Home is Where the Heart Is

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At the end of the episode “The Heroes” Starsky introduced Hutch to the real estate nightmare he invested their $3,000.00 in. The last sight we see is a seriously outraged Hutch. But then what happened?

 

This story first appeared in the zine “Hidden Secrets, Broken Hearts,” published by Lucy. Art by Lorraine.

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“Come on, Hutch. Get out of the car.” Hutch stared stonily through the Torino’s windshield. He seemed totally oblivious to his partner’s pleading.

“You’re not giving it a fair chance,” Starsky accused. He stood beside the passenger side of the Torino, hands stuffed into the pockets of his jacket and shoulders hunched. “At least come inside and have a look around. I’ve got the key.”

“I’ve already sprained my ankle and thrown out my back,” Hutch replied in that icy tone he did so well when he was thoroughly pissed off. “If I go in there, I’ll probably end up in traction.”

“You know something, Hutch?” Starsky said, no longer wheedling, but sounding rather sad and disheartened. ­­It was the kind of tone that warned Hutch, if he were dumb enough to look, he would find a dispirited Starsky. Never something he dealt with well, and something he was seeing far too much of lately.

“What?” Hutch prompted grudgingly. It was probably a mistake, but could it really be any greater a mistake than letting Starsky invest their money in the first place?

“You can be a real bastard sometimes,” Starsky observed, turned his back and walked away.

Walked away, not sauntered, not strutted, not even swaggered. Starsky never just walked, unless someone had given him a kick in the guts–literally or figuratively.

Trying to hold onto his resolve, Hutch watched as Starsky walked up the broken door that served in place of steps that had long since disappeared, and made his way across the dilapidated porch to the dirty white door. Once Starsky disappeared inside, Hutch let his gaze run over the ramshackle disaster in which his partner had been conned into investing their hard earned cash.

How could Starsky have been so stupid, Hutch wondered? This place looked like the big bad wolf would hardly have to exert himself to blow it down. One good puff would be all it would take to flatten the sorry collection of termite-ridden garbage. He wondered just how much they could still get for the land itself. Maybe enough to at least pay off the two thousand dollars they owed on the purchase price.

How could Starsky be so naïve? Even a child would take one look at the place and know that the only thing you could do with it was tear it down. It was an eyesore; a blight on the landscape. Hutch broadened his examination to the neighboring area and revised his opinion. 203½ Borden Street actually fit in rather well with its neighbors.

Poor Starsky. He had to be feeling like an idiot. The real estate agent must have seen him coming a mile away.

Hutch was climbing out of the car before he realized that he had somehow talked himself into sympathy for his partner. He didn’t understand how that could even be possible. Twenty minutes ago, he had been furious enough to threaten Starsky with grievous bodily harm. Now he wanted to somehow find some kind of silver lining for this cloud of financial disaster.

Eschewing the broken door, he put his long legs to good use by stepping directly up onto the porch, reminding himself not to try to use the remaining railing for leverage. Gingerly, he made his way to the door, edging past the bucket seat from some long ago demolished car and the easy chair that had seen better days. One step inside the door that Starsky had left open, Hutch paused to let his eyes adjust to the gloom. With the windows boarded up, it was almost as dark as night, with the only light coming from the doorway behind him and a dim glow at the end of a short hall in front of him. The room to his right, he decided, was a living room, making the assumption based on the presence of the broken-down couch sagging against one wall. To his left was a kitchen, its purpose revealed by the presence of an array of cupboards on one wall. One of them even still had a door. The place smelled musty and faintly rancid, and Hutch was reluctant to venture past the square of brightness in which he stood.

“Starsky?” Hutch called out, but received no answer. “Dammit, where are you?” he muttered under his breath as he took the first hesitant steps toward the glow at the end of the hall. The floor creaked alarmingly, but when he didn’t crash through it on the first step, or even the second, his tread became more confident.

Several paces down the hall, he found himself bracketed by two open doorways. Squinting into the gloom, he was able to identify a bathroom to the right and what he took to be a bedroom on the left. Shaking his head, reflecting that he and Starsky had chased junkies and dealers through better places, he continued his search.

He found Starsky in the room at the end of the hall, discovering that the glow came from two unboarded windows that had, through some inexplicable miracle, retained their panes. Starsky was squatting against the far wall industriously scribbling in the small notebook he always carried.

“Hi,” Hutch offered in a gentle voice to let Starsky know his foul mood was gone.

“Hi, yourself,” Starsky responded, his tone non-committal and his gaze fixed on his notebook.

Hutch suppressed a smile. It looked like Starsky was going to be stubborn. He crossed the room and hunkered down beside his partner, glancing at the page almost filled with Starsky’s hurried scrawl.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

Starsky flipped the notebook closed and tucked it away in his inside jacket pocket. “Just making some notes. What it’s gonna take to fix the place up.”

“Besides a bulldozer, you mean,” Hutch quipped, regretting the comment when he saw Starsky’s jaw tighten, his mouth set in a firm line that Hutch knew represented held-back emotion.

Levering easily to his feet, Starsky had taken only one step before Hutch was up as well, catching his partner by the arm to hold him back. “Starsk, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. But you have to admit this place is pretty bad off. If it were a horse, somebody’d shoot it. The house should be condemned.” Hutch delivered the truth, but he did it in his gentlest, most reasonable tone.

“Shows how much you know,” Starsky challenged with his words and his eyes. “Maybe in Minnesota this place’d be condemned. Out here, three families’d live in it.”

Hutch closed his eyes for a moment, working hard to summon the patience that had never been his strongest suit when dealing with what he privately thought of as bullheadedness for its own sake. “Starsky, be reasonable.”

“You aren’t giving it a fair chance, Hutch. If we just clean it up. Fix it up a little….”

“A little?” Hutch echoed incredulously.

Starsky yanked his arm away. “Okay. All right. I’ll clean it up. I’ll fix it up,” he growled and stalked out of the room.

Hutch sighed in exasperation, and then followed his partner to where Starsky waited on the porch.

“And I’ll get your money back for you,” Starsky further declared as he locked the door. An exercise in futility as far as Hutch was concerned. Who the hell would want to break in? And, even if someone was that desperate, the flimsy lock wasn’t likely the hold them back for long.

“Why don’t we just see if we can sell it?” Hutch asked as they made their way across the weeds to the Torino.

The suggestion earned him a glare.

“Come on, Starsky. Would you want to live here?” Hutch made one last effort to get his partner to see the light.

“Fuck off, Hutch,” Starsky growled and slammed his way into the car.

Hutch scrambled to climb in the passenger side when the big engine roared to life, not putting it past Starsky, in his present mood, to leave him stranded here. To his surprise, Starsky pulled away at a reasonable speed and kept to it until they had cleared the labyrinth of narrow back streets.

Hutch kept his peace until they were half way to Venice Place but could see no softening in the implacable profile beside him. This wasn’t like Starsky at all. Usually, when one of his get-rich-quick schemes backfired in his face, Starsky accepted it with good grace, after an initial period of disbelief/anger/disappointment. Starsky was being as tenacious as a terrier about this one, and Hutch had learned a long time ago that that tenacity usually camouflaged some emotion Starsky refused to admit, or didn’t yet recognize himself.

“Okay, Starsk. I’ll make you deal. We’ll talk to Huggy. See if he knows somebody who can take a look at it and tell us whether it’s salvageable or not.”

“Now you’re talkin’,” Starsky agreed readily, his eyes still on the road, but a satisfied smile melting away the tension in his jaw.

“But,” Hutch qualified, poking at Starsky’s shoulder with a rigid finger. “If he says no go, then we dump that dilapidated turkey just as fast as we can.”

“Deal.”

Hutch settled back for the rest of the ride to his place. He was glad that he and Starsky had come to some kind of truce, if only temporarily. He hated being at odds with his partner. He enjoyed their usual banter and even their semi-serious debates. Lately, however, minor disagreements had become major bones of contention, and what had once been friendly competitions had taken on a more serious edge. The two days they had spent with C.D. Phelps was a prime example, and Hutch was more than happy to no longer have her sitting between them.

When Starsky had first mentioned the possibility of them investing their money together in a quick-turn-around-for-profit real estate deal, Hutch had been resistant. He certainly had enough experience with Starsky’s deals, both as a reluctant participant and as an observer, to make him wary. But he had found himself having so much fun while Starsky tried to persuade him that he just couldn’t resist finally giving in. Of course, he had never intended for them to end up in a financial disaster, but it was so nice to see Starsky once again enthusiastic and animated about something. For the time being, he would borrow a page from his friend’s book and choose to see the glass as half full.

***

“Thanks, Huggy. I’ll meet him there at 9:00.”

The enthusiasm Starsky had been feeling since Hutch had agreed to have their house assessed lasted a few more minutes after he had hung up the phone. By the time he had retrieved a beer from the refrigerator and settled on the couch in front of the television for the late show, however, the dark cloud that had been following him around lately returned to chase away his temporary sunny mood. He could fake it when he had to. Put on a costume of high energy and a mask of frenetic enthusiasm, but, alone, he was uncharacteristically shadowed and unstable, and his temper was beginning to get the best of him more often than was good for him or those around him.

Unfortunately, the cause of his present state was no mystery to him. Hutch. Or, more accurately, his relationship with Hutch. That rock solid, me-and-thee bedrock of his life was showing itself to be built on a foundation of sand. It was shifting, had been for a month, and Starsky wasn’t sure just where it was going to settle. Starsky liked stability, and the uncertainty was driving him crazy.

It had all started after the Higgins bust. A good operation that had netted them a truckload of drugs and a baker’s dozen of pushers and suppliers. Tired from the weeks of intensive work to bring the case to fruition, but euphoric with success, he and Hutch had decided to celebrate at his place with a couple of six-packs of Coors and a marathon game of Monopoly.

Starsky brought the brown bottle to his lips and tilted his head back. After a few moments, when no yeasty ambrosia flowed into his mouth, he lifted the bottle away. He stared at it owlishly, trying to recognize what the problem was, but it was beyond his drunken cognitive abilities to puzzle it out. He needed help, and, even in his present inebriated state, there was only one person he would turn to.

“Hutch?”

No answer.

“Hutch?” He mustered a bit more volume and even less clarity on this attempt and was rewarded with the same response.

Reluctantly, Starsky took his gaze off the bottle that now rested between his crossed legs, and let it wander until it eventually landed, more by accident than design, on Hutch. Like himself, Hutch was seated on the floor, but on the opposite side of the Monopoly board, with his back propped against the couch.

“Hutch?” he repeated, leaning forward to add a prodding finger to his vocal demand. The action nearly upset his precarious balance and he caught himself with both hands on the board, scattering cards, money, houses and hotels all over the carpet.

“What?” Hutch asked belatedly.

“Whose turn is it?” Starsky asked, forgetting all about the bottle that refused to deliver the goods.

Hutch appeared to give the question his gravest consideration until Starsky had to poke his shoulder again to make sure he was still awake.

“I dunno,” Hutch finally admitted.

This struck Starsky as the funniest thing he had heard in a year. What started somewhere in his chest as a hiccup emerged as a giggle. The unexpected sound set Hutch off, and, in a moment, they were rolling around on the carpet, gripped by paroxysms of laughter that neither man could rein in. The drunken hilarity fed upon itself until the partners finally ended up sprawled side by side amid the clutter of their shared evening.

When the room stopped spinning and his chest stopped heaving like overworked bellows, Starsky rolled onto his side, propped himself on an elbow and looked down at a sweaty, red-faced Hutch.

“Ya look like ya bin fuckin’,” he observed. With an uncoordinated hand, he brushed the damp, blond hair off Hutch’s tall forehead.

“So d’you.” Hutch countered both the observation and then the touch, running his hand, flat-palmed, over Starsky’s slick, furry torso from belly to shoulder.

“D’ya think we should?” Starsky asked.

For a second time, Hutchinson deliberation carried on until Starsky became impatient. “Whadyathink?” he prompted.

“Yeah, think we should,” Hutch decreed.

A couple of heartbeats passed, and then Starsky felt the hand on his shoulder slip around to the back of his neck and he was being pulled down. Sobriety, of a sort, crash-landed on him the second his lips met the strong demand of Hutch’s. Unfortunately, it was the sort that stood back and told you you were going to regret what your over indulgence had led you into, but wouldn’t let you do a thing to stop it.

Starsky opened his mouth when Hutch’s tongue tapped for admission, then sucked on the strong muscle until Hutch’s moans started vibrating in his own chest. He finally released the welcome intruder, chasing it back into Hutch’s mouth where he became willingly trapped in his turn. They held on for dear life and dearer pleasure, grinding their bare chests together while, just a little south, their cut-offs tried to re-weave into one piece of material.

Only the fact that, despite the runaway passion racing through them, neither one of them seemed to be able to get it up, broke up what was threatening to become a lust-powered orgy for two.

“You hard?” Starsky panted hopefully.

“Nah. Too much booze,” Hutch admitted. His tone seemed to be trying for mournful, but was overridden by the happy grin on his swollen lips. “You?”

Starsky shook his head regretfully. “Can’t fuck without a boner.”

“Wanna neck?”

“God, yeah,” Starsky agreed happily and tumbled back into his friend’s arms.

***

Waking up the next morning curled up next to Hutch on the living room floor with various bits of the Monopoly game digging into his bare side and his head and belly singing a rousing chorus of “I warned you”, Starsky was mercifully memory-less for only a few seconds. The sound of Hutch’s deep-chested groan, as he also struggled into hung-over consciousness, brought their drunken labial adventures back with stunning clarity.

He had kissed Hutch. Hutch had kissed him. Hell, they’d spent the better part of the night trying to give each other lingual tonsillectomies. They’d fallen asleep–passed out really–till eagerly lip-locked. The worst of it was, it was the best kissing Starsky had experienced since he was twelve and he and Becky Miller necked their way through the double feature in the balcony of the Tivoli Theatre on 37th Street. Unlike his encounter with Becky, however, Starsky knew that if either he or Hutch had been sober enough to get an erection, the other one would have been fucked.

Starsky hadn’t moved while all of this chased itself around in his aching head. Not so Hutch. The idiot was doing stupid things like trying to sit up, and, in another minute, Starsky knew they were going to have to look each other in the eye. When the red-eyed, chafed-lipped countenance came into view, Starsky was relieved to see it was telegraphing the same message that must be written plainly on his own face. We Are Going To Ignore This. With a relieved sigh, he rolled over, crawled to the bathroom, and threw up.

Of course, something like that wouldn’t allow itself to be ignored. For the next week, Starsky went out every night-alone– and went home with any woman he could pick up. He nearly wore out his dick trying to fuck the incredible feel of Hutch’s mouth on his, Hutch’s arms around him, and Hutch’s beloved body writhing against him out of his mind. And from the look of Hutch each morning when Starsky picked him up for work, the beautiful blond was trying a similar path to amnesia.

Stubbornly, Starsky would have probably kept on trying until he had a coronary or picked up some particularly nasty venereal disease. It appeared, however, that Hutch was not as prone to mule-headedness for its own sake.

“We have to talk,” came the Hutchinson declaration near the end of their shift on the Friday night exactly one week after the incident they were trying to pretend never happened.

Starsky really hated those four words. When a woman he had been dating said them, Starsky knew it was time to split. Walking away from Hutch, however, wasn’t an option, so, eyes fixed on the road as he guided the Torino back to the station, he nodded.

“I’ll bring the pizza,” he offered.

There was a pause of a moment or two, and then: “No beer.”

They said it together, and Starsky felt a grin trying to escape around the sober set of his lips. He risked a glance at Hutch and found the exact same held-back amusement pinching Hutch’s mouth. Strained it might be, but their telepathy was still going strong.

***

The pizza was devoured with their usual appetite, washed down with bottles of root beer, and accompanied by shoptalk. Eventually, however, the distractions ran out.

“Starsk…” Hutch began.

“I know, we gotta talk,” Starsky interrupted. “Let’s at least be comfortable.”

They moved to Hutch’s living room, settling at opposite ends of the couch.

“So talk,” Starsky invited. It was only fair, after all, since Hutch was the one who couldn’t keep his head in the sand.

“What do you think happened, Starsk? We goin’ gay for each other?” Hutch asked.

Starsky grinned, recognizing the tactic. Come on strong, while firmly lobbing the ball back into his court. Two could play at that game.

“Dunno, babe,” he countered in his most suggestive tone. “But I have been sorta wonderin’ all week how you’d look in black lace and satin.” For good measure, he batted his long eyelashes and wriggled his eyebrows.

Hutch nearly snorted a mouthful of root beer through his nose. “Point,” he gasped after he recovered from the resulting coughing fit.

The tension that had surrounded them the past week was nicely dissipated now, their usual ease with each other settling in as comfortably as their butts settled into the cushions.

Starsky brought his feet up onto the coffee table and motioned for Hutch to hand over the bottle of soda. “So what do you think happened?”

“I think we were happy. We care about each other. And we drank too much beer,” Hutch said leaning forward to pluck the bottle out of Starsky’s hand, then settling back. “You know I love you, Starsk, but you’re just not my type.”

In his chest, just above his diaphragm, Starsky felt a twinge at the off-hand dismissal, but chose to blame it on the chili peppers that had adorned his side of the pizza. He ran a mocking leer from Hutch’s bare toes all the way up to the freshly washed, blond hair. “Hmmm,” he hummed. “Tall, blond and leggy,” he catalogued, holding back his grin when he saw a bit of pink beginning to blossom on Hutch’s cheeks. “Flat-chested, big feet and clumsy. Nah, guess you’re not my type either.”

But even as he said it, Starsky wondered if he was lying.

Since then, Starsky had felt like an emotional weather vane, spinning one way or the other, and each change of direction totally dependent on Hutch. He had come up with the whole real estate idea simply because of Hutch’s off-hand comment that it had been a long time since Starsky had been involved in one of his schemes. Coaxing Hutch into joining him in the investment had been fun, and everything had felt mercifully normal between them. Right up to the moment C.D. Phelps walked into Dobey’s office. If Starsky definitely wasn’t Hutch’s type, then C.D. Phelps definitely was. He and Hutch had often competed, in a friendly manner, over women. Starsky wasn’t feeling friendly anymore. He had been secretly pleased when her first article came out and he didn’t have to be nice to her anymore. He’d been even happier when her change of heart hadn’t seemed to rekindle Hutch’s interest in her.

Starsky drifted back from his memories to find that he had missed the first ten minutes of the late show. He might as well go to bed. He was going to have to be just as sharp as he could be tomorrow to hang on to their investment. He adamantly refused to consider why it was suddenly so important to him to become a slumlord.

***

“‘Lo,” Hutch mumbled when he finally, after much sleepy fumbling, got the phone to his ear.

“Hi, Hutch.”

Hutch rubbed his eyes and blinked at the bedside clock, trying to bring the blurry numbers into focus. “Starsky? What’s the matter? Dobey call us in?” he muttered.

“Nope. Just wanted to let you know I talked to Huggy and it’s all arranged. His cousin, Al, is gonna meet us at the house at nine.”

“Nine,” Hutch echoed as he finally focused well enough to read the clock. “Nine!” he repeated more loudly. “It’s only six a.m. What are you calling me now for?”

“Gotta get over there and clean the place up first.”

“You are certifiable, Starsky,” Hutch declared, hung up the phone, and pulled the pillow over his head.

When Hutch pulled up in front of the house shortly before 9:00, he was surprised to see that Starsky had not yet arrived. Unable to go back to sleep after Starsky’s call, Hutch had treated himself to a long shower and a leisurely breakfast and then called his partner around 8:00. There had been no answer and Hutch had begun to feel guilty, assuming Starsky had already gone over and started work, but there was no sign of the Torino. It took a few moments for him to notice that the front door was propped open. Either some truly deranged criminal had taken leave of his senses and broken in, or Starsky had already arrived.

“Starsky?” Hutch called as he went through the door.

“In the bathroom,” came the muffled reply.

En route to his partner, Hutch noticed that Starsky had already accomplished a minor miracle. With the exception of the broken down couch in the front room, most of the trash had been removed from the rooms he passed and the floors had been given a thorough sweeping. Surprisingly, even in the gloom, the place looked better already.

Hutch found his partner squatting in the tub, straining to turn the hot water tap.

“Had the city turn the water on,” Starsky explained as he gave up on the tap and sat back on his heels.

Dressed in his worst, already grubby from his labors, and sporting a couple of prominent smudges across one cheekbone and the point of his chin, he looked to Hutch more than ever like some street urchin. Hutch couldn’t seem to stop himself from reaching out and ruffling the filthy curls. He was surprised when, instead of the swat he had expected, Starsky offered a face-splitting grin.

“You look like you need to be in there, buddy,” Hutch commented. “Though I’d add a little water if I were you.”

Starsky levered himself up and stepped over the side of the tub. “Tap’s seized,” he admitted. “But the sink works and so does the john,” he added hastily.

Hutch moved a couple of steps further into the room, glancing down into the bowl filled with rusty brown liquid. “That’s water?”

“Hey, the water’s been shut off for a while,” Starsky reminded him. “A few flushes and it’ll be crystal clear.”

Hutch reached out and depressed the lever on the tank, jumping back in surprise and nearly toppling over into the tub when a sound to rival the thunder of Niagara Falls filled the tiny room.

“So it’s a little loud. Just means it’s got good pressure,” Starsky excused the deafening decibel level.

Hutch didn’t wait to see whether the water really did run clear, but backed out of the bathroom.

Starsky followed. “Place looks great, doesn’t it?” he prompted, waving his arm to draw attention to the improved conditions.

“Great?” Hutch echoed, retreating back up the hall to the patch of sunlight in the doorway. “Maybe a dozen sticks of dynamite might help.”

“You said you’d give it a chance, Hutch,” Starsky reminded him.

“The deal was we’d see what a professional had to say. Speaking of which, isn’t that contractor cousin of Huggy’s late?”

“Nope. Right on time,” Starsky announced, shouldering past Hutch as a truck pulled up outside.

Huggy’s cousin, who could have made up two of Huggy and then some, climbed out of the truck as the two cops approached. Holding a paper-laden clipboard in one hand, he offered the other, which Starsky eagerly accepted.

“Al? I’m Dave Starsky. This is Ken Hutchinson.”

“Pleased to meet you,” the contractor said, also offering his hand to Hutch.

“Huggy said you could tell us…” Starsky began.

“Whether or not we should dump this residential nightmare,” Hutch completed, earning himself a glare from Starsky.

“Might as well start out here,” Al decided, hefting the clipboard.

The partners followed the contractor to the porch where he stopped to make his first note. Casting a doubtful eye toward the makeshift ramp, he reached for the railing to help haul himself up onto the porch.

“Ah, I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” Hutch warned him, indicating the missing railing that he had crashed through the day before.

A few more pencil scratchings went onto the notes before Al went down on one knee to study the supports. Another note, and then the big man lumbered to his feet and hoisted himself up onto the porch. Beneath his weight, the old boards groaned even more alarmingly than they had beneath Hutch’s.

Dividing his attention between Al and Starsky, Hutch saw the contractor raise his leg and watched Starsky wince even before the big, safety-boot shod foot came down with a crunch on, and then through, one particularly rotten board. Another line was added to the list.

“Do you know where the fuse box is?” Al asked, as the three of them filed through the door.

“In the kitchen,” Starsky said and slipped by the other two men to lead the way even though it wasn’t strictly necessary. The house was small enough that only an idiot could possibly get lost.

Nevertheless, Starsky led the way, bringing to Hutch’s mind one of the cartoons that Starsky watched. Seeing his partner’s slim frame practically dancing around Huggy’s small mountain of a cousin reminded Hutch of the bulldog, Spike, and his eager and irrepressible Heinz 57 sidekick.

“It’s right here, Al. I had a look at it myself, but there’s no power yet,” Starsky explained, pulling back the panel to reveal the fuse box and handing the contractor a flashlight.

Al poked around inside for a while, occasionally jotting a note on the list, but offering no comment other than an infrequent and uninformative hum. Hutch had thought that only doctors did that, but maybe house doctors did it, too. He tried to catch a glimpse of what Al was writing, but the handwriting was almost as illegible as a doctor’s as well. Starsky must have seen him trying to sneak a peek and asked a silent question. Hutch could offer nothing in reply except a shrug. Starsky opened his mouth and then closed it abruptly, and Hutch made no effort to suppress his grin. It seemed that Starsky might not be as sure of the fitness of his purchase as he had been letting on. He was certainly looking less confident each time Al put pencil to paper.

His attention having been on his partner, Hutch started when a sudden horrendous banging filled the room. The source of the noise turned out to be the faucet that Al had turned on.

“It’s just air in the lines, right?” Starsky asked, as Al bent over to look into the doorless cupboard beneath the sink. He gave the exposed pipes a couple of good thumps from his meaty fist and then wrapped a hand around one and tugged hard. He straightened up and scribbled a few more words.

“Could be,” Al conceded. “Bathroom?”

Once again Starsky headed up the trio, but Hutch saw that he was now giving the clipboard in Al’s hands jaundiced glances. The tiny bathroom was almost too small for Al on his own, so the partners remained outside the door, listening to the various bumps, thumps and grinds as Al tested out the ancient facilities.

“Tub taps are seized,” he pronounced when he finally emerged.

“Yeah, we know that,” Starsky said, but Hutch could see Starsky had noted that the list in Al’s hand had become considerably longer while the contractor was in the bathroom. Moved to sympathy for his partner, Hutch clapped a hand on Starsky’s shoulder and gave it a reassuring squeeze. Pleased that it appeared this was going to go his way, he, nevertheless, hated seeing Starsky so dejected.

Without asking further directions, Al went through the other three rooms evaluating their fitness. The strong fingers poked at window frames and door supports, and a jackknife was produced to unscrew and pry loose the cover on an electrical outlet in each room. Asking and receiving directions to the crawl space, he went out back on his own to inspect the furnace and hot water heater.

The list grew and Starsky drooped in proportion. Each item scribbled on the growing number of pages seem to sap the confidence from him until, when the three men once again emerged into the sunshine outside, he went immediately to sit on the edge of the porch, legs dangling and back to the other men. Hutch let a twinge of sympathy for the defeated slump of his friend’s shoulders blunt his enthusiasm.

“So what’s the verdict, doc?” he asked in a sober tone completely devoid of even a trace of triumph. He could afford to be magnanimous when he was about to be proven right. Besides, although he never minded taking the wind out of Starsky’s delusions, he didn’t want to be deliberately cruel. He had finally caught on that this house meant something to Starsky–what, he couldn’t imagine, and the why was an even bigger mystery–and hoped Starsky wasn’t going to take it too hard when Al told them to unload it just as fast as they could.

Al didn’t answer right away, his gaze resting on Starsky, speculation there that Hutch couldn’t fathom. What did this stranger see that he was missing?

“Depends on why you bought it, I guess,” Al pronounced his verdict.

Hutch saw Starsky’s head come up at that, but he still didn’t turn around, as if he was afraid to hope.

“It is fixable,” Al continued.

Starsky did turn then and, to Hutch, it was as if the sun had come out from behind a cloud. Only then did he realize how long it had been since he had seen the pure, unalloyed joy that only Starsky seemed able to express when all was right with his world.

Distracted by the discovery, protests died in Hutch’s throat and he brought forward nothing more than an inquiring echo. “Fixable?”

“Sure. There’s no dry rot, except in the porch. No termites. The wiring is decent and the plumbing is fair,” Al pointed out, referring to his notes. “Hot water tank is iffy, but it’s probably a rental anyway, and the furnace still has a few years in it.”

Hutch had finally realized that whatever was going on with Starsky, he needed to focus his attention or be in danger of actually having to go through with his deal.

“The roof’s about to fall in,” he protested and winced internally as he saw some of the light in Starsky’s eyes dim.

Al shrugged. “You don’t have a ladder, so I couldn’t check the attic, but it looks to me like a couple of trusses and a dozen or so shingles and it’ll do.”

Hutch changed tactics. “So it’s fixable. But just how many thousands of dollars is it going to take to fix it?”

Al waggled the clipboard, then pulled off the pages of notes and handed them to Starsky who had joined them. “Depends how much of this you can do yourselves and how much you have to contract out.”

“Ourselves? Come on, Starsk,” Hutch appealed to his partner who was eagerly scanning the notes. “You won’t even fix a drippy faucet at your place. You call the landlord.” He was trying to appeal to reason, but knew, when Starsky wanted, he could be one of the most unreasonable men on the planet.

“Of course I do. That’s what I pay him for,” Starsky muttered distractedly, all of his attention on the contractor’s notes.

“Listen. I’m not saying it would be easy,” Al said. “And like I said, it depends why you bought it in the first place. With a lotta hard work, you could turn this place into a decent home. And, if you’re looking for someplace where nobody cares who you are, what you do, or who you do it with, this is the right neighborhood.” He offered his hand to Hutch and then to Starsky and jumped down off the porch. “A pleasure to meet you, gentlemen. And if you decide you want some help, let me know. I’ll give you the same discount I give family.”

With that, Al departed, leaving behind him two flabbergasted cops.

It took a couple of minutes for Hutch to recover his wits and, by then, Starsky’s attention was back on the notes he held.

“Did he just call us gay?” Hutch asked.

Starsky mumbled something unintelligible and disappeared back into the house. Hutch stood for another minute, and then followed, finding his partner in the sunny room at the end of the hall.

“Starsky, did you hear what I said? Huggy’s cousin just implied that we’re a couple and we want to turn this dump into some sort of love nest.”

“So?” Starsky said, head still down, fingers shuffling the papers so quickly he couldn’t possibly be reading them. “What do I care what some stranger I’ll probably never see again thinks?”

“And what about our colleagues? The guys we have to work with every day? Our boss?” Hutch countered. He wanted to go over to Starsky and hunker down beside him, but something held him back. No, not some unnameable something, Hutch acknowledged to himself, but a memory of a night just about a month ago. A memory he had tucked away into a box in the part of his mind where he put things he wouldn’t, or couldn’t, deal with.

Starsky sighed, so deep it sounded as if he had a boulder sitting on his chest squeezing out every last molecule of air. He finally let Hutch see his face, but, for once, it was so guarded, Hutch couldn’t read anything of what was going on behind the shuttered blue eyes.

“Hutch, we bought a house as an investment. We’re gonna fix it up and sell it and make ourselves a couple of thou in the process. Even IA couldn’t come up with gay outta that.” He leaned back against the wall behind him and tilted his chin so he and Hutch were eye to eye across the width of the room. “I already told ya, Hutch. If you want out, then I’ll take care of it.”

The blue eyes closed and Hutch felt the paralysis leave him, freeing him to cross the room and ease down to the floor beside his partner.

“I can get a loan on the Torino and pay you back your money. I can….”

The monotonic litany ended when Hutch wrapped his fingers around Starsky’s wrist. He shook it a little, making the papers in his hand rattle softly.

“Do you really know how to do this stuff?” he asked.

Starsky’s eyes opened, but his expression remained guarded. “Yeah. Most of it, anyway,” he admitted.

“How?” Hutch asked curiously. He had thought he already knew everything there was to know about Starsky. Two surprises in one month, whispered a little voice, but he ignored it. “I always figured you for the kind of guy who’d hit the wrong nail every time.”

“My Uncle Al owned a bunch of places he rented out. I used to spend a lotta weekends helping him fix up this or that. I’m not claiming to be any kind of expert, but I can handle most of what’s here.”

“Looks like you’ve got hidden talents I don’t know about.” And even Hutch wasn’t sure if he meant the statement to have a double meaning.

But Starsky was searching his face for the sarcasm, looking braced for the joke to be on him.

“So,” Hutch said slowly, feeling as if some imbecile had hold of his lips and was making him spout complete nonsense. “Maybe we ought to give it a shot.”

For the second time that day, Hutch watched the California sun come out on the face of his best friend.

“Do you mean it, Hutch?” Starsky asked, his irrepressible personality beginning to shine through the gloom that had descended on him while Al was assessing the house.

Knowing he had taken complete leave of his senses and sure he was going to regret it, Hutch nodded. “Yeah. I mean it. I guess anything we do is only going to improve our chances of unlo…selling it, right?”

“Right,” Starsky agreed, coming up off the floor in one smooth push and offering a hand down to Hutch. “So let’s get to it.”

Hutch accepted the boost, but pulled his hand free as Starsky began to tow him down the hall. “Hold on a minute. Why don’t you decide what we’re going to do? I’ve got to get something out of the car.” He nearly cringed at the suspicious look Starsky gave him.

“You’re not gonna just take off, are ya, Hutch?” Starsky asked, and Hutch knew Starsky’s doubts weren’t based on imagination alone. He had done it to Starsky more than once, although, to his credit, it was usually motivated by the survival of his gastrointestinal track rather than malice.

“I made a deal with you, Starsky,” Hutch reminded him.

“Yeah, I know,” Starsky allowed. “But I know you were pretty mad at me.”

It was all Hutch could do to bring a reassuring smile to his face, he felt like such a shit. “I’ll be right back,” he promised and fled the house before he could do something really stupid like promise Starsky the moon if he wanted it. There were times, Hutch knew, when he had absolutely no backbone when it came to Starsky, especially when he knew he had been unnecessarily mean to his partner.

When Hutch returned to the house, he watched as his partner eyed the bundle of clothing in his arms, his expression lightening as he identified them as the oldest, most worn items in Hutch’s closet. “I was just being prepared.” He tried to dismiss how much the gesture meant, but the expression of gratitude on Starsky’s face refused to go away.

He went off to the bathroom to change. When he returned from stashing his good clothes in the car, Hutch found his partner in the kitchen filling two buckets full of water.

“There’s no hot water,” he reminded Starsky. Al had said that the hot water heater was iffy. In any case, there was no power as yet to run it.

“So we’ll start with cold,” Starsky said. He waved a hand over the array of bottles on the counter beside him. “Put enough of these in it, and it won’t matter anyway. Choose your poison,” he offered with a grin.

Hutch looked over the labels, saw that Starsky meant poison literally, and chose the Mr. Clean. He upended the open bottle over the bucket, pouring in a good helping of the cleaner, then grabbed up a brush and handful of rags.

“Lead on Macduff,” he invited. “Where do you want me to start?”

Starsky led him to the bedroom where the window was boarded up. “We’ll do the walls first and then the floor. You get started while I take the plywood off the window so we can see what we’re doing. I can put it back up before we leave.”

Hutch shrugged his acceptance of his orders but didn’t begin immediately, watching instead for a few minutes while Starsky wielded the pry bar and hammer. It didn’t take long, even as relatively inexperienced as he was, to see that Starsky really did seem to know what he was doing.

As instructed, Hutch went to one of the walls, set his bucket down, dipped one of the rags in the cold, milky water, wrung it out and prepared to apply a little elbow grease.

“Hutch, you have to start at the bottom and work up,” Starsky admonished him.

That made absolutely no sense to Hutch. He let his expression speak for him.

“If you start at the top, the water runs through the dirt below and makes streaks that won’t come off no matter what you do,” Starsky explained patiently.

Hutch was about to argue, and then remembered that, though Starsky’s handyman skills had yet to be proven conclusively, his partner definitely did know how to clean. Starsky’s apartment was always spotless, and Hutch knew that, unlike himself, Starsky didn’t hire a cleaning woman. Once again, he accepted his orders with good grace.

After a few minutes of industrious scrubbing, however, he looked over his shoulder to find Starsky watching him. “You want me to get you a hard hat and clipboard there, Starsk? Then you could look like a supervisor, too.”

Starsky just grinned at him and carried his bucket over to the far side of the room.

Scrubbing away the accumulated grime of what, Hutch was willing to guess, must be several decades was damned hard work. Oddly enough, however, it was also strangely satisfying. After a while, he fell into a rhythm of wash, scrub, rinse and wring that, he realized after a while longer, matched exactly the rhythm Starsky had developed and the light hearted humming Starsky indulged in as he worked. It seemed that no matter where they were or what they were doing, he and Starsky were destined to mesh like the workings of one of the fancy watches Starsky loved so well. Even… Hutch chased the half formed thought away and concentrated on keeping pace with his partner.

In short order, the filth gave way to a rather pleasing, if faded, shade of blue. With the sunlight streaming in through the gaping window opening, Hutch could imagine that this had once, a long time ago, been a cheery little boy’s room.

They met at the juncture of two walls, jostling and deliberately elbowing and splashing each other as they competed to be the first to finish the last strips of their respective walls. Despite Hutch’s head start, Starsky beat him by about a yard and Hutch had to acknowledge the value of experience once again. He had never washed a wall in his life and, studying the four walls of the room, he had to admit his inexperience showed.

“Now the floor,” Starsky instructed, pointing to one corner furthest from the door and going to the opposite one himself.

Obligingly, Hutch went to his corner. “Hey, Starsk, we should have brought a radio,” he said as he eased down to his knees.

“Whistle while you work. da da da da da da da,” Starsky sang as he began scrubbing.

Grinning, Hutch took up the rhythm with his brush, shaking his head at his crazy partner. “We definitely should have brought a radio,” he concluded.

It took them an hour of muscle straining labor, but, by noon, the bedroom floor had been stripped of its layers of well ground-in dirt. The torn and stained linoleum still wasn’t something Hutch would want in his own home, but, by comparison with its former state, not to mention the tile in the hall that he and Starsky backed into as they finished the job, the blue room was very nearly a show place.

Hutch dropped a hand on Starsky’s shoulder as they trudged toward the kitchen to dump the sludge-like water from their buckets. “Now what?” he asked.

“Lunch,” Starsky announced as, like a magician, he produced a small cooler from one of the cupboards beneath the counter.

“If you paid better, I’d work for you any time,” Hutch declared as he followed Starsky out onto the porch.

They sat on the edge of the porch, legs dangling and the cooler between them.

“Ta da,” Starsky provided the fanfare as he whipped the top off the cooler to reveal wrapped sandwiches, a couple of oranges, and several cans of soda. They dug in with appetites sharpened by hard work, hardly exchanging a word until the food had disappeared and they had cracked their second cans of soda.

Hutch leaned back on his elbows and looked up at the peeling paint on the underside of the porch roof, wondering if that job appeared anywhere on Al’s lengthy list.

“So what’s next, oh Lord and Master of the scrub brush?” he asked.

Starsky turned toward him, propping himself on one elbow. “We gotta get that couch outta there.”

Hutch groaned dramatically. “It probably weighs a ton,” he complained.

“Maybe a ton and a half,” Starsky conceded. “But we gotta get it out back. The junkman’s gonna pick up all that stuff tomorrow.”

“Okay, slave driver,” Hutch groaned, sitting up as Starsky also straightened and then climbing to his feet.

A few minutes later, standing at opposite ends of the couch, they tried to work out a strategy that wouldn’t see one or both of them in traction before the job was finished. They had already tried an experimental lift and had put the massive weight down quickly.

“Too bad we don’t have a mover’s trolley,” Starsky said, eyeing the moth eaten discard speculatively.

“A block and tackle might help, too,” Hutch suggested, rubbing at a warning twinge in his back. “Maybe we should just push it.”

“The feet’ll tear up the linoleum,” Starsky protested.

“Like that matters,” Hutch countered, his disparaging glance roaming from unidentifiable stain, to cigarette burn, to an already prominent rip at the doorway.

“Yeah,” Starsky agreed. “I’ll pull, you push.”

Pushing and pulling in tandem, sweating and cursing under their breaths, they managed to get the ungainly piece of furniture halfway through the doorway before it got stuck.

“I think the middle legs are stuck on the linoleum. Just gimme a minute,” Starsky mumbled as he put one knee up on the arm of the couch.

“Goddamnit,” Hutch cursed. Not realizing his partner’s precarious position, he put his shoulder to his end. Head down and sneakered feet firmly planted, he shoved with all his might.

“Huuuu….”

Starsky’s bellow of surprise was cut short as the couch shot forward a foot and he fell face first into the rotten old cushions.

Hutch straightened to see what the shouting was about, saw his partner ass over teakettle on the old couch, and started to laugh. In a moment, he was bent double, roaring his fool head off.

“Huuuutch,” Starsky bellowed plaintively.

Getting marginal control of himself but still laughing hard enough to bring tears to his eyes, Hutch managed to get Starsky up as far as his knees. They stared at each other through the cloud of dust and disintegrated cushion foam until Starsky, too, saw the humor of the situation and began to chuckle.

“Help me offa here,” Starsky finally demanded.

Hutch obliged, tugging and supporting until Starsky had his feet under him, and they stood together beside the blocked doorway. Impulsively, he held onto Starsky’s shoulder with one hand while he made a vain attempt to brush some of the dust from the wild curls with the other.

“Smooth move,” he chided, his smile acknowledging that the mishap was more his fault than Starsky’s.

“Oaf,” Starsky countered affectionately.

Hutch had to admit, if only to himself, that the tumble was something he was more likely to do than his usually graceful partner. A diversion was definitely called for before the same thought occurred to Starsky.

“We can’t leave it there. Can we?” he asked hopefully.

Starsky gave him a shove back toward his end of the couch. “Get over there,” he ordered while climbing up and over the obstruction into the hallway. “Let’s flip it over on its side.”

Twenty sweating, straining, swearing minutes later, the two men paused a moment to savor their victory before giving a last combined shove to send their nemesis out the door and tumbling down the back steps to lie amid the rest of the junk Starsky had already piled there.

“And now we clean?” Hutch asked, cherishing only the barest glimmer of hope that the taskmaster his partner had become might relent.

“And now we clean,” Starsky confirmed, closing the door on their defeated adversary.

By dinnertime, Hutch was every bit as filthy as his partner, and the idea of a hot shower was beginning to sound like a new definition of heaven. He couldn’t help but notice as the day wore on that Starsky’s buoyant spirits never flagged, no matter how dirty the job they were doing, and that Starsky always had them working together. Hutch had to admit that his partner’s mood was contagious, and by the time the fading light and their hungry bellies insisted it was quitting time, he was as proud of their progress as the obviously glowing Starsky was.

“A good day’s work,” he pronounced when he and Starsky carried their buckets to the kitchen to dump yet more filthy water.

“Man, am I starved,” Starsky announced predictably.

“I am not going anywhere, not even one of your crummy taco stands, until I’ve had a shower,” Hutch insisted. He sat his empty bucket on the counter and headed for the door

“We could clean up at my place and then go out to dinner,” Starsky suggested as he followed. “You got clothes in my closet.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Hutch agreed as he watched Starsky lock the door. “By the way, where’s the Torino?” he asked as he jumped down off the porch.

“You’ve gotta be kidding, Hutch,” Starsky protested. “I wouldn’t park my car in this neighborhood.”

***

Claiming guest privileges, Hutch nabbed the shower first, and while he waited his turn, Starsky started dinner. They could go out, but he was too tired and yet too happy to want to go to the trouble of going somewhere and sitting among a bunch of people. Today had felt like good old times. He and Hutch working together and trading quips. Back to normal. He had found out that the easy give and take of his relationship with Hutch wasn’t as guaranteed as he had always assumed. Even if he was the cause of that present instability, he wasn’t about to take days like today for granted anymore.

“Hey, I thought we were going out,” Hutch said when he returned to the kitchen. “Something smells good.”

“It’s just lasagna I had in the freezer,” Starsky admitted, keeping the rest of his reasoning–that he simply did not want to share Hutch’s company with anyone–to himself. “I think I’m too tired to go out. It’d be pretty embarrassing if I fell asleep in my soup.”

“Especially if you snored,” Hutch quipped. He bumped Starsky aside and took over the salad preparations. “There’s a bar of soap in there with your name on it, buddy.”

When Starsky emerged from the shower, Hutch had dinner on the table and both men devoured it, ravenous from their labors. Conversation centered on the house. Starsky had Al’s notes on one side of his plate and a pad of paper on the other. Between bites, and after due discussion with Hutch, he began transferring the to-do items to a new list, setting them out in a more practical order.

“There’s no sense painting until we get the windows fixed, but we can patch the plaster,” Starsky mumbled around a mouthful of pasta and sauce.

“You know what’s going to happen as soon as we put new panes in, Starsky,” Hutch cautioned. He picked up his wineglass and took a small sip. “Somebody will put a rock through them.”

“I thoughta that, and I think I figured out a way to get around it. I could take the plywood on ’em now and make temporary shutters with it. Lock ’em up when we’re not there. It’d only cost a couple of bucks for hinges and stuff.” Starsky made a note under the column marked “buy”.

When Hutch offered no comment, Starsky glanced up to find himself being watched.

“What?”

“You really do know a lot about this stuff, don’t you?” Hutch asked.

Starsky shrugged casually, his reaction to the respect in Hutch’s eyes anything but casual. He knew that, on many levels, Hutch respected his abilities. However, it was more common for Hutch to be in the more knowledgeable role than Starsky. Most of the time, Hutch would be pretty nice about filling in the gaps of Starsky’s education, but there were other times when he assumed a superior attitude that got old very fast.

“I’m no expert,” Starsky reiterated what he had said that afternoon.

“You know more than I do,” Hutch pointed out.

“That does happen once in a while,” Starsky countered.

Hutch grinned and flicked a piece of carrot at him. “Don’t let it go to your head.”

“No chance of that with you around,” Starsky shot back the banter and the carrot. “Food fight?”

“Hell, no. I’m too tired.”

“Yeah,” Starsky agreed. He began gathering up the dishes and got up to stack them in the sink. “Better make it an early night so we can get started bright and early tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?” Hutch echoed.

Starsky froze, back turned to his partner. After a moment, he busied his hands with the dishes, clattering them together and starting the water running.

“Sure, tomorrow,” he said above the noise. “You got other plans?”

He jumped when Hutch brushed against him, leaning close to add his glass to the dishes in the sink.

“Something bugging you, Starsk?” Hutch asked.

Starsky let out a slow breath as Hutch’s hand settled on his shoulder and squeezed. What used to be such a commonplace method of communication between them now caused reactions that weren’t so comfortable. Hutch’s touch had become something he longed for and dreaded at the same time. They had been so contented with each other all day, why did he have to go and spoil it now? He had no answers for himself as he watched Hutch’s other hand flip off the tap and then cross over him to grip his other shoulder. He allowed himself to be turned to face his partner’s inquiring expression, but couldn’t find anything to say. No reassuring denial, or distracting bit of banter leapt onto his tongue.

“Why is that place so important to you, Starsk?” Hutch probed.

Starsky scrambled for something, anything, to say that would reassure Hutch. But the truth was he didn’t know why it had become so vital to him to make a success out of this venture. Inadvertently, Hutch gave him an out.

“Are you just sick of these ideas of yours not working out, babe?” Hutch asked gently.

Starsky summoned up a weak imitation of a smile and casually shrugged Hutch’s touch away. He turned back to the sink and plunged both hands into the soapy water. “Yeah,” he agreed. He held up a few more seconds under Hutch’s gaze, then grabbed the dishtowel and tossed it in his face. “You dry,” he commanded.

“I think you’re just getting off on ordering me around,” Hutch accused, but nevertheless began drying the dishes Starsky handed to him.

Starsky let that one pass. “Are you busy tomorrow?”

“I have the feeling I am now,” Hutch sighed.

***

When the alarm went off at 6:00 a.m. Sunday morning, Hutch groaned, tried to reach over to shut it off, and groaned louder. Making a concerted effort, he was finally able to roll over and silence the intrusive buzzing. He stayed there, trying to remember what truck had hit him and to decide whether he had survived the encounter. He was supposed to pick Starsky up in thirty minutes. It was going to take him longer than that to get out of bed.

Hutch knew there was no sense trying to avoid it. If he didn’t show up, Starsky would be on the phone at 6:35. All he could do was force his aching-in-places-he-didn’t-know-he-had body out of bed and pray the shower would unlock his muscles. He was the one who worked out, ran regularly, and was supposed to be in shape. No way was he going to admit to his partner that a little scrubbing had made a cripple out of him. Hopefully, if there was any justice in this world, Starsky was hurting just as badly.

***

Starsky locked his door, hooked an arm through the folded stepladder beside him, and hefted the heavy toolbox in the other hand. Harboring no illusions about his neighbor’s reactions should he wake them this early on a Sunday morning, he tiptoed down the stairs, arriving at the bottom just as Hutch pulled up in his rolling scrap yard.

“Morning,” he greeted his partner as the blond slowly got out of the car and came to open the trunk.

It wasn’t until he had stashed the toolbox in the trunk and the ladder in the back seat that Starsky really looked at Hutch.

“Hey. Are you okay?” he asked, watching as Hutch climbed cautiously behind the wheel.

“Fine,” Hutch replied. An obvious fib if Starsky had ever heard one.

“So why are you movin’ like a reject from a nursing home?” Starsky countered from where he had settled himself in the passenger seat.

“You shouldn’t eat so much sugar in the morning, Starsk. It makes you imagine things,” was Hutch’s diversionary response.

Starsky winced as the LTD’s engine coughed into reluctant life. He wasn’t buying Hutch’s story. Moving the couch must have started his touchy back acting up again. He let the subject drop, however, as he mentally reviewed the list of projects he had hoped to complete today, trying to figure out a way to go easy on Hutch without his partner catching on.

“Forget it, Starsk. I can read your mind.”

Starsky started guiltily and glanced over at Hutch, whose attention was on the Sunday morning emptiness of the road. He didn’t say a word; just let his steady gaze eat into Hutch’s stubbornness.

“Okay. So I’m a little sore,” Hutch finally admitted as they pulled up to a stoplight.

“Back?” Starsky asked.

“No. Mostly my shoulders and arms. I have a cleaning lady, remember,” Hutch reminded him.

“Yeah. And this one actually seems to clean instead of moonin’ over your shorts all day,” Starsky quipped.

“Very funny. Honestly, Starsk, I’ll loosen up once we get started,” Hutch insisted.

Starsky kept his opinion on that to himself but made a mental note to keep an eye on his partner as the day wore on. Dobey would not be pleased if Hutch ended up on sick leave, and neither would Starsky. It was no fun hitting the streets alone, or worse yet, with a temporary partner, while Hutch was out of commission.

When they arrived at the house, the junk man was already there. Starsky winced at the noise the old man and his assistants were making, expecting irate neighbors to be hanging out of their bedroom windows any minute. Reluctantly, he left Hutch to unload the car as he ran around the back to see if he could quiet them down and to make sure they left none of the discarded trash behind.

By the time Starsky entered the house, Hutch had already unloaded the toolbox and ladder, and was filling a bucket with water.

“What am I cleaning today?” Hutch asked, pouring a generous helping of cleaner into the cold water.

Starsky pushed the pry bar and hammer to the back of the counter and climbed up behind them. “You don’t have to take orders from me,” he said as he began prying the plywood off the window over the sink.

Ever since Hutch’s teasing remark the night before that Starsky was getting a charge out of ordering him around, Starsky had been worrying at the idea like a dog with a bone. Did Hutch really think that? Worse, was it true? He was enjoying working with Hutch on a project that had nothing to do with their jobs and everything to do with their friendship. Starsky knew Hutch wouldn’t get down on his hands and knees and scrub for anyone else. There was definitely a thrill to be had knowing that Hutch would do anything for him. Well, almost anything.

“I know when I’m out of my element,” Hutch replied. “But, if we ever get around to planting a garden out there…” the blond head nodded toward the window opening as he accepted the plywood Starsky had just removed, “then it’ll be you holding the shovel and me calling the shots.”

Starsky swiveled around on his behind until his legs hung down off the counter. “Garden? You thought about putting in a garden?” he asked, so touched by Hutch’s half-joking comment he was surprised his eyes weren’t tearing up.

“Sure. A few pansies and petunias would really brighten up the place. I may not know much about the real estate business, but I do know that when you want to sell something to someone, appearances make all the difference,” Hutch said.

Sentimentality went right out the paneless window frame. Starsky jumped down off the counter, landing with an unnecessarily loud thump. He shoved a bucket into the sink and twisted the tap.

“Unless it’s you and you’re shopping for a car,” he countered to cover up the fact that what Hutch had said had deflated his little red balloon of happiness. For a minute there, he had thought that Hutch might actually be getting into the whole thing, not just humoring him.

“You can work in here,” he added while pouring splashes of liquid from various bottles into his bucket. “You know the drill by now. Anything that can be scrubbed gets scrubbed within an inch of its life.”

“What are you gonna do?” Hutch asked as he hauled his bucket across the room to start on a wall.

“Bathroom,” Starsky said.

Hutch straightened from where he had started to scrub the bottom of the wall. “I hope you brought rubber gloves. Hell, come to think of it, gloves, gown and mask might be a good idea. You could catch the plague in there.”

“You worry too much,” Starsky scoffed, his emotional weather vane going into another abrupt spin. “I cleaned latrines when I was in the army. Besides, I didn’t hear you objecting to using it yesterday.”

“Yesterday, I wasn’t down on my knees stirring up germs that have been waiting ten years for somebody to breathe them in,” Hutch protested.

“I’ll use lots of bleach,” Starsky promised, picking up his bucket and the bottle of bleach, and trudging down the hall to the bathroom.

He wasn’t about to admit to Hutch that the job appealed to him no more than it did his partner. Somebody had to do it and, since Hutch was being so good about the rest of it, Starsky thought it was only fair that he take on the filthy work himself. On the principal of getting the worst over with first, he went straight to the toilet and upended the bleach bottle over the bowl.

Something else he wasn’t willing to admit to Hutch was how the blond could send him into an emotional tailspin with a hard look or a kind word. Hutch tended to be moody and Starsky had learned long ago to let the storms roll off his back like water off a duck and simply enjoy the fair weather when it came. Not that Hutch couldn’t be affected when something went very wrong or very right in Starsky’s world, but that was far less common. If he didn’t shape up, Starsky harbored a real fear that someday soon he might really slip up and Hutch might just tell him to ship out.

Brooding wasn’t doing him any good, Starsky decided, and distracted himself by imagining just how many butts had sat on the seat he was now scrubbing. Disgusting thought.

Starsky finished up the bathroom by noon. Wishing the hot water heater and the faucet in the tub worked so he could give himself a thorough scrubbing, he made do with a diluted bleach and soap wash in the kitchen sink after he had dumped his fourth bucket of filthy water.

His periodic forays to the kitchen for fresh water and more cleaner had shown Starsky that his partner was making progress as well. The walls, countertops and upper cupboards had been scrubbed clean of their build up of grease and grime, and the room was even beginning to lose its faintly rancid odor.

“Ready for lunch?” he asked as he dried his hands on a rag. Hutch had confiscated the cooler the night before, insisting it was his turn to pack their lunch, and Starsky was hoping there would be something edible in it. Hungry as he was, wheat germ and butterfly bones just weren’t going to cut it.

Hutch followed him out onto the porch and, after Hutch retrieved the cooler from the car, they sat as they had the day before, legs hanging and the cooler between them. While contentedly munching on sandwiches and draining cans of soda, they watched a couple of little kids playing in the weeds of the front yard four houses down.

“Pretty quiet around here,” Hutch commented with a nod that encompassed the nearly deserted neighborhood.

“Gone to the beach for the day, maybe,” Starsky suggested. “I know a couple of the other houses are for sale, too.”

Hutch leaned back on his elbows, his lazy gaze scanning the street. “Starsk, did you really spend your weekends working like this when you lived with your Uncle Al?”

“Yeah. Three out of four a month usually,” Starsky said, leaning back himself but with his gaze on his partner. Even sweaty and filthy, Hutch looked better than a lot of people did dressed to the nines. Starsky tucked that thought way behind a wall of denial and switched his attention to the dusty street.

“Small wonder you make the landlord do everything at your place,” Hutch said.

Starsky laughed. “Yeah. That’s what I pay him for.”

“Your uncle should have been arrested for child abuse,” Hutch suggested mildly. “Working a kid like that.”

“I was a teenager by then,” Starsky defended his kin. “‘Sides, he paid pretty good and it sure as hell kept me outta trouble. Lookin’ back, I guess that was the whole idea. Back in New York, I’d started to go a little wild before my mom dumped me in her brother’s lap.”

Starsky felt Hutch’s gaze upon him and turned his head to meet it. A lift of his eyebrows invited Hutch to satisfy the curiosity he could see on the handsome face.

“You don’t talk about your childhood much.” A hand was held up to hold back Starsky’s protest. “I don’t mean the funny stuff or the cute stuff. I mean stuff like how you felt about being sent out here after your dad was killed.”

Starsky broke their gazes and looked down at his red, bleach-burned hands. “‘Bout the same way you felt when your family packed you up and shipped you off to school. Least I ended up living with family, even if it was all the way across the country.”

“You know, Starsk, that’s something I’ve always admired about you. The way you can make the most of a bad situation. The way you just get on with it,” Hutch complimented sincerely. “You don’t rant or brood or butt your head against the brick wall of fate or circumstances the way I do.”

Hutch’s observation fit in so well with his earlier thoughts that Starsky had to laugh. “Maybe that’s why we get along so well.”

“Yeah,” Hutch agreed, his expression so soft that, for one insane moment, Starsky was tempted to simply lean over and claim the parted lips.

“Who’da thunk it, huh?” he said, resisting temptation by refusing to look at it anymore, busying himself with packing away the remains of their lunch. They were dangerously close to a soapy scene, and Starsky no longer trusted himself to keep hidden what had no business being let out into the light.

Hutch hesitated a moment and then must have decided to take the hint. He took the cooler back to the car and Starsky waited for him so that they entered the house together.

“Lookin’ good, huh?” he prompted, waving to indicate the much improved conditions around them.

“I don’t think I’d give it a good yet, but better,” Hutch agreed.

“A blind man’d be glad to see it, as my Uncle Al used to say,” Starsky contributed and danced away from the swat Hutch aimed his way. He picked up the ladder from where it rested against the wall.

“Where you going with that?” Hutch asked.

“I’m gonna have a look in the attic. Al couldn’t get up there yesterday, and I wanna make sure he guessed right about the trusses and shingles,” Starsky explained.

“You don’t like heights,” Hutch reminded him.

Starsky shrugged. “A six foot ladder is not a height. Some of the rooftops you have me chasing over? Now that’s a height.”

Hutch conceded the point and went back to his battle of the grease in the kitchen.

Starsky was smiling to himself as he set up the ladder under the attic access panel and climbed up. Sometimes, he and Hutch were guilty of excessive over-protectiveness of each other. They knew each other’s fears and strengths so well that their interaction was often a ballet of one smoothly stepping in where the other might falter. Like an old married couple. That being another mental path Starsky refused to wander, he concentrated on climbing the ladder and moving the panel aside. Besides, Hutch had missed the boat on this one. It wasn’t the height Starsky was worried about, he was just hoping a whole herd of spiders, or whatever it was you called it when spiders congregated, didn’t fall down on his head.

When no cascade of hairy, multi-legged critters immediately showered down upon him when he lifted the panel and shoved it aside, Starsky went up one more step on the ladder and poked his head into the darkness above. Ducking back down, he fumbled the flashlight free from where he had clipped it to his belt, and then straightened up. He shone the beam around.

“Hey, Hutch,” he called. “Guess what I found?”

“A trunk full of hidden treasure?” Hutch suggested hopefully.

“No. The doors for the cupboards,” Starsky said, but he felt almost as excited as he would have if it had been treasure. If the doors were still in good shape, their discovery could easily save them a hundred dollars or more. “Come on out here so I can hand ’em down to you.”

Working together, it took only a few minutes for them to transfer the doors from the attic to the hall. Starsky felt Hutch’s steadying hand on his leg as he climbed down the ladder and offered a smile of thanks when his feet were once again planted on faded linoleum. He knelt to inspect his find.

“These look pretty good,” he enthused as he checked out each of the dusty boards.

“Pretty filthy,” Hutch amended as he watched.

“Yeah. But they’re solid,” he concluded. “Hinges are even still on ’em.” He lifted three doors together and carried them to the kitchen. “I’ll clean these up while you finish cleaning the cupboards. We can hang them when we’re done.”

“Aye, aye, mon capitaine,” Hutch muttered just loud enough to be heard.

“Hey, no mutiny on the good ship 203½ Borden Street or I’ll make you walk the plank,” he threatened.

“I already did that,” Hutch reminded him. “Sprained my ankle.”

“Oh, yeah. Well, then I’ll…I’ll…” Starsky groped for some threat to continue the nautical theme but failed to think of one. There weren’t any yardarms or keels in houses. “Hang you from the highest clothesline,” he finally concluded.

Hutch snorted and went back to work.

By the time Starsky had the doors cleaned up, Hutch had also completed the cupboards. Retrieving a jar of assorted screws from his toolbox, Starsky climbed up onto the counter and knelt there, his hands held out expectantly. Obligingly, Hutch passed him a door.

“Come on and hold this,” Starsky commanded after he had lined up the hinges with the holes in the cupboards.

“You are enjoying this far too much,” Hutch complained as he grabbed the door with both hands.

And he was, Starsky had to admit, right up to the moment Hutch leaned his shoulder smack into Starsky’s groin. This was Hutch, who had been on Starsky’s mind far too much lately, the pressure was warm and firm, and Starsky had not recently consumed enough beer to provoke a convenient case of brewer’s droop.

“Uh, Hutch. You’re in my way,” he fibbed, his voice maybe half an octave higher.

“Sorry,” Hutch muttered and shifted.

Starsky turned fully face on to the cupboard. It was going to be a bitch getting the screws in at this angle. Thankfully, Hutch seemed to be oblivious to his discomfort as they worked their way across the line of cupboards, first upper and then lower.

“This place is really beginning to look like something,” Starsky pronounced from where he sat on the floor after he finished securing the last hinge.

Hutch offered a hand and hauled him to his feet. Starsky’s earlier discomfort forgotten, he stood contentedly beneath the arm that circled his shoulders as they admired the results of their labors.

“Floor,” he ordered after a few minutes.

“You really know how to ruin a moment, buddy,” Hutch complained, but went back to work.

Climbing back up the ladder, Starsky stood on the very top step–the one that said right on it not to use as a step–and scanned the flashlight’s beam over the interior of the attic. Dust motes swam in the light as he visually checked out each junk pile before he turned his attention and the beam on the trusses he was up here to inspect. Unable to see much from his vantage point, he put down the light and hauled himself up into the attic.

Unlike most of the attics that Starsky had reluctantly investigated for his uncle, this one had a complete floor rather than a catwalk of beams. Proceeding cautiously despite the fact that this floor seemed to be in better shape than the one below it, Starsky made his way around the cramped space. It didn’t take him long to find one sagging truss or to conclude that Al had been a bit off. As far as he could see, only one needed to be replaced. With only the flashlight’s meager illumination, it was harder to tell, but it looked like there hadn’t been any leaking yet. He would have to check it again with a stronger beam.

Having done what he came up here for, Starsky was about to retreat back down out of the darkness, when his curiosity got the best of him. Moving even more cautiously than he had when testing the strength of the floor, he approached a nearby pile of junk. Playing the beam over the pile, he was able to make out the remains of a broken rocking chair, the skeleton of a wheelless bicycle, and what he thought might be a twisted set of mattress springs. Nothing of any particular value or interest. Once again on the verge of retreat, his back beginning to ache from his half-bent posture, he caught a glimpse of something as his light passed it. Backtracking the light and following the beam, he went to the corner where an old-fashioned steamer trunk stood, an inch of undisturbed dust coating its surface.

No more able to control his curiosity than a cat, Starsky worked at the latches one handed until he was finally able to lift the lid and peer down inside the trunk.

“Starsk? You up there?”

It had been so quiet up here and his attention so engrossed that he jumped at the sound of Hutch calling him from below.

“Yeah,” he answered.

“I’m finished in the kitchen.”

“Grab the other flashlight and come up here,” Starsky called, leaning over the trunk to get a closer look at what appeared to be a doll dressed up in a wedding gown.

“Something wrong?”

“Nah. I found something. Maybe it’s that trunk full of hidden treasure you were talkin’ about.”

Starsky heard Hutch’s footsteps retreat, followed by the opening and closing of the LTD’s door. He lifted out the doll carefully as he heard Hutch come back up the hall and start up the ladder.

“Watch your head,” he warned as the blond appeared through the access opening.

Starsky sat down beside the trunk and in a moment Hutch had joined him. He handed over the doll. “Why would somebody dress a baby doll in a wedding dress?” he wondered.

“It’s not a wedding dress,” Hutch corrected him, his long fingers smoothing over the yellowed satin. “It’s a christening outfit. My sister had one like it.”

“Which, the doll or the outfit?” Starsky asked. He had found a wooden box in the trunk and lifted it out. About a foot square by maybe three inches deep, there was nothing on the outside to indicate its purpose. Releasing the catch, Starsky flipped the lid open to reveal a perfect, tiny tea service.

“Both actually,” Hutch answered.

“Look at this,” Starsky urged, handing the box to Hutch. “Wouldn’t even get a mouthful out of them cups.”

“It’s a toy, Starsk.” Hutch leaned over and added his light to the one Starsky held on the contents of the trunk. “Look, there’s a top and a train and another doll. It’s all toys, Starsk.”

“Sorry, buddy, no treasure,” Starsky said as he lifted out the wooden train.

“I don’t know. This stuff looks about twenty or thirty years old. May be worth something,” Hutch speculated.

Starsky felt Hutch’s fingers encircle his wrist. “And even if they aren’t, to a big kid like you….”

Starsky shook himself free. “Smart ass.” He returned the toys to the trunk and sat back on his heels, playing the light over the outside of it. There were peeling, fading stamps on the outside from places like Singapore and Paris.

“Hutch, you know what this stuff really means?” he asked softly. “It means this place used to be a home. A family used to live here.”

“Yeah, guess so.”

Starsky’s head snapped up at the definite chill that had invaded Hutch’s voice.

“You about ready to go?” Hutch asked as he got to his feet and moved toward the opening in the floor. “It’s almost five and I’ve got a date tonight.”

Feeling as if he had suddenly plunged into a frosty pool, Starsky followed.

***

Dressed in nothing but a pair of running shorts, Hutch puttered around in his greenhouse. He didn’t have a date as he had told Starsky, and his mind wasn’t really on what he was doing now. It was back at the house, in the attic to be specific, when he had realized the true magnitude of the mistake he had made in investing in a house with Starsky.

Ever since he had made his deal with Starsky to give their venture a fair chance, Hutch had been thinking of the broken down old house as their investment. An investment that was, in all likelihood, going to fall on its face. Even as he had scrubbed and washed and labored, it had still been nothing more to him than a place slightly above a pig sty that he certainly wouldn’t want himself or anyone he knew living in. Until they had found the box of once-cherished toys, he had managed not to think of it as a home. He couldn’t afford to think of it as a home.

He had given 203½ Borden Street all the chance it was going to get. He didn’t need the disruption in his life. Tomorrow, he was going to talk to Starsky about selling it, and he didn’t care if he never recouped the $1,500.00. In fact, he would even be willing to make up Starsky’s share if it meant he never had to look at the house again.

Giving his spider plant one last squirt for the night, Hutch firmly refused to think about why he wanted that house out of their lives.

***

Hutch pulled the LTD up in front of Starsky’s building expecting that, as usual, he would have to climb the stairs and pound on the door until Starsky reluctantly rolled out of bed. He was surprised, therefore, when Starsky came bounding down the stairs before he could shut down the engine. He grimaced when he saw the familiar note pad in his partner’s hand.

“Mornin’,” Starsky mumbled as he stuffed the last bite of his donut into his mouth. “Have a good time last night?”

“Wonderful,” Hutch lied sarcastically, and then lied again. “It’s hard to impress a lady when you’re too pooped to pucker.”

Starsky flipped open his note pad. “I started workin’ some stuff out last night and I figure….”

“Please, Starsk,” Hutch interrupted. “I haven’t even had my coffee yet. It’s too early to start talking about that financial disaster. Unless you want to talk about selling it.”

Starsky subsided but Hutch could feel his questioning gaze and determinedly ignored it.

When they arrived in the squad room, Hutch went immediately to their desk, but Starsky stopped to collect them both a cup of coffee.

“You mind checking the in box?” Starsky requested as he set Hutch’s coffee down by his side. “I’m gonna see if I can get Bay City Power. Wanna get the lights on at the house today, if I can.”

“Yeah, yeah. Go ahead. It doesn’t look like there’s much here anyway,” Hutch agreed. Anything to shut Starsky up about the house. He didn’t want their co-workers getting curious and maybe drawing the same conclusion Huggy’s cousin had. Worse, he didn’t want any of them finding out he had actually invested cash money in one of Starsky’s crazy schemes.

As predicted, the in box was full of a whole lot of nothing. At the moment, it looked like their day was going to consist of half a dozen follow-up interviews, none of them particularly interesting. With any luck, however, they might get an exciting call or two once they were out on patrol. He certainly hoped so. Otherwise, Starsky would be going on about that stupid house all day long. On the other hand, there might be an opportunity for some privacy to try to talk Starsky into selling it.

“You ready to go?” he asked as Starsky put the phone down for the sixth time in as many minutes.

“Busy, busy, busy,” Starsky complained as he swung up off the chair and followed Hutch out the door. “You’d think they’d be happy to get your money, wouldn’t you?”

Hutch kept his thoughts to himself.

Once on the road, Starsky pulled out his notes again.

“We’re on patrol, Starsk,” Hutch pointed out. “You’re supposed to be watching for criminals.”

Starsky looked at him with both eyebrows raised. “Like you do when you read the paper when it’s my turn to drive?”

“That’s different. It’s part of our job to keep up with the news.”

“Yeah. Plenty of late breaking stories in the funnies,” Starsky grumbled, but nevertheless put the note pad away.

They had been cruising about half an hour when Starsky pointed through the windshield. “Stop at that phone booth up there, will you? I wanna try the power company again.”

“You haven’t got time,” Hutch insisted as he made a right turn. “Our first follow-up interview is twenty minutes from now and it’s going to take that long to get there.”

“Okay. I’ll do it after. Listen, Hutch, I really do need to talk to you about the house.”

“The only thing I want to talk about is when we’re going to sell it,” Hutch said and waited for Starsky to go ballistic.

“Sell it?” Starsky echoed. “You said you’d give it a fair chance. That was the deal, Hutch. We’d fix it up and then sell it.”

“We spent our two days off fixing it up,” Hutch reminded him.

“Fixing it up? All we did was clean it. I’ve got a list right here.” Starsky slapped his notebook against his palm. “I went over Al’s notes and figured out everything we can do and what we’re going to have to contract out.”

“How long, Starsk?”

“How long what?

“How long do you think all this is gonna take?”

“Well, couple of weeks, I guess, if we work on it after shift every day and on our days off. Maybe longer,” he admitted.

“A couple of weeks. You expect me to spend every minute I’m not on duty, working my ass off, and throwing bad money after good into that… that dump?”

“You promised, Hutch.”

Hutch gripped the steering wheel tighter, asking himself how he could have been so stupid as to get involved in this mess in the first place, and then add lunacy to idiocy by promising Starsky they could try to fix it up. He glanced over at his partner and quickly refocused on the traffic, but it was already too late. He had seen the pained bewilderment on Starsky’s face and knew he might as well quit butting his head against a brick wall. “Okay,” he gave in with a sigh. “What is it now?”

By the end of their shift, which unfortunately remained uninterrupted, Hutch was about ready to pull out his hair. Except for shoptalk, Starsky’s conversation was a one-note song. The house, the house, the house. That was when he wasn’t demanding that Hutch stop at a phone booth so he could try the power company yet again. It was almost a relief when, just before they returned to the station, Starsky finally got through to a clerk.

Back in the squad room, Hutch waited until Starsky was occupied with typing up what little new information they had garnered from their interviews, then slipped away to an unoccupied desk in a relatively quiet corner.

With his back to the room, Hutch had to dig out his telephone book before he could dial the number he wanted.

“Hello?”

“Hi, Melinda? It’s Ken Hutchinson.”

“Hello, stranger. I was beginning to think you’d left town.”

Hutch winced. It had been a while since he had called Melinda, a girl he had been dating on a fairly regular basis. In fact, it had been so long that he was lucky to be getting a reception no worse than a little mild sarcasm.

“Sorry,” he said into the phone. “It’s not that I haven’t been thinking about you. Work’s been crazy.”

“I wondered. Nobody seems to have seen you at all.”

“I’m just about to go off shift now. You wouldn’t be free for dinner, would you? I know it’s really short notice, but…” Hutch let the sentence trail away on what he intended to sound like a very hopeful note.

He waited through the obligatory hesitation designed to let him know he wasn’t the only fish in the sea and that Melinda hadn’t been waiting around hoping he would call.

“Okay.”

“I’ll pick you up at 7:00,” he said into the receiver and hung up.

Feeling a little guilty, Hutch walked back to his own desk and saw the disappointment Starsky tried to hide. He knew Starsky had expected him to work on the house tonight, and it was that which had prompted him to make a date with a woman he had been planning on dumping.

“You almost ready?” he asked.

“Sure,” Starsky said, tossing the last paper into their out box. “Let’s roll.”

***

Starsky finished unloading the trunk of his car onto the porch and went back to close the lid and lock it. Hopping up onto the porch, he unlocked the door and searched in the gloom for the light switch. Finally finding it on the wall at the wrong side of the door, he flipped it, smiling when the bulb in the dangling fixture above his head flickered to life. It looked like Bay City Power and Light came through after all. It had been so late in the day when he had finally managed to get someone on the phone that Starsky had expected to have to wait until Tuesday before the power would be on.

In a few minutes, he had transferred his purchases inside. He paused as he reached to douse the light, his eyes sweeping from where the switch was located on the left side of the door to where it should be located on the right.

“That is going to be a pain in the ass,” he muttered, tapping experimentally at the wall. “Come in here after a late shift and hafta fumble around in the dark…” The grumbling cut off abruptly and his hand dropped to his side as Starsky realized where his thoughts were leading him–as if he and Hutch would actually be occupying the house.

“Stupid,” he chastised himself as he locked the door and went to his car.

He drove to a well-lit parking lot about a mile away. He left the Torino there and began walking back to the house where he intended to get in a few hours of work.

Back at the station, nearing the end of their shift, he had been a minute away from asking Hutch if he wanted to work on the house tonight. Placing the last completed report in the out basket, however, he had looked for the tall blond only to find him hunkered down at a desk in the far corner, back to the room and phone to his ear. Starsky recognized the posture. Hutch was making a date. Rubbing at the sudden twinge in his chest, making a note to buy some antacids–heaven forbid he should think of giving up burritos–Starsky had reminded himself that Hutch was far less enthusiastic about their real estate adventure than he was.

Stalking through the litter strewn streets, past rows of shabby houses that so closely resembled his destination that it would be easy to get confused if he didn’t have such an excellent sense of direction, Starsky gave himself a good mental talking to. 203 ½ Borden Street was an investment. They were going to fix it up and sell it. Make a fast buck or two. It was a piece of real estate that he and Hutch had bought together, not a home that he and Hutch would own. The slap of his Adidas against the concrete seemed to chant, “a house, not a home”.

Without breaking stride, Starsky dug a roll of Tums out of his pocket, teased one out of the packet and popped it into his mouth. He crunched it between his molars as he crossed the patch of weeds and hopped up onto the porch. He unlocked the door, flipped on the light, and pushed the door shut behind him.

Hutch had asked Saturday night what was bugging him and Starsky had had no answer. He did now. He didn’t want them to own an investment; he wanted them to own a home. Together. The feelings he had been pushing away refused to be pushed any longer. So now he had an answer. One he couldn’t give Hutch.

“A few drunken kisses and you’re ready to hop over to the other side of the fence?” Starsky growled at himself, trying to convince his stubborn brain that it had it all wrong.

The trouble was, it wasn’t his brain he was thinking with, it was his heart. Nor, if he was honest, and why not be in the privacy of his own thoughts, was an evening of drunken kisses really to blame. It was years of friendship, long days and nights of partnership, trust that knew no boundaries, and loving Hutch the way he had never loved anyone or anything before in his life. It wasn’t even about his cock, although he could now admit that he wanted Hutch. Wanted more kisses, more caresses, more of any part of Hutch he could have. This was about, for the first time, loving someone enough to want forever.

But he wasn’t Hutch’s type.

***

After the tenth ring, Hutch cradled the phone and sat staring at it. Where was Starsky? It didn’t take telepathy, or even a great deal of genius, to figure that one out. Starsky was over at the house. Working his fingers to the bone. Applying all of that knowledge that Hutch hadn’t even known he had for Hutch’s benefit. For his own as well, of course, but for Hutch, too.

Right up to the moment Melinda answered the phone, Hutch refused to connect his sudden lack of interest in her and the fairly satisfying romps they had had in bed, with one inebriated night with Starsky where not a whole lot of anything had gone on. Except, were it not for his determined denial, a whole lot of something definitely had happened. A lot of cherishing and being cherished, and loving and being loved on levels he never knew he had it in himself to either offer or accept

“Melinda, it’s Ken. I’m really sorry to do this, but Dobey just called,” Hutch said in a rush. “Something’s come up and I’ve got to go back in.”

It took a few more apologies to soothe ruffled feathers and then Hutch put the phone down, and immediately wondered why he had bothered to cancel the date. But he already knew why. He was basically an honest man and taking Melinda out, maybe even sleeping with her, seemed dishonest now that he finally admitted he would be doing nothing more than distracting himself.

He really should tuck this all back into the less explored parts of his brain. Why take it out, examine it, analyze it, and give it its true name? A lesson in futility if he had ever heard of one.

“It’s that damned house,” Hutch accused the innocent plant on the table beside the phone. Owning it, fixing it up, talking about it, wondering what other people thought. It was far too easy, or at least it seemed to be to him, to think of it as “our house” instead of the “stupid investment” Starsky had sunk their $3,000.00 into. The sooner they got rid of it, the better. Everything would get back to normal then. It had to, because, whatever second thoughts Hutch might be having about Starsky as a romantic interest, Starsky had made it abundantly clear that Hutch wasn’t his type.

***

Starsky picked up the pink message slip on his blotter but didn’t recognize the name or number. Just what he needed, a mystery just when he was about to go off the clock at the end of a tense day. Not that their caseload had been heavy, not that they had fought or even sniped at each other the way they sometimes did during a particularly boring shift. Hutch had been kind of quiet and Starsky knew that he, himself, hadn’t exactly been a fount of scintillating conversation. Still, there had been an unnamed and determinedly ignored tension. It was his own fault, of course. He was the one who couldn’t look at Hutch any more without remembering things best forgotten, wanting things that just weren’t within the realm of possibility.

“Hey, Hutch,” he said, flicking the scrap of paper between his fingers and striving to act, to feel, normal. “You got a snitch I don’t know about named Ray Walker?”

Hutch shook his head, not looking up from the report that had to be finished before they could call it a day.

“Wonder who he is.” Starsky muttered.

“Did he leave a number?” Hutch asked, still not looking at him.

Starsky realized that Hutch hadn’t looked at him all day and immediately began to worry that he had somehow betrayed himself. He did a quick mental review of their limited conversations but could think of nothing he had said that might have revealed his thoughts to Hutch. Not that Hutch always needed words to read his mind, or vice versa.

“Well?” Hutch prompted.

Starsky jumped. “Yeah.”

“So call and find out.”

Reluctantly, Starsky picked up the receiver, got an outside line, and dialed the unfamiliar number.

“Good afternoon. Walker and Rightman Real Estate. May I help you?”

Surprised, Starsky fumbled with the message slip for a moment before replying. “Ray Walker, please. Sergeant Starsky returning his call,” he said, mentally thumbing through their case files, trying to make a connection. The polite tone of his voice must have caught Hutch’s attention because the blond head was turned his way, curious blue eyes questioning. Starsky shrugged.

“Mr. Walker is out of the office. Is there anyone else who can help you?”

“I don’t know. He called me,” Starsky explained.

“Can I take your name and number and have him call you?”

“I guess so.” Starsky repeated his name and gave the woman his home number and then hung up.

“What was that all about?” Hutch asked.

“Damned if I know,” Starsky admitted. “Some guy from a real estate company.”

Hutch’s interest sharpened. “Maybe somebody wants to buy the house.”

Starsky shot him a dirty look. If Hutch was any more eager to get rid of their place, he would be calling agents himself. His eyes narrowed, a sneaking suspicion blossoming.

This time, Hutch did read his mind, holding up his hands in protest. “Not me, buddy.”

“I’ll let you know if he ever calls back,” Starsky said, not 100% convinced, but close. Hutch was a damned good actor undercover, but usually couldn’t pull the wool over Starsky’s eyes. At least not for long. He pushed up out of his chair and snagged his jacket with one finger.

“Hey. Where are you going? You’re supposed to sign this, too.” Hutch protested, pointing at the report still in his typewriter.

“Wouldn’t want me to miss old Ray’s call now, would you?” Starsky tossed back over his shoulder in deference to the one or two percent of suspicion that remained. “Forge my signature.”

It wasn’t all that often they drove in separately, but Starsky was just as glad that today they had each brought their own cars. It meant Starsky was free to take off right away. And, since Hutch was going out tonight rather than helping him with their joint investment, Starsky didn’t even have to feel too guilty about unloading the report-writing on his partner. He went directly home with the intention of changing his clothes and grabbing something to eat before he spent the rest of the evening at the house, but had only been home long enough to throw some spaghetti on the stove before the telephone rang.

“Hello?” he said into the receiver, hoping it would be Hutch.

“Mr. Starsky?”

“Speaking,” Starsky confirmed as he sat down on the kitchen stool.

“Ray Walker, Mr. Starsky. We’ve been playing telephone tag.”

“Uh, huh,” Starsky grunted, getting up and stretching the phone cord to reach his pot on the stove. Resisting the urge to hang up before the agent could say anything he didn’t want to hear, Starsky picked up a spoon instead and absently prodded the spaghetti boiling in a pot on the front burner.

“I’m calling about the property you recently purchased. 203½ Borden Street.”

Tightening his hand around the receiver, Starsky poked the half-cooked pasta harder. “Yeah. What about it?”

“I have a buyer who is interested in that property. I’m authorized to offer you $7,000.00. You bought it less than a week ago. I’d say $2,000.00 is a pretty tidy profit.”

Starsky watched the spoon that had just slipped from his nerveless fingers slide under the roiling strands.

“Not interested,” he said and quickly dropped the phone back onto the wall.

Without turning off the burner, he walked into the living room and slumped down on the sofa.

“Hutch is gonna kill me,” he told the indifferent face of the blank television screen.

***

Wednesday, as far as Starsky was concerned, was an even worse day than Tuesday. To the power of about ten. If there were any criminals committing any interesting crimes in Bay City, they weren’t doing it in Metro Division. By the end of the day, Starsky was praying for a 2/11 in progress call. With hostages.

Starsky never kept secrets from Hutch, and now he was trying to hide a couple of whoppers. Every time he opened his mouth, it seemed that one or the other of the damned things tried to leap off his tongue. It was the natural order of things for Starsky to be honest with Hutch, and not doing it was turning him into a jumpy, distracted, bundle of raw nerves.

Despite a growing belief that the day would never end, 3:00 finally did appear on the face of his latest favorite watch, and they were free, at last, to sign out for the night. Eagerly, so eagerly in fact that he crossed three lanes of traffic to do it, Starsky turned the Torino toward Venice Place.

“Hey there, buddy,” Hutch protested, releasing his white knuckled grip on the dash. “We’re off duty now. You can get a ticket, you know?”

Starsky mumbled something intentionally unintelligible about being late.

“Did you say you have a date?” Hutch asked. “You haven’t mentioned anybody recently. Last one was Pammy or Tammy. Something like that.”

Starsky himself couldn’t remember the name, or even the face, of his last girlfriend. He had been playing the field for a while it seemed. Not finding anyone who could hold his interest for long outside the bedroom. He wondered now if it was because he already had what he wanted sitting beside him eight hours a day and usually hanging out with him for at least another eight after that. Could his heart have already committed him to Hutch months ago, but neglected to tell his brain?

“Starsk?”

Starsky realized belatedly that Hutch was waiting for an answer. “Uh, no. No date. ‘M just tired.”

He cut the left turn onto Ocean Avenue a little close in front of oncoming traffic and had to really hit the gas.

“Christ!” Hutch yelped.

Nearly standing on the brakes in front of Venice Place, Starsky brought the car to a screaming halt. “Night.”

Hutch climbed out of the passenger seat and closed the door. He stuck his head back in the window. “You sure you’re okay, buddy?”

“Okay. Just fine. Taking off now, Hutch,” he warned.

When Hutch reluctantly withdrew from the window and stepped back, Starsky put his foot down, laying smoking rubber off the Torino’s new tires for at least half a block as he took off.

“Aw, shit,” he muttered as he looked in the rearview mirror and saw Hutch standing watching him. “That was stupid.” All he could hope was that Hutch would be too tired, or too something, to follow-up tonight.

His wish was a vain one. All he got was a pitiful twenty minutes of peace and solitude at home before Hutch came knocking on the door with pizza in hand and concern in his eyes. Starsky wanted to close the door in his friend’s face. Instead, here he sat at his own kitchen table forcing down bites of a fully loaded slice and trying to keep Hutch from looking too deeply beneath his surface calm.

“Starsk…” Hutch began what Starsky feared was going to be a relentless grilling, but he was interrupted by the strident ring of the telephone.

Starsky now understood just what being caught between the devil and the deep blue sea meant. He had already fielded one call from Ray Walker at work while Hutch was in the john. The determined agent had bumped up his offer to $7,500.00 and had persisted until Starsky had simply hung up. Starsky had the sinking feeling that it just might be Mr. Walker persevering once again. Not exactly what Starsky called being saved by the bell.

“You gonna answer that?” Hutch asked after the third ring.

Reluctantly, Starsky dropped his pizza slice onto the napkin in front of him and slowly got to his feet. Half a dozen steps took him through the fourth and fifth rings, but Mr. Walker was persistent. Starsky snagged the receiver and brought it to his ear, turning his back to Hutch.

“Hello.”

“Mr. Starsky, Ray Walker, here. You really know how to drive a hard bargain but my client says he’ll go up to $8,000.00, and that’s his final offer.”

Starsky held the receiver hard to his ear so that the man’s voice wouldn’t carry to Hutch.

“Not interested.”

“Mr. Starsky, you’re letting a golden….”

Starsky hung up the phone.

Even more reluctantly than he had left it, Starsky returned to his chair.

“What was that?” Hutch asked.

Starsky looked at his friend, opened his mouth and then closed it. He just couldn’t do it. Some people might call keeping secrets lying by omission, and, if the state of his digestive system was any indication, they would probably be right. But he couldn’t just out and out lie to Hutch.

“That was Ray Walker. You were right. He wants to buy the house,” Starsky admitted. He held Hutch’s eyes, but Starsky had looked down the barrel of a gun with less trepidation.

Hutch’s gaze seemed to be studying every tiny nuance of his expression so long that Starsky felt he had somehow been stripped of skin and bone and the blue eyes were boring directly into his brain.

“How much?” Hutch asked, very quietly.

Starsky licked his lips and braced himself for the Hutchinson wrath to come raining down upon his head. “$8,000.00,” he mumbled very fast and very low.

“And you said we’re not interested?” Hutch was still being calm and reasonable. This was going to be even worse than Starsky feared.

“Right,” he confirmed, but it came out sounding a whole lot less self-assured than he had planned.

“Call him back,” Hutch demanded. His tone wasn’t any louder, but you could have used the steel in it to make girders.

“No,” Starsky shot back. It was stupid and senseless. This was what they had bought the house for. All he was doing was taking the risk of revealing himself to Hutch.

“Why, for Christ’s sake?” That did come out at a higher decibel level, but Hutch paused to get control of his voice before he added. “The man wants to double our money. Why?”

“Because I…” Starsky reminded himself that he couldn’t lie to Hutch. He closed his eyes, and then opened them to find the blue lasers still drilling for the truth. Okay, maybe he could lie to Hutch. “I don’t know.”

Hutch pushed up to his feet, planted both hands on the table and leaned in, looming until Starsky had to suppress the urge to scramble out of his own chair. No Hutchinson finger yet, but Starsky feared it wouldn’t be long in making an appearance.

“We are going to sell that dump,” Hutch insisted. “Either you call him back, or I will.”

Starsky kept his refusal nonverbal this time but he knew Hutch got the message.

Hooking his jacket off the back of the chair, Hutch strode to the door, turning back just before going through it. “We are selling,” he stated and slammed the door behind him.

***

Instead of driving home, Hutch drove to the house, parked his car and just sat there looking at it, wondering how such a simple, if sorry, piece of real estate could sabotage a perfectly good partnership and friendship. His father had always told him never to lend money to a friend. Hutch felt he could go him one better now–never invest money with a friend. Especially with a friend whom you wanted to be more than a friend. And especially not in something that your imagination could latch onto to fuel your fantasies.

To Hutch, the house had become a symbol of all his impossible feelings. If it went away, so would the feelings and they could go back to normal. Irrational, perhaps, but it wasn’t written anywhere Hutch knew of that love had to be rational.

They had to sell the cursed house. That was all there was to it. That some imbecile wanted to double their money sounded like manna from heaven to him. He didn’t know why Starsky wanted to hold onto the place, but he was willing to bet Starsky’s reasons were nowhere near as compelling as Hutch’s for wanting to let it go.

Whatever it took, they were going to unload this turkey before their partnership and friendship ended up flushed.

***

Starsky couldn’t believe it when he pulled up in front of Venice Place and Hutch’s LTD was nowhere in sight. Despite their current disharmony, Starsky had dutifully hauled himself out of bed early to pick up his partner. He knew it was still his turn to drive. He never made mistakes about that because he really cherished that extra twenty minutes of sleep in the morning when Hutch drove.

So where was Hutch? Pissed off and letting Starsky know it by driving himself to work? Miffed himself now, Starsky took off fast, hoping one or more of Hutch’s neighbors would recognize the car and give Hutch a hard time about the noise.

“Prick,” Starsky muttered as he turned off Ocean Avenue.

After Hutch had left the night before, Starsky had taken a good hard look at his actions and their motivations and admitted he was being an idiot. He had wallowed long enough, albeit unknowingly until two nights ago, in the fantasy of owning a home with Hutch. Hutch had stated right from the outset that they couldn’t live together. Starsky’s white picket fence dreams were obviously still intact somewhere in his psyche, even if he no longer wanted some faceless woman and 2.4 children inhabiting it with him.

It was hopeless and stupid, and Starsky resolved before he went to bed last night to do the smart thing in the morning. Apologize to Hutch and call Walker as soon as they got into Metro.

Driving on autopilot, Starsky had taken the exit onto the freeway into Bay City and, with only half his attention on the road, skillfully maneuvered in and out of rush hour traffic. He saw that there was a major slow down up ahead, a sea of red lights flickering on, and eased over to the right. Eased over so far that before he knew it he was on the exit ramp onto the highway to San Francisco with no way to get off. Scrambling, committing at least two moving violations, he managed to get himself off that highway and straight into Main Street rush hour gridlock.

He looked at his watch, gritted his teeth and gripped the wheel as he and hundreds of other Bay City residents crept toward their jobs. He was tempted to use the mars light and siren but acknowledged that, short of jumping up onto the pedestrian-crowded sidewalks, there was no place for the cars in front of him to go. Inch by inch, the Torino crept toward Metro while Starsky fumed.

When he finally reached the station, Starsky figured he was so late that he wouldn’t be there long in any case and parked out front. Mentally daring any intrepid meter maid to give him a ticket, he locked the car and bounded up the steps. Even the damned elevator was crowded. The only piece of good luck of the morning, he saw, glancing into Dobey’s door as he stalked up the corridor to the squad room, was that the captain seemed to be late, too.

By the time he sat his ass down in his seat across the table from Hutch, Starsky was holding onto his good intentions by the meagerest of threads. “Where the hell were you this morning?” he growled, glaring at an industriously typing Hutch.

Hutch didn’t even look away from whatever it was in his typewriter. “Did Walker call?”

The autocratic tone of Hutch’s voice blew Starsky’s dangling good intentions right out of the water.

“No.” The word was bitten off so hard Starsky nearly cracked a tooth.

Hutch turned his head to add an icily superior sneer to his tone. “Did you call Walker?”

“No.” The repetition didn’t come out any gentler than the original.

Starsky seethed as one big hand reached for the telephone.

“Then I will.”

“I won’t sell.”

The receiver rattled back into the cradle. “I won’t, I won’t, and you can’t make me,” Hutch chanted in a singsong of unrelenting sarcasm.

As Starsky had noted on more than one occasion, Hutch could be a real bastard when he wanted to be. And playing dumb could sometimes give you a real advantage. He smiled brightly. “That’s right.”

Before Hutch could offer a retort, Dobey pushed through the door from the corridor and dropped a file on Starsky’s desk.

“You’ve got a new case. Get on it,” he commanded, and waddled into his office, slamming the door behind him.

It looked like Dobey was in a bear of a mood today, too.

The partners looked down to where a handful of crime scene photos had spilled from the manila folder. Both men winced, their eyes met, and a truce was called. High finance and personal conflict could wait; they had a job to do for the once-pretty woman lying in death between them.

***

Hutch reached across the desk, pushed the scattered pictures back into the folder and pulled it toward him. He flipped the cover, scanning the pictures quickly. Experience told him that the victim had been beaten to death. There was no sign of anything kinky, but he wouldn’t know for sure until he talked to the coroner. With relief, he picked up the last picture, turning it face down, and came to the reports of the first officer on the scene and the preliminary investigation.

“What happened?” Starsky asked as he leaned over to place a fresh cup of coffee beside Hutch.

“Found about midnight,” Hutch paraphrased as he read. “A drunk from a nearby bar stumbled over her and started screaming his fool head off. Local patrol investigated. Nobody in the surrounding buildings heard anything.”

“Typical.” Starsky picked up the photographs and flipped through them. “Working girl?”

“Looks like it,” Hutch agreed. “The bar owner said she showed up about a year ago. Takes her johns to the rent-by-the-hour hotel down the street, then disappears. Doesn’t have a place in the area as far as he knows.”

“Pretty woman,” Starsky concluded as he put the photos back face down. “Or she was.”

“Yeah,” Hutch agreed.

Their eyes met, and Hutch knew that, for the duration of this case, Starsky wouldn’t be thinking about the house and neither would he. He returned his attention to the report.

“Street name was Angel Cakes. No rap sheet under that name. Hopefully, her prints will give us her real name.”

“So what do you think?” Starsky asked. “Pissed off john or greedy pimp?”

“There was over five hundred dollars in her purse,” Hutch said.

Starsky whistled. “Expensive lady.” He ran his hands back through his hair. “Christ, I hope we haven’t got some kind of nutbar out there doin’ hookers.”

“Me, too,” Hutch agreed. “Let’s go down to the morgue. See if the ME’s done the post yet.”

They rode the elevator down to the bowels of the building where the morgue was located, and were told that the Medical Examiner was just finishing up her autopsy on the victim. They had both attended enough autopsies to opt to wait for the doctor in her office, relieved that it was Ginny Stevenson assigned to the case.

Hutch sat down in front of the desk and watched Starsky pace, knowing from long experience with his partner that something was niggling at Starsky’s instincts. Of the two of them, Starsky was by far the more streetwise and Hutch was always prepared, in this venue at least, to bow to his partner’s superior knowledge.

“Something?” He prompted after ten minutes of watching his caged panther.

Starsky stopped abruptly behind the second visitor’s chair, his hands braced on the back of it. “Yeah. Somethin’,” he acknowledged, “I’m just not sure what. Lemme see those pictures again.”

Hutch handed over the file and Starsky flipped through the photographs until he came to the last one. In this shot, the victim had been snapped full length. Rounding the desk, Starsky opened a drawer and sifted around until he found a magnifying glass. He used it to peer at one section of the photo closely.

“Starsk?” Hutch prompted again when the magnifying glass had been returned to the desk, the photos to the folder, and Starsky had settled down in the chair beside him.

“Somethin’ doesn’t gel. Not sure what. I’ve got a feeling right about here.” He tapped the back of his neck, then settled back with a sigh. “Let’s wait and see what the doc has to say.”

Hutch agreed, but kept a surreptitious eye on his partner. God, he loved it when Starsky was like this. So intensely focused, his trained detective’s mind firing on all thrusters, the handsome features taking on an edge that made him frightening and yet irresistibly attractive at the same time. Catching at his wayward thoughts, Hutch flipped the file open and forced himself to read over the preliminary report again.

Ginny Stevenson arrived a few minutes later. The ME was an attractive woman, about the same age as Starsky and Hutch, and they had worked with her before. She was competent and sure of herself, and not afraid to take a risk. She was observant and didn’t hesitate to draw conclusions from the evidence she gathered during an examination, and to pass those insights on to the police officers she worked with. It had been her conclusion, that a murdered Hispanic woman had been a seamstress, who had led Starsky and Hutch to the garment district and to the eventual unraveling of an illegal immigrant extortion ring and the arrest of a corrupt Immigration official.

“What a way to start the day,” Stevenson sighed as she settled in behind her desk. “Not that there’s really many good ways in this business.”

Starsky and Hutch waited impatiently but without prompting her. They knew that if they gave her a minute to marshal her thoughts, Stevenson would give them everything she could in a verbal report.

True to form, after a minute, Stevenson leaned forward, folding her hands on the desk before her. “Down and dirty, the victim was beaten to death. I’d say no weapon, just fists. Face and torso. Cause of death I’m saying was primarily brain hemorrhage from having the bone in her nose driven up into her brain.”

Hutch scribbled notes as the doctor talked. They would have it in written form in a couple of hours, but it would be heavily laced with medicalese. He wanted to remember it just the way Stevenson told it now, in a form the doctor used specifically to ensure that the cops she worked with understood just what their victims had suffered.

“Take somebody pretty big and strong to do something like that, wouldn’t it, Ginny?” Starsky interrupted the monologue. “Without a weapon, I mean.”

“Or somebody in a blind rage,” the doctor counter-speculated. “Adrenaline can do amazing things.” She waited a moment longer to see if there were any other questions, then went on. “She’d had sex, but my guess would be it was consensual. No tearing or excessive bruising of the vagina to indicate forced intercourse. I fingerprinted her first thing. There may even be some results in your office by now.”

“Age?” Hutch asked, pencil poised.

“Early thirties. Well preserved. Quite fit. Nothing wrong with her except for the fact that someone beat her to death,” Stevenson said, her tone as ironic as her expression.

“Where are her personal effects?” Starsky wanted to know.

“The clothes are being tested to see if any of the blood wasn’t hers. The jewelry and her purse have been bagged for Evidence. Do you want me to have them sent up?” Stevenson offered.

“Yes,” Starsky said abruptly and Hutch shot him a look but received nothing but a shrug in reply. In a short time, the effects would have been in the evidence locker and they could have seen them there.

The doctor picked up the phone and, within five minutes, the bag was delivered.

“Everything been dusted?” Starsky asked before he opened the bag. When the dark blonde head nodded, Starsky pulled open the seal and dumped the contents out of the bag. He immediately picked up the watch.

“Something’s wrong here, Hutch. This gal’s been peddling her ass on porno row for a year. You know the going rate as well as I do. Twenty a trick. Maybe as high as fifty if the john wants something really kinky.” Starsky held up the watch, turned it so Hutch could see the face. “But she’s wearin’ a watch that costs at least a thousand bucks. And you know I know watches.”

Hutch picked up the medium weight necklace and pierced earrings, scratching at one earring lightly with his thumbnail. “This is gold.” If Starsky was the expert on watches, it was Hutch who knew gold. He ought to; his mother wore enough of it.

“Can I use your phone?” Starsky asked, but didn’t wait for the doctor’s permission. He dialed. “Minnie,” he said into the phone. “Anything come through on the prints Ginny sent up this morning? Yeah, I’ll hold. She’s lookin’,” he told Hutch.

“What are you thinking, partner?” Hutch asked.

“That Angel Cakes was no ordinary hooker,” Starsky replied. He waved Hutch to silence and gestured for him to hand over the pencil and pad he had been writing on. “Go ahead, Minnie. Yeah, okay, I got that. What was the charge? Address? Paid the fine and no lawyer, huh? Okay. Listen, sweetheart, do me a favor and transfer me to Missing Persons.”

For a second time, Starsky covered the phone with his hand. “Katherine Weber. One prior–shoplifting, eighteen months ago. Paid the fine. Halton Hills address then. Married. Husband–Lawrence Weber. Name’s ringing bells.”

“With me, too. Financial papers, I think. Up and comer,” Hutch said, falling into the same verbal shorthand as his partner. “Divorce, maybe? The lady fallen on hard times?”

“My gut says no.” Starsky uncovered the mouthpiece. “Sergeant Starsky from Homicide. I need you to check if there’s been a missing person’s filed on Katherine Weber. That’s W E B E R. No, I’ll hold.” He didn’t bother to cover the phone this time. “My money is on the husband on this one, Hutch.”

Hutch had to smile. Starsky had hedged until he was sure, but now that he was, he didn’t hesitate to put his conclusions out there.

“If we wrap this up before the end of shift, Dobey will give us a medal,” Hutch speculated.

“I’ll be happy if he gives us the weekend,” Starsky countered. “Yeah, I’m here. No report? That’s what I thought. Thanks.”

Hutch got to his feet as Starsky hung up the phone. “Thanks, Doc,” he said to Stevenson as he followed his partner.

“You’re welcome.”

“Pay Mr. Weber a visit?” Starsky asked as they rode up to street level where Starsky had parked the Torino.

“We’ll have to get his office address,” Hutch reminded him. “It’s after 9:00.”

“Nope. He’s at home,” Starsky said as they reached the car and he unlocked the passenger door.

Hutch opened the door but didn’t get in, watching as his partner rounded the hood, collecting the ticket off the windshield and stuffing it in his pocket as he went, and unlocked his own door. “Why are you so sure?”

“He beat her to death, Hutch. Couldn’t go into the office today with the hands of a bare knuckle fighter.” Starsky slid into the car and started the engine. “I figure he found out about her sideline, killed her when he was mad like the doc said, and now doesn’t know what to do. Not really a hardcore criminal type, you know?”

“You’re that sure?” Hutch asked as he also got in and they pulled out into traffic.

“Yeah,” Starsky said, but he didn’t sound all that happy about it.

The house was in a well-to-do, but not fabulously rich, neighborhood. Mr. Weber answered the door himself, took one look at the badges they held out, bowed his head and began to weep quietly. He raised no fuss as he was cuffed, his rights read to him, and he was led to the back of the Torino.

Hutch called it in en route and, after obtaining his lawyer’s name from their passenger, asked that he be called.

“You want to take this one?” Hutch asked as Weber was led away for booking.

“Nah. You do good cop better than I do,” Starsky declined. “But I’ll sit in, in case the lawyer’s a bastard.”

Two hours later, the partners walked out of the interrogation room with Weber’s lawyer, Fred Genesee.

“We’ll plead insanity, you know,” the lawyer warned. “You could see yourself that the man has slipped over the edge.”

“Be up to the judge then,” Starsky said.

They went on to the squad room to file the papers and complete their reports, but Dobey shooed them out of there.

“Morning is soon enough,” he declared, his subordinates’ success obviously having improved his mood.

They rode the elevators down to the parking garage.

“Your instincts were right on the money on this one,” Hutch complimented his partner as the car descended quietly through the building.

“Too bad they aren’t always so good. I’ll give Walker’s office a call when I get home,” Starsky offered as they stepped out of the elevator into the garage. “Tell him we’ll sell. I shoulda done it a couple of days ago.”

“Listen, Starsk. If you really feel we ought to hold onto the place…” Hutch counter-offered.

Starsky gave a grunting little laugh. “Now we’re gonna nice each other to death?” he wondered.

They had reached the Torino and Starsky bent to unlock the door. He opened it, braced his arms on the window and pinned Hutch with a quizzical glance.

Hutch shrugged. “If you could just explain….”

Now it was brown leather-clad shoulders that rose and then fell before Starsky climbed into the driver’s seat.

“Pick you up in the morning,” he said, as he keyed the big engine to life and drove away.

Hutch stood and watched him go, then made his way to where he had parked his car. He felt sorry for the Weber’s, but was glad that he and Starsky had had the professional distraction today of all days. It had made him remember what a good team they were, what their close relationship was built on, and how much value it had. He wanted Starsky as his lover, but today had reminded him that what he already had was precious in itself. Tomorrow, the house would be gone, they would be holding a tidy profit, and all would go back to being right in their world.

***

There were two messages waiting on Starsky’s blotter when the partners arrived at work on Friday morning. On the way in, Starsky had admitted to Hutch that he hadn’t called Walker the night before. Hutch had looked disappointed, but hadn’t pushed him. Consequently, Starsky had promised to call as soon as they got in.

One of the messages was from the real estate agent who had been, to the best of their knowledge, ominously silent the day before. The second was an unfamiliar name and number. Starsky flicked that one over to Hutch’s side of the table.

“Anyone you know?” he asked as he picked up the receiver and dialed Walker’s number.

Hutch shook his head and passed the note back.

Getting a busy signal, Starsky broke the connection, and then dialed the number off the second slip. After yesterday, they were in particularly good graces with Dobey, so he felt safe in taking a few minutes for personal business.

“Urban Properties,” came into his ear on pleasantly professional tones.

“Gregory Clark, please. Sergeant Starsky returning his call,” Starsky said with a definite feeling of déjà vu. He could feel Hutch’s eyes on him and met them, but could only shrug in reply to their blue inquiry.

“One moment please.”

Muzak filled his ear. While he waited, Starsky picked up a pencil and began bouncing its eraser end against the blotter.

“Gregory Clark here, Mr. Starsky. I’m Vice President in charge of development with Urban Properties. I understand that you and …” There was a short pause and the sound of shuffling paper. “…Kenneth Hutchinson are the owners of 203½ Borden Street.”

Starsky frantically indicated for Hutch to pick up the other phone and Hutch obeyed, carefully making sure the other party wouldn’t be aware of his presence.

“That’s right,” Starsky answered cautiously.

“Urban Properties has been buying all of those old homes. We intend to clear the area and put in a shopping mall.”

“Shopping mall?” Starsky echoed. He had a sinking feeling that whether he wanted to sell or not had just become academic.

“It’s the first step in our overall plan to completely redesign that entire area of Bay City. Quite frankly, Mr. Starsky, we need that property, and since Mr. Walker, our agent, has had no success in getting you to see things our way, I decided to give it a try myself.”

Starsky watched as the Hutchinson finger came into play, accompanied by a look that told him if he messed this up, he wouldn’t live to regret it.

“It’s my opinion Walker wasn’t being open enough with you. We need that property. Urban Properties is willing to offer you $10,000.00 for it, and we’ll pay off the $2,000.00 mortgage still owing from your purchase.”

Hutch was shaking the finger at him now. Starsky slid down a little in his seat, gripping the phone tighter.

“Now, you could probably hold out hoping that, if the property is so vital to us, we’ll go even higher,” Clark admitted. “Or, since all of our purchases are conditional upon obtaining all the property we need, we might just look somewhere else.”

Hutch’s eyes had turned into twin blue scalpels stabbing into Starsky’s brain.

“We’ll sell,” Starsky said into the phone, quickly, before Hutch could perform a visual lobotomy on him.

“Excellent. I’ll have the papers drawn up this morning along with a check. If you and Mr. Hutchinson could drop by this afternoon….”

“We work until 3:00, maybe later if something comes up. We’re police officers,” Starsky explained.

“Whenever you can in the next day or two will be fine.”

“And we’ve got some stuff….”

Hutch was making slashing motions, trying to get him to shut up, and Starsky didn’t really know what the hell he was doing anyway. He had already made the decision to sell. They could easily sign the paperwork during their lunch break, and $10,000.00 would buy a whole lot of buckets and Mr. Clean. It was just harder even than he had expected to let go of the dream.

“We won’t be starting demolition until the end of next week. Feel free to take until then to remove anything you want. Including the floors, walls and roof, if you like. It would save us the trouble.”

Clark laughed at his own joke and Starsky made a weak attempt to join in. Picking up the pencil from where it had dropped from his shock-numbed fingers, Starsky scribbled down the address, said good-bye and hung up the phone.

Hutch let out a whoop and Starsky tried very hard to whip up an answering grin. He just wished he didn’t feel so much as if he had just shot his own dog.

They signed the papers at lunch and went right over at the end of their shift to clean out the house. For the first time, Starsky noticed as they drove up how empty of inhabitants the area was. It didn’t take them long to gather the few things they had left there and to bring down the trunk of toys they had found in the attic.

“This is the last of it, Starsk. You comin’?” Hutch called.

Starsky knew his partner was standing in the open doorway with his arms loaded down with an assortment of cleaning supplies and tools.

“Yeah. Be there in a minute,” he answered from the back room and heard Hutch leave.

Starsky also knew he was acting like a sentimental idiot, but couldn’t seem to help himself. He walked over to one of the windows, touched the sparkling pane of glass and thought of how he and Hutch had made a contest out of cleaning the only two windows the house boasted. How they had egged each other on in their industrious scrubbing until they had finally declared a draw.

Hearing the Torino’s trunk lid slam, Starsky turned his back on the memory and left the room with every intention of joining his partner who was pretty obviously anxious to be on their way. He was sidetracked, however, when he came to the bathroom door, his feet taking him into the tiny room, seemingly of their own accord. He sat on the edge of the tub, his knees nearly touching the toilet in the crowded space, and laid a hand on the hot water tap.

“Never did get this fixed,” he reminded himself. His grip tightened and he gave an experimental tug, but the stubborn rust built up over years refused to yield. “Never will now,” he acknowledged and stood up. Impulsively, he leaned over and depressed the handle on the toilet. The resulting thunder drove him back out into the hall.

He made it as far as the living room before his determination to leave was once again derailed by memory. Moving that old couch had been quite the undertaking, but Starsky wasn’t thinking about the strained muscles and sweat. He was remembering a warm, caring hand on his shoulder and tender fingers that brushed the dust from his hair.

“Hey, buddy. What’s wrong?”

Starsky jumped as the grip of Hutch’s hand on his shoulder pulled him from the memory of one touch into the reality of another. He hadn’t realized until he began to both crave and dread Hutch’s touch just how often the big hand seemed to settle on his shoulder. Where Starsky might slap a rump, ruffle the blond hair or pat Hutch on his flat stomach, Hutch almost always chose the firm grip on Starsky’s shoulder to express a myriad of emotions from care and concern to brotherly affection.

“Nothin’,” Starsky lied. It seemed to be getting easier to lie to Hutch the more he did it. The observation saddened him as he looked down the road to years of lying to Hutch, if only by omission.

“Tell me another one, partner.”

Starsky forced a smile to his lips before he turned to face his anxious friend. Hutch might not understand his feelings about this place and certainly didn’t share them since it was more than obvious the big blond was immensely relieved to be rid of their investment, but Starsky had to give him credit for being willing to try. He waved a hand toward the room they had scrubbed so industriously, but really meant the entire house.

“We made it look pretty good, didn’t we, Hutch? I mean, since we only had it a week.”

Hutch’s grip tightened and Starsky felt his forced smile becoming more natural.

“Yeah, we did good,” Hutch reassured him.

Starsky let himself be led out into the fading sunshine, feeling bereft when Hutch released him to jump down off the porch. He turned and, despite the futility of it, locked the door and pocketed the key.

“Souvenir?” Hutch asked as Starsky joined him at the car.

Starsky fingered the key as he rounded the Torino’s long nose, telling himself that the little scrap of metal was more than a souvenir, it was a symbol. A reminder that when locking up the place he and Hutch had owned so briefly, he intended to lock up the disturbing emotions that had seemed to come with it.

“Yeah,” he agreed as he got into the Torino and Hutch slid in the passenger side.

“Hey. Why don’t we cruise down to The Pits, tell Huggy Bear the good news and celebrate,” Hutch suggested.

Although he felt more like mourning than celebrating, Starsky agreed and started the car. As he pulled away, he glanced into the rear view mirror, catching one last glimpse of the house. It really was a pretty sorry looking excuse for a house, he told himself.

“I’m still waiting for you to let me in on what piece of brilliance told you not to sell when Walker kept bumping up his offer.”

When pigs fly, Starsky thought, and put his foot down.

***

Huggy started grinning as soon as they walked through the door of The Pits and came out from behind the bar to escort them to a table.

“Is there anything you don’t hear?” Hutch grumbled, shaking his head in wonder at their friend’s awesome connections.

“Lucky thing for you, there ain’t,” Huggy reminded them. Like a maitre de at a high-class restaurant, he seated first Starsky and then Hutch, presenting menus with a flourish.

“Who told you?” Starsky asked curiously.

Hutch noticed that, like himself, Starsky didn’t bother to open the menu. They knew Huggy’s bill of fare as well as they knew the combinations to their lockers at the station.

“A good snitch never reveals his sources,” Huggy declared righteously. He picked up the neglected menus. “This is a celebration, right? For the occasion, I have spared no expense. From sources which will also remain nameless, I have acquired two of the juiciest, Grade A steaks which, when cooked to perfection by my outstanding chef, will melt in the mouths of my two, newly well-heeled friends. They will be accompanied by baked potatoes swimming in butter and heaped with the freshest sour cream.” Huggy’s mobile features acknowledged the oxymoron before Hutch could open his mouth. “And, for the rabbit harboring in my big blond brother, a garden salad of only the freshest produce sunny California has to offer.”

“Okay, Huggy,” Hutch laughed. “What’s the catch?”

“Catch? Catch?” Huggy echoed, clutching his chest dramatically. “You wound me, sir.”

“I’ll wound you, all right,” Hutch mock threatened, reaching under his jacket as if to draw his gun.

Huggy’s hands flew up in equally emotive surrender. “It’s a celebration, right? I just wanna do right by my friends.” His innocent expression became sly. “And if their windfall just happens to prompt these generous friends into paying their tab, well, then I’ll have reason to celebrate with them.”

Both Starsky and Hutch laughed at their friend’s antics, then arched back in their chairs, digging into tight jeans pockets and pulling forth a fistful of cash each. They heaped it into a pile on the table and gestured for Huggy to help himself. Huggy swept up a good portion of the bills, grinning as he made a show of counting them.

“Thank you, gentlemen. Now I am going to send the lovely Anita over with a bottle of perfectly chilled red wine, and tell the cook to get busy on your meal. Then…” He fanned the bills in one hand and slapped them against the fingers of the other. “…I’m going to go pay my mortgage.”

“What a character,” Hutch declared with fond amusement, grateful to Huggy for, if nothing else, the real smile and unencumbered laughter his performance had coaxed from Starsky.

“Yeah,” Starsky agreed happily.

By the time Anita arrived with the wine that turned out to be of good quality, made a production out of serving it worthy of her boss at his most flamboyant, and then departed, the lightening of Starsky’s mood had reversed. To Hutch, it almost felt like the sun had suddenly dropped into the ocean.

“You gonna tell me what’s wrong sometime tonight, Starsk, or do I keep guessing?” he asked.

Starsky shrugged casually enough, but the knuckles of the hand holding the glass turned white as he gripped it until Hutch feared the delicate stem might snap.

“You’re beginning to sound like a broken record, you know that, Blintz? There’s nothin’ wrong with me,” Starsky insisted. “For once, one of my ideas worked out. We made a pile of bread. You’re happy. I’m happy.”

“So why have you got a face on you like somebody just ran over your cat?” Hutch pursued.

“Because my partner won’t quit asking me what the fuck’s wrong,” Starsky hissed.

Hutch backed off. “Okay. Truce.” He followed Starsky’s line of sight to the pool table. “You wanna play?”

“No.”

The single word wasn’t exactly bitten off, but it sounded as if it had been well chewed before Starsky let it slip past his teeth. Hutch gave up for the time being. Whatever was bothering Starsky, a bar, even one as well known and comfortable as Huggy’s, was no place to try prying it out of him.

Their dinner arrived and turned out to be everything Huggy had claimed it would be. It was too bad, Hutch thought, that the truly excellent repast was wasted on his partner. It might as well have been a common order of hamburger and fries for all the appreciation Starsky gave it.

Hutch tried a few times to strike up some sort of conversation, but found it rough going to build on Starsky’s one syllable replies. His morose dinner companion was having such a dampening effect on his own mood that Hutch was grateful when Huggy decided to join them again just as they finished the last bite.

“Well?” the lanky proprietor prompted. “Did I lie? Was it not a repast fit for a king?”

“No truer words were ever spoken,” Hutch assured him. He took a last mouthful of wine and then patted his lips with his napkin.

“Yeah, Hug. Real good,” Starsky contributed.

Huggy flipped the extra chair around and straddled it. “So, I guess you two are gonna be getting into this nice profitable little sideline now. Pretty soon, you’ll be a couple of real estate tycoons.”

Hutch raised his hands in mock horror. “No way. Another week like this and I’ll have an ulcer,” he quipped.

“That’s it,” Starsky growled, thrusting to his feet. “If you want a ride, you better get your ass in gear. Bus is leavin’,” he warned and stalked out of the bar.

Hutch stared after his departing partner in stunned bewilderment, then turned to Huggy.

“Don’t look at me, Hutch. He’s your partner.” Huggy cocked his head as if he could hear the roar of the Torino’s firing engine through the solid walls of his establishment. “But unless you are plannin’ on calling a cab, I think you better haul your honky ass.”

Hutch scrambled to his feet, fumbling for his wallet, but Huggy waved him on.

“I’ll start another tab. You better go catch the Torino express.”

“Thanks, Hug,” Hutch called over his shoulder.

***

Starsky deliberately exceeded the speed limit to Hutch’s place. Not excessively, nothing that would attract the attention of a traffic cop with a quota to fill. Just enough to shave ten minutes or so off the trip and make Hutch grab the dashboard a time or two.

Starsky didn’t say a word as he drove. He had nothing to say, and pretty soon, Hutch subsided into a sullen silence. Starsky knew Hutch wasn’t going to let him off that easy, but he was sick of trying to pretend that their successful real estate venture made him feel anything except an empty sort of grief. Like he had closed a door on one part of his life before a new one opened to show him where he was headed. All he wanted to do was go home, drink a few beers, and mourn in private so he could put the whole episode behind him. Forget he wanted to be Hutch’s lover and get on with the business of being Hutch’s friend.

But Hutch obviously wasn’t going to let him away with it. When Starsky pulled the Torino up in front of Venice Place, his partner sat stubbornly silent until Starsky prompted him.

“End of the line,” he pointed out.

“You’re coming up,” Hutch commanded in a tone that brooked no argument.

Starsky argued anyway. “No, I’m not. I’m going home.”

Hutch made a show of settling his ass more firmly into the seat. “Then I’m coming with you.”

Starsky ground his teeth in frustration.

“Come on, Starsk. Have a couple of beers with me,” Hutch wheedled. “Besides, I have to write you a check,” he added, reminding Starsky, as if he didn’t already know, that, for convenience sake, they had deposited the check made out to both of them into Hutch’s account.

“What, you’re gonna skip town before tomorrow?” Starsky asked sarcastically.

When Hutch finally looked at him, his expression sober, his eyes probing, Starsky knew he wasn’t being given a choice. Hutch was making it clear that they would deal with this here and now.

“No way would I run out on my partner,” Hutch said softly.

“Shit!” Starsky exclaimed and parked the car.

***

“Want a Coors?” Hutch asked after he had locked the door behind them.

“No,” Starsky said. Hutch waited for Starsky to move further into the apartment and, when he didn’t, he snagged him by the arm and dragged him over to the couch, pushed him down onto the cushion and stood over him with hands planted on his hips.

“Coffee?” he suggested.

“No,” Starsky repeated.

“I still have some root beer,” Hutch gave it one last shot through jaws that were not quite clenched, but almost.

“Aw, fu…” Starsky began, bit his lip, and then flopped against the back of the couch. He threw his hands up and then dropped them. “Okay. Okay. You can make me a cup of coffee.”

Content for the moment, Hutch went to make the coffee, but kept an eye on Starsky, not putting it past him, in his present mood, to bolt. If he could help it, Starsky wouldn’t be leaving until they hashed this out once and for all. Yesterday, while engrossed in the Weber case and damned near mesmerized by a Starsky who was so tightly focused, it had been easy for Hutch to forget that all was not right between them. Now that the house was gone, Hutch was determined–no, desperate–that they set their relationship to rights.

He kept his mouth shut while the coffee brewed, trying to decide what might be the best way to pry open the clam his partner had become and discover what grain of sand was irritating his emotions. He knew it had to have something to do with the house, and it was high time he found out why Starsky was treating success like the worst debacle of the century.

When the coffee was made, he brought two cups into the living room where he set one in front of his partner and then sat at the opposite end of the couch. He turned a bit sideways on the cushion, cradling the cup between both hands and watched as Starsky picked his up, mirroring Hutch’s position with the exception that his downcast eyes seemed to have found something particularly fascinating about the steaming liquid.

Hutch had tried head on and that hadn’t worked. Sometimes with Starsky, who never liked big emotional scenes, you had to sort of sidle up on the subject.

“You never did tell me what it was about Walker that made you turn down his offers,” he reminded Starsky.

Starsky shrugged and brought his cup to his lips.

So much for sidling. Hutch could usually offer his long time friend a great deal of patience when he needed it. It wasn’t like it happened very often, not nearly as often as Starsky had to tiptoe around one of his own moods. However, this time, Hutch was trying to deal with his own dichotomy of emotions. He wanted to be ecstatic that what had at first appeared to be a disaster had turned out so unexpectedly well. On the other hand, a part of him wanted to be just as forlorn as Starsky appeared. Pretty soon, the pair of them would be sitting around bemoaning the cruel fate that had handed them a stunning profit.

Hutch put his cup down on the table with a decisive click, slid along the cushion until he could take Starsky’s away and disposed of it as well. He then wrapped both hands around his friend’s upper arms.

“Would you just tell me what is going on in that pea brain of yours?” he demanded, trying to keep his tone caring and concerned and disguise the monumental frustration he felt.

“No.”

That was getting to be Starsky’s favorite word; the same way hiding his expression was getting to be his favorite pastime. They had never hidden from each other, and even though he had his own secret tucked safe inside him, Hutch couldn’t back off now.

“Please, babe. You’re driving me crazy with this,” he begged.

The dark head shook tiredly. “You don’t wanna know.”

“Of course I do,” Hutch assured him. He could feel the muscles under his hands beginning to bunch, and he tightened his grip when Starsky tried to pull away.

“Lemme go,” Starsky demanded.

“Uh, uh. Not ’til you talk to me, partner.”

Starsky began to struggle and Hutch held on until he realized that this was going to escalate and one or both of them could get hurt. He released his grip suddenly and Starsky sprang to his feet, his hand on the doorknob in a flash. Hutch blessed whatever instinct had made him lock the door, because it gave him a chance to offer one last protest before Starsky fled into the dusk.

“Come on, babe. Whatever it is, we can work it out,” he appealed.

He saw Starsky hesitate, drop his hand from where he had been fumbling at the lock and then turn to face him as if Hutch was some desperate criminal with a gun.

“All right, Hutch. You can’t just leave it alone. Okay. I’ll tell you.” Starsky took a deep breath and indigo pools of pain finally met Hutch’s eyes. “I wanted it to be our house.”

“Oh, my God,” Hutch whispered in shocked reverence. Could the two of them really be feeling the same things and working at such cross-purposes? What had happened to their infamous rapport?

Starsky’s posture made him look like an octogenarian. “I told ya you didn’t wanna know,” he mumbled, turned and went back to fumbling with the lock.

Starsky had the door open before Hutch’s paralysis left him, and then it was his turn to cross the room as if he had rocket boosters on his feet. He caught the edge of the door, wrenched it from Starsky’s hand and slammed it shut. For good measure, he threw the lock a second time.

“Please come and sit down, Starsk.” In direct opposition to his violent actions, his voice was the gentlest he could make it. He sensed that one more command would have Starsky fighting for his freedom, but the plea seemed to do the trick. Passively, Starsky allowed himself to be led back to the couch.

Gingerly, Hutch settled himself once more a foot’s worth of cushion away and tried to order his thoughts. Had Starsky really meant it the way Hutch, harboring his own cherished emotions, had heard it? There was only one way to find out, and Hutch had to trust that their relationship was strong enough to stand the strain if he was wrong.

“This is about what happened that night after the Higgins bust,” he said gently.

Starsky shook his head, but contradicted himself with his reply. “We talked about that already. Didn’t we?”

It didn’t take Hutch’s intimate knowledge to see that Starsky’s defenses were down now, and, as had happened before when his world had fallen apart, he was looking to Hutch to make it right, or, at the very least, explain it.

“No, babe, we didn’t. We joked about it. Threw up a few smoke screens. But we didn’t talk. Didn’t tell each other, or ourselves, the truth,” Hutch said gently.

“What’s the truth, Hutch?” Starsky asked desperately.

Daringly, Hutch reached out and took one of Starsky’s hands between both of his. “I’m not sure about your truth, babe,” he admitted. “But mine is that I can’t get that night out of my mind. Can’t forget what it was like to kiss you, to hold you, to feel all the love in the world in your arms.”

“That’s what I’ve been feeling, too,” Starsky confessed cautiously. “But….”

Hutch held his breath, waiting for Starsky to add the qualifier that might doom them.

“Were we just drunk? Neither one of us has ever gone for guys before.”

“Yeah, we were drunk,” Hutch agreed. “But I’m not drunk now and I know I’ve never loved anybody the way I love you.”

Some of the shock was leaving Starsky’s face now, his features beginning to animate and his eyes doing more than just seeking reassurance. Now they were looking at Hutch as if he were the meal Huggy had laid out for them tonight and Starsky hadn’t eaten in a long, long time.

“So do ya think we should try it again? Sober, this time? In possession of all our faculties, such as they are?” he coaxed with the seductive naiveté that could be so damned irresistible.

“Oh, yeah,” Hutch breathed.

He released Starsky’s captive hand, and then brought both of his up to thread his fingers through the clinging curls. He leaned forward, stopping when he could taste the sweet sigh of red wine on Starsky’s breath.

“You sure?” he murmured, and the movement of his lips brushed them against Starsky’s with the force of a butterfly’s wing.

Starsky had no more words for him, just soft lips that annihilated the distance between them, a mouth that opened in sweet supplication, and a tongue that came seeking its partner. Hutch let his heart and soul flow into the meeting of their mouths, feeling as if this were the first, the last, and the most precious kiss he had ever shared.

When their lips parted and he opened his eyes, he was met by a pair of sapphire stars.

“What do you think?” he whispered.

Seemingly still bereft of words, Starsky just reached up and tugged him back down into a kiss that, for Hutch, felt like coming home.

***

A long time later, Starsky let Hutch ease away for a second time. The big hands were still in his hair, fingers twisted into his curls, and he still had his own hands full of blond silk. Beyond these gentle grips and the searching kisses they had shared, they weren’t touching in any way, and yet Starsky was as aroused as if they had been going at it hot and heavy for hours. His cock throbbed a protest at the crotch of his tight jeans and he knew, with the same instincts that had served him so well yesterday, that Hutch was in the same condition.

“Are we gonna make love, Hutch?” he asked, knowing he sounded a little dumb but needing to know that Hutch wanted this as much as he did.

“Aren’t we?” Hutch replied.

Starsky felt one of the big hands sliding down his neck while the other tried to draw him back to kiss-swollen lips. He resisted and saw the doubt bloom on Hutch’s face like some sort of terrifying disease. He tightened his grip, let the smooth caress of his lips chase away the fear.

“Ya got a nice big bed over there, babe,” Starsky explained his hesitation when their lips parted. “Don’t wanna grope around on the couch. Not with you.”

Hutch must have agreed with his plan because, in a heartbeat, he had unfolded those long legs and rose to his feet, bringing Starsky up with him and making him realize that the street wasn’t the only place that Hutch’s clumsiness fell away. They moved together into the sleeping alcove, Starsky, for one, grateful that it was no more than a few steps away. Any more, and he feared his cock would have strangled in his jeans.

Reaching the bed, Starsky freed his hand from Hutch’s grip and began to shrug out of his jacket, but the expression of dismay on Hutch’s face stopped him cold.

“What?”

“Let me?” Hutch begged, running one finger lightly over the shoulder of Starsky’s jacket and down the arm to his hand. The fingers entwined with his.

“I like to unwrap my own presents,” Hutch explained.

“Me, too,” Starsky agreed and demanded the same privilege.

The layers came off slowly, jackets and holsters discarded more quickly, but shirts, button by button. Widening vees revealed tantalizing expanses of silken hair or smooth, golden flesh for caressing fingers to explore until the material was pushed off broad shoulders and left to puddle where it fell at their feet.

They took turns removing each other’s shoes and socks, a fleeting caress to his instep making Starsky giggle and leaving him at liberty to offer the same caress, eliciting the same response from Hutch. Boldly, he unsnapped Hutch’s jeans, ran the strained zipper down over the monster he could feel throbbing behind it. Hands trembling, he dropped to his knees, both of his hands easing the tight material down over the slim hips and long thighs. Starsky had never believed there was a graceful way for a man to discard his pants while standing. Somehow, with his help, Hutch managed it. Leaning forward, Starsky pressed his face to the bar of iron straining the front of Hutch’s virginal white briefs, felt the heat of his new lover’s arousal nearly scorch his skin.

Hutch moaned softly. “Not fair,” he protested though his fingers snagged in Starsky’s curls to hold him there.

Stroking like a cat just once at the urgent protrusion, Starsky eased back, catching the soft material and sliding it down, baring the angry, red cock to his view. Hutch didn’t let him linger, but pulled him up, the long fingers immediately going to the snap at Starsky’s waist, wrenching it open and pulling down the zipper. Starsky sighed in relief at the lessening of pressure on his needful erection, but put out a restraining hand when Hutch started to reach past the gaping edges of his jeans.

“Touch me and I’ll come,” he warned.

Hutch knelt, grabbed the waistband of the jeans, catching the itsy bitsy briefs he wore on the way down, and, in one smooth push, brought the clinging material to Starsky’s ankles. One hand braced on Hutch’s shoulder, Starsky stepped clear of the last barrier between them. Hutch’s hands gripped his calves, fingers sliding a tantalizing caress all the way up the outside of his legs as Hutch rose to his feet. Palms cradling his hips, long fingers splaying over the cheeks of his ass as slowly, centimeters at a time, Hutch brought their naked bodies together for the first time.

With some obscure part of his brain still capable of rational thought, Starsky wondered if somewhere in the universe a sun went nova from the sheer energy of this first coming together. An inarticulate cry of pleasure was ripped from his throat as Hutch’s naked body caressed his from shoulders to knees. To his amazement, when Hutch began to back them toward the bed, he was able to follow, and managed a fairly coordinated fall onto the mattress and into his soon-to-be-lover’s arms without doing either of them a lasting injury.

They squirmed into comfort on the soft bedspread, each wriggle cause for new moans, groans and gasps of delight as their flesh met and parted and came together again over and over. Starsky felt the weeping tip of Hutch’s cock brush his belly and reached for it, wrapping his fingers around the thick shaft. In a moment, Hutch’s grip mirrored his own.

“What…” he gasped against the mouth that was trying to devour his lips. “What do you want?”

Panting, Hutch drew away, looking down between them at the twin grips. “Better keep it simple,” he advised, his breathing no more under control than Starsky’s.

Simple and soon, Starsky agreed. He released Hutch’s cock, encouraging the strong fingers away from his own groin, and then drew their bodies together until their cocks slid smoothly together, the jolt up his spine feeling as if he had touched a live wire. Real soon. One hand holding them together, he surged up and caught Hutch’s mouth in a demanding kiss. Giving no quarter and asking none, he writhed until his body could take no more. Stilling suddenly, he arched against the body that still thrust against him, his body giving up its wet, warm essence to bathe his lover and bring Hutch, shouting his pleasure, over the top with him.

***

Hutch let himself slowly slip back into awareness of something besides the sensation-drenched singing of his own nerves. Starsky was a warm, sweaty, panting weight in his arms and Hutch couldn’t think of even one small thing he could wish for that would make him happier than he was right now. Even with his body still throbbing with the force of his climax, he wanted to start all over. Right now. This minute. Not have to wait for his too human flesh to catch up with his yearning heart.

He felt Starsky stir against him, the stubbled cheek rasping against his nipple. With a gargantuan effort of will, he lifted his hand and threaded his fingers through the sweat damp curls.

“You okay, babe?” he murmured, and felt Starsky’s lips move against his chest but heard no sound. “Hmmmm?”

“Thought my heart was gonna burst,” Starsky admitted, husky voiced and damned near purring in Hutch’s ear.

Hutch lay quietly for a long time, slipping in and out of sleep, drifting on the sweet contentment of being wrapped within the security of Starsky’s embrace. He could tell Starsky wasn’t sleeping and wondered what was going through his new lover’s mind. He remembered Starsky’s sadness at the loss of the dilapidated old house that, it seemed, he had woven his own fantasies around. He heard Starsky heave a deep sigh and knew suddenly that, despite what they had just shared, Starsky was feeling just a bit insecure.

“Hey, Starsk?”

“Yeah?” Starsky murmured and Hutch could hear that the smallest of doubts had crept into the usually confident tone.

“Wanna buy a house?” he asked gently.

Starsky rose up above him, his eyes searching Hutch’s face until he found whatever it was he needed.

Gladly, Hutch gave himself up as his lover’s mouth came down to claim his.

***

With his arms full of the files he had just picked up from RandI, Hutch pushed open the door to the squad room. Seeing the group of detectives gathered around his and Starsky’s desk, he grinned to himself and then began elbowing his way through the crowd until he could dump the files on his desk. He offered Starsky a sympathetic meeting of glances as he took his seat.

“Come on, guys. I got work to do,” Starsky protested, and, from the tone of his voice, Hutch could tell it wasn’t the first time.

“Just take a look at this place for me, Starsky,” one man pleaded, shoving a folded up real estate newspaper under Starsky’s nose.

Hutch hid his grin in his coffee mug. News of their amazing success in the real estate market had quickly spread. Recognizing the potential, Hutch had wasted no time in letting their fellow officers know that it was Starsky who had not only picked out their investment but had had the savvy to hold out until they had more than tripled their money on the resale. Ever since, Starsky had been bombarded by requests for his opinion.

After the first few days, the shine had worn off such popularity and Hutch tended to agree, but it did have one distinct advantage. He and Starsky were planning on trying to repeat their success. Buy another house or two, and hope to turn them over for a quick, if not quite so large, profit. So it was a good thing that their co-workers were convinced that Starsky had become some sort of real estate genius. None of those men needed to know that, some day soon, he and Starsky wouldn’t be looking for an investment, but for a house that would truly be a home.