Dead End

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When Starsky and Hutch are left wounded and bleeding in a dead end alley, they learn that some promises are easier to keep than others.

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Waking up was like being shot all over again, but Starsky opened his eyes anyways. It turned out to be a mistake and not his first. His ordinary day had somehow turned into night, but his vision wasn’t right, and gray cinder monstrosities leered in and out of focus. A streetlight winked on and off overhead, backwashing yellow light over the alley. And to top it off, he was bleeding somewhat abundantly from a hole in his leg.

Damn.

The air was redolent of urine and orphaned trash. It was too much. Starsky found himself on his side, retching until he was finally empty inside. Spent, he lay back down, careful to roll away from it. God almighty, what did he get into this time? Asphalt was roughing up his cheek, but the pain was a small price for consciousness. With a start, he realized he was clawing at the pavement, leaving his fingernails shredded and bloody. He’d been clinging to the spinning world like it would get out from under him if he let go too soon.

Everything hurt. This wasn’t pain like the obedient kind that followed its due course. This was a wild ride, stealing his breath, like going ATV riding with Hutch out on the dunes near Baja last September. If he closed his eyes, he could still feel the wind on his face. Together, they’d saved for the trip all year… best vacation they’d ever had… no one got killed, for once. True, Hutch got buried up to his neck on the second-to-last-day, but Starsky found him just before it was too late and…

Hutch?

How had he forgotten that he wasn’t supposed to be alone? He couldn’t keep drifting away like that. Had to focus. Starsky didn’t really know where he was or how he’d gotten there, but he just knew that he didn’t get into this mess by himself.

“Hutch?”

Just saying the name out loud made Starsky feel better. It could be the only word he’d ever learned in his life, and it would be enough.

“Hutch!”

No answer, and where the hell was he, anyway? His partner was his constant, the air he breathed. The fact that Hutch wasn’t all over him was terrifying.

Starsky couldn’t remember how it had happened but he knew he’d been shot. It wasn’t something you ever forgot – the singular damage a well-aimed bullet could do. It hadn’t been all that long since he’d been lying bleeding on the floor of that Italian restaurant, enveloped by the heady scent of oregano and pain and above all else – Hutch hunkered over him. Hutch had done good. Typical hero stuff, like they always did, but going beyond saving the day. Saving everyone in the restaurant, saving him…

Stop! Quit it with the memories, Starsky. Nostalgia isn’t going to save the day. Time to think. What the hell happened to us?

He touched his leg, and his hand came away wet with blood. Even in the dark, he knew there was too much of it. Blood wasn’t something you ever got used to, even though it was part of the job. But as far as Starsky was concerned, blood had no business being anywhere outside his body, and it definitely had no business ruining his favorite pair of jeans. His stomach rolled again, and he had to breathe slow and easy to get himself together. God, his head hurt. Must have hit it going down. And why was he shivering, anyway? Wasn’t even a cold night… Shock. He was fighting off shock. That’s what Hutch would say. Hutch? Where the hell was he? Maybe he went for help and was already on his way back, dragging the whole precinct back with him.

Damn it, Hutch, where are you?

Starsky wanted more than anything to track down what happened, but his thoughts were fugitives, leading him into one dead end after another. Every imagining was bleaker than the one before it, so he reined them in. With the discipline of a seasoned cop, Starsky willed himself to sit up and take stock of his situation. He needed to find his partner and fast. Instinctively, he reached for his gun and swore under his breath when he felt the empty holster. Damn, damn, damn. A stolen gun meant hours of paperwork and hours of questioning. Starsky almost preferred a bullet in the leg to the legalistic zealots in charge of requisitions. He took a deep breath. Time to do something. Anything! Starsky dared his body to even think of giving out on him. It wasn’t that he was afraid of dying. But there was no way he planned on doing it alone.

Starsky started to crawl. Hutch had to be out there somewhere. As he dragged his poor excuse for a leg behind him, he considered reconsidering his views on amputation. This was a mess. He didn’t even want to think about how long he was going to be laid up this time. It was hazardous going. Moonlight glanced off the shattered remains of broken glass. Hutch would have fussed at him to watch where he was going, but Starsky didn’t have time to be careful. There was only one way out and he wasn’t taking it. Instead, he was heading deeper and darker into the shadows of the alley. Somehow, he just knew that Hutch was in there. He kept crawling, feeling shards of glass imbed in his palms and knees.

God, Hutch, where are you?

“Starsk?”

The faint voice sounded so far away, it could have come from the underworld. Yet, Starsky would have pursued that voice anywhere, whether to the underworld or simply to the dead end of the alley.

Almost casually, he called out, “That you, Hutch? Hold on a sec, I’m coming.”

With renewed strength, he kept crawling. But the further he crawled, the more miserable was the going. It had rained a couple days earlier. With its poor drainage, Bay City never did well with rain. Every time a decent storm came through, the streets flooded and freeways shut down, until the sun decided to give them a break and come out again. This alley was the type that would stay wet for days and days. There were too many places where the sun never shined. Starsky realized he was already soaked to the skin, crawling through the filth. It didn’t help in knowing that Hutch would just hate this. Starsky had been the kind of kid who stomped through every puddle – after all, it was just water. Hutch, on the other hand, was always miserable at being caught by the rain in the city. He was fussy that way. Hated the feeling of damp clothes and muddy hems.

In his eagerness to reach his partner, Starsky was getting ahead of himself, and his bad leg tripped the good one, and he fell flat on his face, scraping his chin raw. But he got himself up on his hands and knees, and continued on, dragging his worthless leg behind him. He was almost there. He could feel it. Could sense his partner’s presence, even if he couldn’t see him. Starsky shoved aside a dented garbage can that was in his way, and then, just like magic, Hutch was there, an arm’s distance away. There’d been so little keeping them apart… Starsky could have sobbed at the wasted time.

“Hutch. Damn it, Hutch.”

Hutch was lying in a pool of moonlight and blood. But he was awake and turned his head slightly.

“Hey… Starsk…”

Even though he was almost there, Starsky could feel his body betraying him as he crawled across the remaining couple feet. He was shaking like his bones had been taken apart and had been put back together all wrong. Hutch saw it and stretched out his hand.

“Hey, what’re you doing?” he asked, with a slur to his voice. “You’re… shot…saw you go down.”

“I’m a little shot,” Starsky confessed, and painfully, he pushed back into a sitting position against the cinderblock wall, cursing his blasted leg, which wouldn’t let him do anything easily. He leaned over his partner. With one hand, he ran his fingers through the wet hair, while he searched for damage with the other. Running his fingers underneath the wet flannel shirt, Starsky asked, “How bout you, buddy? How’re you doing?”

“A little more… shot. Think I’m bleeding. The blood’s kinda warm.”

Hutch started coughing, and then Starsky couldn’t be careful any more. He gathered his partner up, even though he still couldn’t tell where the blood was coming from. Hutch was so cold. Miserably, Starsky tried to remember how to keep him warm. The streetlight abruptly turned on again, filling the alley with flickering yellow light. Starsky looked down at Hutch, seeing him clearly. The blood was welling up from his gut. Just by holding him, Starsky was sodden with it. With wild irrationality, Starsky wished he could hold his own open wound up against his partner’s and share some of his blood with him. There was life and death, and then there was Hutch. Everything else was irrelevant.

“I’m here, Hutch, I’m right here, just hold on. Gonna put you down and go get some help.”

“Starsk?”

“No talkin’, buddy. I’m letting you down real easy.”

Starsky managed to shrug out of his own jacket and balled it up, pressing it hard against Hutch’s belly.

“Don’t… go,” Hutch pleaded, taking hold of Starsky’s sleeve. “Stay.”

“I’ll be right back,” Starsky tried to reason with his partner. “Nobody’ll find us — it’s too dark and we’re back too far from the street. I gotta get help for you, Hutch, and then I’ll be back. I promise. You know I keep my promises, dontcha?”

But Hutch wouldn’t let go. For a man with a questionable hold on consciousness, he had a surprisingly strong grip. Torn, Starsky took a better look around. Maybe there was some way out of this he’d missed. But the alley was a classic dead end. Where it butted into a building, someone had propped up an old couch. It spilled out its stuffing like it had been gutted. A dented hubcap was propped up against it, and somebody had tossed a sombrero on top of that. Starsky felt himself fading, even as he realized that it looked like one of the modern art exhibits that Hutch was always dragging him to downtown…

Hutch’s voice was also fading, even if his grip was holding firm. “You’re…you’re hurt, Starsk. Let someone else get help.”

“There’s no one else.” Starsky bit back a sob, feeling the truth of it. “Just you and me, same as always, buddy. We’re in this alone.”

Then, Hutch moaned and wrapped his arms around his belly. He tried to draw in his knees, but Starsky wouldn’t let him.

“Hey, hey, easy,” he crooned. “Gotta leave that alone. It’s alright, Hutch, alright.”

“I’m shot, Starsk.”

“I know it, and everything’s gonna be alright,” Starsky said. His own hands were starting to bother him as much as his leg, and he let go of the jacket pressed to Hutch’s belly so he could try and pick out some of the glass shards from his palm. The last thing he needed to do was to cut his partner up, while trying to save him.

“Bad guys… get away?”

Starsky really didn’t want to admit that he couldn’t remember who the bad guys were. That would mean admitting that he’d hit his head and that he wasn’t in control of what was happening to them. Hutch liked nothing better than to make order out of disorder, but it was Starsky’s turn to take care of things this time.

“I guess so,” Starsky said. “They weren’t here when I woke up.”

“G-got the drop on me. Wasn’t thinking straight after you went down, Starsk. Sorry.”

“We’ll get ’em next time,” Starsky said. But he had something else to confess. “They got my gun, Hutch.”

“Dammit.” Immediately, Hutch groped for his own holster and cringed when he found it empty. “Mine too.”

“Paperwork,” they groaned in unison, and each snorted back a painful laugh.

“IA’s gonna kill me if this bullet doesn’t,” Hutch said, and then, Starsky didn’t feel much like smiling any more.

“I gotta get help, Hutch. You got a bullet in there, and that bleeding’s not slowing down any time soon.”

“Sorry.”

“Nothing to be sorry bout,” Starsky said, still trying to keep his partner’s hands away from the wound. “Leave it alone, willya? You’re not helping things. I’m gonna get you out of this. I promise.”

“You don’t have to. Just…just don’t leave me.”

Hutch’s breathing was starting to rattle in his chest. They were both shaking so hard, Starsky couldn’t tell where one left off and the other man started. A dandelion had sprouted in a crack between chunks of concrete. Foolishly, he almost reached for it, as if to pick off the petals. He loves me, he loves me not. Damn it all, if you love me, Hutch, don’t make me choose between saving you and staying with you while you die.

The streetlight abruptly extinguished itself again, and Starsky couldn’t see anything, until his eyes adjusted to the gloom. The city at night in shades of gray. At that moment, he hated the desiccated city that he’d dedicated his life to protecting. The only thing Starsky wanted to protect was his partner.

“Starsk?”

Hutch was scared. Starsky could tell.

“Don’t worry. It’s just dark. Nothing to be afraid of.”

A fellow could drown in this kind of dark.

Starsky could feel the city all around them, pressing in. And yet there was a hush at night that was almost a roar. In the distance, he could hear traffic, but all those drivers and cars could have been a world away for what good they did them. It was all too much. In desperation, Starsky looked up at the sky, trying to decide what to do. In the swath of sky, he could actually see a few stars competing with the city’s light. Starsky knew a lot about stars. Hutch liked to lecture him about things like galaxies and constellations, like he was slumming it as a professor on the sly, but Starsky didn’t have the heart to tell him that he knew all about stars and the ancient light they threw. He’d gotten his own telescope for his birthday when he was nine – his dad had saved all year for it. Best present he’d ever gotten, and he got his first library card so he could get some books to learn all the names. But it made Hutch so damn happy to point the stars out to him that Starsky pretended he was hearing it for the first time.

“Hey, keep your eyes open for me, willya, Hutch? C’mon…look at the stars with me. Which one do you think that is?”

Hutch nodded groggily and tried squinting up, just as the streetlight blinked on again.

“Too late,” he mumbled. “Can’t… s-see stars any more.”

For some reason, the words made Starsky want to heave a brick at the damn streetlight.

“Help’s on its way.” Starsky knew he was lying more to himself than to his partner.

“Didya call for back up… ‘fore we went in?”

Starsky flinched. He really couldn’t remember what he’d done or hadn’t. Hell, he couldn’t even remember how they’d gotten into this mess in the first place. Time to fess up.

“I don’t know.”

“I called in last…your turn.”

“Oh hell, I’m sorry. I don’t know if I did. Don’t remember.”

“Starsk?”

“My head’s a little fuzzy, Blintz. Sorry.”

“Got hit by the proverbial bus?”

Starsky could almost see a hint of a smile in the moonlight.

“Talkin’ in metaphor, are we? Can’t be too bad off then.”

“Be alright. Just need to sleep for a minute… Starsk.”

“Don’t!” Starsky said sharply. “C’mon, Hutch, c’mon. Stay awake. I need you to stay with me.”

“I’m…I’m not leaving you.”

Liar. Starsky always knew when his partner was trying to protect him. Hutch could masquerade as anyone or anything while undercover, but he could never lie to his best friend.

“I need to get help.”

“Y-your leg won’t make it.”

“I’ll drag it.”

“It’s bleeding.”

“Let it bleed.” Awkwardly, Starsky wiped at his eyes. “I gotta get an ambulance for you, buddy. You gotta let me go.”

Starsky could hear his partner’s ragged breathing. What a pair of hard-ass detectives they were – crying and holding hands in the dark.

“Hutch, nobody’ll find us here till morning. I’ll come back…you know I’ll always come back for you.”

But Hutch held on tight, shooting a hard glare at his partner. “Don’t make me do this alone.”

Starsky pulled his hand away and wiped furiously at his eyes. “You’re not doing anything,” he growled, angry right back. “You’re going to lie here and wait for me. Now, that’s an order. D’you understand?”

“Starsk… ”

“I’m going,” he said and started pushing up.

But Hutch grabbed him by the wrist and held on. “Don’t,” he gritted out, “tell me you’re sorry. Do…do what I want you to. You owe me…”

With a start of confusion, he realized that Hutch was actually bribing him. You owe me. He was playing out his hand, but Starsky couldn’t even remember the name of the game.

I’ll forgive you if you stay.

That’s what it felt like Hutch was saying. But why the hell did he need that forgiveness anyways?

“Whatcha talking bout, Hutch?” Starsky asked.

“Should’ve stayed down…” Hutch mumbled, closing his eyes.

Starsky was about to give his partner his best “what the hell?” look, but something nudged itself back into his memory. The muddled edges came into focus, and it started coming back to him. With a sick feeling inside, he remembered how it had gone down.

They’d been so close — so damn close to nailing Cheap Eddie, a squirmy but dangerous dealer, and his band of teenage cocaine runners, once and for all. Classic scum of the earth. Cheap Eddie took the corner into the alley, and Starsky was so sure they had him. Even though he didn’t see the other two punks poised in the shadows of the alley, Hutch sure as hell did. Yelled at him to drop. That should have been enough. That’s how it was with partners. One caught what the other one missed, but Starsky didn’t play his part. The last thing he remembered was his partner’s terrified shout when the shot was fired. The impact to his leg was more surprising than painful. And then he was going down, hitting his head hard on the broken pavement….

Which was why Starsky owed Hutch, big time.

There was no question that Hutch took off after the perps who’d shot his partner. Starsky knew that Hutch took that bullet in his gut because he’d been too terrified and furious to think like a cop. Starsky didn’t blame him – he’d been there. If one was going down, the other was going with him. No forks in the road for the two of them…they’d made that choice a long time ago.

Wherever you go, partner, I’ll follow.

“Hutch, listen to me. I’m sorry. I should’ve dropped when you told me.”

In the moonlight, he could see Hutch’s expression. Amused, a little pissed off. In pain. Looking at him with furrowed tenderness in the midst of everything.

“C’mon… Stark… y-you never listen to anything I tell you.”

“How’d you know they were there?”

“Streetlight came on… I saw shadows.”

“You wouldn’t be hurt if I’d listened. You gotta forgive me, Hutch.”

“Dummy….” Hutch was getting harder and harder to understand. “…Forgave you ‘fore we hit the ground….”

“What do you want me to do?” Starsky hated himself for asking.

“Stay. Don’t… go.”

“Gotta get help, Hutch. I can’t stop this.”

“Don’t need to. Gonna be all right, Starsk…I’ve got this…”

I’ve got this. What the hell did Hutch mean by that? He didn’t like the way this was playing out. Starsky had seen many men drawn into death like it was a dark mercy. He’d have begged, if it would do any good.

Stay.

It was Hutch wanted, and it was all Starsky had to give. That’s what it came down to. Fiercely, Starsky curled himself around his best friend, one hand pressing down on the balled up jacket to keep the blood in. With the other, he held on tight to his partner’s hand.

**

A report of gunfire had been called in to Metro, but the caller didn’t give a specific location and had left the receiver of the payphone dangling by the cord. Tracing the call took time, and doing a search of every dead-end street and back alley in the area took even longer. By the time the patrol made it to the alley, it was almost dawn. It was already November but warm, and there was mist rising from the places where the rain hadn’t dried. All the streetlights were blinking off, one by one, and Officer Greg Riggins might have missed the two men lying near an abandoned sofa, if it hadn’t been for the fact that one streetlight had stayed inexplicably on. It cut like a beacon through the gray morning, and it drew Riggins’s attention to the two broken bodies that lay in its misty path of light.

“Oh hell,” Riggins swore.

This one was bad. Blood everywhere. For a moment, he considered going straight to the patrol car to call for a coroner’s wagon, along with an ambulance and backup. But there was something familiar about the two men, and glancing over his shoulder for his partner, Riggins moved ahead on his own.

Covered with blood and filth, they were holding hands, and the sight triggered a groan of recognition in Riggins. He knew them right away. Hutch and Starsky. They’d always been friendly and decent to him, even when he’d been a scared rookie, straight out of the academy. Crouching alongside the two, Riggins didn’t take a breath of his own until he’d found the pulse at Starsky’s neck. He didn’t bother checking for Hutchinson’s. One man was alive, and that was enough to make him sprint all the way back to the patrol car. Moving like that, Riggins almost barreled into his own partner.

“Call it in,” he panted. “Officers down. Hutchinson and Starsky. Starsky’s alive but barely. And Freeman? Hurry it up, alright?”

Riggins hurried back to the alley. Before he crouched down to figure out who needed saving the most, he blew out a long breath, and looked up at the still flickering streetlamp. Almost by its own volition, it blinked off. Not for the first time, Officer Riggins wondered whether he was cut out for this. The job was a heartbreaker.

The first ambulance took a ridiculous amount of time to finally get there. Nobody seemed to know that the alley existed…dead ends were always last to be updated on the maps.

**

Starsky woke up in the back of an ambulance, surrounded by people who seemed to know what they were doing.

He was alone.

First, he tore the oxygen mask off before anyone could figure out what he was trying to do and stop him. Then, he reached for his IV.

“Where is he?”

“Detective, please calm down — ”

“Where is he? Why isn’t he here? He was worse off than I was!”

“Can someone help me calm this man down? Please, Detective, you’re pulling out your IV”

“My partner. I want my partner. That’s what’ll calm me down, damn it. I promised I wouldn’t leave him.”

“Detective Starsky, you’ve been shot. You’ve lost a lot of blood. If you don’t lie back down, I’m going to be forced to sedate you, which is not something I want to do right now. Your blood pressure is already —”

“Please tell me where my partner is.” Starsky’s voice came out as a sob, and it did the trick. Someone felt sorry for him.

A second EMT leaned over and explained, “Your partner’s ahead of us, in another ambulance. They had to get him stabilized, so they took him first.”

“Alive?”

“He was when they left,” the EMT said, not unkindly. “You need to take it easy. We’ll be at Memorial in a couple minutes.”

Starsky couldn’t wait that long, but he couldn’t keep his eyes open any longer.

“I promised I wouldn’t leave him,” he said, before everything faded into darkness again.

**

Later, Starsky found out that Dobey had pulled every string he had to get them put in the same room, even though Hutch really should have stayed in the ICU for another day. Hutch was hooked up to a host of apparatuses that looked like something out of “Modern Medical Marvels,” the late night show Starsky watched when he couldn’t sleep. He was off the ventilator, but breathing had to be the only thing that Kenneth Hutchinson didn’t need help with. Machines kept time all around him, and a unit of blood was dripping through a tube into his arm.

As for Starsky, he’d woken up with a throbbing leg, wrapped stiff with bandages, as well as a headache that made last year’s epic hangover seem like a kink in his neck. Starsky had a simple IV taped to the top of his hand and an almost unbearable sense of gratitude that somehow, a miracle had happened after all, apparently while he was sleeping.

Once he got over the shock of all the machines, Starsky realized that his partner was awake. Remarkably, Hutch looked absurdly self-satisfied for a man with wires and tubes coming out of most of his body orifices.

“See…” was the first thing Hutch said in his exhausted and somewhat doped up voice. “I was right…we’re fine.”

Unbelievable! Starsky’s head hurt, but he had to shake it anyways. Fine?

Do you know what you made me do? Do you know what a chance I took, just because you asked me?

But Starsky couldn’t get the words out. He had to look away.

“Gonna talk to me, Starsk?”

“I shoulda gone for help.”

“That again?”

“You almost died.”

“Didn’t.”

“But you could have.”

“Wanted you to stay.”

“Wasn’t worth the risk, Blintz.”

“Always worth it…” Hutch mumbled, his eyes closing. “…Told you they’d find us in time… my turn to be right…. got that, Starsk?”

“Got that, but if they didn’t find us in time, I’d’ve killed you myself.” Unappeased, Starsky turned to glare at his partner, but Hutch was asleep. His hair was in his eyes. Looked like a little kid. “Go ahead,” he added quietly and unnecessarily. “S’okay. I’ll keep watch now.”

Even though he wanted to sleep, Starsky kept himself awake by drumming his fingertips against his bandaged palms, trying to figure how this would play itself out. He wasn’t sure how he was going to live with himself. Damn it to hell, Starsky had fallen asleep, knowing his partner could be dead by the time he woke up again.

Usually, he bounced back remarkably from every kind of trauma, but this time, Starsky found himself bouncing between absolute relief and abject terror, without a pause in between. He couldn’t stop the grim possibilities from playing themselves out in his head.

He and Hutch should quit while they were ahead. Choose a safer job, a safer life. How long could they push their luck before it ran out for good?

All his worries made him feel like he was turning into a paranoid doppelganger of his all too introspective partner. And yet, next to him, Hutch was dozing away in a blissful albeit medicated sleep. Starsky knew that his partner’s reprieve was temporary. Hutch’s painkillers would wear off, and then there’d be plenty of pain and second-guessing to go around. Starsky shifted his aching leg — apparently, his wound hadn’t been bad enough for the good stuff — and rolled over a bit, taking a good, long look at his partner.

Hutch was out of it, but Starsky knew that didn’t stop him from thinking. It wouldn’t take long before all Hutch’s thinking turned to worrying. When he didn’t have anything to worry about, Hutch usually dreamed something up. There’d been the time when Hutch had convinced himself he had a tumor in his eye. For weeks, he complained he could “see” something obscuring his vision, and after a while, it was all he could think about. Finally, under threat of being dragged into the ER at gunpoint by his partner, Hutch saw an amused department doctor who patiently explained that what he had was simply a “floater.” It wasn’t a tumor at all, but simply a shadow-like shape drifting across his field of vision. Everyone had floaters. It was just that most people were too busy to pay attention to shadows.

Starsky was almost always too busy to pay attention to the shadows that laid in wait for them. That heedlessness had almost cost their lives this time, and he knew it. But he knew something else as well. Starsky took a deep breath, before acknowledging a basic truth. Starsky couldn’t afford to turn into his partner. Hutch needed Starsky to be the way he was, the same way that he needed Hutch.

In the end, it took a lot of doing to not unhook his IV, while using his hands to roll his bed across the aisle and push it up against his partner’s. Hutch was sleeping nice and easy. The machines were taking care of what the painkillers couldn’t handle. It wasn’t like there was anything Starsky could do by staying close — he’d already kept his promise. But Starsky needed to be close enough to hear his partner breathe.

That’s what it came down to — the debt between partners. It was about the air that they breathed, more than anything. Every single day, they had to offer up as their last. But sometimes, things didn’t go from bad to worse. Sometimes, things got better.

Starsky reached over and took hold of his partner’s hand. He held on tight, as if anyone would try and separate them. As he closed his eyes, he knew Hutch was right. It took two to live the life they’d been born for.

The End