One More Time

Dobey, near retirement age, ends up helping S&H on an unusual case and thinks back on their long career and the path life has taken them on this, possibly their last dangerous assignment.

Originally published in the zine Dance With The Devil by Lucy and Elaine in 2003.

The two men stood huddled against the doorway, the leaking awning giving little respite from the rain. The taller of the two struck a hard-faced acceptance of his obvious discomfort, his blond hair plastered to his head. The shorter, darker man never gave in, repeatedly tossing his face to avoid the rivulets, as one soggy curl after another held all the water it could…then yielded.

Dobey could see and almost feel the anger building up inside the darker man. Knowing how short fused that man could be, he wondered for the hundredth time if the re-uniting had been such a good idea. How long has it been since you guys worked together? How long has it been since you’ve been on the streets at all? He’d asked those questions of himself and them, struggled with the fear of a wrong answer. Fuck! He ended the thought with, for him, a rarely used expletive. But considering the disgust he felt for the current situation, nothing less seemed to fit. It just seemed to say it all.

“For that matter, what the hell am I doing here?” he asked himself softly. He wasn’t kidding himself. “What the hell kind of back up do they think I can provide at my age? Sixty-three…two more years and I am outta this damned department, outta this damned state if I can talk the old lady into it. Shit,” he chuckled. “Who am I fooling? Like I’d ever get her that far away from the grandkids.” He wiped away the beads of sweat he felt tickling his bald head.

“Man, I really am too old for this shit, sitting here talking to myself. And what are you doing tonight, Chief Gates? Dining out with your wife, a strategy meeting with the council members you need to keep on your side? Trying to get your fucking ass out of the frying pan this whole Rodney King thing put it in? I hope you burn, you tight-assed sonofabitch! Every Precinct head and watch commander in the city warned you this would happen. But did you listen? Hell, no! So here we sit with guys who have been behind desks for years, out on the streets where they have no business being because you’ve got every other slob down to the last man trying to do riot control.”

He jumped as an unaccustomed streak of lightning pierced the blackness of the sky and he automatically began counting the seconds like he’d done as a child back east. “One thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three.” The counting stopped when the anticipated boom of thunder sounded in the distance. Storm’s coming closer, he thought. The bottom is really going to drop out of it tonight. Great, just what we need. His eyes strained, struggling to keep his field of vision clear, fighting as he was with the dark, the rain and the slow but persistent fogging of the windshield. As the intensity of the rain picked up a bit, he looked down at the open Thomas guide. “Where the hell is the nearest viaduct? I’ll bet my pension this street floods.”

Almost as if his utterance was prophetic, he saw the taller man lean out, then tense and pull the smaller man back and slightly behind him. Dobey smiled at the gesture. “Still trying to keep him safe aren’t you, Hutchinson? Good thing neither of you are on the streets anymore. That kind of stress was killing you,” Dobey remembered. “And I doubt if the relationship you two had started back then would have survived it.”

Dobey had done his best to understand when his two best detectives had gone from being partners and best friends to partners and … partners. He didn’t pretend to understand the why or how, but he did know that Starsky wouldn’t allow himself to be wrapped up in cotton like a piece of porcelain, and Hutch couldn’t go through Starsky sustaining another serious injury. Breaking up their working partnership had been the sacrifice necessary to save the new personal one, and both men felt that was the one that was the most vital.

So Dobey, while sad to lose them, supported Starsky’s transfer to a training position with the academy, and if the caliber of the officers lately were any indication, he’d benefit from it in the long run. The whole department would. And Hutch had used his pre-med classes to go back to school and transfer to Forensics. It had been a good thing for him, too, giving him some much-needed insulation to allow a tender heart to heal after so many years on the street.

“And now here we are…right back where we started. Well, not exactly. There’s a hell of a lot of water under the bridge,” Dobey chuckled at his own joke, wiping the windshield fog away once more and looking with concern at the way the sewer was getting slower about handling the major stream of water run off from the street.

Dobey looked out, picking up his binoculars once more and scanning the area. It was almost as if the world had become a VCR on frame advance. His eyes registered the movement of his men a single frame ahead of the sound…a low-pitched groan intermingled with the rasp of bending metal and splintering wood. In the next frame the whole side of the building, that had a moment before been the sentry place for his two men, was now potentially their watery grave.

“Mud slide!” he growled, as he realized the rain had washed too much of the upper terraced sand and gravel. The entire area right angled to the old building was sliding from around the corner to cave in a building too old and weak to put up much of a fight. “Just like the three of us,” he muttered grimly, as he grabbed for the radio and pushed on the emergency homer, not wanting to waste precious time waiting for the dispatcher. This would get whatever unit was closest there the quickest and that was what he wanted. Fate has such a grim sense of humor, he thought as he got out of the car, praying he wasn’t going to be digging death out from under all the mud.

He could hear their voices behind the crumbled wall and breathed a little easier, telling himself the run across the street hadn’t really caused him chest pain.

“This is why I said I was against going out on the streets again, even for this supposedly simple scam.” Hutchinson’s voice dripped anger and sarcasm.

“Come on, Hutch…you think you can get me to believe you’re becoming clairvoyant or something? Who the hell could have predicted the damn building was gonna pick tonight to cave in to the mud?” Starsky’s voice sounded annoyed.

“Who could have predicted?” Hutch asked, his voice rising a little more. “Eleven inches of rain in four days…that’s more than we’ve had in the last three years! So naturally you pick tonight to come out and play in it!”

“I hate to interrupt this debate but are you two okay in there?” Dobey called out, hoping his voice sounded calmer than he felt.

“Hutch is a little banged up, scrapes mostly. When the wall went it slid in so slow we had time to get out of the way,” Starsky reported.

“Speak for yourself, you idiot. You’re behind me. I’m stuck sideways in eighteen inches of cold, wet mud, but there seems to be a fairly solid frame of wood wall holding it in place. For now…”

Behind you because that’s where you put him, so anything that hit, hit you first, Dobey surmised with a shake of his head. “You’re bitching, Hutchinson, that’s a good sign. Hang on, help’s on the way.” Dobey made his way back to the car and snapped off the homer, hearing a siren approaching in the distance. Using the radio he called requesting dispatch send heavy equipment for rescue and an ambulance to their location. With a shake of his head as he looked back at the muddy debris, he wondered again what the hell they were all doing out here.

It wasn’t the first time he had seen such destruction and probably wouldn’t be the last. Dobey watched as the fire department shored up the wall and prepared to evacuate the men trapped behind it. He’d been lucky, none of his people had been hurt badly. Hutch would go to the hospital to be checked; Starsky would insist on it, Dobey was certain. And Starsky would go along to make sure everything was okay. He took a deep breath not trying to conceal his relief as he saw the shine of wet blond hair in the rescue trucks halogen light.

“Two more years, just two more years.” He breathed another sigh of relief at seeing Starsky walk unaided to the ambulance. “And I don’t care what’s happening or who asks, we aren’t going to do this one more time!”