and it talked clear.

After fixing its position on the scarred table firmly in his mind, he reached out and lifted it up, holding it to the light streaming through the greenhouse windows just to see the colors show through. A thin crack right down the middle blurred thing a little, but he could see just fine the silly little cartoon that always made him rib the hell out of his partner just for fun.

The smiling reptile stared back at him in profile, the crack almost midline through its iridescent russet shell from rounded edge to blunted tip.

A flash and it was five, maybe six years ago, and he was draped across his partner’s long legs. He remembered the smirk that curled his lips, remembered the feeling of the strong, smooth, limber muscles beneath his own. All was right with his world.

“They kill turtles to make these, ya know.”

“Tortoises, Starsk, not turtles. And these aren’t actual tortoiseshell anyway. They stopped making those a long time ago.”

“Just imagine all those poor turtles,” Starsky had continued on, blithely pretending complete deafness to his partner’s words, “walkin’ around naked, shiverin’ in the cold, gettin’ squashed flat by some stoned-out trucker just so you could pretend you were Jimi Hendrix.”

Hutch’s look of exasperation had been a perfect capper to a perfect night, and when he had thrown Starsky’s legs off his own, almost dumping him from the couch in the process, Starsky thought he was about as happy as a man could possibly be in this world.

He also knew that he was in love, and that it was returned in full. Simple as that. No more doubts. No more questions. Just…warmth, and lightness, and smiles in his heart.

“Give me that, you big lummox, and find some other place to park your lazy carcass. If I’m gonna try this again, I need to practice, and you are most definitely not helping right now.”

“You don’t need to practice, Hutch. You got a bee-you-tee-ful voice.”

The tone was jesting, but the words weren’t, and the smile he got in return made him forget, for just a moment, every other love who had ever touched his life.

A blink, and he was back in the present, the warm feelings lingering like the scent of a match just shaken out. His smile was tiny, but pure, and it changed his visage entirely.

“Okay, partner,” he murmured, the sound of his voice not quite so spooky anymore. “You gave me a place to start. Let’s see if I’m still as good as I used to be when it comes to picking up your trail.”

Tossing the guitar pick in the air like a coin, he caught it in his fist and shoved it into the pocket of his scruffy jeans; jeans that were a good deal looser than they’d been that night five, or six, years ago.

Giving the house a last, quick, professional look, he headed out the door, down the walk, and all the way to the car before he even realized he was whistling.

***

“Anyone else?” Starsky asked as he shook out his left hand. “I’m offering a half-price sale for today only. First come, first flattened.”

Just his luck to have picked a hick bar as his first stop on the “Find Hutchinson Tour.” From the outside, it looked like just the kind of place that his ex-partner would frequent: homely. Inside, it was filled with a bunch of oxes in lumberjack plaid with cans of Pabst in the forks of their packed crotches and unfriendly, flat sheens in shark eyes.

The guy in the corner must have taken exception to how he looked—damned if he knew why—and clodded over to him like some Paul Bunyan wannabe. His dirty, freckled fist was the size of a canned ham and it was headed directly for his jaw.

Paul Bunyan was big, all right, but slow. And dumb. Starsky simply ducked, popped back up, and cracked a few knuckles on the bruiser’s glass jaw. Went down like a sack of potatoes, or apples, or whatever the hell it was they grew here in this shitty backwater nowhere.

“Okay, then,” he said after several moments of absolute silence started to grate on his last remaining nerve. “Since nobody here wants to take me up on my generous offer, how ’bout you doin’ somethin’ for me, instead?” Reaching into his breast pocket, he pulled out the picture he’d taken from Hutch’s trashed house and flashed it. “Anybody recognize the big blond in this picture? About yea high, thin, blue eyes?”

Another long moment of silence broken only by the sound of some big truck passing slowly by outside.

Starsky sighed, holding onto his temper by strength of will only. He hadn’t slept in God knew how long and his head was beginning to predict a migraine in his future if he didn’t get some shut-eye in, and soon. “Ok, since all of you seem to be lackin’ in the brains department, what say we play a little game, hmm? I’m gonna ask the same question again. This,” he continued, nodding his head, “means ‘yes,’ and this,” his head shook slowly back and forth, “means ‘no.’ Now, have any of you Einsteins here seen this guy around recently?”

“Why don’t you make like a breeze and blow the fuck outta here?” asked a behemoth at the pool table.

“Oh, that’s a good one. Your mama teach you that when you were nailin’ her to the mattress?”

Bellowing like a gutted calf, the giant started for him, pool cue in hand.

Deciding he’d had quite enough bullshit for the day, Starsky drew his weapon and snapped off the safety in one easy motion. “You wanna couple’a holes to add to your collection, turkey?”

His erstwhile attacker froze in place, cue raised high over his head. Starsky dismissed him with the flick of an eye and turned his head to scan the rest of the bar’s inhabitants. “What about the rest of you? No? Well, then, I’ll just mosey on outta this eloquent establishment. It’s been a pleasure, gentlemen. A real pleasure.”

He didn’t holster his weapon until he was back in his car.

***

Head pounding, the depression and anger that had so briefly lifted clamped like a bear trap around body and soul. The only thing he knew, the only thing he could focus on with a modicum of clarity, was that he needed to get off the streets for a while, immerse himself in nothing but quietude and sleep. If he could do that, he could at least regain some of his steeply bought equilibrium.

Or what passed for it these days.

Stumbling out of the Torino at the first motel that didn’t look like it had roaches big enough to smother him in his sleep, he dragged his weary body into the office and hit the bell on what he supposed was the front desk.

He tried not to see the legions of flies lying belly up in the thick fall of dust covering the desk and hanging latticework curtains in the corners.

He hit the bell again. “Hello? Anybody home? Paying customer out here!”

A woman, so ancient she could have been the real Mona Lisa, made her slow way out of the back office, slippered feet moving across the cracked linoleum two inches at a time. A cigarette poked from between heavily wrinkled lips and she squinted milky eyes against the smoke. “Yeah?” she asked around the butt, her voice a croaking crone’s whisper. “You want a room?”

“You a motel?”

“That’s what the sign says, sonny.”

“Then I want a room. Preferably one a little—” he waved at the dust, coughing, “—cleaner.”

Her laugh was wheezy and full of phlegm, so violent he thought she’d croak off right in front of him. Just as he was about to jump over the desk to help, she straightened and stared him in the eye. “You got cash? Don’t take no credit. Ten bucks. Don’t got no hot water, either, so don’t be expectin’ none.”

“Lady, at this point, if it’s got a bed, I’m sold.” He pulled a ten-spot from his wallet and handed it over. “Key?”

“Gotta sign the register first. And I better not see hookers sneakin’ in your room, either. This here’s a family establishment.”

He glanced at the smoke-stained walls, the dead insects and a calendar at least a decade out of date hanging on the wall and displaying pictures of half-naked women for everyone to see. “Yeah,” he grunted, snatching up an ancient pencil and signing his name. “I’ll bet. Key?”

“Here ya go, sonny. Room 310, around the back. You’ll have to jiggle the handle to get in. Damn lock’s just about rusted out.”

“Terrific.” Grabbing the key, he turned and painfully plodded back toward out the door, waving his hand behind him to acknowledge her “no hookers!” shout.

***

With a breathless “woof” he bolted straight up in the narrow bed, his heart and lungs going like a train at full speed down bumpy tracks. His chest hurt like fire, and he rubbed it hard, pressing the heel of his palm deep into the muscle beneath his heart. That scar was always troubling him, and how was that for irony? His heart, scarred inside and out; a deep cut that never really healed, but never burst open enough for all the poison inside to drain out.

That damned dream. Again. The one that had visited his broken sleep ever since the shooting. It had been a while since he’d last had it, but he wasn’t stupid enough to claim ignorance on why it was making itself an unwelcome guest now.

Damn you, Hutchinson. Can’t you get outta my brain for even one night?

Taking deep breaths of humid, mildewed air to ease the cramping in his scarred lungs, he threw the threadbare blanket from his sweating body and rose to his feet, wincing. The carpet was nothing but a bunch of huge holes strung together by a few rotting threads. The floor beneath was chilled and sticky. He really didn’t need to know with what.

He limped his way across the small room to the only window, his body one huge mass of stiffness and pain. Groaning, he struggled with the reluctant window, wincing at the high screech of surrender when it finally gave against his persistence. Outside, it was peaceful and quiet. The rain had cleared and the clouds were scudding away from a moon just shy of fullness. It looked beautiful shining down through the thick branches of the towering pines, casting its eldritch light in through the window to highlight his profile and bring out the deep violet in his eyes.

Pine and ozone lay heavy on the chill air, enveloping him and raising gooseflesh along his naked skin.

Damn cold. It’d be riding high and easy in the eighties back in Bay City, not a cloud in the sky, barely covered beauties strolling by in pairs, catching your eye and flirting. Not that he noticed them anymore. Didn’t notice much of anything, really.

Grief had reshaped his life into one giant holding pattern, caught like a scene in a picture, frozen at a specific moment in time and never changing. When his sleepy brain tried to look back over the past couple years, all he saw was the gray monotony of a lifeless puppet dancing to someone else’s tune and hating every minute of it.

As his fingers traced idle patterns over the scarred windowsill, he stared at the moon, his mind long ago and far away. The triumphant screech of an owl scoring prey brought him back to the present, and the damp cold caressing his body like the finger of a dead lover.

Shivering at the ghoulish thought, he wrapped his arms around his torso and hooked an ancient chair with one foot, dragging it into position. He bit back a groan as he lowered himself to sit. By habit, his eyes scanned the dark night showing through the window. Now that the owl had gone off to wherever owls go to rend and tear, the scene was quiet, still. A single cricket chirped sluggishly, then fell silent.

The gentle wind stirring the branches of the pines was mournful in a way that spoke to the shadows in his heart.

Mournful. Full of mourning. Full of grieving for the life he had lost, for the love that had slipped through his fingers like sand held too tightly.

Back a year or so ago, Huggy had pushed off on him a book from some chick-writer that talked about grief, figuring it would help. For more than six months, he’d had it stuck high on his bookshelf and refused to read it, nearly coming to blows with his friend when Huggy had asked once too often if he had.

He’d taken it down when he was dusting one day, intending to return it to its owner, unread. Something, he couldn’t remember what now, enticed him to open the cover, and he’d found himself so engrossed that an entire day had gone by without him noticing it. On Death and Dying, the book was called, and it had forced upon him the realization that there was more than one way to die.

One of the most important things he’d learned was that while grief moved along at its own pace, it always moved along.

At least, it was supposed to.

He seemed to be stuck in quicksand between stage two, anger, and stage four, depression, never quite settling on one stage before he boomeranged back to the other like the pendulum on the old clock his grandmother had once owned.

As he stared out at the lonely moon in the lonely sky, he knew that he’d give anything, anything at all, to reach stage five. The small measure of peace that benchmark would deliver his battered soul would be worth its weight in gold.

His body must have moved without his mind’s permission, because when he blinked his weary eyes away from the nighttime sky, he found himself staring down at the picture that had somehow appeared in his hand.

He’d never cried a tear—not one he was willing to admit to, anyway—over Hutch’s easy abandonment of what they’d had. What they’d been. Not one.

But he could feel them, oh, yes, a whole ocean’s worth locked down in that secret vault where he kept all the things he wanted to avoid. Like the door to his motel room, the lock was nearly rusted through, and the walls were bulging out, ready to break. He could feel their tremors, could sense their need to give in to the weakness in their structure and expel their noxious poison by fair means or foul.

What would be left of him at the end of that eruption wasn’t something he was ready to think about.

And he knew, with that cop’s intuition that made him so valuable on the streets, that the picture he was holding might very well be that impetus. With a hoarse yell, he threw the photograph away from him, watching as it caught the breeze coming in through the window and seesawed its way to the decrepit floor, face up and daring him to come back and take a good, long look.

Part of him, a big part, wanted to do just that. To just look, and look, and look at the thing until this painful bursting inside him was washed clean on a tide of tears.

But he wasn’t that kind of man; never had been. He’d taken the death of his father, the second most profound thing to ever happen to him behind this, without even a hint of dampness in his eyes. Which was funny when he thought about it, since both his father and mother had always been open with all of their emotions. No stoic-stiff-upper-lips for the Starskys. That was better left to the Hutchinsons of the world.

Only somehow, it had gotten mixed up. He remained dry-eyed while his partner—his ex-partner—cried easily and shamelessly, letting go emotions too big to be contained, sure that Starsky would always be there to catch him when he fell.

And he always was.

Who’ll be there to catch me?

“Fuck.”

Pushing himself up from his chair, he strode to the bathroom, carefully avoiding the photograph lying so innocently in his path, and emptied his bladder.

Then he went back to the bed, making a cave of his blankets, and forced himself back to sleep.

The picture kept watch through the night.

Waiting.

***

The photograph found itself stuffed back inside Starsky’s jacket pocket the next morning with nary a glance. An idea had come to him in his sleep and he wasn’t going to waste any time in pursuing it.

Returning the key to the same old woman who’d loaned it out to him the night before, he eyed her from across the desk and asked, “I saw a poster for the State Fair yesterday. It still going on?”

“All week, sonny,” she replied from behind her ever-present cigarette. “Gonna go for a spin on the Merry-Go-Round?”

He waited impatiently as she cackled. “Somethin’ like that,” he answered when she’d finally wheezed her way to a stop. “Got directions?”

“Map’s in that rack behind ya. Cost you a buck and a half.”

He didn’t bother glaring her into a cheaper submission. The old buzzard probably got off on things like that and he wasn’t in the mood to give her the pleasure. Instead, he turned, plucked a map out of the rusted holder, turned back, and slapped two bucks on the desk. “How much the address gonna cost me?”

His narrowed eyes must have done the trick, because she eventually crumbled and gave it to him without thinning his wallet any. With a terse nod, he made his final turn and trotted out to where he’d left the Torino. Poor baby was much the worse for wear, dust and dirt covering her glossy shine, a clump of weeds stuck in the corner of the front bumper. “Sorry, schweetheart,” he murmured as he socketed the key and turned her on, “as soon as I find Hutch, I promise, the best wash and wax money can buy.”

She purred obligingly, and he churned up dust and stones as he made his way from the drive to the small two-lane road headed east.

***

The rain started up again before he’d gone three miles. In California, rain was a blessing sometimes, as long as it behaved itself and didn’t strap him and Hutch into mudslide evacuation patrol. Here, all it seemed to want to do was rain. Course, that probably contributed to the vast amount of green all around him, but he’d take a little less green and a little more sun any day of the week.

Rain took him back to the long, lonely days he spent inside the stifling heat of a crumbling Brooklyn tenement, staring out the dirty windows and missing his father with a yearning that gave his guts the shakes.

Rain took him back to the sodden, steaming jungles, the scent of blood, and death, and decay becoming part of him with every breath he took.

Rain took him back to the day he stood in the heat of another home, staring out another window, and watching as the love of his life walked into the arms of a woman.

Rain took him back to the places he didn’t want to go. As he drove on, he hoped this trip wasn’t just more of the same.

The map he’d purchased was for shit, leading him from narrow two-lane roads with potholes as big as manhole covers to even smaller one lane roads which were nothing but potholes. He was damned sure this wasn’t the usual way to get to a huge event like a State Fair. Even in a backwater like this, they had paved roads. The Torino complained each time her suspension was asked to take yet another sneaker-in-the-dryer trip, and he thought more than once about throwing up his hands and just quitting the race altogether.

Something kept him moving, though. Maybe because he thought he’d finally glimpsed at a shaft of light from the end of the tunnel. Or maybe it was that tickle at the back of his neck that always told him Hutch was near.

Two years apart couldn’t erase that. He didn’t think anything ever could. Or would. Some things were just too ingrained in him, like the way he always avoided walking under ladders, or the way he always scanned even the most innocuous of areas for potential danger.

Hutch had grafted himself so deeply that even when he wasn’t there, he was. He could feel his ex-lover’s presence the way iron feels a magnet. Every time he thought to turn around—not that you could on these shitty excuses for roads—something yanked at his insides, leading him on.

He turned from one tiny road to another, even tinier one. Not that “road” was a good description of what he was currently bumping along. Rutted path was more like it. If he imagined hard enough, he could almost see the covered wagons that had no doubt originally blazed this trail. His windshield was so splattered with dead bugs that he had to center his gaze through one clear spot no larger than a baseball. When that, too, got mosquito guts on it, he’d have to stop and clean the whole thing off.

He didn’t relish that. It was no secret that he hated the woods. It wasn’t the city boy in him. It was the soldier, and Viet Nam could never, ever get far enough away to allow him to accept being surrounded by lush greenery with even the slightest degree of equanimity.

After almost getting stuck nose down in a pothole that might have been better labeled a canyon, he breasted a gentle rise and saw, beyond the swaying tips of the far away pines, the graceful silver arc of a large Ferris Wheel.

“All right! Now we’re finally gettin’ somewhere. Good girl, schweetheart,” he said, patting the dash, “just a little further, okay? Okay.”

***

The scent of roasting hotdogs, sweet cotton candy, and pungent sawdust finally overwhelmed eau’ d’Pine and lured him in like a cartoon finger waved under his nose. The grumbling of his stomach was louder than the purr of the Torino as he nudged her deftly around other cars in the area to slide in a spot halfway across the large, open field from the Fair proper, already salivating for a sausage smothered in onions and cheese and chili, and maybe a beer or three.

What little sleep he’d managed to get had done him half a world of good. There was something in him that felt human again, and if it wasn’t quite strong enough to overwhelm the walking ghoul the world saw when it looked at him, at least it was better than yesterday.

Better, he suddenly realized, than quite a few yesterdays, actually.

“Huh. Whadda ya know about that.”

Shaking his head to clear the collywobbles, he eased out of the car, giving the entire area a habitual scan. Little kids with balloons tied to pudgy wrists, cotton candy coating faces and clothing, chattered happily with parents worn to a frazzle.

Older kids traveled in packs, goofing with each other or congregating near the entrance, where they smoked and heckled passers-by with insolent abandon. The cop in him urged action. The cynic let them be. After all, this wasn’t his place; these weren’t his people. It was a fact brought home to him in every well-scrubbed white face he saw, in every expensive automobile he passed, in every well-fed body that spoke of plenty and prosperity and a certain arrogance that made his upper lip want to curl.

None of these fresh-off-the-land, middle-class town folk would have lasted more than a minute in the life he knew, and he felt a certain fierce pride in that and in the people he’d spent his entire adulthood trying to protect and defend.

As he passed through the turnstiles, wallet in hand, he hummed along to the crazy-quilt sounds of the calliope, while listening with half an ear to the carnival barkers shouting their wares in tones—if not in accents—that very much reminded him of his boyhood and weekend trips to Coney Island, where excitement lurked around every corner and the summers were custom made for a rough-and-tumble young boy: fun, sunny, and eternal.

His father’s death had changed all that, and for a long while, he couldn’t even pass by a Fair without wanting to bawl his eyes out. Now, decades after the fact, he found that the sweetness of those long ago memories had gradually overcome their darkness, painting them in sepia tones that his heart remembered with fondness.

Just for the hell of it, he went to the first booth he saw, plunked down a quarter, and chucked a few baseballs at wooden pins. Stinky Callavese had taught him the trick one summer, and he grinned as the disappointed huckster handed over a small, blue stuffed animal of indeterminate species. He in turn handed it off to a little girl with bright blue eyes and cornsilk hair twisted in long braids just to see her smile.

The gap-toothed grin he received lifted the leaden weight just a hair off his heart, and his return smile, though a shadow of its former self, was the stuff of thunderclouds parting briefly to allow a few shafts of rainbow-touched sunlight to shine through.

The blinking lights led him on. Soon, he was leaning against a worn, wooden post, people-watching with idle eyes as he tackled the heart-attack-on-a-plate he washed down with healthy gulps of ice-cold beer.

Without Hutch around to snipe at his eating habits, the food didn’t seem quite as tasty, and he snarled at himself for letting such morose thoughts run loose in his brain. He was a man, for God’s sake, not some sniveling heroine in a trashy romance novel pining over some bare-chested Neanderthal with long hair and a spray-on tan.

And even if he was, he didn’t have to spend every minute of every day thinking about it, did he?

With a sigh, he dumped his plate in the trash, only half-eaten. Dobey was right. The world kept on turning while he stood frozen in place as if waiting for it to turn far enough to let his past become his present. He was trapped in a cage that he himself had constructed. Every beam, every bar, every lock was his creation, and if he could build it, he could sure as hell unbuild it.

Just to spite his brain, he gave a good long look at the next pretty girl who passed him by. He must have been looking better than he thought he did, because she gave him a good long look back, smiling that come-hither smile that had, at one time, churned his nuts and had his dick ready to party.

While he could still appreciate her form—especially those legs that seemed to start in Alaska and end up in South America—as far as his favorite plaything was concerned, he might as well have been watching grass grow.

When the young beauty’s hulking boyfriend came out of nowhere to fling a possessive arm around her shoulders, he felt nothing but relief. He gave the behemoth a glare that was just for show and didn’t even bother watching them move away.

“What the hell am I doin’ here anyway?” he grumbled, using his last napkin to wipe his face. His beard shredded the cheap paper and he tossed it the way of his food with a disgusted grimace.

Giving himself a mental kick in the ass, he pushed away from the post and let his subconscious guide him where it would. He usually wasn’t much on that kind of that stuff—more Hutch’s bag than his—but sometimes it worked, and if he wanted to see the end of this living nightmare, he’d try just about anything, no matter how kooky.

It wasn’t long before he found himself wandering through an area that would have had his ex-partner’s mouth watering. Hippies dressed in colorful rags meandered from booth to booth, listening to some poet ranting here, pawing over cheap paintings there, haggling over the price of a hemp necklace or a set of ugly crystal earrings somewhere else. The stench of too many unwashed bodies mixed with the high sweet smell of pot to create a pong that had his half-empty stomach churning in its own acid.

He hadn’t really paid attention to the cheerful strumming of the guitar when he’d first heard it, but when the beautiful, soft tenor started to sing about love gone wrong and wanting a chance to make it right, his feet kept time with the staccato beat of his heart as he blew past startled shoppers like a rogue tornado in blue Adidas. While his brain already knew he’d be in for a big, fat disappointment, his heart was deaf to anything but its own motives. It was those which drew him forward, blind and deaf to anything but his own need.

Luckily, the stoner crowd didn’t do much more than grumble a bit as he bulled his way through, past, and over them, desperate to see the owner of that angelic voice. From the stares he was getting, he knew he looked like a Cabrillo State escapee, but none of that mattered. He had to see.

He had to.

Applause started up when he was almost to the front, and he used that to his advantage, twisting and squirming and dodging until the stage was finally at his feet. Only then did he dare to look up.

The shot to his gut, made of nothing more substantial than his heart sheering in half, damn near had him folding like a boxer told to throw the match in the second round. The eyes that met his were a deep green and peered from a face the color of coffee with just a hint of cream. One bushy black eyebrow cocked in a way so Hutch-like that his mind reeled, nearly taking his body with it on its trek back down the rabbit-hole.

“Hey, you okay, man?”

The singer was at his elbow, now, fingers light on his skin. He shook them off violently and stepped away, swiping at his mouth with the back of his hand. He wanted to lash out, wanted to take the crushing weight of disappointment and just thrust it, with one savage punch, into a total stranger whose only fault was that he wasn’t tall, blond, beautiful, or Hutch.

“Dude, you look seriously messed up. You need a doctor or something? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“More like heard one,” he heard himself mumble, forcing his anger down like the lid of an overstuffed suitcase.

“Oh man, that’s heavy. Totally heavy, dude.” Starsky missed the speculative glance aimed his way. “Listen, I got my van parked right outside here. What say you and me take a walk and you can lay your troubles on the line. I got some primo weed that’ll make every one of ’em just fade away. Guaranteed.”

Something about the singer’s tone snapped his head up just in time to catch the heated glance blazing along his body from head to toe. Caught between anger and a hint of self-pride at being cruised, he reached into his pocket and pulled out the picture, flipping it up so the singer could take a good look. “You seen this guy around anywhere?”

Disappointed, the man glimpsed at the picture, shook his head, then grabbed Starsky’s wrist, pulled it closer, and looked again. His eyes widened.

“Wait a minute. Wait just a minute, dude! That’s—that’s Kenny, right? I mean, it can’t be, but damn, it sure looks like him!”

“Kenny?”

“Yeah! Kenny Hutchinson! Great singer. Really, really fine. Nice guy, too. Just don’t get him talking about his old lady, man. Real slit-your-wrists time, if you can dig that action.”

Finally! Starsky closed in, the force of his personality holding the man still. His mouth opened, his words issued forth like bullets from his Berretta. “You saw him? Where? When? Is he here? How is he? Show me.”

“Woah, woah, hold up there, dude. Man’s not here. Hell, I haven’t seen him in, damn how long’s it been? Gotta be two weeks at least. Let me—”

Brutal fingers clamping on his own cut morphed the sentence into a hissing wail.

“Quit jiving, turkey. Talk, and make it fast. Hutchinson. Where’d you see him?”

“Yo, dude! Hands off the merchand—”

“Talk. Now.”

“What, you a cop or somethin’? Ow! Damn it, let up, man!”

“Now!”

The singer wrenched his arm away, causing Starsky’s jacket to gape open and expose his holster and the sidearm jacked down into it. “Oh, shit, man,” he breathed. “You are a cop!”

Gritting his teeth, Starsky grabbed hold of the back of the man’s shirt and bulled him out the tent’s back entrance, slamming him against a nearby poll hard enough to start stars spinning before his eyes. “Listen up and listen good, turkey. So far, I got you dead to rights on soliciting and drug possession, and that’s just for starters.” Starsky pinned the struggling man with his icy eyes. “Way I see it, you got two choices. You start answering my questions, or I take you up on your little offer of a look-see inside your van. If you don’t wanna spend the next ten years of your life playin’ pattycake with a bunch of Vice bulls, you’d better start talking. And fast.”

“But—”

“Last chance!”

“Hey—”

“That’s the way you wanna play it? Fine.” Spinning the larger man around, he wrenched the singer’s arm high and hard behind his back as if ready to snap on handcuffs he didn’t have with him.

The ruse worked.

“Okay! Okay! He…he…sings at a few places I hang out at, all right? Coffee houses, mostly. Open mic, you know. Got a good voice. The ladies dig his groove.”

“Where are these coffee houses? When’s the last time you saw him? Talk!”

When the man visibly hesitated yet again, Starsky moved in so that their faces were bare inches apart. He could smell the stink of fear-sweat and old cigarettes oozing from his pores. In his softest, most dangerous voice, he said, “You don’t even wanna think about what I’m gonna do to you if you don’t spill everything you know in the next ten seconds, pally.”

The man’s Adam’s apple bobbed as he forced down a hard swallow, Starsky’s chilling eyes and voice doing more than any amount of yelling and physical intimidation ever could. He nodded sharply, swallowing again. “All right. All right. He…usually hangs out at a place called the Has Bean. He…he’s been having troubles with his old lady, and they have a room upstairs where he bunks some nights after he’s done singing and drinking. You should see the chicks go at one another to be the one he picks to spend the night.” More than a trace of jealousy was stirred into his comments. “Man, what I wouldn’t give to have fine foxes like that fightin’ over me, my man.”

Starsky’s smile belonged on a shark; a big one, all teeth and flat, cold eyes that promised nothing but a long, bad road ahead. “Now we’re getting somewhere. When’s the last time you saw him there?”

“A-about a week ago. No! Last…last Thursday! Yeah! Last Thursday! He-he looked like he’d been through a sausage grinder, dig? Like he hadn’t slept or ate in a week. His clothes were all dirty and rumpled, and his voice…first time he ever got booed off the stage. He just packed up his guitar and left. Haven’t seen him since. No jive, man. I’m bein’ straight with you, right down the line. Now lemme go, huh? I swear, I don’t know nothin’ else, man!”

“You said ‘a couple places,'” Starsky demanded, pulling the man away from the pole and slamming him back into it. “Names! Dates! Now, or we take a nice, long ride in that van of yours. You dig, my man?” The last mocking sentence was accompanied by another hard slam against the wooden pole. A loud crack sounded as rotting wood started to give way. Pieces of bark came loose and dusted the singer’s slumped shoulders.

Like a switch had been flipped, he couldn’t get the words out fast enough, the urgency tripping his tongue. “I—I—all right! The…the…damn… Tam’s Espresso Bar. Yeah! Tam’s. Goes there a couple times a month, usually on Tuesdays. Tuesday’s Ladies Night and he really packs the joint. I go with him sometimes, just to cruise.” His hand, shaky, wiped the sweat pouring from beneath his ragged headband. “There’s another one. It’s…what—shit…oh yeah! Vegan Virgin. It’s a crummy dive over on Northeast Holly. He’s got a semi-regular gig there. Goes maybe seven, eight times a month. One of the owners is hot for him, but he doesn’t give her the time of day. If you ever saw the slag, you’d know why.” His lips curled in derision. The smirk melted quickly in the heat of Starsky’s glare. “That’s it, dude. I’m tapped out. If he goes anywhere else, I don’t know about it. No jive, man. No fucking jive at all, dig?”

“Yeah.” Starsky let out on a sigh. “I dig.” Forcing his cramped fingers to release the reeking clothes, he pushed the singer away from him. “Get outta here before I change my mind and haul you in for polluting the air.”

Eyeing Starsky warily, the man edged away as if expecting to be hauled back any second. When he realized he was well and truly free, he picked up his feet and bolted back to the tent. Starsky caught his muttered “fucking pig” just before he entered, but ignored it.

He had more important things to do.

***

He paced back and forth along the front of his car. His steps were rapid, agitated, miles away from his normal dancer’s grace. The grinding of his teeth was audible to anyone standing even several feet away. Not that anyone was standing several feet away.

Not anyone human, at any rate.

Instead, a dozen huge, smelly geese stood between him and the entrance to the Vegan Virgin, staring at him through hateful, beady black eyes. He faked a step toward them. They hissed and moved to join the battle, settling only when he retreated back to the relative safety of the Torino’s open door.

The air around him was a stenchful, humid swamp; the sky overhead pregnant storm clouds roiling in labor. His temper was that sky, those roiling, angry clouds stretched thin above the trembling nimbus of his remaining sanity. The rumble of thunder was a perfect portent and the geese hissed back in agreement.

“Hutchinson, consider this added to the list of things I’m gonna rearrange your teeth for.” The image of his fist mashing his ex-lover’s full lips against white teeth both disturbed and calmed him. He took a breath, eased it out slowly through pursed lips.

The sound of laughter, derisive and cheaply bought, strained the fraying seams of his temper still further. The last seventy-two hours of his life had been a total bust, and if he didn’t get the answers he sought here, he was seriously contemplating getting in the car, pointing it due west, and driving until the Torino came to rest at the bottom of an ocean tomb—Hutchinson and revenge be damned.

“That’s it. No more mister nice guy.” He slipped off his leather jacket, the wearing of which had gotten him tossed out on his ass in the first place, revealing his holster.

The laughter turned to stone cold silence.

His motions were utterly calm and deliberate as he unsnapped and withdrew his weapon, flipping off the safety with practiced ease and pointing its muzzle toward the sky. “Last time, ladies. Unless you wanna add roast goose to your vegetarian menu, call off the attack squad and let me in.”

Goose Number One was in the crosshairs when one of the women opened the door and stepped out, broom in hand. Her peasant dress was plastered to her body with sweat; her long, graying hair hung in limp ropes around her rounded, weathered face. Both provided a less than enticing sight. The ugly expression on her face did nothing to add to the appeal. “We’re calling the cops!”

“Too late,” he replied in an even voice, lifting the wallet in his right hand and allowing it to drop open to display his badge. “You got five seconds lady. Five….”

“Kathy!” she shouted behind her, never removing her eyes from his. “Call the cops anyway! This man’s obviously—”

“…four…”

“Call them off, Cindy, before he—”

“…three…”

“I said call the damn cops!”

“…two…one—”

“All right! All right! Hester! Sadie! Go on! Get outta here! Shoo! Shoo!”

The woman—Cindy?—hefted her broom and swooshed it at the flock. The geese fluttered and honked but eventually gave in, flapping off in a spray of bird shit and lost feathers. The stink of them on the still, humid air was nearly unbearable and Starsky felt his normally cast-iron stomach heave.

Weapon still in hand, he closed the distance between the Torino and the restaurant at a quick trot just in case the geese decided on a rear assault.

Seeing the madman running toward her with a gun in his hand made Cindy scream and drop her broom. Her hands shot straight up over her head, her eyes as wide as saucers.

“Don’t shoot!”

“Get inside.” He gripped her shoulder, spun her around, and pushed her less-than-gently back into the food inspector’s nightmare masquerading as a restaurant. Whatever had made his former partner want to take a step inside this place, let alone share his music on a regular basis, was far beyond his ability to decipher. It was dark, dank, dirty, and stunk worse than the geese.

Stuffed into a shadowed corner was a rickety platform that looked ready to collapse at a sneeze. Much as he didn’t want to, Starsky’s mind kept trying to picture Hutch standing there, guitar in hand.

Kept trying, kept failing.

A muffled cough freed him from his unwanted musings. He blinked once, then again to clear his eyes of the fuzziness he refused to believe were tears. Pale, frightened faces came into view and he stared at them for a long moment before tracking their gazes down to the gun he still had pointed directly at the tightly knotted group.

Slowly, only a slight tremor betraying his fraying control, he slipped the weapon back into its holster and set his face in a stern, stony expression.

The first time he’d entered and tried to show the picture, he’d gotten kicked out on his ass. His leather jacket had been the culprit. To the vegan owners, he supposed it was like he was wearing someone’s grandmother on his back. It made shit sense, but then again, his being here in the first place made shit sense, so it all equaled out somehow.

“All right,” he began, taking care to keep his tone neutral and steady despite the pounding of his heart and the anger raking his guts through the coals, “we’re gonna try this again. Hutchinson, Kenneth. The guy in this picture. When was the last time you saw him, how long did he stay, and did he mention where he was going when he left.”

The three women shared a look, and when Cindy turned back to him, rubbing her left arm, he knew she was going to lay a big fat lie at his feet. He lifted a finger, Hutchinson-style, and glared at her. “Unless you wanna spend time in the slams for obstructing justice, you’ll tell me the truth, lady. Now.”

This time, Kathy spoke up. “Look, he was just a guy, okay? Had a nice voice, so we signed him on, semi-regular, you know? Came in once, twice a week, sung a few songs, had some dinner, and left. That’s all we know.”

His disbelief was so palpable, it could have been the fifth person in the room. The women, feeling it, lowered their eyes and shifted their feet, obviously uncomfortable.

“Wanna try again?” he asked, his voice taking on that peculiar softness that might have meant gentleness but was its dark twin. “Guy like that? Good lookin’, great voice, vegetarian. Right up your alley. Don’t stand here tryin’ to tell me he was ‘just a guy.’ I ain’t seen a lady yet who didn’t trip over her own tongue tryin’ to make a play for him.”

“He was also married,” Cindy growled.

“So?”

Twin gasps met his question. Kathy, however, had the grace to look embarrassed, and when they noticed, her two companions glared at her as if she’d just confessed to downing a rare steak in one gulp. As one, the others took a deliberately measured step away from her, the leper in their midst.

And so it was naturally to Kathy that he turned his attention. “Help me,” he murmured, his voice showing unvarnished gentleness for the first time. “Tell me what you know. He could be in danger. I need to find him.” His dented pride did not allow him to add please.

Her sigh was long and sad; the look in her eye reminded him greatly of Sweet Alice, another woman whose love could never be returned. “Look,” she began, running a trembling hand through her limp, lifeless hair, “he…he talked to me sometimes, okay? His eyes…they were so beautiful, but so sad. What girl could possibly resist that, huh?” Her tone was defensive as she looked at her companions through her lashes. “I’d serve him his dinner between sets, and if I wasn’t so busy, I’d sit down and talk to him, a little. I hated seeing that sadness in his eyes. I thought…I thought maybe I could, you know, take it away. Fix it, somehow.”

Her reddened cheeks brought out the color in her gray eyes, and Starsky realized she was more attractive than he’d first given her credit for. He reached out and laid a hand on her wrist, giving it a little squeeze to show his understanding. She gave him a little smile in return.

“His wife…Abby? I met her a couple of times when she came in with him. She was nice, you know? A little bland, but nice. I thought they made a good couple. Course, I was a little jealous, but who messes with true love like that? Not me, that’s for sure. No matter how much I might have been tempted.”

The knife she’d unwittingly thrust through his heart caused the breath to escape from his lungs in soundless agony. It took all his strength to appear unaffected, but he thought Kathy caught it just the same.

The look in her eyes changed, and he stared deep, trying to read it. Needing to read it.

If it was pity, he was gone. Flat gone. No turning back, no looking forward. For a moment, he was in the Torino, physically there as it sailed over some looming cliff, the somber gray of the Pacific spread out below like a sheet full of wrinkles.

Then he was back, staring into her eyes as the answer came like a puzzle piece that fit just right. It wasn’t pity. It was compassion. Knowing. A sense of “you too?” A sense of “been there, done that.” A sense of communion never tasted by a lonely kid from the poor side of town left fatherless too young.

His next breath was one of relief and his piercing gaze softened. He nodded slightly in answer to her unasked questions, and her smile was sad and comforting at the same time. It was a salve he desperately needed.

Without looking at her companions, Kathy took his hand and led him to a private office where she told him everything she knew.

***

He snatched what sleep he could in fits and starts, an empty engine he was trying to coax to the gas station before it gave out entirely. Exhaustion painted deep bruised circles beneath his eyes, lightening their color to something more resembling Hutch’s arctic blues than his own “Elizabeth Taylor” violet. The man in the mirror told him any light was better than none, but that didn’t do much for his confidence.

At least he didn’t give in to the urge to punch that stark reflection out like he had before. The knuckles’ bruises were on the wane, and he figured he’d keep them that way. It would make punching the reason behind this mess a little less painful.

He was getting close; he could feel it. When he was a kid, he’d stood under a huge Con Edison transformer pole on a dare. The feeling was similar. The hair on his arms and the back of his neck wanted to stand up. He had that itch, the one right in the center of his spine that he couldn’t quite scratch. Adrenalin was spiking through his veins, giving his world color and sound, kicking his reflexes to hair-trigger readiness.

His brain, thank God, had taken the hint and slunk off to some dark corner somewhere to lick its wounds. Driving the Torino, he was more machine than man, and that’s exactly the way he wanted it.

Kathy hadn’t told him all that much, back in that dank room, but she’d twigged him on to several places his ex-lover liked to hare off to when Abby was giving him nothing but the back of her head.

He’d already searched two of them, not surprised to find no sign of his quarry. He’d known he was deliberately saving the best for last.

When he pulled the Torino down to the end of the dirt road that stopped in front of a nearly impenetrable copse of trees, he knew. He just knew. Hutch wasn’t close.

Hutch was here.

He took several deep breaths, blowing them out hard. His guts were roiling. He stilled them by silent command. His anger revved up to full throttle and, combined with the adrenaline flowing through his system, made the world around him that much more crisp and clear.

Leaves crackled beneath the soles of his sneakers. Somewhere overhead, a startled bird took flight. He swore he could hear the sound of each individual feather as it fought against gravity; could almost hear the damn thing’s heart beating, quick, like machine-gun fire in jungles his younger self knew too well.

Sun glinted down, glancing off silvered bark. He found himself caught in a memory.

Hutch’s hair, glinting silver in the brilliant sun, the ocean behind him the exact color of his eyes. That smile. Just for him.

Blinking quick, he shook his head and walked on, graceful and silent as a cat, all sinew, no bone.

Around this tree, stop, plot a course through two huge holly bushes whose scent snared him back to a Christmas three years past and

Hutch humming—humming!—as he loops the holly-ball over Starsky’s rearview mirror and smiles like he’s been granted a free pass to Heaven, and doesn’t have to die to get there.

“No,” Starsky growled, shaking his head more vigorously. “You hate the woods. You hate ’em just like you hate—”

—Hutch. Covered in dirt and sticks from the perfect tackle Starsky landed on him, his color high, his breath whooshing out as he readily accepts the weight of Starsky’s body landing foursquare atop him, and they roll—

“No! Damn it, no!” Reaching up, he grabbed his ear, fingers biting brutally into tender skin and cartilage, the pain nearly enough to bring tears to his eyes. “You’re a cop. Be a cop!”

A strange wrrrrr, the sudden sharp rustle of feathers, and he nearly jumped out of his skin before realizing he’d startled some bird hiding in the bushes right in front of him. A pheasant, maybe. Or a quail. Hutch would know. Hutch was—

—Laughing as Starsky used his last clean napkin to wipe the bird shit off the freshly waxed Torino. The sound of this simple joy made the cloudy day brighter somehow. Hutch was like that, able to break him out of his shittiest mood without even seeming to try. He was—

“Enough!” he barked, taking a second to regroup as the memories and the surroundings were conspiring to drive him out of what was left of his mind. He rubbed the bridge of his nose, cleared his throat, and squared his shoulders. His sharpened gaze spotted a clearing up ahead and all the puzzle pieces of his life came together in the white haze of sun and pollen no more than twenty feet away.

He felt the anger which had shorn him up and kept him moving for the past two years begin to trickle away like sweat as his feet drew his body toward that hazy clearing. His mind gibbered in a foreign language while his body seemed to be drawn forward by a rope tied around his heart.

The closer he got to the clearing, the harder he fought to hold on to some vestige of his rage, his hurt, his ruined pride, but the insidious, backstabbing twins of hope and joy eased through the widening cracks of the man he’d become, washing huge pieces of him clean and innocent as a newborn first lain at its mother’s breast.

When he stepped through, he found himself in the high grasses of a lakeshore some yards distant. The lake itself was blue and flat and seemed to go on forever. Slightly to the left was a listing, weathered dock with many of its slats missing. At the foot of the dock, sitting a jut of jagged silt, one long leg straight out, the other cocked up at the knee, was Hutch.

The sun pouring down and glinting a silver halo around his bright hair, the long, lean line of his body, the solitary strength of this solitary man struck chords so deep in Starsky he knew he could dig for a million lifetimes and never find their beginning. The years had done nothing to change that handsome profile—if anything, he seemed to be younger, somehow; hair shorn and curling at the back and sides, face free of that mustache that had always made him look twenty years older and a hundred times more careworn. Deep lines of a life lived under the gun had seemingly vanished, leaving behind smooth, golden, sun-kissed skin.

His beauty was almost too damn painful to look upon.

He hadn’t made a sound. He knew he hadn’t. But the second, the very second, he stepped out into that clearing, Hutch turned his head and stared right through him.

Not at him. Through him. Like he wasn’t even important enough to be noticed.

Like he wasn’t even there.

Mustache gone, Starsky could see all-too-clearly the sudden, cruel twist to his ex-lover’s lips. Blue eyes sharpened, and Starsky knew, finally, he was being seen. Seen, and judged.

Judged, and found wanting.

His stomach plunged, well recognizing that look. He had no chance against it. His defenses had all crumbled in that last trek of yards. He stood before that lover-stranger with his hope hanging out like a banner that could be seen from the moon.

He scrambled for protection that just wasn’t there anymore. His mind told him to run. His heart told him to run. His body ignored the order. He might have been many things, but David Starsky was no coward. He would stand there, on his feet, and take the cut. If it felled him there and then, so be it. He was here. He was finally here. He would not, could not, turn away.

Firming his jaw, he lifted his chin and stared across the few feet separating them—a man standing, unafraid, before the firing squad, refusing blindfold and last cigarette.

He had finally found his pride. It had come upon him unnoticed, a fair wind that could nonetheless topple mountains if given breath enough. He had found his pride, and if that was to be his only armor, he would be glad in the wearing of it.

Hutch flicked his gaze up and down, his expression disdainful as it had been in those burned-out days before they’d tossed their badges. Starsky could almost smell the salt in the air, could nearly hear the waves as they crashed down on life and career that day a scarred, beaten lifetime ago.

“Gotta hand it to you, Starsk,” Hutch began, voice absolutely without inflection. “At least when a piece of trash gets thrown in the gutter, it has the sense not to come sniveling after the person who threw it away.”

His lips slightly parted, Starsky cocked his head in disbelief. His tongue cleaved itself to the roof of his mouth, leaving him dumb with shock.

He thought he was ready. He thought he could take anything Hutch could throw at him.

He was wrong.

Hutch’s laugh was derisiveness personified. He came to his feet, languidly, and with contemptuous ease. His huge hands brushed at the thighs of his worn cords. “We always knew you weren’t the brightest candle on the table, buddy, but this new look, well, maybe you had more in common with Terry’s kids than we knew, huh?”

“You son of a bitch,” he whispered, amazed at the audacity of this blackened husk of the man who had spanned the width and breadth of his entire world. A tiny part of him, some dust mote floating free somewhere in his brain, recognized this as a tried-and-true Hutchinson tactic—strike the first blow. When hurt, lash out, cause the other to attack you. By proxy—retribution and salvation, both. The glimpse of understanding that had come upon the heels of recognition waited to burst, full blown, upon his brain until Hutch opened his mouth again, crushing it stillborn beneath the heel of his boot.

“Better than being the son of a two-bit hook-nosed scum who sucked mob cock from behind a badge.”

Red.

His world was red. Black, jagged lightning strikes intruded at intervals that matched his speeded pulse, but red was all he saw as his legs ate up the scant distance between them. His arms were out, muscles bunched, fingers hooked like talons.

Like bulls in the middle of a vast field they met, crashing together with ground-shaking force, each needing to be the first to land a crippling blow. This first meld of body to body lasted only a brief handful of silent seconds before they broke apart, pausing only briefly to re-gather lost breath.

Starsky charged. Hutch easily sidestepped, his caustic laughter ramping Starsky’s rage to lethal levels. The last gasp of sanity screamed, telling him not to do this, telling him that Hutch was goading him, that Hutch knew exactly how lethal Starsky could be, telling him to stop before irreparable damage was done.

He didn’t listen.

Love was snuffed like a candle, compassion likewise. Sanity had gasped its last pitiful breath, and the smile that stood in sanity’s place was one no man could look upon and live.

Fists clenched, he waded back in, waited until the mocking laughter paused for breath, and unleashed with a left hook whose power was the culmination of every single sleepless night, every single tear never shed, every single drop of pain lodged in his heart.

It should have blown the man to kindling.

Instead, Hutch turned his head at the last minute and the punch no more than glanced off of his jaw, rocking his head and body just once before steadiness took rein again. His sneer reappeared, made all the more savage by the small trickle of blood wending its way down from the corner of his mouth. His tongue came out to taste it, the action a deliberate mockery of sexual arousal. Insolence tipped his head down, gaze spearing Starsky’s, emphasizing the difference in their heights with cruel deliberation.

“That the best you got, lover?”

With a growl worthy of any wounded animal, Starsky charged, fists like battering-rams at the end of steel-bar arms. He connected, chest and belly both, and Hutch stumbled back a step, his cocky sneer morphing instantly into surprise as breath woofed from his lungs.

The opportunity was there, weakness was spotted and, exploiting it, Starsky rushed forward again, head lowered, butting his ex-partner solidly against a shoulder. Hutch’s weight gave way, steadied, and pushed back. Hard.

It was Starsky’s turn to stumble back, only his innate sense of balance keeping him on his feet. When he looked up, Hutch’s finger was raised, pointing directly at his heart. “Do that again and I’ll drop you where you stand, buddy. Count on it.”

“Says you.”

Derisive laughter followed like a stinking acid river cutting easily through bedrock. “That’s what I like about you, Starsk. The enormity of your intelligence is matched only by your scintillating repartee.”

“Fuck you, Hutchinson!”

“And deprive some other poor soul the pleasure of being crushed under your sweating attempts at screwing? I think I’ll pass on that one, schweetheart.”

If there had been anything left of his heart but a rusted shell, Starsky might have turned away and left, might have walked until his strength was gone, until he could finally curl up and slip away.

But Hutch had cut the last drop of blood from that living, beating heart and had flung it, uncaring, into the dust at his feet.

Soundless, he darted forward and grabbed two fistfuls of plaid flannel, yanking forward until they were toe to toe, body to body, breath to breath. There was no one he knew in those arctic, flinty eyes. No one he wanted to know.

Gathering the remainder of his strength, he pushed Hutch away as hard as he could.

His rage gave him the power his muscles lacked.

Hutch’s arms pinwheeled as he stumbled backwards, trying desperately to keep his footing. His steps led him onto the crumbling dock where he finally fell, splitting yet more slats beneath his weight.

With a nimbleness rarely seen, he was up again within seconds, skittering backward toward the dock’s listing edge. His eyes were like pinwheels, glittering as they spun in their sockets, his grin a garish cut against a suddenly pale face.

“That the best you’ve got, lover? You’ve really gone to seed since I left, Starsk. Oh, well. Like father, like son, I suppose.”

And that was the final spark to set fully alight Starsky’s rage. Fists curled, he ran out onto the dock, not caring that the boards were splintering under his feet. A hard right to Hutch’s belly doubled him over. A thundering left beneath the chin straightened him up again and sent him tumbling back, back, back. The sound of his head cracking a listing post echoed like a rifle-shot, sending up yet another flock of startled birds to wheel in the sky.

A split second later, he was gone, embraced by the deep, frigid waters of the lake, where he sank like a stone.

Dancing nimbly across the rest of the dock, Starsky skidded to a stop at the edge, ready to pounce upon the blond head once it surfaced again.

Concentric ripples marked the spot of Hutch’s immersion, but of the man, he saw no sign.

Nearly blind with rage, he jumped into the lake, intent only upon finishing what Hutch had started. The coldness turned his body numb instantly and he gasped in shock, inhaling water and choking it out again.

His hands felt like blocks of wood as he dogpaddled in circles, head craning for a glimpse, just a glimpse, of his ex-everything.

When it didn’t come, he calling out, taunting. His voice echoed across the flat surface, coming back to him like bullets striking, distorted and fading like his awareness had when he’d been gunned down in the parking lot of his own precinct.

Water frothed in foam-capped wavelets as he did a quick, clumsy turn, sure he’d heard a sound over the fading echo. It was only his own breath; harsh, choking, hoarse from his continued calls.

Then, like a scene from a childhood nightmare, he felt something slide against his sneakered foot—slide and grip hard, yanking him under and cutting off his surprised yelp with savage abruptness.

Instinct battled instinct, but rage trumped them all. He kicked at the grasping hand with all his might even as he bent at the waist, his own fingers taloned claws ready to rend and cut and tear—

—And snagged fine floating tendrils of what could be nothing other than Hutch’s fine hair—something easily recognized even to the benumbed, clumsy things his fingers had become. Clenching his fist, he yanked brutally.

Hutch’s body surfaced with thoughtless ease as the strength of his pull sent Starsky toward the bottom. He pushed off the rocks and shot upward, his hands on Hutch’s shoulders before his head even broke the surface.

His features twisted in a nightmare grimace, he released Hutch’s shoulders to grab the t-shirt at the neck with his right hand, his left cocked and ready to deliver the final blow.

The sight of Hutch’s head listing stopped him cold. Rage drained away as blind instinct guided his hands to shoulder and head. And for the first time, he looked, really looked, at the damage he had wrought.

Skin as pale and cold as marble met his horrified gaze. Two gaping cuts, trailing blood like falling rubies, stood out in stark contrast; one above the right eyebrow, the second above the left ear. Dazed and drowned, his eyes were blank and empty and focused on infinity.

Having no time in which to determine if this was a living man he had in his hands or a dead one, he grabbed Hutch into an awkward version of the rescue carry that his former partner had tried to teach him back at the Academy. He was tiring fast, his diminished lung capacity asserting itself with a vengeance.

The shore seemed miles away. His kicks were weak and ineffectual, barely enough to keep them both above the water let alone to propel them toward dry land.

Somehow, some way, in the ways that had been there for him as a fatherless kid growing up on the mean streets of a dirty city, or a young man in the muddy, moldy jungles of a far-off land, his body, his muscles remembered what it was they were created for, and he finally began to move. With purpose, and clarity, if not vision.

Soft grunts marked his exhalations. The high tones of wheezing marked the damage his lungs had endured. But, labored or damaged, they were both there, both present, both able to be heard and sensed.

No such sound marked Hutch’s continued presence.

Forcing himself not to panic at the implications, he continued to struggle forward, never as comfortable in this too-buoyant environment as his ex-partner had always been. Finally, when his feet felt the bottom of the lake, he gave up struggling to swim and bulled his way through the rest of the water until there was only rocks and dirt of blessedly dry land.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” he grunted, breathless as he hauled Hutch out of the water and over the rocks. “Goddamnit…shit…fuck!” Quickly stripping out of his heavy, sodden jacket, he dropped to his knees and lightly smacked Hutch on both ivory cheeks. “Hutch. C’mon, Hutchinson…I know you’re in there. Quit playin’ around.”

When there was no response, Starsky held his hand beneath Hutch’s nose. No stirrings of breath came to his chilled flesh and, with a soft cry, he dropped his head onto his ex-partner’s chest, desperately searching out a heartbeat.

It was there. Faint and tremulous, but it was there. Refusing to attribute his faintness in any way to relief, Starsky kept his head down, waiting for the rise and fall of the broad chest to signal Hutch’s full place among the living.

That chest remained obdurate and still.

“Goddamnit, Hutchinson, not now. Don’t fucking do this to me. You wanna check out, you do it on your own shift, not on mine. I still got things I wanna say to you.”

No response met his harsh taunting. He waited another five heartbeats before snatching his head up and rocking back on his knees. “Oh, no, no, no,” he said, grabbing Hutch’s right arm, torquing it at the shoulder and rolling him over onto his belly. “Not this time, Hutchinson. Not this time. You ain’t goin’ nowhere till I’ve had my say, you hear me? You hear me? Huh? Nowhere, partner.”

After making sure Hutch’s head was turned to the side, breathing passages clear of sand and grasses, he moved down to straddle the lean waist. Sending up a short, succinct prayer to anyone listening up there, he placed his hands on the hard, chilled flesh near the bottom of Hutch’s ribcage, and pushed.

When there was no response, he pushed again, and again and again, growling out a “come on, come on” with every thrust. He could feel the cage of Hutch’s ribs flex and return, flex and return and knew that any more pressure would cause them to break, maybe splinter.

But he couldn’t stop. Couldn’t. Wouldn’t. Can’t. Won’t. Will not.

“Goddamnit, Hutchinson, breathe!”

Still nothing. His body, already pushed far past its endurance, worked by rote, but even that was fading fast. “Coward!” he spat, his anger increasing the strength of his thrusts exponentially. “Is that what you are now, huh? Is that what this cushy life your cushy wife turned you into? You a lousy coward, you sucka, you scum? Afraid to face me and tell me the real reason you left? So afraid, you’d rather die than tell me to my face? Huh? Is that it? Is that it, you fucking coward? Is it? Is it?? Answer me, goddamnit! Answer me!” The last had all the ferocity of a lion’s great roar as he pounded down and forward with all his rage-fueled strength. He felt something give underneath his hands.

“Fuck!”

His hands froze as panic rose. It might have swept him away with it had not the broad back upon which his hands were still lying expand, then explode into violent jerks as Hutch gasped and choked. Then, with a moan that sounded like it was coming from the soles of his feet, Hutch spewed about ten gallons—by Starsky’s reckoning—of lake water across the sand.

It was, quite possibly, the most beautiful sound he’d ever heard.

“You’re gonna be okay, Hutch,” he murmured, his hands rubbing gentle circles along Hutch’s heaving back. “You’re gonna be okay. You just stay awake and keep doin’ what you’re doin’ and we’ll have you outta here in no time.”

Hutch answered by vomiting again, and then again, his entire body drawn bow-tight as his stomach expelled the water he’d both swallowed and inhaled.

He slumped all at once, and Starsky caught him, twisting his body to lay on its side as far from the mess as possible. “Hutch?”

A dazed stare lived in those glassy pale blues, and as Starsky watched, the lids flickered, trembled and closed. For a breathless second, Starsky thought Hutch had gone out on him again, but no, he was breathing. It was labored, and noisy, and he was still a little pale around the lips, but he was breathing and that was enough.

For now.

Starsky twisted as his gaze darted from pillar to post, but all he could see was trees, water, and more trees. Leave it to his ex-partner to pick the exact middle of nowhere as the best place to lose his marbles.

He looked back down at the chilled body before him. The skin beneath his hand had warmed up just a little, and he could feel the crackle in Hutch’s lungs every time he took a deep breath. But for now, he was breathing, and appeared to have slipped into sleep.

At least he hoped it was sleep.

He craned his neck again, feeling the abused muscles threaten to cramp. The woods from which he’d exited were no more than twenty feet away. Massaging his left shoulder, he stared into the thick copse, considering.

He could chance hauling ass back to the car, if he didn’t get lost, and if the radio worked, which was doubtful this far out; bringing the Torino to the beachhead was flat out impossible. There were no logging roads or even game trails, and the trees were packed so tight together, there was no way he could fit that big car through anywhere.

Carrying his ex-partner back to the car was also out of the question. Hutch’s limp form was too unwieldy, and he didn’t want to take the chance of dropping the man and causing more damage.

Of course, he could just up and walk away for good. Just walk back through the woods, get in his car, turn it around, and shut himself of Hutch forever. If he was feeling generous, he could even stop back at the police station and let them know where Hutchinson was and spare his conscience any more worry.

It was a tempting idea. Hutch’s sneering face still hovered in his memories; his sarcastic, cutting voice still loud in Starsky’s ears. Even though he’d known what he was in for when he’d first started on this little trip down the rabbit hole, nothing could have prepared him for the reality he’d experienced.

He’d set out to find Hutch and he’d found him. The whys and wherefores were immaterial. He’d done what he’d set out to do and, logically, that should be the end of it. He could go on with his life, Hutch could go on with his, and they could both shut that final door between them for good.

It would be healthy for him. It would be healthy for Hutch. And it would be healthy for all of those who knew them and wanted the people they knew back and not these automatons who bore identical features and alien everything else.

Halfway to his feet, he chanced a look down. The long, half-clad body was covered in wet sand, seaweed, gooseflesh, all jittering like butter on a hot skillet by the violent tremors twitching from head to toe. Eyes, reddened and swollen, were staring directly at him.

Not through him, this time.

At him.

At him.

“Hutch?”

Hutch blinked slowly, blinked again, then groaned as he tried to roll from belly to back. Dropping to a hurried squat, Starsky laid gentle hands on his shoulder and back and helped him turn, settling his head back on the improvised pillow made from his jacket.

He looked down onto Hutch’s features again.

The gaping cut just below the hairline was still leaking sluggishly. Snatching up his t-shirt while shaking the sand from it, Starsky tenderly dabbed at the swollen, mottled flesh before pressing down hard. He winced at Hutch’s pitiful moan. “Sorry, buddy, but you’re bleedin’ like a stuck pig. Here,” he continued, grabbing Hutch’s left hand and pressing it against the t-shirt. “Hold it right there. Yeah. That’s good. How you feelin’, huh? Your head spinning? How ’bout your belly. You swallowed half the lake there, partner.”

The word—that word—tumbled from his lips without thought and, hearing it, he froze, staring down at Hutch, waiting to see the derision he knew—he knew—would come bursting forth from those eyes.

What the hell am I doing? Ten minutes in the same place, half the time trying to kill one another, and the first thing I call him is “partner”? I need my head shrunk. Need somethin’, anyway. This ain’t even close to bein’ right.

Still, with that brave heart as much a part of his being as, it seemed, Hutch still was, he looked on. Waiting.

Hutch’s eyes remained blank. Open, they were, and still staring; unblinking and blank as unminted coins.

Somewhere, very close, a branch cracked beneath a heavy weight. Starsky flinched and watched as Hutch’s blank-shiny eyes tracked the sound. When they returned, they were no longer empty.

Instead, they filled with something very much like wonder—the same wonder Starsky had seen in those blue, blue eyes the first time they’d kissed and if that wasn’t a memory he hadn’t spent two years trying to exorcise, he didn’t know what was.

A glow suffused those marble features and a slow smile of breathtaking innocence eased across the once-harsh planes of his features, softening them in ways that Starsky remembered all too well.

Starsky damned himself for the noticeable tremor shaking his hand as he reached out to cup Hutch’s cheek, thumb stroking tenderly along the deepening smile lines beside the still wondering eyes.

Wonder morphed into confusion as a small frown quirked at Hutch’s lips. “Starsk?” he whispered hoarsely.

Before Starsky’s confusion had a chance to fully set in, Hutch tried to lift his head, which caused him to groan and roll to his side. More lake water dribbled from his mouth as his body heaved.

Starsky could do very little but look on, rubbing his shoulders and belly, and when Hutch finally passed out again, it was a relief to both men.

A sudden noise he knew from unfortunate experience was not something that belonged intrinsically to the woods shot him to his feet, then down in a half-squat, hands out and ready for action. Sniper’s eyes scanned the unfamiliar tree line, watching as a bush trembled here, another shook over there.

“Come out!” he barked, using the voice that for years had set even the streets to order.

This wasn’t the streets, but it worked just the same.

A youngish teen, a mop of red hair curling on his head and more freckles than grains of sand on this shitty beach stepped out, empty hands raised. “I-I heard yelling. I-I thought somebody was in trouble.”

After a quick glance at Starsky, grass-green eyes moved to Hutch, whose resemblance to a corpse was more than a little discomfiting, even to Starsky, who knew that “resemblance” was as far as it went.

Pure instinct brought Starsky back to Hutch’s side and, still in his half-squat, he straddled the fetal form between his legs, daring the young man to even think the wrong thing.

The message must have come through loud and clear as the freckled face paled to curdled milk. “I-I just want to help, honest. I’m an Eagle Scout and everything! Just ask my dad!”

From the spot where the second bush had moved came a huge bearded bear of a man sporting the ubiquitous lumberjack plaid that seemed all the rage in this fucked up state.

Like the son, the man was unarmed, and the size of one of the trees he no-doubt cut down for a living.

“What happened here?” lumberjack man asked, short, sharp, straight to the point.

Starsky found himself liking him on sight.

“My friend and I got into a fight,” he began with his typical blunt honesty, especially with those he didn’t know. “We’re both cops—or we were. He isn’t anymore. I still am.”

The guy looked at him as if he was speaking Martian, and Starsky knew he was babbling. Relief was loosening both mind and tongue and God knew what came out of his mouth at times like that.

“Anyway, we wound up in the water. He hit his head, and I managed to drag him back up here. I got him breathing again. He woke up and said my name, then passed out again. Been like that ever since.”

“Do you mind?” the man asked, eyeing both men carefully as he nodded his bearded face toward Hutch, lying so silent and still.

“Hurt him, and we’ll have a problem, you and me, but help him, and yeah, I’d appreciate whatever you can give us.”

The man stared at him through narrowed eyes a moment longer before staring down at Hutch. “Cops, huh?”

Nodding, Starsky pulled his sandy, sodden jacket over and fished out his badge wallet, flipping it open. “We both are. Bay City California, Detective Sergeant. Captain Harold Dobey, Commander.”

“You came a long way from home, son.”

“Had to.”

After a long, long look, the man finally nodded. “Yeah. I guess you had to at that. You got wheels?”

“Back there,” Starsky replied, gesturing in the direction he’d left the Torino. “I didn’t want to take the chance on leavin’ him here, and I knew my car would never make it through all those trees.”

The giant followed Starsky’s gaze and nodded. “You’re right about that one, boy.” Standing, he held out a hand the size of a Daisy Canned Ham. “Hank Zellinger. This here’s my boy, Hank Jr.”

Straightening, Starsky gave both a nod and held out his hand. “Dave Starsky. This is Ken Hutchinson. And if you’re offerin’, we could sure use your help.”

Zellinger nodded. “We’re offerin’. Junior, you stay with these men here while I get the rig from over yonder. Won’t be but ten minutes. Anything happens, you holler loud and clear, y’hear?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good boy. Well, be seein’ ya fellas in a few.”

As Starsky turned to watch Zellinger stomp through the thick underbrush, the younger man slipped off his dry coat and laid it atop Hutch’s shivering body. “To help build up some body heat,” he explained.

“Thanks,” Starsky said finally, aware of how rough his voice sounded. “We appreciate it.”

Looking up from beneath fair lashes, the young man asked, “You guys really are friends?”

God, what a loaded question. Out of the mouths of babes it seemed.

“Yeah,” he finally answered. “Used to be. Or maybe we still are. Who the hell knows anymore.”

“I-I don’t think I understand that, sir.”

Resisting the urge to ruffle the mop top of red curls, Starsky settled for a smirk. “I’m not sure we understand it either, kid.”

***

The ride to the tiny county hospital was a bumpy one that left Starsky’s kidneys somewhere in the vicinity of his throat. The Torino had been left behind with the assurance from Hank that it wouldn’t be touched by anything more than a spare bit of bird shit on the windshield.

Rather than waiting for a stretcher, Hank simply lifted the still-unconscious Hutch easily into his massive arms and carried him through the emergency entrance and into the hospital proper. Instantly, doctors and nurses surrounded them, demanding information from Starsky as they directed Hank to place Hutch on the stretcher that had magically appeared next to the tiny registration desk.

The doctors and nurses, as well as the rest of the hospital staff, seemed to be quite competent at their jobs. Before he knew it, Starsky was sharing a room with his ex-partner, covered near to the ceiling with warm soft blankets while his busted nose, bruised ribs, and sliced cheek were tended to with a minimum amount of fuss.

On the upside, what, given his history, he was sure was a developing pneumonia was proven by x-rays to be nothing worse than a pair of overworked, but still working, lungs. Some medicated oxygen and IV hydration were, he was told, all he needed to pull through.

With no reason to disbelieve the sure diagnosis, his thoughts turned to his ex-partner.

On the other side of the curtain, he could hear that the team was having a rougher time with Hutch, whose labored breaths drew a dark picture in Starsky’s head. Despite his still present anger, when he heard the word intubate, he nearly came off the stretcher, but the doctors were quick to let him know that such a procedure would only be an outside possibility. As long as Hutch could continue to breathe on his own, they were content to let him do so.

Had it been under any other circumstance, especially, say, two years ago, Starsky wouldn’t have thought twice about getting out of his own bed, IV, packing, sutures and all, and climbing in with his partner, medical team be damned.

Used to be that when it came to a last-ditch solution, two-for-one had always, always done the trick.

He knew it was time to stop living in the time of “used to be.” Acknowledging it was hard, acknowledging that Dobey was right and he was the only one of them who had refused to take one step from that past was harder still. And until he could come to terms with that, both he and Hutch would remain in their lonely beds, thinking their lonely thoughts, and living their lonely lives for whatever they might be worth.

So he stayed on his own side of the curtain, swaddled in warmth, and listened to every single sound coming from the other side, sinner and penitent both. The morphine he’d been given helped to blunt the sharp edges of his awareness, soothe the ache in his head, quiet the deep burn of his anger. It was a muzzy friend too well-known to his life, especially in the months following Gunther’s hit.

His eyelids bore lead weights and after a short, half-hearted fight, he gave in to the seductive promise of sleep.

When Starsky next awakened—ten minutes or ten hours later, he didn’t know—the first thing cleared of the fog that was his brain was the sight of his doctor looking over his chart, a contemplative frown creasing his careworn features.

As if sensing his patient’s newly conscious state, he looked in Starsky’s direction, the frown temporarily deepening before disappearing beneath a mask of bland professionalism. “Mr. Starsky.”

“Doc.”

“How are you feeling?”

Starsky began to stretch. Pain made him think better of the idea. “Like the morning after. How’s Hutch?”

The frown returned. “Perhaps you could tell me.”

“Excuse me?”

Placing the chart on the table, the physician stepped up to Starsky’s bed and grasped his hand, lifting and turning it so his knuckles were displayed. Lurid bruises darkened the olive skin in an unmistakable pattern.

Starsky kept the flush from stealing over his face by sheer will and forced himself not to look away from the accusatory gaze aimed directly at him. “Whadda ya want me to say, Doc? Yeah, we got into it. I punched him into the lake. I also got him out and got him breathing again. Ain’t nothin’ I didn’t tell you when we first got here. So what’s the deal, huh?”

The doctor released Starsky’s hand and stepped back, crossing his arms. “I contacted your captain while you were both asleep. He confirms that you’re one of his detectives and that you and Mr. Hutchinson had been partners for several years. He also stated that you were best friends, as well, when you were still partners on the force, his best detectives.”

The arched, inquiring eyebrow was Hutch personified. It looked strange on another man’s face.

“Yeah, well, even best friends get into it once in a while. Me and Hutch got into it more than once. Didn’t mean that we didn’t love each other.” With a defensive shrug, Starsky finally turned away, his gaze roving from one sterile object to the next, never setting down on any one thing. “Look, I ain’t about to go over my personal life with you. He left the force a little over two years ago. I haven’t talked to him since then. His wife called asking me to help find him after he disappeared. Then she disappeared, and I came lookin’. I found him, he said some stuff I didn’t like, I pounded him. End of story.”

Turning his head, he fixed the physician with a distinct glare. “Now are ya gonna tell me how he is or am I gonna have to get out of this bed and find out for myself, huh?”

The subtle relaxation of the doctor’s body told Starsky all he needed to know about receiving his answers. He muted his glare slightly and relaxed his own body, tugging the tangled sheets up over his waist as he waited.

“You did a good job in reviving him,” the physician said reluctantly. “His lungs show they had quite a bit of water in them, but they’re mostly clear now. We have concerns about a couple of condensing areas we see on the x-rays, but I believe that a round of antibiotics and fluids will, as they say, nip that problem in the bud.” Clearing his throat, he continued. “We had our plastic surgeon suture up his facial lacerations so there shouldn’t be much scarring. The blow to the back of his head showed clean on the x-rays, but it will bear watching in the days to come. His ribs were bruised, but no fractures show, nor are there fractures elsewhere. In sum, Mr. Starsky, your ‘friend’ was beaten, bruised, and drowned. Thankfully, none of those are permanent conditions, and with time, and rest, and good medical treatment, he should come out of this with little in the way of, shall we say, evidence. Which, I am sure, is a relief to you.”

Starsky’s eyes narrowed again, causing the doctor to back away a full step, his hands raising before him in reaction. “Beating the shit out of a man isn’t anything to brag about, and all the evidence I need is right up here,” he rumbled, tapping his temple with one elegant forefinger. “If you think it’s relief I’m feeling, doc, you’ve got another think coming. So leave that pop psychology for someone who has a few more letters after his name, leave your damn judgment for your other patients, and while you’re at it, leave me alone, too, huh?”

Though he looked like he wanted very badly to reply, the doctor wisely kept his lips stapled, settled for a down-the-nose glare, and followed his patient’s orders to the letter.

The sound of the door’s closing was echoed by a quiet whoosh of expelled breath as Starsky turned miserably to one side, stuffed his hand beneath the flat pillow, and willed himself back to sleep.

***

“I’m in Hell,” Starsky muttered, sullenly slumped on his half-upright bed and staring at a television currently displaying nothing but snow. “There ain’t no other word for it. I’m in Hell.”

It wasn’t as if lying in a hospital bed with prongs blowing oxygen stuffed up his nose was anything new. For all he knew, his entire medical file was probably required reading for medical schools across the state, if not the entire country.

Being alone, however, with no partner sneaking in after visiting hours with edible contraband poorly hidden inside his jacket, made everything that much bleaker.

It had been three days since he’d first been parked in this sterile, boring room, and if he had to stare at four blank walls one minute longer, he was going to wind up staring at them while tied hand and foot to a bed in the nuthatch. With no Hutchinson-the-orderly coming to the rescue.

Grunting, he threw the blankets off and winced at the pain and stiffness his unused muscles were pounding into him. He ached in places he didn’t even know he had. His scars ached worst of all, and he rubbed at them savagely as he contemplated his next move.

He steeled himself, rocked up to a sitting position, and swung around until he could plant his bare feet on the cold tiles of the floor. After battling back a moment of dizziness, he pushed to his feet and grabbed the overbed table for a moment as the room around him swayed and danced, causing his gorge to rise to his throat. The oxygen cannula wrenched cruelly at his nostrils, and he wrenched the whole thing off, tossing it in the direction of the oxygen tank standing sentinel at the head of the bed.

“You’re gettin’ too old for this, Davey,” he muttered, shuffling his feet toward the chair where a thin pale blue hospital robe lay hanging over one arm. Belting it securely over his yellow hospital dress, he made for the door and opened it. A quick check of the hallways showed him that the staff was elsewhere for the moment and, with the sly movements of a master thief, he made his way down the corridors until he came upon a pair of large glass doors with the sign “solarium” parked overhead.

It was a small, sun-drenched room, filled with living greenery and overstuffed loungers, and stood thankfully empty in the early afternoon. Entering, he took a lounger sitting close to the large, glass outer doors and slid into it, eyeing with satisfaction the panorama of several beautifully landscaped gardens in full bloom which hid well the more prosaic view of the parking lot he knew was beyond it.

Three days he’d been here. Three days and he hadn’t been to see Hutch even once. Hadn’t even asked about him after that last conversation with his doctor.

He only wished he could say the same about his thoughts.

The man was there, as always and as ever, mired in his memories with nary a thought to moving. Starsky’s emotions, volatile as always, moved in a steady, sweeping arc between anger and guilt, with healthy doses of resentment and sadness mixed in for good measure. Back and forth, forth and back, like the pendulum of that old grandfather clock in his grandmother’s apartment, never really granting him even a moment’s silence, sleeping or awake.

The dreams he’d had were real winners, too, where he replayed the fight and its attendant aftermath over and over and over again, sometimes saving Hutch’s life, sometimes taking it, and always awakening even worse in mind and heart than when he had gone to sleep.

Three entire days and he could count on the fingers of one hand the number of positive emotions he’d harbored. Count, and still have most of his fingers left over.

Resting his head against the cushioned back of the lounge chair, he rolled his eyes toward the plant-strewn ceiling as if his answers could be found among the flowers and leaves.

Would that they were.

***

There might be more than you believe
There might be more than you can see
But I won’t go down, oh I won’t go down, yeah.
—3 Doors Down

 

The sun was slanting its brilliant light across his body and face as he came back to himself after God knew how long.

The old copy of Life magazine on his lap—the one with the huge headline GUNTHER GUILTY above, and the huge, stark black-and-white picture of him, bandaged, tubed, wired, and ventilated, taking up the rest of the cover—hurt to view. An unconscious movement had his hand to his chest, rubbing, rubbing, trying to soothe the burn that wasn’t really there anymore. Not in any physical sense, anyway.

But the pain was still there, and it hurt far worse than the twisted map of scars that marked his torso or the slug floating free somewhere down near the base of his spine.

With a muted yell, he tossed the magazine back onto the table, where it slid to the end and fell to the floor with an unsatisfying plop.

Why, goddamnit? Why, all these years and he still didn’t have an answer? Why? He’d finally seen the man, gotten right up into his face, looked directly into those mocking eyes, and still…no fucking answers!

Why?

Fuck it. There was only so much one person could possibly take, and he’d passed that point over a year and a half ago. And yet here he was, still, sitting in some shitty chair, staring at some shitty pictures, and consumed with the same shitty thoughts that refused to leave him alone for even a measly little second. Just one measly second. Was that too damn much to ask?

Was peace, or lacking that, closure, too hard a thing to attain? Hell, people did it all the time! Why, old man Goldgruber, the oldest man Starsky ever knew, was happily married to Myra Steinmakker after both had lost the loves of their lives in the stinking war. Thousands and thousands of families, torn apart by violence or simple ennui managed to find a way to develop and cement other families no less precious than the original.

Why was he the only one stuck in a picture of a life that used to be his?

Why?

He looked up quickly, suppressing a groan as his neck rebelled the action, just in time to see the object of all his thoughts shuffle through the doors as if summoned by his despair and self-disgust alone.

Perfectly awake and perfectly upright, Hutch nonetheless gave the impression of a dog who had lived his life under the threat of a birch whip from puppyhood on and was approaching his master knowing that he was just about to receive more of the same.

Not a hint of cocky malice marred Hutch’s pale features. Not a trace of bitterness could be seen. Not even an atom of superiority could be fathomed from his carefully schooled expression.

It was as if his entire being was being held in check by only the most tenuous, fraying thread. And yet hold it he did, through what power, Starsky couldn’t even hope to guess.

Starsky steeled himself as he watched Hutch continue his approach; steadily, one foot in front of the other. No hesitation. No sway. His proud shoulders were slumped, his head lowered, but he moved, and his movement brought the two of them closer than they’d been, aside from simple, enraged, necessity, in over two years now.

Neither man breathed. The saying of pins and their dropping was perfectly true in this case.

Starsky sat, and Hutch moved, and that was all there was.

Finally, when he was about three feet away, Hutch stopped and stood, still and slumped, drawn and weary, a penitent before the dubious mercy of his King.

A million words rolled through Starsky’s head, but only one seemed appropriate for the occasion. “Hey.”

A tiny snort at the normalcy of it all was the only answer he received.

“Docs know you’re awake?”

A slow shake of the downturned head was the second answer.

“Am I the only one?”

A slow nod.

For some God knew what reason, that made him feel almost good. Or what good happened to pass for these days, anyway.

“You—ah—wanna siddown?”

Another headshake.

This, too, was normal. Normal for them. It gave him something to hook on to. He sighed quietly.

“You wanna tell me what’s goin’ on here, or is this ‘scare the shit outta the staff day’ and I missed the memo.”

Another soft snort told Starsky that, in this at least, he was somewhere in the vicinity of the right track. “Nah,” Starsky replied, eyes shining with happiness. “They know who we are and how to find us if they need us. C’mon Blondie, let go and live a little, whadda ya say, huh?

It didn’t erase his anger, though to be kind, he made his best attempt to keep his voice and tone on an even keel. “If you got somethin’ to say, I guess you better start sayin’ it, huh?”

The soft statement started Hutch moving again and Starsky watched, holding his temper as best he could, only his eyes moving to track the pale, lanky figure as it walked a path from glass doors to rear wall and back again. Long, lank hair obscured his down-tilted face, making it nearly impossible to completely gauge his mood, so Starsky didn’t bother trying.

The wall clock ticked off the silent seconds that led to silent minutes. When Starsky found his fist clenching and unclenching to the beat of the clock, he decided to go against his natural, angry instinct not to make this any easier on the man pacing before him. Trying to get anything out of Hutch, he knew well, was like trying to pull teeth from the snapping mouth of a live alligator. “Why Abby?” he asked finally, his voice breaking the stone silence like a rock hammer.

Hutch looked up at him, startled, his eyes a pale, washed out pewter that Starsky had never before seen. “Abby?”

Starsky simply leveled a chin-down look at him and watched as the flush bloomed from the collar of Hutch’s robe and spread upwards in smooth stages to tint his entire face with rose and gold-dust. His hair swung loose as he tilted his head again, brushing at the stiff fabric at his neck and shoulders, giving quick peeks at the pale flesh of the so-vulnerable neck that had been one of Starsky’s greatest sexual obsessions.

“I…” A deep breath taken and let out slow. Another. “She was safe.” He looked up as Starsky shifted in his chair. “I quit the force,” he reminded softly. “She was safe.”

“How long?” Starsky asked, using most of his strength simply to keep his mind a complete blank. Letting his emotions out of their tight fetters would be bad. Very bad.

“Excuse me?”

“How long?” Clenching his fists, he forced himself to calm. He was already exhausted, and they hadn’t even started talking yet. “You walked out of our house and into her arms. Start this little conversation off with a lie, and I walk. So I’ll ask again. How long?”

What little color there was to Hutch drained, leaving him much as he had been by the lakeshore—pale and fragile as a single sheet of paper. He shoved his hands deep into his robe’s pockets, shoulders hunched inwards as if to protect his heart from a blow.

It was, Starsky silently reflected, probably exactly what he was doing. He settled glittering eyes upon his ex-partner’s face and waited.

“Okay, okay,” Hutch snapped, turning partly away but not moving otherwise. “She said she called me the night after you got…after Gunther…God, I can’t—” Trembling hands came free and raked through his hair, already in disarray from the days spent in his hospital bed. “I can’t do this!”

“I don’t see you got much of a choice,” Starsky observed, voice flat, emotionless.

That got Hutch’s color up. His own eyes glittered dangerously as his gaze locked with Starsky’s, his thoughts as plain in them as if they had been spoken aloud. Tension arced from one man to the other and back again, creating a closed circuit that was approaching critical mass.

“You talk or I walk. Which is it gonna be? Partner.”

Hutch’s lip curled in response, exposing his canines.

Tension ramped up another ten degrees. Starsky could smell blood and ozone in the air. The hair at the back of his neck stood out, straight and stiff.

Somewhere far off, he could almost hear alarms calling out their warnings in strident death-knell tones.

Then, like a switch flicked off, Hutch crumbled—would have hit his knees if Starsky’s quick movement hadn’t countered gravity’s pull and guided him onto a second chair only inches away. Hutch spilled into it, limbs akimbo, looking drunk and lost and so very alone.

It was a look Starsky knew well; one he had never been able to resist. Yet, somehow, resist it he did, his coldness a shield protecting his own softness safely within.

Minutes plodded by, each its own contained infinity. Starsky looked on, dispassionate, as Hutch pulled himself together, one muscle fiber at a time until, once again, a man sat before him. Partially broken and wholly humbled, but no less a man for all that.

“The first contact I remember was almost a week after you were shot,” he began in a low voice, hoarse with suppressed emotion. “She said she called the first night, but I don’t remember it.”

“Why did she call?”

“Our names and pictures were splashed all over the papers, all over the television. She wanted…she said she wanted to…to see how I was doing.” His head tipped back so very slowly until he was once again meeting Starsky’s intent gaze, his own filled with fathomless misery. “I-I needed…I needed someone to-to talk to. Someone who wasn’t a part of all this.” His clenched fist swung in an arc, indicating the room and everything—everyone—within.

“They were all too close. Everybody. Too involved. Too deep, Starsky, they were all too deep! I needed to be…outside. Outside of myself, outside the situation, outside everything. I couldn’t—I c-couldn’t—Starsky, I couldn’t stand it anymore. I wasn’t sleeping. I wasn’t eating. I was just…hell, I wasn’t even existing. I needed someone who wasn’t part of all this,” he repeated, white teeth flashing briefly as he gnawed at his lower lip. “Someone I could lean on completely. I had no strength to give back. I just…couldn’t….”

Pulled in by the timbre of Hutch’s soft voice, Starsky found himself nodding, if only slightly. He’d pretty much guessed that part of it. Not that the phone calls had come quite so early, maybe—and that was a realization that stung—but that Hutch, wrung out, strung out, rudderless, would need someone to lean on completely. Someone who wasn’t, as he said, part of “all this.” Someone who could be strong for him without expecting the same in return.

The weight of Hutch’s gaze broke him free of his musings and he stared back at the desperately unhappy man seated inches away in body, miles away in spirit. “Okay,” he sighed. “Okay, I suppose I can dig what you’re sayin’ here, Hutch.” His own gaze hardened as he continued, “But that don’t explain the months between that first call and the day you walked out on me and right to her. I mean, I know those months weren’t easy on you, but damn it, buddy, you played me for nine fucking months!”

Starsky found himself on his feet without a memory of having gotten there. He could feel the blood pounding in both temples and knew his face was flushed with anger. Hutch’s eyes were wide and fearful, but he didn’t give a shit. After all this time, he deserved answers, and he’d damn well fucking get them if he had to shove his fist down Hutchinson’s throat and pull them out with his bare hands.

Spinning away, he ploughed gracelessly across the length of the room and back, bypassing his motionless ex-partner to come to a halt before the large glass doors. He pressed his hands against them and leaned his forehead down, letting the smooth glass cool down anger-flushed skin.

“Nine months, Hutchinson. Nine months! I was pissin’ blood out of my eyes for nine months while you were playin’ pattycake with little Miss Health-food!” Gathering his rage, he spun back, his glare boring holes through the statue seated across the room. “How many times did you fuck her before you left me for good, huh? How many times did you turn me down and go to her instead? Answer me that, buddy, pal, friend. Answer that one!”

God, everything in him demanded that he sprint across the room and finish what Hutch had started back at the lake. His entire body was shaking with the need to tear the man into pieces so small, they’d be picking him up with tweezers.

Tiny sparks of pain were but far away things as his ragged nails pierced the tough flesh of both palms. His breathing was harsh and hot and fast in his ears. Every beat of his heart rivaled a jungle firefight. He didn’t even have to try to be able to smell the charred stench of burned bodies—it was there, high and sweet and nauseating and so much a part of him that he couldn’t remember what it was like not to have that stink in his nostrils and in his clothes, permeating everything right down to his soul.

Only this time, there were no faceless dead lying in a swamp somewhere, slugs and bugs and fly larvae having a field day. His victim was very much alive, and very much as dangerous as any he’d ever faced in those jungles.

But the stench was the same. The stink of decay was the same. It threatened to turn what was left of Starsky’s stomach. He’d never puked in Nam. Not even once. He used to give the razz to those that did.

Now he knew they were the lucky ones.

You see. You puke. You move on. The real law of the jungle. One he never had to learn.

“Tell me, goddamn you!” he roared, feeling the thunder of his voice in the faint vibration of the glass now at his back. “Tell me!”

“Never,” came the broken whisper, the sound further muffled by the large hands that covered Hutch’s face. “Not once. Not ever.”

“You expect me to believe that? Fuck, Hutchinson, you think I was born stupid?”

“I don’t,” Hutch whisper-sobbed from behind the safety of his covering hands. “Oh, God, I didn’t. I don’t. God, Starsky, please!”

“Please? Please what? You think I should take it easy on you, partner? Like you took it easy on me every single goddamned time I reached out to you for a little comfort and you turned me down flat? Huh?” Turning slightly, he lashed out hard, pulling his punch only slightly so that the door rattled hard against its frame rather than shattering into a million pieces. “I guess I was born stupid after all, huh?”

His head remained steady as his eyes rolled up to focus his gaze on the blank ceiling. He brutally choked off the nearly overwhelming urge to start babbling like some baby over the realization that everything he’d spent hours worrying over—that Hutch had been turned off by his scarred mess of a chest and belly, by Starsky’s weakness and dependency—had been the complete and utter truth and he’d been too damned dumb to realize it.

His arm lifted, palm open, empty, vulnerable. “Ahh, fuck it.”

Dropping his arm, he spun away from the doors and made for the exit, needing only to get away, to preserve the last tattered shreds of his pride and dignity.

Steel fingers encircled his wrist before he’d gotten all of three steps. He was jerked to face Hutch and held tight. His wrist was released only to have his shoulders taken in twin vice-grips and shaken. Startled eyes set on Hutch’s florid face. Hutch’s teeth were bared, his brows drown down low.

“Now you listen to me, David Starsky, and you listen to me good, you hear? There is nothing about you—nothing!—that led me, had led me, or would lead me into anyone else’s bed, ever!”

“You lie,” Starsky snarled, grabbing Hutch’s bulging forearms and tearing them away.

Hutch struggled for another grip and only partially succeeded. “I’m not lying! I’m fucking telling you the truth, Starsky! The truth!”

“The truth? Nothing about me can chase you away, yet you walk right the fuck away at the very minute I’m well enough to participate in an equal partnership with you! You tell me where there’s any truth in that, Hutchinson! ‘Cause I’m sure not hearing it. Or is that just another sign of my mental inferiority, huh? Huh?”

Starsky was breathing like a bull; a bull with a one second fuse and the red cape that same second away from being shown. Every instinct he possessed coalesced into this one point, at this one time, on this one thing. One wrong move…Armageddon.

Armageddon in the middle of a shitty community hospital. And didn’t that just beat all to hell and back?

Hutch, who had never shown a moment’s fear of that bull, showed the cape and charged immediately. The coming together of their bodies sounded like two tectonic plates crashing, forcing up, forcing down, creating all new topography on the face of their private earth.

An Everest disappeared while a thin, blade of a mountain thrust up in its place, like a finger of the God neither of them believed in but that seemed to be pointing out the very route to Heaven.

If either one had given a shit, they would have seen a ring of white-faced hospital personnel pushed up at the glass like the spectators to the gladiator competitions of old. But they didn’t notice, and if they had, they wouldn’t have cared.

Me and Thee worked both ways, you see.

They were having it out, here and now, and whichever way the cards fell they fell.

Some blows were traded, but it was more a “pushy” fight, body against body, force against force, weight against weight, will against will.

“Goddamnit, Starsky, I left because of what you do, not what you are!”

As Starsky glared on, Hutch paled, giving the impression that he would have given his last drop of blood not to have said those words aloud. His embarrassed relaxation was the opening Starsky needed to pull away, and so he did, taking a quick step back before swinging to face Hutch, half-squatted in a defensive posture, hands out and ready.

“Explain that,” he said in that low, dangerous voice that everyone, even Hutch, even Dobey, learned to dread. “Explain it now, Hutch. Now. No bullshit. No lies. Now.”

Looking as if he’d let half the cat out, he might as well get the whole thing bag-free, so he spun on his ex-partner dead on, stare for stare. “Guilt, all right?” he shouted loud enough to set up an echo.

Neither man was of a mind to know, or even care, if they were attracting any attention.

“Good, old fashioned brought up from the cradle, sustained by life and life experiences guilt. That tell you enough, or do you want to expose my dirty laundry some more, huh, partner?”

“Oh, and I’m supposed to feel sorry for my buddy, my lover, who feels guilty because he’s been stepping out on me every chance he gets? Fuck that, fuck her, and fuck you, Ken Hutchinson. Fuck you right to hell!”

“How can I?” Hutch bellowed. “How can I, partner? When I’m already there!”

Fuming, Starsky swung away and returned to the glass doors. “I ain’t getting out the violin for you, Hutchinson. You made that bed, you lie in it. Just keep me the fuck out of it. You were specific enough to make sure that I knew flat out that I wasn’t welcomed in this lovely little tete a tete New Age love nest of yours. Was a time when a troi was somethin’ we did for kicks! So spare me the ‘I’m already in Hell’ bullshit, cause I’ve seen Hell, and buddy-boy, you ain’t even close to bein’ in it.”

“But you’d like to put me there, wouldn’t you,” Hutch taunted, shoving his face inches away from Starsky’s.

“In a New York minute,” Starsky growled back, fists clenched hard and strong again.

“Yeah, well do us both a favor and get it right this time, huh?” Hutch said in a voice that spoke of nothing but weariness—the infinite kind.

It was like a switch being flipped, a light going on; all the pieces of these last years finally snapped into place before Starsky’s eyes. With that one weary admission, everything looked different, yet everything looked perfect, the way things do when they’re finally revealed to their ultimate conclusion.

“You wanted me to fight you back there,” he said, voice low and full of strange wonder. “That wasn’t your typical Hutchinson-the-asshole bullshit. You wanted me to pound you right the fuck into the lake.”

“Congratulations, gordo,” Hutch replied, still in that weary, weary voice. “You win the prize. Or you would have won it if you hadn’t screwed up. Again.”

“Suicide-by-proxy? Suicide by best friend?” Starsky’s temper, temporarily simmering by way of that new discovery, caught full boil once again. “What, you were too goddamn chickenshit to do it yourself, so you had to have someone else do it for you? You had to have me do it for you? How dare you? How dare you do this to me? How fucking dare you! What fucking right did you have, huh? What fucking right!” His face was florid, sweating, lethal.

Hutch took not one step back. His head hung once again, eyes trained on his shoes. The silence was thick and stenchful as a peat bog slowly sucking him under.

“Answer me, goddamnit! Answer me!!”

“What do you want me to say,” Hutch said, “That I was wrong to do what I did? That I shouldn’t have left you? That I spent every single second of every single day regretting that stupid move? Is that what you want to hear?”

“It’d damn sure be a start!”

Hutch’s head jerked up and he met Starsky’s blistering gaze with one as forthright, as honest, as terrible as Starsky had ever seen. “I was wrong. You wanna hear it again, Starsky? I. Was. Wrong. I’m wrong now, I was wrong then, but back then, I didn’t know what else to do. I felt…trapped. Smothered. I felt that every step I took, every single goddamn move I made was the wrong one, leading me deeper and deeper into-into some huge labyrinth where the closer the answers seemed, the farther they were away! When I saw the rope, Abby’s rope, I took it. I took it and I never looked back. Never. I had to cut that part out of me like a doctor cuts out a cancer.”

“Oh, so you’re calling me a cancer now? That’s great. That’s just great.”

“Starsky! Would you just fucking shut up for one fucking second and listen to me?”

“Why should I? Huh? Why the hell should I?”

“Because I’m telling you the truth, goddamnit! You ordered me to tell the truth, and I’m telling it! Now shut up and listen!”

Spinning away again, Starsky made for the back of the room, facing the corner and forcing himself to take deep breaths despite the pain in his chest. After six or seven of them, some of the anger left; enough so that his ears heard more than just the pounding of enraged blood beating his head like a drum. “I’m listening,” he said to the wall. “Talk. No lies. No bullshit. Talk.”

“It’s…it’s not easy,” Hutch began softly, then lifted his hand. “Hush. Let me talk. It’s not easy because it’s never easy to talk about this shit. You should know that more than anyone.” Like Starsky, he took several deep breaths. “All that talking with Abby, prior to my leaving, was just that. Talk. She was a…friend. Nothing more. A friend who wasn’t part of this whole thing. She was the only one I felt I could turn to. God knows my parents weren’t in the running, and Huggy, Dobey, and everyone else I’d normally go to were part of the problem. They were too close. They were right down there with me, and I was tired of hearing ‘there’s a chance. There’s always a chance.’ I knew there wasn’t. Starsky, in the deepest part of my heart, in the deepest part of my soul, I knew…I knew…there wasn’t a chance.

“You were going to die, and there wasn’t one goddamned thing I could do about it. Not one.” He shook his head, granting Starsky swift glimpses of misery and wonder on his face. “But you didn’t. They were right and I was wrong. Despite my morbid beliefs, you pulled through. You shouldn’t have. By all rights, I should be having this conversation with a rotting corpse six feet under the dirt, but I’m not. I’m talking with you right here, right now, right in the middle of this little room. I can see you, touch you, hear you, smell you. If I believed in God, I’d say it’s a miracle. Since I don’t, I say it’s plain old Starsky stubbornness. But either way…either way…you’re here now.

“And that should have been enough. It’s like when you wish all year for something, wish with all your might, and come your birthday, there it is, sitting on the table just waiting to be opened. Your life, Starsky, whether or not you want to believe it—and right now there’s no reason why you should—was that gift. It should have been enough.”

Hutch lapsed into silence, leaving Starsky to wonder what came next. Part of him—a large part, he admitted to himself—wanted to cross the room and take that broken, beaten man into his arms and tell him all was forgiven.

A larger part, however, nixed that thought at its inception. Whatever this was, Hutch would have to get through it on his own.

As if hearing those thoughts, Hutch lifted his head so their glances met. “Did you know that Abby and I never once slept together? After she left me back in Bay City, I mean.” Starsky’s disbelief showed like thunderclouds on his face, forcing Hutch to hold up an arm, palm flat and empty, imploring. “I’m telling you the truth. Not once. If we’d gotten married in a Church, like she wanted to, we could have the marriage annulled, no questions asked.” His laughter was bitter self-deprecation. “Not for lack of trying on her part. Oh, she understood at first. She knew how I felt about you, about us, how much it hurt, what I did. She was willing to give me time. But it was her watch she was using, and after a month or so went by with no response from my end, she started the digs, the smart remarks, the innuendo. So we started to fight. Little ones at first, but they blew up quickly.”

Again, that self-deprecating laugh. “Even got the cops involved a few times. Apparently, we were scaring the neighbors. I never raised a hand to her, though. She got in a few good punches, but I never even had the urge to defend myself. After all, she was right. I made some vows to her in front of friends and family—hers mostly. Public vows. Not to let death or sickness pull us apart, to be true to one another as long as we lived. Hell, Starsky, you know them all.

“And me? Not a second went by after saying ‘I do’ that I started falling down on the job. Big time.”

“Why?” Starsky asked, voice muffled, horse.

“Why? Because she wasn’t who I wanted. Not sexually, not physically, and not, and this took months to figure out, not emotionally.” He looked up again. “How could I fall in love with her when I’d never fallen out of love with you?”

Stunned, Starsky sought the strength of the two walls bracketing him in his corner. “I-I don’t understand.”

Hutch snorted softly, shaking his head. “I know you don’t.” Now, back down to his shoes. “I don’t blame you, buddy. I don’t understand it half the time, either. Thing is, guilt isn’t a logical emotion. It stinks. It’s a human construct that only tears apart, never heals. It makes you think crazy things, and it makes you believe those things. It makes you do those crazy things; things you’d never, ever even think of doing if you were in your right mind.

“Boy, I had a bucketload of guilt. You could have filled the Grand Canyon with it and had enough left over to fill the oceans across the world.

“And, at the time, I felt like I had two choices. End it all by ending me, or reach out for the life preserver Abby, bless her naïve little heart, was throwing out to me. So I took the second choice and never looked back.

“Except…except…I never stopped looking back. Guilt doesn’t disappear, Starsk. It just multiplies. If you don’t address it, it just keeps on evolving, keeps on procreating until you can’t hold it anymore. It’s like that weed they have in the South—kudzu is it?—once you plant one little innocent sprig, you’ve caused a country-wide epidemic without even meaning to.”

“You still haven’t answered the question, Hutch,” Starsky said. “Why guilt? Why did you take that on yourself? What did I do to make you feel that way?”

“You’re you!” Hutch thundered, his voice shaking the glass like a small earthquake. “Starsky, think about it. How many people in this life have someone who is willing to give up everything; every little goddamned thing in this world to make sure that the one they love stays out of danger, huh? Oh, sure, here and there, someone or other might make a small sacrifice to keep the little wife happy. It’s done all the time. But, come on, be honest, are they really sacrifices? Sacrifices like the kind you made for me? For Christ’s sake, Starsky, you gave up your job for me! You gave up your badge! You gave up your integrity! You were willing to live the rest of your life as a fugitive if you hadn’t tricked Vanessa’s asshole partners into coming clean with their plan. An innocent man died because of your devotion to me! And, worst of all, you gave up your life! Not once, not twice, but three times! At least! How can anyone, anyone in the world, deserve that kind of adoration and devotion? How can I?”

“Hutch….”

“Starsky, I swear to God, shut up! Ok?”

Teeth clacked hard as Starsky shut his mouth at light speed.

Taking in another deep, deep breath, Hutch clenched his hands, belly level, and stared down at them as if they had all the answers for which he was seeking. “I know that I’ve done the same for you, but not to the same degree. I’ve never killed, and in so doing, signed my own death warrant. When you wanted to leave the force, I talked you out of it. I didn’t agree and give up my own job just to support you. I didn’t do those things.”

“We weren’t keeping score, Hutch. What you did for me was every bit as noble and important as what you say I did for you.”

“Don’t you think I know that?”

Starsky held up both hands, placating. “I know you know it, Hutch. I know. So…why the guilt? If we agree that it’s just the way we are, why the hairshirt and the scourge whips?”

“Because you don’t understand. Not,” he added, raising a forestalling hand, “because I think you’re stupid…God!…but because you and me, for all we are, aren’t the same. You get in your funks, yes, but you snap out of them. Mine just grow and grow and grow until they’re all I see. Not you. Not me. Not the job or the life we share. Not our love. That…that tree of guilt…it fills my entire vision. It’s all I am.”

“Hutch….”

“Shut it and listen. I thought everything was gonna be okay. I really did. Once I knew that not only were you going to live, but that you were going to thrive, that tree just withered away and died. I had something to do, you see. I had a purpose, a reason in life, a goal. To get you better. Better than before, even.” A fond smile crossed his face. “Maybe not for you, but for me, it was the best time of my life. I got to be with you, to help you in ways you’d never let me before, never let anyone before, not even the doctors or the nurses! I felt…wanted, important, strong. Any guilt I felt couldn’t even hold a candle to that feeling, or so I told myself. The real reason was, I was just too damned busy tending to our needs that I didn’t have time to see it when the light started flickering.”

A deep sigh lifted his chest and shoulders, and his mood turned once again morose. “But, you see, we were too good at what we did, as always. I had tricked myself into thinking it would be different. But it wasn’t. And the better you became, the more time I had to think. And the more I had time to think, the easier that guilt began to get another root sunk deep into the earth. And when it did, that guilt grew, and grew, and grew. And when you passed fit—something I always knew you would, by the way—that guilt had taken over my entire world. And do you want to know why?”

“No,” Starsky grumbled. “I’ve just been standin’ here in the corner twiddlin’ my thumbs like a dunce cause I got nothin’ better to do this afternoon.”

“It was because I knew, I knew, that once you stepped back out on that street with me, side by side, it would happen again. Not today, not tomorrow, maybe not even in a year, or five, but it would happen sure as I’m standing here.”

“What? What would happen?”

“You’d throw yourself in front of another bullet for me, like your life meant absolutely nothing while my—” his voice was broken by a sob—”while my life was the most precious thing in the universe. And I-I can’t l-live l-like that, Starsky!” he continued, tears of frustration, anger, bewilderment, and deep-deep sadness rolled unchecked down his pale cheeks. “I’m not worthy of it, don’t you see? I’m not worthy of any of it! You treat me like some precious object when all I am is a rusted piece of metal in the dumpster somewhere that nobody ever wanted. That’s what I am…partner.”

Hutch gave a loud yelp as Starsky—moving at half the speed of light—vaulted across the entirety of the room, grabbed Hutch by the shoulders, and shook him hard. “Listen to me, Hutchinson, and listen good. I ain’t your father. I ain’t your mother, or your sister, or your so-called friends. I ain’t your teacher, or your mentor, or some goddamned guy on the street who looked at you funny. I’m Starsky. Your best friend. The man who loves you and would give up his life for you because you’re worth it! I ain’t any single one of those other assholes who’ve got you so beaten down that you actually believe what the fuck they tell you! I’d do anything for you because, where I was brought up, you don’t let a good thing die if you can help it! If that means dyin’ yourself, well, tough shit. You do it and thank God you had the chance! Do you think that once, even once, in all the things I did, I had even one second of regret?”

“Well, no, but….”

“No buts, buddy boy. No buts at all. I been with you through all your ‘prove to me you love me’ bullshit. I ignored it all. I knew where it came from. I didn’t have to prove a goddamn thing to you. I did love you. Enough. More than enough. No proof necessary. When I saw a chance to protect you, or to save your life, or to stick by your side, I did it! And yes, goddamnit, I’d do it again, cop or no cop! I’m sorry if this comes as a news flash to you, Hutchinson, but there are some things worth givin’ it all up for. To me, you’re that thing. There might be others. Who the fuck knows?

“If that makes you uncomfortable, well, there isn’t a thing I can do about that, either. It’s who I am, and I’m not changing for anything or anyone…even you, Hutch. Even you.”

The look Hutch gave Starsky then flashed him back to that time, years ago, in a shitty little upstairs flop; Starsky barring the door with his body, Hutch, having exhausted his invective threats, looking him through those exact eyes before bowing his head and resting it on Starsky’s strong chest like a puppy asking for forgiveness for a misdeed.

And, again, Starsky had to risk everything in him not to cross the room and finish that scene exactly as he had back then, accepting the weight of that submissive head, nuzzling it and rubbing arms and shoulders bowed with the strain of withdrawal.

And, again, he kept his feet rooted to the floor, fighting against his head, his heart, his soul, not to do what was easiest and most comfortable. He knew that doing so would only be putting a band-aid on a hemorrhaging wound. It wouldn’t fix the problem, wouldn’t come close to fixing it.

At this point, he wasn’t even sure if he wanted Hutch back in his life in any capacity. Giving in now would, somewhere, sometime down the line, cause him to regret the weight. That would probably do what Gunther and his goons had failed to do. As much as Hutch was nearly the entirety of his life, as they existed now, only bad, only horror and grief could possibly end the story of them.

Something had to change. Damned if he knew what.

So he stood, coldly, quietly, motionlessly, simply watching, waiting, wondering.

Finally, after being unable to stand by and watch as Hutch sunk further and further into himself, and while remaining in his own far-away corner, he asked the first question that came into his brain, “So, if you didn’t sleep with her, but she was safe, where is she?”

Hutch looked up blankly. He blinked and his vision cleared, causing him to pale a little around the gills. “Abby? She’s at home. Isn’t she?”

Starsky shook his head. “If she was, I wouldn’t be here. She’d called the cops in your area after you split. They didn’t listen. So she called Dobey. I didn’t listen. But when he told me she went missing, too, I came out here. Your house is a mess. She’s not there.”

“Oh, God,” Hutch whispered, dragging a trembling hand through his hair. “Oh, God.”

“What?”

“I—j-just another Hutchinson fuck-up, huh? I leave and something happens to her. GodDAMNit!”

“Earth to Hutchinson,” Starsky said, sarcasm dripping acid down onto the tiled floor. “The whole world don’t revolve around you, buddy. My guess is she got tired of playin’ hide and seek and went back to her brother, or wherever she goes when things get tough.”

“Y-you said the house was a mess….”

“C’mon, Hutch, you’re a cop, or at least you were. Use your head, man. The house coulda been ready for the wrecking ball, but she wasn’t in it. There was no evidence of a struggle. No one saw her get snatched. I’ll put my money down on what I said. She got sick of playing the Hutchinson prove you love me game and split the scene.”

“But….”

“Enough with the buts! This ain’t another helping of guilt you can shove down your throat with both hands like a glutton! You got her family’s number? Call ’em and find out. Do it now.”

There was a white dial-phone sitting in an inconspicuous position amongst a group of wildly growing potted plants. Looking like a man going to his execution, Hutch forced himself to move toward the phone, giving Starsky the evil eye with every other step. Starsky himself kept his own expression unchanged. Sometimes, Hutch had to be bullied into doing things for his own good.

This was one of those times.

When he finally reached the table, Hutch, mulish expression taking over his fair features, snatched up the headset and stuck a huge finger into the too-small hole. Each swing of the dial seemed to hurt like thrusting knives, but he did it, then waited as the phone rang and rang and rang in his ears. After ten rings, he slammed the phone back down and turned to Starsky with a “there, you happy, moron?” look on his face.

Starsky replied with a single shake of his head.

Grumbling beneath his breath, Hutch repeated his actions, three more times in fact, until he reached the home of Abby’s elderly, hard-of-hearing mother. After shouting his request several times, he bit at his lower lip as one finger twirled the coiled cord, knotting it into some pop-artist’s work-of-art. If one was of a mind to call it that. Starsky wasn’t.

When the second voice came on the phone, Starsky could tell who it was just by looking at the juxtaposition between relaxation and tension taking hold of Hutch’s long form. “Hi, baby,” he said in his softest, most-come-hither-voice; one which made Starsky grind his teeth, remembering well when that voice had been used on him—well before he got smart enough to recognize an outright fraud when he heard one.

“Yeah, it’s me. How—ah—how you doin’?”

A second later: “Abby, please-please don’t-don’t cry, okay? Pl-please. It was a stupid question, all right? I’m sorry. I’m sorry…. Yes, yes I know, sorry doesn’t make the bed, but I am sorry. More than you could ever know. Abby. Abby! Wo-would you please just be quiet for a minute and listen to me?”

Pulling the phone far from his ear, Starsky could hear a loud shout cut off abruptly by a familiar buzz. Hutch turned to him, expression bewildered. “She hung up on me.”

Resisting the urge to say I told ya so, Starsky instead asked, “She okay? I mean, alive, not physically hurt, none of that?”

Snorting in self-disgust, Hutch nodded as he replaced the handset into its cradle. “Oh, yeah. She’s fine. I’ve ripped her life apart from stem to stern, I’ve ruined her chances to ever live a normal life again, she’ll never trust another man as long as she lives, but she’s fine. Just peachy,” he snapped, slapping the phone and whirling away, both hands tugging at his hair. “Fine, she says. Just fine! Do you know how fucking sick to death I am of that word?”

“I think I got an inkling,” Starsky replied, trying desperately to keep his lips from smirking at the corners. He knew he wasn’t very successful, but what the hell? It was funny when you looked at it from his end.

“Goddamnit, Starsky! I feel like a depraved King Midas! Everything, every little goddamned thing I touch turns to shit!”

“Nice to know I’m placed in such great company.”

That stopped Hutch in his tracks. Slowly, he turned to face the man still wedged in the corner. “Oh, Starsk, I’m not talking about you. You gotta know that.”

“Do I?” Starsky replied, one brow raised in a remarkable imitation of the man he was talking to. “Cause I gotta tell ya, Hutch, watching you walk straight out of our house without a word and slipping into her arms made me feel like the biggest pile of shit ever dropped.”

“I know,” Hutch whispered after a moment. “I know. And I didn’t mean for you to feel that way. I-Starsky, I wasn’t thinking. All I knew was that I couldn’t live under the burden of guilt and fear anymore. I-I did the same thing I always do. I ran. But this time—this time, you see, this time I ran to a place I knew you’d never follow.” He shook his head. “That’s where we differ, Starsk. You run to a woman, I try to get her away, try to prove who the better man is. When I do the same, you let me go. Why? Why is that?”

“That’s easy,” Starsky replied, shrugging. “Figure if I’m not enough for you, it’s better to let you go to someone who is rather than keeping you back here with me, unhappy. That way, at least one of us gets to be happy.”

“There you go again!”

“Where? Where does it say in the handbook of friendship that you have to keep an unhappy person with you when it’s you who’s making them unhappy!? Hutch, if I could have, I would have changed what I could of my life for you. But you never gave me any reason to think I had to! Not even one word. The stronger I got, the more independent I got, the more down in the dumps you got! How was I supposed to know where to look, huh? You’ve got shields ten miles thick, buddy boy, and even I ain’t strong enough to get past most of ’em.”

“You’ve done better than most.”

“Better isn’t good enough, Hutch. All it did was put us back to right where we are now. Doesn’t that tell you something?”

“It tells me I’ve been a first-class ass, that’s what it tells me.”

“Maybe, but that’s something you can change. It’s something someone who loves you can help you change, if it’s really what you want.”

“I don’t know how,” Hutch whispered in such a lost, mournful voice that Starsky could no more stand in his corner than he could take his own life by his own hand. Without quite realizing he was doing it, he crossed the room in noiseless, dancer’s strides and wrapped his arms around his suffering friend’s body, lending his strength, his comfort, his head, and his love as best he could.

Hutch, at the proverbial end of his rope, melted into Starsky like warm chocolate into warmer vanilla, and for a long series of minutes, the two men clung together as if letting go would spell the absolute ends of anything they could be together. Or apart.

“Shh, boy,” Starsky whispered, petting Hutch’s golden hair with gentle strokes as his other hand drew palm-flat circles over back and shoulders. Not one touch was even remotely close to sexual. This was for comfort only, the same kind of touch he would always use on a miserable soul with nowhere to turn.

“Shh. It’s not as bad as all this. We’ll figure something out, I promise. Somethin’ ‘ll turn, just like Huggy says. We just need time, huh? We just need some time.”

“Time?” Hutch thundered, his head coming up while allowing Starsky to continue to hold him close. “What kind of time? I’ve blown it with everyone! Abby, her family, the force, our friends, and most of all, you, Starsky! I took all the love and adoration we felt for one another, wadded up, stomped it into unrecgonizability, and then took the biggest shit on it I could! What kind of time washes that off, huh?”

“The time that washes everything off, Hutch. The only thing that can wash everything off, make it clean again. Yeah, soap city, I know, but that don’t make it false.”

“Why didn’t it work for you?” Hutch asked; no sarcasm, just flat fact. The man noticed more than Starsky had remembered.

Starsky felt his face flushing and he didn’t much care. They were on the cusp of something big, and he was damned if he was going to play Macho Man just to get out of where they were going with this. “It didn’t work for me, Hutch, because, as those smarter than me have told me more ‘n once—sometimes with a good ass kickin’ too, that though time’s marching by same way it always does, I insisted on standing on the very same spot, not movin’ an inch, and claiming I was movin’ with it. As soapy as it sounds, nothing changed from the minute you left. It was like I was living in one of those Star Trek time warps. I never moved a piece of furniture, a cheap souvenir, a pot, a pan, a towel except to wash, nothing. More’n once, Huggy and his crew volunteered to raid the place to fix it up so that it would be mine again. Not yours. Not ours. Just mine. Oh, a picture or two of me, or you, or the both of us hangin’ in some out-of-the-way place, but changed enough so I could keep going on with my life.”

“Did it work?”

Hissing between his teeth, Starsky shook his head. “I was nuts. I chased ’em all off. Not once, but a ton of times till they didn’t even bother asking anymore and Huggy kept away from me like I had the plague or somethin’. Thing is, I couldn’t move anything. Not one solitary thing. I kept it all there because I always, always to this day, believed that you would come tripping back over the threshold, like the klutz you are, with that goofy grin on your puss telling me it was all one big joke and why wasn’t I laughing?”

With a small groan, Hutch rested the flat of his forehead against the sharp bone of Starsky’s collar, looking like he wanted to laugh, to cry, to scream, to sob, all at once. Like once again, he had constructed the world’s most self-fulfilling prophecy.

“And me?” Starsky finally asked. “Aside from the obvious, here, where do I fit in with alla this?”

“You were all of it,” Hutch replied, voice soft, but clear as crystal. “Everywhere I turned, everywhere I looked, everything I did, I did it with you at my side. No, I couldn’t see you, or touch you, or even feel you in the wind, but you were there, Starsky. You were more real to me than the warm body who shared my bed night after night. Even trying to snuggle was a disaster. She was all soft where you were hard, giving where you were firm, mistaking every single move I made, even in my sleep, as telling her I was ready to morph into that ‘romantic Hutch’ that she said she fell in love with the first time. Every time, every damned time, she wound up disappointed when I just rolled over and went back to sleep.”

Fists bunched tight, Hutch stepped away and walked back toward the cool glass facing the gardens. “I ruined a good woman’s life. I ruined a good man’s life. I ruined my own life most of all.”

“Cut with the woe-is-me pity party you’re throwin’ yourself, Hutchinson and climb your ass down that cross. We could use the wood.” Body posture and glittering eyes made it plain to even an empty room that Starsky had come to the end of his own frayed rope. One more sniveling little lie and Starsky was gone for good. No last goodbye. No second chances. Ever.

Hutch’s eyes were wide as he turned in the direction of his ex-partner’s less than sympathetic response. “You always did let guilt get the best of you,” Starsky continued, “but this is getting a little ridiculous, even for you. We all gotta make our own choices in life, and you know it. You made the choice to leave, I made the choice to stay, and Abby made whatever choice it was she made. The only choice that lays on your shoulders is the one you made, Hutchinson. Not mine. Not Abby’s. Yours. You know it just as well as I do.”

“What do you suggest I do, then?” Hutch demanded. “You’ve got all the answers, Starsky. What’s your suggestion for this, huh?”

If Hutch thought that was the end of it, if he thought Starsky would simply walk away, he couldn’t have been more wrong. Stepping forward so that they were again belly to belly, Starsky glared up into those bewildered, angered blue eyes. “You fight! Guilt is the coward’s way out, Hutchinson, and in all the time I’ve known you, I never thought you were a coward. Something makes you feel guilty? Fine! Take it! Own it! Try to not let it happen again! If you can’t do that, then try and make it into something neutral, or even positive! But you never fucking run! That just makes things worse, and when you do that, you do wind up fucking up everyone else who gives half a shit about you!” Backing away, Starsky moved until he felt one of the edges of the loungers at his calves and lowered himself into it.

“Whoever made you feel like you ain’t got the worth of a slug, Hutch, should be taken out and shot. And I’m not about to spend the next hour pumping up your already oversized ego to try and prove it to you, either.

“Hate to break it to ya, Hutch, but no matter what you think, you fit right at home with the rest of us humans. You’re not perfect, but you’re not garbage, either. You’re a man, just like I am, just like any man out there walkin’ and talkin’ and fightin’ and fuckin’. Some things go right, some things go for shit. But takin’ on someone else’s guilt, or takin’ on guilt over things that haven’t even happened yet tells you to break any relationship before it’s even had a chance to grow!

“I swear, you could teach the Russians a thing or two about the art of sabotage, ’cause that’s what you’ve been doin’ your whole life! You think you don’t deserve what you’ve got, especially if it’s a good thing, so you stomp on it, you tear it, you break it, you trash it, and then you pick it up and go, ‘See? It was just a worthless piece of shit anyway.’ That’s bullshit. You know it, I know it, Dobey knows it, hell, even Huggy knows it! Why do you think they’re all afraid to get too close? Because they know whatever they try to give you, you’ll somehow figure out a way to ruin it just so that you’ll feel better about that idiotic self-image you’ve got built up in that blond head of yours.”

Scrambling off the chair, Starsky rubbed at his belly and chest as he paced the perimeter of the room, always taking great care to keep as far away from the source of his anger as possible.

“You almost did it to me, Hutch. Way more than once. And when the little things didn’t work, you ramped them up, every single time, till, couple years ago, we pretty much couldn’t even stand the sight of one another. Then came Kira and you were working off a script that coulda been written by one of those Emmy Award winners. I thought…stupid me…that was the straw, that one straw, that would do it. But the thing is, I still loved you too much to split over some selfish bitch who wanted to play us both and get her kicks out of it while she could.” He stopped long enough to toss a glance over his shoulder. “I figured you’d felt the same way.”

He continued pacing, sneaking glances his ex-partner’s way every now and then, and taking in the myriad of expressions Hutch was displaying beneath the golden threads of his shining hair. “Then came Gunther, but that didn’t end it, did it. It made things worse. Because, like always, I was still there. Still there, needin’ you more than I’d ever needed anyone in my whole life. Hell, I needed you to wipe my own ass for me! Sometimes, Hutch, I wanted to die. I really did. I spent nights cursing your name, cursing that…whatever it is between us that brought me back from wherever I was to where I am now. But I figured, I figured hard, that bein’ alive, bein’ with you, that was more precious to me than anything that coulda been on the other side. I thought you felt the same way about that, too.”

“I did!” Hutch protested. “Dear God, Starsky, I did! There wasn’t one second that went by, even when I was changing your bandages, listening to your agony, hearing you snipe every word in the book at me, and even wiping your ass for you, that I didn’t thank anyone who would listen that I’d been given a second chance to be with you. Just to be with you.”

“Yeah, and when it looked like you weren’t needed so much as my nursemaid anymore, that old Hutchinson-guilt-trip started askin’ its questions again.” It wasn’t a question; no, it was but another non-sugarcoated statement of fact, allowing absolutely no room from which to escape.

Starsky knew that if he could keep Hutch from running away with his body, he would keep him running away in his mind. Most times, trapped together with nowhere to go, this was the more dangerous of the choices. It also, despite the danger, had the greatest chance of working.

Hutch could do nothing but agree. “Yeah,” he said, voice hoarse. “Yeah.”

“And there was little Miss Abby, sweet little nothing who wasn’t ‘part of all this’ who you could lean on, who didn’t really know what was goin’ down and what you were doin’ about it. Like a drug, Hutch, like that heroin they forced into your pretty little veins. No more cop. No more Starsky. No more guilt. All tied up in a pretty little package with a fancy little bow, with a tag saying ‘To Mr. Kenneth Hutchinson, the answer to all your prayers’ right on the front.”

Sighing heavily, fists deep in his pockets, Hutch could only nod out the truth of Starsky’s statement.

“I know. But the guilt didn’t go away, did it? It might’ve hid for a little while, but it never went away. If it had, you’d have taken Abby, or hell, some other woman who looked at you crossways, to your bed ten minutes after you got to her house. But you didn’t. Why?”

“You already know the answer!” Hutch bellowed.

“Yeah. Yeah, I do. And when you come to a place where you can admit it to yourself and believe every word of it, you’ll know where to find me. I’ll be around.”

With a half-salute, Starsky spun on one heel and exited the solarium, ignoring totally both the crowds of onlookers outside and his name being shouted repeatedly by the one man still inside the room.

***

“Stupid, goddamn piece of…!”

“Mr. Starsky? Mr. Starsky?”

Hopping on his one uninjured foot, Starsky turned to an extremely attractive nurse who had, in her hand, two shiny dimes, the exact cost of the nutterbar his mouth was set for. “Hey,” he said, a ghost of his previous shining smile peeking out from beneath the storm-clouds of his countenance. “You…ah…. I’m hungry,” he said feebly, feeling more or less the world’s biggest heel.

“Think nothing of it. Stupid machine has been acting up just about as long as this hospital was built. You seem like a peanut guy, right?” she said, continuing to grin as she slipped the silver into the slot and gently eased out the very knob Starsky had been fighting with for the last ten plus minutes. Same charming smile in place, she handed the bar to him, winking. “Us peanut fans need to stick together, don’t we?”

Dumbfounded at being spoken to in such a friendly, even flirtatious manner, something he was most definitely not used to, caused Starsky’s real smile to reveal itself for the first time in what seemed like ages. Opening the bar, he cracked it in half and gave her the larger of the two pieces. “For your help, dear lady,” he said, bowing slightly as he presented the gift.

The light, gentle laughter that followed his antics helped to allow a shaft of sunshine into the darkness that was permeating the rest of him, causing his smile to broaden. “Takin’ a break, are you?”

“And how,” was the fervent reply is she nibbled on a quarter of the bar and carefully wiped any crumbs away as soon as they appeared. “They’ve got us racing from dusk till dawn, and most times, even after that. But, as they say, the patient comes first, last, and always.”

“You in between rounds?”

“As a matter of fact, I am. Can I persuade a handsome gentleman to accompany me to the den of slop—otherwise known as the Hospital Cafeteria?”

Lifting the nurse’s free hand, he laid a tiny kiss on the smooth knuckles, then stood, eyes twinkling.

At that very moment, Kenneth Hutchinson could not have been further from his mind.

***

The cafeteria was everything it was advertised to be, and more; unappetizing sights, smells, tastes, ambiance. Both settled for salads and coffees, and after paying, they selected an out of the way corner booth. “Wonder what slop Hutch’s getting?” Starsky mumbled around the mashed up greens in his mouth.

“Excuse me?”

“Kenneth Hutchinson. 10E1021. If the slop he’s gettin’ upstairs is twice as bad as this, he’s gotta be wishing he could come down here instead. Which is pretty sad, when you think about it.”

Her laugh was musical and made him, for some unaccountable reason, happy as he hadn’t been happy in damn near two years.

“Is this ‘Hutch’ a friend, a foe, or piece of dining-room cabinetry in for an x-ray of a broken foot?” she asked, green eyes shining with good-natured-affection.

After wiping his mouth and gulping down some coffee, Starsky couldn’t help but laugh. “Ah…a little bit of both, I think.” He really didn’t want to talk about it, but he really didn’t want to be by himself either, so he clumsily steered the conversation to less dangerous waters. “So, since we’re sitting here sharing a table, can I ask your name?”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she replied, easing out a dainty hand. “Marlie Orland, RN. I run one of the med-surg floors upstairs. 12G, to be exact. I love my work, make no mistake about that, but sometimes taking a break from it, especially in the company of such a handsome stranger, makes it even better, don’t you think?”

“If you substitute ‘handsome stranger’ for ‘beautiful lady’ you’ve got yourself a deal.”

They both laughed. Starsky could feel years of tension slipping from him as if from a sieve. “And before you ask,” he continued, sobering slightly, “name’s Dave Starsky, and I’m a cop from all the way down in Bay City, California.”

“Wow!” she replied, wide-eyed. “That’s a long way from home, Mr…?

“Detective, actually, but you can call me David if you’d like.”

“And I’m Marlie, David.” Lacing her fingers beneath her chin, she fixed him with a birdlike look. “So, David, what brings you all the way up to our world of trees, trees, and more trees? Aside, of course, from a mysterious Mr. Kenneth Hutchinson on the tenth floor.”

Protecting classified information was ingrained in Starsky as if stitched to his marrow, but in this case, and since he was feeling rather mellow, he saw no harm in it. “I’m investing a case.”

Marlie tilted her head to one side. “Case? All the way up here?”

“Yeah,” Starsky sighed, his previous good mood evaporating quickly. “The mysterious Mr. Hutchinson is—was—my partner on the force a couple years back. I got the news that he disappeared, then his wife disappeared, so I came up here to see if I could pick up a trail.”

She nodded in understanding. “And it led you here, of all places. Your friend, is he hurt badly?”

Starsky shook his head. “No. He’s gonna be okay.” It was obvious from his tone that he didn’t believe it. It was also more than obvious that he didn’t want to talk about it, either.

Marlie drew back a little. “I’m pushing. I’m sorry. It’s not my place.”

Reaching out, Starsky grasped the tiny hand, some small part of his brain registering how soft and vulnerable the satin skin was. “Not pushing, Marlie. It’s just been…a trial,” he said on a sigh. Taking a chance, he met her eyes directly. “Did you ever want something more than anything in the world, and when you got it, you wondered if, maybe, just maybe, you might not have wanted it quite the same way anymore?”

Marlie’s laugh had a slight ring of sadness to it. “All the time, Det—David. All the time. It seems to be the lot of us humans, don’t you think?”

Sighing again, Starsky pushed his plate away and nodded. “Yeah. I was just telling that very thing to a fr—to Hutch not ten minutes ago. Only wish I could practice what I preach, ya know?”

“Don’t we all,” came the fervent response before the beeper hidden beneath her whites caused her to jump to her feet. “Unfortunately, duty calls. I’ve really enjoyed talking with you, David. If coincidences happen to bring us into contact again, I’d love to continue our conversation where we left off. Or anywhere else, for that matter. How about you? I’ve been told I’m a pretty good cook, and if you like Italian food, I’ve got a lasagna that’ll knock your socks off.”

Giving her one of his most lopsided, charming smiles, Starsky nodded. The return smile left him dazzled, and he lifted his hand to return the cheery wave Marlie gave to him before turning away and heading back to work.

“Well, wasn’t that sweet,” came Hutch’s voice from behind, every bit as sarcastic as it had been at the lake. “Did you set the date yet? When’s the baby due?”

The rage that had so drained from Starsky’s being poured in again as from a huge spigot just above his head. Standing, he turned slowly, his face flushed with anger. “What business is it of yours, Hutchinson? Since when do you get to make my decisions for me? And what gives you the right to stalk my ass all over the hospital, huh?”

“Pretty words, Starsky. Pretty words you gave me. But that’s all they ever were, weren’t they? Just get the crazy cop down off the ledge before he hurts anyone else, then go back to the old ‘love ’em and leave ’em David Starsky. Is that the way it is now?”

Shooting up from his chair, Starsky grabbed Hutch’s upper arm in an unbreakable grip and marched him out of the cafeteria, down the halls, and out of the building. Anyone who had any thoughts of stopping this apparent kidnapping suddenly found themselves with something infinitely more interesting to do.

Once they were outside and some distance away from the confines of the ugly little building, Starsky tightened his grip on Hutch’s arm and swung around to face him. “What the hell’s going on here, Hutch, huh? Nothing said upstairs between us had anything to do with me wearing a dog tag stamped with ‘Property of’ around my neck! You wanna let me know just which Ken Hutchinson I’m talkin’ to now?”

“Let go of me, Starsky. I’m warning you.”

“Or what, Hutch? You gonna clobber me? Or, better yet, you gonna go after that nice nurse and give her three thousand kinds of what for? Maybe see if you can play her like you played every other woman who had the guts to sit down and have lunch with me? You don’t own me, Hutchinson. That excuse might—might!—have had a chance at one time, but I hate to break it to ya, buddy, that train left the station more than two years ago. You were on it. I wasn’t.”

Letting go a soft sigh, Hutch broke the lock of their gazes and stared down at his feet. “Can’t get anything right, can I?” He shook his head. “And no, before you say anything, this wasn’t guilt. It was just me being a jealous fool. I’m sorry. You didn’t deserve that. She didn’t either, even if she never saw it.”

The corners of Starsky’s mouth twitched. “Yeah, well, bein’ an asshole is part of your nature,” he said, not bothering to disguise the fondness in his voice. “You’d think I’d be used to it by now.” He snorted softly. “Guess I just forgot.”

Releasing Hutch, he stepped away and tilted his head back to look at the looming clouds. “Thing is, that scene back there is part of the problem. Part of my problem. ‘Cause, you see, you were right. I was so damned busy feeling sorry for myself, wondering what I’d done to chase you away that I never ever let anyone else in. I coulda had that all American dream by now, Hutch—that house with the picket fence, the beautiful wife, the two point five kids, even a dog, if I wanted one. I could have had it all. Instead, without even knowing it, I was playing right into your hands. Just like always. Damn. I call you crazy, and I’m the one who should be locked up in the room with the padded walls.”

Shaking his head, he turned and began walking toward the hospital’s entrance once again.

“Starsky! Starsky, wait! Please. Just wait a minute.” Stepping forward, Hutch grasped his ex-partner’s arm and steered him away from the gray stone building where families were rushing up and down the steps in groups small and large, and directed him to a much smaller, less-imposing structure that looked nearly abandoned. On the westernmost side of it, they came face to face with the gardens they’d only seen from the inside. They were beautiful; the air cool, peaceful, and calming.

It was so quiet that all Starsky could hear was Hutch’s repeated whisper of “stupid, stupid, stupid,” like a scratched record caught in a groove. Much as he wanted to kick the dumb thing just to get it over the groove, he moved not a muscle. This was in Hutch’s court, not his, and damned if he was gonna make it out to be any different.

“This isn’t gonna work, is it?” Hutch finally said as he came to a foot away, his expression a combination of misery, sadness, and the ever-present guilt he carried with him for as long as Starsky had known him.

Starsky was quite sure that if the world chose today to end, Hutch would be the one blaming himself for making it happen.

It was then that he was struck with the incredible sadness of realizing—really honest to God realizing, not just saying, not just thinking, but feeling it down to the cellular level—that his faith in Hutch, his faith in them, had slipped away quietly between one breath and the next. He was sure it shown upon his face as he looked into Hutch’s sad, haunted eyes. “I don’t know, Hutch,” he whispered. “I honest-to-God don’t know.”

And God did that hurt. And yes, he’d been saying it, repeating it over and over again to himself, to Hutch, even to that poor unwitting nurse, that maybe this time, it was over for good. But he’d never really felt it, not really, until this moment in time.

The strength of it nearly obliterated him.

“Starsky….”

Hutch’s tone caused Starsky’s head to snap back up. It was a tone rarely used, and certainly not with him. “What?” he answered, flat and wary.

“Starsky, I…goddamnit, I hate this! I hate all of it!”

“I coulda figured that out without passing sergeant, Hutch,” Starsky replied, his own tone slightly softened around the edges. “Wanna try telling me something I don’t know already?”

Hutch rubbed at his forehead, the way he did when he was trying to get his thoughts in order. He sighed. Sighed again. Started to speak, stopped, tensed, and decided to go for it.

Leading Starsky to a cement garden seat carved with mythical creatures at the corner of a gigantic balustrade, he moved over to the edge to encourage his ex-partner to sit right up close to him. “Starsk, I know that as long as we’ve known one another, I’ve never told you everything about myself as a kid, and an adolescent, or even as a young adult before we met. Oh, sure, you know some of the stories, more than anyone, even Jack. But…see…the thing is…no matter how hard I tried, no matter what I did, no matter how many awards I won or how many people I helped, I was never enough. You know how much I adore my sister, but sometimes I find myself hating her, too, because I felt the love and pride she received came at my expense. It wasn’t that she didn’t try to tell Father, or Mother, that I was the one who thought up one thing or another, because God knows she did, but whenever my name was mentioned, everything just…shut down as far as they were concerned. Katherine, the kid they’d always wanted, the perfect little angel who could do no wrong. And Kenneth? He just flew under every family radar there was. Until he screwed up.”

“Screwed up?” Starsky couldn’t help but ask as he pictured the angelic Kenneth Hutchinson working his way through a life he was trying desperately to make into his own.

“Screwed up,” was the immediate answer. “I love her, I swear I do, but I was forced to shoulder the blame for her every waking mistake, even if I wasn’t even in the same place she was when she made them.”

“Man, Hutch….”

“And that was the easiest of the incidents like that in my household. Leave the water running? Kenneth! Forgot to put the seat down? Kenneth Richard! Forget to toss a sock into the hamper, you’d have thought the newest world war was about to start. Don’t get me wrong, Starsk, I was no saint. I did things, said things, that I shouldn’t have done or said. I’m not the innocent party in all this. But to hear my parents talk back then, I was one step removed from Satan himself.”

“Jesus Christ!”

“Set your thoughts a little lower and a little hotter, buddy.”

“But why?”

“Who knows? Thinking back on it, it was pretty obvious they wanted a girl to pamper and dress and play dress-up with before they wanted a snot-nosed little boy with a mind of his own who couldn’t be as easily molded into their way of thinking on how Hutchinsons were supposed to behave.” Hutch shrugged while taking a breath so deep, it seemed to be sucking all the air from the garden. “That’s when this guilt thing started, I guess. The harder I tried to be that so-called perfect son they wanted, the further I fell. And instead of just eating it up and forgetting it, it became…became a part of me, I suppose.” One side of his mouth curled. “And then, when I finally grew balls big enough to get out from under their thumbs, there was this wise-ass, pain in the neck punk from the East Side who wouldn’t take ‘go to hell’ for an answer and I was…I guess I was…stuck, somehow. Guilt was all I knew, Starsk, that and having the worthiness of a piece of shit glued to the bottom of my shoe.”

Another sigh, his biggest yet, and Hutch turned from Starsky completely to stare out at the darkling dusk slowly blanketing the garden. “Talk about your paradoxes. The more I trusted you to cover my back without asking for anything in return, the more worthless I felt. Every time I’m sure I feel a certain way about myself, you come along and turn my feeling onto its ear. Every time you take your life, your job, your ethics, your morality, and put it in front of my own, to save my life, my morals, my ethics, the guilt just keeps building and building and building and building and….” Shaking his head, he moved across a path that seemed to be getting smaller by the second and taking it with him. “I couldn’t take it anymore, Starsk. I ju—I couldn’t take it anymore. Something had to give, and that something was us. You and me. Me and thee. Torn out by the roots so there’d be no chance of it growing anywhere anymore.”

Another self-deprecating smile cracked across dry lips. “Didn’t help, though, did it? You promised me that there’d be nowhere I could hide that you couldn’t find me. God, you’d proved it to me often enough. But I didn’t listen. Until it was too damn late. And then, I did the only thing I had enough presence of mind to think of to do. To get you pissed at me enough to go after me with both barrels. To use your own volatility against me. And-and then I figured that’d be it, you know? No more guilt. No more pain. No more having to live every second of every day wondering if this one was gonna be the one with the bullet bearing my name that you’d jump in front of to save me, again, like your own life didn’t mean squat.”

He turned again, his expression earnestness personified. “Starsky, I just don’t have your strength.” He held up a hand, palm out. “No, let me finish. Please. Would I give my life, my career, my reputation up for you? Yes! Without question. What I couldn’t stand, what I can’t stand anymore is the reverse. And you know as well as I do that it’s going to happen again. Not today, or tomorrow, or even a decade from now, but Starsky, it’s gonna happen. And when it does…when it does, Starsk…there won’t be enough left of me to bury.”

Striding back over to the foot of Starsky’s cement seat, he sat down hard upon it. “So now you know the whole sordid story. The Tale of Yellow-Bellied Cowardice, by Yours Truly, Detective First Class Kenneth Hutchinson (ret).

“Say something. Please. I’m standing with my guts dragging on the floor here. Say something. Anything. Please.”

“I dunno whether to kiss you or shoot you, Hutch,” Starsky said finally. “I really don’t.”

“What the hell does that mean?” Hutch snapped. The line between his brows deepened into a divot. “What are you trying to tell me, buddy, huh? Talk in plain English for once, for Christ’s sake!”

“I am,” Starsky replied, his voice more weary than either man had ever heard it. “You still ain’t ready to listen to what I’m sayin’.” He looked down at the hands clasped hard in his own lap. “Maybe you never did. Maybe you never will.”

“Can you at least give me points for trying? Can you at least give me credit for that?”

“Hutch,” Starsky sighed, “I’m not some hot-shot Professor you can argue an A up from a B. I’m just me, Dave Starsky, a street bum with enough smarts to carry a gun and solve a crime or two. I don’t have your answers for you. Hell, sometimes, I don’t even have my own answers.”

Reaching out, Hutch grasped Starsky’s wrists. “Please, Starsk. I-I need your help. If it would help, I’d get on my knees right here and now and beg you. Please.”

Pulling one hand away, Starsky rubbed hard at the bridge of his nose, high up near where his brows met, his thoughts going a mile a minute. “Hutch,” he began softly, “I gotta be who I gotta be. I’m me. I can’t be anybody else. If I saw you in trouble, in any kind of trouble, there was something inside me, somethin’ deep, somethin’ I couldn’t ignore, that told me to do my best to get you out of that trouble, even if I wound up buyin’ it in the end. It’s not somethin’ I can explain, even to myself. It was just there. I don’t think about it like you do, ’cause it’s just part of me, and thinkin’ about it isn’t going to change it. I never could stand to see you hurt, or sad, or whatever. Maybe I’ve got some screw loose somewhere, but I’m tellin’ you the truth. The one thing I am sure of is that I never, ever, not once ever expected any type of payback for anything I did for you, because, buddy, whatever I did for you, I did for me, too. Doncha see? If there’s some hokey truth to what some preachers say that there’s a reason for everybody’s life, mine was to make you as happy as I can. Even if it took makin’ you mad, or pissed, or sad, or even guilty, as long as happiness comes out of all of it, for me, was worth it.”

“The end justified the means, is that it?”

“Pretty much, yeah.”‘

“Starsky, that’s crazy!” Hutch yelled, jumping up from the cement stair and turning on his companion. “That’s just right out of the loony bin nuts!”

“For you, maybe,” Starsky replied, face closed as a high tide clam. “Not for me.”

“But why?”

Echoing his ex-partner, Starsky jumped up from the step and met Hutch eye to eye. “No ‘why’ about it. Didja ever once think about that?” He tossed his arms up in the air. “Everything with you, Hutchinson, is why, why, why. Why does there have to be a why? I loved you. I wanted to see you happy and well. Tell me where the why in that is, huh?”

Hutch froze, mouth open for the beginning of yet another diatribe. Instead, complete silence met the mournful movement of the air.

“You get so damn deep, Hutch. Every question has to have an answer. Not just any answer, but the perfect answer. And if you don’t get that perfect answer, you go…you go nuts! You can’t just sit there and accept that sometimes, maybe not all the time, but sometimes, there really aren’t any answers. Just actions and reactions. Starsky tries to keep Hutch from getting hurt. There’s no deep philosophical—and, yes, Einstein, I know the meaning of that word, and a buncha other ones, too—answers. Just instinct. Just action. If I could do something about it, I did it, whether or not that meant takin a bullet meant for you, or whatever the hell else you say I did, I did it. No what’s. No how’s. No when’s. And most definitely no why’s. One second to ask why, and you’d have been dead, Hutch. And I couldn’t have that. Couldn’t have it at all. You were too important, Hutch. What we had, it was too important to me to lose, no matter what.”

His expression slightly shy, he gave a defensive half-shrug. “Don’t know any better way to put it. Except to say that I’m no messiah, Hutch. My motives aren’t half as pure as you’re makin’ them out to be. To lose you was to lose probably the biggest part of me. Pretty selfish, if you just get past that damn guilt of yours and let yourself see it. I gave you all I had because I loved you. And because I loved myself too much to lose the part of me that was you.”

Hutch blinked at him, looking as if the last piece of an impossibly complicate jigsaw puzzle had just sprung into being before his eyes. “I guess…I guess I never thought about it that way before.”

Starsky gave a soft half laugh. “Course not. Cause you were too busy planning the sights on the famous Hutchinson guilt trip to see past the pretty flowers and see the shit they were growin’ in.” His expression lightened. “And you call yourself a farm-boy.”

Hutch’s teeth flashed in the gloaming, giving Starsky a brief glimpse at that heart-stopping smile he’d missed so much. Something tiny and warm fluttered against his heart, gossamer wings of a hope he’d long consigned to the loneliness of an unmarked grave.

The smile disappeared as quickly as it had come, and Hutch looked at him with a new somberness in his eyes. “I noticed that everything you’ve said in the past hour has been in the past tense,” he remarked in a voice far too casual to be anything but a patently false cover for fear. “Is that really it, then?”

He looked at Hutch, really looked at him, for a long span of seconds before allowing his mind’s eye to take over. With that eye, he deliberately traversed the living minefield of the past, from the day Hutch had left him until today, not shying away from a single second, thought, or emotion but rather living them all again, both as separate entities and as the united front they, in truth, were—a united front which had shattered, melted and remolded him into the man he was today.

The sad, embittered, hopeless man he’d become today.

His mind flashed back further, unexpectedly, taking him with it to a time when he was just a boy. He’d been sitting in that tiny, stifling hot room that had been his bedroom all those years ago while downstairs, directly beneath him, he could hear the quiet murmurs of family members sharing his mother’s grief. He could feel her sadness even through the floor, enveloping him like a cloying blanket, and he got up from the bed and strode across to the window just to feel some hint of coolness on his skin.

He remembered staring out that window into the coming dusk. The sky was a flat, steel gray filled with clouds and pollution that was exactly as toxic as it looked, and yet nowhere near as toxic as what he felt like inside. He remembered staring at the vast expanse of the city below him; at the boarded up windows and the trash-strewn alleys, at the bums on the sidewalks and the deserted, stripped cars in the streets; at the cats and the rats and the starving, slat-thin dogs and lived in the realization that the only thing that had made this place even remotely bearable was the one thing that was no longer there: the love of the man who had been his father.

He remembered realizing, for the first time, how, for the rest of his life, he would never again bask in that love and affection, how he’d have to go on day by day, minute by minute, heartbeat by heartbeat, all alone.

Forever alone.

If the thought of taking his own life had occurred to him right then, he probably would have taken it.

It hadn’t, so he’d eventually turned away from the window, and crawled into bed, still fully clothed, pulling the threadbare sheet over his head and blanking out the world for a long, long time.

So long, in fact, that he’d never realized how successful he’d been until his first day at the Academy, when a thin, gawky, yet almost inhumanly beautiful platinum-haired man had nearly tripped over him in the hallway. When his hand had shot out to keep the man from sprawling on the floor, that touch had jolted him into seeing the world in color for the first time in nearly twenty years.

That same jolt brought him back from his memories, only this time, it was Hutch’s tentative hand on his bicep instead of the other way around. And, as it was more than ten years ago, a veil was lifted from his sight, and sunshine poured back into his world again.

He stood there stupidly, blinking up at Hutch, watching as the sadness and defeat in those stunning eyes changed to a sort of wonder and the exact mirror of those tiny fluttering wings of hope he’d felt inside his own self just minutes before reflected back at him in Hutch’s gaze.

When his father had died, there had been nothing there for him, but here, in the present, was a single, almost transparent strand, dangling before his eyes; a strand that his mind automatically categorized as hope. The only question remained was if he was strong enough, willing enough, man enough to take it; to risk, once again, losing his heart, his pride, everything that was dear and necessary in his life, on that one, single roll of the dice.

Well, he thought to himself, I guess I’m lucky that I’ve always been a betting kinda man, then.

And, with an interior smile as tiny and tremulous as the strand of hope dangling before him, he closed his eyes and risked it all.

“If you don’t know anything else, Hutch,” he said softly, finally, “you gotta know that no matter what, a ‘that’s it’ just doesn’t fit into you and me. What we got, it’s….” Feeling a blush heat up his face, he looked away and down. “It’s bigger than the world,” he whispered.

And for that, he found himself wrapped in an embrace that made his ribs creak as it squeezed a surprised “whuff” of air from his lungs.

It felt too damned good, too damned necessary, to try and fight and without so much as a whimper of protest, David Michael Starsky tossed whatever remained of his offended pride willingly into the trash and loosed his arms, wrapped them around his partner—his partner—and gave back every bit as good as he got.

They received several looks from those few who passed by, but neither was in a position to notice; nor would they have cared if they did. “You gotta lay down that guilt, buddy boy,” Starsky said as he nuzzled the tenderest part of Hutch’s outer ear, deliberately causing that tremble he loved so dearly. “No matter what happened in the past, no matter what’ll happen in the future, the only thing that matters is you and me, me and thee. If the rest of the world has to fuck itself, well, I’m sure we’ve got enough lube. Let ’em go at it. There’s no room for guilt between us, Hutch. None.”

Starsky pulled an inch away and gave his partner his brightest, most glorious smile. “That’s all you gotta remember. Guilt isn’t what we are. Guilt isn’t who we are. We’re just a couplea guys who love one another more than we love anyone else. Guilt doesn’t belong there. It never did. I know when it’s my time to go, I won’t go blamin’ you cause I know as long as you go on living, that’s where I’ll be. It’s the same with you. I’m not worried about it, and you shouldn’t be either, no matter what stupid asshole told you when you were too young to know any different. You’re strong, you’re worthy, you’re smart and, most important of all, you got a heart as big as the whole universe. And if no one else ever believes that of you, you, my friend, are looking at the only one who matters; the one who walks out there every single day knowing that when push comes to shove, I’m gonna be the one comin out on top because of the man I got coverin’ my back. All because of you. You got me, ya big lug?”

***

It is often said that coincidence sometimes steps where fools fear to tread, and in this case, the saying was spot on the money.

After separating from their embrace, the rest of the world entered in the form of a large man carrying a large gun in one hand and the tiny arm of a toddler in the other. It was quite obvious to even those without medical training that the unfortunate child had been dead for some time. Whatever color her skin might once have been, it was now the black of organic rot, and the arm the man was none-too-gently holding seemed to be attached to the rest of the obviously lifeless body by less than the width of a piece of dental floss.

At the sight of the gun, the sparse crowd sharing the steps of the ex-partners displayed a perfect herd-panic and ran, following one after the other into the most dangerous place of all; the hospital.

“You murdered my baby!” the distraught man screamed at the top of his lungs, each word punctuated by a press of the trigger, followed by the boom of the bullet exiting the chamber. “Who the hell do you monsters think you are, huh? You killed her! Murderers! Assassins! The Holy Bible says an eye for an eye, and I’m here now to follow its holy word! Die, you demons, die!”

Another burst of gunfire scattered those unlucky enough to either run or duck out of the way of the madman’s intent. Screams of agony followed every pull on the trigger.

Starsky and Hutch exchanged glances and, each taking his own deep breath, charged the man in perfect unison as if they’d never been apart.

Starsky caught the gunman’s eye first, and he found himself staring down the barrel of a gun that looked like a canon from his short distance from the weapon. He also knew that Hutch had absolutely no ammunition of any type with him. How could he, dressed as he was in hospital clothing.

Standing stock still to show his submissiveness, Starsky raised both empty hands, palms out to show the man he had nothing to fear.

The action seemed to have the opposite effect. The gunman lifted his weapon and aimed it directly at his victim’s heart. “If you got any God you wanna start prayin’ to, little man, I’d start doin’ it now. And quick. Bessie here don’t have the best firing pin in the world.”

Refusing to show fear of any type, Starsky simply stood as he had, a calm statue among the panic going on around him. Not even his eyes gave him away.

“Okay, then. If that’s the way you want it.”

Before he could put even the tiniest pressure on the trigger, the gunman was attacked out of nowhere by a blond and blue tornado half his size. A minute later, he was flat out cold on the cement steps with his weapon was some twenty feet away. Whipping the belt from around his own robe, Hutch somehow managed to hogtie the behemoth while Starsky gently pried the tiny, rotting corpse of the little girl from the father’s dead hand and swaddle it inside of his own robe, all the while humming the Prayer for the Dead over the innocent little figure buried within.

“Somebody call a cop!” Hutch shouted, still wrestling with the huge mountain of a man. Seeing the coast was now relatively clear, others came to help subdue the distraught father before he could get loose and do more damage. “Don’t touch that gun!” Hutch ordered again. “We’ll need the prints!”

A large circle surrounded the weapon as, thankfully, the bystanders finally heard the sirens coming their way.

Within minutes, the first of the mess was being cleared and the police were beginning to take down witness reports. Starsky and Hutch were the first two on the scene, so they were the first questioned and the first released.

Arm in arm, they picked their way to a quiet corner of the chaos that continued to mill about. Starsky took that moment to bump his hip against Hutch’s.

“What was that for?”

Starsky shot him an “oh, come on,” look from above the rims of his sunglasses.

Hutch released an embarrassed chuckle. “Okay. Okay. I see your point. Even though you knew I didn’t have a weapon of any kind, you knew I would get you out of this.”

“Or die trying.”

Hutch gave a reluctant nod. “Or die trying.”

“And the guilt in that?”

This took Hutch a bit longer to assimilate. “Gone?”

“It wasn’t a question, Blondie.”

Hutch straightened. “Gone,” he said, leaving no doubt.

“That’s my partner,” Starsky said, slapping Hutch hard on the shoulder as he led him away from the hospital and toward the parking lot.

“Starsk…Starsk…don’t you think we’d maybe better stick around and see if we can be of any more help to them?”

“Nah,” Starsky replied, eyes shining with happiness. “They know who we are and how to find us if they need us. C’mon Blondie, let go and live a little, whadda ya say, huh?

Hutch took a long look around the thinning chaos, and Starsky could tell that his mind was once again moving a mile a minute, and that most insidious thing of all—guilt—trying to make desperate inroads into his moral conscious.

This time, though, Starsky didn’t have to say a word. As he watched, Hutch abruptly relaxed and matched his partner smile for smile. “Ah, what the hell. Like you said, they know who we are, and if they want to find us, they will. Life is for the living, Starsky, and I suggest we start doing some of that.”

Giving his first full belly laugh in nearly two years, Starsky shook his head, grabbed Hutch’s hand, and allowed him to drag him where he would.

There would be a lot of work between the two to arrive even close to the men they had been before. Fates willing, it would happen. Perhaps it never would. But in the meantime, they were going to have the best go they possibly could, guilt or no guilt.

Life, as Hutch had said, was for the living, and as long as either one of them could claim that title, Me and Thee would be the strongest force in the universe.

“Think we’ll do it?” Hutch asked.

Starsky didn’t even pretend to misunderstand the question. “You and me? You even gotta ask?”

“It’ll take some time,” Hutch replied.

“And what did I say about time?”

“It washes everything clean.”

“You got it. Partner.”

With a genuine Hutchinson laugh, Hutch reached out his left hand, only to be immediately caught by Starsky’s right.

It would be hard work, but they had one thing on their side.

Time heals all wounds.

THE END