The Day He Left

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187,113 words.

Dandelion’s note: ‘It’s never taken me this long to write a novel (almost two years); I’ve always been able to finish one inside of 9-10 months, but last year was one of the most brutal years of my life and the longer it took to write this story, the lengthier it got. I apologize in advance if it’s too long. Feel free to skip ahead. Special thank you to my readers, Lisa A and Chocolate Egg; thank you additionally to Lisa A for the proofing!’

Previous: The Man in the Middle
(Book Two From Dandelion Series 2).

---

PROLOGUE: A GOOD RUN

Starsky’s Torino wasn’t in the driveway when Hutch pulled up to the canyon road apartment that mid-Sunday afternoon. He parked his Ford alongside the curb in front of the building just in case Starsky had simply run off to purchase more packing tape and would return at any moment.

As Hutch climbed the stairs and looked around the area, subconsciously feeling Starsky’s prolonged absence, he realized it was also possible that he and Starsky had passed each other on the road like ships in the night. But none of those things explained why Starsky had been more than two hours late for lunch—nor why he hadn’t answered his phone during all that time.

It was also possible that Starsky was home, and the car, for some inexplicable reason, was in the garage.

But when Hutch didn’t get an answer to his loud knocks on the locked door, he retrieved the key from the top of the jamb and entered the apartment—to find it completely empty.

“What the hell?” escaped his lips in a startled whisper.

Starsky must have misunderstood the plan: the moving truck they’d reserved wasn’t available for pickup until the following day; only the fragile items in both of their apartments would be carefully transferred by car. How could Starsky not have remembered that?

Other than the telephone on the floor in the living room, still plugged into the wall, and with a phone book by its side, the apartment—including all of its closets and cabinets, shelves and cupboards—was stripped bare. On closer examination, after opening a kitchen drawer, Hutch concluded the place had also been cleaned, possibly professionally, right down to its sparkling shine.

Hutch was nowhere near as prepared to leave Venice Place. He hadn’t even moved any of his fragile items which he was supposed to bring over in his car; he planned, instead, to move them in the morning, then to rent the U-Haul truck, and—with Starsky’s help—to pack it full of his stuff before driving over to Starsky’s apartment to load him up, too.

Hutch remembered telling Starsky these very specific instructions when he helped his partner pack boxes of books and other things while visiting him the night before. Granted, Hutch was a bit behind in the boxing of his own stuff, but not enough to make Starsky think there should be such a drastic change in plans, especially one they hadn’t discussed.

The only way to get to the bottom of Starsky’s reasoning was to get Starsky on the line. But when Hutch bent over to call the house, he realized it wasn’t a phone book beside the phone on the floor; instead, it was a large yellow envelope—the size of an oversized greeting card. On its front, in Starsky’s black-inked handwriting, was a neatly printed, unassuming ‘HUTCH.’

That’s when Hutch’s confusion turned to anxious concern.

Inside the unsealed envelope, Hutch indeed discovered a greeting card, as well as a single sheet of paper, folded into quarters. An artsy black and white drawing of a herd of zebras dressed the front of the card, and its inside flap—originally blank—was filled in with Starsky’s message in seemingly careful lettering, presumably so there would be no misreads.

Hutch.

I’ll be brief and to the point. I thought I could live the life you’ve planned for us, but I can’t. Faking who we are together isn’t something I can do. It will only lead to more resentment and frustration and unfulfilled happiness. I know you know this to be true.

Instead, I’m choosing a life that we both would least expect. So don’t waste your time looking for me. I’ve left no trail. And, besides that, I don’t want to be found, least of all by you.

Love your family. Do your job. Live the next chapter of your life to its fullest—and know that I found a way to do the same.

All was not lost. We had a good run.

Your pal,
Starsk

His heart suddenly pounding in his chest and his breath abruptly shallow and hyper rapid, Hutch opened the folded piece of paper, hoping to learn he’d just been cruelly pranked. But instead he found a Starsky-signed and notarized ‘Quit Claim Deed’—an official document that relinquished all of Starsky’s interest in the house that he and Hutch had just bought and were supposed to move into together that day.

* * *

CHAPTER 1: TOO LITTLE, TOO LATE

It was immediately apparent to Hutch that his suspicions were realized: Starsky had beat him to Venice Place and already retrieved his boxes of VHS and cassette tapes, his family pictures and trinkets, his clothing and other personal items—the things he’d brought over from his apartment after moving in with Hutch following his release from the rehab hospital. Almost a dozen of Starsky’s boxes had been carefully stacked near the piano for the next day’s transfer into the U-Haul truck, but they were now gone, too.

As he spun in the middle of the living room, frantically searching the disheveled apartment with his eyes, hoping to find something to lure Starsky home again, all Hutch could settle on was the water cooler—and there was no way Starsky would come back for something he didn’t own. A half-turn further and Hutch felt the blood drain to his feet for the second time that day: neatly folded and laid at the end of his bed was Starsky’s big, bulky cardigan—no note, but as if he’d left it with Hutch on purpose.

“Oh, what have I done?” Hutch agonized in a whisper. His heart pounded and he felt lightheaded, so much that he stumbled to the sofa to keep from collapsing. He was far too rattled to organize his thoughts and strategize.

‘Think!’ he silently pushed himself as he rubbed his forehead. It wasn’t too late to fix what was broken, was it? Starsky couldn’t have gone too far. It had only been a couple of hours.

Unanswered questions leap-frogged through Hutch’s mind. He needed to slow down his thoughts and take inventory of the facts so he could make sense of the situation. What were the obvious possibilities?

One was that Starsky must have used something other than his car to move his furniture and he would have needed help to do so, too. Did he borrow a vehicle or rent one? Did he use the truck they had already reserved?

Feeling palpably anxious, Hutch sat forward to the edge of the sofa and pulled the push-button phone toward him on the coffee table. He quickly dialed the U-Haul number from the company card he kept in his wallet. It was Sunday afternoon before 5pm, so the business surely had to be open; it was the weekend, after all.

“C’mon,” he impatiently coaxed the repetitive sounds in his ear as the rings went unanswered. More than a minute passed. “Dammit!” he cussed, slamming the receiver into the cradle, and feeling his panic rise: it was close of day and he probably wouldn’t get anyone on the line to give him the clues he desperately needed.

What could he do to find Starsky?

A new list of possibilities entered his mind: Starsky may have packed up everything, put it into storage, rented an apartment or house in the area, and planned to move in when he had leisure time. Or he was already busy moving into a new apartment or house. Or he stored his belongings and drove out of the city, planning to return for them at some later date. Or he rented a vehicle trailer to tow the Torino behind a moving truck and left the state. Or he stored everything, including his car, and flew back to New York—hopefully just to cool off, to get his head on straight—and he’d come back to his repentant lover when he realized how dumb he’d been.

None of those ideas comforted Hutch. Until he could explain himself to Starsky, face-to-face, his nerves would never settle. But what to do next? Storage facilities, rental equipment companies, hiring services—all would be closed on that late Sunday afternoon. He even proved that to himself by dialing a few more relevant businesses that he chose at random from the ‘Yellow Pages.’

That meant he’d have to hit the streets and leave no stone unturned, so he quickly used the toilet, grabbed a lightweight jacket, and bolted down the stairs to his car—glad to have eaten his fill of pizza at lunch earlier—and all while trying to imagine where Starsky may have gone in just the few hours he’d been on the run. If he’d truly planned to hide from Hutch, Starsky could be anywhere—or nowhere—in the entire L.A. basin.

* * *

The sun had set by the time Hutch arrived at the Los Angeles International Airport; Venice Place wasn’t all that far from it, but expansion construction had been well underway and there were long wait times at traffic lights the closer he got to his destination. Once on the airfield property, he immediately entered the nearest parking lot off West Century Boulevard and began cruising the car-packed aisles at a slow speed. Although the sun was about to set, there was still enough light to easily make out a red, white-striped Ford Gran Torino if he stumbled across one.

“C’mon, Starsky,” he begged out loud as he made the rounds through dozens of cars. His hope was that Starsky hadn’t already boarded a plane and Hutch could stop him before he did—assuming he was even at the airport. But the longer Hutch drove around the parking lot, the sooner he realized how meticulously Starsky could have planned his escape: he’d obviously put it into motion long before that night, having been completely able to abandon his apartment without Hutch even entertaining a clue that he would.

Most of the cars Hutch passed in the lot were rather lookalike in nature—same basic shape, same bland colors—but he was able to spot the muscle cars: the Mustangs, Trans Ams, Impalas, and he did recognize a single-color Torino when he saw it, noticing that it didn’t have Starsky’s aluminum five-slot mag wheels, its larger rear tires, nor the air shocks that gave the Striped Tomato its aggressive rake appearance. There was something definitely unique about Starsky’s car—just as there was a uniqueness about Starsky himself.

“Oh, what the hell am I doing?” Hutch said aloud when he suddenly realized he was approaching his search from the wrong direction. There had to be more than 30,000 cars on the airport grounds at any given minute and it would take forever to drive through them all. It would be faster to go directly to the ticket counters. He definitely wasn’t thinking straight and feared his mind would deteriorate further with the fading dusk.

“Think, Hutch!” he pushed himself again, hoping to find the best step forward. He didn’t want to waste time on the mundane, so he slightly accelerated and headed for the closest exit. Finding the car would do him no good if he was too late to stop Starsky from boarding a plane.

Then, “Wait.” Hutch hit the brakes and came to a lurching stop. The setting sun had given him a flash of viper red. He shifted into reverse, looked over his right shoulder, and backed up fifteen feet—to discover a red and white-striped Gran Torino parked two cars in from the end of the aisle; license plate: 537 0NN.

“There you are,” Hutch said as he quickly put his car into park, killed the ignition, and exited the vehicle. He first walked to the front of the Torino and felt its hood, laying his palm on its clean surface; it was cold to the touch. He then peered through the driver’s window to find it empty—unfortunately, Starsky wasn’t hiding inside. Hutch also couldn’t help but notice that the call radio had been removed—and neither the siren nor the emergency light were visible, either.

He opened the door with a key from his ring and sat behind the wheel. The interior was spotless. It even smelled polished; not a hint of Starsky’s cologne. A quick glance into the glove box—finding only the ‘Owner’s Manual’—and a careful look throughout the rest of the car told Hutch that Starsky had removed everything he didn’t want stolen, leaving the car hauntingly barren.

The one thing Hutch was most grateful for that early evening was that Starsky hadn’t remembered to renew his passport—despite Hutch arguing with him about it only a few months earlier. But how long did Starsky plan to be gone? He may have left Hutch, but he hadn’t left his beloved Striped Tomato. When would he return for it? If Hutch was lucky, he would be in time to stop Starsky from leaving the city that night. Failing that, he could stake out the parking lot until his partner returned from wherever it was he may have gone.

But first Hutch abandoned the driver’s seat to open the trunk. A spare tire was the only item in its otherwise empty cavity. Closing the lid, locking the doors, and taking mental note of the car’s location—11B—Hutch then got back into his own Ford and left the parking lot.

He made the immediate right turn onto a typically busy One World Way, lined in silhouetting palm trees, and soon pulled up to the Trans World Airlines terminal, maneuvering traffic—cars, buses, and taxis—to jockey his way into a parking spot along its curb and into the first available spot. Dusk had given way to nightfall and people seemed somehow more frenzied: passengers and visitors, pilots and airport staff, drivers and flight attendants, were engaged in a mutual, but chaotic crisscrossing; except for the outdoor baggage checkers, everyone was quickly headed somewhere.

Hutch turned off the engine, got out of the car, and walked to its passenger side to place the red flashing light on its roof—and then he entered the building through the double, automatically opening doors. Inside the terminal, the sound changed from a cacophony of traffic and horns to intermingled voices and intercoms.

Following the signs as he rushed downstairs, he pushed his way through the waiting crowd when he arrived at the ticketing counter. “May I have a word?” he asked the pretty, young, dark-haired woman who stood closest to the computers, wearing the nameplate, “Lucy.”

He flashed his badge and moved to the end of the counter, closer to the wall, so he would be out of earshot from most passengers.

Lucy obliged by joining him. “How may I help you?” she asked, briefly examining his badge before he pocketed it. “Is this an emergency?”

“It’s not,” he quickly assured her, forcing a smile to ease her concerns, and using a warm voice to solicit further trust. “I’m looking for a person of interest. Can you tell me whether David Starsky is ticketed on any of your flights?”

She immediately began punching keys on the computer’s keyboard. “Do you have a time range?”

Although he’d spoken to Starsky less than a few hours earlier—having called Starsky at his now-vacated apartment—Hutch wanted to cover all of his tracks. He wasn’t thinking at his best and didn’t want to miss a gap in the timeline. “Since noon today would be a good start.”

While Lucy checked the manifest, Hutch drummed the counter with his fingers and impatiently looked around the area, sizing up the goings-on, but mostly hoping to spy Starsky in the crowd—while every minute that passed seemed excruciatingly slow.

“I’m sorry, Officer,” she finally said, making eye contact with him, and sounding sincere. “No one by that name is on any of our flights—not recently, not today, and not for the foreseeable future.”

Starsky was smart enough—and had the connections—to have purchased a fake I.D. and, like Hutch, could have charmed his way past airport security without warranting close examination. A mix of thoughts raced through Hutch’s mind. His questions had no logic to them: he simply needed answers.

“Since, say, 2 pm, what are your flights to New York City?”

Each answer Lucy gave him was preceded by a series of keyboard clicks and a nearly minute-long study of the database. “Our nonstop flight left at 2:35 this afternoon,” she eventually said, “another at 5:10, and our one-stop 8:17 flight is boarding now.”

“Gate?”

“34A,” Lucy said, writing down the gate and flight numbers for him, and then adding, “Our last flight to New York City leaves at 10:44.”

“Is it possible to give me a list of your flights today—from noon on? All flights. Times and destinations.” If Starsky was in the building headed to anywhere in the United States, Hutch was determined to find him.

“I can have it printed for you,” she offered. After explaining to Hutch that it would take some time to make him a printout, he told Lucy he’d be back to pick it up, but he first wanted to search the terminal.

He bolted upstairs to the gates—15 of them, the first of which began with Gate 30A. He jogged past them, searching the areas with his eyes, as he made his way to Gate 34A. When he arrived there, most of the passengers had already boarded.

“I just need two minutes,” he promised the gate agent, showing her his badge. He was promptly allowed entry into the jetway. Despite his urgency, he was polite with the last of the boarding passengers as he worked his way among them to the door of the aircraft, and was met by the lead stewardess. He showed his badge again, promised he’d only be long enough to walk the aisle, and was permitted to step onto the Boeing 727.

With his heart in his throat—mainly because he feared he’d have a public confrontation with Starsky when he found him—Hutch slowly walked from the galley to the rear of the trijet airliner, having to wait only a few times for a passenger to store a briefcase or train case in the overhead. He looked at every face in every seat on either side of the central access walkway as he passed by them—nearly 200 in total—but none were Starsky’s.

That didn’t stop Hutch from looking into both bathrooms at the back of the jet, nor the front one when he returned to the forward galley. He then took the unguarded opportunity to briefly peek into the cockpit—where he found two male pilots busy with a preflight check.

No Starsky. Not on that plane.

So Hutch returned to the terminal and started over in his search from Gate 30 onward to Gate 38—more than a dozen, including the As and Bs. He walked through the restaurants and cafes, the bookstores and newsstands, the men’s rooms and the pubs—and didn’t see anyone who looked even remotely like Starsky.

On his way out of the building, Hutch stopped to pick up the printed list of flights from Lucy, went outside into the cooling night air, got into his car, and drove to the next terminal. There were six in all—more than 80 gates serving 11 carriers—and he scoured every inch of each one.

But not even a hint of his partner emerged in the search.

With his lists in hand, Hutch drove back to the parking lot. Maybe Starsky’s prank had been completed and Hutch would find him at the car having a good laugh. Hutch could then just feel like a fool, and not like the desperate man he was becoming.

But the red and white-striped Gran Torino parked two cars in from the end of the aisle—license plate 537 0NN—was still where Starsky had left it … without Starsky anywhere to be seen.

* * *

“Do you still work here?” the gruff male voice snapped at him when Hutch answered the phone that next morning. He had been startled awake by the ring, grabbed the receiver, and desperately said ‘hello’ into it, praying it was Starsky.

But it wasn’t.

“Yeah,” Hutch said, rubbing sleep from his eyes when he recognized Dobey’s voice. “But we had today off to move our stuff into—”

“Get your ass to my office,” Dobey barked. “I’ll expect you within the hour.”

“Is this about—?”

But the line was disconnected before Hutch could even finish his question.

He sat up from his seat on the sofa, having slept roughly three hours curled up on one end; it had been a restless night. After his painstaking search of the six Los Angeles International Airport terminals—and all of their combined 80 gates, their multiple bars, cafés, gift shops, and restrooms, and having discovered Starsky’s car still parked where he’d found it by the time he left—Hutch had done likewise with the nine hotels on West Century Blvd.

But no one under Starsky’s name was registered at any of the lodgings, and he wasn’t anywhere in the lobbies, restaurants, men’s rooms, elevators, hallways, stairwells—or nearby businesses. Hutch must have walked several miles in his search.

When he had finished his rounds of the hotels and motels, he returned to the airport parking lot—and found the Torino still two cars in from the end of that now-familiar aisle. 11B.

Starsky had to have parked the vehicle there and then either a) boarded a plane under an alias and left the area, or b) taken a cab or a shuttle service to someplace in the city. He certainly hadn’t checked into a nearby hotel. Maybe he went to the bus station to make his escape and simply used the Striped Tomato’s location to throw Hutch off his trail. He wouldn’t need I.D. to board a bus.

Not knowing if that was the case for a train, Hutch drove out to Union Station—a 20-minute drive from the airport in those early Monday morning hours—to learn what he could about rail travel. He certainly wasn’t going to get any sleep.

But all he learned at the Amtrak station—besides that Starsky wasn’t anywhere to be found there—was that Starsky wouldn’t have needed identification to board any of its trains. He could have left late that Sunday afternoon or that evening and been well on his way in any given direction, or he was picked up by a friend and spent the night in someone’s home, with plans to leave Monday morning—either by plane under a false I.D., or by train without needing any. A plane would put him on the east coast later that day; a train would dump him in New York on Wednesday or Thursday—with a layover in Chicago.

Emotionally exhausted, not just physically, Hutch reluctantly returned to Venice Place by 3:30 a.m. He quickly used the toilet, scarfed down a leftover half a sandwich and a fresh beer, and then cleared off the dining table to make room for his map of the USA. Along with his ‘Yellow Pages,’ a notebook, and a lone lamp for light, he created a list of relevant businesses, their phone numbers and addresses, places he planned to call when the world returned to work—listing the closest ones first and plotting them on the map.

When the beer sent him to the bathroom for the second time that morning, he returned to the sofa, unable to keep his eyes open a minute longer, and helplessly fell asleep—waking only when Dobey called him. As soon as Hutch dropped the receiver in its cradle, he picked it up again, and dialed Nick from the number in his address book. But all Hutch got was an answering machine—and he took advantage of it.

“Hey there, buddy,” he said, not thinking to introduce himself, but doing his best to sound unaffected. “So … Starsky and I have renewed our sport of hide-and-seek … determining which one of us is the better detective … and it’s his turn to hide. I think I would have won last time if I hadn’t gotten sick,” he commented, forcing a laugh so Nick wouldn’t think anything was as wrong as it was. “And I know you don’t want to give away his game plan, but since I’m losing this time around, I’d like to at least know he’s okay—if you’re privy to that information. Give me a ring.”

His next call was to Starsky’s mother, to say the same, but neither she nor an answering machine picked up. Failing that, he decided to obey orders and meet with Dobey, planning to resume calls on the other side of that meeting.

Reluctantly, he pushed himself off the sofa and into taking a shower, redressing, brushing his teeth, passing on the shave, and then he headed out the door with his lists, map, Starsky’s goodbye note, and a banana in hand. He would get coffee in the Squad Room.

But first he drove back to the Los Angeles International Airport to check on the car.

* * *

“What’s going on?” Dobey demanded to know when Hutch entered his office and sat in the closest chair at the front of his desk. Dobey sounded concerned, too, and also a bit annoyed, as if Hutch having coffee in his office had offended him. It wasn’t the first time his cop used the opportunity for downing personal food and drink, so why was Dobey agitated?

“We had the day off,” Hutch reminded him, making a mental note to cancel the U-Haul as his anxiety intensified. “We weren’t scheduled to work today.”

“That’s irrelevant.”

“To what?”

“To what’s happened—obviously.”

Hutch felt the knot tighten further in his stomach; he wasn’t about to get worse news than he already had, was he? He sipped the hot coffee, barely tasting it, and averted his eyes, figuring if he ignored Dobey, maybe the past 18 hours would simply disappear. They never happened.

“Hutch,” Dobey said, not asking.

Hutch lifted his eyes and met the Captain’s. Dobey was still dressed professionally for work that mid-morning, and was visibly perplexed; his brow was furrowed and his expression taut. He squinted at Hutch. Starsky must have told Dobey he had left his partner. “I fucked up,” was all Hutch could think to say in his defense.

“You fucked up and that’s why he resigned?”

Hutch nearly choked as blood suddenly drained to his feet. He hadn’t factored into the equation that Starsky abandoned his job, too; at the least, he would request a transfer. “What do you know that I don’t?”

“Are you serious?” Dobey asked, incredulously. He picked up an unfolded piece of paper from his desk and passed it to Hutch. “You’re not aware of this?”

Hutch set his cup on the edge of Dobey’s desk and sat forward in his chair to take the letter. Drawing a breath, he carefully read each word on the otherwise blank page—all in Starsky’s familiar handwriting.

Sept. 23, 1979

Captain Harold Dobey
Los Angeles Police Department
Downtown Los Angeles, CA

Capt. Dobey,

Due to circumstances beyond my control, I hereby resign from the Los Angeles Police Department, effective immediately. I’ve turned my gun over to Weapons and my badge and I.D. are in this envelope along with a couple of other documents. (FYI)

It’s been a privilege to work as a police officer and senior detective for the people of L.A., and especially an honor to have served under you. In many ways, you’ve been a father to me.

Sincerely and with all due respect, Det. David Starsky

P.S. If there are any retirement or other benefits coming to me, please send them to my mother at the address below. She’ll be sure to get mail to me and I’ll let you know if this changes.

Dorothy Starsky
558 1st Street
Brooklyn, NY 11215

‘David Starsky’ was also signed at the bottom of the page.

Hutch’s breathing was shallow and his heart noticeably pounded. He broke a sweat and pushed back on his overwhelming feelings of disappointment, grief, and fear. He had no words.

After what he probably assumed had been enough time to have read Starsky’s resignation letter over twice, Dobey ended the silence. “Why would he resign and, more importantly, why didn’t he tell you he had?”

Hutch still couldn’t find the words; he wouldn’t share with anyone what had transpired between himself and Starsky over the past week—a series of unfortunate circumstances that had clearly caused Starsky to leave his partner, his career, and his … life.

“He included a copy of the ‘Quit Claim Deed’ to your house,” Dobey further informed Hutch, handing him that document. “And I suppose you don’t know about this, either,” he added, pushing a letter-sized envelope to the edge of the desk, his action forcing Hutch to at least lay eyes on it.

“You’ll want to take care of that,” Dobey said, encouraging Hutch to open it.

Anxiously, Hutch reluctantly picked up the unsealed envelope and turned it so he could read the plain lettering on its front.

‘LAX #11B’

“Oh, no,” he whispered under his breath as his mind caught up with his panic; he knew then what he would find inside, but he nervously opened the envelope and removed its contents to confirm it. “Oh, Starsk,” he emotionally pleaded, that time in a low voice, not intending to be heard.

Starsky’s familiar signature was written at the bottom of the small pink slip in Hutch’s hands: a ‘Certificate of Title,’ the official document that signed away Starsky’s rights to his beloved car.

Tears uncontrollably pooled in Hutch’s eyes. “Starsk. What have I done?”

“Talk to me,” Dobey insisted, but he sounded kinder. Perhaps he understood that Hutch didn’t know the extent of his fallout with his partner until that moment. “Tell me what happened.”

Hutch couldn’t. His private life was so extremely private, he wouldn’t share it with anyone; the only other person to know its details was Alec Henley—and not even he knew the recent facts. A lot had gone down in Hutch’s life after his and Starsky’s return from Colorado.

“Hutch.”

Dobey obviously wanted some kind of answer.

Hutch blinked back the wet in his eyes to keep Dobey from seeing how broken he felt when he lifted his head and shrugged at his superior, but he didn’t think he succeeded. “It’s a delicate matter.”

“Aren’t we family?” Dobey asked, kindly.

They were; Dobey had done so much and cared for them over the years. Hutch owed him at least some part of the truth, so he removed Starsky’s goodbye card from his inside jacket pocket and leaned forward to hand it to Dobey. Hutch had read it so many times already that he knew there wouldn’t be anything in it to give himself and Starsky away, but at least it would be some kind of answer to Dobey’s questions.

Dobey read in silence. He then inhaled, slowly, before looking up at Hutch. “What does he mean when he says, ‘I thought I could live the life you have chosen for us’?”

There was no way on Earth Hutch would explain it and, in that moment, he realized he only trusted Starsky—and Alec Henley—to know the truth about his sexual relationship with Starsky. But he couldn’t lie to Dobey, either, so he continued to say nothing.

Dobey silently read the card over again searching for his answer there, and then, not finding it, finally asked, “What did you choose for him, Hutch, that he can’t do?”

“It’s personal.”

“So personal he won’t answer his phone? He must know I want to talk to him about this.”

“The phone is the only thing he left behind in his apartment. That, and a goodbye note. He packed up everything he owned and moved out of it yesterday. He wasn’t there when you called.”

“Oh,” Dobey said, genuinely surprised—more like alarmed. “He moved out without you knowing?”

“We were supposed to move over to the house today and then shut off services to both our places tomorrow.”

“But did he move out of his apartment without you knowing he had?”

“Yeah.”

Dobey was uncharacteristically speechless.

“He was supposed to come by the house for lunch yesterday,” Hutch further explained. “We were going to put the final details on the move—but he didn’t show. So I went over to his place and found it empty.”

“Why would he do something like that, leave like that?”

Hutch knew, but he ground his teeth instead and didn’t say a word.

“You said you fucked up,” Dobey reminded him. “Did you make a pass at him?”

Startled, Hutch impulsively asked, “Why would you suspect I did that?”

“Because I can’t think of anything else you could do that would make him part company with you—not at this stage of the game and not after all you’ve been through together—and not like that, to just up and go. Am I wrong?”

The truth was that Starsky had initiated the sex between them and—in some ways—had seduced Hutch into their intimate relationship. But he wouldn’t tell Dobey those facts. The Captain had hit close to home and that should be enough.

When Hutch didn’t deny the insinuation, Dobey acquiesced. “You’re right, Hutch. It’s none of my business. I’m just trying to understand this sudden news.”

Hutch couldn’t look Dobey in the eye, intentionally leaving him with the impression that it was Hutch who had forced Starsky into abandoning everything by sexually pursuing him. None of that was the reason, but honesty wasn’t the order of the day. All Dobey really needed to know was that Starsky had … left.

“It’s understandable,” Dobey said, easing into his words, as if doing so would enable Hutch to make eye contact with him. When he continued, Hutch realized his superior wasn’t passing judgement on Starsky’s actions, but on Hutch’s.

“We nearly lost him,” Dobey explained, leaning back in his chair, as if to seem less threatening. “You nearly lost him, especially. When he recovered, you’re the one who helped him regain his footing in life. Literally.”

All of that was true.

“And then you brought him home to take care of him. It’s a small place. I don’t know the sleeping arrangement, but I imagine it was cozy.”

Hutch lifted his eyes and finally looked into Dobey’s dark brown ones; they were kinder than he remembered them only minutes earlier—seemed more understanding, accepting, and forgiving.

Dobey finished his thought. “One drinks. Maybe gets to feeling nostalgic. Needy. Afraid to lose again.”

“Close,” Hutch said, implying two things: one, that Dobey had unearthed Hutch’s forgivable mistake—an unwanted pass—and two, that Dobey had been right about Hutch’s feelings, despite the alternating details. “But it’s more complicated than that.”

“I would imagine it is,” Dobey agreed. The room was quiet. He crossed his arms over his chest and sat silently for a moment before adding, “But those kinds of actions … those confusing feelings … they stir up so much … distrust, I guess.”

“I’m sorry,” Hutch whispered, glancing down at the documents in his hands: Starsky’s resignation letter, the title to his car. Hutch’s two words were meant for Starsky, but he didn’t mind that Dobey thought they were an apology for pushing Starsky out of the Force. For all of it, Hutch was responsible, and he felt guilty on a level he never had before.

“I’m sorry, too,” Dobey echoed.

Hutch looked up, overwhelmed by a myriad of emotions, not the least of which was the realization that he was deeply terrified. “I need to find him, Captain.” Despite that he was already exhausted, he wasn’t prepared to quit.

Dobey held eye contact, then broke it to read over Starsky’s goodbye note as if he could see clues in it that Hutch had failed to find. When he glanced back at Hutch, he gently said, “I think he doesn’t want to be found.”

“Because he left without all the facts.”

“And what are those?”

“The situation has changed,” was all Hutch was able to say. “He needs to know that.”

“I’m not arguing with you, Hutch, but why would he trust you again?”

“Because if my word isn’t good enough for him, then nothing ever was.”

Dobey was silent for a minute. A small clock ticked. No doubt, Dobey appreciated Hutch’s perspective. Maybe the actions of his two cops sometimes belied their lifelong beliefs, their unwavering convictions, and their innate integrity—purely in moments of weakness—but their words always stood for something.

“Okay,” Dobey agreed. “Tell me what I can do to help you. Should I issue an A.P.B?”

“He’ll only dig in deeper,” Hutch presumed, nixing the idea, at least for then. “Maybe just … be there for me—again—when I need you.”

“That goes without saying.”

Hutch then had a grim idea. “I should probably resign, too. I have this awful feeling it’s going to take a while to find him—and I have a flight to Chicago tomorrow afternoon besides.”

“What’s in Chicago?”

“All the east-bound trains arrive the next day from the West.”

“Even those on their way to Florida?”

“Even those.”

“Why not hunt for him around here first?”

“I was up all night looking for him. I found his car on my own. I also plan to call or go to every business and hotel after I leave here that he may have used to move out of his apartment. I‘ve already contacted every friend of his that I know from San Francisco to San Diego. He might still be in L.A., but in case he isn’t, I don’t want to risk following a cold trail any sooner than I have to.”

Dobey intently listened while Hutch continued to lay out his plan.

“If I haven’t found him by the time I get back, I have an even longer list to go through—and I’ll go over it as many times as it takes. But first, if I can’t find him in Chicago, I’m going to New York City. It’s possible he boarded an airplane on a false I.D. and is already on the east coast.”

“You think he went home?”

“His brother hasn’t returned my call and I couldn’t reach his mother, but it’s the first logical place I think he’d go if he isn’t in Metro L.A.”

“Don’t resign,” Dobey implored him, uncrossing his arms and leaning forward again; he apparently wanted to be taken seriously. “If you do find him, it’d be easier to get one of you back than both of you.”

Dobey’s assessment was a sound one, but Hutch couldn’t fathom working. His mind was already a jumble of thoughts, fueled by panic and desperation. He was barely any use to himself.

“I’ll snag some special assignments that will give you time off more than time on,” Dobey suggested. “But stay. Let me work this out for all concerned.”

Hutch appreciated the offer and nodded to convey his gratitude even though he didn’t believe he would be afforded the luxury.

But how could Dobey help him in the immediate? To start, Hutch needed a sounding board. But where to begin?

The pink slip.

“I guess he left the car at LAX,” he assumed, “to keep it from being towed until you … I … could retrieve it.”

“He could have left it in the station parking lot,” Dobey considered, innately doing what Hutch hoped: helped him to figure things out.

“That means he left it at LAX to throw me off track,” Hutch decided, already beginning to feel defeated, and definitely tired.

“Probably so,” Dobey agreed.

“What time did he turn in his weapon?”

“You’ll have to ask WEAPONS, but I believe it was late yesterday.”

“When did you get the letter?”

“The envelope was on my desk when I arrived this morning.”

Hutch rubbed his forehead to ease the pain while he stared at the floor. What else could he think to ask? What other information did he need to know before hitting the streets again?

After a minute of uncertainty, he had different questions, but he didn’t share them aloud:

Did it matter why Starsky left his car at LAX?

Did it matter what time he turned in his weapon?

Did it matter how Dobey received the documents?

Did anything matter … anymore?

* * *

“I was just about to split,” Huggy impatiently told Hutch after Hutch pulled up to the Venice Place curb and got out of the car. Huggy was dressed in jeans and a light, zippered jacket, hands in its pockets, and appeared restless. “Where’s the moving van, man?” he asked in a singsong voice.

“I’m sorry, Hug,” Hutch apologized. He’d forgotten about the van, forgot about the arrangement—to meet Huggy at 10 am to begin the furniture transfer—first Hutch’s place and then Starsky’s. “I was called into Dobey’s office this morning.” He anxiously searched the area with his eyes—as if he might find Starsky lurking somewhere, enjoying a good laugh over Hutch’s desperation.

Huggy’s concern broke him out of his lighthearted mood. “You all right?”

“There’s been a change in plans,” Hutch blurted, finally giving his attention to Huggy, but he didn’t know what to say next or even how to say it if he knew.

“Where’s Starsky?” Huggy asked with a furrowed brow. He obviously fed off Hutch’s solemn demeanor. “Is he running behind again?”

“He left,” Hutch said, turning away to look up the street into traffic and not seeing what he hoped. He then paced back-and-forth in front of the Venice Place door, nervously scanning his surroundings. “I don’t know when I can get the truck.” Everything had gone to hell.

“So where did he ‘left’ to?” Huggy wondered.

Hutch stopped dead in his tracks and stared into the cement at his feet as the reality hit him. “He left,” he repeated, that time in a low voice—and with sheer disbelief. Did Starsky really leave him?

Huggy stepped beside Hutch. “ Let me ask this another way. When will the man be back?”

Fear washed over Hutch, physically weakening him. There had been many things in his lifetime that he didn’t have answers for, but none scared him as much as this one did. “He quit,” he murmured, not blinking. How could Starsky have done such an awful thing?

“What’s going on, Hutch?”

“He quit his job,” Hutch explained, speaking in an emotional tone that even he could hear, but couldn’t help. “He quit the house … he quit his car … he quit … me.”

“You’re not making sense.”

Hutch couldn’t believe it himself. “I fucked up, Hug. I fucked up so bad, he left me.” His voice cracked. His heart pounded. He broke a sweat. “I didn’t mean to,” he pleaded as he lifted his eyes and looked into Huggy’s now concerned expression. “All I needed was a couple more hours to fix things, but he was gone by then.” Why didn’t Starsky wait for him just that little bit longer?

“What are you saying, Hutchinson?”

What was Hutch really saying? “He emptied his apartment yesterday without me knowing, signed off on the house we just bought—and his car—turned in his badge and his weapon, and disappeared.”

“Whoa,” Huggy said, alarmed. “The hell you say.”

Hutch pushed back on the tears in his eyes when he didn’t leave eye contact with Huggy. He could tell his friend was dismayed—and couldn’t quite believe what he’d heard, either, but it was true. Wasn’t it? Isn’t that what all those useless hours searching for Starsky throughout the night had told him, that Starsky had disappeared? “What am I to do, Hug?” Hutch pleaded with him. “I’ve racked my brain every which way and I don’t know what to do next.”

Only in that moment did Hutch realize how drained he was and how helpless he felt. He didn’t think he could take another step, and yet he couldn’t not keep looking—but where?

Huggy shifted back on his feet. “Have you had breakfast?”

Hutch couldn’t tell him he’d barely eaten since lunch the previous day—or slept but a few hours, but his silence must have answered the question.

“C’mon, then,” Huggy said, tugging on Hutch’s jacket sleeve. “Let’s get you something to eat.” He pulled Hutch toward the Venice Place entrance. “Maybe two heads can come up with some answers, but first you gotta refuel. You’ll be no good for anybody if you don’t.”

“And then?” Hutch asked, reluctantly following Huggy up the stairs.

“And then you can tell me what happened.”

* * *

Hutch didn’t intend to fall asleep when he did; it wasn’t part of his overall plan. Huggy had made him breakfast—eggs, toast, and coffee; afterward, he looked over Hutch’s list with him of businesses and other places to visit or call in his search for Starsky, and then told Hutch he’d handle the actual move for him, too. Huggy insisted that Hutch get out of the apartment, retreat to the tranquility of the new house, and make his calls from there; be out from under the movers as well.

On his way to pick up the moving van, Huggy first dropped Hutch at the airport so he could get Starsky’s car. Before they parted, Hutch gave Huggy his key ring and the reservation papers for the U-Haul, and then gratefully handed over the moving responsibility to his friend. Huggy promised he’d hire a few day workers to help him and they would bring Hutch’s stuff, as well as his Ford Galaxie, to the house by end of day.

But soon after Hutch arrived at the new house in the Torino, he reluctantly found his way onto the king-sized bed he and Starsky had bought only a few days earlier, and fulfilled his promise to Huggy that he would at least get some rest. Not realizing how exhausted he was, Hutch quickly fell asleep, his eyes closed behind the bend in his arm, and his weight pressed into the mattress. His belly was full and he’d emptied his bladder, so there was no stopping slumber at that point, even though he hoped to continue his search for Starsky after a few minutes of down time.

The only furniture in the house was the bed and a sectional sofa they’d also purchased. A refrigerator was scheduled to be delivered the next day, along with a new dining set and two patio chairs. There was a lone, built-in clock ticking away from somewhere in the kitchen down the hall, but the rest of the house echoed, sounding as hollow as Hutch’s heart felt before he succumbed to sleep.

“Maybe we didn’t need such a big bed after all, hm?” Starsky asked, snuggling into Hutch and pushing him out of his contented peacefulness. “I mean … if we’re going to be on top of each other day-in and day-out, what’s the point of having a king bed, know what I mean?”

Hutch lay on his back near the edge of the mattress, the one closest to the bathroom, closed his eyes, and tried to ignore Starsky and his silly commentary. But when Starsky’s kisses along his arm convinced him he hadn’t succeeded, Hutch mumbled, “There are going to be times when we’ll need the personal space. This is still very new to us. It’ll wear off someday.”

“Speak for yourself,” Starsky said, sounding disappointed. “I’m never going to be tired of crawling on you.” He pressed his naked length along Hutch’s to prove it. “But that’s okay,” he decided. “It just means we’ll have sex on both sides of the bed so it doesn’t get boring.”

Hutch chuckled. “Which is it, buddy? Hanging out on each other will never be boring—or just the sex will?”

Starsky playfully bit Hutch’s arm. “I’m trying to justify the size of this bed is all.”

“Don’t try so hard. It doesn’t matter. We bought it. It’s here. We’re on it and life is good.”

Starsky laughed and nuzzled Hutch’s neck, audibly inhaling Hutch’s scent, and then squeezed him close inside his arm. “Life is good,” Starsky agreed. Beautiful, masculine voice. “I’ve never been happier.”

Hutch woke from his dream with a start. Panting. His breath audible. His heart pounded. No dream, he quickly realized. Those had been Starsky’s exact words.

“I’ve never been happier.”

“Starsky,” Hutch said aloud into the empty room as he blinked back the impossible. “If you were so happy, then how could you break us up like that? Why couldn’t you wait?”

But in the same instant he asked those questions, he knew the answers.

* * *

The hiss of hydraulic systems, the shutting down of locomotive engines, the release of squealing brakes, and the rumble of nearby commuter trains, were among the commingled sounds that greeted Amtrak’s Texas Eagle that early afternoon as it arrived on time from Los Angeles via Dallas. It was the first of four long-haul trains on Wednesday to finish its destination at Chicago’s Union Station.

Thousands of people passed through its hallways—coming and going—as riders and greeters, staff and security, transients and trailblazers. The majestic high-arched halls of the more than 100-year-old building echoed with the cacophony of voices, departing and arriving locomotives and metro trains, and the buzz of ongoing construction.

The city-block-wide structure’s grandeur was best experienced in the Great Hall, the station’s main waiting room whose barrel-vaulted skylight soared more than a hundred feet above the floor.

Hutch’s hopes were also high that he’d find Starsky among the hundreds of passengers arriving from the West. For the first time in several days, he felt he’d gotten enough rest, had eaten better, and was fit mentally and physically to wait out the hours-long afternoon in the busiest train station outside of New York City.

Flashing his badge and a forced, warm smile at the young receptionist, Hutch was granted privileged access to the First Class passenger lounge to wait for inbound trains. There he found comfortable sofas at the rear of the spacious room and rested on the farthest one from the most commotion, soaking in the ambiance of quieter sounds, including the soft music from overhead speakers.

He didn’t sleep, but kept an ear on the P.A. announcements for departing and arriving trains, hoping he would get to embarrass Starsky by intercepting him in Chicago on his way to New York City.

Comfortably on his back, a bent knee against the sofa, his other foot on the floor, Hutch buried his closed eyes under his arm, and rewound his mind to the beginning, feeling mentally calm enough to revisit the facts. Perhaps there was something he’d missed, some little factoid he’d overlooked, a clue he might now use to zero in on Starsky’s whereabouts. He finally had time to think, having flown into Chicago the night before and spent a leisurely morning walking the streets of downtown Chicago.

Starsky was probably in L.A.

In these new musings, Hutch discovered he’d forgotten the Sunday morning phone call Starsky had made to Venice Place. Looking back on it, Hutch realized he’d been manipulated into staying away from Starsky’s apartment that day—obviously to give Starsky time to clear out without Hutch knowing he had.

“Nah, hey, man, I think I’m almost finished here,” Starsky had told him over the phone when Hutch offered to help him wrap up. There wasn’t even a hint in Starsky’s masculine voice that lent itself to his ulterior plans. “Not much point in you coming over. I was up all night filling boxes and they’re mostly good to go.”

When Hutch saw Starsky the night before, Starsky was preoccupied with his packing, listening to Hutch ramble on about their future plans while he wrapped his things in old newspapers, carefully placed them into cardboard boxes that they both had collected from the dumpsters behind the local K-Mart, and sealed them with the tape gun with such perfection one might suspect he had been a professional mover in another life.

Hutch sat on the sofa nearby, watching Starsky, and nursed a beer. Starsky’s ‘yeah’s and his ‘uh-huh’s were sometimes the only sounds he made that led Hutch to believe he’d been heard. But in hindsight, Starsky really wasn’t paying attention—because he had plans to vacate Hutch’s life the next day—forever.

“We can meet up for lunch,” Starsky suggested, purposefully steering Hutch in a different direction, “and then I can help you pack up what’s left at your place for tomorrow’s big move.”

Both of those suggestions were lies; Starsky had no intention of joining Hutch for lunch, let alone helping him pack. In fact, Starsky was long gone by lunchtime; his phone went unanswered for a couple of hours before Hutch finally drove over to Starsky’s apartment early that afternoon and found it empty.

Somewhere between Saturday night and Sunday noon, Starsky had pulled off his getaway. How much did he move out of the apartment the night before? Hutch suspected all along that Starsky couldn’t have done it alone: there was a sofa, bed, bookcase, wicker chair, and dresser that Starsky could never have moved on his own. Who helped him?

Hutch stumbled onto that answer after Huggy arrived Monday afternoon with Hutch’s belongings from Venice Place. Hutch helped him—and a couple of day laborers Huggy had hired—to unpack the U-Haul. Luckily, the new house was a single story and they didn’t have to maneuver a staircase for Hutch’s piano, making it much easier for the four men to get the job done quickly. After all was transferred, Hutch generously paid the young Hispanic hires with cash and then ordered a pizza to be delivered, inviting them to stay with further offerings of beer.

As he rummaged through boxes for plates and utensils, Hutch was awash again with the feeling he experienced when the U-Haul had pulled up to the house and the two movers emerged from the cab; Huggy pulled in behind them driving Hutch’s Galaxie. Together, the three helpers had expertly packed the truck; neatly stacked boxes—and a few stand-alone items—were professionally secured in the vehicle. Hutch was certain nothing was broken.

But there was one thing missing.

Everything in the U-Haul was his. None of it was Starsky’s. The plan had been to move both of them into the new house that day.

Hutch did his best during the hour it took to unload the van to not let his feelings of fear and anxiety show, though he suspected Huggy was aware of them. Despite offers to help him open and unpack the boxes or to rearrange the furniture afterward, Hutch declined. Settling into his new house was the last thing he cared about. The sooner he could get back to his search for Starsky, the calmer he’d feel. Or so he believed. But he was grateful for the pizza when it arrived—and the excuse to drown some of his sorrow in a couple of beers.

Although only one of the hired men spoke English, they thanked Huggy and Hutch more than once for the money and the food. “I promised them a full dinner at The Pits,” Huggy explained, leaning back in his chair at the small dining table and shrugging. “But I think they worked up an appetite and the pizza had perfect timing.”

“Where did you find these guys?” Hutch wondered. “You did such a good job,” he told the men, about packing the truck and handling his precious cargo. He looked back at Huggy for an answer.

“K-Mart,” Huggy said, as if it should have been obvious.

“A two-for-one sale?” Hutch weakly joked.

“They gather there in the parking lot first thing every morning,” Huggy explained. He looked as tired as Hutch felt—drooping eyes, slumped posture. He’d spent twice the physical exertion Hutch had. “They wait for cash-work for about an hour or so and usually get it,” Huggy furthered. “We were lucky these guys were still hanging around by the time I got there, but I’m surprised, my muchacho, that you don’t know how it’s done by now.”

Hutch had never needed day laborers before. Had he and Starsky missed opportunities for clues and leads by not knowing about a completely different culture of casual observers? He looked over at the men—both similar in appearance: strong Mexican features, dark eyes and hair, young, muscled, reserved—and felt the blood drain to his feet when the realization hit him and he stumbled to find his voice. “Did either of you move anyone yesterday?”

Bruno shook his head. “I was home with family,” he replied. He relayed the question to Luis in Spanish. They briefly conversed, and Bruno translated for Hutch. “Luis said he and a couple of guys packed somebody up yesterday morning, but they didn’t take the stuff to a different place.”

“They just loaded a truck?”

A few more words between Bruno and Luis, and Bruno told Hutch, “He says there were multiple trucks.”

Hutch pulled Starsky’s police I.D. from his back pocket and showed it to Luis. “Was it this man?” His heart beat faster and he felt sweat break over his skin. Would he get his first clue or be shoved back to Square One?

“Sí, Sí,” Luis quickly replied after briefly examining the small photo, but he also appeared immediately alarmed, too.

Hutch’s heart pounded and sank at once—first because he’d tripped over his first clue, and then because he understood the young man’s apprehension. “Tell him I’m not asking on official business,” he instructed Bruno. He didn’t want the implication of Starsky’s police authority to shape Luis’ answers.

“But ask him for all the details,” Huggy suggested. “Tell him not to leave anything out.”

Bruno and Luis conversed with mostly Luis talking; he glanced at Hutch and Huggy a few times as he spoke, and he seemed to leave no stone unturned. When Bruno translated for him, Hutch learned more than he expected.

As early as the previous Thursday, Starsky had hired Luis and several of his compatriots from the K-Mart parking lot. He took them to his apartment to show them what he wanted done: they were to arrive early Sunday morning and load everything that wasn’t already in boxes into whatever vehicles they could get the stuff into—and then keep it all as part of their compensation. They were given a downpayment in cash in a gentlemen’s agreement with a promise of more when the job was done. The catch was that they needed to get it all out of the apartment by 11 a.m.

Starsky also hired several housekeeping women from the group’s recommendations—provided they could clean the apartment to perfection before noon on Sunday. Starsky paid handsomely, Luis said; everyone was happy—and Starsky kept to his pledge to give them the contents of his apartment, sans the medium-sized boxes he’d taped shut and stacked near the door. Those, Luis added, Starsky loaded by himself into his car.

“A Ford,” Luis added, by way of translation. “Red with a white stripe. Same as you have in the driveway.”

Hutch felt flushed. Knowing the details of Starsky’s car was a confirming fact to proving Luis’ story. “Did he say where he was going?”

Bruno continued to translate, but the answers were the same words in English.

“No.”

“Did he say what he was going to do after he was done on Sunday?”

“No.”

“Do you know what time he left the apartment?”

“No.”

Hutch knew one thing: Starsky had obviously emptied those boxes out of his car before parking it at the airport. So what did he do with his personal possessions? He’d packed up his belongings, paid for help, got rid of almost everything, and moved his sentimental stuff—into storage, into a new place, or did he ship it home?

Hutch could at least take moving companies off of his list of places to call. He instead spent nearly all of Tuesday contacting storage businesses—knowing he only had to inquire about smaller units—and to scan the classifieds in search of recently hiring public service jobs of any kind he thought Starsky might be qualified to do.

But Hutch didn’t stop there. He also called police stations throughout Metro Los Angeles. He phoned private patrol companies. He placed calls to hotels, campgrounds, single rooms in homes, short- and long-stay apartments and lodges. He posed questions, and wrote down schedules, from just about every freight company in the area, too.

He even called a few of Starsky’s friends; albeit most of the people Starsky had befriended in the City of Angels were acquaintances more than they were compatriots. If Starsky was truly trying to elude Hutch—and apparently he was—he wouldn’t be stupid enough to rely on loosely defined friendships to keep his whereabouts a secret.

Neither Nick nor Starsky’s mother answered their phones that day, and Hutch didn’t leave another message on Nick’s answering machine. What was the point? He didn’t want to appear desperate, either. But the silence he heard was enough to make him suspicious; rather, he was beginning to believe Starsky had gone home. But what had he done with his things in the interim?

When Hutch tired of pressing the receiver to his ear, he drove instead: to familiar haunts, bus stations, markets and restaurants, and made the rounds again at the Los Angeles airport, broadening his flight searches to Van Nuys, Burbank, and Orange County air fields. He didn’t go home when all was done, parking instead at LAX and taking an early evening flight to Chicago—where he finally got some rest and food, despite his late arrival. But first he made the same rounds of airport terminals and boarding gates at Chicago O’Hare before he headed to the hotel for the night.

Hutch was no longer sure he’d missed any clue; he’d been relatively thorough in his search, so he was beginning to think he should seriously outline a fool-proof strategy should he not find Starsky in New York, assuming he wouldn’t find him first in Chicago. But Hutch’s assumption turned out to be a reality.

When he was called to the platform for the first arriving train from the West, Hutch soon learned that Starsky wasn’t on the Texas Eagle that afternoon; Hutch even walked through it just in case Starsky had stayed on board. Over the next few hours, Starsky didn’t step off the Southwest Chief or the California Zephyr, either. He wasn’t even on the long-shot Empire Builder out of Portland, Oregon.

Starsky was still one step ahead of Hutch—wherever he was. As Hutch watched the last of the passengers trail away toward baggage claim and exit doors, he paced in the hallway, snapping his fingers at his sides as if he could somehow summon answers in the repeated feel of their clicks. Disappointment was an understatement.

“Starsky,” he said aloud when the fear washed over him again, unheard in the noise around him. He stopped dead in his tracks and stared into no place. “Please don’t do this.” But there was no time to panic. Not yet. Hutch had a flight to book that night to New York City.

* * *

“Nick?”

“Hey, Hutch.”

Hutch had called Nick from his hotel room in Manhattan, not far from Brooklyn, and was actually surprised to get him on the phone after having failed a couple of times over the past few days. He sat on the edge of the king-sized bed, feet on the floor, elbows on his thighs, the receiver clutched tightly to his ear, and closed his eyes, bracing himself for further rejection.

But Nick sounded cheerful, not just apologetic. “I meant to get back to you sooner,” he quickly said. “I work an 11-7 night shift and my hours can get wonky sometimes. You caught me at a good time this morning. I’m about to go to bed.”

Hutch was relieved to hear he was welcome; Starsky hadn’t yet turned his brother against him or Nick would have immediately disconnected the line. “I won’t keep you then.”

“I assume you haven’t found David,” Nick said. He wasn’t displeased or annoyed. In fact, he chuckled, as if the entire Starsky and Hutch hide-and-seek game was amusing unto itself. “Davey is just that good, I guess.”

“I guess,” Hutch said with a sigh, mocking sarcasm. He didn’t want to let on that Starsky had left him, hoping to keep the line of communication open with Nick for as long as possible. “But have you heard from him?”

“Not a word,” Nick said. “Not in a couple of weeks anyway.”

“Would you tell me if you had?”

“I’d tell you if I had,” Nick promised, “but I won’t tell you where he is—if I ever know that. This game you guys are playing should be fair-and-square, don’t you think? Isn’t that what you both taught me in L.A.?”

Hutch had hit a dead end. He’d already called Mrs. Starsky that morning, hanging up after two long minutes when the line went unanswered—again. But it didn’t mean Starsky wasn’t in New York City. He may have been hiding for a few days, feeling his way around family before letting them know he’d left Los Angeles—and abandoned his partner in the leaving.

“Tell me about your night shift job,” Hutch said. He didn’t want Nick to think he was so desperate he only called to find Starsky—even though that’s exactly how it was. “It’s legit, I hope.”

Nick laughed. “As they come. I work for ‘The New York Times.’ Can you believe that?”

Hutch opened his eyes and blinked. “You’re a reporter?”

“Press room,” Nick clarified. “I help burn the plates and prep the runs. The paper has to be out before the crack of dawn every morning.”

Hutch was impressed. He vaguely recalled Starsky telling him how Nick had once spilled ink all over a printing press at an earlier job. It’s how Starsky figured out where Nick was when Frank Stryker had abducted him. “Your brother never told me you were lawfully employed.”

“He probably wanted to make sure it stuck first, and then forgot about it, but that’s okay, because I’m pretty happy these days.”

“How long have you been working for ‘The Times’?”

“About three months. I think this was the job meant for me.”

No doubt it was, Hutch mused; he could feel Nick’s enormous pride through the phone line. “We’re proud of you, too,” he sincerely said, speaking for an absent Starsky. “It’s a reputable firm and good for your resume.”

“I’m sure learning a lot,” Nick agreed. “I don’t have dreams of being a reporter, but I hope to work in the composing room someday. Ads and page production.”

“I have no doubt you will,” Hutch was certain. “You’re a smart guy.” He stared at the wall across from him, feeling suddenly lost again.

Nick broke into his thoughts. “Thanks. So … you’re still looking for Dave, hm?”

“He’s pulled a fast one this time around.”

“Are you asking me where he might be because you think he came home?”

Home. An interesting word—given that Starsky had lived in Los Angeles for the past two decades and that he was about to buy a house there up until a few days earlier. Did Nick use that word because he suspected something—or knew more than he’d let on? Or was Hutch being paranoid?

“I wouldn’t put it past him to leave California to win this thing,” Hutch pretended to assume. “He thinks he’s smarter than me.”

Nick laughed. “I’m not sure he’s that smart.”

“Could he be with your mom?” Hutch asked, fishing for reasons she hadn’t answered her phone.

“If he is, he’s in Florida.”

“Florida?”

“She went down there last week with Aunt Rose. They’re planning to move to Miami after the first of the year.”

“Tired of all that snow?”

“Yeah, I think she’s done with the weather here. She turns 60 in February and is feeling her age, she says.”

“And you?”

“Am I feeling my age?”

“Your mom’s going to be more than a thousand miles away.”

“She definitely picked the wrong time to leave me,” Nick laughed, playfully, as if he was hurt when he wasn’t. “But I’ll get to see her whenever I want to. I can jump on a plane and go down there on weekends, and she’ll come up here sometimes. She still wants to go to Broadway plays and touch base with civilization now and then.”

Without realizing it, Nick had given Hutch subtle clues. Hutch wasn’t sure what he could do with them, but every tidbit of information he could glean from anywhere had to be useful in the overall.

“How’s the commute from your apartment to your job?” he asked, fishing further. “Are you still living in Brooklyn? Doing the subway thing?”

Nick laughed again. “Yeah, doing the subway thing. It’s actually a good way to relax before and after work.”

“So? Brooklyn?”

“Yep, still around the corner from Mom. Maybe if I move up the ladder into composing, I can get a pad closer to ‘The Times.’”

“Ambition is a virtue.”

“Which is why I wish you luck in finding Davey,” Nick said, not sarcastically. “I still think he needs to get taken down a notch or two sometimes.”

“Maybe so,” Hutch said, reflecting on how and why that could be. He certainly hoped to get his hands on Starsky so he could set him straight. He was anxious even then to get back to his search. “Well, congratulations on the job, Nick, and thanks for taking my call.”

* * *

Hutch lay back on the bed, his feet on the floor, hands on his belly, and closed his eyes. His head spun, so he breathed deeply and hoped it would soon settle. It had been less than a week since Starsky left him, but it felt like an eternity. What clue had he missed? Where was his partner?

“I’ll tell you where I’m not,” Starsky said, sounding glib.

“Let me guess,” Hutch replied with a hint of sarcasm. “You’re going to tell me you’re not in New York.”

“Why would I be, hm?”

“Because it’s home.”

Silence answered him. Home was where their hearts were—together—but Starsky couldn’t say that anymore, so he obviously said nothing. Where was his home now?

“Los Angeles,” Starsky said, matter-of-factly. “The City of Angels and—given that I’m an angel—that’s where I am.”

Hutch grunted. “Leaving me isn’t an angelic thing to do, buddy boy.”

But where did that come from, Starsky being an angel? Hutch mulled it over, and then he knew. Starsky had been an innocent. It was Hutch’s fault Starsky had left him. All of it was Hutch’s fault. The only thing he blamed Starsky for was not going to the wall with him.

“You said your piece,” Starsky argued. “What was left to say? But that’s neither here nor there, you know? I mean, what’s important now is that you accept that I’m gone. You’re not going to find me.”

Hutch ignored Starsky’s attempt to derail him. “Why didn’t you tell me Nick is working for ‘The New York Times’? Seems important enough for you to have mentioned it.”

“I was busy.”

“Doing what?”

“Seducing you, I recall.”

It was more that Starsky was in recovery around the time Nick was hired by ‘The Times.’ He and Hutch were distracted. Nick often called during that time; he even came out to visit early on, but Starsky and Hutch were preoccupied with making Starsky well and walking again.

And, then, of course, there was the seduction. One preoccupation rolling into another.

“Hard to think about much else, right, Hutch? And did you see what I did with the word ‘hard’ there, hm?”

“Wise ass,” Hutch mumbled. He definitely needed to avoid that kind of thinking. He circled back to Square One. “Still in Los Angeles, huh?”

“The best weather in the country,” Starsky reminded him. “You know I hate the cold.”

“But I called every hotel and motel, every house and apartment for rent, every camp site.”

“Yeah. Two things then.”

“One?”

“I booked or rented something under a false I.D. Paid cash.”

“I thought of that. Two?”

“I’m not in L.A.”

“I thought of that … too.”

“I’m in Santa Barbara.”

“You can’t afford Santa Barbara.”

“I have money now.”

“Not since you sunk 150k on a house you walked away from.”

“I still have that much left over from my compensation.”

Hutch rubbed his eyes. He needed to think about whether Starsky would have moved to Santa Barbara; it seemed too elitist for his streetwise boyfriend. “Your money won’t last long there.” It was his only argument.

“Then Ventura,” Starsky countered him. “Or Oxnard. Maybe further away from the coast: Ojai.”

Hutch exhaled. California was an enormous state. Would he ever find his partner? Just the pleasant-weather spots by themselves would take a lifetime to search. He hadn’t even finished hunting his way through the broader L.A. area, let alone the San Fernando Valley to the north and Orange County to the south, and beyond.

“I probably went to San Diego,” Starsky concluded. “A good place to start one’s life over, don’t you think?”

“Will you stop baiting me? You can’t afford to live there, either. Not for long.”

“Oceanside. Long Beach. Sea-”

“Shut up.”

“My point, Big Boy, is there’s no sense in looking for me. It’s an impossible task. I left. Get on with your life.”

Hutch covered his face in his hands and pushed back on the emotion that welled in his chest when he said under his breath, “You are my life.”

But Starsky didn’t reprieve him. “Apparently I wasn’t as important to you as you pretended I was,” he said unkindly.

Hutch couldn’t think about what he’d done; it was too painful, but mostly his regrets would only be in the way of his finding Starsky. He had to keep his eyes on that prize before the trail went cold. So he fought back. “I found your car.”

“I told Dobey where it was, so I’m not impressed.”

“I found it before Dobey told me where to find it.”

That seemed to shut Starsky up for half a minute.

“I also learned how you packed up all your shit and got rid of it. I know not to look for moving companies or storage units anymore—not big ones, anyway.”

“I took everything that was important to me with me.”

“I called the police stations in Metro L.A., security guard services, Border Patrol, bodyguard agencies. You’d need I.D. to be hired.”

“I’m not looking for a job.”

“You’re at least looking for—or already found—a place to live.”

“Shelter from the storm.”

“So I know where you’re not,” Hutch said. “That’s progress.”

“Yeah? Where’s that?”

“You’re not in Chicago. You didn’t arrive there by train or plane.”

“Yet, you mean.”

“I’ve called the airlines and Amtrak every day since you left—from L.A. to Chicago to New York City—and they have no record of a Mr. David Starsky. You can’t fly without an I.D.”

“I can train without one, though.”

Hutch had obviously already considered that fact. Starsky could also have taken a bus somewhere. Or bought a new car—

Hutch opened his eyes with a start when he realized he’d discovered something he hadn’t before. He hadn’t yet hunted down car sales in the greater L.A. area. That was something he could do when he returned to California. And he could browse the classifieds again, searching rooms-for-rent, places that didn’t require a person’s identification to lease for a while.

“That would be some sleazy hole-in-the-wall,” Starsky observed. “Things aren’t so bad in my life that I’d resort to that kind of place.”

Hutch rolled to his side and slowly sat up. His head had stopped spinning, but his stomach felt queasy. Or he was hungry. He wasn’t sure which. Perhaps he should call up a Room Service breakfast.

“Seriously? Room Service?”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know if you’ve noticed this yet, pal, but you’re in the heart of Manhattan. Times Square, for chrissakes.”

“I’ve already been down there this morning. Not much to see.” He’d spent a good hour walking around, mostly feeling lost.

“Not much to see?” Starsky asked, incredulously, sounding as dismayed as he’d been when he learned Hutch had faked amnesia.

“Like I said, Starsk. Nothing to see. You were nowhere to be found.”

Another moment of silence passed. Maybe Starsky felt sorry enough for Hutch that he’d give him a verifiable clue to his whereabouts.

Instead, Starsky threw out a new rabbit trail for Hutch to follow. “I went back to Yosemite, this time with a tent.”

“Fat chance.”

“You don’t think I went camping to get away from it all for a while?”

“Bears, Starsk?”

“You said you looked at campsites in L.A.”

“Places you’d park an R.V.”

“Okay. But what I’m saying, Hutchinson, is that there’s a world of fine-dining restaurants within arm’s reach in the greatest city in the world and you’re thinking about ordering hotel food?”

That was probably a stupid idea, Hutch had to admit.

He looked around the empty room, noticing the standard hotel decor, bland art on the walls, a used coffeemaker on the desk, the open door to the bathroom. Maybe Starsky was right: he should go into the city and find something to eat. It might end his boredom, help to clear his head, and give him more leads.

“Well, I wasn’t suggesting that part, but nice try,” Starsky said with a chuckle. “I mean, you’re not going to find me, Hutch. Give it a rest and get yourself some pancakes.”

“I won’t stop looking.”

“You will. Someday.”

“How little you know me.”

“How little you know me. If you knew me so well, why are you here in New York City, hm?”

“I’m leaving no stone unturned.”

“Yeah, but … some stones should stay where they are, know what I mean?”

“Let me guess. You want me to leave New York—because you are here—and fly down to Florida instead.”

“Nah. I’m not there, either. Too muggy. Even worse than here. Besides … you’re not going to find my mother in Miami. She’s only visiting, looking at retirement places with Aunt Rose, probably staying with some friends. It’d be like finding a needle in a haystack.”

Hutch choked back his sudden anxiety. “Looking for you,” he realized aloud, “is like looking for a specific needle in a stack of needles.”

“My point exactly,” Starsky said, smugly. “So get some breakfast, Blondie, and go home.”

Hutch pushed off the mattress and walked around the bed to where the telephone was stored on the nightstand. He dialed an outside line and asked the operator to put him through to Trans World Airlines at the JFK International Airport. Before heading downstairs to the street to appease his gnawing stomach, he booked a flight the next night to Miami.

* * *

“It’s not the climbing up; it’s the falling down that worries me.”

Hutch remembered Starsky speaking those words when they were on a rooftop together, having climbed up the side of a building from an alley dumpster. His partner wouldn’t appreciate where Hutch was then: leaning on the protective rail that wrapped the outside observation deck of the World Trade Center’s South Tower.

Hutch could feel the ever-so-subtle sway of the super-structure, the high-up wind in his face, and the warming sun on his skin, as the bittersweet euphoria filled him—a top-of-the-world high that was marred only by Starsky’s absence.

“Don’t heights ever bother you?” Starsky asked, trailing behind Hutch on the flat roof.

How long had Starsky known Hutch before he realized Hutch didn’t have a fear of heights?

“Only when I can’t see down,” Hutch replied. He would never be able to explain height-fearlessness to a man who was worried by “the falling down.”

“Sometimes I think there’s something really wrong with the way you think,” Starsky abused him. He emphasized his dismay with a firm voice and a strong finger-point toward Hutch’s head.

“What’s wrong with the way I think?”

“Forget it. I don’t want to think about it.”

Hutch was sure Starsky didn’t want to think about it because he could never wrap his mind around such courage—especially the bravery Hutch summoned that very minute for himself: to be leaning on a rail nearly 1400 feet in the air overlooking New York City.

In the not-too-far distance, against a clear blue, late morning sky, the Empire State Building towered above the surrounding city skyline—and yet it was well below the Trade Center’s horizon. When he was a young boy, Hutch’s family had gone up into the iconic building for his very first panoramic sightseeing experience. They couldn’t imagine ever being higher than they were then. How things had changed in twenty-five years.

It was impossible to see New York’s streets at the base of the South Tower; they were blocked by the suicide prevention fence below the observation deck, but further out into the view, and Hutch immediately spied the familiar yellow cabs in their unending and furious race about the city—still appearing as ants in a tapestry of skyscrapers.

But why would anyone jump to their death from the top of a 110-story building? Why not just leap from 6 stories and end it sooner? He had to assume some people had done just that: jumped from the observation deck—or what other reason could there be to construct such a barrier? The fence was lined in razor wire atop a no-climb cement wall. It was serious about stopping a fall, and that alone would have given Starsky some sense of safety.

But Hutch had to catch himself. Was he feeling so desperate he had subconscious thoughts of suicide on his mind—or were his memories of Starsky’s fear of heights playing on his nerves? Would everything in the rest of his life remind him of that man?

He realized he had spent nearly ten years with Starsky on his brain: he awoke every morning and, even before coffee, would immediately begin wondering what his partner was up to; he looked forward to seeing him sooner-than-later in the squad room, and would drive to work while considering both his and Starsky’s perspectives on their always-shared cases. Before entering the police station, Hutch was already planning what they might eat for lunch or dinner, and where they could go after their shift was finished for the day. Did either of them have a date or would they get precious off-duty time together?

For almost a decade, Hutch’s mind was filled and preoccupied with his curly-haired partner—and he couldn’t imagine it being any other way, not even in the days and years to come, despite Starsky’s departure. Hutch would never stop thinking about him; his thoughts would simply be ones of Starsky’s whereabouts—because he wouldn’t rest until he found him. Hutch didn’t know much on that day, but he knew that.

He lifted his eyes from the morbid thoughts triggered by the suicide fence and scanned the horizon instead. It was a clear day and he could see for miles in every direction. He’d spent the morning aimlessly wandering the busy streets of Manhattan until, quite accidentally, he stumbled across the World Trade Center, having seen its imposing towers from blocks away before he realized where he was.

He rode the dedicated elevator to the 107th floor of the South Tower, a glass-enclosed viewing area for those not brave enough to go to the top, and then the two escalators from there to the observation deck after spending time browsing the souvenir and book shops, its restaurants and tourist exhibits—as well as the memorable view—before committing to going the rest of the way up.

Now he had a chance to send his mind beyond the physical place he was in and to realize how utterly large New York City and its surrounding areas actually were. After absorbing the view north of the Tower, he walked to the east side of the building and discovered the Manhattan and Brooklyn suspension bridges, their discernible spans crossing the East River, which was dotted in sightseeing ferries and day-trip boats, shuttling traffic to and from Manhattan into Brooklyn.

There were millions of people in that vast high-rise landscape: roughly twice as many as there were in all of Metro Los Angeles, so was Hutch crazy to think he could even remotely find a needle in a stack of needles?

He pushed off the rail for the second time, mostly to change his despairing thoughts, gave a nod to a security guard as he passed by him, and repositioned himself on the south side of the building, leaning against the light rail, that time to lay eyes on the Statue of Liberty. She was distinguishable at the edge of Ellis Island, cast against an ocean horizon, but still a miniature from where he stood. The utterly expansive perspective gave Hutch yet another sinking feeling of absolute insignificance—and took his heart down with it. Would he ever find Starsky?

“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

Hutch recalled those words from memory, using them to lift his dampening spirits, to remind himself that time would not stand still—and neither would he. The only way to find Starsky was to keep looking for him.

“I went on down to Bolivia.”

“Not without a passport, you didn’t,” Hutch told him. “Dobey double-checked that for me before I came out here. You never renewed your passport six months ago when I told you to.”

“Whatever.”

Hutch made the final loop around the building and looked across the Hudson River to New Jersey. “Two states you won’t be in,” he decided. “Too cold. In fact, I’m going to rule out the entire northeast corridor for just that reason.”

Wind tousled his hair and he used it for inspiration, as if the cosmos had sent him a message: to push on. “I’m ruling out Florida—hurricanes and alligators,” he continued, despite his flight to Miami, “and I sincerely believe you won’t take up housekeeping in the Deep South, either.”

Starsky didn’t confirm or deny.

Hutch added more states he didn’t think Starsky had fled to: Montana. Wyoming. The two Dakotas. Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. He took the Midwest off his search list, too: tornadoes and wheat fields weren’t his partner’s idea of home-sweet-home. Texas had to go, as well: despite their romp in the foothills north of Los Angeles where they went undercover to flesh out a moonshine operation, Starsky was not a redneck and, besides, Texas was as muggy and tornado-rattled as other parts of the south and Midwest.

On the list to leave no stone unturned: maybe New Mexico. Possibly Arizona. Nevada—near Reno; the rest of the state was too hot and desert-y for Starsky’s taste. Utah was majestic, but he couldn’t imagine Starsky doing more than visiting the national parks there and deciding he’d seen enough. But Salt Lake City—too religious? California? For sure. Both ends of it. Oregon, Washington, yes. Idaho? Who knows? Starsky wasn’t saying. Colorado?

And that’s when it hit Hutch: Colorado was beautiful; it was mostly mountains on one side, the plains on the other. They had history there, too. But most of all it had one major draw: Alec Henley. Why hadn’t Hutch considered that before? Starsky could easily have taken a bus or train to Denver, rented a car, driven up to the Hidden Valley Wildlife Center, and made Alec promise to keep his cover. Starsky would have a built-in boyfriend for his new life. Welcoming arms.

Feeling anxious and jealous, Hutch couldn’t leave the World Trade Center fast enough: he finally had someplace concrete to go. As he rode the 13-minute elevator ride down to the street, he stared at the floor numbers as they slowly ticked off, one-by-one, all the way to the ground.

“I’m sorry, Starsk,” he said in his head when the doors opened and he headed to the busy street. “But please don’t have gone where I think you did. I admit it: I made the wrong decision last week. What you don’t know is that I’ve since come to my senses. When are you going to come to yours?”

* * *

“Alec. It’s Hutch.”

“Hutch,” Alec said after a seemingly stunned pause; he sounded breathless and surprised at once. “To what do I owe this unexpected pleasure?”

Hutch sat at the edge of the mattress near the nightstand, his feet on the floor, the receiver pressed tightly to his right ear, and was relieved to have reached Alec. “I’ve misplaced Starsky,” Hutch told him. He bent over, his free arm propped on his thigh at the elbow, and dropped his face into his palm. He knew he’d just hit another dead end.

“You’ve misplaced him?”

Hutch honestly hoped Alec’s reaction had been different. He was so sure Alec would be cautious, on guard, a bit elusive—because he was keeping Starsky’s secret; more specifically, Alec was hiding Starsky at the sanctuary. But Alec’s breathless response to Hutch’s voice, and the surprise in his questions, told Hutch what he didn’t—in some ways—want to hear: Starsky wasn’t in Colorado.

“He disappeared,” Hutch clarified, impulsively, letting out a breath. There was no reason not to tell Alec the truth, but he couldn’t seem to find the specific words he needed, falling instead over his next ones. “I can’t find him.”

“He isn’t here.”

Hutch had already guessed that much. “But have you heard from him?”

“Not since you both called me more than a month ago.”

“Would you tell me if you heard from him?”

“I would.”

Could Hutch believe him? He wasn’t sure. Alec was fond of Starsky, after all.

But Alec apparently sensed Hutch’s uncertainty, because he quickly explained his position. “I won’t lie for either of you, especially against the other.”

Hutch remembered Alec telling them at the dinner table in that Italian restaurant in downtown Estes Park a month earlier that he was no liar. Hutch believed Alec was a man of his word then, so why would this instance be any different? Was Hutch that terrified of losing Starsky that he would second-guess Alec, a man he’d grown to respect and trust—and with whom he’d shared explicitly intimate experiences? Besides, if Hutch wasn’t mistaken, Alec had been more fond of him than he was of Hutch’s partner.

“I wouldn’t betray a trust,” Alec furthered. “I mean, I wouldn’t tell you what his thoughts or his feelings or his actions might be—if those were his wishes—any more than I would tell him yours if the tables were turned, but I would tell you if he was here and I would tell you if I heard from him. I’m not lying about this, Hutch. I’d say the same to Starsky if he was looking for you.”

Hutch was convinced. “Fair enough.”

“So you haven’t seen him—”

“Not since Sunday,” Hutch said—five days that felt like an eternity.

“—but I trust you’ve ruled out foul play.”

“We had a fight,” Hutch admitted, dropping his arm and falling to his back against the mattress; he held the phone to his belly, the receiver to his ear, and heavily exhaled. The air had been knocked out of him all over again by the reality of Starsky’s leaving, and he struggled to remember the rest of Starsky’s actions as he stared blankly at the ceiling. “He secretly packed up his shit and vacated his apartment. Then he quit his job, forfeited his investment in the new house we bought together, and signed off on his car—which he abandoned at the airport.”

“Shit.”

Hutch closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead to ease the sudden pain—as if he could get rid of it and his broken heart at the same time. “But he didn’t take a plane anywhere—at least not yet; not as far as I can tell.”

“I’m sorry, Hutch.”

“I know I did wrong,” Hutch confessed, overwhelmed by his guilt. “He had every right to leave me. I just didn’t think he would. I thought we could withstand anything…” His voice trailed away in his deep exhale. Who was he kidding? He asked way too much of Starsky. “I dismissed him … it was wrong of me … if I could just talk to him … maybe I can fix it.”

“Wherever he is, Hutch, you have to know he’s heartbroken. He didn’t leave without a care in the world. You guys were everything to each other. So maybe he just needs time to figure things out—and he’ll eventually come home.”

Hutch bit down on the shame he felt for the hurt he’d caused. He didn’t care if he sobbed; Alec would have understood. But he needed to stay the course: keep his focus on the search and not be sidetracked by his always-present desperation, his well-deserved remorse, and that ever-growing fear.

“If I see or hear from him,” Alec added after a moment of silence, “the first thing I’ll tell him is that I promised you I’d let you know he and I were in touch.”

“Thank you,” Hutch replied, his voice emotionally breaking between words. “I just need five minutes with him. That’s all. Just five minutes.”

“If he does show himself, would you like me to pass on a message?”

“I figured out what I’d done wrong two hours before he left me,” Hutch recalled, feeling the urgency to intercept Starsky wherever he was while he continued to push back against the compelling urge to break down and cry. “He won’t believe that I came to my epiphany when I did; he’ll think I’m just trying to get him back and my apology will mean nothing. He’ll never trust me. Why should he?”

“Because you have a profound history together and an even deeper love for each other.”

Did they? “I need to see him—and he needs to see me—when I tell him what he needs to know. All I have is my word. If that’s no longer good, then … I guess we really are done … and I’ll leave him alone after that.”

“I understand,” Alec said. “If I hear from him, I’ll tell him you need five minutes—in person. And if he comes home, let me know? I’d hate to think you guys were apart when you weren’t.”

“I’ll send up a flare.”

“Call if you need me, Hutch. I’m always here for you.”

“Thank you, buddy.”

After Hutch said goodbye to Alec, he set the receiver in its cradle, rolled to his side, closed his eyes, and hugged the phone to his chest. He could cry himself to sleep, but he had no time for that. The longer Starsky was gone, the harder he’d be to find.

“Starsk?”

“Hm?”

“I didn’t mean to hurt you. You have to know that’s the last thing I wanted.”

They sat in a booth across from each other in a restaurant on Olympic Blvd., shared a medium-sized pizza and drank a couple of beers, and debated the delicate situation they were in from every angle Hutch could think to challenge it. But he met with Starsky’s unwavering resistance, his every reply a pushback, some of it sarcastic, maybe even hostile, and—when Starsky didn’t actually speak—his straight-faced expressions spoke louder than words. He wasn’t forgiving.

“You can’t be serious about this,” Starsky growled, putting down his beer as if he didn’t plan to finish it, and making determined eye contact. “I mean, this can’t possibly be your solution.”

“Do you have a better idea?” Hutch flippantly asked, tossing a Parmesan cheese packet at Starsky to force the perplexed look off his face. It didn’t work. But why should it? Hutch could hear himself and he was dismayed by his own arguments. Even as he laid out the plan, he couldn’t believe what he was doing.

Starsky was on fire, seething perhaps. Primal in that moment. His dark wavy hair, a bit unkempt, curls peeking over the collar of his red crewneck tee-shirt, and those blue eyes—darker than usual, under a creased brow—told Hutch he was all-male and he should not be trifled with, not even by his partner.

But then Starsky grimaced—an upturn in the corner of his mouth, that crooked smile dissolving into a frown, and a roll of his fierce blue eyes as they softened. He looked tired; they’d spent the week embroiled in a complicated situation—and spent days packing up their belongings, signing paperwork, meeting with the realtor, transferring bank funds, all to buy that new house, and begin their lives together in earnest.

But, looking back, Hutch now realized Starsky was much more than tired: he was defeated. There in that pizza parlor on that specific day—Wednesday, was it?—Starsky gave in. He had nothing left to argue. He wasn’t acquiescing; he was busy leaving.

Hutch had made his case, said all he could think to say, and Starsky seemed to agree; he had no other ideas, not even after Hutch asked him for one. In that fatal moment, Hutch read Starsky’s surrender to mean, “Okay. I don’t like it, Hutch, but I can live with it.” In fact, Starsky’s self-defensive smirk had actually meant, “I don’t like it, Hutch, so I’m out of here first chance I get.” Wasn’t that the gist of his goodbye message? He was gone inside of five days, pretending all along that he had accepted the new direction of their lives. And Hutch was none the wiser, so he never saw it coming.

“You misread me, too, Starsk.”

Hutch opened his eyes and stared at the wall. He was at it again: trying to justify his unjustifiable position.

“I really was asking you if you had a better idea,” Hutch insisted, hoping to push him out of the silence. “Maybe we can still fix this for us.”

But there was no reply. All Hutch heard was:

The air conditioner hum. The chime of the arriving elevator. Muffled voices outside the door, fading away down the hallway.

Starsky had no intention of sticking around for Hutch’s pleas. They were too little, too late. Hutch had broken him. He was done.

* * *

“The New York Times. How may I direct your call?”

“David Starsky, please.”

It was a long shot, but Hutch would leave no stone unturned. It was possible Nick had helped to get Starsky a job in the press room. But when the receptionist returned to the line, she informed Hutch that there was no David Starsky working for ‘The Times.’

“Sorry about that,” he quickly said, feigning embarrassment. “I meant Nick Starsky.”

“Nick reports to work at 11 PM tonight,” the sweet female voice told him, seeming relieved to learn the call was legitimate. “Would you like me to take a message?”

“Thanks, anyway. I’ll try him at home.”

Another fact Hutch could add to his list of facts: Nick did, indeed, work for ‘The New York Times.’ At least Miss Sweet Voice had told him so.

After using the toilet, he packed the few things he’d brought with him to Chicago and New York—all in the backpack he and Starsky had used in Colorado for a few days—and checked out of the hotel before he headed to the street with his belongings slung over his shoulder. He bought a copy of ‘The Times’ at a newsstand on a brief walk to a side street off Broadway, and soon found a sidewalk cafe.

It was a beautiful afternoon—clear blue skies, a comfortable temperature, low humidity, and a rather quiet ambiance in the air. The city would seriously come to life by evening, so he took advantage of the early daytime to relax with a beer, a sandwich, a small side salad, and a newspaper. While he ate, he also watched the passersby and the hurrying traffic, and sent his mind out on occasion into the cosmos as he contemplated Starsky’s whereabouts. Hutch hadn’t come to New York just to make phone calls that he could have made from home.

“Are you a tourist on your own?” the waitress asked him when she brought him the piece of apple pie he’d ordered for dessert. “Or did you recently move into the neighborhood?”

He looked up at her, forced a shy smile, and shrugged, using that pause to come up with an answer. “Just visiting some friends and seeing the sights on my way to Miami.” He noticed her name tag: Sheila.

She was pretty, probably in her late twenties/early thirties, with a slim shape, large blue eyes, medium-sized breasts, and dressed in a waitress’ uniform, no engagement or wedding ring, and her long blonde hair pulled into a ponytail. He briefly pictured her in casual clothes with her locks let loose, and only then noticed how patiently she waited on his reply to her question. Was she hitting on him?

“I see you’re not married,” she coyly noted, obviously spying his ring-free fingers, and not waiting for him to answer, “so, if you’re alone and want a tour of the city this evening, I’m off work at five. I know my way around New York fairly well.”

He chuckled as he thought to himself that Sheila probably knew her way around a lot more than that, and he no longer needed to wonder about her motivation; she was definitely engaging him. “Unfortunately,” he lied, “I’ll be on my way to Miami by then.”

She frowned. “A girl can dream,” she lamented, “but if you change your mind, the offer still stands.”

After he thanked her and she left him to his dessert, he realized how easily he’d just been handed a sure thing; all he had to do was show up and ask for ‘directions.’ Besides, a little sex might help to clear his head. It wasn’t too late to reconsider. When was the last time he’d enjoyed the pleasures of the flesh?

“I tried for a good come,” Hutch silently told Starsky as he watched an iconic yellow cab drop an exuberant family of tourists at the curb. “You turned me down,” he accusingly remembered. Looking back, he was certain that Starsky hadn’t told him the truth about his reasons.

“I meant it,” Starsky argued. “I was tired.”

“Three nights in a row?” Hutch snapped at him. “Nah. The truth is, you had already dismissed me, and I was too blind—and trusting—to see it.”

Starsky had been his usual self, albeit focused on packing up his belongings to ready for the Monday move. It was only natural that he’d be preoccupied, maybe even tired, but in hindsight, he was preparing to leave Hutch—and abandoning the rest of his known life at the same time. His playful demeanor had been a facade.

“You finally got your wish,” Hutch noted. He stood on one side of the bed and eyed Starsky with a mischievous intent. The man was all the more appetizing in his worn jeans and his red tee-shirt; the contrast brought out the blue in Starsky’s eyes. He looked disheveled on that day, too—as if he hadn’t combed his hair or shaved. There was an unusually primal vibe exuding from his pores, a manliness Hutch felt he lacked himself. Starsky would always visually turn him on just by his very presence. That the man was an uninhibited lover was purely icing on a cake.

“You wanted a bigger bed to play on,” Hutch added. “Let’s get to it.” He sensed Starsky’s sudden hesitation, but didn’t understand it. “I don’t care if you’re a sweaty mess, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

They’d just finished assembling the bed’s frame and positioning both the box springs and the mattress on top of its metal slats. Having purchased the king-sized mattress earlier that day, and just having had it delivered to the new house that afternoon, Hutch was anxious to break it in.

“Imagine that,” Starsky said, standing with his hands on his hips and beaming as he studied the unmade bed, but still not budging. “We’re not going to get to use it every day,” he reminded Hutch with a light laugh. Or was it a sad one? “Are you good with that?”

Hutch didn’t want to be derailed, so he shrugged off Starsky’s complaint. “We’re here now, so what are we waiting for?”

“It’s missing some things, you know.”

“Us, for starters,” Hutch observed, climbing onto the mattress and patting a spot for Starsky to join him. Hutch should be the one to ignite their passion since he apparently was the one wanting it more than Starsky seemed to. “But now it’s only missing you.”

“It needs sheets,” Starsky pointed out, as if Hutch hadn’t noticed. “And at least one blanket.”

“We can warm it up without those things.”

“Pillows, too,” Starsky continued. “With pillowcases.”

Hutch frowned at him. “You can’t be serious, buddy. We can play on the bed without needing to make it first.”

“A mattress cover,” Starsky concluded. He dropped his arms to his sides and turned away to leave the room. “What do they call those things, Hutch? Bedroom sets or something?”

“Where are you going?”

“To a store to get bed stuff,” Starsky quipped. He paused in the doorway and looked back at Hutch. “I’ll make you a deal, horn dog. I’ll get us some bed things and you get us some dinner. We can meet back here in about an hour or so?”

“Or so?”

Hutch wanted to enjoy Starsky right then, not later—or right then and later, if it were up to him.

“We can get everything ready, Hutch,” Starsky explained. “Make the bed, have dinner, watch some TV, and then … you know.”

At least the ‘you know’ was still on the table, so Hutch surrendered, despite his disappointment. “What are you in the mood for?”

“Chinese,” Starsky replied, disappearing down the hall. “Keep it simple.”

It turned out that Chinese food was the only thing Starsky was in the mood for that night. When he returned to the house with the promised sheets, blanket, pillows, mattress cover—and even some basic groceries—he helped to make the bed all right, but it wasn’t enough to reorder his earlier listed priorities. He definitely wanted dinner first. “While it’s still hot,” he explained. Together they ate Chinese food in the kitchen standing at the counter—because they didn’t yet have chairs or a dining table—drank beer, and talked briefly about the move, among other topics of little importance.

After they trashed the empty food boxes and plastic utensils and put away the few leftovers into the new refrigerator they’d had delivered the day before, they walked through the house and discussed what furniture should go where and why. There was little debate, and Hutch was pleased—and believed Starsky was, too—that they were of one mind on how to set up their new house.

“But you never planned to move anything in,” Hutch recalled in context. The bed, the refrigerator, the TV, and some kitchen stuff. “You were just keeping up appearances.” Hutch slowly ate the apple pie and drank coffee while he watched tourists and reflected over the past week. How could he have been so stupid? “You spent all that time eluding me.”

“I was tired.”

“You were faking tired.”

“We’d been running around all day,” Starsky reminded him. “Your place. My place. The new house. Back and forth. Errands thrown into the mix.”

“I did all of those things, too, and still had energy to burn.”

“Yeah, but by the time we got to bed, I was so relaxed that I was out like a light.”

“Not true,” Hutch countered him. “We watched a movie.”

“Oh, yeah,” Starsky remembered. “‘Superman.’”

“On our brand new VCR, no less.”

“I couldn’t help falling asleep at the end of it.”

“You mean, you faked falling asleep at the end of it, so you could avoid having sex with me. Nobody falls asleep in an action-packed movie like that one.”

Hutch would never forget how excited he felt to see their new bed all made up with sheets and blanket and pillows, and to have surprised Starsky before dinner with a housewarming gift of a VCR and the ‘Superman’ movie on VHS; Hutch was sure Starsky would be so thrilled to see the Man of Steel that he’d want to prove he was as virile. They sat against the headboard, naked, with just beer bottles in their hands, and watched the film. Hutch should have noticed sooner that Starsky was slipping away. He was asleep just minutes before Superman could save the day.

“It was a long movie, Hutch. I was tired.”

“You were out of bed the next morning before the sun came up.”

“Because I fell asleep so early.”

“You didn’t think to wake me up for some rock and roll.”

“Because you needed your beauty sleep. I decided to make you breakfast instead.”

“I would rather have had the climax over the cereal.”

Starsky had apparently found the box of kitchenware that Hutch had brought over the night before, but never emptied. His partner had put everything away into the proper cabinets and drawers and set the breakfast table, too. But not once did Starsky return to the room to see whether Hutch was awake and to do with each other what they both seemed to love doing with each other.

“Like I said, Hutch. I fell asleep early and woke up early. Simple as that. Stop turning it into something it wasn’t.”

“I’ll tell you what it wasn’t. It wasn’t your usual behavior, Starsk. You’re as horny as I am. In fact, you might even be needier than me. But you had me believing it was sweet, you playing the housewife, having breakfast ready by the time I crawled out of bed. I just didn’t realize that your generosity was yet another ploy to keep me at arms’ length.”

“I was hungry, too.”

“Are you hearing me? I wanted sex, pal, and you knew it.”

“We had a lot to get done to be moved. No time to waste.”

“Fifteen minutes wouldn’t have made a difference.”

“Whatever,” Starsky mumbled, sounding annoyed and finished with the losing end of the conversation.

“I could believe you,” Hutch continued, “if you hadn’t moved out of my life on Sunday. But it doesn’t matter; in retrospect, everything you said and did last week was a ruse to push me off so you could make a clean getaway.”

Starsky had left the house right after breakfast Friday morning ‘to get moving on moving,’ despite Hutch’s apparent plea for intimacy, and forced Hutch to clean up the dishes on his own. But he kept in touch with Starsky throughout the day while he himself packed up clothes and books and record albums at Venice Place, occasionally checking in with his partner to evaluate the situation: did Starsky need help packing? No. Did he want to have lunch together? No. He said it would only slow him down. Were they going to sleep at the new house again that night? Sure, Starsky said, sounding like he really wanted to.

So Hutch brought burgers and fries—and more beer—to the house, and Starsky showed up with ice cream. He first helped Hutch unpack Hutch’s car, especially of his potted plants; they set most of them out on the patio and a few of them on the kitchen windowsill.

“Why didn’t you bring anything over?” Hutch asked when he noticed Starsky’s empty Torino. “You came all this way from your place and didn’t think to fill the trunk—the back seat, at least?”

“Oops,” Starsky said with a silly grin, pretending to only then notice he hadn’t packed the vehicle with any of his things. “I didn’t think of that. I figured we would get it all on Monday.”

“You’re full of shit, you know,” Hutch said, matter-of-factly. He finished his lunch in the Times Square cafe and allowed his anger to subside before he pushed on in his argument. “You acted like your usual self—affable and eager—but you arrived that night already planning to avoid me.”

“I don’t know what affable is, but if it’s a positive thing, then, yeah, I was excited about spending the night there and playing around on the big bed with you. You forget we did that.”

“I remember it differently.”

They ate again at the kitchen counter, refreshed themselves afterward in the bathrooms—Starsky in the master, Hutch in the guest, separately for expeditious reasons—and then arrived in the bedroom, first Hutch, then his partner. That time, they didn’t turn on the television, but undressed and climbed into bed. Hutch was already feeling excited; he had an emerging erection when he snuggled up against Starsky, heightened after he slipped his arm around Starsky’s naked waist and felt his warm flesh. He pressed his blood-filling penis to Starsky’s bare thigh and enjoyed the thrill it gave him.

“Did you get a lot done today?” Hutch asked, gently kissing Starsky’s shoulder. He didn’t really care about the answer, focusing more on the orgasmic pleasure he anticipated, but he didn’t want to appear overly excited and needy, either, fearing Starsky would think his desire had everything to do with sex and nothing to do with wanting to absolve his guilt over their recent debate about the upcoming living arrangements.

Starsky lay on his back against the pillows at the headboard and heavily sighed, as if he relaxed for the first time in as many days himself. “I opened a new bank account,” he said, his voice low and reflective. “What a pain in the ass that was. It took time away from my other stuff, too.”

“I thought we weren’t going to do that kind of thing—transfer banks and phones—until after the move.” They already had a new line activated at the house, but planned to use it for business, and to keep their private lines for themselves, not yet installed.

“I had to go out and get more packing tape,” Starsky explained. He stroked Hutch’s forearm while he spoke, but it lacked sexual intent. He seemed content just to be with Hutch. “So I figured I’d do the bank thing while I was at it.”

“Because packing tape and banking have so much in common,” Hutch dryly noted. He tickled Starsky’s belly to get the reaction he expected and, on cue, Starsky slapped his hand. “You noticed my fingers,” Hutch joked, “but seem to be ignoring my dick.”

Since they’d begun having sex with each other, their routine to pleasure themselves was usually twice a day—first thing in the morning and the last thing at night. Although Hutch didn’t think Starsky was having second thoughts about their sex, he was disappointed that Starsky wasn’t as aroused and wanting as Hutch was that night, and that Starsky seemed to prefer simply being together to playing around.

So Hutch paced himself by taking a moment to appreciate the blue in Starsky’s eyes and to finally listen to his partner. “You changed banks and stocked up on packing tape; did I hear you right?” Starsky didn’t make the eye contact Hutch had hoped for so he pushed him with a playful observation. “That’s a lot to do in one day. Visit a bank. Buy some tape.”

“I got ice cream while I was out, too,” Starsky reminded him, obviously dismissing the barb. “Went home, put it in the freezer, and did some more organizing. I was in such a rush to get here tonight that I almost forgot to bring it with me to the house.”

Starsky’s loss had he forgotten to bring the ice cream, Hutch silently decided; he’d never been all that into ice cream, certainly not to the degree that Starsky was. “The point is that you were productive today,” he concluded, giving Starsky what he wanted: praise for his efforts. Hutch wasn’t sure he’d accomplished as much as he should have by end of day, but then Hutch had until Monday to finish the last of his packing; unbeknownst to him, Starsky’s deadline was Sunday morning.

“Did you remember to bring the almond oil?” Starsky asked, looking about the room as if he’d spy it in plain sight from his pillow, and despite that the room was empty—sans the bed, a TV against the opposite wall, and a VCR propped beside it on a cardboard box. “I mean, you didn’t forget that little gem, did ya, hm?”

“That won’t stop us,” Hutch promised, rising to his elbow to kiss Starsky’s lips, to feel the warmth of his partner’s skin fully at his own. His arousal deepened from the touch, more fervently than earlier, further hardening his penis, and he was immensely grateful for permission to proceed. When they broke apart after a minute of kissing, sucking tongues, and audible breathing, Hutch playfully concluded, “We’ll just have to do this the old-fashioned way.” He trailed soft, wet kisses from Starsky’s nipples to his navel.

Hutch stared across the street to a couple of souvenir shops. “But why didn’t you think to bring the oil yourself, Starsk?”

“Why me?”

“You’re the one who was missing it. It’s not like we needed a lubricant. There’s always spit, you know.”

“But it’s nice to have, isn’t it?”

“Well, yeah, but … you’re trying to cover up the fact that you didn’t have any plans to have sex with me Friday night, despite giving me a green light. You got out of it Thursday by falling asleep during ‘Superman,’ and you found a way out of it—”

“I told you why I did. I was tired.”

“I’m not buying any of this.”

Hutch had admittedly bought it at the time. He believed Starsky wanted sex Friday night when Hutch trailed kisses over Starsky’s quivering skin because Hutch heard him abruptly inhale the moment Hutch’s wet mouth met the tip of Starsky’s engorging penis.

There was no way Starsky faked pleasure. His fingers were immediately entangled in Hutch’s hair. He audibly moaned while his breath deepened and accelerated, his belly heaved, and he pushed his pelvis forward to encourage Hutch to take him deeper.

It had been days since Hutch had enjoyed the pleasure of pleasing Starsky—coupled with the promise of experiencing the same orgasmic bliss as his partner would. They’d hit a rather rough patch, debated and argued over the new house rules for hours, and redefined their lives, so it was understandable that Starsky—and, to a lesser degree, Hutch, too—had little interest in having sex during that time, despite that nothing else had ever stopped them from such enjoyment before. Both of them had been very disappointed for some of the same reasons, and for different ones, but Hutch believed he’d found a compromise—one Starsky had seemed to agree to—until that Sunday afternoon.

“You lied about it being okay,” Hutch grumbled. He shoved his empty dessert plate away on the table and sat back in his chair. It was impossible to enjoy anything: not apple pie, not New York City, not the beautiful weather. “You looked me in the eye and said all was fine when obviously it wasn’t.”

Starsky pushed back. “I can’t believe you thought your solution was a good one.”

“Well, no, it wasn’t ideal—but we agreed to do what needed to be done, except you didn’t agree to anything, despite saying you did.”

“Whatever,” Starsky mumbled again. When he was losing an argument, he simply gave up listening, too.

Hutch immediately noticed the moment when Starsky’s grip in his hair loosened; he felt the subtle disengagement first, the release in tension, causing him to skip a beat in the rhythmic cadence he provided Starsky’s stiffened shaft with his wet lips and saliva and pre-cum lubricated fingers. Before Hutch could even open his eyes to investigate, he suddenly felt Starsky’s erection lose its tumescence. When he looked at Starsky, up over his hairy belly and chest to the underside of his chin, Hutch discovered that Starsky had—yet again—fallen asleep.

“You faked that with such perfection, I fell for it hook, line, and sinker,” Hutch said with a hint of snarl. “You let me get that far and then found a way out of it.”

“You really think I was that good of an actor?”

“Weren’t you? What man falls asleep in the middle of a blow job?”

“A tired one.”

“Not even a tired one.”

“A lot had gone down that week, Hutch. I was emotionally drained, you know.”

Maybe he was. Hutch was willing to reconsider his position. He didn’t want to believe Starsky had played him for a fool for several days, but there was other evidence in the mix to convince him.

“Oh, yeah?” Starsky asked. “Like what?”

“Like … you left me … and I didn’t see it coming. Obviously, I was an idiot.”

Saturday night hadn’t been any different, either—Starsky found a more clever way out of engaging intimately with Hutch. He insisted he was behind in packing and ‘on a roll’ so Hutch should tend to his own duties and leave Starsky to his so they would be on time for the moving van. Hutch spent the evening at Starsky’s apartment, offering to assist, but was relegated to just watching Starsky pack his things. Starsky then convinced Hutch to spend the night apart so they could hit the ground running Sunday morning.

Hutch realized another way he’d been fooled. “You didn’t want my help because you had to be careful about what you boxed up and how: separating what you were going to keep from what you were going to give away.”

“That was another reason I was so tired. I had to get out of town with my sanity intact in order to save myself.”

“You didn’t have to leave me, Starsk. I could’ve saved you—and us—if you would have hung around another couple of hours.”

“Excuse me, sir?”

It was Sheila breaking into his thoughts. She stood beside his table as if she’d been there for half a minute and finally got his attention. “Is there anything else I can get for you?”

“No,” he quickly said, forcing a smile to show his appreciation for her attentiveness. “Besides, I should get going. Lots to do and little time.” He reached for his wallet while she tallied his food ticket and set it on the table.

“If you change your mind about going to Miami, I’m here until five.”

He winked at her. “You flatter me.”

“You’re a beautiful man who seems a bit sad. I lost my brother to a skiing accident last month, so I thought maybe we could cheer each other up.”

“I’m sorry for your loss,” he replied with sincerity as he pulled $20 from his billfold. He didn’t dare tell her he’d lost someone dear to him, too, or he might break down in sobs right there on a public street and succumb to her wishes. “If I had my way, and in another life,” he added, “you wouldn’t need to be cheered up.” And neither would he.

She thanked him for his kindness and picked up the money. Neither of them spoke for a moment while they held eye contact. Maybe she had the right idea—immerse himself in the Big Apple’s icons and follow it up with a night of good hard fucking—but he was in no mood.

“You wouldn’t happen to know where I can buy a watch,” he wondered. He hadn’t come all that way to New York City just to make phone calls, eat apple pie, and be hit on by a pretty young woman.

“Every other store on Broadway is a watch store,” she pointed out with a light laugh. “It is ‘Times’ Square, after all.”

* * *

“Nice watch.”

“You like it?”

Hutch had just glanced at the time, angling the new watch on his left wrist in the sunlight to see its hands better, and noticed its polished shine.

“But it’s not like you to spend so much on one,” Starsky accusingly noted.

That was true. “It’s a Yamamoto Reflex with a platinum band.”

“I’m not an idiot, Hutch. I know what it is.”

“I took your advice,” Hutch replied, ignoring Starsky’s snideness while he defended the amount of money he’d spent on the watch. He’d also bought a black-and-white New York Yankees baseball cap at a souvenir shop to complete his disguise and, coupled with his backpack as if he were just passing through the neighborhood—or was simply a New York City tourist—he felt unnoticeable as he sat on a bench in Prospect Park, just blocks from Nick’s apartment.

“I know what you’re doing, Hutch.”

“Stalking you?”

“I mean, about the watch.”

“How’s that?”

“You think you’ll get a chance to give that to me.”

Starsky had given him his brand new Yamamoto watch while they were trapped in a barn during a shootout. Starsky was wounded and afraid he might die, so he gave Hutch his coveted watch—as if they were boots from a cowboy movie.

“All right,” Hutch had told him, reluctantly accepting the poignant token while he was busy trying to jumpstart the tractor in order to escape their deadly predicament, “but you get it back as soon as we get out of here.”

He ended up using the watch’s alarm as a decoy to distract one of the shooters and it was destroyed in the ensuing exchange of bullets.

“I do owe you one,” he said, circling back to Starsky’s supposition that they would see each other again, “and I’m not a man to go back on my word.” He watched a woman—possibly old enough to be his mother—walking her little cat-sized dog at the end of a leash along a nearby path. A mutt, maybe—or one of those highfalutin’ yappy breeds whose names he could never pronounce. He preferred large dogs, like German Shepherds and Rottweilers.

“Yeah, about that,” Starsky snarled. “You wouldn’t take my watch at first because you said you wouldn’t know how to ‘operate it,’ but then you set the alarm.”

“That much I know about a watch.”

“Uh-huh.”

“When I see you, Starsk, you can have this one and I’ll have fulfilled a promise, okay? Maybe it’ll still be brand new at the time.”

“That’s why you’re in Brooklyn. You don’t believe my brother when he says he hasn’t heard from me.”

“Since when did either of us take anybody’s word for proof?”

“We take the word of witnesses all the time.”

“Not when the stakes are this high.”

Starsky didn’t respond, so Hutch turned his attention then to his immediate surroundings. It was a beautiful late afternoon with no breeze, but Prospect Park wasn’t as ambitious as its name implied. It seemed rather neglected—uneven gravel pathways, bushes and trees in desperate need of water, barren patches of dirt where grass should be—despite that there was a public zoo and a meandering creek inside its perimeter.

A group of young volunteers, however, were busy raising awareness and funds to develop the park’s grounds into a more pleasant experience, so he imagined they would eventually succeed. Their booth, not far from where he sat, was well-attended by the day’s park-goers. Unfortunately, he didn’t have enough loose cash on him to make a donation.

“This place is where I grew up, playing cowboys and Indians,” Starsky said.

“Let me guess. You were a sheriff.”

“And the Indians would shoot at us from up in the trees.”

Hutch glanced around, stretching his legs out in front of him and his arms along the bench’s back. “I see some nice rock groupings over there,” he noticed. He might need one to sleep behind. Maybe he’d get lucky and find a big boulder that wasn’t near a lamppost.

“You’re not going to spend the night in the park,” Starsky warned him. “Get a hotel.”

“Why spend the money?”

“You spent a boatload on a watch!”

“I’m doing this my way, buddy. Get used to it.”

Hutch had already been to Nick’s apartment—at least to 2nd Street to walk past his place. He noticed that the drapes were closed; Nick was probably still asleep; and he visited Dorothy’s apartment around the corner on 1st Street. Her drapes were closed, too, which did add credence to the possibility that she’d gone to Miami—that, and the airline had confirmed her trip to Florida some days earlier.

“But that’s not enough to convince you I’m not in New York, hm? Don’t you think the curtains would be open if I was staying with Nick—even if he was asleep?”

“Maybe you’re with your mother,” Hutch reluctantly supposed, “or a hotel under an assumed name—and your brother is lying.” He didn’t think Nick had lied to him; he sounded way too sincere and he was no actor. “Still … I need to see these things with my own eyes,” Hutch explained with a sigh, knowing Starsky would appreciate his reasons.

When Starsky didn’t answer him, Hutch spent a minute watching a middle-aged male jogger in tee and shorts approach, nodded a mutual hello as the man passed, and was reminded of the times he and Starsky jogged together in the park. Those days couldn’t possibly be over.

“What’s it gonna take, Hutch? How much more evidence do you need that I’m gone?”

“A lot more than I already have.”

He planned to wait until closer to Nick’s evening to return to his apartment—looking for clues that Starsky might be in the area. Maybe the brothers would share dinner before Nick took off for work. Hutch would be on guard for a decoy or disguise, but Starsky would never be able to hide his beautiful face, not even with hair—fake or otherwise. Oh, and those blue eyes—

“I must not have been that pretty, Hutch, or you’d have chosen me when you were given a choice.”

“Stop it, Starsk.”

“It’s true and you know it.”

“That wasn’t the problem and you know it; besides, it wasn’t a beauty contest and—for the record: I chose you.”

“Whatever.”

“Fine,” Hutch said, abruptly rising to his feet, “I don’t want to have this conversation again, either.” Besides, something about that little yappy dog he’d spied earlier tugged at him; he decided to follow it and the woman out of the park.

* * *

“Dorothy?”

The woman was about to climb the stoop at 558 1st Street, but even before she turned around to face Hutch, the little dog had become a distracting bundle of wiggles and waggles at his feet. He couldn’t help but notice the animal—who wasn’t yapping—making a concerted effort to climb into his arms, standing on its hind legs and pawing at Hutch’s knees to be obliged.

“Well, he sure does know you,” the woman said—having been brought around by the dog tugging on his leash or by Hutch’s voice, or both. “You’re obviously a member of the family—at least as far as he’s concerned.”

She wasn’t Dorothy; Hutch knew that from a quick glance at her face. But she was Dorothy’s age, her relative height, her graying hair color and wardrobe style—as he vaguely remembered Dorothy’s appearance.

“Shirley,” she introduced herself, bending over to scoop the dog into her arms so as to stop bothering Hutch. “Dorothy is in Miami with her sister, Rose. I’m watching Patches while she’s away.”

Something about the dog had earlier drawn Hutch’s attention and he followed his hunch to its answer. “I haven’t seen Patches in years,” he said, reaching over to scratch Patches behind the ear and allowing the dog to excitedly lick his hand. “I’m amazed he remembers me after all this time.”

“How could he forget a face like yours?” Shirley sweetly said, seeming to admire Hutch’s overall look. “But who might you be? I don’t think we’ve ever met.”

“Ken Hutchinson,” he replied; he would have offered a handshake but Shirley’s arms were full of a still-wiggling bundle of fur, a tri-colored fluffy dog who sure was happy to see him.

“Oh, you’re Davey’s partner!” Shirley exclaimed, finally placing him in context and relaxing whatever guard she may have had until that moment. Her blue eyes smiled at him.

“Yeah, I’m Davey’s partner,” he echoed in a low voice, forcing a smile. He wasn’t concerned that he had blown his cover. By the time Shirley told Dorothy and Dorothy told Nick and Nick told Starsky, Hutch would be long gone from New York City—with or without his partner in tow.

“What brings you all this way from California?”

“I’m on Special Assignment for a couple of days.”

“Is Davey with you?”

“Not anymore,” Starsky said.

“He’s on a case elsewhere,” Hutch fibbed, ignoring Starsky’s cruel comment. Besides, in some ways, there was truth in Hutch’s statement; Starsky was on his own mission. “I came to see Nick,” Hutch furthered, “only to find he’s asleep, so I swung by hoping to visit with Mom until he’s awake. But it appears I’ve struck out there, too.”

“Nick works the night shift at ‘The New York Times,’” Shirley said, in case Hutch didn’t already know, and sounding proud of Nick. “He’ll be awake soon. In the meantime, come up with me,” she encouraged Hutch, turning toward the stoop. “I have to get Patches some water—and I’m sure he wants to spend a bit of lap time with you, too.”

There was something off, an immediate hit of negative feeling that Hutch couldn’t identify when he stepped foot into Dorothy’s apartment that late afternoon. He recognized so much and yet it felt incredibly foreign at the same time.

“You know what this is called, doncha, Hutch?” Starsky asked, sounding glib.

“What’s that?” Hutch silently asked him as he followed Shirley through the living room and into the kitchen after she unleashed Patches.

“This is called trespassing.”

“Don’t be an asshole, Starsk.”

“You have no right to be mad at me, Hutch. You’re not the one who got hurt.”

Hutch wanted to immediately search the place, but he would have to be more stealth.

“Shall I make us some tea?” Shirley asked. She didn’t wait for an answer as she set a kettle on the burner and ignited the gas.

“If you like,” he said, mostly to be accommodating. Tea wasn’t exactly his drink of choice, but Shirley was hospitable and he didn’t want to seem ungrateful. “Can I help in any way?”

“Trespassing is a crime, Hutch.”

“Then show yourself, Officer, and arrest me.”

“You could get the cookies out of the pantry,” Shirley suggested, pointing to the cabinet door beside the refrigerator. “You choose.”

“You shouldn’t be here,” Starsky snarled. “You’re not family anymore.”

“Patches invited me,” Hutch defended himself, admittedly irritated. “Shirley said so herself.” He couldn’t decide on which type of cookie to choose—there were half a dozen opened packages in the pantry, from chocolate chip to Oreos to vanilla wafers. He was about to grab the closest bag but decided on all of them. “If you can’t find your favorite in this stockpile,” he joked, sitting at the kitchen table with an armload of cookie bags after Shirley set two saucers on it with paper napkins, “then you can’t call yourself a cookie lover.”

“A true statement if ever there was one,” Shirley said with a laugh. “We’ll try one of each.” She then found a lemon in the fridge and cut it into slices at the counter, neatly arranging the pieces on a small plate and placing it on the table, and then she brought over the sugar bowl, too. While the water came to a boil, she gave Hutch a box of dog treats. “If you don’t think Patches can love you more, these will prove you wrong.”

Hutch liked Shirley; she was welcoming, easygoing, and relaxed, calming him in a kind of way he hadn’t been in days. She—and Patches—were a nice distraction, maybe even a necessary one. The little dog was the most forgiving in the bunch, taking to Hutch despite his years-long absence, and not because he fed him doggie cookies.

“Don’t get too comfortable here, Hutch,” Starsky warned him.

“Or what? You’ll tell your mother why we broke up?”

“We didn’t break up. We had a falling out.”

“You had the falling out,” Hutch corrected him. “I’m still falling in.”

“You’re insulting me, pal.”

Shirley poured both their cups of tea before putting the kettle back on the stove. When she finally joined Hutch at the table, she stirred sugar into her cup and squeezed a bit of lemon in as well. “You’ll have to tell me what’s so special about your Special Assignment.”

Hutch had to think fast. “Missing persons case,” he quickly said.

“Are you looking for a bad guy or a good one?”

“He’s been known to be bad,” Hutch said with a laugh. “But not dangerous.” He lifted Patches into his lap and gave the dog a vanilla wafer—mostly to distract Shirley from her line of questions, and it seemed to work.

They talked instead about the weather and Dorothy’s reasons for wanting to leave New York City for a warmer climate. Shirley said she would miss her dear friends, two people she’d known for decades, but she understood the women’s need to relocate. They were getting older and joints were more fragile. Maybe Shirley would follow their lead and eventually find her way to the Sunshine State. “I think if I visit enough times,” she imagined, “it’ll begin to feel like home and then it won’t be so unfamiliar to actually live there.”

They also talked about Nick’s job at ‘The Times’—one the entire family was proud of him to have snagged. That Nick genuinely loved working for the newspaper made it all the more palatable. “He seemed wayward there for a time,” Shirley reflected, staring off momentarily. “He was lost—but has since found his footing.”

“Better late than never,” Hutch agreed. “He sounded quite happy when I spoke to him earlier.” He wanted Shirley to know he’d been in touch with Nick, making it all the more natural that he’d be in the neighborhood. “Sometimes what one is looking for finds you.”

“I think he just missed his big brother.”

“He’s not alone.”

“How do you mean?”

Hutch realized he’d said those words out loud to Shirley and immediately felt flushed—and uncharacteristically speechless.

“Do you have a big brother?” Shirley wondered, sipping tea, none the wiser about Hutch’s internal struggle.

“I sometimes wish I had one,” he lied.

“Do you have a younger brother?”

“Just a sister.”

“I see,” Shirley said, innocently enough. She admired Hutch, watching him as he drank tea, ate cookies, pet Patches, and spent a quiet late afternoon with her. “I have two brothers. They sometimes get on my nerves, but I suppose I’d miss them if they moved off.”

“I’m sure they’ll miss you if you move to Florida.”

“They might just go with me,” she said, a twinkle coming to her eye as if she had manipulative powers over her siblings. “But enough about family,” she added with a light laugh. “Tell me why you’re not married.”

“I’m married to work,” he said, realizing she’d made that assumption about his marital status from his lack of a wedding ring.

“Do you think you’ll ever settle down?”

“The thought lurks in the background,” he replied, feeling suddenly sad all over again to realize that he alone owned that big house—and only furniture to fill it. “But retirement is something I’ll consider when the—how did you phrase it?—‘joints grow fragile’?”

Shirley laughed. “I can see why you’re the perfect match for Davey. Clever, witty minds.”

“We do have chemistry.”

“We did,” Starsky reminded him.

Hutch changed the subject to Shirley’s pleasures in life—cooking, reading, dining out with Dorothy and other friends, gardening on her balcony—and soon conversation turned to currently running Broadway plays, Prospect Park’s renovations, and the Pope’s visit to the City in the coming week. Patches eventually fell asleep in Hutch’s lap, and the setting sun began to darken the room, so much that Hutch felt sleepy relaxed for the first time in days. Maybe tea was a drink of choice, after all.

“Oh my goodness!” Shirley exclaimed after spying the kitchen’s wall clock. “I’ve enjoyed myself so much I’ve lost track of time. I promised my son I’d meet him for dinner and now I’m running late, so I must go. Are you staying in the area?”

“Lower Manhattan, just overnight. I’d stay with Nick, but he’s on a different schedule and I don’t want to interrupt it.”

“But why go back to the City? Why don’t you stay here? There’s a guest room. Save yourself the time and money?”

“Don’t you dare, Hutch.”

Shirley had made him a tempting offer, but Starsky’s warning stalled him. Would Hutch be taking advantage of Dorothy without her knowing? If Starsky were to find out he stayed in the apartment, would he be as disappointed as Hutch feared he might? In the end, did it matter?

“Besides,” Shirley added, sweetening the pot, “you could keep Patches company. He’s been alone most all days and nights for nearly a week now. Dorothy would appreciate knowing her little man was with you. She comes home on Monday.”

“Hutch, don’t do it,” Starsky whined. “You’re not welcome in my family anymore. Why do you have to add injury to insult, hm?”

“It’s insult to injury, you moron.”

“This is my mom we’re talking about.”

“And she’d ’appreciate knowing her little man was with’ family.”

“It would give me more time to have dinner with my son,” Shirley explained, squeezing Hutch’s forearm where it rested on the table, her eyes alone pleading with him to accept the invitation. “Patches will need another walk before bedtime and some dinner.” She quickly rose from the table, waking Patches out of his sleep, but not out of Hutch’s lap, and fetched the bag of dog food. “In fact, I’ll feed him now so you don’t have to, but there’s no point to going all that way back to Manhattan, is there?”

“I was thinking maybe catching a bite in the Big Apple with Nick before he goes to work.” It was a lie, but Hutch needed to keep up nonchalant appearances.

“There’s a pizza joint around the corner from here,” Shirley informed him. “Mario’s. Nick knows where.”

The word ‘pizza’ triggered Hutch. He bit his lip, pushed down hard against his unexpected feelings, and tried not to remember that last real conversation he’d had with Starsky.

“That’s where I made my decision,” Starsky reminded him—as if he wanted to drive the knife in deeper.

“It’s where I made my decision, too,” Hutch said at the pizza joint, fighting back. To reprimand Starsky further, Hutch caved. “I’d love to stay,” he told Shirley; she’d been kind to him, helped him to escape his tormenting thoughts and fears—albeit temporarily—and the private truth was that he had planned to sleep in the park that night anyway, so being offered a real bed wasn’t anything he should turn down. “I’ll take care of Patches. I leave in the morning, but I’ll feed and walk him again then, too, so you can also sleep in.”

“You are such a dear. I wish I’d gotten to know you better over the years.”

“I’ve only been out this way once before.”

“Once before would have been nice, too,” she said, her back to him as she prepared Patches’ food bowl and refilled the other one with water. “You know where the treats are—for you and Patches, but don’t get them mixed up,” she joked. “There’s some bagels and cream cheese and coffee, if you want breakfast here—and a cafe on the same side of the street two shops down from Mario’s if you prefer to dine out in the morning.” She gave Hutch a spare key and told him to leave it on the kitchen table before he left in the morning. “Just lock the door handle when you go,” she excitedly said, happy to have talked him into staying overnight. “But promise me you won’t be a stranger.”

After a warm farewell, during which Hutch had to disturb Patches’ comfort, put him gently on the floor, and hug Shirley goodbye, she profusely thanked him again for agreeing to stay, told him her number was on the speed dial under 8, and to call if he needed anything.

“She’s hitting on you, Hutch.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. She’s old enough to be my mother. In fact, Snark, she’s old enough to be your mother. Drop it. You’re not going to scare me off.”

To prove it—and after a useless but thorough search of the premises—Hutch spent the rest of the afternoon and evening taking Patches for a few walks—some to the park, some just around the corner past Nick’s apartment. Each pass was uneventful except the last one—wherein Nick’s drapes were finally opened, a lamp burned brightly from inside the glass French doors onto the balcony, and Nick was alone in the house: eating a TV dinner in front of the television from the comfort of an oversized armchair. Hutch knew this because he walked two-thirds of the way up the stoop and leaned over the rail to have a careful peek into the living room. There was definitely no David Starsky in Brooklyn.

Later that night, closer to Nick’s departure for work, Hutch was able to arrive in time to see him draw the drapes, turn off the light, and leave the apartment, heading to the closest metro station. Patches never blew Hutch’s cover by barking, and none of the few passersby noticed Hutch, probably because they were sidetracked by the little, fluffy, cute-as-a-bug, tri-color dog instead of the beefy blond. Upstaged by a canine—but Hutch didn’t care; he preferred it in this instance.

He also took Shirley’s advice and bought himself a couple of slices of pizza to-go from Mario’s, stopped in a corner market on the way back and purchased two beers, and then went to Dorothy’s apartment to have Patches keep him company while he ate dinner at the small kitchen table.

“I told you I wasn’t here,” Starsky bragged. “At what point do you start taking me at my word, hm?”

“Shut up, Starsk,” Hutch mumbled, pushing away from the table and getting to his feet to use the bathroom. He was tired, both from his activities that day, but also from the emotional toll Starsky’s growing disappearance weighed on him.

After their last walk for the night, Hutch poured himself a glass of red wine from an already opened bottle, sat on one end of the comfortable sofa under a lone floor lamp with Patches asleep against his thigh, and browsed a family photo album he’d found on the lower shelf of the coffee table.

At first glance, he assumed he was viewing pictures of a young Starsky, but there was just enough difference to quickly realize it was Starsky’s father; they had the same eyes and nose. The photos were in sequence: Sam and Dorothy as young adults, then as lovers, eventually married, bearing and raising children.

That’s when Hutch laid eyes the first time on Starsky’s baby pictures—and they took his breath away. His boy, brand new to life itself, right there in black-and-white, chubby baby cheeks and diapers, no less. All smiles, too. Innocent. Long before the world would take from him, before he’d suffer a great loss.

Half a dozen photo album pages later and there was no guessing when that time had come: the smile had disappeared from Starsky’s face. In its place, a lost 12-year-old boy with no ambition, no interest in what lay ahead in life, no joy in the present.

“I’m sorry, buddy,” Hutch whispered. “I can’t imagine having lost either of my parents, least of all the way you lost your dad.”

“Maybe I wouldn’t have gone into policing if he’d lived,” Starsky said, considering it with no real commitment. “I mean, I didn’t know what to do after he was gone, so mom sent me to L.A. It was my aunt who suggested I might find something to do with my life if I honored him by serving.”

“You did find happy in it,” Hutch agreed, turning another page and entering Starsky’s early career years. A sense of purpose now lined his expressions and he seemed proud to be wearing the uniform. But maybe it was because he’d met Hutch by then.

“Don’t flatter yourself,” Starsky muttered.

“I don’t know, Starsk,” Hutch argued with him. He’d found the pictures Starsky had apparently sent home to mom, candid ones of him with Hutch—and there was a smile on his face as wide as the Rio Grande in just about every one of them. It wasn’t lost on Hutch.

They had a once-in-a-million-lifetimes kind of friendship, one that no parent, no sibling, no other friend, no woman, could have made as rewarding. No one else was capable of loving them the way they loved each other—as unconditionally and without pretense; to do so required serious events and life-altering circumstances preor­dained by the gods themselves. No one, not anyone, would sacrifice their lives for either of them the way they would for each other, or the way they had over the years, or with the same immeasurable enthusiasm and unfaltering loyalty and determination.

They had known since nearly the day they’d met exactly where they stood with each other, both professionally and personally—and they were as consciously aware of it as they were grateful. Their bond needed no words to recognize it; the knowing passed between them by way of the light in their blue eyes and the warmth on their faces, and sometimes with private smiles. They knew—and only they needed to know. The unspoken conversation between them about how important they were to each other usually lasted an instant, but on some days, under some circumstances, it lasted much longer.

It was there in a picture Dorothy had taken of both men during the Thanksgiving dinner Hutch had been invited to attend some six years earlier. It was his one-and-only time with Starsky’s New York family. Hutch had felt right at home, had been so welcomed, perhaps to a greater degree than by his own blood.

“We should have done more of that,” he told Starsky. “We got so wrapped up in our jobs that we didn’t spend enough time with our loved ones.”

In truth, he baited Starsky, but there was no reply.

“I’m keeping this one,” Hutch said, expecting an argument, but sounding firm enough that he hoped Starsky would leave it lie. He carefully lifted the cellophane on the photo page to remove a picture from its long-sticky place in the album. “This one says it all.”

In the picture, he and Starsky were sitting knee-to-knee, shoulder-to-shoulder on a patio bench in the small backyard of that very apartment Hutch was in. It was daytime, late in the day on Thanksgiving, and they had been photographed from the waist up, wearing sweaters of nearly the same blue color, accenting their eyes. Hutch smiled at the camera, but Starsky’s head was tilted toward Hutch’s, and the wry smile on his perfect mouth said what Hutch knew was in his heart: “This man belongs to me.” Neither of them knew just how much they would become the other’s everything.

“I’m supposed to let that go?” Hutch asked into the room’s quiet. “You haven’t been gone a week and I miss you something fierce already.”

For nearly a decade, Starsky had been in Hutch’s life every single day with rare exception. He worked alongside him, ate nearly every meal with him, argued the facts of their cases together, laughed at their stupid jokes, watched movies and drove cars and checked out women, and eventually became lovers, tangled in each other’s lips, arms, hardened bodies.

“You can’t possibly live without me, lover boy.”

When Hutch didn’t hear a reply, he leaned into the sofa cushions behind him, Patches still snug along his thigh, and shut the photo album, leaving the pictures inside, sans the one he’d taken. He dropped his head back, closed his eyes, and audibly exhaled.

“Starsk?”

“Hm?”

“C’mon, man. Where are you?”

* * *

“So where to now?” Dobey carefully asked.

Hutch didn’t know. He was exhausted. He probably appeared as tired as he felt when he slouched in the chair in front of Dobey’s desk and propped his chin in his hand, his elbow on the armrest. He couldn’t even look at Dobey for a few minutes, not until the silence in the room forced him to lift his eyes.

“He’s not in New York,” Hutch said, stating the obvious. “He’s not in Florida, either. I followed his mother all over Miami and there was no sign of him. He’s hiding out from everyone.”

“He may even still be in our area.”

“That hasn’t gotten past me. But I had to interrogate the usual suspects first.”

Dobey sat with his arms crossed over his chest, his focus on Hutch, his expression one of calculated patience.

It was late Monday morning following the Sunday Hutch had spent in Miami. He’d arrived back in Los Angeles late the night before. The week had felt like a month … a year at times. Hutch’s panic had become a relentless, low-level anxiety gnawing at him 24/7.

“Do you have any ideas, Captain?” Hutch’s voice was as helpless sounding as he felt in that moment, but he knew Dobey understood the gravity of what he’d lost, even if it were only temporary. It was temporary, wasn’t it? “I’m going to find him. It’s just a matter of time. But it sure would be better if it was sooner than later.”

“I’m afraid I don’t have any ideas,” Dobey said with a heavy sigh. “I’m not sure I can even console you. I’ve had as long a time to think about this as you have. He seems serious, Hutch.”

Those weren’t words Hutch wanted to hear; he hoped there would be a weak link in the chain that only his superior had fleshed out, using his vast knowledge and wisdom-with-age virtues. But Dobey was right: Starsky was serious; he’d given away most of his worldly possessions, abandoned his beloved car, quit his dream job, forfeited his new house, and left his partner, someone he’d only recently copped to being deeply in love with and enjoying an intimate, sexual, romantic relationship with him—one that Hutch had destroyed in the blink of an eye.

“Don’t quit,” was Dobey’s only advice. “Like I told you earlier, it’ll be easier to get him back—if that’s in the cards—than to get you both back. But I know you’re going to be distracted by this search. I think what you need is a complete change of scenery.”

Hutch dropped his hand from his face and straightened in his chair. He wasn’t certain he liked the sound of what Dobey seemed to be suggesting. “I just need time, Captain. I’m sure I can find him. I’ll use weekends and after work to—”

“I’ve found you a case that will keep you on the Force, but also give you time off for yourself.” He obviously knew how important Starsky was to Hutch.

Hutch’s curiosity was peaked, though he wouldn’t appreciate being babysat. “Desk job?”

“Special Assignment. You’ll be working with the FBI.”

“That sounds ominous.”

“They think they’ve discovered a nationwide serial killer whose last victim was just a couple of hours down the road from here.”

“That’s some change in scenery,” Hutch noted, but before Dobey could explain to him what he already knew about how he’d be given time to himself, Hutch quickly added, “I’ll take it. I might even get to travel.”

Dobey chuckled, in a sad way; they both knew it wasn’t ideal to tangle with serial killers, but it would keep Hutch on the police force and give him down time he could sorely use. “You start this week. They’ve assigned you to Special Agent Simon Torelli.”

“There’s an Italian name if ever there was one.”

“You’ll meet with him here first, but you may be called to D.C.”

Hutch pictured himself stopping in cities across the country when making trips to FBI Headquarters and using the opportunities to search for Starsky. He was going to find that boy—or die trying. “Thank you, Captain.” He held eye contact with Dobey to send home his appreciation for still being cared for, despite that he was only one half of Dobey’s favorite duo.

“I already confirmed for you that Starsky never renewed his passport; I’ll keep an eye on it and let you know if it changes.”

“Thank you for that, too.”

“Whenever you want me to put an A.P.B. out on him, let me know. If he ever needs a reference and calls on me for one, I’ll give you that information. But I admit I’m in between a rock and a hard place, Hutchinson. I want you to find him because I believe you might be able to reason with him—just from having learned your lesson.”

Hutch knew Dobey suspected he’d made a pass at Starsky, scared him off, and that the punishment of Starsky’s leaving would be enough to keep Hutch from ever doing it again. But, for then, Hutch was okay with Dobey’s perception of things.

“At the same time,” Dobey continued, “I want to honor his wishes, too—and he’s made them abundantly clear.”

Hutch broke eye contact, feeling both the shame of what he’d done and the building anxiety of possibly having forever lost what he never believed he would lose. “I just need five minutes with him,” he promised, looking back at Dobey. “If he still wants to be gone, I won’t stand in his way.”

“I trust you,” Dobey replied. His posture hadn’t changed the entire time they sat across from each other, but his expression seemed to have softened. “Do you want to tell me what happened in more detail? Maybe I can help you make better sense of it.”

“If I find him, it will be moot. If I can’t find him … maybe then.”

“Whatever you’ve done, Hutch, I’m sure it’s nothing to be ashamed of; your feelings are understandable, even if they weren’t welcome.”

“Oh, I beg to differ, Captain. My actions were definitely inexcusable.”

* * *

“Simon,” the agent corrected Hutch after Hutch greeted him as ‘Agent Torelli.’ “That’ll keep you from calling me a pasta.”

Hutch got it: Tortellini. He didn’t laugh, though; he didn’t want Simon to think he found his name amusing—nor the brutal case to which they’d been assigned. “Hutch,” he said in reply, firmly shaking Simon’s hand. “Not as much of a mouthful as Hutchinson.”

Their pleasantries had been exchanged. Simon was early to mid-50s maybe, grey around the temples and throughout his short-cut, dark brown hair. He was clean-shaven, of slim build, not nearly as muscled as Starsky and Hutch, but that may have been the result of his mostly desk job—and that wasn’t to say his job was any less important. To the contrary. Simon was valued for his mind, not his muscle. He didn’t wear a wedding band, but he did wear a watch on his left wrist, and he was dressed the way Hutch expected to see him: in a gray suit and red tie. Simon had been with the FBI for more than 20 years and was still forced to dress the part.

“Will I need a three-piece?” Hutch quipped, mostly to show Simon his amicable personality, despite that Hutch could only feel anxious and frustrated. He himself was dressed in his usual open-collared, button-downed, short-sleeved blue shirt with patches of green and yellow, worn jeans, and walking shoes—and Starsky’s new Yamamoto Platinum watch.

“A suit is only required when you’re at Headquarters and the boss is leaning in the doorway,” Simon said, but his tone of voice seemed to imply he was kidding. “You’re fine,” he said as afterthought, looking Hutch up and down with his dark brown eyes; there was a formidableness to his appearance and posture. “Besides,” Simon added, “your street-level look gives you a certain authenticity.”

They met in Dobey’s office, as planned, with Dobey listening in and not saying much as Hutch and Simon made their acquaintance. Simon was alone, sans a partner, Hutch noticed, so they had that in common, though he was sure it was for different reasons.

“What’s our first task?”

“Scene of the crime,” Simon authoritatively said, but he didn’t sound demanding or arrogant, just directional. “I haven’t been there yet, so we can be newbies on site. Maybe we’ll see things together that none of us have noticed—like viewing the forest without all those trees in the way, know what I mean?”

“I do. And you can tell me why you think this particular victim fits the bill for your killer.”

“There’s lots to tell you,” Simon concluded, turning toward the door, “so let’s get started.”

Hutch had spent the past few days on the job, familiarizing himself with just a few of the case files that had been overnighted to him. The victims were widespread and maybe not even related to each other in death, so Hutch was first anxious to hear why Simon believed one of his crimes had recently been committed in Southern California.

On the hours-long drive to the crime scene—his host at the wheel behind sunglasses—Simon filled Hutch in on a few more details, answering Hutch’s first question, which was: “What do these victims not have in common?” Certainly that would be the shorter list and therefore the best place to start.

“Location,” Simon said. “More than a dozen different states. Age: from a 12-year-old to a 38-year-old. Race: Hispanic. Caucasian. Black. Some were raped, we think, some not. Social status: from a runaway to a successful entrepreneur.”

“What do they have in common?” was Hutch’s next predictable question. He propped his arm on the opened window of the passenger side of the two-door car and watched the scenery while he listened to Simon’s matter-of-fact answers.

“They were all murdered elsewhere and dumped along a highway,” Simon answered. “They were all killed by the same type of weapon. And they’re all male.”

That last notation made Hutch abruptly look over at Simon to make sure his new colleague wasn’t being facetious. He didn’t appear to be. “I thought you said some were raped,” Hutch remembered.

“Well, as you know, Officer,” Simon said, donning the detective hat, “they can’t ‘technically’ be raped in most states, but if this motherfucker did to me what he did to them, I’d sure call it rape.”

“Sodomy?”

“Forcible sodomy. Forcible oral copulation.” Simon briefly checked his rearview mirror. “I mean, if you want to be technical about it.”

Hutch knew Simon meant the legal terminology; unless a penis was forced into a vagina, most states in the U.S. didn’t recognize nor legally define forced sodomy as rape. “Okay,” Hutch said, slowly, easing into his next question, and not sure he wanted to hear the answer. “What was the weapon of choice?”

“Ice pick—or something of that nature.”

Hutch flinched.

“Driven into the brain through the left ear.”

Hutch had to look back to the passing scenery to distract himself from all he’d just heard. He felt overly sickened and no longer sure this new assignment was going to be good for him. “The evil some men do,” he said under his breath, forcing himself to block the grisly visuals of such acts of depravity that had suddenly circulated in his mind. “How long do you suspect he’s been active?” he asked, to steer away from the disturbing mental pictures.

“I’m ashamed to say it’s been three years since we were made aware of the similarities—and no real solid leads that lend themselves to an arrest any time soon, besides what I’ve told you.”

“Other than the similarities then, what do you have on the killer? Anything?”

“It’s why we’re now in California. We received an anonymous call about some creepy guy harassing an individual male at a rest area on Interstate 10—and the caller described the ‘missing eye’ that two of our survivors recalled during an attack, a detail a couple of other anonymous callers have also reported to us.”

“Are these other reports as recent?”

“Seems we get one or two a year,” Simon confessed, sighing with frustration and disappointment. “That’s why I’m ashamed of us: we can’t figure out who this sick fuck is or where he’ll strike next. Seems the entire country is his hunting grounds.”

“Have you ruled out that the anonymous callers aren’t actually the killer?”

“No,” Simon sadly said. “They’ve all been male voices. They all seem to know this one detail about his eye. They could very well be him.”

“And we know that serial killers, deep down, wish to be caught,” Hutch added.

“Yeah, at some point.”

“How many victims so far?”

“Fourteen—if we’re just counting the ones we ascribe to him. Obviously, there could be more.”

They were quiet for a while on the long drive to the L.A. crime scene, each lost in his own thoughts, Hutch doing his best to admire the beauty of the wilderness, going so far as to forget obsessing on Starsky’s whereabouts—at least for a few minutes. Maybe this hunt for a serial killer would give Hutch new hunting grounds in which to look for his partner. Perhaps he’d get to kill the proverbial two birds with one stone.

But it already gave Hutch another idea: he would leave none of those stones unturned when it came to finding Starsky. His partner might already be employed at some new law enforcement job. As soon as Hutch could get home and have the time, he would call every police station, every police patrol agency, every bodyguard service, every private detective in the Metro Los Angeles area to see whether Starsky had found a home for what was obviously in his blood.

Hutch would then branch out from there until he covered similar jobs in every state in the union if need be. He might even raise his sights to the federal level. Funny if he should stumble into Starsky in the halls of the FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C. Wouldn’t that be a kick in the head?

* * *

“This is a case we should be working together,” Hutch told Starsky, sitting at home on the sofa later that evening, surrounded by still-stacked, unpacked cardboard boxes of household items, and examining the evidence he and Simon had collected from the crime scene. A lone floor lamp shone light onto the notes Hutch had made, along with the typed-written police reports he was provided by the Bureau. “We’ve always been smarter than the FBI.”

“You like this guy,” Starsky surmised.

“That’s your first thought?”

“He’s your father figure.”

“Stop it, Starsk. You’re the one who’s needed a father figure. I may have been that for you, so watch your tongue.”

“I saw how you took a back seat to him.”

“He’s the one in the know.”

“You had immediate respect for him; you’re not usually trusting this soon.”

“He’s got seniority and a shitload more experience than I do.”

“He’s not a bad looking guy, either.”

“You’re the one noticing.”

Hutch closed his notebook when he realized the stupid conversation he was having with Starsky was purely in his own mind and so it followed that it was he, Hutch, who was having these lame and abusive thoughts. But maybe he should explore them rather than avoid them. Why let something brew in the background that didn’t need to?

“I’m not drawn to him, Starsky, if that’s what you’re implying.”

“You’re attracted to him.”

“I don’t know what made you decide that’s true.”

“At the scene … you watched him like a hawk.”

“Because I learned things from his body language, his tone of voice, his mannerism.”

“Things like what? how sexy his ass is?”

“I couldn’t see his ass—and I wasn’t looking, so fuck right off, pal.”

“Then what things?”

“That he’s still deeply offended by the horrors of his job. When we laid eyes on the still-bloody highway scene—and then later on the victim at the morgue—I could tell Simon gives a shit about victims of violent crimes. He cares about the pain some unfortunate people go through—even after 30 years in law enforcement. That’s almost as many years in that job, Starsk, as we’ve been alive.”

Hutch listened to the sound of a ticking clock from the kitchen while he waited for Starsky’s snide comeback, but there was none.

“So I like that about him,” Hutch pushed Starsky. “Crucify me.”

No further pushback.

“Anything else, Detective Blue Eyes?”

“I can see you working with him,” Starsky replied, sounding serious and not so hostile and accusatory. “I mean, he’d be a good replacement for me.”

Hutch’s hackles raised. “No, he wouldn’t. No one will. I’m not drawn to nor attracted to anyone else—and nowhere near to how much I am to you. I’m not going to forget this past decade—least of all what we recently had together—whether you want to run from it or not. There’ll never be another you. Another us. Why don’t you come to your senses, Starsky, and get your ass back home? How long are you planning to punish me for this one stupid mistake?”

* * *

Hutch sat at the breakfast counter in Simon’s comfortable house in Chevy Chase, Maryland, on the outskirts of Washington, D.C. He watched Simon at the kitchen sink preparing a meal while listening to low-volume Italian music emanating from a neighboring room. The ambiance was perfect after the day they’d had, immersed as they were in the gruesome details of their case; the downtime was appreciatively relaxing and replenishing.

“Come over for my famous spaghetti sauce,” Simon had earlier propositioned Hutch after a long day in the Bureau’s data center. “We can brainstorm while I cook.” He was Italian after all, full-blooded, and had years more experience in food preparation than Hutch had, and that was saying something, so how could Hutch possibly decline such an invitation? Besides, he’d sorely worked up an appetite as he helped to collect evidence boxes in the storage room.

When Hutch asked what he could bring to dinner, he was told there wasn’t anything Simon didn’t already have on hand—including a personal winery of his own for which he took pride and from which Hutch could choose any bottle—and therefore to just bring his ‘smarts,’ as Simon put it. But when Simon subsequently learned that Hutch was living at an extended-stay motel outside the Beltway, he insisted that Hutch save the money, take the guest room at his house for those times when Hutch was in state, and to make himself at home.

“We’ll get a lot more done together than apart,” Simon added, pleased that Hutch had agreed. “I’m also looking forward to having a fresh pair of eyes on this mess of an investigation.”

Hutch showed up with his backpack and a store-bought cheesecake, just in case Simon had forgotten there should be some. Despite that he may have already had one in the freezer, Simon was happy to see the dessert in Hutch’s hand.

“Just a backpack, though, huh?” Simon wondered, closing the door after Hutch had entered the house. “Extended stay motel but not much to wear?”

“A change of clothes, a shaving kit, and a toothbrush,” Hutch answered with a shrug, dropping the backpack near the sofa in the neatly laid out living room. “What else does one man need? A tux?” He was happy to see Simon in casual sweat clothes, thick socks, and not a tie in sight. It made him even more approachable.

“No formal wear necessary,” Simon laughed as he led them to the kitchen where he’d already been preparing the evening’s meal: a definite aroma of tomato sauce, fresh garlic, and caramelized onions had filled the house and smelled delicious, deepening Hutch’s gnawing hunger and the anticipation that it would soon be satisfied.

“I’d offer you one of my suits,” Simon said, putting the cheesecake into the refrigerator and resuming what appeared to be the makings of garlic bread, “but I don’t think they’d fit you. You’re what? Three inches taller than me?”

Hutch took a seat on a cushioned stool at the counter and had to calculate: “Well, I guess that depends on how tall you are.”

“Five-ten. You must be six-one?”

“Right you are,” Hutch said, impressed.

“All these years writing up D.O.A.s has made me an expert,” Simon claimed, not proudly. “What do they call that? An educated guess?”

“I’m inclined to call it an expert’s fact,” Hutch said. “But you’re right: your suit pants might be mistaken for women’s capris on my hideously long legs.”

Simon laughed again. “And we sure as fuck wouldn’t want that.”

“Is there anything I can do to help with dinner?”

“Just talk to me.”

“I think I’m burned out on all the gruesome conversation for one day.”

“How about you open a bottle of wine then?” He pointed Hutch toward the pantry—and then to the glassed-door cabinet that housed the crystal glasses. “Choose whatever you like.”

The entire pantry was indeed Simon’s personal wine cellar: multiple shelves of racked bottles stored in down-pointing directions, neatly laid out, rosés separated from dessert wines, cabs from merlots, and so on; the whites in a small refrigerator, and each shelf labeled so that someone like Hutch, new to the small room, could easily find his way around. After wishing he could taste them all, he eventually emerged with a Cabernet.

“You’ll find what else you need over there,” Simon said, nudging Hutch with an elbow toward the drawer on the kitchen’s hutch.

Hutch found a corkscrew, and then took the bottle, its opener, and two wine glasses to the dining counter where he reclaimed his seat.

“You’re a connoisseur, I see,” Hutch noted as he removed the bottle’s cork.

“Just Italian.”

“Redundant then,” Hutch said with a laugh. It was the first such sound he’d heard emerge from himself in nearly a month. It wasn’t a happy laugh, more of an amused one, making him wonder if he’d ever truly be “happy” again.

“Start without me,” Simon encouraged Hutch after Hutch poured wine into each glass. “I’m going to have a break in a couple of minutes and I’ll join you.” By then, the meal would be simmering. Hutch could already see that Simon had made a garden salad, which was in a large wooden bowl near the sink, full of fresh greens and vegetables; the balsamic vinaigrette dressing was probably made from scratch, too.

“Nice house,” Hutch commented after taking a few swallows of wine and admiring his surroundings; the music piping in from the living room and the warmth of the wine down his throat relaxed him further. “You mentioned earlier that you have kids?”

“Two. Boy and a girl. But they’re grown and moved out. I’m left alone with this big house to myself, so it’s always nice to have a guest.”

Those words hit home. Hutch still hadn’t unpacked anything at his new house except the things he absolutely needed: some clothes, a lamp, utensils, those kinds of things. What was he to do with all that space?

“And the wife?” Hutch asked, not realizing he’d stepped into a conversation he’d be lucky to work his way out of without spilling his own beans.

“Divorced,” Simon said, turning his back to add uncooked penne pasta to the boiling pot of water and to set the timer. “Three years ago. Nasty breakup. On the bright side,” he added with a sarcastic laugh, “this case is a healthy diversion from all that drama.”

Words Hutch himself had uttered. “Sad story,” he mumbled, “when serial killers are more fun than divorces.”

Simon grunted. “No shit. So what about you? Married? I see no ring.”

“My first wife and I were divorced eight years ago; irreconcilable differences.” That was Hutch’s mistake, casually using words he didn’t intend, so he decidedly blamed the small amount of wine he’d consumed for his lazy thoughts because, sure enough, Simon had a follow-up question.

“And the second wife?”

“Left me a month ago,” Hutch said, stumbling over his answer to make certain he hadn’t implied he was married a second time, when he hadn’t been, and further that he meant Starsky; theirs was a marriage of sorts, wasn’t it?

Simon turned around, made warm eye contact, despite the alarm in his expression. “Oh, hey, man, I’m sorry. I didn’t realize you were dealing with that shit while you’re in the middle of this other shit.”

“Well, like you said: a serial killer case is a healthy diversion from all that drama.”

Simon joined him at the counter, didn’t laugh, not even sadly, but poured more wine into the glass Hutch had nearly filled for him, and took a long swallow. After he downed it, he looked Hutch in the eye. “At least I got a couple of kids out of it. You? Any kids?”

“None,” Hutch said, feeling stupid in his answer, “not yet anyway.”

“That’s the spirit,” Simon cheerfully decided, touching Hutch’s glass with his own in a sympathetic toast. “Eyes on the future, my man. It’ll get easier with time. Trust me on this.”

That was one thing Hutch wasn’t certain he could trust. No amount of time was going to help him overcome losing the undeniable love of his life, not even the day after forever.

“So how’s your partner handling all of this?” Simon innocently wondered. He set his glass on the counter and waited on Hutch’s answer.

“My partner?”

“Dobey said you’ve been partnered with the same guy for the past eight years.”

“I met him at the Police Academy; we were loosely partnered during our field training and permanently partnered roughly eight years ago, so I’ve known him about ten years.”

“Yeah. So how’s he handling the ‘separation’?”

The problem with telling one lie, or even allowing false impressions, was that there were always more lies to tell and more false impressions to make.

“He’s busy doing his own thing,” Hutch said. It technically wasn’t a lie.

“And he’s okay with you being partnered with someone else?”

“He’s not the jealous type.”

That was probably the biggest lie Hutch told that night. Starsky had finally experienced jealousy, no thanks to Hutch for being the one to bring it out of him.

“That’s good to hear,” Simon said about Starsky’s unthreatened feelings. “I wouldn’t want to overstep, know what I mean? I asked for help from L.A.’s best detectives and they gave me you by yourself.”

“I’m flattered they think so.” The truth was that Hutch was only as good as the two minds he shared with Starsky. “But that’s because my partner was assigned elsewhere.”

“Respect!” Simon said, pleased, and drinking wine from his glass to celebrate. “So what’s he up to then?”

“Missing persons case,” Hutch fumbled, trying to say it as nonchalantly as possible so he wouldn’t bring more scrutiny to it. Before Simon could ask anything else, Hutch threw him a question to derail the conversation. “I believe he might be working on it with the FBI. Have you heard of him? David Starsky?”

Simon mulled over it for a moment and then concluded, “The name isn’t familiar.”

“Keep an eye out for him when you’re wearing a suit?” Hutch joked, but he was mostly serious. “Tell him I said hello if you run into him.”

“What does he look like? I might remember the face better than the name—though ‘Starsky’ is memorable in its own cultural way.”

“Five-eleven,” Hutch said, knowing Simon would notice a detail such as that one, “dark hair and blue eyes. My age.”

“Sounds impossible to miss.”

“Mole under his right eye, one on his lower left cheek.”

“Ah, distinct markings. Better yet. That’s why I think this killer is the perp in these crimes across state lines: blind in his left eye. Must be a noticeable enough injury for anyone to make note of it.”

“Or the anonymous calls are the killer playing cat-and-mouse with the FBI.”

“I’ve thought that, too.”

“And maybe he isn’t blind at all.”

“That’s true. Have you investigated serial cases before?”

“A few. All female victims. Strangulations.” He had to shake the picture in his head, the one that got taken when he and Simon examined the nude male body in the morgue: a twenty-something young man, clean-cut, dark-haired and lifeless hazel eyes, athletic build, yet still no match for a monster. Blood oozed from his left ear while brain matter spilled around it.

The kind of evil it took to brutally murder a person, let alone the way these victims were killed, wasn’t anything a sane person could wrap their normal mind around; how far removed from one’s humanity did one have to be to commit such heinous acts of violence?

“Okay, enough of this shit,” Simon said, seeming to sense Hutch’s dismay and turning away to attend to the last of his meal preparation. “We weren’t going to talk gruesome the rest of the night. Nor did I think we’d discuss broken marriages and hearts, so let’s find another topic, shall we? How does food interest you?”

“It interests me plenty,” Hutch said, relieved to have survived the conversation about Starsky. But would Simon eventually catch him in a lie? Hutch would have to be more careful in baring his soul.

* * *

Hutch made them coffee in the morning, having awakened long before Simon, and found his way around the kitchen to do just that. He even made toast with jam and cut up fresh fruit he’d found in the crispers. He decided against eating anything else in case the full and very delicious meal the night before had satisfied Simon as much as it had Hutch and neither of them were all that hungry.

When Simon eventually joined him at the counter, still dressed in sweats, with a cup of coffee and the morning newspaper, they spoke very little to each other while they gave themselves time to fully wake up. But, eventually, Simon was the first to open a dialogue.

“You don’t have to come to the office with me today if you don’t want to,” he informed Hutch. “It might be best if you stayed here and got up to speed on all those boxes of evidence. I think we’re just having an overall briefing this morning, with very little discussion on this case.”

“I like your plan.”

“Besides,” Simon joked, “I figure you’ll have this solved by the time I get home.”

“Such faith in me.”

“But you will go to the gay parade tomorrow, won’t you? We can go together. Make it look like we belong there,” he added. “It’s at the national mall not far from the office.”

That invitation truly whet Hutch’s appetite to learn more. “Is there something you want to tell me, boy?”

Simon laughed. “I thought we might learn something.”

“About being gay?”

“It’s too early for me to have this conversation,” Simon said, laughing at himself, as if he weren’t awake enough to keep up with Hutch’s insinuations.

“But I’m going to need to know more,” Hutch insisted.

“This pervert preys on males, right?”

“Yeah.”

“So he might be gay.”

“And gay people are serial killers?”

“I didn’t mean it like that. I’m saying maybe the killer is gay and we can learn something about gay ways of thinking that might help us.”

“That’s an interesting perspective you have there, Simon,” Hutch dryly said.

“C’mon. I’m not saying gays are perverts; I’m saying, maybe, just maybe, we might learn something, some little thing, that makes us know this piece-of-shit better. I mean, I hear gay people, for example, live with a lot of self-loathing.”

That part was true. “Yeah, okay,” Hutch acquiesced. “I’ll go to the parade with you tomorrow. Should I wear a suit?” He wasn’t serious.

“With a colorful ribbon for a tie,” Simon laughed. “Wear whatever you like. We won’t be there on official business.”

Simon, aka the FBI, was sincerely reaching for straws in finding this killer. Hutch hoped to find ‘something, some little thing,’ that would narrow the field in all those half dozen-and-more boxes they’d earlier uncovered and Simon had brought home the day before.

“Do you want me to have dinner on the table by the time you get home?” Hutch playfully asked. He wanted Simon to know he held no ill feelings about his impressions of gay men, and that he promised to do his share of household chores while living there, too.

“Now who’s gay?” Simon fired back. “But I’ll let you play it by ear. We have leftovers and we can always order a pizza.”

Pizza. That word, that dish, would always and forever haunt Hutch—even if he found Starsky.

* * *

“Hey, Hutch.”

“Hey, yourself.”

Hutch’s reply had been impulsive—and not intended for Simon, despite saying it to him; it was a knee-jerk reaction triggered by his second-nature way of being with Starsky. He regretted the affectionate retort in Simon’s direction, and quickly moved to diminish its warmth by adding, “Long day at work?” He instead played off his and Simon’s earlier banter about same-sex relationships.

Simon laughed. “Boring, really. But it’s always refreshing to learn how much more I know than the boss does.”

“Be careful. If he discovers that truth, he may expect miracles from you.”

“Do you speak from experience?”

“Not really. My superior is actually smarter than me.”

Simon dropped his keys in a large ceramic bowl on the kitchen counter and joined Hutch at the dining table, loosening his tie. “I like him, too,” he said about Dobey. “So? Did you solve our case while I was gone?”

“Maybe,” Hutch said with a satisfying grunt. He organized the piles of paper on the table to make space for Simon to sit across from him without the clutter. “But even if I didn’t, I did order Chinese food.”

“Because you didn’t want my pasta leftovers?”

“Because I ate the pasta leftovers for lunch,” Hutch said with a wink. He shyly shrugged at Simon to suggest he simply couldn’t help himself. “You may or may not be smarter than your boss, but you’re definitely a better cook than I am—and that’s saying something, if I may brag.”

“You’ll have to prove it by me someday,” Simon suggested, sounding pleased because Hutch liked the meal so much the night before that he ate what was left of it again so soon. “But I don’t see a newly opened bottle of wine. What’s Italian food without the vino, even for lunch, hm?”

His ‘hm?’ was reminiscent of Starsky’s, though Starsky’s was much more innocent and impulsive. Hutch felt the sweat break over him as he once again realized how interwoven Starsky was into the very fabric of his being, and that he knew he’d never be able to purge the man—and didn’t want to. “Why don’t you just come home?” he asked, pleadingly, but not audibly, and not in a way Simon would notice the pregnant pause in their own conversation. “You know we were meant to be together—forever.”

Starsky didn’t answer him.

“But you did learn something today,” Simon assumed, thumbing the edges of the stacked folders and binders, and hinting that Hutch must have discovered something in all those files that even Simon had missed. Or at least hoping he had.

“I learned plenty,” Hutch confirmed. “One thing I learned is this guy—as you put it—is some helluva motherfucker. There’s evil and then there’s next-level evil. He tortured his victims, too.”

“Sadist is the word you’re looking for.”

Hutch noticed again Simon’s overall appearance, his darker European skin, like Starsky’s; his unique facial features: deeper-set eyes, longer nose, like Starsky’s; a palpable masculinity that gave him a definite handsome-ness, like Starsky’s, but Simon was older, at least by 15-20 years, seemed even more certain of himself, but not arrogant—and easier-going, but no push-over. Maybe it was the suit, Hutch thought, breaking eye contact so Simon wouldn’t know he’d been sized-up.

Before either man could speak, a knock sounded on the door and then the doorbell rang. “I’ll grab the food,” Simon offered, rising from the table, “if you’ll get the drink.”

By the time they met back in the dining room, Hutch had completely cleared the files off the table, and Simon had changed out of his suit into sweats. Plates, utensils, paper napkins, a wine bottle and glasses—and the food in take-out boxes—were also ready for dinner.

“It’s not New York Chinese,” Simon said, opening the first of five boxes and feasting his eyes on its contents, “but they make fairly good Chinese food around here just the same.”

As he uncorked the bottle of Chablis, Hutch just had to ask. “You’re from New York?”

“Brooklyn, born-and-raised.”

“Of course you are,” Hutch silently thought, momentarily staring at his empty plate and kicking himself for asking. And, still, he couldn’t help himself. “My partner’s father was a Brooklyn police officer, killed in the line of duty.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. His name again?”

“Starsky. Samuel. He left behind a wife and two sons: my partner, David, and his brother, Nick.”

Simon gave it some thought as he filled his plate with a portion of food from each box—chow mein, fried rice, moo shoo vegetables, kung pao chicken, sweet and sour pork—all while hungrily eyeing it. “I’m better if I could see their faces,” he admitted about the Starskys, looking up and shrugging at Hutch. “Like I’ve said, I’m really not so good with names, but I haven’t forgotten the facial features you gave me about him.”

“Fair enough. It was 24 years ago.”

“You’d think I’d remember that then. Oh, wait … it was around the time I moved to D.C. I had other things on my mind.”

“You were a federal agent in your early thirties?” Hutch asked, impressed, as he finally dished himself a plate full of food.

“I began as a New York City police officer and then graduated to D.C. Capitol police before being briefly assigned to Secret Service for Richard Nixon when he was VP, and then I was ‘retired’ to the FBI.”

“That’s some resume.”

“It sounds more romantic than it actually was,” Simon said, biting into his first mouthful of food. “Tourists are a pain in the ass. But I digress. Do you have a picture of your partner—on your person, I mean? It might jog something loose in the old noggin.”

Hutch actually had a couple of pictures of Starsky in his possession, but he wouldn’t admit it. He’d wait for another time to show a photo of Starsky to Simon. He didn’t want the seasoned federal agent to think he couldn’t go a week—let alone a day—without laying eyes on his male partner, or was Hutch being overly sensitive? Despite that concern, he sided with caution. “I’ll get you one,” he promised, pouring white wine into both glasses.

While they ate all of what Hutch definitely decided was a delicious meal between them, followed by yet another bottle of shared wine—that one a merlot—he and Simon got more acquainted with each other. Small talk, mostly, but they happily familiarized themselves with their personal preferences on music, movies, work ethics, politics, and more.

“Dessert?” Simon eventually asked, but Hutch declined, feeling full, and Simon followed his lead. “Just as well,” he lamented, patting his stomach with both hands. “I’ve been putting on some pounds.” He instead cleaned off the table, washed and put away the utensils, turned off the kitchen lights, and returned to his seat, leaving just the overhead on, as if he planned to dive deeper into the case, and was prepared to do so until late into the night, if necessary.

“I like your tidiness,” Hutch observed, trying to sound as nonjudgmental as he possibly could. He himself was a bit of a ‘clean freak,’ but he also enjoyed trashing Starsky’s car whenever he got a chance to give his partner a bad time. “Raised mostly by women, I assume?”

Simon laughed. “You know me well already. Mother. Two sisters. Aunts. Grandmothers on both sides.”

“And the wife?”

“I was neater than she was; I drove her nuts.”

“I hope it wasn’t grounds for divorce.”

“The affair I had was,” Simon candidly admitted, briefly staring into his past through the wine in his half-filled glass. When a moment of silence passed, he looked up at Hutch, and shrugged. “There you have it. I’m not perfect. We make mistakes. Some of us do, anyway. And I paid handsomely for it in more ways than one.”

Hutch could just about verbatim say those words in vulnerable reply, but he chose not to. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust Simon with his private life; he did to a point. What he didn’t trust were his own fragile feelings and the last thing he wanted was to openly cry in front of the man. His loss was a soulmate, after all, not a wife. Hutch wasn’t sure he could trust anyone with that knowledge—besides the man in the middle from Colorado, his friend, Alec Henley.

Even that memory startled him when he viewed it through a stranger’s eyes, even a stranger who was becoming respectfully familiar with him the way Simon was. “I’m sorry you went through a divorce like that,” Hutch said. “Mine wasn’t so exciting,” he sarcastically added. “She didn’t like my job so we fought a lot.” He meant his marriage to Vanessa and hoped Simon would assume he fought in both of his ‘marriages’; in many ways, he had.

“You don’t strike me as the arguing type.”

“I’m not,” Hutch said, truthfully. “I mean, I can debate an issue and stand my ground on my convictions until the cows come home, but…” He pursed his lips and glanced away, hinting toward the real reason he divorced Vanessa. “I know how to handle those kinds of fights with a man—I’d punch him in the mouth. But with a woman, I’d rather leave than endure the constant arguing. So I left.”

“Both times, hm?”

Hutch refused to say, but not in a way that Simon noticed. Hutch’s silent replies, as they were with Dobey, allowed his listener to settle on his own conclusions.

“But do tell me,” Simon said after half a minute. “Besides that piece of shit being what we already know he is—a piece of shit—do you have any questions about our case?”

“Before I ask one, let me give you the back story.”

“I’m listening.”

“I read in the paper you left on the table this morning that Interstate 5 was officially completed yesterday, joining Mexico to Canada and making it ‘the first contiguous freeway that connects the North American countries.’ Amazing factoid, huh?”

Simon eyed him, as if he believed Hutch had to have more to say than something as useless to their case as that sounded. “And that helps us, how?”

“Just that it got me to thinking.”

“About freeways?” Simon quipped.

“About freeways,” Hutch replied, watching Simon’s expression change from amusement to serious consideration. “Well, about freeways and how they come to pass.”

“Because I believe you’re going somewhere useful with this, you have my undivided attention.”

“Okay, here’s my question,” Hutch said, leaning back in his chair, enjoying the wine and the transition from personal conversation into his reason for even being in Simon’s life. “Am I such a rookie that I’ve stumbled onto something you guys have already long-ago discovered and eliminated as irrelevant?”

Simon straightened. “That sounds promising.”

Hutch didn’t want to get into too much detail if he was only telling Simon what Simon already knew, so he threw out the fewest words he could think of to find out. “Divisible by five, right?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“The math.”

“You’re definitely going to have to explain yourself.”

“The highway numbers.”

Simon leaned forward, made firm eye contact with Hutch, seemed as if he wanted to be excited about his assumption that Hutch was about to tell him something he didn’t know, but guarded in case he was wrong. “I love that you’re not making any sense and really hoping that, when you explain it to me, we’re going to find ourselves with a long-needed break in this case.”

“It was my partner’s idea,” Hutch said, giving credit where it was due.

“Oh? You talked to him today?”

“I talk to him every day,” Hutch said, realizing he’d once again cornered himself. But what did it hurt? “I’m only half a brain without him, so I gave him the general facts of the case and he said …”

“Sounds like a math problem, Hutch.”

Starsky had definitely been looking over Hutch’s shoulder while Hutch browsed the evidence collection that day and made notes onto a new paper pad he’d found in Simon’s home office. Hutch didn’t realize what he’d been scribbling until Starsky’s observation made him stop and study it.

“Am I right?” Starsky asked. “I mean, all you have that ties these victims together is that they were male. Not race. Not age. Not social standing. Not location. Not marital status. Maybe they were all gay, but that isn’t conclusive.”

“What is?”

“That they were stabbed in the ear with an ice pick or some other sharp object like that—which tells us little except that the killer is a bonafide sicko—and that they were dumped on a highway somewhere.”

“And from that you think it’s a math problem?”

“It’s a numbers game. That’s what I meant to say. Well, that, and yeah, I think there’s some math to do in there, too.”

“Meaning … highway numbers,” Hutch assumed, studying the list of notes he’d made on paper. “Interstate designations.”

“Exactly.”

“You think there’s a pattern.”

“Don’t you see it? Figure that out and you’ll find your killer.”

“So … what did you learn?” Simon eagerly asked. “I’m on pins and needles over here.”

“I took the metro into D.C. this morning,” Hutch told him; he’d left within a few hours after Simon departed for work upon hearing Starsky’s calculations in his mind, “and I stopped by the Federal Highways Administration just to rattle the rafters and see what fell out. Did you know the FHWA is just a hop, skip, and a jump from your sorry office?”

“C’mon, Hutch,” Simon playfully but firmly suggested, “insult me all you want, but don’t keep me in suspense.”

Hutch winked at him. “Turns out there’s a system.”

“That’s obvious.”

“Is it?”

“I mean, I’m sure there has to be—not that I know it myself.”

“Well, I was given an earful by the Highway Administration and a lot of maps and pamphlets. I came back here and began charting what I was reading.”

“And?”

“And I think this killer is using a system. If I’m right, we might just know where he’ll dump his next victim.”

“No pun intended here, Hutch, but you’re killing me. Get to the point already before I drop dead.”

Hutch had to leave the dining room to retrieve all the work he’d prepared that day, bring it back to the table, sit beside Simon, and lay it out in front of them the way he’d organized it earlier so he could walk Simon through it.

“I think it comes down to this: the locations of bodies have one thing in common. They were dumped on interstate highways that serve two or more states.”

“That narrows it down,” Simon dryly noted.

“Actually, it does. There are 42 interstates that serve two or more states. Even-numbered interstates are assigned smaller to larger numbers and run west to east and odd-numbered interstates are assigned smaller to larger numbers and run south to north.”

“I’m following so far.”

“Of the 42 Interstate highways serving two or more states, only 16 have numbered designations that are divisible by five: Interstate 10 in Arizona being our latest example. Tell me if you’ve heard this before.”

“Not even a word of what you’re talking about.”

“The victims have all been found on interstates serving two or more states with a highway designation number divisible by five—but only one body per state. He began with the highest highway number and worked his way across country.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning he started with Interstate 95 on the east coast and is now down to interstate 5 on the west.”

“If I’m doing the math right, I’m guessing there are some lapses in the highway numbers?” Simon figured.

“Correct. There is no Interstate 40 and no Interstate 50 and Interstate 25 only serves Texas.”

“Greedy bastards. But what’s that about only one body per state?”

“The killer didn’t dump a second body in the same state on the two or more states served by an interstate.” He showed Simon his deductions in pencil, but knew Simon was more interested in what he was hearing than in what he was seeing.

“Tell him about the mile markers,” Starsky nudged him. “Tell him.”

“Yeah, Starsk, I’m getting to that.”

“But that’s a whole lot of square miles to cover,” Simon observed, not sounding as excited as he wanted to be. “It doesn’t help us figure out where to find him or where he’ll strike next.”

“Oh, but there’s more.”

“Now you’re giving me chills, Hutch.”

“Each of his victims was numbered, too. Victim #1. Victim #2, and so on.”

Simon studied Hutch’s notes with him, but couldn’t foresee where Hutch was leading him. “And you know that, because?”

“Because his victims were found near mile markers, according to the police reports. Look at this here,” he said, showing Simon his list of the killer’s victims and the locations of their remains. “Victim #1 was dumped on Interstate 95 in Connecticut—at mile marker #1. Victim #7, as another example, was dumped on Interstate 65 at mile marker #7. And so on.”

“Jesus.”

“You’re right: if we had to figure it out from scratch, I’m not sure we could do it, but we’re using known facts now, and that allows us to see the pattern.”

Simon obviously did some calculating in his head. “You said there are 16 interstates that serve two or more states and are divisible by 5. He’s killed 14, which means he has two more to go before he devises another pattern—”

“Actually, if my theory is right, he’s killed 15 already; you’ve missed one.” Hutch went over his notes to make sure he got his facts straight, and then said, “Interstate 90. In one of 13 states it serves. Mile marker #2.”

“You’re saying a body should’ve been found on highway 90 somewhere in the U.S.—but not in a state that he’s already dumped someone.”

“Yeah, but unfortunately, we can’t rule out any of the 13 states served by Highway 90 because none of them overlap with another victim’s location.”

“Crap. So where does that leave us?”

“Interstate 5 is his next target highway; it serves California, Oregon, and Washington—the last of which is one of the 13 states also served by Highway 90. Since he’s already left us a door prize on Interstate 15 in California, that narrows it down to Oregon if there was a body on 90 at mile marker #2 in Washington.”

“So I understand you: we have two states, mile markers #16, where he conceivably will drop someone next, but if we can find out whether he’s already dropped in Washington, we only have to focus on Oregon.”

“Yes, but the records department at the Washington police station nearest mile marker #2 was closed for the day by the time I stumbled on this and won’t reopen until Monday.”

Simon leaned back and stared into everything he had just learned before making his own observation. “He committed five murders Year One, one every other month beginning in February, five murders Year Two, one every other month beginning in February, and five murders so far this year, one every other month, but he began in January so he could squeeze this last one in.” After looking at Hutch’s charts, Simon concluded, “He’ll kill next in November, sometime around Thanksgiving.”

“You’re catching on, Officer.”

“I’m stating the obvious, Hutch, when I say we have to intercept him. We’ll call the Federal Highways Administration on Monday and see if they had anybody working for them with a chip on his shoulder and an injured eye, and we’ll also call about the possible Washington murder. We should know this week whether we rule it out. And then, assuming we do … where did you say we’re going specifically for this stakeout?”

“Ashland. Roughly 15 miles north of the California border in Oregon.”

* * *

“That was some impressive detecting, Detective,” Starsky said, proud of his partner, or so it seemed. On second thought, he would be proud. The littlest things Hutch did often impressed him. Maybe there was a paternal nature to Hutch’s relationship with Starsky—subtle, underlying, but not so much that it prevented them from being in love with each other.

“I can’t do this without you,” Hutch quietly said. He lay on his side on the full-sized mattress, nude under a light blanket, facing the room’s window. The drapes were closed, but the daylight coming through them told him the sun had risen. Somehow he’d made it through another day.

“You’re doing it without me,” Starsky reminded him. “Look what you did yesterday! Broke a case wide open. You’re going to get this guy. You’ll see.”

“I didn’t do it without you, Starsk. One of the few things you’re better at than I am: math.”

“Dream on.”

“You’re not better at math?”

“I’m better at a lot of things than you are, not just a few.”

“Yeah? Name another.”

“Driving.”

Hutch laughed. “Don’t kid yourself.”

“Running. Climbing. I’m a faster draw, too.”

“Whatever, Starsky.”

Hutch closed his eyes, hoping to end the nonsensical conversation he was having with himself, but it only pushed him inward. He was alone in the room, on the bed. “I miss you.”

Starsky couldn’t possibly be gone. He really didn’t plan to hide for the rest of his life, did he? Time would help him to see that he’d made a mistake; he simply needed to get away from the drama, allow it to be buried in the inevitable past, and then he’d take a look around and realize home was where his heart was. They both knew where they belonged.

“He kissed you last night, Hutch.”

“What?”

“Simon. He kissed you.”

Hutch quietly chuckled. Would Starsky really make something out of a benign gesture like the one he referenced? It was after Hutch had laid out his case findings, after he and Simon had finished the wine and the subsequent small talk, after they agreed to ‘hit the hay’ following a long day, that they both rose from the table.

Hutch was about to turn toward the hallway, but Simon reached over just as Hutch walked past him, grabbed him and pulled him into his arms, hugged Hutch close, and profusely thanked him. When he let Hutch go, he kissed Hutch on the side of his head. “You have no idea how grateful I am,” Simon added, himself turning into the direction of the bedrooms, “because I haven’t got the words to tell you what I feel.”

“He kissed you, Hutch.”

“Affectionately.”

“A kiss just the same.”

“He’s Italian.”

“Well, what you said earlier, Hutch—to Simon, I mean.”

“About?”

“Being divorced because you didn’t like the constant fighting.”

“What of it?”

“That’s what we would have spent our lives doing: fighting all the time. I spared us years of grief.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Like I know anything,” Starsky said, smugly.

“You believe in werewolves and vampires, so don’t trust what you think you know.”

“You hurt me, Hutch.”

“I know I did,” Hutch agreed, opening his eyes to stare at the wall and window. “I’m sorry, buddy. I don’t know what else to say. But I’ve since fixed it.”

“What needed fixing wasn’t the situation; it was that you—”

“It’s that I passed you over.”

“That can’t be fixed. You understand that, right? It’s like you saying you’re sorry you killed my puppy, but since then you’ve buried him in a nice shady spot under a tree surrounded by wildflowers on a hillside overlooking a blue lake under a sky of shiny stars. My puppy is still dead, Hutch.”

“Shut up,” Hutch ordered him, exhaling long. “You’ve made your point.”

Starsky couldn’t possibly be gone forever, could he? He’d eventually get over a ‘dead puppy,’ wouldn’t he?

“It was a metaphor, Hutch.”

“I’m not an idiot.”

“You proved that yesterday. You even impressed an award-winning detective who’s been solving crimes for as long as we’ve been alive.”

“I didn’t do it without you.”

“You kinda did.”

“I imagined what you would have added to the equation.”

“See what I mean?”

Hutch hugged his pillow, closed his eyes, pressed back into his feelings. He might just help find a sadistic serial killer that the entire FBI couldn’t find in three years, but he’d be damned if he’d gotten any closer to finding Starsky in three weeks.

He wouldn’t survive the loss, the growing emptiness. He would never overcome losing the greatest love of his life. They’d been through so much together and were just about to embark on a new way of being in the world when it got turned upside down. Hutch handled it badly. He’d give anything to undo his actions.

“I miss you, Starsk.”

“You should have thought of that before you gave our bed away to someone else.”

“I didn’t give our bed away to anybody else.”

“Semantics. You just took it away from me.”

Hutch opened his eyes to let the first of a few tears find their way out, but he had to cut them short. He heard movement in the hall, footsteps, and realized Simon was approaching. The sounds ended in the doorway to the guest bedroom; Hutch had purposely left the door open after his early morning trip to the bathroom so Simon would know he could intrude if he needed to. Hutch quickly blinked back his tears, drew a long breath, and prepared to greet the man.

“Hutch?” Simon quietly asked, sounding as if he didn’t plan to wake Hutch if Hutch was asleep, but wanting his attention in case he was.

Hutch rolled back to look over his shoulder, and made friendly eye contact with Simon; his host was already dressed: jeans, untucked buttoned-down shirt, seeming groomed and refreshed. “Hey,” Hutch said, as if it weren’t obvious. “I’m awake.”

Simon warmly smiled at him. “May I interest you in some breakfast, pal?”

* * *

“We won’t get far on peanuts and beer alone,” Simon said to Hutch as he motioned the bartender over and asked for a menu. “I think we’ve both worked up an appetite.” His comment was a joke because neither he nor Hutch had done much that day except attend the first-ever March on Washington for Gay and Lesbian Rights.

Hutch sadly laughed, reflecting over the past seven hours. “It did take its emotional toll,” he warily admitted, allowing Simon to peruse the menu while Hutch stared into what remained of his second beer. He had attended protests and demonstrations in his youth—for civil rights, safe drinking water, and to bring awareness to abused children, among other social issues—but he’d never experienced anything as impressive as the parade he and Simon witnessed earlier that day in Washington. More than 120,000 people had been in attendance.

The march began at 4th Street and Madison Drive, proceeded west down Pennsylvania Avenue and across E Street, snaked its way past the White House, and eventually gathered on the expansive lawn at the Washington Monument, where a stage had been erected to host the event’s speakers and musicians.

The weather was a cool 50 degrees, perhaps due in part to the record early snowstorm that had swept through D.C. just four days earlier; there hadn’t been much snow, most of it having already melted, but it dropped the region’s temps to such a degree that long-sleeves and jackets were the apparel of choice. Hutch wore his letterman just in case and was glad to have it when the sun eventually set and even cooler temperatures moved in.

His and Simon’s original plan wasn’t to participate in the March, but they were unceremoniously dragged into it when a couple of young and euphoric men wearing colorful hats pulled Hutch in from the sidelines—and Simon went with him.

“How many times were you hit on today?” Simon asked, passing Hutch the menu after he apparently decided what he wanted to order from it. They sat side-by-side on cushioned stools in the crowded bar, shoulder-to-shoulder. “Four times?”

“Five.”

“But who’s counting, right?”

“Right,” Hutch said with a sad chuckle. He read over the food items, but nothing sounded as good as he hoped; maybe he didn’t have much of an appetite after all.

“Does that happen to you often, even when you’re not at a gay parade?”

“Get hit on?”

“By men.”

“Not really.”

“That’s surprising. I mean, it’s no secret that you’re beautiful.”

Hutch turned his head to look closely into Simon’s dark brown eyes, searching for a meaning he eventually realized wasn’t there—or he couldn’t see it—and forced a smile. “Thank you. Do I count that comment as the sixth time I’ve been hit on today?”

Simon laughed. “Just an observable fact.”

“Well, I’ve never seen men be this publicly open with each other before, not even in L.A.”

“The march gave them permission.”

It certainly had. Tens of thousands of men and women from all persuasions had gathered that October morning to celebrate who they were, how they felt, and what they believed about each other and themselves. They danced in the streets, sang known and spontaneously birthed songs, laughed and openly cried together, walked alone with irrepressible smiles on their faces or in locked arms a dozen people wide.

Hutch was shy at first when he was forced into joining the rambunctious crowd, but Simon was seemingly amused to have been invited to participate in the demonstration, so Hutch soon let down his guard. He wanted to support the cause and therefore allowed himself to be swept up into the spirit of the event’s purpose.

Simon seemed to be considering those very thoughts because he next said, “In another life you must have been a musician. It wasn’t hard to hear you in that crowd; you have a lovely voice.”

Hutch shrugged, set aside the menu, and drank the last of his beer. “Thank you again. Music was definitely my first love.”

“No shit?”

“I thought I could make a difference in the world if I wrote and sang the right songs.”

“But?”

“It didn’t pay.”

“There had to be another reason,” Simon insisted. They both knew one followed one’s heart whether the salary matched the effort. “Seems a stretch to go from promising singer/songwriter to homicide police detective.”

“Well, when you put it like that,” Hutch said with a light laugh. “But the truth is, it just didn’t do enough soon enough. It didn’t pay in that way. I made the right choice.”

“That might be true,” Simon said, sort of sadly. “I mean, if you hadn’t taken the path you did … we might never be in a position to catch this motherfucker before he kills again.”

The bartender stopped to take their food orders; there hadn’t been much to choose from on the menu, and both men decided on the baked ziti pasta dish with a side of seasoned vegetables, and garlic bread. Simon also ordered a bottle of Cabernet after asking Hutch if he was agreeable.

While they waited for dinner to be served, they talked about the day’s highlights, inevitably leading Hutch into recalling verbatim a few of the words from Allen Young’s closing speech, then quoting them to Simon with a bit of dramatic effect just for fun.

“‘We are all here, the almost-liberated and the slightly repressed; the butch, the femme, and everything in-between; the androgynous, the monogamous, and the promiscuous, the masturbators and the fellators and the tribadists.’” He remembered those poetic words because he kept repeating them in his head during the blocks-long walk, following Simon, to find a bar after the march had ended and the crowd dispersed.

“You’re good!” Simon said, impressed, raising his beer glass to Hutch’s empty one. “But what the hell is a tribadist?”

“I have absolutely no idea.”

“Well, here’s to them, anyway,” Simon added, swallowing his toast. “So tell me, Hutch. What was your overall takeaway?”

Hutch didn’t have to think for long. “Every time they threw a punch at Anita Bryant, I felt justice was served.”

“There’s definitely a lot of venom there for her.”

“Deserved.”

“How so?”

“She’s actively anti-gay. Good old Christian values, telling other people how to live their lives.”

“It probably didn’t help that the Pope paid a visit here just a week ago. That had to motivate the gays.”

“I meant no offense,” Hutch promised, “assuming you’re Catholic.”

“Another brilliant deduction, Hutchinson—but I’m not a practicing one anymore. Divorce, remember? You? Any particular belief system?”

“Raised a Lutheran, not practicing, either. Divorced, remember?”

“Twice, no less,” Simon noted, not judgmentally. “We’re wayward boys.”

“Are we redeemable, do you think?”

“I hope so,” Simon said in a low voice, somewhat not certain, and then seemed to drift away in thought as he lazily drummed the bar top with his fingers.

Hutch did likewise with his own musings. He replayed certain moments from the march in his mind, particularly a tender one that he’d privately kept an eye on: two middle-aged men lying together in the grass on the National Mall, dressed warmly and in each other’s arms, lost in their own conversation and affection. It should have been Hutch with Starsky in a moment like that one. It should have been them throwing caution to the wind, them being liberated into who they’d become together, safe and validated in public, them enjoying a freedom they had never experienced before.

“Starsk?”

“I haven’t known you long,” Simon said, breaking into Hutch’s thoughts, “but you seem a bit melancholic tonight.”

“Just thinking.”

“Try eating,” Simon encouraged him with an elbow nudge, “and follow it with some drinking.”

Only then did Hutch realize that their dinner had been set in front of them; he hadn’t even noticed, not the visual nor the aroma. He didn’t even see the glass of wine until half a minute later, but he pulled his plate closer, did his best to savor the meal at least with his eyes, and finally picked up his fork.

“This should be us, Starsk,” he told his partner in his mind. “We should be the ones in this bar, having this food together, talking about a gay parade we went to. This should be us.” He blinked back his unexpected grief, and took the first bite. “This is good,” he said to Simon between mouthfuls, covering for his stumble as if he had to. “Don’t you think so?”

Simon agreed. “The chef is Italian.”

“You’ve been here before.”

“First time. But I saw him in the doorway earlier.”

“And he had ‘the look.’”

Simon laughed. “Yah. The Paesano vibe.”

They ate in relative silence for a while; the cacophony of voices and music filling in where their words didn’t. They ate as if they were hungry; perhaps Simon was. Hutch only finished his meal to keep the pain at bay—but whether it was the one in his stomach or in his heart, he could no longer say.

* * *

Hutch sat on the soft-cushioned sofa, feet on the mahogany coffee table, crossed at the ankles, his hands on his full belly, relaxed; Simon opposite him, slouched comfortably in the recliner, his legs open and his feet on the floor, arms on the armrests, just as wiped out, but neither man ready to call it a day. The house was nicely furnished: minimally decorated, not cold, but not an overall warmth, either—as if it simply needed a woman’s touch. Or Hutch’s green thumb.

They both knew upon arriving back at the house that there was more to discuss before turning in for the night, so they didn’t indulge an after-dinner drink. They needed to think, not further dull their senses. The purpose of attending the gay rights parade was to be inspired by some thoughts or concepts they hadn’t yet considered that might lend themselves to better understanding the dark mind of their serial killer.

On cue, Simon spoke first. “That line from the speech you quoted earlier: ‘the almost-liberated and the slightly repressed’ … you have to wonder … how many watchers from the sidelines, wishing they could join in, were still too afraid, or in denial, or just not ready for one reason or another, despite the warm welcome of thousands of people just like them.”

Hutch remembered how vehemently he fought Starsky after his partner had gone down on him without asking that first time, how angry Hutch was, how scared, how … not ready. He was one such watcher from the sidelines that fall day.

He listened to the authenticity in Simon’s reflective voice—to his mental exploration using audible words, to his search for some meaning beyond the superficial—and hoped he wouldn’t give too much of his personal life away in what he imagined was an inevitable conversation.

“What do you think, Hutch?” Simon sincerely asked, throwing his question out for a team effort answer. “Are they repressed, those watchers, angry—at themselves, at others? Enough to kill? There was a lot of hostility in some of those speeches.”

“People kill for all kinds of reasons,” Hutch reminded him of the obvious, “and not necessarily because they’re self-hating gay men.”

“But a guy who fucks men before he murders them … that’s a gay man, don’t you think?”

“I don’t know,” Hutch honestly replied. He breathed slowly, allowing himself the time to think, to not be flippant or careless. “I read about this woman who profiles rapists; she’s convinced that rape is ‘violence as pleasure.’”

“You mean, it’s the harm they’re getting off on and not the sex they believe they can’t get except by forcing it? Wow. Who is this woman?”

“Ann Burrows or Burgess. Something like that. I have her name in my notes. She lives in Boston and is considered a groundbreaking researcher in psychiatric nursing. She’s been consulting with the FBI on some cases, in fact—a lone female voice in this all-boys club.”

Simon raised an eyebrow. “We must meet with her then.”

Hutch was going to suggest it earlier, but hadn’t gotten that far in his strategizing. “Do we know whether all of his victims were sodomized? There’s a lot of that kind of information missing in those reports.”

“On the few they performed sodomy tests, they were positive, but the tests weren’t always done. They did find semen on the bodies, on most of them, but they didn’t routinely test to see whether the killer jacked off on his victims—or came in them. I honestly don’t think anyone was looking to log that kind of detail.”

“Because they were men?”

“Quite possibly.”

“What did the two survivors report?”

“Just that they were abducted, beaten, nearly killed, but got away.”

“I’d like to see those reports and any available transcripts.”

“They should’ve been in the files,” Simon said, sounding disappointed in his staff. He exhaled frustration and seemed tired, as if the case, and not the day’s activities, exhausted him. “We’ll look for them tomorrow.”

They were quiet for several minutes as they separately wound facts and suppositions through their minds. There were more questions than answers when it came to specifics about the ‘rape’ nature of the attacks.

“We can’t figure out motive beyond his simple thrill of harming people,” Simon observed, thinking out loud as he dropped his head against the back of the chair, audibly sighed, stared at the ceiling, and stated the obvious. “Was he a jilted lover? A disgruntled employee? A repressed homosexual taking his self-loathing out on those who weren’t? Should we assume all of his victims were gay? And, if we don’t, does that hurt or help us?”

“Because if we assume he’s gay,” Hutch surmised, “we spend our time and energy in Ashland looking for him in gay bars and seedy motels and other meet-up joints—when maybe he isn’t in any of those places except when he’s hunting.”

“And we want to grab him long before he nails his next prey.”

“Maybe we spend more time in Ashland than we’re planning,” Hutch proposed. “Get to know it so well that we notice the littlest something out of the ordinary.”

“Let’s plan on spending all of next month there,” Simon decided, lifting his head and looking at Hutch. There was wisdom in his expression, enough to know he didn’t have all the answers and could learn so much from his younger colleague. “Of course, this Ashland job assumes that we don’t have to look for him on mile marker 16 on Interstate 5 in Washington state, but we should have that answer sometime this week. Obviously, we’ll need two teams if we have to search two states.”

A month-long stakeout would have been Hutch’s next suggestion, to spend all of November in Oregon; they were of one mind on what needed to be done and how to do it. Plus, Hutch could use any ‘free’ time to hunt the state for Starsky, whichever state he and Simon were assigned to.

“But on second thought, Hutch: this guy is targeting men. He’s raping them or getting off on them, or having consensual sex with them, maybe purposefully humiliating them, and then definitely and viciously murdering them. Men, not women.”

“Whether he likes sex with them or forces himself on them, the fact is he hates men enough to kill them,” Hutch agreed with an echoing thought, appreciating Simon’s frustration. “But if that’s true, how does a 12-year-old boy offend him as much as a 38-year-old man does? What do they have in common?”

“Dicks.”

Hutch rolled his eyes, but Simon wasn’t wrong. “Okay. There’s that.”

Simon straightened and posed his next line of inquiry. “What do you think makes a man want to fuck another man—whether it be for the pleasure of violence or the pleasure of pleasure?”

“He’s gay?”

Simon lightly laughed as if he realized how dumb his question about man-on-man ‘desire’ had been, and tried again. “What makes them choose gay?”

“I don’t think they choose it.”

“I’m not saying I disagree, but you think they’re born that way?”

“I don’t know. Are any of us born one way or another? I mean, when you met your wife, did you choose to love her, or did it just happen?”

Simon considered it. “It’s right there in the phrase: fell in love.”

“Exactly,” Hutch said. “We don’t choose who we love. And, for some people, they don’t get to choose whether they love someone of the opposite sex or the same one.”

“I’m inclined to agree with you.”

“So maybe this guy is having consensual sex with men on a regular basis, but every now and then, every month or so, his rage builds up, and he can no longer control it unless he kills someone who was willing to fuck him.”

“So maybe none of it was rape,” Simon figured, looking at Hutch, making direct eye contact. “Maybe every sex act was consensual.”

“Yeah, maybe. Or maybe he jerked off to knowing he was going to kill them.”

“That’s one fucked-up human being.”

“He may have proven it at least fifteen times already.”

“But that doesn’t explain the boy.”

“Or why he’s chosen an interstate designation pattern to drop the bodies.”

So many questions, so few answers.

“What was your main takeaway from today’s events?” Hutch asked. It had to be different from his own perspective; surely Simon wasn’t pining to be in that crowd in the arms of another man.

“That gay people are fed up by how they’re judged, that they come in all shapes and sizes, from all walks of life, and that—like they said at the march—they’re everywhere.”

Hutch chuckled. If Simon knew that a man who loved a man was right there in his living room, would he be offended to know such a thing?

“Did you have a partner on this case or have you been working it alone?” Hutch impulsively asked, not realizing until it was too late that he’d just set himself up for scrutiny.

“Joe Razolli. Fellow paesano. But he couldn’t handle the gruesome nature of this case, especially after we tied a boy’s killing to it, and he was either going to be reassigned elsewhere or he was going to quit. So the agency was kind enough to rehome him until this case is solved.”

“I take it then that you’re not sharing these details with him.”

“No, but we’re working a couple of cold cases together, and he’s on a missing persons case with a temporary partner, so we’re still a team. How about your guy? Why were you split?”

“Same reasons,” Hutch lied. He wished he could tell Simon the truth, use Simon’s experienced brain to help him find Starsky, but he didn’t have the courage that tens of thousands of other people in that earlier parade obviously had.

“It would be funny if it turns out that our partners are working a missing persons case together,” Simon noted with a smile.

Hilarious, Hutch dryly thought, with no disrespect to Simon. But was it possible?

Something in Hutch’s questions or his silence, asking about Simon’s partner and then not commenting on their partners’ teamwork possibilities, seemed to peak Simon’s curiosity. He squinted at Hutch, as if Hutch had told him something, but he didn’t quite know what. He certainly had a sense for it, though. “Do you think you could ever be attracted to a man?”

To keep from saying more by his startled pause, Hutch quickly replied, “Never say never,” and then he uncomfortably laughed, like he’d made some kind of meaningless joke. He was tired and should be more careful.

Simon cocked his head. “That’s an interesting thing to say.”

“Why?”

“If I’d been asked, I would have said there’s no way I could be attracted to a man.”

“Why not? You find me ‘beautiful.’”

Simon was about to say something, but he closed his mouth instead and carefully eyed Hutch, as if sizing up Hutch’s unspoken motives or his intentions—or he considered something else altogether.

“Okay,” Simon finally said, letting out his breath. “It’s been a long day; we both should get some sleep. Tomorrow we’ll go to the office and dig up some of those facts we still need. On Monday, we’ll call Washington and then we’ll know if we’re only booking Ashland for the month. We should also find out if the Federal Highways Administration ever hired a dude with one eye.”

Hutch gently smiled at Simon. He hadn’t meant to put his temporary partner on the spot—or himself—but he was glad he’d made the man consider something he hadn’t before: that one doesn’t get to choose who they love—or to whom they’re attracted.

* * *

“I can’t say I’m not impressed,” Dobey admitted. He sat at his desk across from Hutch and made firm eye contact, a tempered admiration for his detective having filled his expression, as if he wanted to Cheshire Cat-grin, but didn’t feel it was an appropriate reaction under the circumstances; he needed Hutch to know just how sincere his professional pride went. “You busted a case wide open in less than a month, one that the FBI has been working on for years.”

“Simply an instance of not seeing the forest for the trees,” Hutch explained with a shrug, downplaying his role. He sat slumped in his chair and tried to ignore the emptiness in the one beside him.

“Don’t sell yourself short,” Dobey advised him. “I really am proud of you. The whole department is. Solving that serial pattern was a stroke of genius.”

A lot of research and data-collecting had gone into the case, most of it by Simon and his staff; Simon’s partner probably aided in some evidence gathering, too—until he could no longer stomach the violence. Hutch simply structured it in a way they hadn’t envisioned it before and the formula emerged in the process. But Dobey was still missing the bigger picture.

“So you and the FBI are going to spend next month in Ashland,” Dobey noted, changing direction. “When do you leave?”

Hutch toyed with a shoelace on the foot he had resting on his knee. He had arrived in Los Angeles that late Monday morning from Washington D.C. less than an hour earlier, stopping by the precinct on his way to the new house, and hadn’t yet wrapped his head around the immediate future. “End of next week, I think,” he said in a low voice, not certain of the day, but knowing it would be the first of November.

In the previous week that Hutch spent at Simon’s house, they’d received the news they hoped for: that a John Doe had, indeed, been found two years earlier on Mile Marker #2 on Interstate 90 in Washington state; the autopsy report showed that he was a 20-something male who’d been mortally punctured in his left ear by an unknown sharp object and was then dumped along the highway. No one had stepped forward to claim the body, so the case remained cold and—probably because it seemed like a ‘homosexual killing’ on the surface—it was relegated to a storage room.

But a man in that age-range, killed the way he’d been, and discarded at a mile marker—specifically the one at which they anticipated to find another victim—confirmed Hutch’s theory that the serial killer was discarding his victims on America’s interstate highway system using a master plan. He was about to drop his next victim in Oregon—and the FBI now knew exactly where.

Dobey’s secretary entered the room before Hutch could give him more details about his upcoming trip, and set a cup of hot coffee on Dobey’s desk. She said a cheerful hello to Hutch on her way out, telling him how ‘nice’ it was to see him again, and asking him if he’d like coffee, too. He said ‘no’ and forced a smile at her to show his appreciation for being asked.

“What are your plans once you’re in Ashland?” Dobey asked, cautiously sipping coffee to test its temperature. “Any particular places you’re going to stake out?”

“The entire town,” Hutch assumed. He watched Dobey, waiting for empathetic eye contact, the kind he needed in that moment, but it didn’t come.

“These other two area killings,” Dobey referenced, leaning back in his chair, cocking his head, and watching Hutch watch him for a moment before continuing, “anything about them that’s useful outside the details of the previous thirteen murders?”

Victim #14 had been found at Mile Marker #14 on Interstate 15 in California, closer to San Diego than it was to Los Angeles, and roughly in the middle of the desert. The most recent victim had been found at Mile Marker #15 on Interstate 10 near Quartzsite, Arizona, approximately 4 hours from L.A. That man, too, had been dumped in the middle of the desert, but it was in a ditch right off the road and just inside the perimeter of a public campsite, a kind of social rest stop along the busy highway.

“We don’t know much about the San Diego killing besides the forensics similarities,” Hutch said, finding something of interest to share with his superior. “But the murder in Arizona has a back story.”

“Isn’t that the one we received an anonymous call about?”

“Yeah. He told us there was a ‘crazy psycho man’ harassing him,” Hutch recalled. He’d read over the transcript of that call enough times to have it memorized, but the only thing in that report that stood out to him was that the ‘crazy psycho man’ was ‘most likely’ in his early 40s, had short, dark, uncombed hair, was roughly five-feet-ten and of slender build, was wearing clean, casual clothes but dirty shoes, and had an unmistakably injured or missing left eye covered by a black patch; his other eye was blue.

Although it was the most detailed description of the killer—in that it covered his overall appearance—it echoed similar anonymous reports by two other callers and two survivors over the span of the past couple of years.

“We have to wonder if he didn’t make those calls himself,” Hutch reminded Dobey, “especially because he called LAPD and not the Phoenix police. You know how these depraved criminal minds hope to get caught eventually.”

“And we hope to oblige him, too,” Dobey agreed; he’d obviously done his own research into the case to stay apprised of it without having to depend on others for updates.

“According to the FBI report,” Hutch added, “the Arizona campsite was hosting a ‘gay man desert party’ the night before the anonymous call came in, and the consensus is that the killer snagged a partygoer a couple of nights later.”

“So you’re of the mind that he’s gay?”

“Simon and I are agreeing to disagree, but we won’t leave a single stone unturned.”

“Smart,” Dobey said with a nod. He drank more coffee, stared away for a minute to consider something on his own, and then looked back at Hutch to ask him if he needed anything for the stakeout. When Hutch shrugged at him, Dobey said, “If you think of something, you’ll let me know.”

“It goes without saying.”

Dobey’s phone rang. “Hang on a minute,” he said to Hutch as he quickly answered it and slightly turned away in his chair, explaining, “It’s chaos around here lately; new cars and new uniforms and everyone jockeying for possession.” Into the phone, he barked, “Dobey!”

Hutch briefly listened to Dobey’s end of the conversation, his superior sounding frustrated and annoyed, but doing his best to soothe wounded egos; the dialogue did seem to be related to new stock inventory and seniority distribution, and who got what and when. Lucky were the undercover detectives, those who could wear what they wished whenever they wanted. Even Simon had to wear a suit and tie.

But Hutch soon bored of the topic and tuned out; in fairness, he’d arrived that morning already feeling immensely bored, physically and mentally tired, and disinterested in just about everything. His meeting with Dobey only exacerbated his feelings of despair.

After a minute, he glanced at the empty chair beside him, unable to avoid it a second longer. In his mind’s eye, he immediately saw Starsky, dressed in casual clothes—jeans, button-downed shirt, leather belt, his blue Adidas, a silver watch on his left wrist—and hanging off the chair’s arms, slouched in its seat, rolling his blue eyes in Hutch’s direction. They were of one mind in that way, too.

They were of one mind in many ways. In most ways.

“If you just waited another hour,” he silently chastised Starsky, “we could be here together feigning interest in this stupid police problem. One more hour. Didn’t you know my mind better than to sign off on it when you did?”

“Hutch?” Dobey said, sounding louder than previously, and tapping his desk. “Did you hear me?”

Hutch snapped out of his trance. “I didn’t,” he confessed, noticing that Dobey had since ended his phone call and was focused on him.

“By end of November, you’ll be available for another special assignment,” Dobey noted.

Hutch stared at him.

“No?” Dobey asked, sensing Hutch’s changed demeanor—or finally noticing the one he’d walked through the door with less than an hour earlier. “You’re not thinking of quitting,” he insisted.

“No,” Hutch said in a low voice. “I’m not thinking of quitting.” But he did think about leaving. “I’m tired,” he admitted, rubbing his face. “How about I come back later in the week to have these conversations?” He didn’t wait for an answer before he got to his feet. “I can’t do this right now.”

“What’s the problem?”

“The world has moved on,” Hutch emotionally said, his voice cracking on his words as he turned toward the door. “But I haven’t.”

“Hutch.”

“I’ll talk to you later,” Hutch replied, cutting Dobey off when he clasped the door handle. “I can’t be in this room.”

“Hutch.”

Hutch didn’t wait. He walked out of the office despite hearing Dobey order him to come back.

Twice.

* * *

The master bedroom was to the right off the tiled foyer; the open living room and kitchen to its left. On the far side of those rooms was the hallway with three bedrooms and a guest bathroom. They eventually planned to use that wing for visitors, a home office, and a private gym, but they never got that far in their staging.

The only things in the house of any real consequence were the king-sized bed in the master, a 19-inch-screen television against the wall across from its foot, a new VCR next to the TV on a cardboard box—and the numerous stacked, disorganized boxes still packed with Hutch’s belongings: kitchenware, clothes, books, the like. Within view from the foyer: the split-level living room and Hutch’s piano, the sofa and coffee table; in the dining area, his nook table and its four mismatched chairs.

Hutch dropped his backpack to the floor and stopped dead in his tracks the moment he entered the house after closing the front door behind him. He’d forgotten how empty he’d left the place nearly a month earlier. He and Huggy—and his day helpers—had unpacked the contents of the U-Haul truck into the living room, haphazardly dumping its spill-over boxes throughout the left-wing bedrooms.

There weren’t any pictures on the still-bare walls, no knickknacks or sculptures or home decor on any shelves, no curtains or blinds on the windows. No heat or air conditioning. The refrigerator hummed and a clock inside the kitchen kept rhythm.

Hutch had left California the morning after he’d moved into their new house to catch that flight to Chicago where he hoped to intercept Starsky’s Amtrak on its way to New York City, but Hutch failed in that endeavor. Starsky wasn’t in Chicago; he wasn’t in New York, either.

Hutch had returned to the house just for a few days when he arrived back from Florida, but only long enough to check in with Dobey, meet Simon for the first time, and briefly familiarize himself with the serial killer case before flying off to D.C.

This return was different. He’d come back all the more empty-handed after a long search. A month later, what had he really accomplished? He was no closer to knowing where Starsky was than the day Starsky had left him.

“Starsk?” he called into the house. Starsky’s car was parked in the driveway, off to one side, right where Hutch had left it; he hadn’t yet stored it in the garage, but maybe—just maybe—his partner had since used it and returned it to the very spot from which he’d found it. Maybe Starsky had played an elaborate joke on Hutch all that time, a cruel prank to teach his partner a lesson, but he hadn’t really gone far and, while Hutch was traveling around the country, Starsky was actually at home waiting for him to return.

But there was no reply to Hutch’s call—except the house’s echo.

He stepped into the master bedroom and looked around. Nothing had been moved since he’d been in it. The bed was sloppily made; the closet door was open enough to see there wasn’t anyone inside; and the room was as still as night. Hutch then walked to the spacious bathroom and stood in its doorway. His red bath towel hung crookedly over the shower’s rod, the toilet seat was still up, and the only thing to catch his eye was the single toothbrush in the clear plastic cup between the double sinks.

“You have to come back for that,” Hutch said under his breath, knowing how stupid he sounded, but not having anything else to hang his hope on. “Am I right, Starsky? You have to come back for that. You have to … come back.”

When Hutch turned away from the bathroom, he laid eyes on the bed again; that time it brought back memories of those earlier nights with Starsky at Venice Place. It was in that bedroom, snugged up against each other on the full mattress, that Starsky had found the house sale among the numerous realtor pamphlets he’d collected throughout the day.

“‘This beautiful residence consists of a 4-bedroom 2-bathroom home,’” Starsky informed Hutch, carefully reading the listing, “‘2200 square feet, a 2-car attached garage, and a stand-alone workshop.’”

Hutch had barely heard the words; he’d instead immersed himself in the soothing sound of his partner’s voice. He also couldn’t close his eyes; maybe he would never tire of looking at Starsky. Almost losing him in the police station parking lot had given new meaning to Starsky’s very existence.

“‘Expansive lawn and treed-perimeter of this one-of-a-kind property,’” Starsky dutifully continued. “‘Original hardwood floors throughout.’”

Starsky’s profile, his dark wavy hair, thick eyelashes.

“‘Indoor laundry room. Dual pane windows.’”

The black hair on his darker-skinned arms, the muscle in his biceps, the shapes of his fingers. Clean, manicured nails. Starsky’s hygiene was impeccable; Hutch again inhaled the aroma of his alluring cologne.

“‘New deck off the living room. Brick fireplace. Ceiling fans’—ceiling fans, Hutch. Imagine that.” Even Starsky’s excitement was hypnotic.

Hutch had to admit, if only to himself, that Starsky was the most masculine one between them—his manly features were more prominent: his muscled calves, hairy legs, deeper male voice.

“Listen to this: it has a ‘family orchard and wild berries flourish along the privacy-fenced boundaries.’ A built-in garden already, Hutch—and it’s ‘flourishing.’”

Everything about Starsky: so familiar and reliably attractive. If he lived a thousand years, he’d grow old gracefully—of this, Hutch was certain.

The house on that half-acre had lived up to its description when the boys saw it for the first time that next morning, though it was much roomier than they expected, having separately lived alone in a small apartment for most of their adult lives. Manicured lawns, fruit trees and flowers, room to build a deck outside the master bedroom for a hot tub, fairly good-sized bedrooms. A mansion compared to what they’d experienced.

“We’ll flip a coin to see which of us gets which room,” Hutch playfully suggested at the time; they hadn’t planned to bed together then. “I call heads.”

“It won’t matter to me,” Starsky had told him. “Whatever makes you happy.”

“No arm-wrestling over which end of the house you’ll live on?”

“I’ll take your scraps. This whole place is perfect.”

Maybe it was too perfect. Even the front door was red—just how Starsky had fantasized his dream house.

There was also a dining area off the large kitchen and a picture window above the farmhouse sink. Hutch dreamed about the meals they would make together in that well-lit room, the wine they’d drink, the lazy conversations they’d share … and he was lost again in his feelings.

“There’s nothing wrong with this place,” Starsky told him when they stood beside each other and gazed into the backyard from the sliding glass doors. “I mean, except that it’s further from work than we’re used to, it has everything we want, doesn’t it?”

“What happens if one of us wants to sell?”

“Why would we want that?”

“One of us gets married?”

“You think that’s gonna happen after all these years?”

“I’m saying, what if it does?” Hutch wondered, feeling nervous.

“Burn that bridge when we get to it?”

Hutch laughed; he didn’t intend to. “I think you mean we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.”

“If you think we’re doing this too fast, let me know,” Starsky said, as if he’d read Hutch’s mind. He turned to walk back through the house, admiring its custom touches along the way. “But whatever obstacles we hit, Hutch, I know we can work them out.”

The irony.

“You said those words,” Hutch silently reminded Starsky, using his sudden anger to force himself out of the master bedroom and into the kitchen where a two-slice toaster, a coffee pot, and a used ceramic cup were the room’s only decorations, “but you apparently didn’t mean them.”

There wasn’t anything out of the ordinary in the living room, either: piano, sofa, coffee table, unpacked boxes, framed pictures stacked against the wall, but none on them. An empty fireplace and the sliding glass doors that opened onto the patio, and from there into the backyard.

They’d planned on sharing cozy winter nights together before the fire in their new house, warmly bundled in sweats and thick socks, eating homemade hot stew on the sofa while wrapped inside the same blanket, and drinking wine and hot chocolate while they watched old movies in each other’s arms. Hutch’s fantasies. Now those dreams were … broken.

He probably should have stopped along the way from police headquarters and picked up some groceries, at least the basics; the refrigerator and pantry were relatively bare, and he knew that because he opened each one and then slowly closed them when nothing of substance materialized after a minute.

Because of his disinterested search, Hutch realized he wasn’t really hungry. The house hadn’t yet become a home; it didn’t feel inviting, so it was best that he go to a nearby restaurant when the mood struck him and surround himself with strangers and other distracting sights to shield him from the reality that he was unbelievably alone.

In the first hallway bedroom, he found more unpacked boxes, and his bed frame and full-sized mattress leaning against the wall. They were going to replace that one with a new mattress because Starsky had soiled it during his recovery, but that was now moot, too.

The closet was empty. No pictures on walls. No curtains on the window.

“My room,” Starsky said—mostly to hurt Hutch.

“My room is your room,” Hutch corrected him, pushing against his guilt so he could fight back. “But you didn’t stick around long enough to find that out.”

“I shouldn’t have had to.”

Hutch turned on his heel and went down the hall to the next room, hoping to leave his forever pain where it had unexpectedly caught him. They hadn’t yet decided on which of the rooms would be the gym and which would be the home office; one had the remaining unpacked boxes in it, the other was empty—just like the guest bathroom. Not even a roll of toilet paper was handy.

When Hutch returned to the living room, and specifically to the sliding glass doors that looked out into the yard, he heard the silence grow louder—because he hadn’t found Starsky. What was the point of his being there himself? The house would never be home.

“We were so in love, Starsk,” Hutch reminded him, hoping to find sanity in what had become his surreal existence. “I’m still in love.” He would forever be in love with Starsky. Nothing could change that.

But Starsky didn’t seem to care.

“You said we could work anything out,” Hutch said again. “I believed you.”

Starsky wouldn’t answer him that time, either; besides, what could he say? His promise had apparently been meaningless.

“Remember, Starsky, how in love we were? You said it first.” He recalled that specific moment almost verbatim as if he’d heard Starsky’s sworn oath only a moment earlier.

“How could I not be in love with you, hm?” Starsky had asked, posing the question as if there could only be one answer. “You know I’d die for you. But something else, Hutch.”

“What else?”

“I’d also die … without you.”

Hutch would never forget hearing Starsky’s testimonial—because he felt likewise.

“I just want to be with you as much as I can,” Starsky added, “and be as close to you as you’ll let me. I want to be with you … until …”

“Until?”

“… until the world blows up.”

Forever, he meant. As if nothing and no one else was more important to him than the man lying beside him on the bed. “Same,” was all Hutch could manage to say past his deepening warmth.

“So,” Starsky said, as if easing into his closing, “I think the house is meant for us. I don’t care which end you want to sleep in … as long as we’re together.”

“You’d die without me, Starsk. If that was true, then how could you leave me?”

“You gave me no choice.”

Angry again, Hutch opened the slider and stepped onto the patio. He wanted to get away from the stupidity of a losing argument, but realizing he couldn’t avoid himself—or his tormenting thoughts—to save his life.

His plants had survived his absence, grouped as they were in their pots under the umbrella of the automated lawn sprinklers. His porch swing was motionless beside a solitary patio chair, and a small round table between them, making everything seem stale. But the rush of fresh air and greenery also gave Hutch an unexpected reprieve and his mind went immediately to Starsky’s other fantasy.

“I think I should build us a gazebo out there,” Starsky decided, pointing to an open area on the lawn among some shade trees. “I’ll even build an elevated wooden walkway to guide the way.”

“Elevated walkway?”

“So it’s level with the deck I’m going to build off the master,” Starsky explained, as if Hutch was an idiot. “May as well keep things even, you know?”

“In case the backyard floods?” Hutch teased him.

“Can you picture it, Hutch?” Starsky dreamily imagined, ignoring Hutch’s barb. “A romantic, meandering path lined in flowers to take you out to the enchanting gazebo covered in Christmas lights. Can you see it?”

Hutch could, but he didn’t want Starsky to know how pretty and sweet that would be; he’d rather give Starsky a bad time. “That’s usable land out there, Starsk.”

“What’s your point?”

“That we should plant some nut trees and a couple more raised-bed vegetable gardens instead.”

“Because you can’t find enough food at the local grocery store?”

Hutch laughed, tousling Starsky’s hair as he surrendered to having been bested. “Touché, buddy, touché.”

But all those dreams, plans, fantasies, wants … were now dead.

Hutch sat on the porch swing to survey the yard for a few minutes; it gently rocked beneath him and instantly flooded his mind with memories of times Starsky joined him there—sometimes to read his newspaper, sometimes to close his eyes and doze, sometimes to watch Hutch fuss over his house plants, sometimes to do all of those things at once, but always to keep Hutch company, to simply be with him—because that’s how they were with each other, attached as much and as often as possible.

“We were going to be together forever,” Hutch reminded him. He pushed his foot against the ground to stop the swing from rocking, specifically to avoid further reminiscing about a moment that might never reoccur.

And that’s when it hit him.

If Starsky really was gone, then Hutch would never see him again. He’d never look into his blue eyes again, never hear his masculine voice again, feel his warm breath, his comforting presence, his tender touch, listen to his soothing heartbeat, share meals and beer with him, argue with him over the stupidest things, laugh and cry and razz him just because he was there, solve crimes with him, chase bad guys with him, go to movies and kill time and make love with him—ever again.

“You can’t be serious, Starsk,” he said under his breath as a sudden wave of nausea swept over him. “You can’t really have left me.” He had been saying those words, obsessing on those very thoughts, for a month, and yet Starsky hadn’t countered him, hadn’t materialized—if for no other reason than to gloat over having punished Hutch long enough for his stupidity; Starsky hadn’t lived up to his promise of never leaving Hutch, of confirming that there wasn’t anything they couldn’t overcome if they did it together.

Starsky was gone—and not a single lead in sight.

The mounting nausea finally overwhelmed Hutch; he was about to be sick to his stomach. He bolted off the porch swing just as his legs went weak, and stumbled from the patio, falling onto his knees in the grass. A full-body tremble pushed him further to the ground, his forehead onto his arms, unable to open his eyes.

But sick wasn’t what overcame him; instead, he hyperventilated and then dry-heaved a gut-wrenching sound of disbelief and helplessness rolled into one. An all-consuming feeling of absolute empty rolled over him, a sense of doom that he didn’t think would ever leave him. He cried, audibly; he cried until his nose ran, until he coughed to catch his breath, until he thought he’d die crying.

That terrible emptiness. The hollow non-echo of his loss. The never-ness of what his life had become. He was forever damaged.

“Starsk. Please … don’t. Don’t leave me. Come home, Starsky. Please come home.”

And that’s when Hutch distinctly heard his name called. Male voice. Familiar. From inside the house.

* * *

“I’m sorry, Hutch,” Dobey quickly said, freezing in the doorway from the living room into the backyard. “I’ll show myself out.”

“Don’t go,” Hutch hurriedly replied, somehow finding his voice in time to keep Dobey from leaving. He clumsily climbed to his feet, wiped his eyes with the palms of his hands, and didn’t look directly at Dobey. “I need…” But he couldn’t finish his sentence. He didn’t know how to ask for something he knew could never help him.

“I brought us some food,” Dobey said, turning toward the living room. “I’ll put it away and be right back.”

Hutch knew Dobey used the opportunity to give his cop time to further compose himself. There could be no doubt that Dobey had seen Hutch bent over in the grass, heard him crying, sobbing, actually, and knew why Hutch was in such pain; there would be no denying it, so why hide the obvious?

Still trembling, Hutch sat on the porch swing again, drying his eyes further on his shirt sleeve, clearing his throat, and running his fingers through his hair to comb it back in place. He would at least do his best to appear presentable. It was a peaceful afternoon, and he used its tranquility to help him breathe again.

When Dobey returned to the patio, he wordlessly positioned the lone chair to face Hutch, and then sat in it. For nearly a minute, neither man spoke. Hutch felt so drained of emotion and energy that he couldn’t think of anything to say.

“How you’re feeling isn’t anything to be embarrassed about,” Dobey finally said. He was a foot from Hutch, but didn’t touch him. “I came out to tell you I haven’t moved on. I just don’t know what to say or whether to say it. It hasn’t gotten past me that you’ve been gutted.”

Hutch was doing it again: diminishing his feelings for Starsky by avoiding eye contact with Dobey, fearing it would give away just how deeply he loved and missed his partner. Hiding his affections for Starsky was the very thing that had driven Starsky away. It was time to stop running from the truth. He lifted his gaze and looked into Dobey’s dark eyes.

Dobey seemed appreciative. His expression softened, appeared more inviting; he was dressed still in his shirt and slacks, no tie or jacket, seeming to have come straight from the police station to the house, having left work not long after Hutch abruptly left Dobey’s office. Arms crossed, and holding careful eye contact, Dobey added, “Well, I think I do have something to say, after all, whether I should say it or not.”

Hutch forced a small smile. He knew his eyes were red and his face flushed and that he appeared exhausted and defeated, but he also believed Dobey forgave him for his weakness. “I miss him,” Hutch conceded with a shrug. Dobey may have had something to say, but that was all Hutch could think to add.

“You boys were joined at the hip,” Dobey observed.

“And the shoulder.”

“And of one mind most of the time.”

“I lost my right arm.”

“And your heart, no doubt.”

Tears welled in Hutch’s eyes again; he knew Dobey didn’t mean to provoke them, but Hutch couldn’t help himself. He was deeply heartbroken and fragile.

“I want to say this,” Dobey continued. “When I got Starsky’s resignation letter that morning, I was very upset and I demanded answers from you. All you would tell me at the time was that you had ‘fucked up’ and that’s why he left.”

Hutch remembered. He’d been elusive with Dobey, but he didn’t plan to be that way anymore. What did he have to lose?

“I tried to bait you into telling me the details of the ‘fuck up’ by asking you if you’d made a pass at him.”

Hutch remembered that, too. He hadn’t cared what Dobey thought about the reasons Starsky had left; Hutch didn’t plan to tell him the truth on that terrible day—or any other day, for that matter.

“I said it wasn’t really my business, and that if that’s what had happened—you made a pass at him—I could understand how something like that was possible between you two, given how close you’d been for years, and that we’d nearly lost him in the parking lot shooting, and how you took him home to care for him afterwards. But you still wouldn’t give me details.”

Because Hutch couldn’t bring himself to do so at that time.

“I explained to you that maybe you’d had too many drinks,” Dobey continued, “and understandably got to feeling nostalgic and needy, afraid to lose again, and made a pass at him in a way that was so offensive to him that he had no choice but to leave everything in his life behind and start over somewhere else.”

“That wasn’t true,” Hutch admitted in a low voice.

“What I’m trying to tell you now, Hutch, is that I never believed what I had proposed to you at the time. I had hoped I could say enough along those lines that you would tell me what really happened.”

“I didn’t know how.”

“And I didn’t feel it was my place to ask.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t trust you.”

“It wasn’t a matter of trust; it’s much bigger than both of us. A man loving a man like that isn’t so easy to deal with.”

“Even he and I fought about it after our first time,” Hutch agreed, feeling sheepish, but proud of himself for finally sharing his truth. He was sure his voice conveyed just how sincere he was, not just how timid he felt.

“But here’s the thing, Hutch,” Dobey replied, showing how accepting he was by not stumbling over Hutch’s disclosure, “when you invited me see the house the week before you moved in, I suspected more was going on between you guys than either of you let on. I didn’t suspect anything because you’d bought a house together and planned to live there like a … family.”

“You wanted to say ‘like a couple’ just now.”

Dobey didn’t commit, not with words anyway. “It wasn’t that the only bed in the house at the time was the king-sized one in the master; you explained that it was brand new, had just been delivered, and that ‘the other beds’ would be brought over that Monday.”

Hutch remembered that, too. All benign conversation.

“It wasn’t when I asked which one of you would get the big bedroom and Starsky said you guys were going to take turns using it.”

Hutch lightly laughed, remembering Starsky’s silly and impractical answer. “What then?”

“There were two toothbrushes in a cup in the master bathroom and none in the guest one.”

Hutch pursed his lips. He and Starsky should have known they’d invited a seasoned detective into their house that day and gave him a personal tour, but instead they had been so naive about what he might discover that they couldn’t think to hide something as seemingly inconspicuous as what Dobey just told him.

“You’re not wrong about us,” Hutch said to be clear, still holding eye contact, finally wanting to be brave in admitting the truth about himself and his partner—and mostly to honor Starsky who’d left him because Hutch wouldn’t be open with others about the nature of their relationship. “But we weren’t like that until after he got out of the hospital and came to live with me.”

“I don’t doubt that for a second—and I’ve never passed judgment on it since I realized how that relationship evolved. You guys were already closer than a tick on a dog’s ass.”

Hutch dryly laughed, appreciating Dobey’s attempt at comic relief, but aware of its innuendo—or maybe he was the only one who’d made the leap; without a doubt, he was hypersensitive lately.

“I’m sorry, Hutch,” Dobey genuinely said. “I baited you that day, hoping you’d tell me something that, in the end, really wasn’t my business—any more than it is now. I just desperately wanted to know what had happened so I could figure out what to do about it.”

“Maybe you could have helped me find him that day if I’d been honest.”

“That’s neither here nor there. I’m coming clean now by letting you know I already believed—not suspected, but believed—you were in that kind of arrangement together. Starsky wouldn’t have left you over any other reason than one that could only have transpired from an all-in relationship. Nothing could break his heart to that degree except he loved you … completely. And I could have been more forthright in letting you know this is what I believed at the time—and still do.”

“I was freaking out,” Hutch explained, momentarily rubbing his eyes, and feeling relieved that Dobey knew something Hutch had feared would cost him respect by a man he immensely respected, but it hadn’t. “I didn’t know what to say, what to do, what to think.”

“The apology isn’t yours to make.”

“Maybe if I had leaned on you, I could have found him by now.”

“I don’t have any leads or ideas that you don’t already have.”

“I used to know his mind better,” Hutch lamented, feeling choked up again, sorry for himself because he couldn’t find a single clue to lead him to Starsky’s whereabouts.

“There’s another reason I came out today,” Dobey said, “and that’s to tell you what else I think, for whatever it’s worth, but it isn’t a lead.”

“I’ll take whatever you have to say and appreciate it more than you know.”

“All I have is insight—and maybe some advice.”

“Okay,” Hutch replied, straightening on the swing, preparing himself to hear every word Dobey had to tell him and to hear it clearly.

“He’s as gutted as you are,” Dobey bluntly said.

Hutch wasn’t prepared for that harsh disclosure, so he braced for what Dobey might say next.

“You and he didn’t have a relationship that was easy to leave,” Dobey explained, “even if you didn’t have the ‘romantic’ part in the mix—so whatever happened, Starsky was mortally wounded in a way no bullet could affect him.”

Hutch slowly exhaled, keeping his mind on knowing Dobey wasn’t out to hurt him, but to help him understand something he didn’t.

“That means Starsky doesn’t know which end is up,” Dobey concluded. “He didn’t have a soft landing ready for himself when he took off. He doesn’t know what he’s going to do or where he’s going to be or how he’s going to get there. He left on impulse. He’s as heartbroken and as lost as you are—maybe even more than you are, if it’s true that you were the one to ‘fuck’ it up. Where you might differ in feelings is that you’re also living with enormous guilt; he’s battling betrayal or rejection.”

Hutch had only considered Starsky’s anger, not his pain; he’d been so wrapped up in his own devastating experience that he hadn’t recognized what drove Starsky out of his life; it wasn’t purely anger, it was mostly hurt. “I made him feel second to everyone else that week before we were to move in—when, of course, he’s not.”

“It’s going to take a long time, Hutch—a long time—for him to get over this split, if he overcomes it at all. Work will never be the same for him. Love will never be the same. Life will never be the same. Just as those things won’t be the same for you.”

Hutch swallowed his emotion to keep it from showing again in his eyes. Where was Dobey taking him?

“I’m saying this, Hutch, because I don’t think he’s anywhere to be found; not yet. He’s still figuring out where he wants to be, what he’s going to do, how he’s going to get along in the world without you.”

There might be truth in Dobey’s words.

“So here’s my advice; take it or leave it and I won’t be offended if you don’t: let time settle. Let life itself settle. Give him space to figure out which end is up and to light somewhere. I’m not saying don’t make those phone calls you’re making every day—searching out every law enforcement job he may have taken, calling every 411 in the nation to see if he’s a resident in any given area code, keeping in touch with his family—but give yourself some breathing room, too.”

Every breath Hutch took over the past month had been to give himself the strength to place one more call, make one more trip to an airport, to strategize and plot and plan his very next move, on paper and in his mind.

Dobey wasn’t finished. “Get it out of your system when you need to, like you did today, but don’t forget to take stock. You’ll be stronger with each passing day and he’ll settle somewhere in a way you can eventually find him. I’m sure of this.”

Dobey’s advice was sound. “Thank you, Captain.”

“You can tell me anything, Hutch.”

“I believe you.”

“Lean on me now, or don’t; just know that you can. You’ll find no judgment here.”

“I want to tell you what happened. Maybe it’ll give you a perspective you didn’t have before—and you’ll save our lives because of it.”

Dobey gently smiled. “Maybe,” he said, appreciating Hutch’s faith in him. “But first … let’s eat the food I brought … and open a couple of beers.”

“So you can handle everything I’m about to tell you?”

“I can handle anything you’re about to tell me. But let’s eat because I’m hungry.”

* * *

“I had lunch with Joe a couple of days ago,” Simon said after he joined Hutch that early November afternoon in the backseat of the taxi at the Rogue Valley International Airport in Ashland, Oregon. “I hadn’t seen him since you left D.C.”

Hutch had arrived in Ashland about an hour before Simon did and waited in a lounge for him, sipping a beer, until Simon’s plane landed, after which Hutch caught up with him at the gate. They hugged and patted each other’s backs in a warm greeting when they met, and Hutch couldn’t help but feel he’d been reunited with a friend. Neither man had brought checked-in luggage so they immediately headed outside with their carry-ons to catch a ride to their rental.

“Joe?” Hutch asked, seeking clarification as the taxi pulled away from the curb; he was embarrassed not to have immediately known who Joe was in the scheme of their lives.

“My partner,” Simon explained with a chuckle, rolling down his window as cool, fresh air engulfed the cab. “Agent Joe Razolli.”

“I forgot his—”

“Don’t worry about it. He’s forgettable.”

Hutch lightly laughed. Simon had to be kidding. “Is he missing you?”

“I doubt it.”

Hutch glanced over at Simon to get a better read on the seriousness of his reply, but Simon was looking out the window and enjoying the feel of the wind on his face. He was notably dressed in jeans, a light sweater under his jacket, and casual shoes. Hutch was reminded just how debonair Simon looked, even in street clothes.

“Beautiful country in spring, I’ll bet,” Simon dreamily noted.

Hutch looked out, too. Fall had already arrived in Ashland; although some trees had lost their leaves, most of them were still covered in soft shades of browns and yellows, but it was apparent that the region was usually rich in green foliage, and Simon was able to picture it all brand new again. The daytime temperatures were cooler than Los Angeles and the sun was lower in the sky for that time of day, casting longer shadows. Blue sky, pocked by billowing clouds. Ashland would be home-away-from-home for the next month and it already felt like a refresh.

After a minute, Hutch looked over at Simon. “So you had lunch with Joe—and you mention it, because?”

“Oh,” Simon said, realizing he’d been distracted by the scenery, and turning his head to make eye contact with Hutch, his dark eyes warm with affection. “He brought his temp with him. Eric Flanders. Forties. Black hair, not much gray, and brown eyes. Definitely not your lost partner.”

Hutch’s heart sank; he wasn’t expecting to hear about Starsky, despite his and Simon’s earlier ‘joking’ in D.C. that maybe Starsky was working with Joe on a missing persons case, that both his and Simon’s original partners were serendipitously partnered. The odds were against it, but to have it confirmed in an unexpected moment knocked the breath out of Hutch. Another dead-end lead.

Six other federal agents had arrived in Ashland over the previous few days, each of three pairs going to their respective dwellings, staying in contact by telephone when necessary, but the plan was to be as inconspicuous as possible. They would spend most of the month familiarizing themselves with the town, with its layout and accommodations, its gay bars and other hotspots, its street and highway grids, its churches and community events. They planned to make themselves at home in Ashland in time to notice anything out of the ordinary—such as a man in a black eye patch.

Hutch and Simon had been provided with a small, two-bedroom, one-bathroom house on the southwest side of Ashland, a little bit toward rural countryside and away from the hustle of downtown. The house was owned by the cousin of an Ashland police officer who gladly gave it up to help the feds capture a serial killer. There would be several briefings between the FBI and local law enforcement throughout the month, but by-and-large, the agents were to lay low and keep a watchful eye.

“If we were ever to marry,” Simon quipped after he and Hutch exited the cab in front of the small house complete with a white picket fence and numerous rose bushes, “this is the kind of cozy place I hope we’ll buy.”

Hutch stumbled again. He owned a 2200-sq.-ft. house in Los Angeles that he and Starsky had bought together and Starsky since forfeited. Simon’s wisecrack was another stark reminder of what Hutch had lost. Unless he found Starsky soon, he would have to sell the house. It would never be a home without that dark-haired boy; it would only serve to haunt him.

“Just as long as it has a fireplace,” Hutch joked in return, but not feeling as light as he sounded as he followed Simon inside. There was a dampness in the air that made the daytime temp of mid-60s seem all the colder; that, and Starsky’s continuing absence. “Or at least a hot tub.”

“Now you’re talking,” Simon said. He then spied a fireplace and pointed it out to Hutch, “but you chop the wood.”

“Why me?”

“You’re younger. Stronger. Better fit.”

From the small and comfortable living room, they could see the short hallway to the bedrooms and bathroom, as well as into the kitchen and eating area. The house was the size of an average two-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles, completely furnished, but with the added touch of a real fireplace and a tree-filled yard.

Simon dropped his duffel bag on the sofa and picked up a set of keys from the ashtray on the coffee table. “I hope they left us a Ferrari,” he chuckled.

“Because nothing says ‘undercover’ like a quarter-million-dollar Italian sports car.”

“You have a point.”

“I should talk,” Hutch mumbled. “Starsky’s car is a candy apple red Ford Gran Torino with jacked-up rear tires and a white racing stripe from front fender to the top of the hood.”

“No shit?”

“But we look like a couple of bums most of the time, so no one ever seems the wiser.”

“Whatever works,” Simon agreed. He put the keys back in the ashtray. “I don’t mind driving if you don’t want to, but I’m okay if you do, too.”

“We can take turns,” Hutch suggested. It reminded him of Starsky’s comment to Dobey that he and Hutch would be taking turns with the master bed in their new house. “First we flip a coin to see who gets which bedroom, huh?”

“Who gets the master?” Simon asked, removing a quarter from his pocket.

“Sure.”

Simon tossed the coin into the air. “Call it.”

“Heads.”

When Simon caught the coin and flipped it onto the back of his other hand, he briefly studied it and then sadly looked up at Hutch. “Sorry, pal. Tails.”

Hutch laughed. “You do that just the way I win all the coin-tosses with Starsky; he never gets to see the outcome and trusts me to tell him the truth.”

Simon laughed as if he’d been caught, and tossed the quarter at Hutch. “You go, then.”

“Nah,” Hutch said, catching the coin and tossing it back. “I respect my elders enough to give them what’s best, no matter how they get it.”

“Suit yourself,” Simon playfully said, picking up his duffel bag and heading toward the hallway. “But I don’t know who you’re calling an elder around here.”

Hutch followed Simon down the hall and turned into the room across from the master after Simon disappeared into it. In the guest room, there was a full-sized bed, covered in thick blankets and several fluffy pillows, a nightstand with a shaded lamp, a small TV on a dresser, a few nature pictures on the walls, and a telescope on a tripod in the corner near the drape-covered window. Hutch would be comfortable in that room, despite the earlier banter with Simon about having to fight over the other one.

After digging his small plastic bag of toiletries out of his backpack, Hutch went into the bathroom to find a place to store them. Two shelves above the toilet were filled only with a box of tissue and a small candle. He claimed a shelf, then found a clean bath towel in the linen closet to keep in his room until he and Simon established who was using what and how. They’d already lived with each other for a couple of weeks, but this was a new arrangement for both of them.

A couple of minutes later, Hutch joined Simon in the kitchen, which is where Simon had apparently gone after unloading his bag into his bedroom. Simon was opening and closing all the cabinets and drawers to learn the extent of the kitchenware available to them and what they’d yet need to buy to comfortably stay in that house for a month.

While Simon took inventory of plates and cups, pots and pans, knives and cooking tools, appliances and utensils, Hutch verbalized what he was finding: peanut butter, grape jelly, margarine, instant coffee and powdered creamer, seasonings and condiments. “Nothing Italian in here,” he joked when finished. “You are going to make us some homemade pasta dishes during our stay, I’m guessing.”

Simon whistled. “You know it, boy. I’m going to start with my famous eggplant Parmesan, assuming you like eggplant.”

“More than life itself. And I’ll make us a mean salad to show my appreciation.”

“Then let’s figure out what we’re going to eat this week and go now to the grocery store while we still have the energy. And let’s not forget the wine, either. We should buy a couple of logs to burn, too, in case there isn’t already a wood pile in the yard. What says you, Mr. Beautiful Blue Eyes?”

* * *

A pasta fork and a large colander were the only items Simon purchased to complete his work station in the kitchen; they bought those tools at the local K-Mart before going to a grocery store and filling a basket with enough groceries for two grown men to eat over an entire week.

They also bought a few office supplies while they were at K-Mart: writing pads and pens, a stapler and folders, a small box of paper clips and a couple of highlighters. They’d brought just a few documents with them: a collection of the case’s most relevant records, so they didn’t have to recall certain facts from memory.

The car they’d been gifted for their month-long stay was a blue 1978 two-door Buick Rivera, fully fueled; in that same garage they also found enough firewood stacked in one corner to last them the entire winter.

“Let’s never go home,” Simon quipped, despite that he had a much nicer house and furnishings in D.C.

Hutch felt homeless; he would gladly stay forever in Ashland.

After changing his travel clothes into sweats, Simon began preparing his signature pasta sauce as soon as they returned to the house so it had hours to simmer before dinner. He baked the eggplant, too; Hutch simply kicked off his shoes to get comfortable and eventually made a lettuce salad with a variety of fresh vegetables—tomatoes, cucumber, carrots, celery, and such—and all was stored in Tupperware containers in the refrigerator for later.

To keep hunger at bay in the meantime, they sat at the dining room table that mid-afternoon and ate peanuts from their shells, and dried apricots, while drinking a beer each. Both men kept notes during their discussion about how to assimilate Ashland into their lives and why they should concentrate on some aspects of the town and not others.

“Do you agree with me that our focus on finding him should be primarily nighttime activities?” Simon asked after briefing himself on the details from his notes. “I mean, we know the killings all happened after dark. The autopsies show times of death within those windows.”

Hutch agreed. “The call that came in from Quartzsite, Arizona, was the next morning, but it was about a man the caller had run into the night before.” That caller claimed he’d been harassed by ‘a crazy psycho man’ with a black eye patch—and a body was found the next night in a ditch near the campsite. “Didn’t the other caller—Michigan, was it?—also report this lunatic at night?”

“As did the two survivors,” Simon concurred. “So … that means … if we want to see a Shakespeare play while we’re here, we’ll have to attend an early matinee.” They had discovered together that Ashland was most famous for its Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

Hutch lightly laughed, but added a serious touch. “We should do that earlier in the month rather than later.”

“A good compromise,” Simon agreeably said. “Under that guideline, maybe we can go to a couple of plays. The closer we get to the end of the month, the more we should eat out, though. Bars mainly. Gay bars.”

Hutch approved Simon’s plan. By then, he hoped they knew the town well enough to know where the best hotspots were; the other FBI teams in their Task Force could stake out the less-popular places.

“But let’s talk about the elephant in the room,” Simon suggested, pushing back from the table as if he’d had enough of peanuts and dried apricots and wanted to focus his attention on something else—and it turned out to also be food. “We should probably assume we’re having Thanksgiving here.”

“When is it?”

“The 22nd. Third week this month, right around the time the Interstate Asshole will be prowling the city.”

Although the schedule for the killer to strike his victim was closer to the last week of November, it wasn’t worth the risk to miss seeing him beforehand by either of them going out of state for the holiday.

“Are you cooking the turkey?” Hutch wondered, conveying by his tone that he didn’t plan to. He wasn’t the master in a kitchen the way Simon was, but he’d never made a Thanksgiving meal before, and he wasn’t about to start then.

“We’ll go to Denny’s,” Simon said with a chuckle. “You’re not alone. I’ve never basted a turkey in my entire life, either.”

“How about this idea then? Suppose we stop by a deli that week and pick up all the trimmings? Turkey. Mashed potatoes. Gravy. Whatever else we need we can get at a market—cranberry sauce, a pumpkin pie, stuff like that—and bring it all back here? Treat ourselves to a homey and relaxing Thanksgiving with a fire in the fireplace, music, and wine…”

“I like your thinkin’, Blond Boy.”

“A little bit of prep work,” Hutch added, to finish off the scenario, “minimal clean-up, and it can still feel like we had a family holiday.”

“You’re a genius,” Simon said with a wink, “but since we both already know that about you, there’s no need to thank me for the compliment.”

Hutch laughed and tossed a shelled peanut at him, harmlessly hitting Simon in the shoulder. “Make me dinner,” Hutch prodded him. “Show me you mean it.”

* * *

Days turned into weeks while the FBI agents did their due diligence: they familiarized themselves with Ashland’s history and layout, malls and other stores, award-winning galleries, its city council members, restaurants and bars, parks and theaters, community leaders and farmer’s markets. And they met covertly with the rest of the Task Force to compare notes. Simon and Hutch even knew their way around—from grocery store to house, from house to downtown, from downtown to freeway—without needing a map.

Their mornings were spent having breakfasts together, mostly at the house, but sometimes at a local restaurant, and discussing ideas and the facts they had separately mused over from the previous day. But, without verbalizing it, they each found time to themselves, too—Hutch with a brisk jog through the neighborhood before his morning shower and breakfast, and Simon by sitting on the patio those mornings, reading the daily newspaper, drinking his first cup of coffee, and waiting for Hutch’s return so they could eat together; sometimes he’d have their meals ready by the time Hutch had showered and dressed.

When Simon was in the shower, Hutch used the opportunity to privately call telephone information—he’d brought a list of nearly 90 area codes with him—to ask if anyone with the surname ‘Starsky’ was a resident in any particular region. Hutch was beginning to believe there were only a few Starskys in the entire nation: the one he knew from Los Angeles, and the mother and son in Brooklyn. But, of course, Starsky could have easily acquired a false I.D. with which to lease a private room in a house.

“S-t-a-r-k-y?”

Frustrated, Hutch tried again. “No, ma’am. S-t-a-r-s-k-y. As in stars-kee.”

“No such name by that spelling is registered in this area.”

“Could it be unlisted?”

“We would still see it if it were unlisted; we just wouldn’t be able to give you the number if it were.”

And so those calls went, none of them as quickly as he hoped.

Hutch did have a plan. He would put the upcoming Thanksgiving Day to good use, but it would take a bit of finesse to pull it off. One thing Hutch did notice as the holiday approached was that he had stopped talking to Starsky in his head. What was the point, after all? Starsky had nothing new to tell him and what he did have to say was only hurtful. Hutch took Dobey’s advice to keep his eyes on the prize: and to let time settle.

Simon and Hutch usually ate lunch at a restaurant, using each new place as an opportunity to know the area better, its small business owners, and what was and wasn’t popular to local residents. Because the world-famous Oregon Shakespeare Festival was the heart of Ashland, the town was a bit of a tourist attraction, too. Coupled with the Southern Oregon University, the rural metropolis was a happening hotspot despite its location far from any major city.

“I know murders go on all the time,” Simon lamented one day when both men were finished with lunch and thinking their own thoughts about what lay ahead, “but knowing a cold-blooded murder is about to happen really has me down sometimes.”

“I’ve noticed that,” Hutch said, not unkindly. Simon wasn’t moody, but sometimes he would go silent, and Hutch couldn’t help but be aware of it. “Remember that we might get to save a life, so we have that in our favor.”

“I don’t need your optimism,” Simon jokingly said, pretending to sound annoyed, but allowing Hutch to break him out of his melancholy. He pulled his eyes away from the goings-on outside the restaurant window to make eye contact with Hutch instead—and he shined with appreciation. “I think it’s the waiting that’s killing me.”

Hutch knew that feeling all too well. Waiting to find Starsky was killing him—and he couldn’t say so. The only thing that kept Hutch sane under the circumstances was Simon’s usual upbeat mood—his eagerness to cook for them, make meals that were both tasty and satisfying, and to go out together afterward to a gay bar to map out the more popular and most likely places a killer might choose to target; they would have to isolate one or two liquor establishments on which to aim their sights, and the bar scene seemed to always keep Simon in a good mood.

They would usually stay until midnight to completely scout the patrons of the more frequented taprooms, but as the end of the month neared, they stayed until closing time. If an afternoon was cloudy and cold, which was more often than not at that time of year, they would make lunch at the house, sit by a fire, and drink wine afterward, using those times together to play Devil’s Advocate on where and why they needed to be ready at any particular watering hole. And sometimes they just shared the details of their lives and their values, their politics and their dreams. They were still getting to know each other.

“So we agree that he has to be driving a van without windows,” Simon said, seeking confirmation from Hutch. They sat in a bar early one evening, dressed in jeans and crew neck sweaters, drinking beer and eating peanuts, having narrowed their stakeout to the establishment they were in at that minute—due to its popularity, lighting (both inside and out), and its location to the freeway—and two others, one of which may not even be considered a gay hangout, but it was owned by a gay man.

“Our killer can’t afford to leave evidence behind in a residence or hotel,” Simon added, to justify his position that a van had to be in play. “And he can drive it from state to state, traveling with a built-in place to sleep and a place to kill, complete with his murder kit.”

“He lures them into the van,” Hutch hypothesized after washing down a mouthful of salty peanuts with a long drink from his glass of beer, and not wanting to ignore Simon’s grim description of the killer’s mode of operandi, but not wanting to dwell on it too much, either, except to say, “He drives to someplace secluded: a spot in the woods, a dark rest area, an empty parking lot behind some closed warehouse …”

“… has consenting sex with his victim,” Simon furthered, “or rapes him.”

“Then plunges an ice pick or a screwdriver through his left ear and into his brain, killing him instantly.”

“At least he’s kind enough to do that,” Simon replied, nowhere near seriously. He was disgusted and it came through in his voice. “I still think his victims were all gay; the families we talked to simply didn’t know that their brother, father, uncle was gay, so they weren’t helpful, but I’m betting on it. We were able to trace most of the victims to gay hangouts despite family members insisting they weren’t gay.”

“I think you’re right, that they’re all gay,” Hutch agreed. “So, toward that end, I say we remove the gay-owned bar from our list and focus on this place and the one other. Let the rest of the Task Force handle the lesser ones. I mean, we should be the ones to catch this sicko, right?”

“We did the time.”

“Well, you did the time; I simply helped you out.”

“In a way that puts you up there with me.”

“After your partner quit,” Hutch wondered, “did you work on this case by yourself?”

“I had help from a few top agents—ones who were working other cases. In some ways, I guess I was on my own. You’ve been a godsend.”

Hutch was flattered, but he’d spent less than two months on the case; Simon had spent three years buried in it; he’d had to collect crime scene evidence, which included laying eyes on the bodies, possibly fifteen to date. He was entitled to paid time off when this was over, sent away to some tropical island where he could do nothing else but enjoy sandy beaches in the sun, babes in scantily clad bikinis, and long naps in hammocks sipping cocktails.

“As we get closer to the end of the month,” Simon suggested, half-turning on his stool to face Hutch, “we should consider acting a bit … gay.”

Hutch glanced over at him, into Simon’s sparkling brown eyes, searching for more than he may have been hearing, determined that Simon was serious, and then playfully asked, “You’re not suggesting we suck lips and grab each other’s dicks under the table, are you? I mean, I’m kinda shy in public.”

Simon laughed, reached over and tousled Hutch’s hair. “We could at least sit closer.” He shifted on the bar stool until his knee touched Hutch’s thigh. “We can tell secrets,” he added, first combing Hutch’s hair in place, and then he leaned in, embraced Hutch’s neck, and pulled their heads together. “Make like we’re telling each other sweet nothings.” He lowered his voice in Hutch’s ear. “We have to blend in, Goldilocks; we can’t stand out.” He let Hutch go. “What thinks you, partner? Good idea or nah?”

“All par for the course,” Hutch concluded, running his fingers through his hair to straighten it, and not feeling violated. “But no dick-grabbing, okay? I really am shy about that kind of thing in public.”

“No public dick-grabbing,” Simon said, pressing a finger to his temple, as if making a mental notation to himself. “We’ll save that for private.”

* * *

“Dorothy?”

“Speaking.”

“Ken Hutchinson.”

“Oh, Hutch!” Dorothy exclaimed on the other end of the phone line, her voice filled with excitement and surprise. “It’s so wonderful to hear from you!”

“Happy Thanksgiving!” he replied, as energetically—mostly to cover for his nervousness. “How are you and the family?”

“We’re wonderful,” she said. “Nick and his lady friend are arriving any moment, and Rose and I have already cooked most of the meal. I think we’re in good shape.”

“Have you met Nick’s lady?”

“Oh, yes. A lovely girl he works with at ‘The Times.’”

“And David? Is he joining all of you?”

“Oh, I thought you boys were working this week.”

“Is that what he told you?”

She laughed with uncertainty. “Well, not in so many words, but he surprised us by dropping in last Friday—at his usual call time—because he said he wouldn’t be able to come to dinner today.”

“He may very well be working,” Hutch said, not wanting to get her son in trouble—and feeling painfully envious of Dorothy’s visit with him. He realized Starsky couldn’t go home for Thanksgiving; he’d be afraid Hutch would catch him in the act. “I’m calling for two reasons,” he said. “One is to wish you and the family a Happy Thanksgiving, and the other is to ask if you would be kind enough to pass a phone number on to David.”

“But, of course.”

“I’m on Special Assignment, stationed in Ashland, Oregon, and haven’t been able to reach David to give him my number here. His answering machine hasn’t been picking up.” He hated lying to Dorothy, but desperate times called for desperate measures.

Simon had gone out to the patio to read, a predictable occurrence Hutch had planned on; he needed a few private minutes to call Dorothy, so he could lie without being caught. He brought the living room telephone to the dining table to place the long distance call, going as far from the patio doors as the phone line would allow. He then listened while Dorothy found paper and a pen, and then he gave her the Ashland house number, slowly enunciating each of the ten digits to make sure she had them all correctly and in the right order.

“If you’re in Oregon on assignment,” Dorothy wondered, entering the part of the conversation Hutch feared would materialize and knew he had to be careful navigating; the fewer lies he told, the better, “what is David doing all this time without you?”

“Missing me, I hope,” Hutch said with a playful tone, but secretly wishing Starsky desperately did miss him, at least half as much as he missed Starsky.

“Oh, I’m sure he misses you. But, I mean, is he working cases, too?”

“He’s on duty somewhere, holding down the fort.”

“Why are you in Oregon?”

“Interstate murder case,” Hutch said, hoping to sound matter-of-fact so he wouldn’t alarm her too much, “and closing in our suspect. After he hurt someone in Los Angeles, I guess they thought I’d be the smarter one between David and me to help solve the case.”

Dorothy giggled. “I’m sure that didn’t go over well with David. He’s always been competitive when it comes to you. He’s never liked that you’re smarter, kinder, handsomer … taller.”

Hutch laughed. “I doubt I’m any of those things when compared to him.” Time was of the essence; he didn’t know how long Simon would be on the patio. “So you saw him last Friday?”

“He showed up out of the blue,” she said, sounding almost as thrilled then as she did the moment her boy arrived unexpectedly at her door. “Stayed all day, visited with Nick and me, spent the night, was gone late the next morning, but we all had a nice visit.”

“How was he?”

“His usual self.”

“I haven’t seen him in a while,” Hutch truthfully explained, wanting her to know why he asked about Starsky’s demeanor. “I’ve been on this assignment almost two months now and I’m feeling homesick”—for the boy.

“You keep in touch with David, though, yes?”

“Trying to,” Hutch said with a careful laugh. “That’s why I’d appreciate it if you could give him my number. I’m here at least until the end of the month. Back in Los Angeles after that.”

She promised to pass on his message, expressed her disappointment that neither he nor Starsky could spend Thanksgiving with her, and wished him a happy one just the same. “Maybe you can visit for Christmas,” she suggested.

“Did he say he’ll come home for the holiday?”

“He didn’t,” she replied, sounding discouraged, “but you work on him, okay?”

“I sure will. Thank you, Dorothy, for giving him my number. If you remember, would you also tell him that … tell him that I … tell him things aren’t as they … I mean, tell him a lot has changed since I saw him last—and all in a good way.”

Dorothy didn’t seem to realize that Hutch had stumbled, or that he sounded cryptic in his message; she was more than happy, she said, to let Starsky know what Hutch asked her to convey.

“Give your other son—and his lady friend—a big hello from me, too.” He didn’t forget to pass on his affection for Patches, either.

After he ended the call, Hutch sat quietly for several minutes at the table, staring into oblivion, replaying the conversation in his head, drawing facts from the clues: Starsky was alive and apparently well; he’d visited his mother in New York City less than a week earlier; he never let on that he wasn’t in Los Angeles, was no longer employed, or that he’d left his partner of nearly ten years. How long could Starsky keep up the charade—with his mother, no less?

Hutch removed the picture from his back jeans pocket, the one he’d taken from Dorothy’s apartment nearly two months earlier when he spent the night in her home so he could more easily spy on Nick. He laid it on the table in front of him, carefully flattening it with his fingers as best he could to minimize the curve it had taken from the shape of his left buttock. An audible and lengthy sigh escaped him as he crossed his arms on the table’s edge and set his eyes on the now sentimentally familiar photo.

Both he and Starsky were sitting beside each other in the picture, shoulder-to-shoulder, hip-to-hip, knee-to-knee, as they very often did. They had spent the day at Dorothy’s with the rest of the Starsky family enjoying a Thanksgiving meal some six years earlier.

Somehow he and Starsky had ended up on a patio bench in the small backyard; it was daytime, late in the day on Thanksgiving, and they had been photographed from mostly the waist up, wearing sweaters of nearly the same blue color, accenting their eyes. Hutch smiled at the camera, but Starsky’s head was tilted toward Hutch’s, and the wry smile on his perfect mouth said what Hutch knew was in his heart: “This man belongs to me.” Neither of them knew at the time just how much they would become the other’s everything.

What was the worst that could happen now if Dorothy gave Starsky Hutch’s phone number in Ashland? Starsky would learn his partner was working on special assignment to solve a murder case. They still were partners, weren’t they?—maybe not in the legal sense, but certainly in loyalty—even though they were apart? In any event, Starsky might gather from Hutch’s current assignment that he was on his own, had moved on with his life, and was open and hoping for a long-overdue reconciliation now that the path forward was clear.

What would Starsky think or do if he read between the lines: “Tell him a lot has changed—and all in a good way”? Would he hear that Hutch hadn’t gone through with his stupid intentions and therefore it was time for Starsky to come home?

Maybe the house phone would ring any minute, Starsky would be calling, but the noise that visibly startled Hutch came from the hallway.

Simon entered the dining room; Hutch had been certain Simon was on the patio during his call, not that he’d been in his bedroom all that time. “Hey,” Hutch quickly said, finding his voice, but not before he could compose himself, and he was sure Simon could tell he’d been unnerved. “I thought you were outside.”

“I was,” Simon replied, pulling out a chair across from Hutch and sitting down. “But it was too cold out there, and when I came in, I overheard you on the phone, so I went to my room to give you your privacy.” He apparently could still hear enough to know Hutch had ended the call and was the reason he now joined Hutch at the table.

Did he grant Hutch his privacy because he sensed Hutch wanted to be alone when he talked to Dorothy and, if he did hear some of the conversation, which part did he hear? Hutch didn’t want to be caught in a lie—not with Simon, not ever.

Simon broke eye contact and leaned forward on the table, having noticed the photograph. “May I?” he asked, opening his hand. His question and curiosity were purely innocent; this much, Hutch believed.

He handed Simon the photo. “Six years ago,” he explained. “At his mom’s house on Thanksgiving.”

“So, that’s your boy,” Simon said, closely and at length examining the photo, his expression soft and pleased, seeming to appreciate that he was finally able to see what Hutch’s partner looked like. “Handsome man,” he noted. “Nice smile. A lot like yours, but understated, at least in this picture.” When he handed the photo back to Hutch, he added, “If ever there was a picture of two people in love, it’s that one.”

Hutch nervously laughed. “He’s in love with me?”

Simon made eye contact, subtly shrugged as if to say it was obvious and that Hutch hadn’t understood him. “You’re in love with each other. I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know.”

Hutch laughed again, trying to pass off Simon’s observation as nothing more than the agent’s trademark generosity. “Yeah,” Hutch sarcastically said, hoping to dismantle it, “you see right through us; we’re madly in love.”

At least they were then. Hutch was still in love; how could Starsky have fallen out of something as enduring and intense as their bond had been to them? They’d unknowingly fallen in love with each other on the day they met; they simply hadn’t sexualized it until ten years later. But when they bought the house together, they both understood they planned to make up for all that lost time.

“I’m not saying you’re fucking each other,” Simon clarified, not crassly, “but you’re definitely bonded beyond the call of duty.”

“I won’t argue with you there,” Hutch quietly said, pocketing the picture. What would be the point? Besides, he was too stunned by Simon’s observation to speak another word, and Simon seemed to have said all he planned to on the matter.

“Let’s eat,” Simon suggested, and they both rose from the table to do just that.

“It’s strange not being with my kids on Thanksgiving,” Simon said while he and Hutch were in the kitchen preparing their holiday meal—which meant removing the bought items from the refrigerator, opening a few cans—cranberry sauce, creamed corn—heating the food in the microwave, and then dishing it all into serving plates and bowls.

The phone did ring a few times that day, causing Hutch’s heart to race, but it turned out to be Simon’s kids and the other agents on the Task Force, checking in with Simon and Hutch, mostly to wish them a “Happy Homeless Thanksgiving.”

Hutch and Simon had discussed a couple of weeks earlier whether they should have an FBI holiday for Thanksgiving in Ashland, but Simon leaned toward something quieter, and Hutch was grateful for that because he wasn’t certain how emotionally strong he’d be going through the day without Starsky. But when Thanksgiving finally arrived, Simon’s meal preparation and relatively jovial mood kept Hutch mentally occupied without knowing it.

Simon lit a couple of vanilla-scented tapered candles and a stick of incense, and arranged the quaint bouquet in the center of the runner. “I forgot to buy flowers,” he complained, but the aroma of the incense made up for their absence. Hutch built a fire in the fireplace and Simon found a classical music station on the radio; he kept the volume low, so it was both soothing and homey in its softness.

They opened a bottle each of red and white wine, poured themselves a glass of their preferred taste, and eventually cleared the table of the phone and various case files to cover it instead with a variety of traditional Thanksgiving dishes—a feast for a couple of men who were, in some ways, homeless.

“Does the entire family usually get together for Thanksgiving?” Hutch asked, slipping a serving spoon into each of the bowls that didn’t already have one. “I mean, if your kids have Thanksgiving with you, does that include the ex-wife?”

“They alternate: one year for the dinner at her house, dessert at mine, and then they switch the next year. It works. But I always do see them on Thanksgiving—except this year—and the same arrangement for Christmas.”

“I’m sorry you’re having to do without.”

“It’s for a good cause.”

“Then here’s hoping this one is memorable for a completely different reason.”

“I won’t survive it if it isn’t,” Simon insisted, taking a seat across from Hutch as they both sat down. “But I’ve got a good feeling about this.” He forced a smile at Hutch to let him know he was doing his best to remain positive about the outcome.

“We’re going to pull it off,” Hutch promised him. “It’s you and me on the case, remember?” He winked at Simon and then extended his hand for Simon’s plate. “Nothing we can’t do when we put our genius minds together.”

Simon grunted and handed Hutch his plate. “Well, if I was going to have to spend Thanksgiving without my kids, I’m glad it’s with you, partner. How do you usually spend yours?”

“With Starsky,” Hutch impulsively said. “That one time we went to his mom’s house, another year to my parents’; they still live in Minneapolis, so going east isn’t always feasible, but we try on occasion.”

“Otherwise, it’s just you and Starsky?”

“Captain Dobey once had us both over for his family event.”

“And now you have yet another different way of spending it.”

The atmosphere was warm, but not uncomfortable. Both men were wearing crew neck sweaters and jeans; Simon usually wore sweatpants when he was at the house relaxing for the day, but jeans seemed to be more appropriate for a special event. To balance it, he donned house slippers; Hutch was just in thick socks to keep his feet warm.

Between the candles and the living room table lamps, as well as the softer light on the stove hood from the kitchen, the ambiance was relaxing and cozy. Music, fire, food. It wouldn’t be a bad Thanksgiving, despite that they both wished they were somewhere else—with someone else.

Having bought a Peking duck instead of a turkey, Hutch placed several slices of the bird on Simon’s plate, added a spoonful of mashed potatoes and a helping of carrot salad, a hot roll on the side, and then gave it to Simon so he could dish out the rest of the table’s offerings himself.

“Thank you,” Simon politely said. “I hope it’s okay we decided on duck.” They couldn’t find a small turkey—a size two men could consume in a week without getting sick of it.

“I chalk it up to yet another unique aspect to this year’s celebration,” Hutch quipped. He filled his plate with food—including dishes Simon held for him to take from. It was late afternoon, cloudy, dark and stormy outside, but they still had a few hours to digest their feast before bedtime.

“I just might cater all my Thanksgiving meals from here on out,” Simon said with a light laugh. “I love to cook, but this way of doing a big meal is a helluva lot easier.”

“Less cleanup, too. We may be onto something.”

They ate eagerly, drank wine, listened to music, enjoyed the room’s ambiance, the commingled aromas of incense and delicious food, each other’s company, their wandering conversations—about the weather, about growing up in parts of the northeast, about their experiences in the academy.

“I overheard you tell—I guess it was his mother?—that you haven’t talked to Starsky in a while,” Simon said, unknowingly startling Hutch by his astute observation. “How long have you boys been out of touch?”

“Since you and I moved in here,” Hutch said, avoiding eye contact. He already knew Simon would find the holes in his story; the agent was a smart man. “I didn’t get the number to him before I left L.A.”

“You said his answering machine wasn’t picking up; Captain Dobey couldn’t give him the number?”

Simon’s questions, at least his tone, weren’t indicative of him being suspicious of anything, but purely curious—the detective in him.

“Dobey says he passed it on,” Hutch lied, forcing down a swallow of mashed potatoes, “but Starsky isn’t known for taking orders from headquarters. I figured I had better luck with his mother.”

“But that means you guys haven’t been in touch for three weeks now?”

“Just through the grapevine,” Hutch said. He slowly drew a breath so he wouldn’t show his deeper feelings. “Ships passing in the night and hoping neither of us is the Titanic.”

“Still, that’s gotta be tough for a couple of guys who are ‘madly in love’ with each other.”

“Tougher than you think,” Hutch said with a purposeful hint of sarcasm. He didn’t want Simon to know just how deeply heartbroken he was. “But you’ve filled in the void.”

“The feeling’s mutual, pal.”

After they put the leftover food away, washed the dishes together, cleaned off the counters, set out the trash, and tidied the kitchen, they met in the living room, across from the fireplace where a fire still burned—Hutch on one end of the sofa, Simon on the other, both men with their feet on the coffee table, and their last glass of wine in hand.

“May I ask you a highly personal question?” Hutch asked, staring over into the flames, enjoying the warmth, the end of the holiday, Simon’s company, and the realization he’d survived Thanksgiving without Starsky. The wine gave Hutch bravery he didn’t otherwise have. “I won’t be offended if you tell me to mind my own business.”

“Never,” Simon replied. “Ask me anything.”

“Why did you have the affair?”

Simon lightly laughed. “Okay, I didn’t see that coming—but I have an answer. It was a few years ago. Kate was going through the change—at no fault of her own—but in her eyes, I couldn’t do anything right. Eventually, I began to feel unloved and … unwanted.”

The way Hutch had made Starsky feel.

“Long story short,” Simon continued, his voice low and reflective, “I started hanging out in local bars … met someone who made me feel wanted, and the rest is bad history.”

“There’s nothing sexier than being desired,” Hutch said; even an unattractive woman coming on to him was arousing.

“Ain’t that the truth?” Simon agreed. “Well, anyway, Kate caught on and confronted me. I’d finally done something wrong for real.” He turned his head and looked over at Hutch.

When Hutch felt Simon’s eyes on him, he looked back, made eye contact.

“Was your breakup over something similar?” Simon asked. He held his wine glass with both hands in his lap, slouched down into the cushions, relaxed and patient, and all seemingly open to being told to mind his own business.

“Yeah,” Hutch said, admitting to his wrongdoing. “Something similar, but in my case I was the one who made someone I’d die for feel unloved and unwanted. I don’t think I’ll ever live down that guilt.” He choked on his last few words, realized he couldn’t tell Simon the rest of his truth, and apologized for not saying more. “It’s so raw still,” he explained, looking away, back to the fire. “I can’t talk about it right now or I’ll…”

“Say no more,” Simon said, letting him up. “I wasn’t looking for details. But know you can talk to me anytime about anything.”

Would Simon ever be put to the test?

“So here’s something I’ve learned about guilt,” Simon added, keeping his head turned toward Hutch while focusing his eyes on his past. “Guilt is self-inflicted. It doesn’t fix anything. It doesn’t solve anything. It doesn’t change anything. It only hurts the person self-inflicting it.”

Hutch had to wipe his eye to stall his unexpected tears from showing and quietly laughed at himself. Guilt was the only punishment he was afforded. How could he ever not stop paying for what he’d done?

“I gave her the house,” Simon continued. “I gave her the cars and the savings accounts and everything else she wanted. The only thing I asked to keep was my income; our kids were grown and moved out, so I didn’t have to pay child support, but I didn’t want to pay alimony for the rest of my life, either. She agreed. As you saw when you were in my house, I’ve rebuilt my life. Over time, she and I got back on speaking terms and things are cordial now, but they’ll never be the same.”

If Hutch found Starsky, could it be the same again? Or had Hutch done permanent damage, too?

“Guilt ate me alive,” Simon finished, “until I realized it wasn’t helping matters. Having said that,” he said with a sad laugh, “I appreciate what you’re dealing with because I’m back to fighting guilt again—but this time it’s over not having figured out this killer sooner. I mean, if it wasn’t for you, well, I don’t want to think about it.” He looked back to the fire. Both men battled demons they couldn’t speak about just then.

Hutch also couldn’t help but think Simon changed the subject on purpose, to help Hutch out of his sudden withdrawal into self-abusing thoughts. He appreciated the relief, however it came. “We’ll catch this guy,” Hutch reiterated, using Simon’s redirection to compose himself and look forward again. “The traps are in place and he’s going to walk right into one.”

“Is it still illegal to beat a suspect to death?”

Hutch laughed. “We’ll recheck the regulations in the morning just to be sure.”

“I do think I could kill him.”

“You? Nah. Me, maybe. I’m a hothead. But you’re an easygoing, likable guy.”

“Yeah? Name one thing about me that’s likable.”

Hutch knew Simon baited him—purposefully to take Hutch further away from his personal pain. But Hutch wanted to be honest, too. He might need Simon in ways he hadn’t needed him before; he’d long known that Simon was older by 17 years. It was easy to see Simon’s virtues, one of which was his wisdom.

“You care about people,” Hutch told him, “even more than I do—and I think that’s saying something in itself. Starsky always says I’m a bleeding heart. You’re smart—even though you think you should be smarter. You’re comfortable in your own skin and own up to your mistakes. You make it easy for someone to be themselves around you and you’re forthright at the same time.”

“Okay, okay, Blondie,” Simon said, briefly lifting his hand to stop Hutch from saying more and embarrassing him further. “You’ve made your point. But, c’mon, buddy, tell me something you don’t like about me—or I’m going to get the Big Head.”

Hutch looked over at Simon, to his distinct profile and his inviting relaxation. He was hard-pressed to find a single thing he didn’t like about the agent, but then he thought of something. “You’re a better cook than I am.”

Simon heartily laughed. Even Hutch’s negative had been a compliment. He glanced at Hutch, the fire’s flickering flames and table lamplight shining in his brown eyes, appearing pleased, tickled, touched. “I like you, partner.”

Hutch reached over and affectionately squeezed Simon’s forearm. He didn’t let go. “The feeling’s mutual, pal.”

* * *

“It can’t be this easy,” Hutch said, straightening on his stool as he felt his heart thump in his chest. “Or we’re just that good,” he added, nudging Simon with his elbow to get his attention.

He and Simon were sitting at a bar table that late Saturday night, drinking fake beer and eating pretzels, and watching the gay goings-on, when Hutch took immediate notice of the two men who’d just entered the establishment. His and Simon’s table was near the back wall in a corner, situated in such a way that they had full view of the wrap-around bar, the entryway, the dance floor, and the hallway leading to the men’s bathrooms.

The nightclub was rather busy that night, the first weekend after a national holiday, and the music was pulsing, the lights strobing, the dance floor hopping; the patrons were happy: they were singing and dancing, and otherwise talking, laughing, and even hugging and kissing each other. What they did in the restrooms down the hall was anyone’s guess, but Hutch had a rather good idea about those activities when he saw that a few men spent considerable time tucked away in the johns before making their reappearances.

He and Simon sat close to each other in order to be heard without having to raise their voices too much. It looked good for appearances, as well, so they could easily pretend they were the gay couple they portrayed themselves to be. In truth, they were purely there on a stakeout—and planned to stay sober.

Less than half an hour earlier, Hutch was solicited by a young, attractive black man, probably in his late 20s, playfully interrupting what he must have assumed was an established couple, introducing himself as “Ben,” and timidly asking Hutch to dance with him. “You won’t mind?” Ben asked Simon, seeming to brace himself for rejection, and hoping not to have offended Hutch’s boyfriend. “It’s just that he’s so pretty. I can’t help myself. I promise I won’t touch him.”

“I’m not that fragile,” Hutch said, not intending to encourage any hands-on contact, but joining the conversation to jokingly remind both men he was present and within earshot. “Besides, I’m no one’s concubine.”

Simon laughed, sounding deeply amused, but didn’t act on it; he took his relationship role seriously. “You’ll have to ask the pretty boy yourself, Ben. He’s free to play with anyone anytime and in any which way he wants.” He winked at Hutch who had given him a reprimanding look.

Simon introduced himself as “Simon,” and extended his hand for a handshake. “This is Pretty Boy Hutch,” he told Ben. “You can shake his hand, too. He doesn’t bite all that hard.”

Ben’s handshake was firmer than his demeanor seemed. “Pleasure to meet you both.”

“But for the record, Ben,” Simon firmly said, leaning over so he’d be better heard, and gripping Ben’s wrist to make doubly sure, “he comes home with me.”

“But of course,” Ben said with a laugh, apparently enjoying the openness of the men he’d braved approaching, despite the restrictions. He was roughly Hutch’s height, close-cut hair, dark eyes and skin, dressed nicely in belted jeans and a long-sleeved, tucked shirt, and definitely a bit shy; a couple of drinks had probably given him the courage to ask Hutch for a dance. “Will you give me the pleasure?”

Simon shoved Hutch’s shoulder. “C’mon, Blue Eyes, you know I get off watching you play with others. Do Ben and me a favor.”

“That sounds delicious,” Ben said, raising an eyebrow as he licked his lips. “I’ll get to please two men at the same time.” He took a step back to encourage Hutch to follow him.

Hutch knew they had to fit in with the bar crowd; he just didn’t think he’d have to perform. But how bad could it be? He loved to dance, the music was rocking, and Ben was friendly and eager, so Hutch pushed off the stool, shot Simon an unserious, ‘I’ll get even with you later’ snarl, and followed Ben to the dance floor.

Self-conscious—and for no discernible reason—Hutch stumbled at first, couldn’t find the beat, and felt flushed with stupidity. But once he saw how happy Ben was—dancing and smiling and laughing and devouring Hutch with his eyes—Hutch decided to play the part and give the young man a show. He briefly closed his eyes to allow himself to feel the music’s rhythm and soon got caught up in its exuberance, especially when he noticed that other men on the dance floor were enjoying the visual of his gyrating body, too.

Hutch eventually realized it was Simon who’d made him initially apprehensive; a man he respected watching him dance with another man seemed somehow inappropriate and made him feel awkward.

But maybe Simon was enjoying Hutch’s performance as much as Ben and the other dancers were. One thing Hutch was good at was dancing; music was in his blood. He even decided to stay for a second dance, giving Ben a warm hug of gratitude when they finished—instead of the handshake Ben asked for, both surprising and pleasing Ben at once—and then Hutch returned to the table.

“You’re a natural out there,” Simon noted, giving Hutch’s neck an affectionate arm squeeze and not immediately letting him go. “You had fun despite yourself, huh?”

“It was easy once I got my head in the game,” Hutch admitted, pulling at his sweater to cool his perspiring skin, and enjoying Simon’s affection; at least two people that night wanted to be around him, even if Starsky didn’t. “You should try it. What do you say, Brave Boy? Shall we dance?”

Simon released Hutch and sat back. “Not so brave,” he said with an embarrassed laugh. “Besides, I have no rhythm. You’ve got me beat in the dancing department.”

Hutch remembered the day Starsky dipped him in Dobey’s office, telling Hutch, “When you’ve got it, flaunt it, boy.” Hutch would never forget being bent over backward and looking into Starsky’s blue eyes, feeling vulnerable in his strong arms, but safe, feeling wanted by him, but played, feeling right at home.

Hutch was about to slip into a sudden melancholy brought on by those memories, but that’s when he saw the two men enter the bar.

“It can’t be this easy,” he said, loud enough for Simon to hear him, and straightening on his stool as he felt his heart thump in his chest. “Or we’re just that good,” he added, nudging Simon with his elbow to get his full attention.

Simon followed Hutch’s line of sight and, after half a beat, abruptly looked back into Hutch’s eyes; his expression was one of shock, dismay, excitement, disbelief. “We’re just that good,” Simon decided.

One of the two men who’d just entered the bar was an undercover police officer in civilian clothes that Hutch and Simon immediately recognized; the cop’s job was to sit in a nondescript vehicle with his partner and watch the parking lot until closing time. The cops were allowed to start the engine to warm the car when they needed heat, but to be certain no one caught on that they had no intention of entering the building—or that they were having or soliciting sex.

One officer obviously remained behind in the car while the other entered the bar; he nodded at Hutch when they made brief eye contact, and then stepped aside and against the wall near the entry door to wait for further instructions.

The second of the two men who’d entered the building had been unknowingly followed in by the undercover cop; he appeared to be in his early 40s, was of slender build, about five-foot-ten or so, had short, dark hair, was dressed casually but warmly in a sweater and jacket, clean jeans and hiking boots, and he confidently walked up to the bar and sat on an empty stool with no one on either side of him. After ordering a drink, he glanced around the room at the goings-on. But what had first caught Hutch’s attention about the man when he walked in was that he was wearing a rather noticeable black eye patch.

Simon almost stumbled off his stool. He then turned and grabbed Hutch’s face in both hands, looked Hutch in the eye, and said, “I love you,” after which he kissed Hutch’s forehead and let him go. “You’re a god,” he breathlessly added, “and don’t let anyone tell you differently. Now let’s go make our acquaintance, shall we?”

“I’ll follow your lead,” Hutch said, pleased for what they were about to do—and especially for Simon; he knew how troubled Simon had been about the case, and it was about to finally come to a close.

When Hutch and Simon reached the suspect, they were able to take the stools on either side of him before anyone could inadvertently intercept them. Hutch felt Simon lean into the killer from the other side, pushing the perp off balance, so Hutch leaned back, effectively squeezing the man between them.

“Can we interest you in a threesome?” Simon coyly asked. “You, me, and the blond?”

The man laughed, awkwardly, looking from Simon to Hutch with his one visible blue eye, and back again. “I’m not an orgy kind of guy,” he said, deep voice—and sounding palpably defensive.

“I’m Simon. He’s Hutch. You are?”

“Jimmy.”

“You intrigue us, Jimmy,” Simon said, as if to explain his attraction and the reason for their solicitation. “Are you sure you don’t want to play with us?”

“We’re open to anything,” Hutch said, drawing Jimmy’s attention. “Anal.”

“Cock-sucking,” Simon added.

Hutch kept up the pressure. “Bondage, Jimmy. Are you into bondage? You watch, we fuck—or any combination thereof.”

The bartender put a beer in front of Jimmy and asked the other two if they wanted anything; Simon opted for a beer, Hutch for a whiskey, only to further the illusion that they too were drinking.

“We’ve been looking for a third player,” Simon explained, leaning on the bar as much as he leaned into Jimmy so he could see Jimmy’s face better.

“We come here every night,” Hutch added. “Never been turned down. Don’t hurt our feelings, Jimmy.”

“Got the right spot for a threesome, too. No one will know but us cocksuckers. Real private,” Simon swore.

“I don’t think I’m into the group thing,” Jimmy said again, nervously sipping his beer. “I’m more of a one-man-at-a-time kind of guy.”

“Are you new around here, Jimmy?” Simon asked. “We have a reputation for delivering fairly hot sex, so I’m thinking you don’t know about us yet.”

“Yeah, I’m new,” Jimmy said, as if that might help get the men off him. “Just rolled into town.”

“Ah, that explains it,” Hutch said, as if reprimanding Simon for not knowing sooner. They could have immediately arrested Jimmy, but Simon apparently wanted to toy with him first. “Jimmy doesn’t know how good we are together, Simon. But, Jimmy, we can take you places you’ve never been before.”

“Yeah? Well, I’d be happy to do one of you,” Jimmy insisted.

“Which one?” Simon asked, pretending to hope he’d be chosen.

Jimmy turned his head and looked Hutch in the eye. His voice was low, direct. “You.”

Hutch felt the chill go through him; this monster of a man had singled him out as his next victim; he was willing to kill Hutch in cold blood.

“I’m hurt,” Simon said to get Jimmy’s attention off of Hutch. “But I can handle it. Tell us how it works, Jimmy.”

“How what works?”

“You rolled in here in a windowless van, we’re guessing,” Hutch explained. “Maybe parked near the road for a quick exit?”

Jimmy squinted at Hutch, then at Simon. “Who are you guys?”

“You take Hutch out to the van,” Simon supposed. “Do you fuck him in the parking lot or do you drive someplace private first?”

“Or maybe someplace isolated,” Hutch furthered. “Someplace off the highway in the middle of nowhere?”

“Somewhere off Interstate 5 at, say, Mile Marker 16?” Simon assumed.

“Who the fuck are you guys?”

“And then what, Jimmy?” Simon continued to prod him. “Would you tie Hutch up or would the sex be consensual? I’m guessing you’re the ‘kind of guy’ who loves to rape.”

“What I want to know,” Hutch said, reaching over and quickly pulling the eye patch off Jimmy’s head before Jimmy could stop him, “is whether this is really hiding an injury or it’s just bait.”

Two healthy blue eyes, now in shock and dismay, stared straight ahead, into the bar’s mirror, while Jimmy’s body stiffened, his jaw clenched, and his breathing became labored and audible. Yet he still tried to elude them. “I don’t know what you guys are talking about.”

“Bait,” Simon concluded to answer Hutch’s suspicions. Before Jimmy could try to bolt off the bar stool, Simon pressed more firmly into him with a warning. “You left your screwdriver in the van, but I’m packing a fully loaded Glock, asshole, and you were followed in here by an armed police officer. Try it and we’ll both shoot you dead right where you ooze nothing but evil.”

“You have the wrong—”

“I’ll bet your van begs to differ,” Simon argued, motioning over the undercover cop; the officer intuitively understood the assignment and proceeded to handcuff Jimmy while reciting him his Miranda rights.

“What are we going to find in there?” Hutch asked Jimmy. “Bloody clothes?”

“Pictures of your victims?” Simon asked.

“Murder weapons?”

Simon pulled Jimmy’s wallet out of his back pocket and opened it in the light from the bar mirror and the dim overheads. “James Roker from Greenwich, Connecticut, not too far from Mile Marker Number 1, I figure–where you left your first victim.”

“A little too close to home,” Hutch assumed, tsk’ing, “so he had to branch out. Didn’t want his mama to know he loves to fuck boys—and then kills them.”

“Poor little James—such a weenie that he uses a boy’s version of his name and an eye patch to get sympathy, lures his victims to their gruesome deaths, and now thinks for a second that we don’t have him dead-to-rights.”

“But why the 12-year-old boy?” Hutch asked, easing off James once he was handcuffed and he knew the police officer also had a grip on him. “He didn’t fit your pattern.”

Hutch didn’t expect an answer, but it seemed James wanted to fire back at them while he still could. His wisecrack was as evil as his soul.

“The kid was in the way, cock-blocking me from his dad, the little pisser. But I sure showed him.”

Hutch tried but couldn’t stop Simon from grabbing the back of the suspect’s head and slamming his face into the bar’s hard surface. James let out a wail and came up with a bloody nose before he even knew what hit him, but it could have been a lot worse had Hutch not initially intercepted and cushioned the blow.

“Let’s get this piece of shit out of here,” Hutch fumed, shoving James off the stool and following the officer—with James in his custody—out of the building. Music still played, but the patrons had long since turned their attention to the action at the bar; Hutch could sense their bewilderment and feel their eyes on them as they passed through, especially Ben’s.

Simon, meanwhile, had punched the edge of the bar with his fist and walked off in the opposite direction.

* * *

“I shouldn’t have asked him about the boy,” Hutch said, sitting at the dining table across from Simon on that rain-filled November morning. They had just finished breakfast, their plates were cleared, but neither of them seemed quite ready to leave each other’s company—or their analysis of the previous night. “You made the comment about James using ‘Jimmy’ to get attention,” Hutch explained, “and I shot my mouth off without thinking.”

Simon stared into his coffee cup and didn’t say anything. Like Hutch, he was neatly groomed, clean-shaven, and dressed in a winter sweater, jeans, and shoes, ready for the day, but not appearing all that eager for it.

“I shouldn’t have stopped you from beating the shit out of him, either,” Hutch continued, annoyed with himself for pushing Simon into such a somber disposition. “I could have looked the other way.”

Simon lifted his head and made firm eye contact. “You did the right thing,” he insisted in a low voice, “in both instances. Besides, the last thing I needed was to be charged with assaulting a handcuffed suspect in police custody.”

“I’m not sure it would have gone that far, given his crimes. I would have sworn he threw the first punch and then was cuffed.” Hutch didn’t care if Simon was disappointed to hear he would break the law for him; it was Hutch’s honest inclination.

“Well, don’t be second-guessing yourself, Hutch. You don’t have anything to apologize for. The let-down I’m feeling this morning comes from knowing I could have stopped him sooner if I’d used half my brain.”

“The forest for the trees,” Hutch forgivingly said, relieved to know he wasn’t the cause of Simon’s dark mood.

“But it was all right there in front of me, don’t you see?” Simon implored him. “Instead, I thought the mile markers were just locators in case the police didn’t find a body near them, and this piece-of-shit wanted us to know about his latest trophy and where to find it.”

“A perfectly logical assumption.”

“It never occurred to me that there was a formula in the mix. I should have figured it out after the third or fourth victim.”

“I’ll say it again, differently, and maybe you’ll hear me this time: You were too close to it. There were moving pieces. These were interstate crimes—at first appearing unrelated.”

“But they weren’t unrelated.”

“I read all the police reports; they weren’t sequential, either. You didn’t know about body #2 until after body #9 was found, and so on. Only when I listed the victims and the markers on a single piece of paper was I able to see the pattern.”

“Listing the victims and their markers is something I should have done early on.”

“Okay, so where does that leave us, huh? You playing over and over again what you should have done and—what was that you said about guilt?—going nowhere, solving nothing? Or maybe we should just concentrate on the fact that we stopped him.”

Simon looked back into his coffee as he held the cup with both hands on the table. After a minute, he heavily sighed. “I have a lot of calls to make,” he eventually said, “first to the Task Force, next to the Bureau, and then to the families. I guess I can do that much before we head over to the station.”

“I’ll wash the dishes,” Hutch said.

His disarming comment made Simon look up at him again—and reluctantly laugh. “You always know how to snap me out of it.”

“Do I?”

“Something about perspective,” Simon mused. “I’ll call the murder victims’ families and let them know we caught their loved one’s killer and you wash the dishes.”

Hutch chuckled. “When you put it like that…”

“Thanks, partner.”

They left the table; Simon to the living room phone and Hutch to the kitchen sink. Hutch couldn’t say who Simon called first, but he assumed it was each set of Task Force agents because he greeted the other person on the line with an exuberant, “I guess you heard from Agent Taylor last night; I told him to let everyone know we got him!”

One call sounded as if Simon spoke to Agent Joe Razolli, his partner in Washington, D.C., because he made a similar greeting, but this one was simply, “We got him!” and then he proceeded to give details.

Hutch had called Dobey first thing that morning to tell him about the capture. Dobey was predictably ecstatic to hear the news—and proud of his officer. “You did real good, Hutch.” But there was no mention of Starsky—or how Hutch was faring without him—as if Dobey was afraid to bring up Starsky’s name in case it diluted their jubilation.

It was quite late by the time the arrest wrapped up the night before. The undercover officers called for a flatbed tow truck and a squad car, and the killer was transferred from their back seat into the cage of the police car while the brown, windowless Chevy van—itself a crime scene—was hoisted onto the back of the tow truck.

Simon had emerged from the bar after the prisoner transfer had been made, and not because he knew the deed had been done, but because he’d finally been able to compose himself and face his compatriots. Or so that was Hutch’s assumption. He was certain Simon had gone out the back door of the nightclub into the alley—after he’d slammed James’ head into the hard surface of the bar—to have a good cry; Hutch could still see the wetness in Simon’s eyes, even in the dim light of a parking lot lamp; Simon’s relief had to be enormous.

As the red flashing lights of the police car made the turn onto the road with the undercover car and tow truck following, Simon faced Hutch. They weren’t alone outside; some of the patrons had followed the arresting officers out of the bar and huddled near its front door under the porch lights to keep an eye on the remaining action. Hutch and Simon stood at the rear of their car, inhaling the cool fresh air of a late November night, and were still too wired to go home.

“I can’t believe it,” Simon said, running his fingers through his hair to tidy himself. He must have felt he was all over the place that night. “He flat-out walked into our trap—just like you said he would. We picked the right bar at the right time. I can’t believe it.”

Hutch leaned against the car’s trunk, crossed his arms to settle further, and looked into Simon’s shimmering eyes as Simon stood before him. “Great minds,” he explained it with a pleased laugh. He felt a bit wild himself. Adrenalin slowly dissolved in his veins, but he was emotionally pumped despite it; mostly a mix of relief for the would-be victim and Simon.

“How this ended was inevitable because of the formula,” Hutch told him. “It had no other way to go except the way it unfolded—maybe not as smoothly as it did, I’ll grant you that, but that we’d corner him in this town was in the bag from the moment we arrived.”

“I wanted to believe it, but couldn’t; I’ve been too terrified to put hope into something I could barely imagine. I’ve had countless nightmares about this guy. He’s always one step ahead of me, leaving a bloody trail of broken bodies in his wake.”

“It’s over, partner,” Hutch said, using his authoritative voice. He cocked his head and continued to look into Simon’s brown eyes as Simon seemed suddenly speechless, as if he was finally soaking in what Hutch had just told him. “It’s over.”

“I couldn’t have done this without you,” Simon said, stepping up and taking Hutch into his arms, pressing his face into Hutch’s cheek. He held Hutch close—and at length—in a strong, warm embrace, one obviously driven by sincerity and gratitude.

Hutch couldn’t help but hug him back; besides, the affection was inviting, almost necessary, a connection Hutch sorely missed, realizing it only when it was given to him in moments like that one.

“I owe you so much,” Simon added, patting Hutch on the back when he finally let him go to hold Hutch at arm’s length and gaze into his eyes. “My first good night’s sleep in three years will be because of you, Blondie.”

Hutch smiled at him, a genuinely warm smile, one from his heart. He didn’t have the right words, only wordless affection. “It’s been my privilege,” he finally said when their eye contact lasted long enough to remind him of Starsky’s lingering gazes. He straightened off the back of the car and out of Simon’s grasp, affectionately squeezed Simon’s arm, and then headed for the driver’s seat. “Let’s go home.”

But there was no Starsky to call to exuberantly say, “We got him!” no Starsky to tell the details of the capture, no Starsky to be proud of him—and of Simon—for catching a monster before he could kill again. There was, simply, no Starsky.

Another overwhelming mountain of melancholy was interrupted when Simon came into the kitchen just then and said he decided to call the victims’ families later that day instead; he wanted to stay on a high after talking to the Task Force and Agent Joe in D.C. Hutch had just finished washing the last cup and set it in the drainer when Simon entered the room. “I suppose they’re all looking forward to going home now,” Hutch assumed about the Task Force. It had been a long three weeks.

“Agents Randall and Tom will take the perp back to his hometown in Connecticut after we’ve signed off on the extradition papers this morning; we have to figure out what and where to charge him and I think it best to start with Mile Marker #1.”

Simon didn’t say it, but Hutch already knew it: these 15 victims weren’t necessarily James’ only kills. But law enforcement had to begin somewhere so it was wise to initiate the legal process at the first relevant place.

“Are you in a hurry to get back to Los Angeles?” Simon asked, leaning against a kitchen counter, facing Hutch while he watched Hutch finish up his morning chore. “Any reason you have to go home right away?”

“Not really. What are you suggesting?”

“The homeowner says we can keep the house until the end of the month since that was the original plan. It’s only another six days. What say we stay and catch a Shakespeare play or two—at night instead of a matinee? See this town from a completely different perspective, hm?”

Hutch liked that idea for two reasons: first, for the one Simon outlined, but second because the idea of going back to that big empty house in L.A. was more than Hutch could handle just then. It was too in-the-middle of the holidays to do anything but bring him further down. The longer he stayed away, the better for his spirits.

But how was he going to survive the Christmas season—or winter itself, for that matter? He was on pins-and-needles just hoping for a phone call, knowing Starsky had talked to his mother the day before—if not on Thanksgiving Day itself—and learned of Hutch’s doings and whereabouts.

Starsky was going to call, wasn’t he?

* * *

“I’m glad we decided to stay in,” Simon said. He was dressed in heather gray drawstring sweatpants and a navy blue sweater as he knelt in front of the fireplace and stoked the burning logs. “We needed the rest. It feels like we’re actually home for once.”

They’d been out working every night in a bar or restaurant since they arrived in Ashland three weeks earlier and then spent four hours that morning at the police station interrogating their suspect before filling out and signing paperwork for his extradition.

They then ate an early lunch at a small cafe across the street from the Oregon Shakespeare Festival after having purchased a couple of tickets for a play the following night, and decided to have a rare dinner at the house to finish off their day; Simon baked his well-loved eggplant Parmesan and Hutch made a green leaf salad and garlic bread. They had leftover pumpkin pie and enough wine on hand from an earlier purchase to round out the meal. Now on their second glass of Merlot, they met in the living room to enjoy the toastiness of a warm fire, the amber glow of its flames, and two small table lamps.

Hutch lit a match to a few candles he set around the room and further pleased Simon by igniting a couple of sticks of incense, too. Darkness had fallen. It was cold and raining, and had been for most of the day, so the cozy hearth and the miniature flames warmed them beyond the comfort of their clothes.

“We don’t have much use for fireplaces in L.A.,” Hutch mindlessly commented as he sat in the reclining armchair closest to the fire and watched Simon rearrange the logs. Hutch too was dressed in heather gray drawstring sweatpants, but in a red sweater, warm black socks, and relaxed. “Most of them are gas-powered—or fake.”

Simon laughed. “Like most of that city, huh? A bit artificial?” He closed the screen to the firebox and stood. “You were born and raised in Minnesota, do I remember that right?”

“Duluth, outside Minneapolis.”

Simon returned the poker to its nearby stand. “I assume you had real fireplaces there?”

“I think everyone did—still does.”

“Same as New York,” Simon observed. He went to the sofa and sat nearest Hutch—because that’s where Hutch had set Simon’s wine glass—and put his blue socked feet on the coffee table. “Sometimes I miss the city,” he dreamily added, looking over at Hutch, “especially this time of year.”

“Much like the movies, isn’t it? All that bustling and last-minute Christmas shopping, the Times Square neon lights, and ice skating in Rockefeller Center?”

“It really was like the movies; don’t know if it’s still that way. Everyone in the holiday spirit.”

“But?”

“But the winters are brutal there. I like the D.C. weather a lot more. It’s cold and it snows, but it doesn’t last nearly as long.”

Hutch better understood why Dorothy planned to move to Florida after the holidays. At a certain age, the frigid cold and dampness had to be even more trying on the bones. “We did a lot of skiing and snowboarding where I’m from. Sleds and sleighs and snowball fights. That was my childhood.”

Both men stopped talking as they each privately reminisced about a time long past, to when they were very young and life was much simpler. Hutch stared into his wine glass in between swallows, and Simon into the fireplace. The aroma of vanilla-scented candles and incense filled the room as they listened to the steady rain on the roof.

“We work well together,” Simon noted after a while, breaking into their silence as he looked over at his partner and made eye contact with a warm and genuine smile. “I mean, we’ve practically lived with each other for the past two months and we still get along—enjoy figuring stuff out together, catching a serial killer together, cooking a meal and spending a quiet night alone in front of a fire together.”

“Who says romance is dead?”

Simon laughed. “I didn’t mean it that way. Well, I guess it is romantic, depending on how you look at it. But what I’m trying to say is that we have a mutual respect for each other, one I haven’t had with anyone in years.”

“I’m flattered.”

“So, I’m wondering what you think about us putting in for another case after we’ve officially wrapped this one up? We could probably have our pick of the best because of this bust. It doesn’t have to be as gruesome as a serial killer mystery. There are plenty of long-missing persons and cold murder cases to solve. What do you think, Blue Eyes?”

“How is my being partnered with you going to make Agent Joe feel?”

“I like Joe, don’t get me wrong, but he’s a by-the-book kind of guy, and I don’t really have all that much in common with him beyond the job. I mean, I’ll stay in touch, work some angles with him, but I’d love to solve another case with you.”

Hutch felt a sinking feeling in his gut and broke eye contact with Simon as he tried to isolate why he suddenly felt the way he did. It wasn’t because Hutch would rather be partnered with Starsky; that was a given. It wasn’t because Simon made him uncomfortable; Simon had never made Hutch feel awkward or threatened or unsure about his motives and intentions. So why did Hutch feel sick in his stomach just then? And then he knew why.

He looked back at Simon, into his expectant expression, and first offered an apologetic smile.

“You don’t think it’s a good idea,” Simon assumed from Hutch’s silent reply, not realizing he had misread him. He sat forward and picked up his glass, took a long swallow of wine from it, and then leaned back into the sofa cushions, as if trying to ease the blow of Hutch’s rejection. “What don’t you like about me? Be honest. I can handle anything you tell me.”

“The fact is that I don’t dislike anything about you,” Hutch honestly said. He felt flushed with a kind of dread, yet determined to follow it through. “I would love to tackle another case with you, but I have to come clean about something first; you might not want me after this.”

Simon raised an eyebrow. “Come clean?”

Hutch also took a long drink from his wine glass, and then sat forward in the chair to set it on the coffee table. It was time to confront his truths. “I want to stop lying to you.”

Simon’s expression abruptly sobered. “Stop lying to me?” He swallowed whatever he was feeling—probably a similar kind of dread—his, the fear of having been played, used, deceived, manipulated perhaps. “What could you possibly have been lying to me about?”

“I was only married the one time,” Hutch said, briefly breaking eye contact to look into his past; he sat with his forearms on his thighs, wringing his hands, and didn’t know where else to begin. “I let you believe the breakup I had a couple of months ago was from a second marriage; I didn’t lie to you about it, but I didn’t correct your assumption.”

“What was it really?”

“A split with Starsky. And I did lie to you about being in touch with him.”

Simon appeared to relax, if only a little, as if he understood that Hutch’s ‘lies’ were personal to Hutch and not related to their work together. “Okay,” he quietly said, “but why would you lie about that?”

Why had he? Was Hutch ashamed of his relationship with Starsky? No, not by a long shot. But he was definitely ashamed of being the cause of its demise. How to explain that, except to go back to its beginning?

“We saw it all: rapists and drug dealers, killers and child abusers, the addicted and the down-and-out. You know the things I mean; I’m sure you lived through it as a Brooklyn police officer.”

Simon pursed his lips, blinked, but he knew what Hutch was telling him. “More harrowing experiences in a week than most people ever have in a lifetime.”

“Exactly,” Hutch said. He appreciated Simon’s empathy; it helped to explain to Simon why he trusted and depended on Starsky as much as he did without Hutch having to say it. “We survived Department corruption, shootouts and car chases, fist fights and kidnappings. As I’m laying it out to you now, I wonder why none of us are spending the rest of our lives in mental wards.”

“No shit,” Simon agreed. He dropped his feet to the floor and pushed himself into sitting instead of slouching; he apparently sensed there was more to the Starsky and Hutch story than the obvious and he wanted to be prepared for it. No doubt he wondered what could have possibly happened between Starsky and Hutch to cause a split—knowing as Simon did, how bonded two police partners could be.

“About five months ago,” Hutch continued, “Starsky got shot up in the precinct parking lot; three bullets to the back; went into a coma … and then flat-lined.”

“Jesus.”

“I was out hunting his would-be assassins and called in to see how he was doing when Dobey told me he was in cardiac arrest.” Hutch reflected on that chilling moment. How he ever arrived in time to be told Starsky had survived was still beyond his comprehension; pure panic drove him. “But he came back to us just as I entered the hospital.”

“You mean, he came back to you just as you entered the hospital.”

Simon’s observation choked Hutch up such that he couldn’t speak for half a minute; first, as if he could control his emotion one way, he weakly smiled at Simon to hide his feelings, but then had to look away to actually compose himself. Clearing his throat, he made eye contact again. “That’s what everyone else told me, too,” he confessed. Hutch just couldn’t fathom it; he’d been undeserving of that kind of lifeline—because he failed to intercept the bullets in time.

“I believe he came back because of you even if you don’t believe it,” Simon said with certainty. “Those kinds of profound moments aren’t just coincidences.”

“Maybe you’re right. Sometimes I think I was more important to him than he is to me. I say that because there were many instances where he sacrificed his life for mine, and me not as much for him.”

“I would bet he wasn’t keeping score.”

“He should have. I’ll never forgive myself for following my dick over this woman I barely knew and leaving him uncovered in an alley shootout because I thought I had something more important to lose than him.”

“The dick is a powerful force,” Simon said, not facetiously; he didn’t say those words with even a hint of humor. He seemed instead to want Hutch to forgive himself for his feelings. “I suspect Starsky forgave you for it.”

“And still I punched him in the face when he told me later that my love interest was actually a hooker, a call girl, who’d just been killed by her pimp.”

“And he forgave you for that, too.”

“I put the moves on a woman six months ago, a lady police officer who I knew he’d been intimate with and was falling for. She baited both of us and he ended up catching me at her house coming out of her bedroom, tucking in my shirt. It was another instance where I knowingly put his feelings behind my own and below everyone else’s. What an absolutely shitty thing I did to him.”

“And he forgave you for that, too, I’m guessing.”

“Because I mattered more to him than he does to me—what other explanation can there be?—and don’t get me wrong, Simon: I would trade my life for his in a goddamn heartbeat. On the flipside, I’ll die without him.”

An inexplicable wetness had come to Simon’s eyes. “I don’t doubt your conviction for a second.”

“You’ve had partners.”

“I have.”

“You know what I’m talking about.”

“I do.”

Hutch realized what he’d just said—and that Simon apparently didn’t have that bond with Agent Joe. Did he have such a bonded partner in Brooklyn? Or were they also too ‘by-the-book’ for Simon’s tastes, or he didn’t have enough in common with them beyond the job? But Simon just said he understood the bond, one so strong that he would lay down his life for his partner.

“I’m afraid to ask,” Hutch carefully said, asking without asking, and feeling anxious about Simon’s answer.

“He was killed in the line of duty,” Simon replied, wiping his eye, sounding emotional, and confirming Hutch’s suspicion. “Matthew Rosenberg. My partner of 12 years. Family man. Good heart. I’d take a bullet for him in a heartbeat, too. Instead, I watched him die and then helped to bury him. Soon after, I left Brooklyn because I couldn’t go anywhere without constantly being reminded of everything I’d forever lost.”

“Simon, I’m so sorry,” Hutch said in a soft voice, feeling shocked and hoping Simon could feel just how sorry he was beyond his lame words. The pain of Simon’s long-ago loss was an echo of Hutch’s and he keenly felt it; he too had to blink back tears. “I can’t even imagine … I mean, I saw Starsky take those bullets … I will never forget how terrified I was … I’m sorry you lost Matthew, especially the way you did. I have no words.”

“We were like you and Starsky. We fought, we slipped up, we let each other down sometimes, but we always knew we had each other’s back where it truly counted—until we didn’t, that day he was killed. But I can’t imagine what could have caused this split between you and Starsky. I remember you telling me—when I thought you were talking about a recent divorce—that you were the one who had fucked up. Is that part still true?”

“I fucked up big time.”

“Because you followed your dick again?”

“Maybe it was just my heartstrings this time—aimed on the wrong person.”

He’d never be able to forgive himself for that stupidity, either—nor the terrible pain it had unleashed on Starsky.

“When they let him out of rehab,” Hutch explained, “I brought him home to look after him. I had this one-bedroom postage stamp of an apartment over a restaurant and across the street from a mini mart. We were all set to put him completely back on his feet. Anyway, on the first night he was there, he insisted he take the sofa and I sleep in my own bed—that it was the least he could do for all the months I’d been helping him recover from near-paralysis.”

“But you couldn’t let him do that.”

“We fought about it and he won the argument with a compromise; we’d sleep in the bed together—the way cowboys do in old western movies.”

Simon chuckled. “Cozy.”

Hutch heard the fire pops and the rain on the roof and for a moment he wasn’t sure he should detail what he planned—but it was at the heart of his relationship with Starsky; there’d be no way around it.

“I woke up one morning and got to thinking—before I was even out of bed—about how lucky we were that he wasn’t paralyzed from the neck- or waist-down and he didn’t die. I guess you could say I got to feeling extremely grateful and privileged. And I should probably back up here and tell you that I’ve been sleeping in the nude since I was in Junior High.”

A quick glance at Simon, and Hutch could tell, from Simon’s jarred expression alone, that he probably guessed where things were going in Hutch’s story, so Hutch quickly said, “He woke up about then, too, read on my face what I was obviously feeling in my heart, and leaned over and kissed me right here.” He tapped the center of his chest. “His way of telling me he heard me. I was overwhelmed by that, as you might imagine. I’ve always been aware of our wordless conversations; this one was so poignant.”

“Tender,” Simon noted, his earlier dismay seeming to ease. “You guys really were ‘madly in love.’”

“Probably since the day we met,” Hutch agreed with a gentle laugh. “But then, right after the kiss, he went down on me.”

“Oh, boy,” Simon said under his breath. “I thought that’s where this was going at first, but then changed my mind—too soon.”

“Do you want me to stop here?”

“No. I told you I could handle anything you tell me, and this is no different.”

Hutch was relieved. “Well, I tried to stop him.”

“Of course you did. But it felt too good to stop.”

“Yeah,” Hutch said, remembering that first time, how easily he could have stopped Starsky, outmuscled him, but surrendered instead; the pleasure felt so necessary—and right. “It felt too good to stop.”

“And because it was him.”

Hutch read the empathy deep in Simon’s eyes. “Yeah,” Hutch agreed again. “Because it was him.”

“And so?”

“And so, naturally, I emotionally beat him up for days afterward. I was so angry at him—not because he’d taken me in a weak moment, violated me somehow, but because I felt he had threatened us. Every single romantic relationship he and I had in our lifetimes all ended in disaster. He took us down that same path and I was terrified that we’d lose us in the long run, too.”

“And that’s what the split was over, that you were right?”

Hutch hadn’t considered that notion before, that their relationship had, indeed, ended because they were lovers, but that wasn’t the whole story. “I let him talk me into a full-on sexual relationship, much the way he talked me into sleeping in the same bed with him—and we were off-and-running there for a while, sex twice a day every day.”

“A seducer,” Simon observed, not judgmentally. “Charismatic guy?”

“Very—but I was never happier in my life. I didn’t feel taken advantage of; we were simply making up for lost time.”

“Had you ever indulged sex with a man before?”

“No. I’m not gay. Neither is he.”

“Except obviously for each other.”

Hutch found Simon’s perspective almost amusing, but perhaps there was some truth in it, too. “Have you ever had sex with a man?”

“No, and I’m not sure I ever could. But I can understand how two men might find their way to that even if they’re straight. So what happened, Hutch?”

“The Department gave him a payout for his troubles, he shared it with me, and we ended up buying a 4-bedroom house together where we were going to live happily-ever-after. But then I ended up in this situation—”

“With a woman?”

“It was complicated, but yeah, I—”

“Because you’re a straight man,” Simon concluded. “I mean, you guys didn’t wake up that morning after all those years and realize only then that you were gay for each other, did you?”

“No. It arrived that morning. But being straight has nothing to do with being loyal.”

“You’re right, of course, but crossing that line with a person you’d give up the world for—a person who just happens to have the same body parts as you—doesn’t change who you fundamentally are, either.”

“But that wasn’t the problem. I mean, there was a lot of truth in his convincing argument that we had everything anyone could possibly ever need in another person—except the sex, and then we had that, too. The problem was that I let this other thing get in the way—and totally broke his heart as if I couldn’t have cared less about him. I made him feel Second Place again when he was always First. I knew better, but took him for granted.”

“I’m sorry, Hutch.”

“I came to my senses two hours too late. We were to pack up our shit and move into the house we’d bought, but he didn’t show that afternoon. When I went looking for him, I found out that he’d cleaned out his apartment, abandoned his car at the airport, and resigned from his job.”

“You mean, he just up-and-left? Into the wind kind of thing?”

“Without a trace.”

“Oh, shit, Hutch. And please understand that I’m not judging you. You know I’m not. I had an affair that destroyed my marriage, so I’m the last person to throw rocks from my glass house. But—to use another metaphor—I guess there’s only so many straws a camel’s back can take.”

“This time was worse,” Hutch admitted, especially to himself. “This time we were in love with each other, planning a future that was meant only for us. I can’t tell you the number of calls I’ve made, how much research I’ve done, the stakeouts I’ve carried out, or how many miles I’ve driven looking for him. I won’t give up until I find him, but he’s solidly nowhere to be found.”

“Because you shattered his … everything.”

“Yeah. And my everything with it.”

* * *

“Hey, buddy,” Hutch said into the payphone receiver. “I have some news for you.”

“About your partner?” Simon asked, sounding hopeful.

If only Hutch had that kind of news to report, but alas he didn’t, and it demoralized him to be reminded of his ongoing failure in finding Starsky. “About New York City,” he corrected Simon, trying to sound upbeat.

“What about it?”

“It is still like the movies.”

Simon delightedly laughed. “Ice skating in Rockefeller Center?”

“And neon lights and last-minute Christmas shopping in Times Square.”

Hutch knew very well about his last statement; he’d spent all of his mid-afternoon in the brightly-lit neon neighborhood—having arrived just an hour earlier in New York City by train from D.C.—to shop for a plain black scarf. The additional item would serve to disguise him for his upcoming nightly stakeouts, despite that the weather was unusually mild for that time of year, though a bit breezy. “It’s crazy around here,” he added, remembering how long he had to stand in line just to buy one thing.

“You can always come back,” Simon reminded him.

Hutch told him he’d keep his options open, but they both knew he’d go through with his plans. He was banking on Starsky having gone home for Christmas.

After buying his scarf, Hutch downed a tasty meal inside a nearby diner, then killed time in a bar watching a sports game on the wall TV while nursing a solitary drink. Traffic, passersby, shoppers, and tourists filled the Square, and the night was alive with excitement and chaos. There was a lot going on to dazzle and mesmerize Hutch; people-watching was one of his favorite pastimes.

He closed out the exhilarating day with a rather short stakeout across the street from ‘The New York Times,’ wondering whether Nick would work over the Christmas holiday or if he had the days off.

On cue, and five minutes before his 11 p.m. shift that night, Nick appeared out of the shadows from the direction of the nearest subway station—wearing a jacket and beanie—and entered the newspaper’s building.

Hutch eventually returned to his hotel room, but was awake in time to catch Nick’s 7 a.m. departure from ‘The Times’; he followed Nick to the subway station, easily keeping a stealth distance. When they inevitably arrived—separately but together—at Nick’s apartment in Brooklyn, Hutch noticed right away that the curtains were drawn on the front windows before Nick had even ascended the steps.

If Starsky was in the residence, he could very well still be asleep, or the drapes were long-closed because that’s probably how Nick kept them when he went to work. Hutch couldn’t remember those details from his previous stakeout, but he supposed the latter option was more likely.

The curtains didn’t open again until early that evening—Christmas Eve—when Nick would have normally begun his day, forcing Hutch to believe Starsky wasn’t in Nick’s apartment. Not long after, a woman arrived, carrying bags of who-knew-what, and went inside. Hutch had kept an eye on both Nick’s and Dorothy’s apartments throughout the late afternoon, but he also used the time to find himself a hotel room near Prospect Park so he could stay a couple of days in the area. He even found a few local places to eat where he believed he wouldn’t be discovered.

Later in the evening, nearly an hour after the sun had set, Nick and his female friend emerged from the apartment. They both carried bags of food and gifts (Hutch assumed), and walked the dimly lit street around the corner to Dorothy’s apartment, presumably to spend Christmas Eve with her. Hutch followed a short distance behind, hoping to catch a glimpse of whomever answered Dorothy’s door, but he was too late getting to see anyone.

As full-on darkness fell and he sat on a bench—across the street and two doors down from the apartment—dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved tee-shirt, a long-sleeved sweater, his jacket, and a warm scarf—he began to feel the cold, and not the kind caused by the weather.

If Starsky had come home for Christmas, he may already be in Dorothy’s apartment; perhaps he’d arrived the previous morning or even days earlier and had been inside all along, helping his mother prepare the home for Christmas dinner and decorating the tree; Hanukkah had ended just a few days prior. Or maybe Starsky had slipped in during one of those times Hutch was watching Nick’s place or while he was booking his hotel room or when he was judiciously scouting restaurants, or during his hurried dinner break.

Hutch could go to the door, knock loudly, playfully barge in under the pretense that he was ordered to search the home for his partner as if he were there on official police business, but if Starsky wasn’t in residence, how could Hutch explain his otherwise obnoxious interference? At the same time, if he didn’t make the effort to know if Starsky was with his family, he might lose the rare chance to finally lay his hands on the man.

In the end, before returning to a warm and comfortable hotel room, and to ease his anxiety in order to sleep, Hutch decided to call Dorothy first thing in the morning under the guise that he simply wanted to wish her and her family a “Merry Christmas.” He would learn from her what he needed to know and go from there.

“He just left,” Dorothy said, after Hutch fulfilled his self-made promise and called her house before he even got out of bed. He purposefully hadn’t asked about Starsky—to keep from giving himself away—but Dorothy offered the information as if she thought Hutch’s call was to connect with his partner on Christmas Day, and not because he called to wish her a happy one.

Hutch was momentarily stunned: his heart pounded and he bolted upright when he heard the news, quickly glancing at the clock. 7:23 a.m. “He just left?” he asked in disbelief, not certain he could believe what he thought Dorothy had told him. Choking on his inability to sound unnerved, he gingerly asked, “Where did he just leave to?”

“Nick and his lady, Donna—and David—were up at 5:30 a.m. and went to the airport. I made them all oatmeal and they left right after breakfast. She’s taking Nick to meet her parents in Wisconsin.”

“And David’s going with them to chaperone?” Hutch pretended to joke. He wanted to be careful with every question he asked and yet get pertinent answers, too.

“Oh no, honey,” Dorothy gently laughed. “He’s going home.”

Hutch tried again. “He left you on Christmas Day to go home? Shame on him.”

“It’s okay,” she assured him. “He was here almost a week and we had a very nice Hanukkah for a couple of days to honor his father, and then a festive Christmas Eve. He said you were out on another manhunt or you would’ve joined us.”

Hutch certainly was on a manhunt, but not the kind Dorothy had been led to believe; her son was obviously playing her.

“So, where is home for him these days?” Hutch asked with pretend playfulness—and not commenting on her misled perceptions about where she’d been told Hutch was or what he was doing and why he couldn’t join them for Christmas.

“Los Angeles, silly. But I’m not supposed to tell you that.”

“Why not?”

“Because … he wants to surprise you by showing up for what’s left of today.”

Hutch was rattled, but couldn’t let it show. Was Dorothy telling him the truth? Did Starsky really fly off to Los Angeles to finally make amends with him? Or had Starsky lied again to his mother? “That’s just like him, isn’t it?” Hutch teased, knowing he had to tread lightly if he was going to snag further information. “Well, I promise to do my best to act surprised.”

“Speaking of surprises,” Dorothy said, “we are all so proud of you for catching that horrible man when you were in Oregon. You didn’t tell me it was a serial killer you were after.”

“I didn’t want to scare you,” Hutch said. He wondered how she knew he’d closed the case. “Did you see the arrest in the news?”

“David told us. He’s very proud of you, but he talked to Captain Dobey and Dobey said he was so impressed by your work on the case that he’s now thinking of promoting you to senior detective. You and David won’t be working together anymore. Is that true? It’ll break David’s heart.”

Hutch knew exactly what Starsky was doing: he was setting up his mother to tell her before too long that Dobey had done just that: promoted Hutch out of their partnership. Starsky wouldn’t have to pretend to be partners with Hutch and he could stop lying to his mother—at least about that.

“Which airport have they gone to?”

“JFK,” Dorothy said, but sounding confused. “You don’t think you can call him there, do you?”

“I have a different idea,” Hutch said, proffering a lie. “I want to meet him at LAX when he gets here, so I need to know his arrival information. It’ll be a kind of turn-around-is-fair-play surprise.”

Dorothy laughed. “Oh, that would be funny. Yes, I’m sure they went to JFK.” She didn’t seem to notice that Hutch was really asking for Starsky’s departure stats.

“And the airline?”

“I think TWA. Something about a 9 a.m. flight, which is why they had to leave so early, but I can’t remember who was taking what to where or when. I’m sorry I’m not much help.”

She’d been more help than she knew, telling Hutch one important thing: there was no time to waste.

There also wasn’t anyone under the name ‘David Starsky’ boarding any of TWA’s flights to Los Angeles that morning, or even that day, or to anywhere, in fact—leaving Hutch with a high-pressured decision to make.

He could spend wasted hours searching the other airlines for his partner—all of them at JFK’s domestic terminals alone—or he could concentrate his efforts on TWA flights. Studying the schedule boards and calculating quickly, he learned that Starsky may have boarded the 9:12 a.m. flight—under an assumed name with a fake I.D.—with a 90-minute layover in St. Louis, if, in fact, he’d bought a TWA ticket and left that morning. But if he was going home to see Hutch, why would he have to fake his identity?

It was possible that Nick and his girlfriend were the ones who had 9:00 a.m. TWA tickets; Hutch hadn’t looked at Wisconsin flights from JFK. Perhaps Starsky was returning to Los Angeles via a different airline—assuming he hadn’t lied to Dorothy or Dorothy hadn’t lied to Hutch about Starsky’s destination.

After studying all of the day’s flights to Los Angeles, Hutch realized he could purchase a more expensive seat on the nonstop flight from JFK to LAX, leaving around 10:15 a.m., and quite possibly beat Starsky home.

His desperation made his decision a rather impulsive one, but would he regret it? He arrived in L.A. with 12 minutes to spare between his deboarding the nonstop flight and rushing to the gate to greet the TWA plane arriving from St. Louis just in case, but no Starsky—under his own name or any other name—walked off the aircraft.

There was also no point in spending hours intercepting every arriving L.A. flight from New York City; Hutch would rather be at the house waiting with open arms when Starsky made his surprise appearance, assuming he wasn’t already there.

Hutch first stopped at what seemed to be the only locally opened market on Christmas Day to pick up a few groceries, given that there wasn’t any fresh food in the house; it was Christmas, after all, and Starsky was obviously going to use it as an excuse to forgive Hutch. Hutch didn’t want Starsky to know he’d been staking out apartments in Brooklyn, so the least Hutch could do was make the holiday as festive as he could at such a late date; he hadn’t set up a tree or strung lights before he departed for D.C. a week earlier.

In fact, he’d spent the weekend leading up to Monday’s Christmas Eve at Simon’s house—a warm and inviting place Hutch had come to call his home-away-home, complete with all things Christmas, before taking the three-hour train ride into New York City that day.

So, it was early Tuesday afternoon on Christmas Day by the time Hutch arrived at his own cold and unfortunately empty house, and the first thing he did was confirm his suspicion about Starsky not having called Captain Dobey. Hutch believed Starsky lied to his mother about that, too.

“I’m back in L.A. for a few days,” Hutch said when Dobey answered the phone. He wished his superior a late Merry Christmas and then point-blank asked him if he had heard from Starsky.

Dobey hadn’t. “You know I’d tell you the minute I hear anything,” he firmly promised.

Dobey had known Hutch was spending Christmas with Simon because he’d invited Hutch to join his family for the holiday, but Hutch and Simon were working a missing persons case, and Hutch decided to stay on the East Coast instead. But now he had to tell Dobey he’d returned to L.A., hoping Starsky would come ‘home.’

Besides, Hutch hated that big, empty house he and Starsky had bought—the one Starsky had abandoned. When Hutch returned from Oregon, he moved himself into one of the bedrooms in the guest wing; he couldn’t bring himself to sleep in their kingsized bed. He unpacked some of his clothes into a small closet and used the guest bathroom for his personal care. In some ways, he was camping out in his own house, but for the first time since Starsky had left him, Hutch was hopeful the home would come back to life. They could change the sheets on the big new bed together—and start their lives over.

But food first. Starsky would undoubtedly be hungry, so Hutch quickly set the kitchen table with a charcuterie board: cheeses, crackers, a few cold cuts, green olives, cut carrots and potato chips, a couple of types of fruit, and several small tubs of tasty dips. He even had time to put out a couple of slices of apple pie, two dessert plates, and open a bottle of wine. He finished off his inviting display with two strategically placed sparkling glasses as the centerpiece.

Keeping a keen ear to the sound of a vehicle in the driveway, Hutch dug around in a couple of packing boxes in a back room for a few candles he’d remembered seeing, and also found a book of matches; he set a burning candle alongside the wine bottle, one on the coffee table, and one on each end of the fireplace mantle. He was about to head for the garage to collect a few logs of firewood when he heard noise outside the front door.

His heart immediately raced. He froze. Listened more intently. Waited. Would this actually be a Christmas he could believe in? A half-minute felt like an eternity. But no further noise was heard. He ran to the door and flung it open, hoping—almost expecting—to see Starsky standing there, smirking at him. But only a gray squirrel scampered away to a neighboring tree; it had probably jumped from the roof onto the bushes near the front door and was frightened away when Hutch made an appearance.

By nightfall, Hutch accepted that his only visitor that day was a small bushy-tailed rodent. He sat alone instead at the table and stared into nothing for a while, eventually snuffing out the candle. He slowly ate a cracker, not tasting it. Listened to silence.

Hutch’s return to the house was made all the lonelier when he realized, yet again, that not a single call from Starsky had come in, that there hadn’t been any reaching out, not in three months’ time. Starsky apparently knew about the serial killer bust in Oregon—he’d told his mother about it—but not even that was enough to remind him of their work and life together, and put Hutch’s mistake behind him.

It seemed that Starsky was as determined to hide from Hutch for the rest of his life as Hutch was dedicated to finding him—but there could only be one winner in this terrible game—and Hutch was losing.

He poured himself a drink.

“Merry Christmas, Starsk,” he said aloud into the empty room before he drank down the first glass, “wherever you are.”

* * *

“What has you a little more down in the dumps today?” Simon asked. He affectionately hit Hutch’s knee as he walked past him and sat in the armchair beside the sofa. “The sun is shining, the birds are singing, the flowers are blooming—or they will be soon. It’s spring, you know.”

“It’s also his birthday,” Hutch said. He couldn’t believe—again—how alone he was as yet another milestone day ticked by him.

“How old is he now?” Simon wondered, as if he better understood why Hutch was hurting, but didn’t know how else to handle his friend’s pain except by posing a small-talk question.

“He’s still five months older than me.”

“Well, I’m glad to see your sarcastic edge is intact.”

Hutch was sitting at the end of the sofa, hugging a decorative pillow in his arms, and stared into the past. It was late in the morning on a very special day and he hadn’t made contact with his partner. How was it possible that he would spend Starsky’s birthday without Starsky? And at what point in time would Starsky decide he’d punished Hutch long enough?

Simon tried a different tact. “I assume the Federal Vehicle Registry didn’t turn any—”

“There’s only one David Starsky in the entire database,” Hutch explained, not meaning to cut him off. “A single car is registered to him—the Ford Gran Torino that’s parked in the garage at the house in L.A.”

Silence settled over them for a couple of minutes. Hutch didn’t intend to be a downer that day. The last thing he wanted was for Simon to be uncomfortable. “He’s 37,” he answered Simon’s earlier question, looking over at him, “and I thought by now he’d show himself.”

New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day had passed without any contact with Starsky—nor any new leads. Hutch spent the holiday with Simon; they watched the ball drop in New York City, toasted each other while they feasted their eyes on televised fireworks, and bantered about their New Year’s resolutions. Hutch only had one: to find Starsky.

Valentine’s Day, Presidents Day, and even the official first day of spring passed without any unturned stones in Hutch’s research; he continued to call area codes, law enforcement agencies, apartment complexes, and the like—sometimes strategically, other times purely at random—but learned nothing he didn’t already know: Starsky had left without a trace of a trail on that September day.

“I guess you guys always did something together on each other’s birthdays,” Simon assumed. He set a foot on the coffee table, relaxed into the chair, and seemed to be genuinely interested in learning about Hutch, but also in finding a way to help him out of his melancholy.

Both men were dressed and fed and about to resume their day immersed in yet another federal missing person’s case, but then got sidetracked when Hutch had abruptly left the table and slumped into the sofa.

“I can’t imagine he’s having all that great a day today himself,” Simon noted.

Or maybe Starsky was holding a party.

“I’d give him a bad time on his birthday,” Hutch admitted, reflecting over the past decade, “but I always ended it by taking him to some five-star restaurant for dinner and giving him presents he cherished. I was never into Christmas all that much; I jerked him around over that day, but for his birthdays, I made sure he was happy.”

“Give me an example.”

“Oh, you know, like buying him a professional car detail. Paying his rent for a month. Treating him to a movie of his choice and all the popcorn he could eat. One time I took him to a hockey game; we had seats in the lower bowl above the glass: 200 level—as close to center ice as one can get.”

“Nice!”

“But he’d have liked better what I would have given him this morning if he’d stuck around.”

“Yeah? And what’s that?”

“Well, first, I’d have started off his day by giving him a no-strings-attached blowjob.”

Simon choked on his laugh. “I did not see that coming—pun intended. Give a guy a heads-up next time before you tell him something like that.”

“I thought I just did.”

Simon laughed again. “I should have said give a guy fair warning next time.”

“Do you have something against blowjobs?”

“Only giving them.”

Hutch had done his job; he’d pulled Simon away from drowning in his Starsky obsession along with him. Losing Starsky continued to be a lonely affair.

“Have you been taking care of yourself?” Simon asked, easing into his question.

“As in, have I been getting laid?”

“In one way or another? by yourself or someone else?”

“Not since him,” Hutch confessed, unashamed. He wasn’t embarrassed, either. “You?”

“I have a couple of lady friends … one in Richmond, another in Rockville … I see them now and again.”

“Just for the lay of it?”

“Pretty much. They feel likewise.”

“Nice arrangement.”

“You might need one of those. Clear your head.”

“My heads, you say?”

Simon chuckled. “Think about it. A good-looking young man like yourself shouldn’t go too long without, know what I mean?”

Hutch nodded, mostly to tell Simon that he’d consider it, but it wasn’t at the top of his list; he hadn’t even thought about sex since the last time he’d played with Starsky. No one could make him feel better than that man did—and that man had broken his heart—so what would be the point?

“Okay,” Simon finished, apparently ending the conversation about sex and focusing instead on new possibilities. “Have you factored into your searches that Starsky might be living in New York City? He’s from there, after all—and he wouldn’t need a car to get around.”

“He was only visiting at Christmas,” Hutch reminded Simon. “He left there by airplane, if his mother was being honest—and I have no reason to believe she’d lie for him.”

“Maybe he’s living with her?”

“She moved to Miami last month. She was supposed to move in January, but there was a hold-up and she didn’t get down there until the first week of February.”

“How do you know that?”

“I called the property owner and told him I noticed the place was vacant; asked him if he would be willing to sell it, but he offered the information about Dorothy’s delayed move.”

“So you were in Miami?” Simon wondered, confused; he normally knew Hutch’s whereabouts.

“It was a bluff over the phone,” Hutch explained. “It paid off—and I didn’t have to fly to Florida. I didn’t even see the place to claim it was vacant.”

“Clever boy.”

“All those years of undercover work … what can I say?” Hutch said, sheepishly. “To answer your question: he’s not living with his mother in New York City.”

“Maybe he bought her old place?”

Hutch hadn’t considered Simon’s supposition; the notion gave him a goosebump. “I’ll follow up on that.” It wouldn’t be far-fetched to think Starsky would live around the corner from his brother. Besides, New York City would be a lot more appealing to his partner than Miami, despite the weather differences in favor of the latter.

Simon seemed to catch on, too. “On your next break, spend some time in The Big Apple. I don’t mean a couple of days like you’ve been doing now and then, but a week. Settle in. Imagine he lives there and how his routine might go. That may help you find him.”

Hutch liked Simon’s idea—a lot. He was excited about it enough that he would go on to helping close their current case sooner than he may have been able to otherwise; nearly a month later and he had read the police reports, examined the evidence, and brainstormed new leads with Simon—until they came to the same conclusion: the missing person they searched for had actually been long-dead.

She’d been murdered and buried in a backyard across the street and one house down from the killer; he had owned the property the day she went missing, murdered her, stuffed her into a metal barrel, and dug a hole. He then closed on the new house, moved, and—by the time the police investigation began—was living his new life without anyone suspecting that he’d used his old property to bury the body.

“Another notch on our belts,” Simon said, patting Hutch on the shoulder when the backhoe uncovered what they had come to suspect. “We’re getting really good at this together.” He promised to have another missing persons or murder case ready to investigate when Hutch returned from his week-long excursion to New York City.

Hutch planned to settle into an extended-stay hotel and look for Starsky in a more leisurely but concentrated manner. He even packed his backpack with a few more clothes and toiletries. Maybe he’d stay a couple of weeks; the Agency didn’t expect him to return to work until mid-May and Dobey wasn’t pressuring him, either.

“Keep in touch,” Simon implored him. He stood in the bedroom doorway and watched Hutch gather his things. Simon would be his ride to Union Station. “But do try to get laid while you’re up there.”

Hutch lightly laughed. “I’ll keep your advice in mind.”

“Are those other pictures of him?” Simon asked when he noticed the few that had slipped from their envelope onto the mattress. He stepped forward to have a closer look.

“Different ones for different scenarios,” Hutch explained. He let Simon pick them up off the bed and examine them while Hutch stood beside him and captioned each one. “When I need to let someone know he’s a police officer, I have that picture of him in uniform. When I want them to think I’m on an official manhunt, I show them that one; it looks like a mug shot.”

Simon quietly laughed. “It does indeed.” Starsky was a bit unkempt in it, a photo Hutch took of him on the beach one afternoon.

“When I need them to know we’re friends,” Hutch furthered, gazing at the picture of the two of them standing on Starsky’s car, “I flash that one. And when I need someone to know we are really close, there’s that one you’ve already seen: from Thanksgiving.” He could tell Simon remembered.

“You have it covered,” Simon agreed. He put the pictures back into the envelope so Hutch could add them to his backpack. “I really hope this trip pays off. It just seems logical that he’d return home.”

“Logical,” Hutch concurred, “but that may be exactly what he’s avoiding.”

“Well, there’s only one way to find out.”

“Only one way,” Hutch repeated in a low voice. “I just have to hope he’s not nearly as smart as you and me put together.”

* * *

“Hey, Hutch,” Nick greeted him from the other end of the phone line after Hutch introduced himself, but that’s as far as Hutch was able to say anything. Nick went right into a seemingly well-rehearsed monologue.

“You know I respect you to the moon and back, Hutch, but he’s my brother, you know? I have to do what he’s asked me to do, which means I can’t relay any messages from you, and I can’t discuss details of his life with you, and I have no choice but to end this call before it begins. I trust you understand—and I’m sorry. Take care of yourself.”

Nick disconnected the call.

Hutch was stunned and terrified at the same time. He felt hit by yet another fast-moving train. Obviously some things had changed since Christmas; Nick was privy to information he didn’t have before. Whether Starsky told his brother everything about why he’d left Hutch or was just advised on what to say if Hutch called him, Hutch would never know.

One thing was clear: Starsky was still adamantly committed to ending his friend- and partnerships with Hutch. Had Dorothy been advised to sever all ties with Hutch, too? He wasn’t about to ask by calling her, not then anyway. He felt too rattled just to think straight.

But when Nick went to work that night, Hutch showed up at his apartment door, just shy of midnight, and knocked on it. It was probably the wrong move if Starsky was in residence; he’d have been told earlier that day that Hutch had placed a call to his brother, and he’d be on high alert, but Hutch was impatient, not just upset. The drapes were customarily closed at that time of night, and no one answered the door.

In the morning, Hutch did the same at Dorothy’s apartment, knowing she had since moved to Miami, but hoping Starsky would answer. If he didn’t, Hutch would keep trying; to his chagrin, a young Asian couple and their two children under the age of five greeted him. Starsky hadn’t bought his mother’s old place.

So Hutch was back to his usual haunts: police departments and precincts, private security contractors, neighborhood patrol providers, and even going as far as to inquire about elementary school crossing guard jobs throughout the city. No one by the name of David Starsky, nor anyone who looked like him—according to the pictures he showed police officers and CEOs—was employed in law enforcement on any level.

Nor was David Starsky a New York registered voter. Nor was he a landowner. Nor was he listed with telephone companies. Could he possibly be a resident in New York City if he wasn’t any of those things or customarily subscribed to residential services: electric companies, local banks, cable or TV or mail delivery or garbage collection?

He could be—under an alias, living below the radar in a rented room in someone’s home to help the landowner pay the bills. Or he was living with Nick, but that became quite unlikely the longer Hutch scouted the apartment. Nothing out of the ordinary changed in Nick’s comings-and-goings—except occasional visits by his girlfriend. On his days off, Nick often met friends at a local bar or restaurant, took long walks with his girlfriend, shopped for groceries—all usually with her—presumably to make the most of his daylight time. But no David Starsky emerged from the residence or was seen anywhere with Nick.

Hutch kept a room at a hotel near Prospect Park, but he occasioned a trip into the city—to keep track of Nick’s work schedule, and to make rounds in person at places he could imagine Starsky might frequent. Of course, the city of New York was a big and busy one, but Starsky definitely wasn’t anywhere near ‘The New York Times’ where he could easily make contact and visit with Nick—at least not as far as Hutch could tell. Nor was he employed at ‘The Times.’ So if Starsky did live in the city, where was he?

Before his week-long stay ended, Hutch had already decided he wouldn’t find Starsky in New York—not unless some very special holiday magically appeared that required his presence. Next Christmas would probably be spent with mom in warmer Florida, but that was more than half a year away.

By Day Five in the city, Hutch was feeling unusually defeated, so he reluctantly returned to Times Square to immerse himself in its lights and cacophony of traffic and human busy-ness. When he finally got hungry mid-afternoon, he found the café at which he’d had breakfast months ago, and took a seat behind a table under an umbrella, to both shield himself from the sun and to give him an unobstructed and entertaining view of the streets.

“Well, aren’t you my Prince Charming riding in on his big white horse to save my day,” he heard a woman’s voice exclaim when she approached him from inside the restaurant. The woman was his waitress; he recognized Sheila from past experience—and obviously she had done likewise. “I haven’t forgotten you,” she added, still excited. “The beautiful blond who got away.”

He shyly smiled at her. “I’m back,” he joked. He hadn’t given her a single thought for nearly six months, claiming to have a trip to Miami planned during that previous visit, and escaped her proposition by having to leave the state; in reality, he crossed the bridge into Brooklyn. But on this day, he had nowhere to go—and he was feeling rather demoralized because of it. “How have you been?” he asked, setting aside his menu. He’d already decided on what he wanted to eat.

“Rather well,” she said, asking him the same. He lied and told her “life is good.” They shared small talk for a minute before she took his order. When she returned with his lunch of tuna sandwich and pea soup, she sat down at the table across from him. “I’ll kick myself if I don’t try this again,” she said, her blue eyes smiling at him with a mix of excitement and desire. “I have two tickets to an off-Broadway play tonight, but my girlfriend had to cancel; I was just about to give them away when I saw you sitting out here.”

He smiled again; she was trying so hard. “What’s the plan?”

“You buy me dinner at a nice restaurant; I treat you to the play; we see where things go from there after that?”

Hutch mulled it over for a couple of minutes while he ate his sandwich and drank beer, keeping an eye on her, and a bit amused by her anticipation. She sat forward, arms crossed on the table, eagerly waiting on his answer.

She was pretty, probably in her late twenties/early thirties, with a slim shape, large blue eyes, medium-sized breasts, and dressed in a waitress’ uniform, still no engagement or wedding ring, and her long blonde hair pulled into a ponytail.

Simon’s words echoed in Hutch’s head: “Have you been taking care of yourself? A good-looking young man like yourself shouldn’t go too long without, know what I mean?”

“I don’t have a jacket and tie,” Hutch told her between bites. The practicalities did need to be addressed. Of course, he could easily buy something before dinner time, but he wondered if she had a simpler solution.

“I lived with my brother before his accident and still have his things,” she informed him. “You’re about the same size. I’ll bring a jacket and tie to dinner for you.”

“You’ll have to choose where we eat; I’m not all that familiar with the better restaurants.”

“Carmine’s Italian Restaurant,” she quickly said. “It’s two blocks north of the Square; meet me here at 5:30 and we’ll go there together.”

And that was what he did, after spending the afternoon aimlessly walking around New York City; he met her at the cafe, fit comfortably into the jacket she’d brought, allowed her to knot the silk tie around his neck, and off they walked to the Italian eatery, a restaurant that turned out to be a perfect place to forget anything else existed: ambiance and aroma, a beautiful woman, delicious food, and flowing red wine. What more did Hutch need just then to boost his morale?

After they dined, they walked six minutes to the Trafalgar Theater on 41st Street, just south of Times Square, and were ushered into the play not long after arriving. He was so busy talking to Sheila about other plays he’d attended in his lifetime that he didn’t notice the marquee before they entered the theater.

Their tickets were good ones: a clear view of the stage, and close to it, too, making him wonder if Sheila’s girlfriend really couldn’t attend the production or if Sheila pushed her friend out in order to take Hutch. Maybe the girlfriend even understood; it wasn’t as if the local girls couldn’t go to off-Broadway plays any time they wanted, but Hutch’s visit was purely serendipitous.

What Hutch hadn’t counted on, hadn’t even bothered to wonder about, hadn’t given a single thought to that day, was the plot of the Harold Pinter play they were about to see. When he finally stopped talking to Sheila long enough to glance at the front of his Playbill, the play’s title was an unexpected punch to his gut:

‘Betrayal.’

Hutch tensed in his seat, looked right and left and back again for the nearest exit, and clumsily brainstormed excuses to leave early if he had to. He was distracted from his tormenting thoughts by Sheila’s personal reviews of the actors involved; there was no doubt it was a well-cast production: Blythe Danner, Roy Scheider, and Raul Julia were its main stars.

But as Hutch tuned her out while she raved about Roy from his movie performances, he noticed the play’s synopsis, twisting the knife in deeper: “An extramarital affair between Emma and Jerry—who is the best friend of Emma’s husband, Robert—is examined in backwards chronology.”

Too late to bolt for the nearest door, Hutch slumped into his seat, pressed his hands to his mouth, and turned his attention inward to keep from ruining Sheila’s night. He just had to hold his thoughts and feelings at bay until the cast bowed at the end. The lights suddenly dimmed, the curtains rolled up, and the play began. It was full of what Hutch expected to see: lies on top of lies, deceit rolling around inside secrets, and twists of betrayal and infidelity leapfrogging over each other.

Although a lot of the story wasn’t even close to his situation with Starsky, its overall message, in the end, was the same: Starsky had been betrayed. Hutch had abandoned him to a fate he never deserved, gave him no precedence; Hutch dismissed, humiliated, and diminished him. Starsky wasn’t wrong in leaving Hutch—but maybe, just maybe, if Starsky had stayed around a couple of hours, he’d have found his way to redemption.

More than once, Hutch wanted to leave the theater and thought he might; he couldn’t handle the shame and remorse the scripted words brought up in him. He felt queasy at times, too, like he might get sick to his stomach. Worse than all of that, he fought off the notion that it was Starsky seated beside him, pointing out all the ways Hutch had hurt him, and using the play’s more poetic words to do so.

“Did you hear that, Hutch? It isn’t love if you can trample all over it that way.”

But despite the internal abuse, Hutch managed to stay glued to his seat for the play’s duration—if only to keep Sheila from losing out on her special night—and didn’t even hint at leaving the theater during the intermission.

When the play finally ended more than a couple of hours later, and they were outside in cool, fresh air, Hutch could breathe again, but he wasn’t any less shaken. Before Sheila could proposition him for that ‘see where it goes from there’ option she probably had planned, Hutch stopped them in their tracks on the way to somewhere—her pad? Hutch’s hotel room?—to tell her the truth.

“I’m sorry, darling, but I’m going to call it a night,” he eased into his rejection. He noticed the palpable disappointment in her eyes and was truly sorry. “It’s just that … I’m in love with someone who … left me … recently … and the play stirred up all these feelings … I can’t shake.”

Sheila was surprisingly gracious; instead of ending their time together there, she asked if he would be kind enough to share a drink with her somewhere, and they could then go their separate ways—at least that night. Out of respect for her, Hutch agreed.

In May, after learning that Starsky’s tax return listed his brother’s home address as his own and left no other clues, Hutch accompanied Simon to Arlington Cemetery to attend the Memorial Day festivities in the 600-acre park to honor America’s fallen. It was a beautiful, partly cloudy day, with highs in the mid-70s.

When they arrived at the eternal flame along with scores of other tourists, they turned inward, inside themselves. Hutch’s thoughts wandered into that terrible day when he heard the sickening news of Kennedy’s murder, and then, just like that, without any warning, he left those sad memories behind and fell into his own feelings of loss. He missed Starsky so much: the banter, the companionship, the problem-solving, the eating, the sex. The love.

Would he ever find him? And, if he did, would it ever be the same?

It was in that moment, just as he and Simon turned to face the view—from the Kennedy memorial to the Washington Monument in the distance—that Hutch thought he saw Starsky in the crowd. It was a flash of wavy dark hair, perfect height, athletic build that hit Hutch out of the corner of his eye. He looked back in a second, his heart immediately pounding, his skin breaking a nervous sweat, a pit of pure joy commingled with dread punching his gut.

But the image must have been an illusion. There was no Starsky in the crowd. No dark-haired lover of his that he could then see in their midst. Hutch’s mind was beginning to play tricks on him.

* * *

“Not even once?” Simon asked, sounding more incredulous than he probably was, maybe just to bait Hutch. He remained slouched in his Chaise lounge chair, as if nothing really rattled him, not even Hutch’s answer to a deeply personal question.

“Not once,” Hutch admitted. He too was comfortable in a cushioned patio chair, his feet propped on an adjacent ottoman, and dressed for a hot day wearing a cool, untucked, short-sleeved shirt and belt-less jeans. He lazily studied the plant life in their vicinity—new flowers and trimmed bushes, old trees and crawling vines—while he answered Simon’s questions about his personal experience in homosexual sex. “Why would I find someone I love repulsive, huh?”

“Well, not that you found him repulsive, but I mean, you know … a penis.”

“But Starsky isn’t a penis,” Hutch said lightly, almost with a snort laugh, amused by Simon’s careful choice in words, as he nursed a cold soda and enjoyed the cooling breeze of a mid-morning day outside Simon’s house. “He just happens to have one.”

“But that’s my point, Hutch—and you know what I mean. You love him, you made love with him, but that first time … not even a twinge of ‘something’s really wrong with this picture’?”

Hutch chuckled; he was further intrigued by Simon’s discomfort, or maybe it was Simon’s dismay, or perhaps it was something less obnoxious: Simon’s battle with his own conflicting feelings about sexuality. “If you’re asking me to picture your dick,” Hutch said, pretending to have given it serious thought, “I might feel a bit queasy.”

“Butthead,” Simon cussed under his breath. “C’mon. You know what I’m asking you.”

“You want to know how a straight boy like me came to suck off a straight boy like him.”

“You told me how it went down. I’m wondering if you ever felt uneasy about it.”

“Only in that I feared it would end us.”

“But someone else’s hard-on in your hands … in your mouth, I assume … never did make you … feel … ‘nervous’?”

Hutch watched a large bumblebee fly from flower-to-flower among the white daises and the pink roses. It was June and life had returned to what had once been an otherwise barren landscape; a cold winter, lots of snow and ice, grey skies and wind. But on that day, it was unusually warm, sunny, teaming with the sounds of a promising summer, all wrapped in a clear blue sky.

“I wasn’t nervous,” Hutch recalled, thinking back. “I mean, once I decided that the sex wasn’t going to kill us, I was all in. I was turned on by what we were doing. That I had never been so openly loved like that before was a high I didn’t want to ever come down from.”

“Because he’s a guy? that’s what made it so ‘liberating,’ do you think? Or you just never found a woman who could be that way with you?”

“I don’t think women like him exist. What woman wants sex—sometimes twice or three times a day—every day of the week, know what I mean? And nothing is off the table with him.”

“Wow,” was all Simon could think to say to that notion. He drank orange juice from a tall glass and seemed to watch the flowers, too, while he mulled over what he’d heard, imagining it for himself: sex every day, as often as he needed it, however he desired it. “Did he come in your mouth?” was his next impulsively blunt question.

“When he wanted to.”

“Why wouldn’t he want to?”

“Sometimes he preferred to finish during intercourse.”

“Oh. You did that thing, too.”

Hutch lightly laughed and briefly glanced at Simon—mainly to enjoy the visual of the man’s subtle embarrassment. “Yeah, we did that thing, too.”

“Okay. So … when he came in your mouth, did you … um … you know … ?”

Hutch knew what Simon was asking. “Yeah, I did.”

“And that didn’t faze you, either?”

“Honestly? It got me off. I loved his ultimate euphoria, his … everything.”

Hutch realized in that moment that he’d used a past tense word in his recollection. It brought him back to earth and killed the simmering sexual urge that just talking about sex with Starsky had begun to build in him.

“But you still say you’re not gay, right?” Simon asked. He seemed to enjoy talking about Hutch’s sex with Starsky; maybe it titillated him, maybe he just appreciated learning something new about his friend, or about sex, or about men—or about himself—in those conversations.

“I did have a threesome with Starsky and another man, but I don’t fantasize about men,” Hutch explained. “Never did. Still don’t.”

“Okay. Wait. Back up. You had a threesome? you and two other men?”

“Starsky and I were on a job in Denver; long story short: we were hit on by a guy there that we’d spent a couple of days with—and I thought it might be fun to see what kinds of trouble he could teach my new lover and me.”

“And did he?”

“He did.”

“Just when I think there are no more layers to you, Hutch, you reveal another one. I feel so one-dimensional compared to you.”

“It’s just the perks of having been single a lot longer than you’ve been.”

Simon didn’t seem to believe him. “Maybe.”

“It doesn’t negate the fact that I don’t fantasize about sex with men,” Hutch added, “or check men out or plan to ever have sex with anyone else with a dick.”

“But even when you had a chance to lay a woman, you didn’t take it,” Simon noted, referring to Hutch’s interrupted date with Sheila in New York City more than a month earlier. “You even said she was pretty.”

“Sheila’s pretty,” Hutch reiterated, recalling her blue eyes in his mind. “But … I guess I’m not out to get laid—as much as I might wish I could—and that off-Broadway play she took me to didn’t help my mood any, not even after a drink or two.”

“No, I suppose it didn’t.”

Hutch had eventually left New York for Miami, to follow Dorothy around over the Mother’s Day weekend after he called his own mother to wish her a happy one. But Dorothy joined her girlfriends for brunch that Sunday at an outdoor seaside cafe that overlooked the water—and there was no sign of Starsky anywhere in the city or on the beach or at her new house or at the airport.

Hutch flew the next morning to Los Angeles for a few days—to see Dobey and visit with Huggy, to pay the house bills, catch up on the news, mow the lawn, do laundry, drive both cars around, and to freshly repack for his return to D.C.

He and Simon ended up solving two missing persons cases when he got back—one a death by murder, another a teenage runaway—and there they found themselves that mid-morning, enjoying some down time after a late breakfast.

Simon apparently wanted to talk about homosexual sex after he examined the finer details of Hutch’s somewhat failed date with Sheila. Why would Hutch let the memory of man-sex stop him from sure-thing sex with a woman if he weren’t gay? That’s how the conversation had begun.

Hutch now had something else to add, having been given a few minutes to watch the bees and the occasional butterfly, to listen to songbirds in perfect harmony, and to feel even more relaxed and trusting to tell Simon his deeper feelings.

“It goes like this,” Hutch began, dreamily settling into his monologue. “When I get to work and I see him come through the door, I feel something. It’s nothing tangible or definable, but it’s definitely a feeling. A familiar presence has made its appearance and I feel it in an instant. He has no name, no life story, he’s neither male nor human. In that split second, he’s simply everything I need in that moment: safety, connection, a kind of coming home.”

Hutch felt his way along, waxing poetic, and Simon seemed to yield to it, too.

“In the next second, he’s human, flawed, sentient, perfect. He has history: his experiences and his dreams, his disappointments and his regrets, his love and his frailty. I connect with his empathy and wisdom and everything else that makes him formidable. He has a name now, too. He materializes as someone I know, someone I’ve always known, someone I respect, love, need, trust, am forever bonded to.”

At least, at the time, he believed it was forever. But some truths would never die.

“He’s my partner, the person I depend on, my hero, the one I live for, will die for in a heartbeat. He’s all of our experiences—his and mine—rolled into a single truth: that we are in each other’s minds and hearts every minute of every day—engrained in each other’s souls—as if we’ve always been there, together, as if nothing could tear us apart.”

Hutch looked over at Simon; Simon’s eyes were closed, but he wasn’t asleep. He was listening, maybe even enjoying the poetry he heard, words that were spoken by the even softer voice Hutch was sometimes known to summon.

Hutch looked back to the garden. “In these split seconds,” he continued, “he’s my purpose, he’s what gives my entire life its meaning. He’s who I was destined to know. He belongs to me. All those bullets and car chases and fist fights, the meals and the stakeouts and the cases we’ve solved, the stupid and the all-too-serious stuff between us, the brushes with death and the moments worse than dying, it all belongs to us. He is our story. He was meant for me—and I for him.”

Simon softly moaned, as if he had been unexpectedly elevated to a higher level of consciousness.

“In the next second,” Hutch furthered, “he’s Detective David Starsky, the dark-haired moron pretending to be Sherlock Holmes, once again late for work, and I let him know I’m not happy about it—and we’re off! on another nonsensical and unserious argument before Dobey calls us into his office.”

Simon chuckled, but still didn’t open his eyes; he apparently enjoyed the journey and wasn’t ready for it to end.

“I nearly lost him,” Hutch reminded his wiser friend. “We came so close. And I realized all over again in those terrifying moments that I’d die without him. I have no words for my relief, my undeserving gift that is his recovery, nor for the gratitude that spills out of me. I didn’t know myself until then just how much I loved him and would be lost without him. But he sees it, feels it, understands and embraces it, completely, and he has no other super power with which to reply in kind except to … pleasure me.”

Simon grunted, expressing a kind of realization he hadn’t come to before.

“I never expected to be so loved, least of all by someone as dear and special to me as he is,” Hutch finished, closing his eyes and feeling the warmth of the sun. “I have everything I need and could possibly want. I am compelled to give back, do you see? In the giving, I am not repulsed. How could I be?”

Simon let out his breath; Hutch heard him and slowly drew a deep one himself. He’d spoken from his heart, was emotionally drained, but still didn’t know why he was without Starsky, especially in light of how deeply they loved each other. How could Hutch have done that man so wrong?

When nothing but silence enveloped them, Hutch looked over at Simon to discover Simon had already opened his eyes, turned his head, and was looking back at Hutch. He appeared relaxed, yet moved, full of questions and unspoken thoughts, and yet speechless. Finally, Simon said, “You can’t possibly think for a second that Starsky isn’t twice as heartbroken as you are.”

“He holds the reins.”

“He does, but the horse tried to kill him.”

“Not on purpose.”

“Not without foresight, either.”

“I know I did wrong.”

“The wound seems fatal, Hutch.”

“God, how I didn’t mean it.”

“In the end, you know it’s not what you did; it’s what you didn’t do.”

Hutch didn’t put Starsky first. In fact, he’d put him last.

“May I see his goodbye note again?” Simon asked, holding out his hand, as if Hutch carried the card around in his pocket every day. “As I was listening to you, I kept thinking about something he said in that note, but I want to read it verbatim.”

Hutch pushed out of his comfortable chair and left the patio for his bedroom, where he retrieved Starsky’s greeting card from his stack of personal papers, and brought it back to Simon. He handed it to his friend and returned to his chair. “I have it mostly memorized,” he told Simon, “but I don’t know what has you so intrigued.”

“Weren’t you guys called Zebra Three?”

“Yeah—much to my dismay.”

“Well, I mean, despite his matter-of-fact message on the inside, it’s kind of sentimental, this card, don’t you think?”

Hutch looked over and noticed that Simon had removed the card from its envelope and held it up so Hutch could plainly see its cover. It took Hutch a moment; how had he missed it the first time—and the dozens of times he’d opened it after that? A herd of artistically drawn zebras in black-and-white graced the card’s front; he’d seen that before: the zebras. But he hadn’t paid attention to their number. Three in the herd. Starsky had done it again: punched Hutch in the gut when he wasn’t prepared for it.

“‘I’m choosing a life that we both would least expect,’” Simon read from midway through Starsky’s note. He looked at Hutch. “Why, then, partner, are you looking for him in law enforcement?”

Hutch defensively blinked. “I haven’t been focused on him only being a detective somewhere. I’ve dug through every kind of job he could possibly do that ‘we both would least expect’: private patrol, SWAT agent, department store bodyguard, FBI agent, bar bouncer—”

“I’m saying, why law enforcement of any kind? He’s never used Dobey as a reference. Besides, that’s not how I read what he’s saying here.”

Hutch’s heart raced. “Tell me what you’re thinking.”

“Well, I mean, he’s saying ‘a life’ you would ‘least expect.’ Law enforcement—on any level—is kind of predictable, don’t you think? But what would you least expect? Lifeguard? Candlestick maker? Garbage man?”

Hutch felt suddenly overwhelmed. The whole world opened up just then and, although it was quite a wide one, it meant he could hunt for Starsky beyond the dead ends he’d already hit. “Tell me where you think I should go with this.”

“Start at the beginning. What did he do in his previous life? Before you were cops, what jobs did he have?”

Hutch pressed his fingers to his lips and tightly closed his eyes, thinking back, hard, and then impulsively blurted the first thing that came to mind. “He was a doorman once.”

Simon didn’t laugh. “That’s a kind of guard—law-enforcing job—don’t you think?”

Hutch tried again. “We sometimes talked about quitting the Force and playing professional football.” He laughed when Simon did, at the absurdity of such a thing in hindsight. “And we sometimes talked about turning in our badges and being truck drivers.”

“Interesting. Did either of you have any experience?”

“He was a cab driver for a while.”

“In New York?”

“In Los Angeles. Cabs there are mostly on-call.”

“Is cab-driving something he enjoyed enough to go back to?”

Hutch opened his eyes as he remembered. “Not after he and I went undercover to catch a serial killer preying on cabbies.”

“Yeah. So, never mind,” Simon dryly said. “That would turn me off, too.”

“But you’re making me think … something with cars.”

“You said he loved his Ford.”

“More than he loved me sometimes; at least, as much.” ‘Don’t make me choose’ was a refrain Hutch had heard too often.

“So let’s start thinking of all the things he might do with cars,” Simon suggested, “or with a car business, or as a car salesman or aficionado.”

“He’s into modeling.”

“The home kits kind?”

“He finely details them, too. Not just cars. Boats. Airplanes. He’s pretty good at those.”

“So … might he enjoy detailing real cars?”

“He’d consider it an art form.”

“Is he much of a real car mechanic?”

“Very much so.”

Simon and Hutch turned their heads at the same time and looked over at each other. No words were necessary. It had suddenly occurred to Hutch that he may have been looking in all the wrong places for Starsky and he now had new hunting grounds to explore. He quickly got out of his chair and went to the table to draw up another list, one with a whole new set of possibilities.

* * *

“There he is,” Simon said when Hutch entered the house, welcoming him in further with friendlier words. “I’ve missed ya.” Simon was sitting at the kitchen table, facing the front door, its surface covered in various papers and notebooks, pens and markers, paper clips, a stapler, and the living room telephone. He’d obviously been busy while Hutch was gone.

“It’s nice to be missed,” Hutch replied in kind. He was genuinely happy to see Simon again even though he’d only been gone a week.

“How was your flight?”

“Smooth as glass,” Hutch said, dropping his backpack on the foyer floor and walking through the living room to the kitchen. He gave Simon’s shoulder an affectionate squeeze as he passed him. “Dobey says to tell you hello.”

“Hello to him back.”

“I think he’s going to can my ass soon,” Hutch commented, not nearly as serious as his statement sounded. “It’s going on a year since I’ve been on part-time duty and he says it’s beginning to wear thin with the Department heads.”

“There’s plenty for you to do at the agency,” Simon reminded him, returning to his busy work at the table. “Whenever you want full-time employment, let me know.”

Hutch retrieved a cold beer from the refrigerator and opened it after he rolled it around his neck and his unbuttoned collar to cool himself; he’d probably be cooler if he changed out of his jeans, but he felt too lazy to do that just then. It had been a long trip and he simply wanted to be off his feet.

“Want one?” he asked, assuming that Simon heard the bottle open and knew what Hutch had offered him. When Simon said he was ‘good,’ Hutch joined him at the table, sat across from him, and was careful not to disturb any of Simon’s folders and paper piles. “What are you working on?”

“Missing persons case,” Simon said matter-of-factly. He scribbled a note on a piece of paper and finally looked up at Hutch. When their eyes met, he gently smiled. “That California sun looks good on you, Surfer Boy. Is it as hot there as it is here?”

“Hot, but without the humidity.”

“It’s freakishly hot here,” Simon added, despite that it was cool in the house. He didn’t look like he’d spent any time outside that day, dressed as he was in navy blue cotton pants and a matching short-sleeved shirt.

Hutch’s beer further cooled him. “Record-breaking heat,” he noted, having read the headlines earlier. “It’s killing more people than usual.”

“So I’ve heard. But I still want us to go to the fireworks display at the Lincoln Memorial on Friday.” It was July 4, after all. “You haven’t seen anything until you’ve seen that.”

“Assuming I don’t die from heatstroke before it goes off.”

“We’ll take a couple of canteens with ice water; it’s only for a few hours after the sun goes down. I think you’ll survive.”

Hutch was actually happy to go—another event to distract him from the otherwise emptiness that had become his personal life.

He’d returned to Los Angeles at the end of June to begin his search over again—that time to leave no stone unturned at car dealerships, car washes, car detailers, car races, car shows, and anything else he could think of related to the automotive industry and its enthusiasts. Los Angeles was the city of cars, but nothing turned up, not even a hint of a clue. Starsky was either successfully living under an assumed name or he wasn’t in Southern California.

Hutch also had to fulfill his routine at the house he’d come to hate: clean up the yard, trim the bushes, mow the lawn, and he had to service the cars, do his laundry, meet with Dobey, visit again with Huggy, and pay his bills.

After a long talk with Huggy about whether he should sell the house, Hutch decided to keep it, at least until the end of the year. He was probably going to lose the part-time work he did for LAPD, and he spent most of his time and his life in Washington, D.C., at Simon’s house, so what was the point in keeping the empty one in L.A. anyway? It only served to remind him of just how alone he was without Starsky.

The case Simon currently puzzled over would probably be good for Hutch, too—to get his mind on something other than Starsky. He liked finding missing persons: to give families closure, and to solve crimes without needing his handgun or involving a fist fight. “Who are you looking for this time?”

Simon dropped his eyes back to his papers, made more short notes, and nonchalantly said, “I’m looking for some guy you once referred to as a ‘dark-haired moron pretending to be Sherlock Holmes.’”

Hutch internally choked; those were the last words he thought he’d hear Simon say. “You’re not serious.”

“As serious as a record-breaking heat wave.”

“He’s really what you’re working on? Officially?”

Simon winked at him. “Well, not officially, but what headquarters doesn’t know won’t hurt it.”

“I can’t say I don’t like your style.”

“I’ve been at this for a while now,” Simon admitted. “I didn’t want to say anything unless something came of it, but I’m fairly sure I’ve found a big piece of the puzzle.”

“And what’s that?”

“I think your boyfriend is living somewhere in the area.”

Hutch stared at him in disbelief; he was speechless while a hundred questions flooded his mind, but he was also so stunned that he couldn’t verbalize a single one.

“I’m fairly sure he’s in one of four states,” Simon explained. “Virginia, Pennsylvania, Maryland, or Washington, D.C. They border each other in one specific geographical spot.” He turned an unfolded paper map of the eastern United States around on the table so Hutch could read it.

“A lot of states border each other,” Hutch flippantly said as he studied the circled area Simon had drawn on the map. “I assume you have more than just that to go on?”

“You mock me, Detective,” Simon joked, “but I forgive you because I know you don’t mean it. Just the same, allow me to elaborate. Your boy called his mother from various pay phones over the past ten months—mainly from the six area codes that cover the four states; if he lives inside this circle I’ve drawn there, he can easily drive within an hour or two into any and all of those area codes to place calls to Mama Dorothy. He might even make a day of it: buy his groceries along the way or fuel his car.”

“He doesn’t have a car—that we know of.”

“I’m betting he does. Cabs can get to be expensive and he needed some means to travel around the country calling his mommy 34 different times.”

“And you know that because you have Dorothy’s phone records,” Hutch concluded, spying the recognizable stack of GTE invoices on the table. “How’d you get them?”

“FBI, baby. But like I said, what they don’t know won’t hurt them.”

Hutch’s heart continued to race and he didn’t think he’d be able to cool off any time soon. He wanted so badly to believe Simon was onto something.

“As I’m sure you’re aware by now, there are 86 area codes in the United States,” Simon continued to explain. “With the exception of a few in New York and a couple in Florida, that man of yours has primarily used six of the same codes in the last five months—and they’re all right here in our backyard. All from pay phones. All on Fridays at 6 p.m. I’ll bet you dollars to donuts that he makes another call this Friday from one of those six area codes.”

The papers—their lists and numbers, scribbled notes and connecting lines—blurred Hutch’s vision; he couldn’t compute them because he felt flushed with a cautious optimism, but he desperately wanted to trust Simon’s research, and Simon’s judgement, not just Simon’s sincerity.

“I know it’s still a big area,” Simon pointed out, “and it’s a lot of ground to cover, but four states out of 50 is the closest you’ve been in ten months.”

It was a major find—if it were true.

Simon further explained that it was his own call to Dorothy a few weeks earlier that made him think about area codes. With Hutch’s permission, Simon had contacted her under the pretense that the FBI was interested in offering Starsky a special assignment. It obviously wasn’t true, but he and Hutch might learn something useful from their fishing expedition.

The one thing that bothered Simon was when Dorothy told him that Starsky didn’t have a phone number other than the one in Los Angeles—which apparently she still didn’t know was no longer in use. She said her son was often undercover and she didn’t jeopardize his work, so they had a routine wherein he would call her every Friday around 6 p.m. and they would catch up on each other’s lives.

“She had no way of contacting him, but didn’t need to,” Simon said, not telling Hutch anything he didn’t already know, “which made me think he’s banking on that.”

“One less lie to tell.”

“But what if it’s true that he doesn’t have his own phone number? Then how is he calling her? And that’s when I came up with the idea of pay phones—and that there’d be a record of where his calls were originating.”

He showed Hutch more of his research, that time on a calendar. “There were 14 Fridays in 1979, beginning with September 28—the first Friday after he left … you. He called his mother from a pay phone in Hodgenville, Kentucky, that day—area code 502.”

The calendar’s Friday blocks were filled in by Simon’s handwriting with area code numbers. “I assume it was him,” Simon continued, “because who else would call Dorothy on the Friday after he left you from a pay phone at 6 p.m. in nowhere’sville, Kentucky, hm?”

Hutch was beginning to feel hopeful again. “That makes sense—but why was he in Kentucky?” Starsky could have flown across the country in a day, or driven the country in four days. Why was he in Kentucky on Day Five of a road trip if he had left that September Sunday? Or did he leave Los Angeles later than Hutch had earlier figured? If so, why the delay?

“Who knows?” Simon replied, sounding genuinely not interested in the why. “The fact is that there were 14 Fridays in 1979 since September 23, and there have been 26 Fridays so far this year—thanks to this being a leap year—for a total of 40. With the exception of a few missed Fridays—presumably because he was too busy to call her or he was actually with Dorothy in person and because one of those days was Mother’s Day, maybe even her birthday—he called mom from pay phones 34 times.”

“Was he that desperate to throw me off the trail?”

“Obviously.”

“Wouldn’t he know those phones can be traced?”

“He’s probably banking on them not being under surveillance, at least not anytime soon. But eyes on the prize, boy. Of those 34 calls he placed, 27 were from one of the six area codes in those four states I mentioned—and all of those were made in the past five months.”

“And in the first five months?

“A few calls in New Jersey and New York, a single call from North Carolina, and that one in Kentucky. I’m now working on connecting all of the phone numbers to the actual pay phone locations.”

“So … what you’re saying is … he ‘settled’ somewhere in the past five months.”

“That’s what I’m thinking—right around here somewhere, no less. Why here? That, I don’t know, either. It’s not like it’s halfway between New York City and Miami so he’d be at the mid-point and have the same amount of commuting distance either direction to visit mom or brother.”

“He’d be bored to death in Florida,” Hutch assumed, imagining Starsky living there, “and he’s no beach bum. New York City is too cold for him. But, you’re right. What difference does it make? Besides, we don’t know if these are even the facts.”

“Well, who else would be making these kinds of calls? If you have a better idea, light-haired Sherlock, let’s hear it.”

Hutch wanted so badly to believe, but he was also terrified of being disappointed again. He hadn’t had a lead like this one in ten months. What did he have to lose except more time? He decided then not to question it; the why was nowhere near as important as the where.

“Why didn’t I think of this sooner?” he complained, rubbing his forehead.

“Why didn’t I?” Simon echoed with a certain frustration. “I’ve even used payphone area codes to solve crimes in the past. But maybe it wouldn’t have mattered. Like that highway system, enough time has gone by to give us a pattern we may not have had until now.”

“That’s some fairly determined action on his part,” Hutch noted with dismay and an overwhelming sense of shame. He also felt punished and guilty, angry and embarrassed, all at the same time. “How long do you think he’s planning to hide from me? When do you suspect he’s going to let down his guard?”

“I’d say about a year from the day he left,” Simon decided, as if he had a crystal ball. “By then he’ll probably figure that you’ve gotten married, had a kid, and moved on with your life.”

“But I didn’t get married, I didn’t have a kid, and I haven’t moved on with my life.”

“What he doesn’t know will hurt him,” Simon quipped, not unkindly, and briefly pursing his lips. He then pushed several folders toward Hutch. “You go ahead and look over my notes, do the math, cross-reference, double-check, and then you decide if my conclusion—which I believe is way beyond a hunch—confirms what I’m telling you.”

* * *

“I read a couple of days ago that Congress has set aside two acres—right around here somewhere—to build a Vietnam memorial,” Simon said as he and Hutch walked in the hot sun along Constitution Avenue toward the Lincoln Memorial. He shifted the large bag he carried to his right shoulder. “It’s long overdue if you ask me.”

“For sure,” Hutch agreed after taking a cooling swallow from his plastic water bottle; his jeans shorts and white cotton shirt were of little help; he’d been sweating since before they’d left the car. “Maybe one day they’ll create a memorial for World War Two vets,” he added, not facetiously, and scanning the large crowd that had already gathered on the National Mall despite the unusually high heat and pressing humidity. But Simon insisted that they see the fireworks from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, and Hutch needed a distraction—record-breaking heatwave be damned.

In the few days leading up to the Fourth of July festivities, Hutch had made dozens of calls throughout the region: to auto repair garages, car dealerships, tow truck services, and any and everything else he could think of that was related to jobs Starsky may have taken.

Hutch even went so far as to visit a couple of the pay phones on the list; the closest one to Simon’s house was 40 minutes away. It felt strange to be someplace he imagined Starsky may have been—more than once—and Hutch wasn’t with him. Assuming Starsky had his own car or rented one, how far did he drive to get to those specific pay phones? How long did he stay in those neighborhoods? What else did he do while he was there? Starsky was so close and yet still so far away.

Hutch checked off the usual suspects, too: police stations, grant deeds, power and phone companies, voter registrars. None of his new area searches lent themselves to Starsky’s whereabouts, so a night of fireworks, cheering crowds, and a change of nighttime scenery might help to remind Hutch that there was more to do in life than pursue his normal routine.

Simon’s comment about a Vietnam memorial, however, brought Hutch right back to Square One. “Starsky was in the Army,” he said, wiping sweat from his brow as they left the blazing sun and crossed a grassy field under large shade trees. “Did I tell you that before?”

“You didn’t,” Simon replied, but sounding impressed. He drank water from a canteen he’d pulled from his bag, and walked shoulder-to-shoulder with Hutch as they approached a wall of people at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial, one that spilled onto both sides of the Reflection Pool. “How long did he serve?”

“Two years.”

“Did he see combat?”

“Almost, but no.”

“Do you think the Army experience shaped his disciplinary skills at all?”

“He had disciplinary skills?” Hutch joked. He only lashed out because he was angry it wasn’t Starsky he was seeing the Fourth of July fireworks with—from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, no less. Starsky should have been the one doing everything in life with Hutch. “I lucked out,” he added, regarding military service. “I was never called.”

“I lucked out by age.”

They politely pushed their way through the packed crowd, Hutch following Simon, and temporarily lost their ability to hear each other; a cacophony of traffic, commingled voices, dueling music, and the occasional roar of an overhead airplane filled the void.

But Simon eventually niched out a small area on the south side of the Memorial, at the edge of its lower steps landing, a few tiers up. He and Hutch wore baseball caps and sunglasses to shield their eyes, and they had plenty of water with them, too. They were also well-fed and had used the john prior to their trip into the city, so Hutch was comfortable, at least for a while, and especially after he spied the numerous portable toilets that lined the adjacent street.

“I brought a bag of trail mix and some dried fruit if you get hungry,” Simon confessed with a light laugh, as if he was willing to be ridiculed for thinking about food so soon after their early evening feast. It would be a few hours before the festivities would begin, and he was obviously thinking ahead.

“There’s plenty to eat around here—if you don’t mind souvenir junk,” Hutch noted, referencing the food trucks and tents. “There’s water, too, if we need refills, but the lines are long and you may have a heatstroke before you can get help.”

“Don’t joke about shit like that,” Simon playfully warned him. “I’m an old man, weak under the sun, and it’s got to be 95 degrees out—with 110% humidity.” He was right about the temperature, but the humidity wasn’t as high as he apparently felt it was; still, it was unusually muggy.

“The March on Washington had the right idea,” Hutch said as he looked across the park to the towering point of the Washington Monument and then upward to the clear blue sky. “They held it in August—earlier in the day. On my birthday, in fact. But I don’t remember the heat, just the event.”

“You were there?”

“Came down on a bus with some friends from Minnesota to be part of it.” On that day, he stood not too far from where he was then, but faced the opposite direction to look up at the Lincoln Memorial so he could lay eyes on the forever iconic Martin Luther King.

“No shit.”

“Profound day—and memorable.”

“You impress me, Mr. Hutchinson.”

“I was just a 20-year-old kid that day, full of optimism and naivety; so certain we were going to change the world.”

“In some ways you have—it led you into the good work you do.”

“Maybe so.”

Life had gone on since that monumental day in D.C. nearly two decades earlier. It seemed a lifetime ago. So much had changed and yet nothing had since then. Hutch waxed nostalgic as he looked back at the Lincoln Memorial and scanned the crowd around him on its steps, feeding off the energy of so many people coming together again—different religions, politics, races, genders, ages—all to see the same thing and be moved by it.

He was grateful to have his new friend and to share that experience with him; Simon had been healing and inviting, not just useful, but Hutch also couldn’t help but feel the unending emptiness Starsky had left in his soul. His was a mix of emotions that day.

Telling Simon about his attendance during the 1963 March on Washington led them into discussing their own upbringings when it came to social issues, and how they ended up in the careers they’d chosen.

Simon was further generous in his observations about Hutch, especially noting his kind heart, telling Hutch that “under that sometimes gruff exterior, and behind those often intense blue eyes, lies a big old softie.”

Hutch saw a young woman in a floral summer dress and a matching red sun hat appear to pass out near a food truck only a few yards from them. He bolted off the step toward her—or so he tried—but Simon firmly caught his arm and stopped Hutch in his tracks.

“Not so fast, Mother Theresa,” he chastised Hutch. “Don’t make my point for me.”

“But she—”

“She’ll be fine,” Simon insisted. “Leave it to the experts.” He brought Hutch’s attention to the paramedics who had already made their way through the crowd to help the woman. “The pros are on the job,” Simon advised him, “so stop trying to save the world and instead enjoy yourself for once, capeesh?”

Hutch surrendered his sense of duty only when he noticed the dozen ambulances parked along the curb of a surface street beside the Memorial, as were several police cars; there were even a few mounted policemen on duty. Hutch should know—or at least remember—how skilled D.C. was when it came to public safety and management.

“Okay,” he reluctantly agreed when the fainting woman seemed to rouse and begin to drink water from the plastic bottle she’d been offered. “But you won’t mind if I don’t wait for them to come to your rescue; you’re my buddy. I get to give you mouth-to-mouth if you pass out right here beside me, don’t I?”

Simon laughed. “I’ll insist on it.”

Hutch affectionately punched Simon in the side with his elbow. “One thing I like about you, Finelli—”

“Only one?”

“One of the things I like about you, Finelli: you roll with the punches.”

“It’s either that or get knocked down by them.”

Maybe there was something to learn from Simon’s insightful comment: roll with the punches to keep from being knocked down by them. Hutch decided he’d give that philosophy an honest try. He may even have succeeded in letting go of his depressing thoughts by the time the sun set and the fireworks began as promised right on schedule—at 9:09 p.m.—because what a mesmerizing and brilliantly colorful presentation it was!

Despite the heat and the crowds—and his ever-pressing loneliness—Hutch had never seen anything as spectacular as the 19-minute fireworks display he witnessed that night: a kaleidoscope of exploding color lighting up the darkening sky against the backdrop of America’s well-lit memorials and monuments. For some time, he even felt as proud to be an American as he was in 1963, and he was especially grateful to have agreed to Simon’s insistence that they spend the Fourth of July right where they stood.

When they left the Memorial grounds after the show and headed back to their parked car, Hutch serendipitously noticed the young woman in the floral dress and red hat walking parallel to them as they crossed the park lawn toward Constitution Avenue; she was laughing with several friends, engaged in excited conversation, and seemed fully recovered from her earlier collapse.

At least in one way, all was well that had ended well, despite that the ride from the National Mall back to Simon’s house was rather quiet; Simon seemed lost in his own reminiscing thoughts, and Hutch was already feeling depressed again about having any luck in finding Starsky.

Only weeks later, the former governor of California and actor Ronald Reagan, and former Georgia state senator and peanut farmer, Governor Jimmy Carter were nominated for U.S. president, respectively, by their political parties; Yankees Reggie Jackson hit his 400th home run, the national heatwave raged on, and Hutch and Simon solved one case of mistaken identity, and began work on another. But Hutch was feeling less than optimistic about finding Starsky. While the world seemed to move on, Hutch felt stalled; not even his and Simon’s wins with the FBI cheered him up in the overall.

“I’m going to spend my birthday in L.A.,” he told Simon one early evening toward the end of August. “Starsky doesn’t have any real way to reach me—except through iffy third parties—so I want to be at the house in case he calls.”

Simon didn’t say anything; he was unusually wordless.

“You think it’s a bad idea,” Hutch assumed from Simon’s silence. They’d finished dinner, but were still at the table nursing the last of their wine bottle. “You don’t think he’ll call.”

“I’m afraid he won’t,” Simon admitted, twirling his wine glass, and not looking at Hutch when he spoke. “There’s a difference between being afraid he won’t call you and believing he won’t. I don’t know that he won’t. I just hate to see you get hurt—again, still.”

“I should give up this search.”

“I didn’t say that, either.”

“I did what Dobey suggested I do: I’ve leaned into letting time settle while not leaving any stone unturned.”

“I know you have, Hutch. But you’ve been deeply disappointed along the way, too.”

Hutch couldn’t argue that fact. “I just thought this new lead—with the area codes—would get me closer. But I feel as far away from him today as I did that Sunday he left.”

“So you’re going to spend your birthday at the house you’ve come to despise, and wait for a call from him, and when he doesn’t call, what then, Hutch?”

“Maybe that’s when I give up. If he can’t call me on the one day that belongs to me—a day we shared together for the past so many years—then maybe you’re right: I should stop looking. He really is done with me.”

Simon slowly exhaled. “That’s not what I said. I’m not saying you should stop looking for him. I’m just afraid you’re going to feel all the shittier on your birthday when you’re alone in that house and he doesn’t call.”

“It’ll only be a degree of shittiness,” Hutch argued, not sarcastically. “No matter where I am in the world on that day, if he doesn’t call, it’s going to be a punch to the gut.”

“Yeah, but do you really want to be alone for that hit?”

“I’ll make you this promise: if he doesn’t call by six p.m. on my birthday, I’ll hang out with Huggy at The Pits. Hug will make sure I drink just enough to drown my sorrows without hurting myself.”

“You call me if you need a friend,” Simon made him also promise. “I’m not saying Huggy can’t handle it for you, but if he’s busy with customers, and you just want to talk to somebody, call me.”

Hutch did call Simon from the house on the eve of his birthday, to let him know he’d safely arrived in California, and to tell Simon it wouldn’t be a wasted trip after all because his few house succulents needed water. They both sadly laughed. “But thanks, pal,” Hutch said, “for being there for me.”

“No problem, ever,” Simon emphasized. “Call me any hour of the day or night if you need to.”

Hutch slept relatively soundly and fielded early “Happy Birthday” calls from his closest friends and family the following morning while he was drinking coffee and eating toast with jam, standing at the kitchen counter. His parents called him, his sister, too, and Dobey and Huggy made their predictable calls, as well, tying up the line, but fortunately it was open for most of the day after mid-morning.

Hutch laundered his clothes. He did likewise with the bed sheets, and then vacuumed the entire house, washed a few dishes, watered plants, and organized his button-down shirts in the closet. He cleaned out the refrigerator and paid a few bills. He hung a picture in his bathroom—an artistic rendering of two yellow dandelions against a muted blue sky—and rested for a while in a patio chair to read from a book about butterflies that he’d found among his things.

The phone didn’t ring.

Although there was some yard work that needed doing, Hutch decided not to leave the house—or, more specifically, the vicinity of the telephone. After the sheets were tumble-dried, he remade his bed, and folded his clothes. He ate a peanut butter-and-jelly sandwich for lunch with a Coca-Cola and a small bag of potato chips, again standing at the kitchen counter.

He looked for—and finally found—a couple of AA batteries to replace the ones in the living room wall clock, and then set its time to his watch. By mid-afternoon, he was running out of things to do, so he sat in the patio chair with his second Coke and stared off into the yard with an ear to the phone through the opened sliding glass door.

But it didn’t ring.

It was there among the greenery that he remembered when he and Starsky were going to plant more fruit trees along the back fence. They settled on peaches, plums, Asian pears, and cherries. Hutch suggested an almond tree, too, and Starsky, a peanut, “so we can have our own beer-and-peanuts thing going, know what I mean?”

“Peanuts don’t grow on trees, numb nuts,” Hutch berated him. “Stick to buying them instead—and choose something else.”

“Eggs. Let’s grow some embryos.”

Hutch didn’t argue with Starsky’s nonsense. It was easier to change the subject.

They made plans to install raised vegetable beds in the remaining open area of the yard; Starsky would build the boxes, Hutch would grow the greens. They would both share mowing the lawn, pruning the trees, cleaning the house, and they would grocery shop together, too, so long as Hutch agreed not to complain about Starsky’s junk food choices.

Hutch would give anything to be sitting on the patio just then, bitching at Starsky about the ‘so-called food’ he was eating.

The phone didn’t ring.

They would also build a deck outside the master bedroom sliding doors, so they could put a hot tub right off to the side, sit in it under a moonlit sky—in the nude—drink from the same bottle or glass of wine, share life’s liberating moments, make love in steaming hot water.

Exhausted, contented, and completely drained, they’d sleep peacefully in each other’s arms every night. Sex would be the norm in the mornings, followed by pancakes, omelettes, and coffee, and they’d be energized and ready to work for the day.

That was the plan. Hutch botched it. Big time.

His shame brought his sight into the space before him, but his vision blurred. How their lives had changed in so many ways in those few months after the parking lot ambush. Weeks turned into months of recovery and therapy; there was jubilation when Starsky came to live with Hutch after his release from the rehab hospital; and there was the unexpected turn in their relationship shortly thereafter, one filled with sensuality and sexuality and intimate excitement in ways Hutch never imagined.

There was the trip to Colorado, where they watched an endangered bald eagle return to the sky and later spent a night having sex with another man. There was their return to California, the enormous payout by the Department for Starsky’s injuries, and the house purchase, the plans: fruit trees and vegetable gardens and a hot tub…

And Hutch blew it. He took a wrecking ball to it in the most hurtful and callous way. He didn’t deserve a Happy Birthday phone call from Starsky. He didn’t deserve Starsky. And to prove it, the phone didn’t ring.

Hutch eventually retreated to his back on the sofa, dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved shirt, no shoes, the telephone on his belly, his eyes fixed on the ceiling, seeing nothing. How long was he going to miss Starsky—his smile, his blue eyes, his boyish charisma, his trust, and his touch?

Nearly a year earlier, they were wrapped in each other’s arms, loving and laughing, brainstorming and bantering, feeling forever bonded in every possible way. So how was it possible that they were now separated, maybe until the end of time? Had Hutch’s wrongdoing been that wrong? If he could see Starsky—reason with him, lay hands on him again—would it make a difference? Could Hutch not try, despite how demoralized he was that very minute?

Didn’t Starsky love him as much as Starsky said he did?

Hutch accepted Starsky’s invitation into their sexual life. It was a reluctant beginning, but once committed, Hutch was more than enthusiastically immersed in their new way of relating. He never had a single thought about it being unnatural, or misguided, or against the grain of his soul.

Looking back, both his emotional and physical love with Starsky was the most satisfying relationship he’d ever experienced. He couldn’t love the man enough, be more dazzled by his animalism, feel deeper in love than he was—and he was certain it was reciprocated. Hutch believed that with every beat of his heart.

It had to be so: they crossed a hard-wired line in themselves to become one with each other. Starsky’s nudity, his arousal and his desire, actually aroused Hutch. As he lay on the sofa that early evening, the day of his 37th birthday, Hutch recalled how mesmerized he was by the unexpected titillation of Starsky’s maleness.

They were only a week into discovering how to pleasure each other when Hutch became overwhelmed with an inexplicable feeling, one so strong it broke him out of fellating Starsky right there in the middle of the dance, and he unintentionally let Starsky go. Hutch had been straddling Starsky’s legs, was on his knees, bent over him, taking the man rhythmically in and out of his viscous mouth and lubricated hand, and very much wanting to teasingly bring Starsky close to orgasm—or maybe put him over the edge when he least expected it.

Hutch listened to Starsky’s heavy breaths and his soft moans, his gentle cries and whimpers, and appreciated just how much Starsky was enjoying himself. Starsky’s meaty flesh in his mouth was a sexier feel than Hutch imagined it could be and, in that rare moment, it fully hit him what he was doing: willingly and wantingly giving a man oral sex.

Hutch allowed Starsky’s rigid penis to gently slip from his mouth as he rose to his hands and knees; he opened his eyes and dropped his head to look down between them, to confirm visually what he knew physically and sexually—that they both had erections; Starsky’s straight and swollen and glistening from almond oil and saliva, Hutch’s, larger and tumescent, and aching for touch, its crown having long-emerged from its foreskin, a pearl of pre-cum in its slit. Hutch could barely believe it: they really were turned on and wanting and enjoying each other in sex.

That notion thrilled him. Thrill was what he felt—un-adulterated, absolute bliss, orgasmic want and desire—for each other. He had to catch his breath in that unprecedented moment. A second later, he felt Starsky’s fingers entangle his hair. Starsky probably didn’t understand the stall and he no doubt wanted his pleasure to resume; his hands were gentle yet firm. He obviously didn’t want to beg.

But Hutch was wrong about his lover’s intent.

Instead, Starsky lifted Hutch’s face. They made eye contact—and only then did Hutch realize that’s what Starsky wanted more than he wanted the pleasure of sex; the connection he desired wasn’t sexual, but emotional—the way Hutch was feeling. Hutch was also shy, as if he’d been caught in a private, inexplicable thought, and Starsky knew it and wanted Hutch to know that he knew it.

Starsky softly smiled at him, a genuinely affectionate, connecting parting of his lips, more of a breathless, wordless greeting, a softening of his eyes, kind of dreamy and fully aware, at once. There was warmth—inside their bodies, in their penises, in their hearts. He asked for a kiss without words. Hutch obliged him; he wanted it, too. Wet mouths, supple lips, passionate touch. The kiss heightened their desires and deepened their breathing, in tandem. When they naturally broke apart, Starsky whispered, “I love you so much, Hutch. So much. More than you know.”

Hutch never felt more loved.

But fast forward, and lying on his back on the sofa in that big empty house, hugging the telephone to his belly, Hutch recalled when he was terrified the new relationship would end them. Emotion welled in his heart. He stroked Starsky’s hair, gazed into his blue eyes, finally found his voice. “Don’t ever leave me,” he impulsively said, softly, and with great restraint to hold back his deeper fears. Nothing scared him more than Starsky leaving him.

“I’m not going anywhere,” Starsky replied, appearing confused, as if he couldn’t believe Hutch would ever think he’d be abandoned. He held Hutch’s arm, perhaps to be heard more clearly. Masculine, familiar voice. “Wherever you are, I am.”

But none of that was true. None of it. Starsky didn’t love Hutch as much as he said he did, and he wasn’t where Hutch was—anymore.

And the phone didn’t ring.

* * *

“Hutch?”

Alec Henley sounded as shocked as he was surprised—and thrilled.

“Hey,” Hutch shyly replied, relieved to feel welcomed after braving a drop-in on the Hidden Valley Wildlife Sanctuary. It wasn’t unusual for visitors to stop by unannounced, but Hutch wasn’t just any visitor—and he knew it.

“How are you doing? I hope I’m not interrupting anything.” He had knocked on Alec’s bungalow door and then stepped off the porch when he suddenly felt anxious and uncertain about his bold approach.

But Alec was absolutely delighted to see him. “Hutch, I can’t believe it!” he said, skipping off the porch to take Hutch in a strong and lengthy embrace. He kissed the side of Hutch’s head before letting him go. “Damn, boy, this day just took a turn!” He then held Hutch at arm’s length to look deep into his eyes; his own were filled with affection and gratitude, with palpable disbelief and sheer happiness.

Hutch laughed, appreciating the irrepressible fondness he saw in his friend’s blue eyes. Hutch was genuinely tickled; he enjoyed Alec’s greeting more than he expected he would. Alec’s dark brown hair was slightly longer than last year’s, but he sported the same overall look as Hutch remembered him: close-trimmed beard, well-muscled, lean, energetic, dressed casually in jeans, a long-sleeved cotton shirt, open at the collar, and hiking shoes.

Alec’s surprise and his immediate inviting demeanor when he opened the door and found Hutch standing on his front lawn was a far cry from the day before: when Hutch sat alone in the big house he’d purchased with Starsky and waited for a desperately-needed call that never came.

The silence had been more than Hutch could handle; he left the phone on the answering machine and drove to The Pits to fulfill his promise to Simon, sitting at the far end of the bar and ordering a strong drink. Huggy kept an eye on him, as Hutch suspected he would, and eventually gave Hutch a soda when Hutch asked for yet another shot of whiskey.

“You ain’t drivin’ home tonight,” Huggy insisted, tapping the bar to get Hutch’s full attention. “I don’t want an argument about it, either. You sleep upstairs; I’ll take the sofa, but c’mon, man, you’ve had enough tonight.”

Hutch didn’t argue with him. He was feeling so weak and defeated, he didn’t have the strength to debate his friend—and he trusted Huggy’s judgement more than his own. While Hutch slowly nursed his soft drink, Huggy brought him a chocolate-frosted cupcake with a single burning candle stuck in the middle of it, along with a napkin and a fork.

“Happy birthday, my man,” Huggy said, leaning on the bar to watch Hutch make a wish.

They both knew what he wished for, but what was the point? Hutch grudgingly snuffed out the candle flame with his thumb and forefinger. “I should have wished for the moon. I have a better chance of getting that than I do this other thing.”

Huggy pursed his lips, held eye contact for as long as Hutch allowed him, and then said, “I know it feels like forever right now, but things have a way of surfacing.”

Hutch looked up at Huggy as anticipation flooded his senses. “Do you know something I don’t?”

“I didn’t mean it that way; there’s no birthday surprise here for you, and I’m sorry it came out that way. I’m just sayin’ that life is unpredictable. None of us knows what the future brings.”

It was late at night, most of The Pits’ customers had gone home, and the music was low enough that he and Huggy could speak to each other without raising their voices—and still share a quiet, private conversation.

Maybe it was the alcohol or maybe it was just Hutch’s new way of being in the world, but he finally opened up about his personal life, and not cautiously. “Remember when I told you that he’d made a pass at me when we were living together at Venice Place?”

“I remember,” Huggy said. He leaned in closer, sensing he was about to hear something confidential, and pulled his cap lower on his forehead, as if he were undercover on some mission. “You said he flat out asked you for sex, but you didn’t tell me how he did it.”

“He went down on me one morning.”

Huggy didn’t show any sign of shock or dismay, nor did he make a sound, not even a disapproving grunt.

“I let him blow me because … I was feeling close to him … and it felt good … and before I could think to stop him, it was well on its way to being finished.”

“Sex is a powerful force, muchacho. But … then?”

“We fought about it for days—until I realized I loved him as much to return the favor.”

Huggy drew a small breath, barely noticeable, and didn’t move. “I’m surprised, but not shocked,” he admitted after a moment of silence.

It had been nearly a year since they’d had that conversation about Starsky’s wants and Hutch’s fears. But Hutch didn’t have anything else to lose. “The thing is, Hug,” he lamented, twirling the cupcake on its plate, but not seeing it, “everything I did to set things right, I did after he left.”

“You didn’t know he was gone.”

“Irrelevant. I came to my senses too late. Just hours after he left, I told her I was in love with him. I told Dobey and Simon—after he left. I told you just now—after the fact. Why couldn’t I have said all of this when he was still here? What was I so afraid of?”

“Judgement?”

“I don’t know.”

It didn’t feel like judgement. Why would he care what others thought, especially at the risk of losing Starsky?

“Embarrassment?”

“Maybe.” Hutch wasn’t sure what held him back; nothing made sense, and he’d racked his brain over it for eleven months, leaving him still without answers. “All I do know, Huggy, is that he never would have abandoned me if I’d done the right thing right out of the gate.”

No one had answers. Everyone seemed to have questions. Hutch was left with one notion: his relationship with Starsky was nowhere near as bonded as he had believed it was. Maybe Huggy was right: sex was a powerful force; his partnership with Starsky was held together by fragile impulses. What was that they say about the strength of a chain? that it’s only as strong as its weakest link?

Hutch had spent nearly a year looking for a man who didn’t want to be found, who didn’t love him as much as he had believed in his heart-of-hearts that he did, who hadn’t been true to his words of loyalty. Trust, love, honesty: those things only mattered, it seemed, when he and Starsky were literally under the gun. Without those daily life-and-death threats, what did they really have?

“I’m not interrupting anything, am I?” Hutch asked Alec when Alec turned toward the bungalow and invited him to follow. “I know it’s Labor Day Weekend and you’ve probably got a hundred-and-one things planned.”

“We do,” Alec admitted, closing the door after they entered the small house, and taking a moment, it seemed, to unabashedly look Hutch over, mostly because he couldn’t believe the man was really in his presence. “Same kinds of events as when you and Starsky were here, but our biggest ones are on Sunday and Monday. The only thing we have planned tonight is a potluck.”

“It was my birthday yesterday,” Hutch blurted with a light laugh, still hoping to ease his own perception that he was intruding. “I woke up this morning with an impulsive idea to come here.”

He’d slept above The Pits in Huggy’s room, as promised, and went back to the big house after they shared breakfast. When Hutch discovered the ‘0’ on the answering machine’s number of recorded calls, he was so overwhelmed by disappointment that he let Simon know he was going to spend the weekend in Colorado—and then he headed to the airport.

“So, happy belated birthday,” Alec said, gently slapping Hutch’s shoulder. “Shall we have a celebratory beer?”

Hutch accepted the offer; it might help to settle his nerves, ones he didn’t realize were in play until he’d entered Alec’s home. He noticed right away that it was a two-bedroom unit; he could see a king-sized bed inside the room on the right, and a bunk bed inside the one on the left.

A visually comfortable sofa and armchair filled most of the living room, with a coffee table between them. Animal prints and bookshelves crammed with books decorated the walls. The kitchen was quaint with a center island, a window above the sink, and a small refrigerator, from where Alec snagged two beers.

Hutch had rented a car in Denver and drove the nearly two hours to the sanctuary, mostly sending his mind out to the natural beauty along the way, and easily finding the private side-entrance to Alec’s bungalow behind the main house that few people knew existed. No one saw him arrive. He parked behind Alec’s red truck, the same vehicle Starsky had made note of when he and Hutch waited for Alec that Sunday night at the Italian restaurant.

“Nice truck,” Starsky had said, but when Hutch looked out the window, he saw Alec leaving it and crossing the street toward them. Maybe it was just Starsky’s way of drawing attention to Alec, but in hindsight it was probably the truck. Red was Starsky’s favorite color.

Alec popped open the bottles and handed one to Hutch. “So, let me put this out there up front,” he said, leaning against the counter. “He’s not here. He hasn’t called and he hasn’t ever shown up. I haven’t seen or spoken to him since the call you guys made when you got back to California almost … what? a year ago?”

“Eleven months.”

“I’m assuming he’s still missing because you’re by yourself,” Alec noted. “But I don’t have any news for you. I’m glad you’re here; you have no idea how thrilled I am to see you, but you could have spared yourself the trip by—”

“I didn’t come looking for him,” Hutch bluntly said. “I came to see you.” Before Alec could get the wrong idea—or maybe it was the right one and Hutch just didn’t want to admit it—he quickly added, “I wanted to talk to someone who not only knew him, but who knows me, someone who knows who we were together—and how we were together. I guess, more than that, you have the added benefit of having known him intimately. There isn’t anyone else I care to talk to about this, not the way I know you and I can.”

“Okay,” Alec said, accepting Hutch’s intentions. “But I’m not sure any of my insight can help you find him.”

“Maybe my being here isn’t about finding him,” Hutch solemnly replied, breaking eye contact to look deeper inside himself. He said impulsively what was in his heart in that moment. “Maybe my being here is about finding a way to stop looking for him.”

* * *

“I’d ask you how you’ve been, but I think I know the answer.”

Hutch sighed, thankful for Alec’s empathy. “Well, I’m either hungover or travel-weary or emotionally exhausted. Maybe all of the above. I don’t know which anymore.”

“I’d go with ‘all of the above.’”

What Hutch probably needed was a therapist; perhaps that’s what Alec would be for him. “We can talk about this later,” Hutch said with a sad laugh, “or tomorrow, better yet. I’m too fried to think straight right now.” Just being in Alec’s company was comforting enough.

“Then let’s do this,” Alec suggested. “I have to show my face at an orientation. Suppose you make yourself at home—the place is yours—and I’ll be back in time to hang out with you for a while before the potluck, which you’re more than welcome to come to.”

“I’d like that,” Hutch said, feeling relieved and grateful. Already he believed he’d come to the place he should have come to months earlier. After Alec left, he retrieved his travel bag from the front seat of the rental car, but then made the mistake of lying down on the king-sized bed just to rest for a minute, and instantly fell asleep. He didn’t wake up until 2 a.m.

The only light on in the house was the one in the stove’s hood. The door to the second bedroom—presumably where Alec was sleeping—was closed. There was a covered plate on the table with a note on top of it which read, “In case you’re hungry. More in the fridge.”

Hutch ate the hummus and roasted veggie sandwich he found under the plate lid, enjoying its taste and the satisfying fullness it gave him, and drank tap water from a glass. He never thought he’d find water delicious, but well water sure was, and he couldn’t seem to get enough of it. While he dined, he sat alone at the small table, in mostly darkness, with just the light from the kitchen stove casting shadows on the wall.

The early morning silence was almost deafening. Although the windows were closed, he could hear an owl as clear as day calling out to another, and the immediate reply—sounds so pristine that he was able to appreciate how utterly silent the night was in the mountains. No wonder he’d slept so deeply.

After cleaning up after himself and using the bathroom, he turned on a floor lamp in the far corner of the living room, and sat in the armchair under it to read a hardcover book he’d pulled at random from a nearby bookcase. ‘Animal Factories’ by Jim Mason. Before long, Hutch was buried in an issue he’d never given much thought to before—and found himself better understanding and appreciating Alec.

A couple of hours later, Hutch went back to bed, that time completely undressing and slipping under a cool sheet and light blanket. A waning moon reflected soft light through the window, enough to sleep by until the sun took its place.

He was awake, dressed, and in the kitchen again before Alec emerged from the second bedroom. Hutch had brewed coffee for them, figuring there was a group breakfast about to take place somewhere on the premises, or he’d have prepared a meal, too. He sat at the table, reading Mason’s book, and said good morning to Alec as he sized up his host: the man appeared sleepy still, disheveled, and yet awake enough to be surprised.

“Hey,” Alec said to Hutch, scratching his head. He wore an untied robe, and seemed to repress a big smile. “You really are here.”

“I didn’t intend to steal your bed,” Hutch apologetically replied. He didn’t look away from briefly noticing Alec’s nudity through the open slit in his robe: his hairy chest, flat belly, flaccid penis, and his snugged-to-legs sac. “The least I could do was make coffee.”

Alec raised a finger to ask for a moment to himself and then disappeared into the bathroom. When he returned, tying the robe around his waist, he joined Hutch at the small kitchen table. “I thought maybe I dreamt you,” he joked, immediately pouring sugar into his cup.

“I didn’t mean to fall asleep on you last night,” Hutch promised. “I make a lousy guest.”

“You fell asleep yesterday afternoon; when I got back from my public appearance, you were already out. I thought you might wake up in time for our potluck, but you were still down for the count, and hadn’t even budged when I got in around 9:30. You must have needed it, Hutch. You look—”

“Rested?”

“That, too, but I was going to say, ‘relaxed.’”

Hutch realized he was as Alec saw him; he hadn’t felt that unburdened in months and it probably showed. “Something about that Rocky Mountain High,” he quietly laughed.

“It’ll do it every time,” Alec agreed.

“I’d forgotten how quiet it is around here. I heard a couple of owls last night as if they were in the house with us.”

“Our resident pair,” Alec noted. “The moon phase was perfect for an early morning serenade.” He must have heard them, too. “But be careful reading that book you’ve got in your hands. It might morph you into a vegetarian—or worse.”

“I do need a change of scenery,” Hutch chuckled, setting aside the book, and giving all of his attention to Alec.

Alec told Hutch about the evening’s previous event, its every detail—how many people were in attendance, what they all ate, how long the dinner lasted, and how much everyone enjoyed themselves. He was happy with the turnout and expected a lot more visitors over the next few days.

“You’re welcome to join us. We’re having our Saturday pancake breakfast this morning, followed by a hike just for the fun of it. I’m sure we can drum up a pair of hiking shoes to fit you.”

Hutch wanted to go. “I actually brought some with me, but I think I’ve been atrophying for months now. The only physical activity I’ve been having is running to catch airplanes.”

Alec leaned on the table, carefully watched Hutch, seemed to want to say something, but didn’t.

“Treat me like you know me,” Hutch told him, noticing the man’s casual intensity. “If there’s something you want to say, say it.”

“You’ve been looking for him all this time,” Alec assumed. The conversation had just turned serious.

“As much as physically possible when I’m not on a case for both the LAPD and now the FBI. I’m one of those people you worried about when Starsky and I came to visit last year.”

Alec laughed. “At least you’re out in the open. It’s the undercover agents who worry me.”

Hutch proceeded to tell Alec the details of his life—from the time he and Starsky returned to Los Angeles from Colorado nearly a year earlier right up until the moment he sat there. Alec intently listened, not speaking a word during the entire ten minutes it took Hutch to encapsulate the past eleven months. “I’ll probably resign from LAPD by end of year, if they haven’t fired me by then; devote all my time to the FBI,” Hutch concluded. He’d brought the conversation full-circle.

Alec leaned back in his chair. “I’m sorry you’ve been through that—even if it did get you a federal job.” He agreed with Hutch that they should speak of it later in more detail when they had unlimited time, but at least he understood what had brought Hutch to his door.

“You have a lot to think about while you’re out on the walk today,” Alec suggested, not unkindly. “Regardless of what you did to him—and, granted, with all due respect to you, it was conceivably a lethal blow—even if you could explain why you did it and apologize for it, the more difficult task will be rebuilding a broken trust. Do you think that’s possible?”

The phone rang just then and startled them when it shattered the ensuing silence. Alec quickly got out of his chair to answer it, and Hutch used the minute to breathe.

Maybe that was why he’d come to Colorado, for sorely needed insight into that bigger picture, to stop searching for a man who didn’t want to be found, but also to stop looking for one who wouldn’t forgive him, no matter what words Hutch could think to tell him. Maybe time itself would be Starsky’s gift: he’d one day recover from Hutch’s ‘lethal blow’ and truly get on with his life—sooner than if Hutch meddled in it again.

But that’s how Starsky would survive. How was Hutch supposed to?

* * *

The Sanctuary’s hospital, nicknamed ‘The Hutch,’ was a more impressive building than Hutch expected it to be. Were it not for all of the barns and other buildings, public restroom, pastures, and main house, one would simply think they’d arrived at a local veterinarian’s clinic. ‘The Hutch’ had a receiving room, two exam rooms, an office, supply room, patient holding wing, and an operating room—complete with X-ray machines, microscopes, scrub sinks, and surgical tables.

Alec didn’t just have a Masters in biology, nor was he simply an experienced hands-on wildlife rescuer; he was also a bonafide veterinarian.

“Someday maybe we’ll get another vet on staff,” he told Hutch as the two of them stood inside the empty hospital lobby and Hutch admired its very existence, “but for now it’s just me—and my aides. I’ll never be able to thank you enough for making this possible.”

Hutch was humbled. All he’d done that day was help the Sanctuary win a baseball game against the County in exchange for a bed and food; he played his heart out for the fun of it. But he never felt prouder to be honored by Alec—and by Alec’s staff and volunteers—for the hospital built in his name. He would forever remember how Alec was responsible for saving a female bald eagle—giving her species that extra chance at survival. What other milestones would Alec be responsible for in that hospital?

‘The Hutch’ and animal pens were off-limits to the public except by guided tour, but Alec gave him a private one; the only other people in attendance were Kevin, Alec’s best friend, who had since married Tyra—and had a baby!—and Sarah, Alec’s office manager. Tyler was still working at the Sanctuary, but he was busy keeping the public entertained, along with the help of Sally and other volunteers, so Alec could devote personal time to their unplanned guest.

Hutch was taken on a trip around the Sanctuary to see its improvements after the pancake breakfast and before the hike. When everyone gathered at the trailhead to begin the 90-minute walk, he and Alec split up, so that Alec could take the lead; he was the one everyone had come to see or meet, at least to follow, and he took his celebrity seriously.

Fresh air and wilderness were exactly what Hutch needed that day; he joined other hikers off-and-on along the walk, but was also able to find time to just be by himself and follow the crowd. Those alone moments gave him time to study trees, appreciate the blue in a brilliantly blue sky, and to hear the subtle sounds of the outdoors: its birds and light breeze in tree leaves—Alec’s favorite sound, Hutch remembered.

Following the hike, and during a workshop on how to give first aid to abandoned and injured wildlife—a talk led by Alec—Hutch cut out to find refuge by himself in the bungalow. He knew a public lunch would be presented after the workshop ended, but he wanted time to disconnect from everyone and everything; he made a sandwich with cucumber, tomato, lettuce, red onion, avocado, and mustard—on whole grain bread—and ate it with a beer and a bowl of potato chips.

Afterward, he took Mason’s book to the porch and sat in a patio chair to read and think, sitting just outside the sunbeams as the day warmed. He broke from reading to listen to or watch a bird, or to contemplate a philosophical thought the book had inspired, or just to stare into nothing.

A couple of times, he noticed Alec’s red truck, and remembered Starsky pointing it out; those thoughts led Hutch to remembering that he and his partner engaged in a threesome with the owner of the vehicle. Those memories didn’t arouse Hutch, but he wondered how things would be different if he’d never engaged in that sexual experience—if he’d put Starsky at the top of his list in every aspect of his life. Would Starsky be helping him plant trees in their backyard at that very moment instead?

Hutch joined the crew again for its potluck dinner, and stayed for its marshmallow roast, not eating any but enjoying watching everyone else indulge, and he was glad he hadn’t been asked to play the guitar and sing songs; he wasn’t in the mood for any of that, and he appreciated just being there with everyone, not feeling expected or obligated or coerced into performing.

Alec winked at him a few times when they made accidental eye contact, and they smiled at each other once from across the crowded fire pit, but Hutch was able to immerse himself overall in the goings-on around him, and be further unburdened by the somewhat detached experience.

Alec and Hutch said their good nights when the activities ended for the day and walked back to the bungalow behind the main house together. Neither of them wanted a nightcap; they took turns showering—Hutch first—and readied for bed, meeting up in the living room to close out the night.

“How was your day?” Alec asked, slouching into the sofa; he wore sweats and was barefoot, his hair was still damp, and he looked as relaxed as his friendly eye contact.

“It was a good one,” Hutch said, truthfully. “A hot afternoon, but cooler than it’s been in the city, I guess because of the higher elevation? It cooled off nicely tonight.”

“But you know I meant beyond the weather, right?”

Hutch quietly laughed. “I knew what you meant, but I thought I’d start there.”

“I’m glad you took time out for you. You probably need more of it than you know.”

“I’ve learned that much today.”

Hutch was slouched in the armchair, also barefoot, and dressed in his jeans and an untucked clean shirt, having brought only those clothes he needed to be comfortable in the wilderness. He hadn’t planned to stay long—just until he had answers to questions he didn’t know to ask.

“I had a salad sandwich for lunch,” Hutch said with a smile. He figured Alec knew what such a sandwich entailed. “Not bad,” he added, recalling it. It was fresh, like the wild he was in, and healthy, and had filled him long enough to not be hungry until the spaghetti feed. “Reading that book by Mason is an eye-opener and made the sandwich even tastier.”

“I told you to beware.”

“Actually, I’d rather be aware than not.”

Alec seemed pleased with that notion. His blue eyes sparkled and his voice was relaxed, low, masculine—much the way Starsky’s could be sometimes, when Starsky was feeling content in life. “I won’t expect a life-change,” Alec said about Hutch’s new awareness, “but I like that you have an open mind. To quote Aesop: ‘No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.’”

Hutch smiled at him. “I think you’re a teacher more than anything else.”

“Nah. I’m just filled with anecdotes.”

Hutch laughed. “To answer your question, yeah, I had a good day. Quiet. Peaceful. Unhurried. It’s also something I should do more often: disengage from missing persons, rape, and murder cases.”

“I have to agree: you probably need to escape those more than you know. Some of the shit we have to see—the sadistic brutality of human evil—has an affect on us much deeper than we realize. It’s important that we crawl out from under it as much as possible.”

Hutch told Alec about the serial killer case that he and Simon had solved and how satisfying it was to capture the monster, but he probably should have taken time out after that investigation. “The Grand Canyon,” Hutch whimsically said, making Alec chuckle. “I should have gone to see it afterward. Put things into perspective in ways only places like that can for one’s soul.”

“On that note, you might consider going for a hike by yourself tomorrow—and I don’t mean be alone in the wilderness; maybe take another trip to the Rocky Mountain National Park and see its vistas from the safety of its trails.”

“I might just do that.” An entire walk in the wild, alone but not by himself, might help Hutch to find those answers he so desperately sought. “I trust you get a lot of alone time in nature?”

“I haven’t taken a single day in this country for granted.”

Hutch believed him. They talked then about Hutch’s dilemma. Alec came up with a number of ways Hutch could look for Starsky, but none of them were ones Hutch hadn’t already pursued. The lengthy discussion shined a light on just how expansive Hutch’s effort had been, and why he felt so demoralized.

“Don’t you think Starsky feels as heartbroken losing you as you do losing him? I mean, he can’t possibly be living his life without you on his mind every day.”

“But he has the added benefit of knowing he can pick up the phone—or just show up—and he hasn’t. It can’t be that painful for him.”

“His hurt and his anger probably keep him from doing what he’s probably wanted to do since the day he left.”

“So, what are you saying? Enough time might go by that he gets past his hurt and his anger and he finally reaches out?”

“Maybe. I wouldn’t change my phone number if I were you.”

“I was thinking about selling the house at the end of the year.”

“Why the hurry?”

“It’s not home without him.”

Alec understood. “Home is where the heart is.”

“It’s also possible he was so hurt and angry that he relocated,” Hutch imagined, “found himself a job, found himself a woman, found himself a new life. Don’t you think that’s possible, too?”

Alec didn’t answer; he probably thought it would be too hurtful to say Starsky might already have a new life, and a rewarding one at that.

“Well, anyway,” Hutch said, waving it off, “I wanted to get away from this. I appreciate our talks; I can hear myself think. But I need to find a way to get a concrete lead on this thing or … or I don’t know.”

“Take that walk tomorrow,” Alec again suggested. “If I can do anything for you it would be to give you that advice: escape into the mountains, on your own, away from everything that’s familiar including the people you know.”

Hutch would heed Alec’s wisdom. In the meantime, he hoped to get another good night’s sleep, to wake in the morning feeling all the more relaxed, maybe even stronger in his heart. “This is the moment in our conversation where I go to bed,” Hutch said, rising from the chair with some effort. He’d been too relaxed and could have slept where he was were it his home. “Do you have a preference for me?” He picked up the Mason book as he headed toward the short hallway.

“You can have the master again,” Alec said, following Hutch’s lead in going to bed, too. “It’s obvious it was the perfect mattress for you—and I can sleep anywhere. In fact,” he added with a laugh, “I’ve often slept on the cold, hard ground and found it to be…”

“Uncomfortable as hell?” Hutch joked.

“…grounding.”

Grounding. Hutch liked that word, its concept; maybe he’d do some grounding the next day. As he went into the master bedroom and turned on the nightstand lamp, he asked Alec—who was turning off the lights in the living room and kitchen—if there would be another outside breakfast catered to the public in the morning. Hutch wanted to know for himself if he should make a meal for them in case he woke before Alec did.

“Potluck breakfast,” Alec informed him. “Lots more to eat than just pancakes—but nothing dead, so don’t get your hopes up.” He went into the second bedroom. “Maybe we’ll have a birthday pancake for you, too—but don’t tell anyone I told you that. I made the mistake of mentioning your very recent birthday to Kevin and he and his wife want it to be a surprise.”

Hutch lay down on the bed, still dressed, slumped into the pillows behind his shoulders and head, up against the headboard, and opened the book. But he didn’t crack its cover. The notion that he’d come to Colorado to find answers—or maybe to find a way to break free of the man who hadn’t cared to wish him a happy birthday—suddenly hit him all over again.

“Hey, Alec?”

“Yeah?”

“Can you come here for a minute?”

Alec appeared in the doorway and leaned against the door jamb, hands in his sweatpants pockets, the epitome of relaxation. “You’d rather skip the birthday pancake?”

“No. It sounds nice and I wouldn’t want to disappoint them.” He made sincere eye contact with Alec and braved his question. “But … I mean … do you think it would be cheating if … if we were to give each other head tonight?”

Alec visibly flinched; he didn’t move a muscle, but it was in his expression, as if that was actually the last thing he’d hear from Hutch; he was momentarily speechless.

“Assuming you’d want to,” Hutch quickly said. “No strings. No kissing. No anal. Just some … good, old-fashioned head?”

“Is this a question or an invitation?”

“It depends.”

“On whether I think it’s cheating?”

“Would it be?”

“It wouldn’t be for me. But I can’t answer it for you. Do you think it would be cheating?”

“I don’t know.”

“Maybe you figure it out by answering this for yourself: how long are you going to wait before you decide he’s not coming back? A year? Five years? The rest of your life? At what point do you decide you’re on your own?”

“I’ve been on my own for almost a year now.”

“I assume by your comment that you haven’t had sex since he left?”

“Not even with myself.”

“What does your gut tell you about whether it would be cheating?”

“That maybe it isn’t. That maybe a long-overdue blowjob by someone I care about and trust might be the thing to snap me out of this year-long and pointless obsession I’ve had looking for him.”

* * *

The feel of his warm flesh at Hutch’s fingertips.

The primal look of his heaving belly and haired chest.

The sky blue of his eyes, filled with palpable bliss.

The sounds of his heavy breaths and soft moans.

The sexy taste of his skin; rigid penis, slick with saliva and almond oil, heated with blood and want.

All of these sensations filled Hutch’s senses with memories of Starsky. How could they not? Alec shared similar features with Hutch’s partner. His kindness, his tenderness, his touch. His desire to please. Enthusiasm. Skill. Experience.

It had been months since Hutch had felt orgasmic pleasure; he’d almost forgotten how necessary it was to life. While he and Alec took turns pleasuring each other’s phallus with their hands and lips, tongues and fingers, the reminders of making love with Starsky arrived more frequently in Hutch’s mind the closer he came to orgasm.

He wasn’t comparing, only noticing: the similarities in their features, the sexual feelings aroused in him, the honorable attributes of each man. But where Starsky differed was in history: so much he and Hutch had lived through together because they were together. But also Starsky’s playfulness. His superstitions. His formidableness. His intelligence. Charisma. Their chemistry together. Implicit trust. Unconditional love. Loyalty.

“Oh, that feels good,” Hutch whispered when it was Alec’s turn to heighten his desire and deepen Hutch’s aching want. Hutch lightly perspired, had to breathe through his mouth, clutched Alec’s hair, watched his lover eagerly and expertly devour his erection—Alec’s mouth tight and viscous and perfectly timed. Hutch had to finally drop his head to the pillow and close his eyes; if he saw it for longer, he’d ejaculate too soon.

There was that moment on the rooftop when Hutch suddenly realized he couldn’t shoot Bellamy. How could he kill the one thing that held the key to Starsky’s very existence? But Hutch was trapped by the gunman and beginning to panic. There was a new life-and-death battle in play.

They’d more than once laid down their lives for each other.

“You suck so good,” he said, panting, entangling his fingers in Alec’s soft hair, and sharpening that picture in his mind of Alec taking him in, sliding him out, taking him in again, gently at times, determined in others, gloriously teasing him, skillfully lengthening the pleasure for him.

How many bullets did Starsky fire that night? Was it three? Four? Hutch was stunned when the shots rang out; he couldn’t believe his ears. Bellamy was dead; the threat was gone—but a new and even more dangerous one emerged in its absence. Hutch looked over his shoulder at Starsky, found him slumped just outside the rooftop door against the wall. Oh, what had he done?

Alec massaged Hutch’s sac, gently, adding another sensation to the already powerful ones Hutch felt himself slowly succumbing into; was it time to climax?

“I thought it was a good idea at the time.”

Just as Hutch felt that very second. “A good idea at the time.”

He surrendered—and not to the orgasm he so sorely longed for, but to his heart-of-hearts, the one deep within him that wouldn’t let go of Starsky, the one he simply couldn’t abandon, despite feeling abandoned himself.

He slipped his hand into the mix of fingers and tongue, took a hold of himself, reluctantly interrupting Alec’s rhythm, and broke the physical contact between them. “I’m sorry,” Hutch whispered. “I can’t.”

Alec let him go without a moment’s hesitation. He crawled up to lie beside Hutch, pressing his hardened and oiled flesh into Hutch’s hip, sliding his engorged shaft along Hutch’s skin as if to steal the very last instant of pleasure he was permitted. “It’s okay,” Alec said in a warm and quiet voice, breathless and forgiving. “It’s okay. I understand.”

“Finish yourself,” Hutch told him, opening his eyes and meeting Alec’s with his own. He couldn’t deprive the man of something he was responsible for initiating—especially after he noticed the hope in Alec’s yearning expression.

“Can I come on you?” Alec asked. “I won’t be offended if you say no.”

“Come all over me,” Hutch insisted with a gentle laugh. He wanted Alec to know he could have what he desired despite Hutch’s inability to share it. “Use me.” To prove he meant business, Hutch reached between them and took Alec’s oiled and heated penis into his hand, firmly but tenderly pumping it, and keeping his eyes on Alec’s face to make sure the man heard him and would proceed.

It was apparent that Alec used Hutch’s beauty—and Hutch’s fading but still-obvious arousal—to bring himself to orgasm. He swept his gaze over Hutch’s nude body, lingering on the visual of Hutch’s erection as it lay against his bare belly, and telling Hutch, “Your cock is so beautiful.” His breaths were deeper, more rapid as he approached his climax. “You’re so hard. I love sucking your dick. Did you love … sucking … mine?”

Hutch wanted Alec to feel wanted, not rejected. He wanted Alec to enjoy himself, to be rewarded for accepting Hutch’s invitation. He wouldn’t let the man down. “I’ll make you come,” he reminded Alec when they locked eyes again. “I’ll suck your cock again.”

“You’ll suck me?” Alec asked, sounding timid, yet excited, but not moving out of the strokes Hutch’s hand gave his shaft, nor did he pull away from Hutch’s thumb purposefully teasing his frenulum. “Suck me, Hutch?”

“Long and hard.”

Hutch had every intention of doing so; he couldn’t live with himself if he’d coerced a man into oral sex and then didn’t deliver.

“Suck me, Hutch,” Alec repeated, “suck me long and hard.” He began to thrust inside Hutch’s hand—as if he didn’t have any intention of reaching orgasm inside Hutch’s mouth, but the talk of it obviously helped him to reach ejaculation through masturbation—as did keeping his eyes fixed on Hutch‘s large and tumescent shaft, its crown, snug sac. He erupted, tightly closing his eyes, and loudly moaning with pleasure as he crested. Most of his semen ended up between them, but a couple of spurts found their way onto Hutch’s belly.

A light sleep quickly overtook Alec. He lay snug against Hutch, on his side, an arm draped over Hutch, as their slightly perspiring skin cooled and the heat in their bodies dissipated. Hutch was still on his back, sometimes staring up at the ceiling, seeing nothing, sometimes immersing himself in the darkness behind his closed eyelids, pushing the tormenting thoughts of Starsky from his head while he listened to Alec’s soft breathing in the room’s silence.

Only when Alec stirred did Hutch realize he lovingly caressed Alec’s shoulder; he cared about Alec and was ashamed for disappointing him. “I’m sorry about that,” he regrettably said when their eyes met. “I thought I could, but…”

“Don’t apologize,” Alec warned him, kindly, a kind smile in his overall face. “If someone had told me that Ken Hutchinson would show up at my door one day unannounced and later be in my bed—cock-sucking or no cock-sucking—I wouldn’t have believed them. Just having you here is a thrill for me. You have to know that.”

“You’re a forgiving man.”

“And you learned something.”

Hutch should have known Alec understood more than he’d let on, despite how overcome he was at the time with orgasmic pleasure and desire.

“You’re not done with him,” Alec factly concluded, saying what they both knew to be true in that moment. “You haven’t quit looking for him, wanting him, needing him, planning to find him. So we learned that tonight—and I still got a good come out of it. I enjoyed the overall intimacy, too. No complaints here, Hutch, if that’s what you’re thinking. Be my friend and don’t have those thoughts, okay?”

Hutch swallowed emotion with his overwhelming gratitude. He realized Alec never intended to let him perform fellatio on him after Hutch stopped it for himself, but that Alec wanted to think it so he could heighten his self-pleasure.

“I’m a greedy man in that way,” Alec said, as if he’d just read Hutch’s mind. “I’m now going to ask for something else to show you just how greedy I can be, but there’ll be no hard feelings if you’d rather not placate me.”

Hutch smiled, feeling shy; what could Alec possibly want that it was already understood Hutch couldn’t give him?

“Would you mind if I slept in here with you tonight?” Alec asked. “Just to sleep. I like how the bed feels when you move on it. It makes me feel … not so alone.”

Hutch understood Alec’s sentiment; he felt it himself. “I wouldn’t have it any other way,” he said, lightly hitting Alec’s nose to break them both out of their sentimentality, but first adding, “I need you for that very reason far more than you need it from me.”

* * *

“I met someone,” Alec said, as if he was giving Hutch a weather report. Alec stood at the kitchen counter, the both of them dressed in jeans and tee-shirts, while he fried up some potatoes, onions, and peppers for their breakfast. It had already been established that Hutch would toast the bread and set out the jam when the time came.

“You met someone?” Hutch asked, not sure he completely understood the comment after having spent the night with Alec. “As in a woman? Or maybe a man?”

Alec looked over at Hutch and smiled. “I love how well you know me.” He went back to his cooking. “I met a man,” he eventually said.

“I mean, you met someone—a romantic someone?”

“A couple of months ago,” Alec replied. He sounded happy to be telling Hutch the news. “His name is Dillon Montana and he’s a few years older than me and he—”

“Dillon Montana. Sounds like a character in a cowboy movie.”

Alec laughed. “He is a cowboy—but doesn’t have any cows.”

“What then?”

“Wild horses.”

Hutch leaned against the refrigerator and watched Alec cooking their meal. He’d already made the oatmeal; it stayed warm in a covered pot, and Hutch had since cut up the fruit for it and chopped the raw walnuts. When the potatoes were close to being done, he’d pop the bread into the toaster, and he and Alec would be ready to eat. Sooner than later that morning, they’d go to the potluck breakfast—where a birthday pancake would be presented to Hutch.

“You met a guy who’s a cowboy and has wild horses?”

“He runs a wild horse sanctuary outside Dillon, Montana, and keeps a couple hundred head on his 18,000-acre property.”

“I thought you said his name is Dillon Montana.”

“That’s the name he goes by; it started out as a marketing tool, but ended up sticking. His real name is Myles West.”

“That sounds just as fictional.”

“You’re not believing me.”

“Tell me more. Maybe I will.”

Alec laughed again and threw a piece of cooked onion at Hutch. “I’m being serious. I met someone, a romantic someone; he lives outside Dillon—a small town in Montana—and rescues wild horses. He’s a few years older than me and he goes by the name Dillon Montana.” Alec sounded serious.

Hutch had caught the tasty piece of onion and eaten it. “Okay. I’ll buy your story. How’d you manage to meet him—with him up there and you all the way down here?”

“He apparently found me at the annual Association of Sanctuaries Conference in D.C. a couple of months ago. If I’d known you were in the area at the time, I’d have gone looking for you. Anyway, he and I hit it off—spectacularly. Chemistry like I’ve never had with anyone before. I ended up spending the entire weekend with him.”

“Sex?”

“That’s what I meant by spending the weekend together,” Alec dryly said, rolling his eyes at Hutch, but coupling it with a gentle smile. “Since then, he’s been here and I’ve been up there and—”

“—you were in bed with me last night.”

“Oh, I see what’s troubling you. But Dillon and I only met a couple of months ago. We’ve seen each other a few times and we want to be together, but it’s logistically complicated, so we agreed to a no-strings attached-when-it-comes-to-sex relationship until we can figure something permanent out.”

“How does that look?”

“I honestly don’t know. He has a really nice piece of land up there—and two hundred horses—not a species that would do well on my limited acreage, comparatively. And I’ve got a well-established Center here—complete with the hospital of my dreams and the most spectacular backyard anyone could wish for, so I guess we’ll just have to see.”

“You’re excited about him, though.”

“Very much. We think alike, share the same objectives, are compatible in bed—you know, like you and I are. I mean to say he’s not a repressed gay man, which is refreshing.”

Hutch studied Alec for a few minutes and decided his friend was being truthful about his new love interest. “Will you tell him what we did last night?”

“I told him about the threesome I had with two very sexy straight guys when he and I were comparing sex stories in bed one morning,” Alec said with a wink, “but I didn’t name names, if that’s what you’re afraid of.”

“I wasn’t afraid of anything. I’m asking if it’s the kind of relationship where you would tell him about playing around with someone else.”

“Only if he asks. I’m not interested to know his private life in that way, but I won’t lie to him, either.”

Hutch was pleased. “I’m happy for you that you found someone.”

“You can put the bread in now,” Alec said, turning down the heat on the potatoes. “I’m happy for me, too. But, anyway, I wanted you to know I met someone who excites me, a romantic someone, a guy I’m really hoping I can figure out a way to spend more time with, and you don’t have to feel awkward about last night. Besides,” he added with a sincere smile, “I really don’t have anyone else to talk to about him, so thank you for listening.”

“You haven’t told Kevin after all this time?” Hutch had assumed by then that Alec had let Kevin know he was bisexual.

“Oh, I told him about myself after you guys left here—you inspired me—and he was a bit surprised to hear it, but he accepted it. I just haven’t wanted to tell anyone about Dillon until I know for sure it’s a permanent thing.”

Hutch felt privileged. “So tell me what he looks like.” He pushed the lever down on the toaster and stood near it while it baked the bread.

“Attractive in a way like your man: sexy, charismatic, masculine. You wouldn’t take him for gay—not that your man is gay.”

“He’s gay for me.”

He was, anyway.

“That’s all that matters,” Alec said with conviction. “Well, let’s see … Dillon has brown eyes, dark hair, short. He’s a couple of inches taller than me and leaner. Clean-shaven. Nice smile. Great ass. Strong dick. Wears a cowboy hat.”

“His dick wears a cowboy hat?”

Alec laughed again; he was obviously enjoying talking to Hutch about Dillon. “He’s a jeans and denim-shirt kind of guy—and he knows everything about horses. Was once a reining champion until he found himself embroiled in the plight of wild horses.”

“I don’t know what a reining champion is, but I really hope this works out for you guys. I think if there’s something real there, you’ll find a way to be together-together, and not just together with a couple of states in between.”

Alec turned and leaned against the counter, crossed his arms, cocked his head, seemed suddenly serious. “Thank you, Hutch. I hope you find what you’re looking for, too. I mean that. It breaks my heart to know you and Starsky are separated. I can only imagine how it’s crushed your spirit.”

Hutch sometimes didn’t have time for a broken heart; it served no purpose. If he couldn’t find Starsky in the long run of his life, then—and only then—would he really allow himself the shattering broken heart that he knew was just a beat away. His trip to Colorado and into Alec’s bed had taught him that much.

“You go back to where you boys made love,” Alec advised him again. “Throw your mind out to the mountain. It’ll guide you. I’m sure of this.”

“I’ve got nothing to lose by trying.”

“Good. So let’s have breakfast, then we’ll eat a birthday pancake and say our goodbyes. You’ll want to get up there before it gets too hot. This national heat wave is finding its way here; that’s how bad it is.”

“Twelve hundred people dead so far,” Hutch commented in an empathetic tone.

But was Alec right? Would a mountain speak to him? Hutch had nothing to lose by listening. So he committed himself to following Alec’s instructions: they ate breakfast together—sharing ‘boyfriend’ stories—and then Hutch acted surprised and thrilled to be served with a birthday pancake by the Center’s staff. It was apparent that they wanted to thank him, again, for ‘The Hutch’ hospital.

He said his goodbyes to Alec: a warm, lengthy embrace, a promise not to be strangers and to keep in touch, and a reminder that they would be there for each other, no matter what. Hutch then packed his travel bag, left Alec to his fans, and got into the rental car to drive to the Rocky Mountain National Park.

It had been nearly a year since Hutch had experienced such a peaceful morning—notwithstanding the one he and Starsky spent in Yosemite less than two weeks before their trip to Colorado the previous September. The first thing to strike Hutch when he arrived at the Rocky Mountain National Park’s southern entrance, parked and got out of the car, was how sound itself ceased to exist in the Rockies—except for all things nature: summer birds, a barely noticeable breeze rustling tree leaves, and deafening silence that drowned out all the human noise.

The day was already warm, and he had an hour’s hike ahead of him, so he paced himself with a water bottle in hand. It was somewhat of a steep climb in some parts of the trail, especially after he passed Bear and Nymph lakes, so he took time out to enjoy the serenity of the latter’s lily pads in the company of its resident elk herd.

There was light foot traffic along the well-maintained gravel path, most of it over moderately uneven terrain—and through spectacular scenery—but Hutch eventually arrived at Dream Lake relatively alone; very few tourists were present. Perhaps the heat threat had kept most visitors at home.

Hutch was also pleased to have found the very spot he’d taken off the beaten path that allowed him to drag Starsky a short way up the mountain. He even laid down in the exact patch of mountain grass where he and Starsky made passionate animal love—to the place Hutch bottomed for Starsky the first time. Something about being there again had a surprisingly calming effect on Hutch; he was alone in wilderness—as old as time itself—and somehow felt Starsky’s keen presence.

Hutch also remembered his partner’s reaction when they finally arrived at that destination. “You weren’t kidding, Hutch,” Starsky had admitted when they turned their attention to the spectacular view overlooking the blue green lake. He whistled through his teeth. “It was worth the hike to get here.”

The mountain summit, more than 12,000 feet at its highest point, was the centerpiece of an awe-inspiring view. The tree line stopped well below it and helped to define the picturesque landscape: Dream Lake, flanked by alpine forests and wildflower meadows, was dwarfed by the cliff-chiseled natural monument known as Hallett Peak and its iconic ridge line.

“I’ve never seen anything like this, Hutch, not even in Yosie-might.” Maybe it was the high-up vantage point: the one from which they viewed Yosemite gave them a majestic perspective, whereas here the mountain was much more within reach.

Nothing was different in that seemingly attainable grandiose wilderness—except that Hutch was now alone in a tranquility absent of thought, in a kind of time-stand-still quiet. No Starsky there to share the magnificent sight.

Demoralized, Hutch lay on his back and looked up at the bluest sky. That’s how he’d last visited the site—on his back, looking up at a blue sky—except Starsky was snug inside his arm alongside him, the two of them completely nude, having just indulged themselves in liberating pleasures of the flesh.

“Have you ever had sex like that before?” Starsky had asked him.

“As in, wild?” Hutch assumed.

“Wild and free like that.”

“Never,” Hutch said, closing his eyes so he could instead listen intently to Starsky’s masculine voice and focus on the warmth of his skin. “This entire past week has been sex like I’ve never had it before. We were meant to do this with each other.”

“Same. And it’s how we’re supposed to have it, Hutch. Wild and free.”

Starsky brought them out of their sleepy delirium by noticing a pair of bald eagles aloft in the sky overhead. He called them ‘buzzards’ and Hutch corrected him. Looking back, Hutch wondered if Starsky hadn’t just been pulling his leg. Maybe Starsky had a repertoire of those digs saved up: all designed to make Hutch believe Starsky was an idiot—when he wasn’t.

Alec had seemed to think so; he privately told Hutch during the previous year’s visit that he thought Starsky played his partner, and that Hutch always fell for the ruses. Maybe Alec was right. It would mean Hutch should respect his clever boy all the more. It also meant that Alec was a wiser man than Hutch, so what was Alec expecting Hutch to find on this second trip to Dream Lake?

Hutch closed his eyes to listen more carefully to the mountain wilderness, but a half hour later, he was no closer to an epiphany. He gave up trying and instead decided to be grateful to have that outdoor experience at all in such a remote and peaceful environment. It wasn’t every day that he was able to escape into amazingly beautiful country. All was not lost—even if it was just to relive the memories.

“Suppose we build a house right here and hide out for the rest of our lives?” Starsky had dreamily suggested, hugging Hutch closer and softly kissing his shoulder. “Go off-grid, if you know what I mean.”

“‘Off-grid.’ You’re reading the wrong shit again.”

“It means to leave—”

“I can figure out what it means.”

“So that’s what we do, Hutch: say goodbye to the world and live here among the birds and the bees—and do what they do.”

“Eat bugs and drink flower nectar?”

Starsky laughed and then corrected Hutch. “Have sex all day. But, I mean, we live right here—with that lake down below and that mountain peak up above.”

Starsky and his bright ideas. “Okay,” Hutch said, initiating the debate, “so where do you plan to get the building materials?”

“There’s plenty of wood in some of these trees to build us a comfy cottage and still not destroy the view.”

“They’re not Legos, Starsk.”

“Yeah. I know. We’d have to cut them into boards.”

“With what tools?”

“Measuring tapes and chainsaws. Are you this dumb?”

“I mean, how do you plan to get that stuff up here? You complained about the hike and I was the one carrying the water.”

“Haven’t you ever heard of helicopters?”

Hutch laughed. “And land them on the lake?”

“Donkeys then—like the kind that carry people into the Grand Canyon.”

“Are they a special kind?”

“Probably.”

Starsky obviously knew nothing about equines. “And feed them, how?” Hutch wondered.

“They’d carry up their own food—and they can drink water out of the lake. While they’re drinking, I’ll be fishing.”

“And what happens after they eat the few bales of hay they hauled up here?”

“They can eat the grass.”

“So set them free to graze and lose your mode of transportation?”

Starsky huffed at him as if the solution was obvious. “You put those ropes around their feet to keep them from going very far very fast.”

Hutch laughed at him. “Groceries, Starsk? Groceries like popcorn and potato chips and bean dip? Beer? TV? That’s a lot of donkey rides to and from—and it’s an hour to the parking lot one way.”

“What else do we have to do all day besides eat, sleep, and have sex, hm?”

“How are you going to handle all the ice and snow, Mr. Lightweight? The Rockies get blizzards, you know.”

“So we hole up in the winter—after chopping enough firewood. You cook and I clean—and we have sex.”

“We hibernate for winter, huh?” Hutch asked, ruffling Starsky’s hair as if it would snap sense into the man—but it didn’t seem to. “We emerge in spring—along with the bears?”

Starsky pinched Hutch’s side. “Don’t threaten me. But you’re missing my point, Hutch.”

“That’s because it was bogus from the start.”

“Okay, so maybe we don’t escape to this exact spot—”

“You can’t even pitch a tent here without a permit.”

“So we find a different place, but the point is still that we hide away from the world.”

“But why would we?”

“I’m saying if we wanted to, we could.”

“All right, Starsky. Let’s say we buy a place—maybe that house we like in L.A. with the big back yard so we can—”

“—plant fruit trees and build veggie boxes and put a hot tub on the deck—”

“—‘hide out’ the way you’re hoping,” Hutch continued, ignoring Starsky’s commentary, “and assuming all of our needs are met, we’re as happy as—”

“—the birds and the bees,” Starsky concluded.

“Do you really think you’ll be satisfied living a do-nothing life?”

Starsky went quiet on him for a while; he seemed to genuinely search for that answer. After a couple of minutes, he deeply sighed. “Yeah, I hear what you’re saying. I guess we still have to do what’s in our blood to do.”

“In our blood to do.”

Hutch opened his eyes. All he could see in that moment was blue. All he could feel in that moment was stunned. It suddenly hit him. He quickly sat up as his heart began to race and an avalanche of thoughts flooded his mind. “I know what he’s doing,” he excitedly said aloud. “Shit. I know what he’s doing.”

Hutch couldn’t slide down the side of the mountain to the trail that early afternoon fast enough; he couldn’t hike back to the parking lot fast enough; he couldn’t drive to the Denver airport and turn in his rental car fast enough; he couldn’t book a flight and get to Dobey’s office after landing in Los Angeles fast enough—to tell Dobey what he believed and what he planned.

Hutch couldn’t get home fast enough—first stopping by the ‘Los Angeles Times’ and using his badge to be given every newspaper it published over a specific two-week period the previous September.

He called Simon. “You’re right,” he told him as soon as Simon answered the phone. “I think he’s living somewhere in that group of area codes you narrowed it down to—and I know what he’s doing there. I’ll see you next week, buddy. Next week I find him. I’m sure of it.”

* * *

A young girl in pigtails answered the door; she couldn’t have been more than nine years old. Hutch would never understand why some parents allowed their young children to greet strangers without supervision, but Hutch admitted to himself that he lived in a darker world than most people. “Is your mom home?” he asked with a friendly voice, showing the girl his badge. “I need to ask her a few questions. She’s expecting me.”

Before the girl could call her mother, 32-year-old blonde and blue-eyed Angela came to the door, wearing a summer dress, apologizing for not having heard the doorbell—and again puzzling Hutch about how vulnerable some families allowed themselves to be. He already knew the two females living in the house were without a male presence.

“Come in,” Angela invited him, opening the door wider for him to pass, and asking her daughter to go to her room or outside, explaining that she needed a few minutes by herself to spend with the ‘nice policeman.’

She walked Hutch to the kitchen table where she had already set a folder, and asked him if he wanted a refreshment. After she brought him a glass of water with ice, she sat across from him. “I hope I can help you,” she said. From her folder, she removed a few Polaroid pictures. “My husband was very proud of his truck,” she told Hutch, combing her long blonde hair behind her ear while she browsed the photos.

Hutch politely took the pictures from her, but he was less interested in the truck and more anxious to know who bought it. Still, he made a mental note of the vehicle’s features: a Dodge Power Wagon, red like Starsky’s Torino, but with hubcap-less mud wheels, and black—not white—horizontal striping from front to back. The two-door truck also sported a black roll bar, large chrome side mirrors—as if to pull a trailer—running boards, and a crossover tool box in its bed. License plate MEM988. Several pictures showed—presumably—Angela’s husband, smiling, as he proudly stood beside his new toy. Had Starsky bought that truck? did he feel the same way about his prize?

“Nice truck,” Hutch heard Starsky say in the back of his mind.

Angela had told Hutch over the phone that her husband had purchased the vehicle only a few months prior to her having to sell it because he’d been accidentally killed in a forklift tragedy at the warehouse where he worked, and that she had no other option but to sell it because it had been financed; the truck was practically brand new with only a few thousand miles on it, and she was simply no longer in a financial position to pay its fees.

She also told Hutch in that phone call that the truck’s buyer was a late 30-something male with wavy, dark hair, blue eyes, and was casually dressed. Though she was sure the man’s name wasn’t “David Starsky,” she believed she could identify him from a photo.

It was because she sold the truck on the Wednesday before Starsky left him—and that it was red—that Hutch drove out to Studio City to put the woman’s memory to the test. He’d already spent hours calling classified ads looking for a truck, specifically a red one, that would have been sold from that Tuesday through the Sunday of Starsky’s departure—and only one matched that criteria.

If Hutch couldn’t find a truck sale with promising leads in Los Angeles, he’d search the classifieds in Kentucky—in the area where he and Simon believed Starsky had a made a call to his mother shortly after leaving California. Failing there, Hutch would scour the four states near D.C. from which Starsky had repeatedly called his mother’s Florida home. It was quite possible that Starsky hadn’t bought a truck at all, but Hutch didn’t want to leave L.A. without first confirming his hunch.

“He paid cash,” Angela said when asked. She momentarily closed her eyes when she had trouble remembering many of the details Hutch asked for, explaining that her recollection was poor around that time because her husband had recently died, but she would do her best to remember everything. “I do recall that he paid cash,” she repeated, “because it was a lot of cash. Over $3000. He didn’t even want to negotiate.”

“Because he was in a hurry?”

“I think he just wanted the truck.”

Hutch had told her over the phone that he wasn’t looking for a criminal; he was investigating a missing persons case, so she answered him without worrying that the buyer was a desperate man. And Starsky very probably wanted that truck; it was in good shape, had low mileage, was available when he needed it, and was an upgraded replacement for his beloved Striped Tomato.

“Did he tell you what he might use the truck for?”

“No.”

Hutch gave her back the truck pictures and laid five black-and-white photos of his own on the table in front of her. The one of Starsky was from his police I.D. and fit nicely alongside four mugshots of perps that Hutch had brought with him. But before he could even ask her to choose the man she thought may have bought her truck, she pointed at a photo and said, “That’s him!”

Starsky.

Hutch’s heart jumped. His first real lead and he could barely believe it. He asked her again—to be sure.

“Oh, yes, that’s him,” she said, almost with excitement. “I remember he had a great smile. You can’t tell in the picture, but he also has blue eyes, doesn’t he?”

Hutch would never forget those blue eyes; apparently, she hadn’t, either. “But he didn’t give his name?”

“He gave his name, but I don’t remember it. I just know it wasn’t the name you said.”

“David Starsky.”

“It was similar to that, maybe ‘David’ or ‘Dave,’ but it wasn’t that last name, Starsky.”

“Did he come here with anyone?”

“He arrived in a cab.”

“And left in the truck?”

“Yes.”

Hutch wondered where Starsky had kept the truck during those days prior to his leaving, assuming they really were talking about the same man. He had to have hid it somewhere. “And it was on Wednesday that you sold it, yes? September 19?”

“I’m pretty sure.” She then thumbed through other papers she had in the folder, explaining that she’d kept the original paperwork of her husband’s purchase, as well as their insurance papers, but that the truck’s buyer had taken the service receipts, the owner’s manual, and of course, the official title.

“Oh, here,” she said, realizing she had something else. “It’s the Bill of Sale, sort of. He insisted that he didn’t want one, but I needed these details for my tax records.” She handed him a small piece of white paper.

When Hutch laid eyes on the words written on it in blue ink, he couldn’t decipher what he was seeing at first; it seemed too much to take in at once—despite that the details’ were simply a few words. But they were powerful ones.

The date was “Sept. 19, 1979 – 2:30 p.m.”

Was that her handwriting? It wasn’t Starsky’s.

Hutch’s heart pounded as he prepared himself yet again for defeat.

“1979 Dodge truck”
“Paid cash: $3,125.00”
“Sold to Dane Skyler”

Hutch’s heart sank. How could he have been so wrong this time?

Beneath the name was an address:

“638 S Beacon St
Los Angeles, CA”

Hutch did a double-take when he suddenly recognized the address as belonging to their precinct. If the note had just read “Dane Skyler” at any other address, Hutch wouldn’t again be feeling so overwhelmed with excitement and anticipation. Angela had probably asked Starsky for contact information and, under pressure, he wasn’t about to give his own, so he chose their work address instead.

So it had to be Starsky. Starsky bought the truck. On September 19, 1979. At 2:30 p.m. He arrived by cab to that very house on that day, paid the woman in cash, and drove away in a relatively new pickup truck—a Dodge, red with black striping—and he did it under the name Dane Skyler.

The VIN was on other paperwork Angela had in her possession, so Hutch wrote it down on the back of one of the photos he brought with him, though he was fairly sure Starsky hadn’t yet registered the vehicle—unless he was somehow able to do that under an assumed name.

And so it was that Hutch couldn’t thank Angela enough, couldn’t leave the premises fast enough, couldn’t drive home and call Simon fast enough—to tell him what he’d discovered and ask him to do a search on the truck’s VIN—couldn’t then pack the car for a cross-country road trip out of L.A. on Interstate 15 fast enough, couldn’t wait to hit the road for what he was then certain would be the most important case he’d solved in his lifetime.

* * *

“Any luck?”

When Hutch walked through the front door into Simon’s house after half a day of searching for Starsky, he nearly bumped into Simon on Simon’s way to the kitchen. Hutch’s senses were also met by the inviting aroma. “Smells great in here,” he said, forgetting Simon’s question, and passing him a warm smile instead.

“Have you had lunch?” Simon asked. When he heard that Hutch hadn’t eaten since breakfast, Simon implored him. “C’mon, buddy,” he said, tapping a table chair as he walked past it to the stove. “Sit down and let me feed you. The garlic bread is about to come out of the oven, I’ve made a salad, and I’ve already heated up the leftover lasagna—enough for both of us. How does that sound?”

“It sounds delicious,” Hutch replied, the enticing tastes of Italian food spurring his hunger. “But I can’t believe you were going to eat this well without me,” he joked. Simon had already fed Hutch a plentiful breakfast earlier that morning.

“It’s a dirty job,” Simon quipped, “but somebody has to do it.”

“I think you miss me.”

Simon laughed, sadly. “Maybe I do. It’s nice having you around, and I’m sorry you leave for the reason you leave.”

Hutch offered to help Simon dish out their meal, but Simon ordered him to sit at the table and tell him about the day.

“As I was saying,” Simon reminded him, “did you have any luck? You’re back earlier than usual—but this time you look … hopeful.”

“I actually am,” Hutch replied. He’d been excited all the way from Redland in Maryland to Simon’s house in Silver Spring, and still felt rather joyous. “I did my schtick,” he explained, borrowing a word from Starsky’s vocabulary, “and it turned up a very promising lead—the breakthrough kind.”

Simon froze in his tracks, still holding a large salad bowl with a serving spoon, two smaller bowls, and two forks, appearing quite awkward, but shocked, too. “Are you serious?”

“‘As serious as a record-breaking heat wave’—finally ending—to play on your phrase,” Hutch laughed. “Let’s eat and I’ll tell you about it.” He dished salad into the two bowls while Simon went back to the kitchen for the bread and lasagna. “So I go into the umpteenth hardware store on my list of, well, hardware stores,” Hutch began, unable to wait to tell Simon what he’d learned, “and the owner asks me what they all ask me…”

“May I help you?” was the question.

Hutch had his speech down to a science. He had to flush answers in a way that didn’t raise red flags, but also ask questions that wouldn’t lend themselves to innocent gossip that could get back to Starsky—and alert him to someone on his trail.

Hutch hated that he couldn’t just ask the store owners if they’d seen ‘this man’ and show them Starsky’s picture, but the last thing he wanted was for anyone to tell Starsky that some guy was looking for him, and that said guy even showed them a photo of him. Any phrase related to ‘looking for you’ would let Starsky know that Hutch was closing in on him—and he might easily bolt to another town in another state.

“I’m in need of a handyman,” Hutch told the shopkeeper with a light laugh, using his skills as an undercover detective, and pretending to be embarrassed for needing help. “I was hoping you might be able to recommend someone?”

On cue, the middle-aged, burly man with the name tag, ‘Roger,’ informed Hutch, “We have a bulletin board near the door; you’ll find more handymen posted there than you can shake a stick at.”

Hutch pretended to be interested in the wall of tools to his left as he nonchalantly replied, “Yeah, I saw those, but they all appear to be licensed and bonded.” None of them were posted with the name David Starsky or even Dane Skyler. Hutch looked back at Roger and faked a meek smile. “It’s just a small job, so I’m hoping to find someone who can do it on the … um …”

“Cheap?” Roger assumed.

“Yeah. If possible.”

“What are you looking to have done?”

“I want to turn a small closet into a pantry. It shouldn’t be too big a job, but anything that requires measuring, cutting, and leveling boards is way out of my league.”

Roger laughed with him. “We all have our talents,” he forgivingly said, removing a small notebook from behind the register. “I think Eric Smalls might fit the bill,” he decided, flipping through its pages. “He’s a local. Does the odd job.”

Eric wouldn’t cut it, but Hutch wasn’t done listening to his options before he had to implement Plan B.

“Eric is rather busy, though,” Roger mumbled, scratching his head. “Seems most jobs are odd ones.” He closed the book and turned to Hutch. “There’s always Sky. He’s new to the area—maybe the last four or five months—and I’ve been hearing good things about his work. He might not have the clientele yet to be overly busy.”

“Sky?” Hutch asked, his heart skipping a beat when he realized he may have just stumbled onto something he’d been searching nearly a year for.

“Skyler,” Roger explained. “Dane Skyler; goes by ‘Sky.’ Comes in here for nails and knobs and such. He might be licensed, but he hasn’t lived here long, so it’s probably pending. That could be in your favor, too: an un-busy, but quality craftsman.”

Hutch almost choked on his beating heart. He couldn’t even begin to tell the shop owner just how much it would be in his favor to ‘employ’ Dane Skyler. “You wouldn’t happen to have an address or a phone number?”

“I don’t, actually, but he works a lot with Scott. Scott’s a general contractor; I see them in here together from time-to-time. I can give you Scott’s number.” He returned to his notebook to find that info for Hutch.

Hutch immediately went fishing, but didn’t expect the detailed answer he was about to get. “Does Scott live in the area, too?”

“He lives on Lisa Drive off Muncaster Mill. Built his own house out there. You should see it sometime. I don’t know the address, but it’s gorgeous. You can’t miss it.” He handed Hutch a small piece of paper with the name ‘Scott Wilson’ written on it and a phone number underneath. “I think Sky lives near him. Smaller house, though. My vague recollection is that Sky bought a fixer-upper.” He smiled warmly at Hutch and wished him good luck.

“Where was this?” Simon asked; he apparently was so riveted to know what happened next—or what was about to happen—that he hadn’t begun to eat his lunch until he knew more. “How far away?”

“Redland,” Hutch said, waiting to see whether Simon knew the town. When he noticed Simon’s shocked blink, he realized he did. “Yeah,” Hutch agreed. “Thirty minutes east of here. When you said you think he might be in our backyard, you didn’t know how right you were.”

“You’ve got to be kidding,” Simon said, leaning back in his chair, laughing and swearing at the unexpected news. “He’s been living a half hour away all this time? That’s got to hurt.”

“Nothing hurts right now,” Hutch said. “I’m this close to finding him. I came back for the car and a street map; if I don’t find him in Redland, I’ll call Scott and see if I can’t flush him that way. But I dropped by Redland’s City Hall and learned that it has less than 13,000 residents. How hard can it be to narrow it down to one?”

Simon laughed. “When you’re searching a small pond for a big fish, I have to agree: you’re within days, Hutch—if not hours—of finding him.”

They didn’t discuss what either of them imagined Starsky’s reaction might be to having been discovered; he had been adamant in his goodbye note that he didn’t want to be found, so would he be angry or shocked or relieved—or none or all of the above? Would it be a painful reunion? Would there be a reunion at all?

For Hutch, Starsky’s feelings were irrelevant in the moment. It had been a long year, one filled with Hutch’s fears and his frustration, his desperation and his anger, his remorse and his grief. He and Simon both hoped Hutch was about to be redeemed, and that’s all that mattered.

Hutch showered after lunch and changed into clean clothes. He then familiarized himself with Redland’s street map. His plan was to search Lisa Drive for any sign of Starsky and, failing to find him there, begin searching intersecting streets and neighborhoods. He would hit Redland’s diners, its pizza parlors, grocery stores, and bars—of which there were few. Starsky just had to be somewhere in the area and Hutch wasn’t going to leave it until he turned over every stone.

The national heat wave had ended, and that September 11 was a relatively cool one in the scheme of the past few months; its usual high 80s were a welcomed relief. Though hot, it wasn’t a deterrent and Hutch was going to make the most of the late afternoon’s search.

Lisa Drive was as beautiful as the surrounding countryside from which Hutch entered at one end: mature shade trees littered park-like grounds along the route and cast long, late afternoon shadows over the landscape; some home perimeters were enclosed by three-rail wooden horse fencing, but no sign of the animals. It was a peaceful neighborhood, with plenty of room between houses, yet still keeping its friendly, family feel.

Some of the properties also had driveways that wrapped behind their houses, making it impossible for Hutch to see vehicles outside garage doors—a red pickup truck, in particular—but he figured those houses were simply too big for Starsky’s taste anyway: they were more like two-story mansions, even in comparison to the large house he and Hutch had bought in L.A.

Hutch’s heart was in his throat during that drive. He was so certain he was going to come across a new lead, a solid one, that he could barely see straight, but when he was met by a cul-de-sac at the end of Lisa Drive and nothing concrete to hold onto by then, his spirits fell. There wasn’t a single house on the street that had lent itself to Starsky; Hutch might have to go door-to-door at some point, but it was still possible that Starsky could be out-and-about in the area. So Hutch turned around in the cul-de-sac and headed back to Muncaster Mill Road.

Before reaching the main highway, he noticed Sweetwater Drive intersected Lisa Drive, almost as if it were a driveway—which is how he missed it while driving the opposite direction—so he turned left onto Sweetwater. The new street was narrower, the houses smaller, and his spirits were once again flying high. The beauty of the surrounding properties was no less peaceful than his previous search, and he found himself envying Starsky if Starsky did indeed live in that neighborhood.

Less than a quarter mile in, Hutch hit the brakes. In the driveway of a small house on the left side of the road was a full-sized red pickup truck. Hutch’s breathing accelerated, his blood visibly pumped through his veins, and his thoughts became a jumble of mishmash. He crept up slowly to the property, braking when he was at the bottom of the driveway, and set his eyes on the truck from a much closer position.

A Dodge Power Wagon. Red with black horizontal striping from front to back. Hubcap-less mud tires. Running boards. Roll bar. Trailer-sized side mirrors. And a crossover tool box. Then he noticed the next telltale sign: Blue California license plates—MEM988–legally still belonging to Angela’s husband; as suspected, Starsky never re-registered the vehicle.

Hutch shifted his eyes to the house and right away saw the red front door—a color Starsky had insisted was the crowning touch on his dream house. Hutch pulled over to the curb, parked the car, killed the ignition, and got out of the vehicle. He was trembling, both from anxiety and fear, but also with excitement and hopeful desperation. If Starsky answered that door, Hutch was going to melt right there in front of him.

He realized, all too late, that he wasn’t fully prepared for what he had hoped would be the inevitable, despite that locking eyes with Starsky was all he ever wanted, no matter the outcome.

As he walked along the landscaped path to the front door, he noticed the little things: wind chimes hanging from one corner of the front-wrapped porch; two chairs and a small table between them were on the porch outside the living room windows—which weren’t draped—and faced the street, but also the row of potted colorful flowers in homemade wooden boxes atop the porch rail. There was a large ceramic purple frog in the nearby flower garden along neatly trimmed rose bushes, and a bird bath between the house and the 40-year-old shade tree in the center of the grassy lawn.

Starsky’s house was everything Hutch had never imagined it could be: quaint, tranquil, nature-loving. Thoughts of Starsky’s new life raced through Hutch’s mind: he was married and she was the landscaper, or he was in love and lived with a gay man who loved the outdoors—or it wasn’t his house?

Summer birds were the only sounds Hutch heard besides the knock he rapped on the front door. But no one shuffled inside the house. No one came to the door. He knocked again. No car drove by. No dog barked. He rang the doorbell, clearly hearing it inside the house. But nothing stirred. Maybe Starsky had heard Hutch’s car drive up and stop outside his property; the neighborhood was so quiet, Starsky was bound to have noticed a rumble that didn’t continue past his house. Or maybe it wasn’t his house?

Hutch braved the few steps to the living room windows, placed his hand on the glass to shield it from the late afternoon sunlight so he could see inside, and peered into the house. Two things seemed to happen at once: one was that he decided it was Starsky’s residence; Starsky’s familiar wicker chair faced the window, and his serape draped the back of what appeared to be a new sofa. There was his Menorah on the wall and an almost finished car model on the coffee table.

The second thing to happen when Hutch looked into the house was that a car suddenly appeared out of nowhere—or Hutch was so engrossed in what he hoped would be pending contact with Starsky that he didn’t notice until it was upon him—and a woman’s voice called out to him.

“May I help you?” she asked.

Startled, he turned and saw a young, long-haired brunette in a Toyota Celica parked at the bottom of the drive, leaning out of the open driver’s window, questioning him.

“I’m looking for a friend of mine,” he told her when he reached her car. She had emerald green eyes, was probably in her late twenties, and wore a tee-shirt and body-hugging jeans. Her voice was also kinder than her question; maybe Hutch was simply on edge and suddenly feeling like an outsider. “I’m looking for …”—he almost said “Starsky,” but caught himself at the last second—“… Sky. I was in the area and thought I’d drop in on him.”

“I’m Kayla,” she replied, holding eye contact with Hutch as if she liked what she saw. “I live a couple of houses down the road. I didn’t mean to pry. But Sky isn’t home right now.” Her suspicions of Hutch were apparently eased when she realized Hutch knew who lived in the house. “It’s Thursday Night Out With the Boys,” she explained, “so he probably won’t be back until after nine or so.”

“Would you know where that night takes place?”

“Different places, I guess. But he’s still at work if you want to try him there. I don’t think they get off until five-thirty or six.”

She sure knew a lot about Starsky’s schedule, Hutch noticed. “I guess you two are friends.”

She shyly smiled, as if caught in a personal moment, and she also hesitated before answering, as if she carefully chose her words. “Yeah, we’re friends. Good friends.” She left it at that and answered Hutch’s next question before he could ask it. “They’re building a few houses over by Shady Grove Middle School. If you hurry, you might catch him there—or you could leave me a number where he can reach you and I’ll let him know you stopped by?”

Hutch liked her first idea better. “I’m hoping to make it a surprise,” he said; maybe she’d keep his secret. “Point me in the direction of the school and, if I don’t see him there, I’ll come back here after nine.”

“Sweetwater to Muncaster Mill Road, left on Shady Grove, but that’s all I know. The school is right in that area. Maybe follow the sound of hammers?” she joked.

He thanked her for the information, told her he hoped to see her around, and then quickly left the neighborhood, following her directions, and ended up—as expected—in Shady Grove. He even rolled down his window so he could hear hammering, just in case that was sound advice, too. The trip from Starsky’s house to the school was only about ten minutes, but it took Hutch nearly twice as long to find the housing development, and even then it was by accident. He turned a corner and there it was on his left: a small one—maybe half a dozen houses under construction—across the street from a row of long lived-in properties.

Work trucks and an office trailer were parked at the curb of the new subdivision; Hutch pulled up behind a parked pickup along the sidewalk to his right and killed the engine. That’s when he heard the hammers. From what he could see across the street, there were maybe a dozen men on the grounds, a couple up on a roof, and a few in conversation in one driveway.

Was Hutch to believe he was finally this close to Starsky? All of the facts seemed to point in that direction, despite how weak some of them may have been; i.e., word-of-mouth and gut instinct. But they all brought him to that moment in time and to that very place: The truck sale. The license plate match to a truck on Sweetwater Drive. The alias Starsky had been living under. All those area codes and pay phones that narrowed it down; Starsky’s confirmed calls to his mother on Fridays at 6 p.m., and most of them easily in reach from Maryland. The hardware store owner’s casual observations. Kayla’s inside information and the directions she gave Hutch that put him on that street.

Were one of those men in the housing development his beloved partner? Or was Hutch simply setting himself up for another disappointment? He realized he was terrified: of being let down again, but more than that: he was afraid of being rejected again, that time to his face. Starsky might very well not be pleased to see him. Had Hutch done the right thing? Should he rethink it?

He noticed in his stall that the hammering had ended. The street had returned to its usual quiet self, so much that Hutch was aware of the sound of his own breathing—heavy and anxious. What was his next step anyway?

It was probably to get out of the car, walk across the street, and root among the half-finished houses—welcomed or not—for a man he’d been searching nearly a year for, to find the person who meant more to him than anything ever had or ever would, to confront his wrongdoing head on in what he’d spent every day yearning for since that terrible Sunday, September 23, 1979.

But Hutch didn’t get that chance to get out of the car. He wasn’t given the opportunity to do what his courage expected him to do. He didn’t have to guess, didn’t have to wonder, didn’t have to decide what his next move was in that moment because, for the first time in eleven months and two weeks, he was left feeling absolutely helpless and physically paralyzed when the man he’d been looking for for so long a time suddenly emerged by himself from the construction site—dressed in worn jeans, a soiled, short-sleeved dark blue tee-shirt, and leather work boots—and walked across the street to a house on its opposite side.

All Hutch could do in that moment was simply sit back hard against the car seat and lay his eyes on David Starsky.

* * *

CHAPTER 2: ON THE EDGE

“Do you have a better idea?”

Starsky had heard that question more times than he cared to have heard it over the past couple of days and he finally pushed back. “I keep telling you what I think, but you’re not listening or you just don’t give a shit about what I think.”

“C’mon, Starsk. Don’t be mean.”

They were both seated that Tuesday night across from each other in a booth beside the window at a pizza parlor having yet another useless argument about the situation. It wasn’t that Starsky didn’t appreciate Hutch’s dilemma; he simply hated Hutch’s solution. It made no sense to him.

“Your ideas aren’t practical,” Hutch told him. There was a fire burning in Hutch’s blue eyes and he was visibly frustrated—as if Starsky was the problem. “Tell me something that works for everybody and I’ll hear you out.”

“You’re not listening,” Starsky complained, emphasizing each word. They had finished their shared medium-sized pizza and drank their one-and-only beers, and somehow the conversation evolved yet again into an argument instead of a discussion. Starsky was both impatient and fed-up. “Or maybe it’s that you’re not hearing yourself,” he growled. “You can’t possibly want things to be this way.”

“It’s not about what I want,” Hutch argued, meeting Starsky’s stare with one of his own, and controlling his voice so it wouldn’t be heard beyond their booth. “How many times do I need to tell you that I have to think long-term now?”

“Except you’re not thinking far enough,” Starsky debated him. He pushed his empty glass away as if it would take the knot in his stomach with it, but it didn’t. “You accuse me of not being practical, but you’re the one creating a situation that can only go from bad to worse.”

“How do you figure that?”

“Because it’s not rational … I mean, it isn’t … survivable. It’s not legit.”

“You’re afraid we’ll get caught?”

“I don’t care if we get caught. I for one don’t want to live in hiding the rest of my life.”

Hutch broke eye contact and silently looked out the window.

He was obviously avoiding Starsky’s perspective on things, which only angered Starsky further, so Starsky purposefully used words to provoke him into a new way of thinking. “Maybe I don’t mean as much to you as I thought I did.”

“Don’t say shit like that,” Hutch snapped, abruptly looking back at him. “You know that’s not true.” Despite standing his ground, Starsky couldn’t help but feel that Hutch wasn’t being truthful with himself.

“I honestly don’t know anymore where I stand with you,” Starsky said, pressing Hutch as best he could. “All I do know is that we had plans—and then she comes into the picture and those plans no longer seem to matter to you.”

“Life got in the way.”

“You’re letting it.”

“I know what you want me to do, Starsk, but I can’t tell her something like that.”

“You mean you won’t tell her.”

“I know her well enough to know she’d make my life a living hell if she knew about you and me.”

“So that’s it then?” Starsky asked, incredulously. “She moves into our house, into our bed, and we’re the ones who have to find the time to be with each other—because you’re afraid of what she might say or do?”

“She’ll go grocery shopping,” Hutch predicted, outlining those times he and Starsky could be intimate without the worry of being discovered. “She’ll visit her girlfriends. She’ll take Lamaze classes. She’ll wheel the baby around the block and stop to show it off to the neighbors, buying us time. Maybe she’ll visit her parents for a weekend. Then there’s pre-school and—”

“Jesus, Hutch, are you hearing yourself?”

“What am I missing?” Hutch flippantly asked. “It’s not like she’ll be there every minute of every day; we’ll find plenty of time to fool around.”

“That’s your plan? to steal whatever moments we can? It doesn’t matter to you that there’ll be times I want to just be with you, but I’d have to wait until the coast is clear?”

“I can sneak into your room in the middle of the night.”

“You’re insulting me,” Starsky said, feeling a new wave of anger sweep through him.

“I’m compromising.”

“Reducing what we have to ‘fooling around’ isn’t the compromise you think it is, asshole.” Starsky was obviously feeling rage, too. He didn’t know any other way to defend himself against Hutch’s cruelty.

“You don’t have to call me names, Starsky. I’m doing the best I can.”

“So tell me how else it works, Hutch. You both snuggle on the sofa while we all watch a TV movie? and I sit in a chair like some uninvited guest that she’s hoping will leave soon—and there’s me wishing I could be the one with you?”

They were back to Square One. Starsky could see it in Hutch’s uncompromising posture; he’d go silent when he didn’t have a sound comeback or anything different to say.

Starsky briefly dropped his face in his hands and drew a long breath. “There’s only one way out of this.” He looked at Hutch. “How can you not see that?”

“I can’t tell her, Starsk,” Hutch finally said—repeating himself—“and if I can’t tell her, I have no choice but to keep it from her by every means possible.”

Hutch had also, once again, completely dismissed Starsky’s feelings—as if Starsky was no longer a part of Hutch’s private life.

Hutch’s solution also lent itself to a subject that Starsky hadn’t broached before, but Starsky was losing a battle—perhaps the war—so he couldn’t not ask the question. “Will you be having sex with her, too? Is that in your plan?”

“I’ll fake impotence,” Hutch said with a huff.

“You know you can’t get away with faking it forever—and, besides, that doesn’t answer my question.”

Hutch briefly glared at him before he looked out the window and said nothing. But Starsky wouldn’t let him avoid the answer that time; Starsky’s silence pushed Hutch into a place he apparently didn’t want to go, forcing Hutch to quietly say, “I’ll be married to her”; he allowed the rest of his answer to Starsky’s question be self-evident.

Starsky sat back, braced against the table, and tried to keep his hurt from rising to the surface and showing itself. He didn’t want to give Hutch the satisfaction of knowing how deeply wounded he’d just become; Hutch was continually dismissing him so why should Starsky let on just how vulnerable and outcast he was feeling?

“You can’t be serious,” he eventually said, lowering his voice. “You’re going to marry her and have a kid with her; that’s one thing—and I’m not saying I like that idea either, but I can understand it. But you having sex with her is a bridge too far.”

“She’ll expect it now and then, Starsk, and we’ll be married. At some point, I’ll have to act like it.”

“It sounds like sex with her is something you want.”

“I’m just trying to get through the best way I know how.”

“For fuck’s sake, Hutch, you can’t really be bullshitting me like this. You’re treating me as if I’m the enemy and what I want doesn’t count.”

“You’re not the enemy,” Hutch told him with conviction, but he didn’t address Starsky’s deeper concerns.

“I feel like I am.”

“Honestly, Starsk, do you have a better idea?”

That question again.

“I’ve told you a thousand times what we need to do,” Starsky implored him. “You have to come clean.”

“Tell me how that makes sense.”

“It’s the only way it will work in the long run.”

“Not if I lose my rights. You’re not factoring those into the equation.”

“All I know, Hutch, is that you need to tell her about us—or I can tell her if you don’t have the guts—and you tell her it’s our house, it’s our bed, it’s our life together.”

“I’m responsible for what’s happening to her.”

“That’s why you tell her that she can have all the rooms in the house she wants—all but ours. She can either live with us in our house or not live there, and she can let us take care of her and the baby or not.”

“She won’t see it that way.”

“But you and I are the couple, Hutch, not you and her, aren’t we? The choice is hers; she takes what we’re offering or she doesn’t. We will have done our part.”

“She’ll cut me off,” Hutch swore. “I know her. I’ll lose the rights to my kid. I know that’s hard for you to hear, Starsk. I know we didn’t plan on this, and maybe you think I shouldn’t be having fatherly thoughts so early on, but how can I not plan for that far down the road?”

“What about me and what I want?”

“I know you think I’m taking sides and putting you in Second Place; I’m sorry it seems that way—”

“It is that way.”

“What if the tables were turned, huh? You’d really give up your own kid for us? Is that the kind of man you are, partner? the kind of man you think I am?” Hutch sounded as angry as he looked.

“I’m not asking you to give up the kid,” Starsky reminded him, frustrated to hear Hutch would ever think that’s what he was suggesting.

“If I tell her,” Hutch explained, “it’s a guaranteed strike against me.”

“She can’t stop you from seeing—”

“In a court of law, she very well could. It wasn’t that long ago when you believed I couldn’t be ‘that sophisticated’ when it came to ‘a man preferring another man’—and she’s a deeply religious woman.”

“Not by my religion.”

“Maybe things will change as life goes on—”

“I don’t want to live the life you’re laying out for us,” Starsky adamantly said; he was sure of that much. “I don’t want to put us on hold—especially for a time that may never come. You think it’s hard to tell her now; imagine months, years down the road after she’s long been your wife and—”

“I don’t know what else to do, Starsky,” Hutch replied, rubbing his face. He exhaled, sounding as frustrated and angry as Starsky felt, not just tired. Without looking at Starsky, and from behind his hands, he solemnly added, “You want the world to know something I don’t want the world to know.”

“What’s the matter with you? Why do you give a damn what anyone knows? Do you still love me?”

Hutch dropped his hands and angrily stared at Starsky. “You know I do.”

“Then you’re ashamed of us.”

“I’m not.”

“You’re embarrassed.”

“I’m not that, either.”

“You don’t know how she’ll react until she does.”

“I have a pretty good idea and I’m not willing to risk it.”

“You’re a coward then,” Starsky said, accusingly.

“What I am is in between a rock and a hard place. I don’t understand why you can’t see that.”

Starsky was pulling out all the stops. “You had no trouble jumping into bed with Alec Henley.”

“He invited us, together. You agreed or I wouldn’t have done it. By your definition, he’s ‘sophisticated’ when it comes to men preferring men, and we all went into it knowing it was a highly private affair. You can’t make this comparison.”

Starsky was out for the fight of his life and yet he already knew his arguments were lost ones. What could he possibly say to Hutch that he hadn’t already said over the course of the past couple of days to make him see the light and change his mind?

“You’ll be living a life of lies,” he told Hutch, trying again to reason his way forward and feeling more desperate by the minute. “You’ll be having an affair behind her back with the guy who lives down the hall. You’ll be pretending to be happily married while you’re in love with someone else.”

Hutch didn’t say anything.

“Or maybe you love me, but you aren’t in love with me anymore.”

Hutch squinted at Starsky as he seemed to repress his deeper emotions. “I will forever be in love with you. That’s one thing that will never change.”

“Then think this through, will ya? There’ll be jealousy—and not just mine—even if she doesn’t know about us. She’ll get tired of your buddy living with your family. I don’t want to be Uncle Dave who’s someday outlived his welcome. I don’t want to pretend I’m just some innocent bystander.”

“She knows it’s our house.”

“There’ll be frustration because we can’t be together when we want to be. I don’t want to be your mistress.”

“You matter more to me than anyone else.”

“That’s not true. You’re willing to have sex with someone else so you and she can keep up the appearances of Mr. and Mrs. Hutchinson.”

“Only on paper—”

“—and in bed. Hear me out, Hutch: I can’t handle you having sex with someone else—and not just because it would be in our bed while I’m down the hall alone in the dark in mine, but because I love you, goddamnit. I want you all to myself. I’m greedy that way.”

Hutch stared at the table, lost in his own thoughts. He inhaled a long and barely audible breath, wrung his hands, but said nothing.

“Is that what you want for us?” Starsky asked, a cry in his voice. “Is that what you want for me—to need you and you’re taking care of someone else instead?”

“I don’t want any of this,” Hutch admitted, looking back up at him, “and I didn’t ask for this any more than you did, but here we are.”

There was no ‘we’ in Starsky’s mind in that moment. He’d again laid out every reasonable option they could use to turn the situation around, but Hutch still wasn’t budging. Hutch was so blinded by his duty or his guilt or his fears that he couldn’t possibly know what he was doing, but it was too much for Starsky to withstand.

He could wait for Hutch to come to his senses, but Starsky’s heart was already breaking. Hutch didn’t want what Starsky wanted enough to risk having it; Hutch was so afraid of what she would think that he wouldn’t let himself consider what mattered most to himself and to his partner—or, as Starsky was quickly concluding, Hutch couldn’t prioritize what mattered most to Starsky.

“Here we are,” Starsky echoed. He broke from the connection he had with Hutch’s eyes and dropped his gaze to the empty pizza pan to stare into exactly where that ‘here’ was—realizing it wasn’t anywhere near to what he wanted. Or needed.

Hutch was choosing her feelings and his fear of the unknown over his relationship with Starsky. There was a time when Starsky believed Hutch would lay down his life for his partner, but Starsky suddenly no longer felt that way. They had been arguing this point for two days and no change in sight. Hutch didn’t see him, couldn’t hear him, wouldn’t take his side.

Starsky lifted his gaze. He felt spent and defeated. How was it possible that the man who had such beautiful blue eyes, the perfect face, translucent blond hair, who was well-muscled, formidable, kind and smart—and who couldn’t have been a better lover, friend, and partner for the past decade—suddenly be so far out of Starsky’s reach?

Hutch noticed the scrutiny. “What are you looking at?”

“The most beautiful man in the world,” Starsky replied after finding his voice, and speaking truth, but then sadly added, “I’m looking at the person I’ve loved and wanted more than anyone else in the whole world and now he happens to be the man who is destroying my life.”

Hutch momentarily closed his eyes to absorb the blow. When he opened them, he looked into Starsky’s, and quietly said, “Oh, Starsk, c’mon, why do you have to be so mean?”

“I’m just calling it like I see it.”

“Hey. Really. We’ll get used to a new way of being together. It’s just the transition that’s going to be hard.”

Starsky hit the roadblock and barely kept his emotional balance. He protected himself with a shrug, and dropped his chin in a nod. “Okay,” he quietly said, biting his lip as he surrendered. He was so close to losing his silent battle with an audible sob that he needed to end the fight before he openly sobbed in a public place.

“Okay?” Hutch cautiously asked, as if they’d finally come to an understanding.

That Hutch couldn’t see the truth staring him squarely in the face was pain on top of pain, so Starsky lied. He was on his own.

“Yeah,” he said. “Okay.”

He had just lost Hutch.

* * *

“Aren’t you coming up?”

Starsky forced a smile. “I have to get a jump on packing. We’ve only got four days to be ready for the moving van.”

“Five days,” Hutch corrected him. “We pick the van up on Monday.”

“Four, five—the point is: not much time.”

“I thought we’d help each other pack,” Hutch explained, “first at your place, then at mine. It might go faster that way.”

Starsky pretended to disagree, but really he wanted to be alone. “If I know us, we’ll spend more time shootin’ the breeze than boxing shit up. I think it’ll go faster to do our small stuff separately. Besides, I’ve got books and records—and a whole lot of other things—I want to concentrate on dumping or keeping.”

“And I’d just be a distraction—or in the way, huh?”

“Well, not in a bad way, but probably.”

Hutch still didn’t leave the car. They had just arrived from the pizza parlor that night and were parked along the curb outside Venice Place—where he and Hutch had been living together since Starsky was released from physical therapy following the shooting.

“Maybe come up for a goodnight kiss?” Hutch coaxed him, looking over at Starsky with palpable hope in his soft voice; light from a nearby street lamp reflected in his blue eyes and made them shine. They were in public at that moment, so even stealing a kiss while pedestrians roamed the street was risky, and Hutch obviously knew it, too.

“A kiss will lead to blowing each other,” Starsky insisted, ignoring his sudden desire to have that very thing, “and then that leads to me spending the night, and there goes my early morning packing plan.” He shrugged to convey his helplessness and disappointment, most of which was insincere.

“We can skip breakfast,” Hutch suggested, placing his hand on Starsky’s thigh to remind Starsky of his intimate touch. “That would save you some time.”

“Get out of the car, Hutch, before I change my mind,” Starsky replied, pushing Hutch’s hand off of him. “Losing ground is only going to put me in a bad mood tomorrow. Let’s get this packing thing out of the way and then we can play house.”

Hutch squinted at him for a moment, as if trying to figure out whether Starsky was being honest about his reasons for not coming up to the apartment for a goodnight kiss. He must have decided Starsky was being truthful because Hutch sighed and opened the car door. “Okay,” he reluctantly said, “I’ll see you in the morning.”

“Not if I see you first,” Starsky joked, faking a friendly laugh.

Hutch got out of the car into the cool night air, closed its door, and then turned back to lean in the opened window. He made determined eye contact with Starsky as he tried again. “You know this’ll be the first time we haven’t spent the night together since this personal relationship between us began, right?”

Starsky forced another smile, pretending to be nonchalant about what he was about to say and, mocking playfulness, replied, “We may as well start getting used to that.”

Hutch’s neutral expression turned sharply sober. “You’re not still mad at me, are you?”

“Just trying to keep my eyes on the prize, Buddy Boy. I have to get a jump on packing, even if it means sacrificing in the short run, know what I mean?”

“Yeah, I guess so,” Hutch said in a low voice, straightening. He tapped the top of the door as if to say he wouldn’t push Starsky any further, and added, “Good night, partner.”

“Good night there, Romeo,” Starsky replied, easing his foot onto the accelerator and pulling away from the curb. He fought the temptation to look in the rearview mirror and see Hutch on the sidewalk; the sight of the man he was leaving behind would only break him down further.

Still, he no sooner drove several blocks from Venice Place before he turned a sharp right onto a side street, pulled to the curb and parked the car—to let out his breath. Tears came to his eyes and the burning pain pressed hard against his heart.

“What are you doing to us, Hutch?” he said aloud, his voice breaking on his words. “What the fuck is the matter with you?”

Hutch had been such a reasonable man, but was now nonsensical. He used to make Starsky feel all-important, most wanted, sexually desired, and needed. A yet-unborn child had derailed him. Perhaps Starsky wasn’t being the understanding person Hutch kept hoping from him. Maybe Starsky would feel exactly how Hutch was feeling if those proverbial tables were turned.

But it didn’t matter. None of it changed the cold, hard facts: Starsky had been relegated to a back burner. How he felt, what he wanted, all he needed, were no longer priorities in Hutch’s life. Hutch had long ago left him.

* * *

“Hey,” Starsky cheerfully said, greeting Hutch after Hutch answered the phone and said hello.

“Hey, yourself,” Hutch replied as friendly. “How are ya, partner?”

“I have that dentist appointment I was telling you about,” Starsky reminded him, “so maybe we catch up after lunch?” He’d purposefully chosen the 9 a.m. hour to return the message Hutch had left on his answering machine a couple of hours earlier, so he could blow up half a day.

On the recording, Hutch suggested they meet at a mid-point diner between their apartments for breakfast to figure out the next steps in their ‘moving adventure.’

“I have to be at the dentist at 10:30,” Starsky told him, as if it were fact, “so it’s going to be a while.” It was a lie, of course; there was no appointment.

Starsky didn’t want to avoid Hutch so much as he wanted to be alone with his thoughts and feelings. He felt out-of-sorts, overly emotional, and unusually confused about nearly everything in his life. The longer he could keep Hutch at bay, the sooner he might be able to make sense of things.

“I’m going to buy packing tape, get a bunch of newspapers, and take some things to the dump,” he said, fleshing out his lie. “I think this move is giving me the chance to unload a lot of shit I don’t need.”

“We can get packing tape and newspapers and go to the dump together,” Hutch offered. He sounded uncharacteristically careful, as if he suspected—or even expected—a rejection, or maybe that was just Starsky’s assessment.

“There’s a K-Mart near the dentist,” Starsky told him, as if he knew that for a fact, too, “so it’ll be faster for me to stop by there on the way back. How’s your packing coming along?” He had quickly changed the subject to avoid getting in deeper over the nonexistent dump run, and pretended to be interested in Hutch’s progress—but he wasn’t that, either.

“It’s going okay,” Hutch said. “Maybe I should throw out some stuff, too. She’ll probably redecorate, anyway, so there’s no point in being attached to things,” he added with a sad laugh. “I guess this move is going to be different. It’s kind of like starting over, huh?”

‘Starting over’ hit Starsky in a way he didn’t expect. Hutch was beginning a new life—wife and child—while Starsky was losing serious ground in his own. Maybe Hutch had a point: but wasn’t it fair that they both begin again?

“Yeah,” Starsky said, slowly, feeling an epiphany overtake him, “it is like starting over. That’s a good way to look at it.”

“Great,” Hutch said, sounding satisfied. “Okay, then, call me when you’re ready to meet somewhere or we can meet at the house. We could take some of our unpackable things over in the cars sooner than later, don’t you think?”

“Yeah,” Starsky said again, but inwardly not committing. “I’ll let you know when I’m back.” He said goodbye to Hutch and set the receiver in its cradle.

Starsky hadn’t filled a single box, despite telling Hutch the previous night that he needed to get a jump on packing his things. Instead, he’d returned home to an emptiness that kept him from being motivated about anything.

A couple of beers later and some mindless television, and he was soon asleep on the sofa, still dressed, including his shoes, until the next morning. His sleep was haunted by weird dreams, none of which he could remember, but he woke with a persistent sense of doom.

He showered and changed clothes, made breakfast, tried to read the morning paper—but couldn’t concentrate—stared out the window for a while, and then ignored Hutch’s incoming call, allowing his answering machine to record a message instead.

A half hour after finally talking to Hutch, his mind kept returning to Hutch’s comment about starting life over. Maybe that’s what Starsky should do: get rid of a lot of things he no longer needed and go forward into his new life without any expectations.

As he looked around the living room, he imagined that he could unload just about everything in his possession—with the exception of his clothes, his books and records, his movies and his car models, his personal pictures, and a few sentimental items from family and friends. But a lot of those things were at Venice Place. Almost everything Starsky had left behind in his own apartment when he moved into Hutch’s could easily be disposed of—just about all of it.

On a second thought, Starsky might like to keep his wicker chair. A painting or two. His remaining clothes. Suppose he stayed in his apartment and didn’t move into the house? It would make everything simpler, and he would have a refuge from the private pain of being Hutch’s secret lover. On yet another thought, as the hurt suddenly welled up in him even then, Starsky realized he couldn’t play that role; he couldn’t be Hutch’s sideline.

But where would Starsky go if he didn’t move into the house with the soon-to-be married Hutchinsons? If his apartment had already been rented to a new tenant, he could proceed as planned: to have everything boxed up and moved out—perhaps into storage—and then find someplace else to live. In that way, he would be starting his life over, too.

But that plan didn’t change the bigger picture: Hutch had already left the relationship they’d built together; all that trust and love, loyalty and desire, the work they’d done as a formidable team, the cases they’d solved and the bad guys they’d taken off the streets, the harrowing experiences and the personal history between them—all gone the moment a bump in the road arrived in their lives.

There was no way Starsky would survive the insult, let alone the loss. So maybe he should just pack and go. Leave the city.

That thought woke him up and his heart raced. He startled himself. His next thoughts came faster still: he would need a place to leave the city to. Back to New York? Doing so would require the means to relocate his possessions. Hire a moving company? No. That would be traceable—and Starsky suddenly didn’t want to be tracked. A small trailer then—and a way to pull it. Dump the car. It would only remind him of what he had and what he’d lost anyway. Buy a truck instead. Something different for his new life.

He picked up the newspaper from the coffee table and sorted through its sections to the classified ads. He then searched the columns for the TRUCKS heading and read through the listings until he came to a vehicle that caught his eye.

“1979 Dodge Power Wagon. Almost new. Red with black striping…”

* * *

“You didn’t go to the dump without me, did ya?”

“I didn’t go at all,” Starsky confessed. “Some of the shit I want to unload won’t fit in the car, so I’ll wait until we can use the van or we hire someone to take stuff to the dump for us.”

“That might not be a bad idea,” Hutch said, considering it.

They met at a diner closer to Venice Place than to Starsky’s apartment, which Starsky knew would ease whatever concerns Hutch may have been developing about Starsky’s long absences.

During his ‘dental appointment,’ Starsky called the truck seller from a nearby pay phone for details and directions, and then withdrew $3500 in cash from his local bank account. He then drove to the Los Angeles International Airport and parked the Torino in one of its long-term lots.

From there, he hired a cab outside the TWA terminal to take him to Studio City where he bought the relatively new truck under the alias, ‘Dane Skyler,’ having changed one letter from his abbreviated first name and borrowing the last name from an alias he’d once used undercover.

He returned to the airport to swap out the vehicles—leaving the truck in its parking lot—and then drove the car to his apartment, pretending to have been so distracted by his packing task that he forgot to let Hutch know he’d arrived back home. Hutch had left one message on the machine while Starsky was driving away from the airport, asking Starsky to call him, and Starsky connected with him half an hour later upon his return.

Starsky quickly packed up loose items, lots of little ones, to give the appearance that he’d filled numerous boxes and really had been busy at home during that time—just in case Hutch should happen to stop by, unannounced. But he didn’t. Maybe Starsky was just being paranoid.

Now at the diner, Starsky had to keep from telling Hutch about his new truck. He had decided to hide plans of his departure from everyone, but he didn’t trust himself, either. A big part of him wanted Hutch to know he was leaving, but on second thought, Starsky couldn’t figure out why that mattered; it wouldn’t change anything.

While they waited at the table for their meals—Starsky nursing a root beer and Hutch a beer—they finally left off the small talk and got around to discussing the move logistics.

“I packed a lot today,” Hutch proudly said, but appearing tired, “and I even put some of your things into boxes to help you out—video tapes and books, stuff like that.”

Starsky thanked him for the effort. “I mostly went through what was left of my clothes,” he added, “deciding which ones to give to charity, which ones to keep.”

“Ah, charity,” Hutch said, sounding grateful for the idea. “I think that might be where we take kitchenware, huh? I mean, how many forks do three people need?”

Starsky did his best not to let those kinds of casual comments show how much they hurt him. He agreed with Hutch instead, that they should limit the number of kitchen utensils to a reasonable amount, but in the end, Starsky didn’t care about those details: he planned to give everything that didn’t have sentimental value to charity.

“The plan,” Hutch outlined for them, “is that we move into the house first so we can help her with the big things she has; maybe we unload our stuff from the van on Monday and then give ourselves a day or two to organize it all before we add hers to the mix.”

Starsky nodded as if he thought it was another good idea. “I might keep my couch,” he lied. “I can set up a mini-living room in one of my hallway rooms for when, you know, you lovebirds want to be alone and I plan to watch a horror movie.”

Hutch squinted at him; it was obvious that he wasn’t sure Starsky was being sarcastic or genuinely okay with the situation. Starsky didn’t want to show his hand, either, so he regretted his attempt to slap back. He quickly changed the subject to keep Hutch from finding out which was which.

“It’ll be kind of neat to have my own apartment inside the house,” he pretended to joke. “I might even punch a door through a wall in the end bedroom that goes out to the yard for a private entrance kind of thing.”

Starsky failed. His superficial ruse was just as suspicious; he could tell by how nonreactive Hutch had become—so he tried again. “I was thinking we might want to keep two refrigerators—it doesn’t matter which two—so we can have one in the garage for overflow. What do you think, hm?”

Hutch nodded, as if he was okay with that idea, but his mind was somewhere else.

Whatever it was that he was thinking about got disrupted when the waitress arrived with their meals. Starsky used the moment to talk about food instead and how hungry the day had made him. They began to eat right away, Hutch first salting his food, and not saying much.

Eventually, and maybe because Starsky wasn’t talking, either, Hutch finally asked, “Are you sleeping with me tonight?” He avoided eye contact until he noticed that Starsky hadn’t responded, and then he looked up at him while he ate. “We should take advantage of the times we’re really alone,” he suggested.

“I had these weird dreams last night,” Starsky complained, “and I didn’t sleep so well. I’m tired and have lots to do.”

They ate in silence for a while, neither looking at the other for some time. Starsky could feel the tension between them, and assumed Hutch wasn’t buying his excuses; what man wouldn’t want sure-thing sex? How was Starsky going to avoid it for the next four nights?

“We both have lots to do,” Hutch said, breaking into the silence between them. “I still think we should pack up your place first and mine next. That’s another way we can take care of each other, no?”

“Don’t think I don’t hear you, Hutch. I miss it, too, but I’d like to put a dent in my packing and determining what-to-do-with-what without all the distractions, know what I mean?”

“Maybe you had weird dreams and didn’t sleep so well because you weren’t with me. Did you ever think of that?”

Starsky chuckled, but sadly, more sad than he let on, and barely tasting his food. “Oh, believe me, it crossed my mind.”

“So, you’ll sleep better and have more energy, think clearer, and be better fed. How can you beat that?”

“I don’t know about that ‘more energy’ part,” Starsky replied with a light laugh, implying that sex would actually drain him. “But how about this … we go to our separate corners tonight … eat breakfast on our own … and then go out to Levitz together.”

“Levitz?”

“Furniture store. There’s one in Culver City.”

“Oh, that place.”

“We bought my sofa there.”

“I remember.”

“And we bought my wicker chair—”

“So what are we buying now?”

“A bigger bed.”

Hutch’s expression softened, his blue eyes shined, and he almost smiled. “Okay, partner, that’s a deal: we’ll buy a bigger bed tomorrow.”

Starsky couldn’t seem to help himself. “You’re going to need a bigger bed no matter who’s in it, right, Hutch?”

Hutch dropped his gaze to his plate, slowly ate, and didn’t answer.

* * *

“You prefer the softer one,” Hutch concluded.

“Well, in terms of a mattress, yeah. But in other things, I like it firm, know what I mean?” He winked at Hutch.

They were lying on a bed in a furniture store, fully dressed and facing each other, not nearly as close as they would be if they were alone, but near enough to feel intimate.

Starsky was sure Hutch wanted to touch him; Hutch had that fond and longing look in his soft blue eyes. He probably didn’t suspect Starsky’s truer feelings, but he knew enough to recognize that the situation between them was a difficult one, and that Starsky had been sexually out of touch for at least 24 hours—for the first time in a month.

If Starsky allowed it, he might even feel sorry for Hutch, but mostly he pitied himself. Hutch didn’t have anything new to say—except to note which type of mattress Starsky preferred. He even seemed to smile, underneath his tentativeness, whenever Starsky said anything playful or made an innuendo, perhaps more from relief. Hutch was needing the reassurance, but he wasn’t changing the narrative.

“Are you two boys shopping for a mattress or just taking a nap together?” the male salesman playfully asked, interrupting the lengthy gaze between Starsky and Hutch when he arrived on scene.

Hutch rolled away from Starsky to sit on the edge of the bed. “I think we like this one,” he said, patting the mattress as if to confirm it and not looking at the salesman. “I mean, I think this is the one.”

“We can deliver it today if you buy it within the hour.”

Starsky turned onto his back and stared at the ceiling while he added context. “It’s for the blond,” he explained, trying to sound cheerful as he folded his hands over his belly and quietly let out a sigh. “He’s getting married next weekend.”

“Oh, yeah?” the salesman replied, sounding surprised and maybe even relieved. “Congratulations.”

“Yeah, thanks,” Hutch said in a low voice. “You said one could be delivered today?”

“This afternoon,” the salesman promised. “Follow me to the register, and we’ll get it on its way.”

Hutch pushed off the bed and trailed behind the sales agent to the rear of the store—and he didn’t look back.

Earlier that morning, Starsky hired several day laborers, including housekeeping women, from a K-Mart parking lot. He brought them to his apartment to show them what he wanted done: they were to arrive early Sunday morning and load everything that wasn’t already in boxes into whatever vehicles they could get it all into—and then keep it as part of their compensation. He gave them a downpayment of cash in a gentlemen’s agreement with a promise of more money when the job was done. The catch was that they needed to get it all out of the apartment that day by 11 a.m.

He then let Hutch buy the mattress; it would be Hutch’s in the long run, anyway, so why even offer to pay for half? When they left the store after sealing the deal, Starsky suggested they stop for tacos and drinks, and they ate them outside at a small table, talking mostly about nothing. The mattress ended up being delivered only a half hour after they returned to the house.

Despite Hutch’s attempts to coax Starsky into playing with him on the bed once they’d assembled it, Starsky managed to wiggle his way out of joining him by making a fuss about going to the store for sheets, blanket, and pillows first. He then pretended to fall asleep while they were watching Christopher Reeve’s ‘Superman’ after eating a Chinese takeout dinner standing at the counter in the kitchen. Were there not a wife and a baby in Hutch’s future, or more specifically, if Hutch had taken Starsky’s side on things, Starsky would have joined him on the bed in a heartbeat.

Using more ‘errands to run’ and ‘boxes to pack’ as his excuses the following day, Starsky was able to push Hutch off until that evening. That time, they didn’t turn on the television, but undressed and climbed into bed. Hutch was already excited; Starsky couldn’t help but notice his partner’s emerging erection when he snuggled up against him.

“Did you get a lot done today?” Hutch asked, gently kissing Starsky’s shoulder and pressing his blood-filling penis into Starsky’s bare thigh.

Starsky lay on his back against the pillows at the headboard and heavily sighed, letting down his guard for the first time in several days. “I opened a new bank account,” he admitted, his voice low and reflective. “What a pain in the ass that was. It took time away from my other stuff, too.”

In fact, he opened a new checking account in a national bank, not a local one, and transferred all of his money from the old one to the new one, giving the bank Nick’s home address as his own. But he also took the time to purchase a small trailer, one he could keep locked for his trip across country. He bought both a hitch and wheel locks to secure the trailer, and parked it a couple of blocks over from his apartment at the end of an empty field, but close enough to a house to give the appearance that it belonged there.

“I thought we weren’t going to do that kind of thing—transfer banks and phones,” Hutch noted, “until after the move.”

“I had to go out and get more packing tape,” Starsky lied. He stroked Hutch’s forearm while he spoke, trying to give him some kind of affection without involving sex, and pushing away the sickening thought that he would never be touching the man after the weekend. “So I figured I’d do the bank thing while I was at it.”

“Because packing tape and banking have so much in common,” Hutch dryly noted. He tickled Starsky’s belly to get the reaction he expected and, on cue, Starsky slapped his hand.

“You noticed my fingers,” Hutch joked, “but seem to be ignoring my dick.” When he didn’t get a reaction, he backtracked. “You changed banks and stocked up on packing tape; did I hear you right?” Starsky didn’t even make eye contact, so Hutch pushed him with a playful observation. “That’s a lot to do in one day. Visit a bank. Buy some tape.”

“I got ice cream while I was out, too,” Starsky reminded him, dismissing the barb and not returning it with one of his own, as much as he wanted to. He bought a greeting card with three zebras on the front while he was in the grocery store, along with a medium-sized ice chest—and he picked up a ‘Quit Claim Deed’ at the title company, and had it notarized on the spot.

“Went home, put the ice cream in the freezer, and did some more organizing,” he continued. “I was in such a rush to get here tonight that I almost forgot to bring it with me to the house.”

“The point is that you were productive today,” Hutch said, not knowing just how busy Starsky had been. He rose to his elbow to kiss Starsky’s lips—and Starsky succumbed; when it came to sex—especially sex with Hutch—he was a weak man. Besides, how could he completely avoid the intimacy without raising red flags? Maybe one more sexual experience was in order—for the road.

He especially gave in when he felt Hutch’s wet mouth meet the tip of his engorging penis. His fingers were immediately entangled in Hutch’s hair; he audibly moaned while his breath deepened and accelerated, his belly heaved, and he pushed his pelvis forward to encourage Hutch to take him deeper.

It was otherwise quiet in the house. Just the two of them. Their breaths and moans the only sounds. The soft giggles. Enjoying themselves. Without sneaking around behind anyone’s back. Without the worry of judgement or interruption. The way it was supposed to be. The only way Starsky could withstand it.

He loosened his grip on Hutch’s hair as his erection immediately lost its tumescence. He didn’t open his eyes when Hutch let him go; he wanted Hutch to believe he’d fallen asleep again. The willpower with which Starsky summoned to fake sleeping should have been awarded. It was convincing. In the morning, he would be out of bed again before being solicited for sex, fixing breakfast, telling Hutch he was anxious to finish his purging and packing.

Instead, he cleaned out the Torino and fueled the truck—using the airport as his interim parking garage. He purchased a Glock handgun at a pawn shop. He spent the afternoon writing his resignation and goodbye letters. He didn’t dwell on those things; he was on a mission and kept his focus.

To give the impression he’d been justified in taking all that time to pack his apartment, he used the late afternoon to finish boxing up his possessions at Venice Place and stacked the boxes on ones Hutch had already packed for him and left in a pile near the front door. Little did Hutch know how convenient he’d made things for Starsky.

Saturday night hadn’t been any different—except that Starsky found a more clever way out of engaging intimately with Hutch. He insisted he was actually behind in packing everything at his place and ‘on a roll’ so Hutch should tend to his own duties and leave Starsky to his so they would be on time for the moving van.

But Starsky couldn’t talk Hutch out of spending the evening with him at his apartment, offering to assist, though Starsky was able to relegate Hutch to just watching him pack. Starsky then convinced Hutch to spend the night apart so they could hit the ground running Sunday morning. They could get to the sex they both wanted on Monday night after the move was finished—and Hutch seemed to buy it.

He kissed Starsky good night and prepared to leave the apartment. The kiss was their last one. The pat on the back Hutch gave him was also the last time Hutch would touch him.

“Hey,” Starsky said. He intentionally stopped Hutch in his tracks just as Hutch opened the door to give Hutch one last chance to change his mind. When Hutch turned to face him, Starsky carefully asked, “Is the plan still that you’ll get married, have a kid, and the four of us will live together?”

“I think so,” Hutch said with a shy laugh, as if he was caught off-guard by the question and didn’t have a gentler way to answer it.

“Is she going to sleep in our bed, Hutch?”

Hutch deeply sighed. “Yes.”

“Are you going to tell her about us?”

“No, Starsk—for all the reasons I’ve already told you.”

“Are you sure about this?”

Hutch hung in the doorway. After half a minute, he finally replied with an all-too-repeated question, but that time he didn’t ask it unkindly. “Do you have a better idea?”

They held lingering eye contact. Starsky gave him just a few more moments to consider what he was doing. But when neither of them said anything, Hutch shrugged, grimaced, and then left the apartment, closing the door behind him—leaving Starsky to stare at it in disbelief.

Hutch was officially gone.

Starsky’s feelings were too mixed to have any single one rise to the surface and define him in that moment: he was angry, deeply sad, frustrated, and overwhelmed. Maybe his anger won out in the long run because he focused on his departure more than he did the mortal wound Hutch had inflicted on him.

Early on Sunday morning, Starsky called Hutch to ask if they could meet later for lunch. He figured if he set a lunch date, Hutch wouldn’t ask him to have breakfast and thereby interrupt Starsky’s plans to move out of his apartment before noon.

Starsky’s gamble paid off.

“Good timing, partner,” Hutch told him over the phone. “She wants to come to the house today anyway to help decide what she’s keeping and what she’s not, so why don’t I pick up a pizza and we all meet in our kitchen?” He lightly laughed, maybe a bit sadly, but Starsky wasn’t sure, and then Hutch added, “I guess it will be all right to call it ‘ours’ from now on—for the three of us, I mean—and not be literally correct all the time, don’t you think?”

“It suits me fine,” Starsky told him. He had already signed the ‘Quit Claim Deed’ and sealed it in an envelope. The house was no longer his property; Hutch could call the kitchen whatever he wanted to.

But instead of lunch that day, Starsky met the laborers and the housekeepers at his apartment. He asked them to bring the wicker chair down to the driveway and leave it there, but told them they could take everything else except the boxes he planned to keep. When they finished taking away all of his things in numerous trucks and trailers, he generously paid them, and then drove the Torino to the airport while the place was being cleaned.

There, he parked, emptied, and locked the car, transferring its contents to the nearby parked truck. He then walked to the TWA terminal and hired a cab to take him to the precinct to drop off his badge, the Torino’s keys and title, his resignation letter, and a copy of the house’s ‘Quit Claim Deed.’ All were in a sealed envelope with explicit instructions for the receptionist to give it to Capt. Dobey in the morning. He also turned over his unloaded handgun to Weapons, no questions asked or answered.

After the drop-off, he rode the same cab back to the airport to pick up the Dodge truck, and returned to his neighborhood just after noon-thirty. His first task was to unlock and hitch the small trailer to the truck, and drive it to his apartment; the hires were gone, having done their jobs, so Starsky worked quickly and without witnesses, easily loading the trailer with his boxes and one wicker chair.

When he returned to inside the apartment for the last time, he couldn’t help but feel its sheer emptiness. The day workers had cleaned out every single item—including all but one toilet paper roll in the bathroom. The only other thing they left, as per his instructions, was the telephone, which had no place to be except on the floor.

Starsky set the card he’d bought for Hutch beside it. Inside its envelope was the original ‘Quit Claim Deed’ document, signed and notarized. He had been brief in his goodbye note—and to the point about his reasons for leaving. There was no time for sentimentality. He never did like ‘soapy scenes.’

He kept an eye on his watch; at 1 p.m., he would drive to Venice Place to get the rest of his things. He could be certain by that time that Hutch would have bought the pizza and been well on his way to the new house, allowing Starsky time alone to raid Hutch’s apartment.

The only thing Starsky purposely left behind was his bulky cardigan sweater, which he folded and placed at the foot of Hutch’s bed. Seeing the sweater would only remind him of his days on the L.A. police force working alongside Detective Ken Hutchinson. Better that Hutch had that memory now. Starsky didn’t linger in the room for that reason, either. He didn’t want to remember the lovemaking he’d shared with Hutch on that bed.

Locked and fueled and finished, Starsky headed out of the city sometime after 2:30 P.M., going east on Interstate 10. His plan was to drive the 5.5 hours to Phoenix, but once he left Los Angeles behind, and the great desert opened up before him, the weight of the world on his shoulders over the past few days took its toll, and he only made it as far as Quartzsite, Arizona.

He pulled off the highway into a rest area 3.5 hours after leaving L.A., having stopped only once, and that was to relieve his bladder at a diner in Thousand Palms, not far from Palm Springs. Having taken a break from the drive, he decided to eat a proper meal there instead of the sandwich he’d brought with him and kept in the ice chest. Relatively alone in the desert, he thought it might be wiser to hang on to all of the food and water he could. Besides, a cooked meal was much more appealing—as was the restaurant’s air conditioning.

It was dusk and beginning to cool by the time he arrived in the unincorporated town of Quartzsite, a place on the map that was originally a waterhole from 1863 to the 1880s and later a stage station called Tyson’s Wells. The town itself still had fewer than 1200 residents, and maybe even a motel, but Starsky chose the campground.

After he parked, he busied himself reading about the campsite on a kiosk near the public restrooms, and was intrigued by what he learned: “Quartzsite is a popular recreational vehicle camping area for winter visitors with tourism being the major contributor to its economy, bringing in about 1.5 million people annually to its wares-trading events and celebrations.”

Starsky looked around. Maybe this was where he should rebuild his life. Meet new people every year, hide out from the world, not need much that he didn’t already have in his physical possession. He might pick up a mattress for the truck bed and a camper shell to keep out the sun and the rain. What more did he need besides food and water?

Yards from where he was parked, he noticed a large group of people and dozens of vans, pickup trucks, campers—and more—gathered around a central meeting place. He’d been driving for a few hours, so he decided to walk over and see what the fuss was about. There wasn’t any real trail to reach the campsite and he sometimes stumbled on the desert rock and sage grass, causing him to chuckle to himself that he should probably reconsider living in that area.

Long before he met up with the group, he could hear their laughter and music and, as he approached, saw men and women, and families, dancing and playing. He only hesitated when he passed a welcoming sign that read, “Pride Desert Nomads Get-together 1979.” Apparently, the party was an annual event for gay and lesbian people and their families.

Starsky only paused because he didn’t think he’d be welcome, but couldn’t he be? He’d had sex with a same-sex partner—and would still be having it if his partner hadn’t decided to put the feelings of his wife-to-be before his lover’s.

All of that was beside the point: Starsky was welcomed as soon as he was spied, enthusiastically coaxed into joining the group with open arms. He even stayed a while as the weather further cooled, sitting on the ground with others around a campfire, and drinking beer and sharing conversation; he eventually told his story to a few people—without naming names or divulging jobs or where he was from—and ate some of the food they offered, too. What else did he need besides any of that? He might even find sex right there in the desert if he played his cards right.

But as the evening wore on and the reality of his situation began to fully sink in, he excused himself from his hosts, walked back to the truck in the relative darkness—with barely enough light from the waxing moon to guide the way—and crawled onto the bench seat. Pulling a blanket over himself as the night continued to cool off, he was determined to get some sleep, covering his face in his arms, and hearing nothing but the sound of his own breath and absolute quiet. Not in his entire lifetime had he ever been that alone.

“What have I done?” he whispered into the silence. “Why did you do this to us, Hutch?” he continued, purging his thoughts out loud and weakening under the wave of emotion that overtook him. “Oh, god, Hutch, I’m going to miss you so much.”

He missed Hutch already, even more than he thought he would.

If Starsky let himself imagine Hutch’s experience when Hutch discovered Starsky’s shocking departure, he might feel guilty; he might just turn the truck around. But the question that repeatedly nagged at him and stopped him from returning to Los Angeles was Hutch’s sarcastic: “Do you have a better idea?”

Hutch would marry her and sleep with her and have sex with her and pretend they were the couple—and Starsky would be relegated to Hutch’s private fuck boy. Starsky could never survive that life with Hutch. The pain would be every day forever and was certain to slowly kill him.

This new pain, the one he felt in leaving Hutch, might end someday. That was Starsky’s hope: that with time, he’d move on and find a new life, one that was at least bearable. Hutch would be in his own new life—when the baby was born. Until then, there would be pain and grief and second thoughts, but in the long run of their lives, it was better for everyone that Starsky left when he did—and especially the way he did; what would have been the point of dragging out the inevitable?

He cried for a while, off-and-on; mostly he was exhausted—and not just physically. A week had felt like an eternity and he’d barely escaped it. The planning, the hiding, the lying. But sleep that night was fitful; he was haunted by strange dreams and deep feelings of loss before sleep would temporarily overtake him again.

A sharp rap on the passenger window woke Starsky in the very early morning hours; he dropped his arms from his face, bolted upright, and immediately turned his attention to the person standing outside the truck, expecting to see a park ranger or security guard, but the person was neither.

Whoever it was, he’d walked out to Starsky’s vehicle and trailer in near total darkness; Starsky wasn’t about to just open the window, let alone the door, but he did retrieve the flashlight from the glovebox. “What do you want?” he gruffly asked, raising his voice to be heard through the glass while he shined the light onto the intruder’s face.

“Just wondering if you’d like some company,” the man—perhaps a few years older than Starsky and roughly his size—whimsically answered. “I came out here alone—specifically to see you, sugar plum.” He tried a warm smile to coax Starsky into accommodating him.

Starsky was turned off by the blue eye looking hungrily back at him and the black eye patch covering the other, not just by the stranger’s predatory rudeness. “No thanks,” he said in a firm voice. “Fuck off.” The stranger struck him as more of a stalker than a suitor.

“Ah, c’mon, buddy, give a guy a break, huh? We’re both alone. I’ll suck your dick real good—for free.”

“If you don’t walk away and do it now,” Starsky warned him, “I’ll put a bullet in your head.”

In hindsight, he would come to wish he had.

* * *

“Hey, there, cowboy, where’re you headed?”

Starsky saw the man approaching him before he heard the question—but he knew right away it was the stranger in the black eye patch who’d interrupted his fitful night’s sleep just hours earlier; where the interloper had come from was anyone’s guess. Starsky didn’t see a tent or camper in that direction; the man appeared seemingly out of nowhere.

Starsky was standing in the opened passenger door of his truck and had just finished brushing his teeth, combing his hair, changing his socks, and re-tying his shoes, when he was confronted.

“Did you hear me?” the intruder asked as he drew closer. “Where are you headed, boy?”

“The Atlantic Ocean,” Starsky replied, raising his voice to be heard as he turned away to open the truck’s glovebox.

“That’s a long way from here, sweetheart. Want some company?”

Starsky quickly removed his handgun from the glovebox and faced his uninvited guest. “Maybe you didn’t hear me the first time,” he firmly said, pointing the gun at him. “One step closer and I’ll take your other eye out.”

The trespasser immediately stopped in his tracks and threw his hands into the air. “Hey, c’mon, man, sorry,” he hurriedly said. “I thought you were just tired last night and—”

“I’m not going to tell you again to fuck off.”

The man backed up, enabling Starsky to internally lower his guard, but not his pistol, and to take notice of the way the intruder was dressed, his height, weight, and color of his hair. Starsky was more than just unsettled by the harassment, but he couldn’t put his finger on what else troubled him about the encounter; his was just a gut feeling that the intruder was up to no-good—and not that he was simply looking for sex or a ride.

It was still early morning when Starsky pulled out of the campground and onto Interstate 10, headed east. A couple of miles later, he entered the small town of Quartzsite—a barely noticeable pin on a map that was obviously popular for its fast food restaurants, truck stops, gas stations, souvenir shops, and the weather-worn 10-room Stagecoach Motel that also boasted a sit-down diner right there on Main Street. Starsky pulled off the highway and into its parking lot.

“Our sheriff retired a couple of years ago,” the waitress, an older woman, told him after he slid into a booth at the window and ordered pancakes with a side of scrambled eggs. She poured coffee into his cup. “No one wanted the job after that, I guess,” she added. “Too many weirdos out at the campground.”

“I ran into one myself,” Starsky replied, thanking her for the coffee. “Maybe that’s why this town needs a sheriff.” It was the reason he’d inquired about one the minute he entered the diner.

“Are you applying for the job?” she facetiously asked with a light chuckle. “You wouldn’t have any competition.”

“No, thanks,” Starsky dryly said. He wasn’t interested in law enforcement work; it would bring back too many memories of Hutch. But it did beg the question: what was he going to do with himself? He had enough money still to not worry about an income for a while, so perhaps he should just continue to ride the wave of life and see where it took him—much the way his trip across the country was going.

“I didn’t mean any disrespect,” he continued, “but I think I’d be crazy-bored in this town—no offense to all the weirdos.”

She laughed, but then told him about the sightseeing places in the area. “You’ve got to see the ruins of Fort Tyson before you leave. It was built in the 1850s and is located at the corner of Main Street and Moon Mountain Road. Can’t miss it on your way out if you’re headed east, but be sure to have water with you. It’s going to be another hot day.”

He told her he’d stop by, and she left to place his order. When he looked out the window to the highway, he noticed how many semi-trucks and recreational vehicles passed by; Quartzsite was definitely a stopover town on everyone’s journey to someplace else, including his own.

Starsky also remembered reading about the town’s origins on the campground kiosk, learning that it was originally the site of a stage station sometime in the mid-1800s. The horse-powered stagecoach shuttled passengers between the towns of Ehrenberg and Wickenburg, the latter town’s name sticking in his head because it was the title of an episode from his favorite western television series, ‘Alias Smith and Jones.’ Starsky might want to drive through Wickenburg on his way east, and made a mental note to do so; perhaps he’d even run into the outlaw, Hannibal Heyes.

He did as he promised and stopped to explore the Fort Tyson ruins after he left the diner, the heat be damned, but he also swung by the Hi Jolly Monument, having learned about it at the Fort. The monument was a large stone obelisk that marked the grave of Hi Jolly, a Syrian who’d been brought to the United States in 1856 to drive camels for the U.S. Cavalry. “Over 30 years a faithful aide to the U.S. Government,” the memorial plaque read, in part.

Starsky loved the idea of riding with the Cavalry; he wasn’t too sure about the camels, though—and the brutal desert heat wasn’t attracting him, either.

The drive to Phoenix took a little more than two hours; pulling a trailer, he was restricted to the lowest allowed speed of 55 mph, but he was still able to arrive comfortably around noon in the air-conditioned truck. He stopped at the first pay phone he encountered, this one at a gas station, where he topped off the truck’s fuel tank and refilled his ice chest with ice, to call the Phoenix police department.

“Somebody out there rubbed you the wrong way, huh?” the receiving officer sarcastically asked with a laugh. “That place is full of quacks—fags and other mentally retarded folks—enough to rub any sane person the wrong way. Don’t know why families camp on those grounds. They must not see the warning signs as well as you did. But I wouldn’t waste my time worrying about it. Anyway … who did you say is calling?”

“Just a concerned citizen,” Starsky angrily said as he hung up the receiver. He liked to believe his department wasn’t as callous and dismissive as this one had been. So, on that note, he called LAPD. When he was asked if he wanted to be transferred to a police officer, he told the receptionist that he didn’t have time and could she please take his short statement instead.

He then reported ‘a crazy psycho man’ who was ‘most likely’ in his early 40s, had short, dark, uncombed hair, was roughly five-feet-ten and of slender build, was wearing clean, casual clothes, but dirty shoes, and had an unmistakably injured or missing left eye covered by a black patch; his other eye was blue. No crime had been committed by this individual, but Starsky had a really bad feeling about him, like he was the type to commit a crime, and thought someone should follow up.

He asked her to read his report back to him, pleased that she had written down all of the details he’d given her, so he hung up the line before she could ask for his name, and felt satisfied to have done his part. Little did he know: he’d just sealed his fate. He’d unknowingly dropped the first breadcrumb onto his trail for Hutch to follow.

Breaking a sweat while he stood inside the driver’s door of his truck drinking a cool soda with his U.S. map opened on the seat before him, Starsky decided to treat himself to an air-conditioned restaurant lunch rather than the sandwich he’d brought from L.A. the day before; he’d eat that later when he would most likely be in the middle of nowhere crossing the hot Arizona desert.

He chose an Italian hole-in-the-wall from the directory at the pay phone and then used the map to find the place. It was a beautiful, clear day, albeit hot, so he forced himself to think of his trip as a well-deserved vacation, and not allow ‘leaving Hutch’ to rule his thoughts. Sometimes it worked, but often, it didn’t.

A big plate of spaghetti later with a side salad, a glass of Cabernet, and cheesecake for dessert, and he felt he’d properly treated himself. He had a full tank of gas and a map to guide the way to the East Coast, a place to sleep if he couldn’t find a motel, food and water and enough cash on hand for any emergency, and a means to defend himself on the road from ‘crazy psycho’ men. Such was his new life.

But it was while he was finishing his wine in the corner of the restaurant near the window that he noticed a billboard outside.

“Grand Canyon Helicopter Rides”

He stopped the waitress. “Hey,” he timidly asked, sensing that he was about to embarrass himself, “is … um … the Grand Canyon somewhere around here?” He hadn’t seen any highway signs pointing the way—or he’d missed them.

She lightly laughed. “Funny,” she said, turning to leave, but he stopped her again.

“I’m not from these parts,” he humbly explained. “Born and raised in New York City; living in Los Angeles for the past two decades. I don’t get out much.”

“Yes,” she then said, sobering. “Up the road about three-and-a-half hours.”

“I mean … is that the Grand Canyon—like the one we all learned about as kids—or is it just ‘a’ grand canyon?”

She bit her lip to keep from smiling at him—or bursting out with a laugh. “Yes,” she said again, “it’s the Grand Canyon—the one we all learned about as kids.”

He meekly thanked her and left her to other business while he sat back against his chair and chastised himself. How could he be so dumb? He would bet Hutch knew the Grand Canyon was in Arizona. Hutch had known where Yosemite was, too. Hutch could probably find Yellowstone on a map—blindfolded.

“Next vacation, Starsk,” Hutch had told him when they were lying beside each other in Cook’s Meadow in the Yosemite Valley, “let’s visit the Grand Canyon. It makes this place look like a romp in a city park.”

“I can’t even fathom what you just said,” Starsky managed to say in reply, feeling dumbfounded by the comparison; Yosemite was the most spectacular place he’d ever seen. How could the Grand Canyon top that? “I’d be afraid I’d die from the sheer wow of it.”

Maybe that’s what Starsky should do: drive to the Grand Canyon that hot afternoon—and die.

He learned a few more things from the waitress about the trip to the national park and decided to risk it. He’d have to head north out of the city to Interstate 40 and then backtrack a ways to Highway 64; from there, it was a straight shot north through nothing but wild forests to the iconic canyon. He made a mental note of the ‘Grand Canyon Camper Village’ and its general store about ten minutes south of the park as he passed it, so he at least had a place to overnight already lined up.

$10 in cash allowed him into the park late that afternoon. He drove first to the Welcome Center to learn what he could—historical canyon facts and about the wildlife that called it home, as well as safety tips—and then bought a souvenir hooded sweatshirt in the attached gift shop that read, “GRAND CANYON: EXPLORE THE WILDERNESS”; it featured an artist’s colorful rendering of the canyon inside a large circle.

Starsky thought about buying it in blue, but he had plenty of blue tee-shirts and jackets; he liked the green color, too, but it would only remind him of Hutch, so he ended up with charcoal gray, a more neutral color. He’d been told he looked good dressed in all-black; maybe he would make black—and its shades—his new color for his brand new life.

After asking about where he could best view the canyon, he was directed to Maher Point. “Leave here and go west a ways to the next parking lot you come across,” the male shopkeeper advised him, dropping an informative pamphlet into Starsky’s bag. “This time of year, it’ll be less crowded; hike a little further west from there and you might even get to be alone.”

“I have a fear of heights,” Starsky confessed, laughing nervously at himself. “I don’t know why I thought this was a good idea.”

The clerk smiled at him. “Because you can’t not see this.”

“Yeah,” Starsky replied, imagining it. “I guess I can’t … not.”

He left the shop and then the parking lot, noticing how few cars were in it, and drove toward Maher Point. In a bend in the nearly deserted roadway, he caught a glimpse of the canyon’s rim through the trees. He didn’t realize it at the time, but he was actually seeing the far side of the chasm, some eight miles away.

What would Hutch think of him in that moment? He remembered having a brief conversation about heights when he and Hutch were on the roof of some tall building, having climbed up in order to drop down into the top story through a vent.

“Don’t heights ever bother you?” Starsky had asked, trailing behind Hutch on the wide, flat roof.

“Only when I can’t see down,” Hutch nonchalantly replied, headed with confidence toward a rooftop door.

Only when he couldn’t see down? How did that make sense?

“Sometimes I think there’s something really wrong with the way you think,” Starsky abused him. He emphasized his dismay with a firm voice and a strong finger-point toward Hutch’s head.

“What’s wrong with the way I think?” Hutch innocently wondered—or maybe he baited Starsky.

“Forget it,” Starsky had told him. “I don’t want to think about it.”

He could never wrap his mind around such courage, and yet there he was, about to lay eyes on the Grand Canyon—a gargantuan abyss more than one mile deep, 277 miles long, and up to 18 miles wide. Fifteen minutes later and less than fifty feet from where he parked, locked, and left his truck, Starsky found himself alone in the hot desert sun at the edge of a four-million-year-old cliff a mile high up from its floor.

But he was unexpectedly spellbound, not terrified. He was captivated, awestruck, and overwhelmed; the Canyon fell away before him—one moment it was just a hard rock surface under his feet and a clear blue sky above him, and the next it was as if a gigantic quake had blown past the Richter scale and ripped the earth apart—as if it had emptied the oceans—right there beneath him.

He was too stunned to be anywhere else in that second except in the now. Sheer cliffs of millions-year-old red-colored rock as far as the eye could see stole every thought out of his head and left him with nothing but presence and a measurable stillness.

Tears burned his eyes and blurred the landscape, his legs went weak and buckled, his heart raced and pounded at once, and he dropped to his knees right there—just feet from the edge—and not because he was afraid, but because he’d been overcome by a powerful force.

The Canyon’s timeless magnificence had put everything into perspective—in less time than it took Starsky to take a single breath—and then it knocked two words right out of him.

“Oh, Hutch.”

* * *

Four-and-a-half hours of driving that next day and Starsky arrived in Santa Rosa, New Mexico. He’d taken Highway 64 from the Grand Canyon back to Interstate 40 where he eventually merged onto Interstate 10 toward Dallas, Texas.

His second night sleeping in his truck just south of the Grand Canyon was uneventful—except that he yet again didn’t sleep terribly well. No single reason kept him awake; it was a combination of conflicting thoughts and feelings that persistently leap-frogged through his mind.

It would be more than seven hours of driving had Starsky gone nonstop to the halfway point to Dallas from the Grand Canyon, so he broke up the drive with a stop-over in Albuquerque where he again treated himself to a restaurant meal—and then quickly got back on the road. He’d eaten his L.A. peanut butter-and-jelly sandwich for dinner the night before, along with a bag of potato chips, and finished it with a beer, and for breakfast he downed donuts and coffee that he purchased at the Grand Canyon’s Camper Village General Store.

The drive to Santa Rosa wasn’t eventful, either; with the air conditioner blasting to keep out the desert heat, and a country music station to even out its sound, Starsky made overall good time pulling his small trailer while finding himself entertained by the lyrics to most of the songs—many of them bringing ‘soapy’ tears to his eyes when the words hit too close to home.

When he arrived in Santa Rosa, he backed his trailer up to the first floor motel room he’d reserved, and then walked across the street to a fast food restaurant, buying a couple of hamburgers, some fries, and a coke. Exhausted, he ate the meal on his bed while watching an old western on the small TV, and soon fell fast asleep.

Up early to beat the heat for the first part of his trip, Starsky drove into Dallas—an eight-hour drive—stopping in Amarillo, Texas, for a quick lunch. He’d begun to get the hang of how many hours he could drive before he needed fuel, how to sync his rest stops with his stomach’s needs, and where to find a hotel room in time for his dinner. His newly discovered travel expertise sometimes lent itself to thoughts that he might just live the nomad’s life forever.

After overnighting that Wednesday in a Dallas hotel, the detective in him decided to take time in the morning to visit what he had remembered was the John F. Kennedy historical landmark in Dealey Plaza. Although there wasn’t much to see—and things seemed a lot smaller in person than they did in the iconic Zapruder film and subsequent documentaries—it was a surreal experience to be in the actual place that held so much significance and national heartache.

He spent time visiting the memorial and its obelisk monument, similar to the one for camel driver Jolly in Quartzsite, AZ, and finished his tour with a swing by the Parkland Memorial Hospital just to lay eyes on it; although he was unable to enter the Texas School Book Depository due to construction and from which Lee Harvey Oswald ended an era, Starsky was still able to immerse himself in memories of a bygone time—but also with deeper thoughts of Hutch.

His partner had been very active in social issues as a young man—and was even in the room when Robert Kennedy was murdered—a notation that caused Starsky to begin thinking about life in terms of chapters. The Kennedy Chapter had ended, as had the Martin Luther King and Vietnam chapters; perhaps Starsky’s chapter with Hutch was simply another one of those: it had closed and a new one in Starsky’s life just opened. What kind of excitement would this next chapter bring?

Eager to find out, Starsky was on the road again by mid-morning; a seven-hour drive to Memphis, TN, was ahead of him, and by the time he arrived, he was comfortable with the notion that progress had finally been made—not just in miles, but in time and space, too.

The shock of Starsky’s abrupt departure had already worn off Hutch; the blond was now busy moving his wife-to-be into the house, and they were hanging pictures and arranging furniture; Hutch was obliging all of her wishes about what-went-where and why it should. He would cook and clean for her, pay for groceries, maintain the yard, do all those fatherly and husbandy kinds of things. The happy couple could finally look forward to a family life free from Hutch’s partner—the dark-haired third wheel.

It was Thursday, four full days since Starsky had left him; Hutch had certainly let go—not happily, not without some anger and maybe even some hurt—but a child on the way, a new house to move into, and, most likely, a new partner to break in, and Hutch was preoccupied with his own life to be worried about what Starsky was up to—or even where he was.

Hutch had already learned that Starsky had quit his job and given away his car; he may have somehow discovered that Starsky had left Metro Los Angeles, and probably assumed Starsky had returned to New York City. Hutch must have called Nick and Starsky’s mother by then, looking for him, pretending that things were still cool between himself and his partner, but learning nothing—because Nick and Starsky’s mom didn’t know anything.

Hutch would have gotten nowhere early on in his search—and that was that. What more could he possibly do to find Starsky once he hit those dead ends? Not much.

That’s what Starsky told himself, anyway. But after dining in Memphis, and taking a short city walk that evening to see the downtown outdoor sights, feeling more alone by the minute than he’d ever felt, he retired to his second-floor hotel room with a heavy heart; he had reassessed the situation.

The shock had definitely worn off Hutch, but he was no doubt quite angry. Maybe he was even hurt more than he was mad. Disappointed, for sure. He wouldn’t let Starsky go that easily—because he’d at least want to be the one to throw the last punch, especially for having been played by his partner—so Starsky would have to keep up his guard for a while.

The window air conditioner, kicking on again, woke him in the morning. He rolled to his back on the mattress, nude under a single cotton sheet, two pillows behind his head, and stared at the ceiling for a while, not feeling all that motivated to get on the road any time soon. He’d already mapped his route for the day—a 5.5-hour drive to Hodgenville, KY—to give himself a break from the previous day’s long drive. But despite the short day he planned, he still couldn’t seem to leave the comfort of the soft mattress.

Empty room. There were muffled voices in the hallway; an elevator chime. The hum of the in-room air conditioner. Rush-hour traffic below his window that provoked the occasional irritated horn. All strangers and strange sounds. What city was he in? He couldn’t immediately remember. But what difference did it make anyway?

Emptier bed. He covered his face with his hands as a sudden pain rose up in his heart and he groaned in a failed effort to push back on it. What was he doing? Where the hell was he going? What was the purpose of his escape? He couldn’t stop the irrepressible sobs those elusive answers triggered in him—nor the words they brought forth.

“It’s not supposed to be like this, Hutch,” he angrily cried, wiping the tears from his wet eyes as fast as they spilled. “It was never supposed to be like this.”

He could turn the truck around and drive all those highway miles back into the arms he desperately needed; that was what his heart wanted. But reality dogged him and kept him rooted. He would never escape the cold, hard truth: Hutch didn’t love him as much as Starsky believed he did. Starsky’s entire adult life had been dependent on evidence—and the facts were indisputable:

Hutch would marry on that Saturday at City Hall. He no longer had his best man, but any witness would do. He would then play house and make love with someone else and have a baby, too; if Starsky had stayed, he and Hutch would pretend to just be pals, best friends, police partners, and nothing more.

Hutch didn’t love him, not really, not in that way, not to that degree, the degree to which Starsky loved him. How could he have been so wrong about the man and what they shared together?

“We weren’t supposed to end this way,” he said to no one listening. He couldn’t stop crying that morning. “We weren’t supposed to … end.”

* * *

“Joe Razolli.”

“An Italian name if ever there was one,” Starsky said, firmly shaking the 30-something agent’s hand. “Kind of like ‘Ravioli,’ hm?”

Razolli rolled his dark brown eyes, but smiled; he was of slender build, had close-cut hair, a welcoming demeanor, and a strong voice—plus a suit and tie; the stereotypical FBI agent.

“Dane Skyler,” Starsky said. “Pleasure to meet you.”

“Have a seat,” Razolli offered him, gesturing toward the empty chair in front of a desk as he sat behind it. They were in a small, tidy office on the first floor of the federal building. “I’m sorry we kept you waiting. This was my partner’s task this morning, but he just got called away—and I was slow picking up the slack. I apologize. How may I help you?”

Starsky didn’t care about the wait; he was in no hurry that day. Sights to see, and eat; those were his plans. But he still got right to his point. “Two questions and then I’ll have all I need so I don’t hold you guys up.”

“Shoot,” Razolli replied, immediately frowning at himself with a roll of his eyes for his choice of words before shrugging it off. “Here’s hoping I have the answers.”

“Who qualifies for the Federal Witness Protection Program?”

“In short? A witness—one who has pertinent information about a case and whose testimony could bring serious injury or death to themselves or their loved ones. Did you see something you need to tell us about?”

Starsky didn’t qualify, although he might be creative and desperate enough to devise a reason. “No. Nothing.” He decided to ask his second question just to lay his curiosity to rest, but already expecting the answer. “Does local law enforcement have access to federally protected witnesses?”

Razolli cocked his head, his dark eyes studying Starsky’s overall appearance. “Are you in local law enforcement?”

“Asking for a friend,” Starsky reluctantly said, knowing he sounded unconvincing and the agent wasn’t buying it.

Starsky was dressed in jeans and a blue tee-shirt, red socks and his Adidas, hadn’t shaved; he also hadn’t thought his questions through when he imagined them. What FBI agent in good standing wouldn’t be suspicious? It would be sloppy work if Razolli didn’t question him.

Starsky had dropped down into D.C. the previous evening after a short stay in New York City. He’d driven the 5.5 hours from Memphis, Tennessee, a week ago Friday—through Nashville—to Hodgenville, Kentucky, having already planned a stop to visit Abraham Lincoln landmarks: the President’s boyhood home and its nearby historic park.

It had been a long time since Starsky had visited places with so much lush vegetation: woods and trees and green rolling pastures. He also noticed the numerous churches, brick buildings, and fence-less residential yards that were scattered throughout the mid-west and northeast landscapes.

California was a much newer state, he realized again—and it showed. It didn’t seem as if there was as much history in the West as there was in America’s earliest years. And maybe the desert lifestyle wasn’t in his blood. He rather liked the green. Hutch would like it, too; green was Hutch’s favorite color, after all.

When Starsky reached Hodgenville, a call to his mother was in order that Friday evening after his late lunch in a Denny’s diner. He found a downtown pay phone near the Lincoln Museum, and placed the call, having completely forgotten that his mother was in Miami with his Aunt Rose, house-hunting.

“I’m Kimberly,” the young woman who answered his mother’s phone told him. When she learned who was calling, she informed him of Dorothy’s whereabouts. “I’m her housekeeper,” she further explained. “You may not remember, but we met some years ago when you and your handsome blond friend came out from California for Thanksgiving.”

Handsome blond ‘friend.’ That was the lie Starsky would have had to continue telling if he’d stayed with Hutch under Hutch’s new rules. It was yet another reminder of why Starsky left him.

He also didn’t remember Kimberly, but he pretended otherwise. “You’re family,” he reminded her, speaking as if it were fact.

“Thank you,” Kimberly replied, pleased. “Shirley—our other ‘family’ member,” she added with a playful laugh, “is taking Patches for a walk in the park right now. She should be back in half an hour if you want to call then; she may have more to tell you about your mom’s trip.”

Starsky would never forget his mother’s long-time friend, Shirley; she was like an aunt to him. “I’m sure the girls are having fun.”

“I think they’re coming home tomorrow,” Kimberly said, “but I’m finished here and leaving in five minutes; I haven’t spoken to your mom since before she left, so I don’t have any news for you.”

Starsky didn’t know where he’d be thirty minutes or even an hour from then, but he thanked Kimberly for the information and asked her to say hello to Shirley and Patches just in case they did run into each other when Kimberly left the apartment—not knowing that Hutch was with Shirley and Patches at that very minute. Starsky was briefly on the road again, that time to find a motel room for the night in Hodgenville; had he called his mom’s apartment back as soon as Kimberly had suggested he do, Hutch would have answered the phone.

Starsky wanted to visit the Lincoln Museum, having stumbled across it while he was having lunch at Denny’s, but it had closed for the day, so he planned to stop by in the morning before heading out of town. After another sleepless night—with strange dreams of Hutch as the President of the United States and Starsky as his humble V.P.—he was more than ready to leave the area.

For breakfast, he enjoyed a tasty meal in a local downtown cafe, appreciating the better taste of its pancakes, seasoned potatoes, and fried eggs, and even its coffee, before spending leisurely time inside the Lincoln Museum.

The stroll through a different era made Starsky feel relieved that neither he nor Hutch had ever held such positions of power; between the Kennedy and Lincoln assassinations, the job didn’t seem worth it. At least Starsky’s former employment as a police detective helped to save lives, and not that Starsky ever wanted to be a martyr, but at least his death—had he suffered one—would have been clearly on the side of what was right against all that was truly wrong.

But it was while he was in the Museum that he became equally interested in revisiting the Civil War, supposing that it would be a kind of escape from his real life into both history and fantasy. So he changed his plans that day to spending the night just this side of Huntington, West Virginia, instead of driving into D.C., thereby splitting the 9.5-hour drive—albeit through scenic countryside—from Hodgenville, KY, to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

It was Saturday. While Starsky was on his way to the somewhat nowhere town in West Virginia simply to overnight before his 6-hour drive to Gettysburg on Sunday, Hutch was getting married.

“Moron,” Starsky cussed under his breath. He had no other words, but it was the only one he settled on that kept his anger at bay while he was behind the wheel. Mostly, he focused on the highway and its scenery along the way, listening to music and talk radio, and occasionally stopping at rest areas to stretch his legs, read the kiosks, use the toilets, and otherwise refresh himself before continuing on his journey.

After overnighting in Huntington following a long day’s drive, he hit the road early Sunday morning. But he long-passed signs for the Gettysburg National Military Park by mid-afternoon as he approached the Gettysburg city limits because he had seen a billboard on the highway for COLONIAL VEHICLE STORAGE; he decided to first drop his trailer there.

Gettysburg was only a few hours from New York City, and only slightly longer to D.C., so it would be relatively easy to pick it up whenever he wanted to. It didn’t take long to purchase a trailer spot; he only needed his California Driver’s I.D. and the trailer’s license plate—which still belonged to the original registered owner—to store the trailer on a month-to-month basis, and he gave Nick’s home address and phone number as his own.

Finally free of the trailer, and feeling lighter overall, Starsky drove around town that late afternoon until he stumbled across the impressive Inn at Herr Ridge, once an early 1800s tavern. It quite recently had been renovated into a Bed & Breakfast lodge, retaining its charm of the old building that had originally served as a major stop in the Underground Railroad and, later, as the first Confederate hospital during the Battle of Gettysburg—an irony that wasn’t lost on Starsky.

He was even given Bedroom #3 by the friendly receptionist, a room that had been used for life-saving surgeries during the war, and from which he had panoramic views of the battlefields from his south-facing window. Maybe he should ‘retire’ into America’s original landscapes, buy up some old building, and turn it into a museum; he’d sure have fun spending his life locating historic artifacts.

Before heading out for dinner, he joined a few of the Inn’s mostly older male guests on the rooftop terrace for an even broader and more spectacular view of the area, sharing wine, cheese, and crackers with them, and talking briefly about the Civil War—and what specifically had brought them to Gettysburg; Starsky simply said he happened to be driving home to New York City when he saw billboards that enticed him into the visit. In some ways, his story was true.

After the social get-together, he left the Inn and walked over to a nearby diner, sitting in a booth by a window and watching pedestrians and traffic, wondering what kinds of feelings and thoughts he might experience when he actually visited the battleground park the following day. For the first time in over a week—by one day—Starsky had slept better because his previous hope that a visit to the historic park serving as an escape from his real life paid off.

A hearty homemade breakfast in the morning, served in the dining room along with some of the guests he’d spent time with on the rooftop terrace, and Starsky was out on his own to explore Gettysburg and to immerse himself in all things more than 100 years in the past.

For at least most of Monday, he was riveted and absorbed by everything he learned and every place he visited: first the Gettysburg Museum and Visitor Center, where he bought a Union-blue souvenir hoodie, then a drive by the Seminary Ridge Schmucker House—still showing its 1863 physical damage from cannonball fire—and eventually on to Cemetery Ridge, where he pictured in his mind the strategic details of the July 3 Robert E. Lee-ordered infantry assault known as Pickett’s Charge.

At the Gettysburg National Cemetery, he was again moved by what he’d come to know were some of the most powerful words ever spoken in U.S. history, those from Abraham Lincoln’s forever-famous 1863 Gettysburg Address: “… that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

They were the context into which Starsky spent considerable time sitting alone on a large flat rock on Little Round Top, snugged between its few monuments to the soldiers who’d fought and died there. He couldn’t imagine having to fight to the death with muskets and bayonets; he’d be forever grateful he lived in a time when he had much more modern weapons.

It was there on that rock that Starsky also recalled disturbing pictures he’d seen over the years of the lifeless bodies of men and horses strewn across Gettysburg’s battlefields—of those who died in the pivotal and bloody battle that ultimately decided the fate of the country—right there in his field of vision.

What would Hutch think of all the bloodshed? Sure, he’d be grateful, too, for better weapons, and he’d definitely have been on the side of the Union—against slavery, and defending the nation itself—and he’d be relieved for the side that had won, but he’d probably also be very moody visiting the park that day, or any day, for that matter.

Hutch would be melancholic over the suffering and death of more than 50,000 men, and he’d especially be angry about the root cause of those deaths—because Hutch was a big softie underneath his sometimes gruff exterior, and time itself couldn’t ease his empathy. No one was ‘just a casualty.’

He would lecture Starsky about the stupidity of it all; in fact, Hutch would rant on and on about how much peace there would be in the world if people just left other people alone. He’d complain the entire time they were visiting Gettysburg—until Starsky was sick of hearing it.

That thought made Starsky chuckle even as he sat there in one of the most somber places in the United States. Leave it to Hutch to force a light laugh out of him.

“Idiot,” he called Hutch that time, finally pushing off the rock and heading back to his truck. It was a short walk to the road, and a 15-minute drive to the Inn at Herr Ridge, but he was deeply satisfied with his visit to the historic sites, and felt both heart and body weary by the time he put his head on his soft pillow following another delicious meal in the diner across the street.

On Tuesday morning, while on his way out of the area, he began to fantasize about life in the 1800s from the point-of-view of The West—its pioneers and explorers, gold miners and cowboys—the latter of which brought him to a surprising thought, one that changed his route, yet again, that time from the Big Apple to Rochester, New York.

The drive took him 5 hours through beautiful countryside and green open spaces. Maybe he should settle in Upstate New York; there was no place more beautiful in autumn. Already some of its trees were beginning to show their vibrant fall colors. But then he remembered how cold it could be in New York City itself, and decided he would have to settle further south instead.

Once in Rochester, he dined in an Italian restaurant to enjoy finer food, and found a comfortable hotel room for the night, giving himself a break from sightseeing and driving, and instead used the evening to watch mindless television.

On Wednesday morning, during his shower, he felt compelled to pleasure himself while he enjoyed hot water and its steam. The pace at which he pumped his penis, the tightness and the slippery sensations, the warmth he felt inside him, the need to be satisfied, the drive to relive an experience he’d grown accustomed to but hadn’t felt in more than a week, spurred him on. He used the soap’s lubricious feel to accelerate the pleasing stroke of his shaft until he was moments away from orgasm.

But then he made the fatal mistake of unintentionally picturing Hutch in his mind: his blond’s perspiring, glistening skin, his closed eyes and warm, happy smile, his swollen and wanting penis, that patch of blond curly pubic hair, his heaving and bared belly, his erect nipples, the sound of his labored breath, the moan of more want and anticipation—and Starsky suddenly lost his desire.

“Fuck it,” he cussed, abandoning the effort and dropping his arms to his sides. He set his forehead against the wet, tiled wall and closed his eyes as he allowed the hot water to roll of his back, over his butt, and down his legs, his erection swept away with it. Life was never going to be as good as it had been.

“Goddamnit, Hutch,” he swore again. “Why didn’t you love me as much as you said you did?”

Starsky would forever be dumbfounded by how little Hutch had been there for him when he was put to the test. Hutch had passed seemingly tougher ones. How did this one fail him?

But Starsky had other plans for his day besides wallowing in what he couldn’t change. Anger took charge. He finished showering, then dressed, and drove to Penfield, a suburb of Rochester, to have breakfast at a small hole-in-the-wall cafe, mainly to get the local feel of the town’s welcoming hospitality.

Afterward, he found the local library on the map and stopped in for information about the places he wanted to visit, the first of which was the Deuel family home on Penfield Road, a two-story house that had partially served as Dr. Deuel’s outpatient clinic. Starsky had embarked on an unscheduled tour to visit the life and times of Peter Ellstrom Deuel, the actor who had played and embodied his favorite TV cowboy. No cooler bandit had ever lived.

Having to ask for directions to the Oakwood Cemetery when he stopped at a grocery store to buy a dozen red roses, and after having visited downtown Penfield, Pete’s high school, and the First Baptist Church that had facilitated his memorial service, Starsky found the lesser-known second driveway off Whalen Road and entered the cemetery grounds.

Slowly driving in, he counted ‘three to four trees on the right’ and immediately saw the sizable black DEUEL memorial stone from the alleyway. He parked in the shade of very old and very large oak trees, and left the truck, feeling heartbroken even before he arrived at the gravesite.

“Peter Ellstrom 1940-1971” was the only headstone in the family plot; it was covered in flowers from fans, poetry notes and letters, memorial cards and coins, candles and flags from other countries. Pete was only 31 years old when he died by a self-inflicted gunshot just eight years earlier. Despite his personal pain, he had brought a lot of joy to so many lives as the incarnation of the charismatic outlaw-turned-good guy, Hannibal Heyes.

Starsky couldn’t not take the time to pay him homage. He had been deeply affected by the tragic death of the well-loved actor beginning the day the terrible news came in, and he was keenly feeling loss in his own life on that mid-Wednesday morning. A grave seemed the only place where Starsky found empathy and perspective.

It was a beautiful, peaceful morning punctuated with bird songs. He sat in the grass over Pete’s grave and laid his dozen roses on the headstone. “Hey, man,” he gently said. There was no way he was going to cry over someone he’d never met, but tears did burn his eyes when he reflected on just how sad Pete’s story had been—a well-loved person with fame, fortune, and looks. If it couldn’t work out for a man with those virtues, how was it to be any better for someone without them?

Starsky spent an hour at the site, replaying his own life—from losing his father, to his move to California, to his rewarding life fighting crime, but then his thoughts ended up at the shooting in the police station parking lot, and how close to death he himself had come.

In the end, however, his life story had been well worth the trade-offs—it all fell into place when he met and eventually fell in love with Ken Hutchinson. Starsky had never been happier nor more excited about anything as much as he was in that relationship, despite that it was short-lived. What was the lesson here? that nothing good lasts forever?

“I get it,” he said to Pete. “Sometimes life gets in the way of life.”

But it was now time to shed those painful memories—America’s and his own—and to connect with the people who were still alive and who dearly loved him. He left Penfield by noon and drove the 5.5 hours to New York City, arriving in time for dinner. Parking along the curb in the only open spot he found on a street that flanked Prospect Park, he then walked the three blocks with his duffle bag to Nick’s apartment on 2nd Street, knowing he was about to give his brother one hell of a surprise.

“Holy shit!” Nick exclaimed when he opened the door that Wednesday evening and found David Starsky on the other side. He quickly looked around, as if he expected to see someone else, or he was searching for the person who had put Starsky up to this surprise prank. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“Can’t an older brother visit his younger brother without it being a federal case?”

“Sure he can!” Nick said, laughing, as he stepped onto the porch and grabbed Starsky in a long and firm embrace. “But where’s your right arm?” he asked after he let Starsky go. “Is he planning a later surprise or are you hiding from him here?”

“He’s visiting his people,” Starsky lied. “I’m visiting mine. Taking advantage of a few days off to catch up with family.”

Nick bought the excuse, and then immediately invited Starsky into the apartment, telling him to make himself at home, but that they should go for pizza before Nick had to take the subway to work in four hours. He obviously expected Starsky to stay with him and that they had a lot to catch up on. After Starsky dropped his duffle in the guest bedroom and used the toilet, the brothers headed out to Mario’s, a local Italian joint not too far from Nick’s place.

They ate New York City pizza and drank Moretti beer and reminisced, filled each other in on their lives—Starsky sharing only up to 10 days earlier, as if it were present-day—and then got down to more basic details.

“How long are you here for?” Nick asked. He hadn’t seemed to stop smiling since his brother arrived—even though they’d seen each other just a few months earlier during Starsky’s physical therapy sessions in California. “You’re gonna see Mom tomorrow, right?”

“Of course,” Starsky said, feeling a bit insulted. “Why wouldn’t I?”

“Well, I didn’t know if you’re still playing hide-and-seek and have to run off first thing in the morning or if you’ll be here for the weekend.”

“I have to be in D.C. Sunday before dark; I’m meeting with some folks Monday morning.”

“So … no hide-and-seek game?”

“Hide-and-seek?”

“Hutch said you guys were playing it—‘again’ was his word—but I guess he’s since found you, huh? You weren’t as smart as you think you are?”

Starsky faked a laugh. “I always win. But that was a week ago.” He risked knowing when Hutch must have called Nick. “When did you talk to him?”

“Thursday. He said he wasn’t expecting me to tell him where you were, but he wanted to know if you were okay.”

Hutch had been fishing, just as Starsky suspected he would, but the news pained him just the same; he was torn between his feelings: guilt and yearning, that Hutch was sentimental enough to ask how Starsky was doing—and the realization all over again that he sorely missed Hutch—but angry that it took Hutch four days from Starsky’s L.A. departure to make that call.

“I told him about my Times job,” Nick furthered. “I guess you never said anything to him?”

“Only because I was in physical therapy at the time and not thinking much about anything else.”

Nick forgave him. “I told him about Donna, too; he didn’t know about her.”

“Donna?”

“My girlfriend.”

Starsky reached across the table and smacked Nick’s arm. “You never told me about Donna!”

“Yeah, I guess I didn’t,” Nick sheepishly said. “I’ve been wrapped up in work and love.” He then proceeded to tell Starsky how he and Donna met, how long they’d been dating, and just how much he was feeling high on life because of her.

Starsky was proud of him. “You’re a good man, Nick. You look good, too. I’m glad you finally discovered yourself.”

“Aw, shucks, Davey,” Nick shyly replied, sounding genuine. He’d needed his big brother’s approval for just about all of his life. “Oh, wait,” he remembered, thinking for a moment. “Hutch actually called me a week ago from this past Monday; I was at work—which he didn’t know; he left a message on my answering machine. That’s where he mentioned the game you guys sometimes play.”

Starsky was relieved to learn what he just did, that Hutch hadn’t waited a minute longer than he needed to before he looked for Starsky in New York City. “I eluded him for a week,” Starsky explained, forcing pride in his words. “It was only supposed to be for a weekend, but I made it last; he ain’t no Sherlock Holmes.”

His hope was that, anyway. Starsky was right back to wishing Hutch had finally let it go and that they were getting on with their respective lives. But Starsky also decided that night to wait until after the baby was born before he’d let down his guard; Hutch would definitely be embedded in his new life as soon as his reason for being married arrived.

Starsky spent the night by himself in Nick’s apartment, feeling truly at ease for the first time in days; he would go on to have breakfast with Nick in the morning as soon as his brother returned from work, and then left him to sleep while he made a surprise visit to his Mom’s. He caught her just as she was leaving the apartment with Patches—and she was as excited to see Starsky as Nick had been, inviting him into their walk to Prospect Park.

They made lunch together afterwards, then spent the afternoon in small talk and catch-up. She told him all about her trip with Rose to Florida and the places they’d visited, adding that she thought they might focus their next trip on retirement communities instead of single-family housing. “I think we’ve grown accustomed to not doing yard work,” she laughed. “Not that I’ve ever done it, but buying a house seems to require it.”

Her words took Starsky right back into his memory of a gorgeous house he’d owned for about a month. In contrast to his mom’s wishes, he had looked forward to sharing yard tasks with Hutch—he planned to build veggie boxes and a greenhouse and then to watch Hutch grow food for them. All those plans, gone in the blink of an eye.

“Did you hear me?” Dorothy asked, squeezing Starsky’s arm to get his attention. She sat beside him at the dining table; they had finished lunch and were snacking on pistachios and fresh berries. “I said I’m sorry I missed him.”

“Missed who?”

“Hutch.”

The knot returned to Starsky’s stomach. “How’d you miss him?”

“Oh, he came for a visit while Rose and I were in Miami.”

Starsky was stunned. “In Florida?”

“No. Here in New York.”

“He came here? to your apartment?”

“Shirley said she ran into him while she was walking Patches in the park.”

“He was in the city?”

“How do you not know this?” Dorothy asked, not sounding alarmed; more playful than concerned. “Shirley invited him to stay in the guest room while he was here.”

“Did he?”

“She said she left Patches in his care—and he apparently fed and walked Patches in the morning. Kimberly said that he even finished off a bottle of wine.”

“When was this?”

“Last Friday; he left Saturday morning.”

Starsky felt blood drain to his feet when he realized he’d been talking to Kimberly on a pay phone from Hodgenville, Kentucky, at the same time Hutch was in Brooklyn meeting Shirley and Patches in the nearby park. Ships passing in the night. Starsky was sure Hutch would call his family, but he didn’t think he’d actually come to New York City. What was Starsky to make of that?

The easy answer was that Hutch really did love him and wanted to make a case for Starsky returning to California, but none of it negated the fact that Hutch obviously left New York City on Saturday morning so he could be home in time to get married that day, and to eventually have a baby—all while playing house with someone other than Starsky. Hutch may very well love and want Starsky, but it wasn’t enough love and it wasn’t enough want to make the difference; Hutch would never understand how it felt to be second place in his life.

“Is there some reason you don’t know he was here?” Dorothy asked, unknowingly taking Starsky away from his brooding thoughts.

“Just that he went his way and I went mine,” Starsky replied, truthfully, but lying about the reason. “We had this time off to see family, but we’ll catch up in D.C. on Monday. He can tell me all about it then.”

In the evening, she and her two sons—and Donna—had dinner at a nearby Greek restaurant. There was little talk of Hutch. Whenever his name was mentioned, Starsky would provide a quick, vague answer, and then change the subject, and no one seemed the wiser. He made it sound as if Hutch was in Minneapolis, visiting his own family, before he and his partner would meet up in D.C. on Sunday for some sightseeing together, followed by law enforcement business on Monday. When asked about the latter, Starsky simply joked, “It’s classified. I’d tell you about it, but then I’d have to kill you all.”

He stayed again at Nick’s place that Thursday night, and then hung out with his mother on Friday after breakfast at Mario’s with Nick, joking with Dorothy that he shouldn’t have to call her at 6 p.m. because he was already in residence. While his mother napped in the afternoon, he checked on his truck, and then they had dinner with Nick and Donna, that time at Dorothy’s apartment for a homemade meal.

On Saturday, and because Nick had the weekend off from work, the family went out to a late breakfast, and then stopped by a grocery store to buy flowers. Starsky said he wanted to visit his father’s gravesite—having been reminded to do so when he recalled his trip to Rochester—and then he and his mom spent the afternoon taking Patches for walks and looking at family pictures while Nick went home to nap.

On Sunday morning, Starsky lied about his mode of transportation, telling them that he had an Amtrak train to catch after breakfast from Penn Station to Washington, D.C., and insisted that he walk alone to the subway station to begin the nearly four-hour trip to the nation’s capitol. He almost didn’t succeed in breaking away because Nick really wanted to walk with him, but Starsky convinced him that he needed the time to himself to mull over a case, after which Starsky headed for his truck.

Starsky had never been to D.C. before. He did want to sightsee—all those iconic monuments and memorials and museums—before his plan Monday morning, which was to meet with the FBI to learn what he could about its Federal Witness Protection Program, right from the horse’s mouth.

“Did I answer all of your questions?” Razolli asked with a light laugh. “All two of them?”

“You did,” Starsky replied, rising from his chair. He leaned over the agent’s desk as Razolli stood, and shook his hand. “You’d be surprised how much I learned with so little.”

He probably said more than he should have, but he didn’t want the federal agent to be so suspicious of him that he’d put a tail on Starsky. That was probably paranoia, too. Even after two weeks, Starsky still felt Hutch might close in on him.

“Well, I do hope you find what you’re looking for,” Razolli said, “or maybe I should just say good luck keeping ahead of whatever you’re running from.”

Starsky paused in the doorway and looked back at Razolli; Starsky hadn’t fooled anyone, and not that he was trying to, but he couldn’t pretend his questions weren’t about himself. He told the truth. “Just doing my best to outpace a broken heart is all.”

“Well, I’m sorry for your loss, Dane,” Razolli sincerely said, “and I do hope you get past her. I know this doesn’t help right now to know, but there are plenty of other women out there.”

* * *

“Can we buy you a drink?”

“Well, you could,” Starsky replied, “but the question is why would you want to?” He was usually fully aware of the happenings around him, but on this night, he seemed to have regrettably slipped up—especially because he was in a bar, having gotten lost in his beer and moody thoughts.

Two men had sandwiched Starsky in before he even realized they were there and he was caught off guard. But impulsiveness was his nature and his comeback had been witty enough to politely suggest he wasn’t interested.

“We’d love to buy you a drink because you’re sitting here all alone,” one of them said to answer Starsky’s question, unfazed, “and we thought we might liven up your party.”

Starsky sipped from his glass as he stole a glance in the mirror behind the bar to quickly size up the men beside him. They were both blond with flyaway hair, darker eyes, were neatly dressed, lean and fit—and at least a decade younger than he was.

“You never heard of a party of one?” Starsky asked. He’d been listening to live music, not hearing the lyrics, and staring into the day’s earlier events—imagining them in the context of his life and what they might mean for his future. He then looked into the eyes of the man to his left. “But more than that, don’t you boys have each other?”

The young man laughed. “We’re hoping to spice things up.” He leaned on the bar to face Starsky more directly, and smiled, in his eyes and on his face; harmless behavior, not just intent. “My name’s Dan and my friend here is Cliff. If we buy you another beer, you might come to see things our way.”

Starsky lightly laughed. “You’ve confused me with someone else.”

Cliff was quick to reply. “Mistake your dark hair and blue eyes for someone else—even in this low light? Not on your life.”

“Or that uniquely handsome face?” Dan added, as playfully.

“Your deep voice?”

“Manly walk?”

In unison, they finished with, “and the world’s sexiest ass?”

Starsky pretended he couldn’t fault them for their assessment. “Well, when you put it like that.” He didn’t want to be rude to the men after he realized they must have seen him earlier—when he wasn’t sitting alone on a stool drinking a beer in the corner of a bar he’d accidentally found on K Street. “But I’m not gay.”

“You were there for us.”

“Because I believe in the cause,” Starsky explained. He softened his approach, made friendly eye contact, enjoyed the flattery—and the banter. “I accidentally fell in with the crowd.”

Starsky had been sitting on the top step of the Lincoln Memorial earlier that morning, reading a pamphlet about the building’s construction while he enjoyed the views of the Reflection Pool lined in elm trees, the Washington Monument pointing to a clear, blue sky in the not-too-far distance, and beyond it to the commanding presence of the U.S. Capitol, when a couple of men joined him on the other side of the Memorial’s entrance.

Hardly anyone else was around on that Sunday in October; it seemed most people were further east on the Mall; Starsky spent his time watching nearby pigeons and occasional passersby when he wasn’t reading or aimlessly gazing. At times, he’d drop his attention to the first landing on the steps to recall the Greats who’d once stood there, Martin Luther King, Jr., the most notable one to come to mind. ‘I have a dream…’

The weather was a cool 50 degrees, perhaps due in part to the record early snowstorm that had swept through D.C. just four days earlier; there hadn’t been much snow, most of it having already melted, but it dropped the region’s temps to such a degree that long-sleeves and jackets were the apparel of choice. Starsky warmed himself in one of his souvenir hoodies, that time the one he’d bought in the Grand Canyon gift shop.

As he contemplated life in the shadow of Abraham Lincoln right there in the heart of American politics and power, he was again aware of the subdued male voices to his left, from the men who’d sat down not too far from him; they lightly laughed at times and, in longer moments, were seemingly wordless. When Starsky looked over at one point to gauge their silence, he noticed that they sat knee-to-knee, hip-to-hip, and shoulder-to-shoulder, much the way he and Hutch often did.

It should have been Starsky and his partner on those steps that morning, seeing the nation’s capital together; Hutch would just love being Starsky’s personal tour guide. There had been so many places to visit: the monuments and museums, Arlington cemetery and Ford Theater, restaurants, bars, and breakfast cafes, bookstores and the U.S. Capitol building itself. It had been as fascinating a journey for Starsky as it had been as lonely.

When he glanced back to the men on the Lincoln Memorial steps, he saw them leaning into each other, arm-in-arm; after half-a-minute, one of them dropped his head onto the other’s shoulder. They were definitely a gay couple.

As the morning lengthened, more people arrived at the Memorial, disappearing inside to cast their eyes on the larger-than-life, four-years-to-carve, nearly 20-feet-high, white marble sculpture of a sitting President Lincoln, overlooking Washington, D.C.; his iconic words of wisdom were engraved on the surrounding walls, particularly those from the Gettysburg Address. “We the people…” Starsky had completed his pilgrimage.

But, oddly enough, most of the tourists in D.C. that early morning seemed to be gathered around the Washington Monument; an almost disproportionate number of them had slowly materialized on the Monument’s surrounding lawns in the hour that Starsky had been gazing into the view. When the two lovebirds to Starsky’s left finally rose to their feet and prepared to descend the steps, he called out to them.

“I don’t suppose you guys know why everyone is over at the—” he almost called it the ‘pyramid penis,’ but quickly caught himself, “Washington Monument?” He should be so glib about the memorial to the nation’s first president and the third tallest monumental column in the world, rising more than 550 feet into the air, but he was in a sarcastic mood.

The men approached him, both dark-haired, each on a different step, one below the other. The younger man reached Starsky first and told him, “There’s a gay parade starting over there in a couple of hours—around 10 a.m. You should come down and join it.”

A gay parade beginning near the base of the phallic Washington Monument; Starsky had to bite his tongue. “Yeah? What are they celebrating?”

“More like a call to action,” the older man told him, both men having come to a stop a couple of steps below Starsky, and looking up at him. “For our rights,” he explained. “The more bodies there, the better.”

“I’m not gay,” Starsky said, not defensively. “Does that matter?”

“It doesn’t,” the other replied. “If you believe in our rights, we’d love to have you join us.”

There was a time when Starsky wasn’t sure what he believed about gay men, but he’d long left those insecurities behind. “I think I will,” he promised. He even pushed off the step and followed the two men down the steps, across the promenade, and finally onto the lawn around the Monument. He then meandered over to the northeast intersection where hundreds of people had already gathered, despite that the parade was a couple of hours from starting.

In the end, more than 120,000 people were in attendance at the first National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights that day. The march began at 4th Street and Madison Drive, proceeded west down Pennsylvania Avenue and across E Street, snaked its way past the White House, and eventually gathered on the expansive lawn at the Washington Monument, where a stage had been erected to host the event’s speakers and musicians.

Tens of thousands of men and women from all persuasions had gathered that October morning to celebrate who they were, how they felt, and what they believed about each other and themselves. They danced in the streets, sang known and spontaneously birthed songs, laughed and openly cried together, walked alone with irrepressible smiles on their faces or in locked arms sometimes a dozen people wide.

Before Starsky could realize it soon enough to resist, a couple of men grabbed him off the sidelines, shoved a small sign into his hands, and dragged him into the crowd; he became a part of the March. He’d come a long way in his relationship with homosexuality—and it made him feel good. Even the sign he carried expressed his heartfelt views: ‘Love is love.’

In a bar later that early evening, Starsky found himself being solicited by Cliff and Dan, two gay men who’d apparently seen him in attendance at the parade. They weren’t all that dissimilar in confidence from a certain tender picture Starsky had privately kept an eye on toward the end of the speeches as he sat in the grass just outside the perimeter of the enormous crowd.

Two middle-aged men were lying together on the National Mall under large elm trees away from the stage, and caught Starsky’s eye; they were dressed warmly, and lay together in each other’s arms, lost in their own conversation and affection. It should have been Starsky with Hutch in a moment like that one. It should have been them throwing caution to the wind, them being liberated into who they’d become together, safe and validated in public, them enjoying a freedom they had never experienced before.

Starsky’s first memorable lying-in-the-grass experience with Hutch was in Cook’s Meadow in Yosemite Valley—with quite the view: majestic mountain rocks against blue sky and tall waterfalls. There were elk at the meadow’s edge—a herd of animals Starsky claimed were moose, just to bait Hutch. He never felt more alive and connected than he did during that adventure with Hutch. They were unknowingly on the threshold of their romantic, intimate, sexual relationship, and Starsky was about to realize that he never wanted anything more.

His second memorable lying-in-the-grass time with Hutch was in another meadow, this one outside the Hidden Valley Wildlife Center, spearheaded by its director, Alec Henley—with whom Starsky and Hutch would engage a threesome. Heated flesh, heavy breaths, perspiring skin, hardened penises, orgasmic pleasure—the mix of feelings and titillating visuals Starsky would never forget; they mildly aroused him even then.

But prior to that threesome, in the meadow earlier that day, right before the gathering would witness the release of a rehabilitated bald eagle back into the wild, Starsky wrestled Hutch in the grass. He couldn’t remember what caused them to get physical with each other, but he would never forget how it felt to climb on his partner right there in the open with nearly a hundred people in view. He’d never felt more liberated.

His third memorable experience lying in the grass with Hutch was in a secluded spot high up on a Rocky Mountain overlooking Dream Lake—a place Hutch had taken them to have intercourse, with Hutch on the receiving end for the first time.

But what made that memory so special was how in love Starsky felt afterward, snug inside Hutch’s arms, their warm bodies touching each other’s from head to foot, fully nude and in the wild, completely spent and yet filled, needing nothing and no one else. He even believed Hutch felt the same way that day and that their lives had forever changed together. Little did Starsky know at the time, but in roughly a week from then, his world would be turned upside down—and that dream on Dream Lake would be unbelievably shattered.

“If you change your mind,” Cliff said, snapping Starsky out of his melancholic thoughts and bringing him right back into the bar, while leaving the men’s invitation for a threesome wide open, “we’re staying just a few blocks from here at the Henley Park Hotel.”

‘Henley’ Park Hotel. “Of course, that’s where you’ll be,” Starsky said with an inward laugh. Where else would one have a three-man orgy but at a hotel with the name ‘Henley’?

When Starsky’s suitors tired of the chase and moved on to easier prey, Starsky asked the female bartender for a telephone. “I’ll pay for the time,” he promised as he put $5 up. She trusted him enough to place a push-button phone on the bar in front of him—and gave him a wink.

The alcohol powered his courage. Or maybe it was his loneliness. He pressed the receiver to his ear, dialed a zero followed by the L.A. phone number, and waited two rings before the operator answered.

“I’d like to make a collect call,” he said, trying to sound determined. When she asked him for his name, he replied, “Starsk … Starsky.”

Excited? Maybe not so much. Anxious? For sure. Uncertain about what would transpire? He couldn’t predict the future. But why was he making that call?

When the answering machine on the other end of the line picked up—and even before he heard the greeting—Starsky quickly put the receiver back in its cradle and immediately disconnected the call. So much for his bravado. But what did he really expect would be the outcome anyway?

* * *

“Hey, mom?!”

“You don’t have to yell, Davey; I’m right here.”

Dorothy was in the kitchen preparing a meal when Starsky went from complete relaxation to grand indignation on a hair-trigger. “What’s the problem?” she asked, not even bothering to glance at him.

Starsky sat at the lunch counter, flipping through a family photo album. “Well, where’s that picture of me and Hutch at Thanksgiving when we were here a couple of years ago, hm?” He had lowered his voice and hoped his faux calm would give him the answer he wanted without another lecture from his mother.

“It should be in that album you have there.”

She’d been paying more attention to him than Starsky realized. He sat on a stool and faced into the kitchen, was nursing a soda she’d earlier given him, and had been enjoying the romp through early family pictures when he came upon the Thanksgiving dinner he and Hutch had attended on their one-and-only visit to New York City together.

“I figured it should be in here,” Starsky replied, certain that he sounded as annoyed as he felt, but not meaning to; he was a detective, after all, and he was well aware that the photo should be in its proper place.

“Maybe it’s in a different album,” Dorothy suggested.

“Why would it be in a different one?”

“I don’t know, honey. I’m just saying it should be somewhere in our pictures.”

He looked back at the half-empty page. “All of the other Thanksgiving dinner pictures are in this album, but there’s an empty space where one ought to be and ain’t.”

Dorothy abandoned her meal prep to investigate Starsky’s claim, leaning over the counter to study his discovery. “Oh,” she said under her breath. She then straightened, ruffled Starsky’s hair in an attempt to comfort him with what she believed was the obvious, and went back to the kitchen counter. “I’m supposing Hutch must have taken it when he was here last month.”

Starsky abruptly sat back as blood drained to his feet. He hadn’t forgotten that Hutch had visited the apartment a week after he had left him, but it hadn’t occurred to Starsky that the picture he was looking for had been taken by his former partner.

Why would Hutch abscond with that photo? Starsky suddenly resented him for it. Other than a couple of photos that had appeared in newspapers of the two of them together, the Thanksgiving photo was the only personal one in the family—and now it was solely in Hutch’s possession.

“He stole our picture, mom,” Starsky complained.

“I took that picture,” she reminded him.

Starsky rolled his eyes, even though she couldn’t see it. “You know what I meant.”

“So it’s still in the family,” Dorothy decided. “Why are you so upset?”

“Because…”

Dorothy brought a large cutting board to the lunch counter—covered in a variety of freshly-cut veggies, salted nuts, pickles and olives, potato chips and crackers. She didn’t pause or even make eye contact with Starsky when she heard her son stall on his answer because she was obviously distracted by preparing their lunch.

It was just as well. Starsky was able to catch himself from saying more—despite really wanting to. Sometimes he thought if he cried on his mother’s shoulder for a while, he’d recover sooner from his loss. But his mom wouldn’t understand the deeper reason Starsky had left Hutch. He could never tell her how intimate the relationship had become.

That realization gave him pause. He was angry with Hutch for not wanting to come clean about them with his wife-to-be, and here Starsky was, avoiding that very thing with his mother. In his defense, Starsky figured it wasn’t necessary to share those details with Dorothy; his relationship with Hutch was over.

“What is he doing anyway?” Dorothy asked, finally sitting at the counter with him after she’d brought over a couple of opened-container dips. “Why aren’t you boys together these days?”

“We’re together in spirit,” Starsky said. He hated lying to his mother, but forgave himself, deciding it would be short-lived in the long run. “He’s on a case and I’m on a different one,” he continued, digging into the snacks to fake his nonchalance. “Those will end soon enough,” he added between chewing, “and things will get back to normal.” That last part sounded innocent and truthful enough.

“So you’re sure you boys can’t come to Thanksgiving next week?”

“We’re scheduled elsewhere.”

“What about Christmas?”

“Maybe. Too early to say.”

Starsky dropped his eyes to the blank spot in the photo album. He still couldn’t believe Hutch had taken the picture. Why would Hutch hold onto something that he obviously didn’t make a priority in his life when he had the chance?

“What’s the matter, Davey?” Dorothy asked, squeezing Starsky’s hand to get his attention. “Why are you so gloomy today?”

Starsky shrugged and faked a smile. “Tired, I guess.”

“Or maybe you just miss your partner?”

* * *

“Your father would be proud of you,” Dorothy told Starsky, squeezing him close. She was obviously thrilled to have yet another surprise visit from her son—this time a week before Christmas. “I hope you know that by now.”

“He wouldn’t be proud of me lately,” Starsky impulsively complained as he reluctantly left his mother’s arms to head for a glass of water. He’d eaten an entire bag of potato chips on his way from D.C. to New York City and his throat was parched. “But I did come home to celebrate Hanukkah in his name, if that helps.”

Dorothy trailed after him into the kitchen. “What do you mean he wouldn’t be proud of you ‘lately’? What have you done?”

He realized his mistake. “Nothing, mom. Never mind.”

“No never mind. You said what you said; now explain yourself.”

He couldn’t. What he wanted to say was that his father wouldn’t be so proud of him if he knew his son had engaged in oral and anal sex with his male partner—and once with two men. “Sometimes,” Starsky explained instead, “I kill people.”

“I’m sorry, David. But ‘sometimes’ you have to—and you save more lives than you’ve ever taken.”

Starsky couldn’t help but think it was a sad world he lived in: how it was forgivable, even sanctioned, that he killed people—eleven human beings in total—but that he should be more ashamed to have enjoyed sexual pleasure with consenting adults who just happened to be male.

“I’m sure you and Hutch have had these ‘in-the-line-of-duty’ talks. Your father had similar ones with his partner.”

“Yeah, I guess so.” He needed to change the subject and used the noise of filling a glass with tap water to interrupt their conversation. After drinking it all at once while his mother watched, he then winked at her as if to say he were some kind of Superman and then he quickly suggested, “Why don’t we go out and get some sufganiyahs—if you haven’t already done so.”

“A splendid idea!” Dorothy exclaimed. She wasn’t Jewish, but she’d come to appreciate Judaism’s traditions and customs, some of which she’d continued long after her husband’s death. “We need more candles, too.”

Starsky loved shopping with his mother for Hanukkah and Christmas goodies: food, candles, tree ornaments, small gifts for family. It was a nice distraction from his heartbreak—feelings of loss that were magnified around days like those: the holidays and upcoming birthdays.

Later in the day during their recent Thanksgiving, when Dorothy gave Starsky the phone number Hutch asked her to pass on while he was in Oregon—adding that Hutch was apparently there on police business—Starsky quickly changed the subject; further details would only deepen his depression. His mother had begun to ask persistent questions about why he and Hutch were still separated on the job, and Starsky didn’t know how or whether he should tell her anything. He needed serious alone-time to think it through.

More importantly, why couldn’t Hutch just leave him be?

But during the first week of December, while lounging in yet another hotel room watching old detective shows, Starsky ended up calling that number in Oregon; he’d had more beers than usual at a nearby bar, followed by a satisfying spaghetti dinner and a glass of red wine, and was feeling quite brave when the loneliness urge hit him again squarely in his heart.

Impulsively, he picked up the phone and dialed the number. He was pining and second-guessing himself. Big time. Maybe he’d been too hard on Hutch. Maybe he shouldn’t have wasted his life on being mad about stupid things like the man of his dreams marrying and having a baby and making love with a woman in what was originally his and Hutch’s bed. Maybe Starsky should just learn to take what he could get—any way he could get it.

He was anxious when he pressed the receiver to his ear, sprawled as he was on the hotel room mattress, still fully dressed, and listening to the telephone rings. One. Then another. He hadn’t heard Hutch’s voice in two months. How was Starsky going to feel to hear that buttery softness? Would it break him all over again? In the end, it was a moot point. The person who answered the phone in Oregon wasn’t Hutch.

“May I help you?” the man cheerfully asked after they both said hello to each other.

Starsky was supposed to speak next, but he was stalled by the unfamiliar voice that had greeted him—and was about to hang up; in his inebriated state, he must have dialed the wrong number.

“Hello?” the man repeated.

Despite his stumble, Starsky realized he’d come that far; he may as well go further. “I’m calling for Ken Hutchinson.”

“Oh, you mean Hutch.”

Starsky knew perfectly well what he meant, but he was too uneasy to be flippant. “Can you put him on the phone?”

“He doesn’t live here anymore.”

Starsky was dismayed to hear that Hutch had been ‘living’ in Oregon, but perhaps he misunderstood. “Can you tell me where he went?” Relief was mixed in with Starsky’s reluctant curiosity. Calling Hutch was probably a mistake in the long run.

“I suppose he went back to California.”

“How long was he in Oregon?”

“Just for the month.”

A month was a long time. “He was on duty there,” Starsky noted; it wasn’t a question. He hoped if he acted like he knew more than he did, the answers to these unsettling insights might be forthcoming without his having to pry them from the other end of a long-distance phone line.

“Yeah, they were on duty all right, thank god. They caught the guy the day after Thanksgiving,” the man explained, “and then they packed up and left here this past Saturday morning. You missed them by just a few days. Can you tell me who’s asking?”

“His old friend, David.” Maybe Starsky should have said, ‘Dane,’ but he wasn’t thinking fast enough. “Hutch left this number with my mother to call him when I got the chance.”

“I’m sorry you’re too late—but really glad that serial killer was caught.”

Starsky was floored again. Hutch had been in Oregon for a month on the trail of a serial killer? But more importantly, “Who is they?”

“His partner Simon—can’t pronounce his last name. My cousin is Ashland P.D., so I lent them my house for the month while they were stationed here. I stayed with my sister.”

Two things struck Starsky: one, that Hutch had lived for a month in a house with another man, and two, that the other man was his ‘partner.’ Hutch really had moved on: brand new California house, brand new pretty wife, brand new child-on-the-way, brand new male partner, brand new interstate cases; Dobey had probably promoted him, too. More money. More responsibility.

“I don’t have his number in Los Angeles,” the man apologetically told Starsky, “but—”

“That’s all right,” Starsky said, feeling heartsick from everything he learned in that brief phone call. “I have it. I’ll try him there. Thanks for your time.”

He was angry all over again. Angry and hurt. He wished he hadn’t made that phone call. He wished he didn’t know what he then knew. Starsky was still trying to find a place to land and begin his life over—and Hutch was well along into his own promising future; he hadn’t missed a step in Starsky’s absence. Starsky had made the right decision to leave him.

So when Dorothy asked Starsky why he and Hutch weren’t together over the holidays, Starsky simply told her that Hutch was on yet “another manhunt” and that Dobey was so proud of him for catching a serial killer that he was probably going to promote Hutch to Senior Detective. That would permanently break up their partnership. It was a lie Starsky was willing to tell so he could eventually explain to his mother why he and Hutch no longer worked together.

But Starsky also decided to continue killing time until he figured Hutch’s baby had been born, permanently sealing Hutch’s fate, and Starsky could then put his own life together—settle down, buy a house, get a job. Until then, he would continue to believe that Hutch was still looking for him—if, for no other reason, than to cuss Starsky out for running away like a coward, to throw verbal punches, to add insult to injury, to explain, yet again, why he had to do what he did, and none of it changing anything.

For that reason, Starsky was willing to stay with his mother and brother until Christmas morning—when he lied yet again, telling his family he had to leave early so he could get back to Los Angeles before the day was over; he said he wanted to surprise Hutch by spending some of the holiday with him, but really it was because he didn’t want to be a sitting duck in New York City on Christmas Day. No one questioned Starsky on his plans—or his reasons.

In reality, he asked Nick and Donna to drop him at a different terminal at JFK from the one Nick and Donna were leaving from to visit her parents; he used the detour to leave the airport by cab to Penn Station where he caught an Amtrak commuter train back to D.C., to the extended-stay hotel he’d been using for the month. There were still sights to see in the area: Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, Harper’s Ferry, Mt. Vernon. Those would help him to continue escaping his relentless and homesick thoughts—and kill time, too.

He considered heading for the National Mall later that evening—just to walk past the nation’s monuments and see the Christmas lights and carolers. But when the pressing realization that he was utterly alone on that day kept him in his room, on his bed, staring at a television set that he wasn’t watching as one TV show rolled into another.

Hutch probably had a festive holiday. He would have given his wife a piece of jewelry, something sweet like a necklace—and for certain he wrapped up baby clothes and maybe even some furniture, like a bassinet or a crib, that he put under the tree. The parents-to-be would have already decorated their house, too: icicle tinsel and shiny ornaments on their first Christmas tree, stockings over the fireplace, lit-candles throughout.

They would invite friends and her family for a feast; they’d listen to Christmas music—Perry Como and Mitch Miller—and Hutch would have played his guitar for a singalong. They would unwrap presents. There would be laughter. Peace. And not a single thought of Starsky.

“Merry Christmas anyway, Hutch,” Starsky said into the void. “One of us should be happy.”

On New Year’s Eve, Starsky joined brother Nick in a very packed and very cold Times Square to watch the ball drop and ring in 1980. Valentine’s Day, President’s Day, his mother’s birthday and her move to Miami, and the First Day of Spring would soon pass, too.

The next thing Starsky would dread was his birthday.

* * *

“Do me a favor?”

“Anything,” Nick said with conviction. He even looked eager to fulfill the task—no matter what it was—as he leaned on the booth’s table across from Starsky, made determined eye contact, and waited for instructions.

Starsky eased into his words, dismayed by the fact that he was actually about to say them, but feeling compelled despite his reservations. “If Hutch calls you again…”

“Yeah?”

“Would you do me a favor and not talk to him?”

Nick leaned back, visibly alarmed, and searched Starsky with his eyes for his brother’s seriousness. When he didn’t get an immediate explanation, he quickly asked, “What happened?”

It was New Year’s Day, 1980, and the Starsky brothers were having breakfast in a diner near Nick’s apartment before Starsky would leave the city to avoid being found by his ex-partner—if his ex-partner was even tailing him anymore.

Nick and Starsky had spent New Year’s Eve in Times Square, bundled in warm clothes on a freezing night, watching the ball drop, and then the fireworks, while the streets filled with loud jubilant music and the cacophony of tens of thousands of people packed into a 10-block stretch to greet the new year.

Nick hugged Starsky at the stroke of midnight, kissed his face, told him he loved him, and immediately began singing ‘Auld Lang Syne.’ He was high on life because he was truly in love for the first time.

Maybe Starsky should devote himself to developing a closer relationship with Nick now that he was free of his once-beloved partner. Maybe he should settle into New York City after all. But it was too soon. He had to kill another couple of months, let Hutch’s baby be born, know Hutch was thoroughly involved in a new life, and then Starsky could put down his own roots.

“C’mon,” Nick encouraged him with an elbow nudge. “Smile!” He had noticed that Starsky wasn’t overtly involved in the holiday singalong. “It’s a new year with a ton of new possibilities!”

But Starsky couldn’t bring himself to feel hopeful. The only thing he wished for was to forget Hutch sooner than later, to stop lying to his family, and to see what the next chapter in his life would bring. But he did force a smile at his brother. “I’m overcome,” he reluctantly said, implying that he was so moved by the festivities that he couldn’t sing.

So it was all the more confusing to Nick, no doubt, that Starsky had just asked him to not speak to Hutch if Hutch should call him again. “Are you guys fighting?” Nick wondered.

A fight would have been long-over by then; this break was much more serious—because it was permanent. “We split up,” Starsky admitted. He broke eye contact with Nick to avoid the scrutiny, stared into his coffee, and tried to find better words, but couldn’t. “Let’s just say we had an irreversible disagreement.” He meant an ‘irreconcilable difference,’ but couldn’t remember the phrase.

“I can’t believe it,” Nick swore.

“Nothing lasts forever,” Starsky mumbled.

“Some things do.”

“Family,” Starsky pretended to agree. “One’s past lasts forever.”

“When did this break happen?”

If Starsky told Nick the truth, his brother would know he’d been lied to for a few months, so Starsky carefully chose his words. “We decided to call it quits and start the new year on different beats.”

“I’m really sorry to hear this, David.”

“Ten years is long enough,” Starsky explained, trying a laugh when he looked up at Nick, but not feeling lighthearted by any measure. “The job takes a lot out of a person, know what I mean?”

“Are you going to change jobs?”

“Just do me a favor and don’t take his calls—and don’t take any messages from him, either. I don’t even want to know if he called. I don’t want to hear another word about him, do you understand?”

“Not really, but I’ll do whatever you say. You can’t tell me what happened?”

“Maybe someday.” That was as far as Starsky would go with any details. He was relieved to know Nick would honor his wishes; one avenue from Hutch had just been closed. The next one would be through Starsky’s mother.

Unbeknownst to him, Hutch had called Dorothy on Christmas morning, but she never told him about the call because she was afraid she’d spoiled Starsky’s plans to unexpectedly join Hutch when he returned home in time to spend the rest of the holiday with his partner. All Starsky knew was that his mother asked him if Hutch had been ‘thoroughly surprised.’

“Blew his mind,” Starsky had told her that Friday following Christmas; he’d called her from a payphone in Maryland. “It was a good Christmas all around.” They spoke no more about it because Dorothy assumed her son had told her the truth; what was left to discuss except details?—and Starsky skillfully avoided those.

But how was Starsky to stop Hutch from calling her again? Maybe Hutch would lose contact with her after she moved to Miami in February and Hutch no longer had her phone number. The bigger question was why Hutch had bothered at all: to call Nick the day after Starsky had left him, and then to call Dorothy on both Thanksgiving and Christmas. What was Hutch looking for?

They’d been in each other’s lives for a decade—the Academy schooling, their uniform phase, those unforgettable detective years. Starsky had a couple of days to prepare for his sudden departure; Hutch meanwhile suffered a rude awakening that Sunday in September. He probably wanted some kind of closure—or another opportunity to plead his case.

But one thing that wouldn’t change was Starsky’s inability to live in the closet in his own home—and to be relegated to a back bedroom instead of the king-sized bed he and Hutch had bought together.

Starsky had tried for days to make Hutch understand that—and to honor his partner’s needs—but Hutch had been stone-deaf. Even if he’d come to see the light since Starsky had left him, the fact remained: Hutch had chosen another relationship over the deeply personal one he had with Starsky.

“What do we get mom for her birthday?” Starsky asked, purposefully changing the subject after they finished breakfast and slowly drank their last cups of coffee. “She said she didn’t want anything she’d have to pack and move.”

“She’s going to miss New York,” Nick predicted.

“Until she walks on a warm sandy beach in the dead of winter.”

“And gets bored with all those sunny days.”

Starsky laughed. “She’s only a three-and-a-half-hour flight away. We’ll visit her; she’ll visit us.”

They retreated into their own thoughts as they contemplated birthday gifts for a woman who didn’t want anything.

After a couple of minutes, Nick snapped his fingers. “Tickets to a Broadway play!” he excitedly suggested. “We probably can’t get into one for a few months. She can adjust to life in Miami and then we bring her back here—say in April or May—to ease whatever homesickness she might have, and help her see how easy it is to come home now and then.”

“That’s actually a good idea, little brother,” Starsky said, feeling impressed and not just pleased. “You handle the show tickets and I’ll take care of the airplane tickets.” He would be able to pretend he’d flown into JFK from Los Angeles, if need be, and ‘early enough’ to greet his mom’s plane from Miami.

Nick also took charge of their mother’s relocation arrangements. He hired the interstate movers, and then he and Donna helped Dorothy pack up what she planned to keep, give away what she no longer wanted, and sell most of the big furniture because she planned to buy new things once she resettled. Rose’s family helped Rose—and Starsky showed up in Miami to help both women do the unveiling. It also gave him the chance to see his mom’s residence and to scout out the neighborhood.

But he didn’t find anything in the area that attracted him—not even any rent-to-own properties that could buy him time; he was definitely born-and-bred in New York City and then raised in California. He needed someplace that gave him the best of both worlds.

He also happened to be in Miami helping his mom settle in when Valentine’s Day rolled around; they were all so busy with the task that no one paid it much attention—and Starsky didn’t have to think about how Hutch spent it without him. Worse, how Hutch spent the romantic day with someone else.

When Dorothy was finally at home in her new place with Aunt Rose, Starsky checked out of his D.C. extended-stay hotel after more than a month of relaxation and local sightseeing, and used his already planned trip to Monticello to celebrate his own birthday.

He hadn’t forgotten how generous Hutch could be with him on that day: once buying him a professional car detail, another time paying his rent for a month, often treating him to a movie of his choice and all the popcorn he could eat, and making him homemade meals. There was that time Hutch took him to a hockey game; they had seats in the lower bowl above the glass: 200 level—as close to center ice as one could get.

But those days were over. Starsky needed something grand to overshadow them—if he could—and Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello took the birthday cake. After talking to his mother and brother early that morning—so they would wish him a happy birthday—he hit the road.

The trip from the D.C. area to Charlottesville, Virginia, was about three hours; Starsky chose to drive instead of taking a commuter train or tour bus because he stopped mid-morning less than 90 minutes along the way in a town called Fredericksburg to have breakfast. He’d heard that the small city boasted chef-owned restaurants—and they didn’t disappoint. It was his birthday, after all, and he wanted to begin it in style.

After a satisfying meal and an ice cream cone from a neighboring parlor afterward—enough to keep him from being hungry for most of the day—he spent a couple of hours walking around the town’s historic sites. Heritage museums, food markets and cafés, as well as gift and souvenir shops, pockmarked the well-known Fredericksburg Historic District—an area that encompassed more than 350 buildings dating to the 18th and 19th centuries.

When Starsky stumbled across a slave auction-block from as far back as the 1770s, he was caught off-guard; chills ran down his spine and unexpected thoughts of Huggy Bear leap-frogged through his mind; Starsky would never understand the mindset of owning another human being—though he grudgingly wished he had a certain power over Hutch.

The weather was quite pleasant for that late March day; Starsky was dressed in jeans and a tee-shirt, and felt good, not just relaxed. His last visit to the popular 40-block Square was to the Mary Washington House, where George Washington’s mother had lived. Floor boards creaked, the beds were small—in width and in length—and household items were ancient and quaint. A troubled time, but also a simpler one, too.

Starsky had escaped once again into a long-ago past. After a short visit to the site of the Battle of Fredericksburg where hundreds of men had fought and died during the Civil War—reminiscent of Gettysburg—he continued on to Monticello.

While on the road this time, he began to wonder if retirement was a lot like the life he’d been living for the past six months. Maybe he should abandon his stupid ideas to ever work again and simply spend his days as a nomad traversing the country. There were a lot of backroads he could explore. It would take the rest of his life to drive them all, but what an adventure that would be!

Bypassing Monticello turnoffs from a county highway, Starsky first reserved a room in a nondescript Charlottesville hotel just off Interstate 64 before entering the city, and then scouted public transportation ways to get to Thomas Jefferson’s historic home. He planned to stay a few days in the area and would rather enjoy the scenery and the sights without worrying about driving directions and parking availability.

He eventually arrived at Monticello in 15 minutes by bus around 3:30 p.m. and had a few hours to see the plantation and the architecturally impressive house itself before the sun would set. Guided tours walked him and a small group of other visitors through each of the unique home’s three floors, and eventually into its iconic dome, too. He learned a lot about Jefferson’s passion for art, nature, invention, and gardening, as well as about his immediate family, his wife and his children, and also about many of his free and enslaved people—especially the forever famous Sally Hemings.

After the house tour, Starsky browsed Mulberry Row where he found himself contemplating the lives of those who’d worked its flowers, fruit, and vegetable gardens, how those people lived and labored—often under a hot sun in unbearably humid weather—and all while cultivating Jefferson’s fields and vineyards. Starsky supposed the Founding Father’s slaves survived on the plantation’s food offerings that they themselves grew, but he doubted that Jefferson allowed them to share in the wine.

In the Monticello Café and Farm Shop afterward, he bought a couple of books—one on Jefferson’s life and another on American democracy—along with a red tee-shirt with MONTICELLO printed on its front and an art rendering of the house. He also bought a jar of fig jam made right there on the plantation. He ate a pre-made turkey sandwich with lettuce and tomato, downed it with a cold soda, and followed both with a bag of popcorn, which he slowly munched on his way to the cemetery.

“Happy birthday to self,” he mumbled under his breath as he followed a group of tourists. It was the best he could do. “And many more,” he sarcastically sang. At least he was having a unique experience in Virginia that day.

He didn’t know what he expected to find when he arrived at the Monticello graveyard, but he wasn’t prepared to be shocked, either. Although 400 people were enslaved at Monticello over a 60-year period, only 40 graves were estimated to be within the Burial Ground for Enslaved People. Some of those graves were marked by blank fieldstones at the head or foot, but most of them had no surviving markers. It haunted Starsky to imagine he may have been standing on long-buried bodies without anyone having a clue that they were there.

In another part of the cemetery, Starsky joined dozens of people around Jefferson’s resting place. The third president of the United States had died—remarkably—on July 4, 1826, at 12:50 p.m. at age 83; that day was the 50th anniversary of the adoption of the nation’s Declaration of Independence. Unbeknownst to Jefferson, his close friend—Founding Father and second president of the United States—John Adams would also die that day, just several hours later.

Starsky blinked when he overheard the tour guide telling the group those facts. It couldn’t have been coincidence. Both men surely had to know the other was leaving—and chose to leave with him. That notion choked Starsky in that moment; he pushed back on his tears and the pain in his chest. There had been a time when a story as profound as that one could have been his and Hutch’s.

“Jefferson not only sketched his own monument,” the female tour guide told them, standing off to one side so everyone could see the tall obelisk over Jefferson’s grave, “he wrote his own epitaph, too.” It was carved on the face of the granite marker:

‘HERE WAS BURIED THOMAS JEFFERSON, AUTHOR OF THE DECLARATION OF AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE, OF THE STATUTE OF VIRGINIA FOR RELIGIOUS FREEDOM, AND FATHER OF THE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA.’

She also explained that the original obelisk had been taken to a family museum for safekeeping after visitors chipped away at it in the early 1800s, and it was replaced with the taller one a year later by an Act of Congress.

Starsky leaned against the bars of the four-foot-high wrought-iron fence that prevented the public from touching or trampling over the gravesite—and heard himself exhale. There was so much to absorb at Monticello about Thomas Jefferson, about Jefferson’s life and his slaves—and about American democracy, its founding, and a lot more; Starsky had barely scratched the surface.

He was overwhelmed. He decided to take his leisurely time over the next few days to explore what he’d known so little about in his 37 years of life: America’s story. Maybe it wasn’t too late to consider going to college, getting a Bachelor’s degree to teach American history, use historic landmarks for field trips, and learn himself how much he still wanted to know. Maybe he should rent an apartment or a house nearby and get to know the area. The University of Virginia was right there; what better place to begin learning about U.S. history?

As he pulled himself away from Jefferson’s gravesite in order to catch an awaiting return bus to Charlottesville, he realized he’d grown proud of his discoveries, his desires for them, and was finally excited about where they might take him.

Hutch would probably be proud of him, too, if he knew about Starsky’s newly found interests—wouldn’t he?

* * *

At the end of April, Nick and Starsky treated their mother to a Broadway play; they had given her the tickets on her birthday in February, and now the time was upon them to actually attend the show.

Starsky pretended to have flown in that morning on the Red Eye from California in time to meet Dorothy at her arriving plane from Miami. In reality, he’d boarded an Amtrak commuter train from D.C. to New York City and then took a cab from Penn Station to the airport. Together, he and his mother rode a Yellow Taxi to a Manhattan hotel near Times Square, booked a shared room, and prepared for a night out in a city they’d once called home.

Starsky dressed formally in a new suit he’d bought for just that occasion—complete with a colorful tie and polished shoes—and his mother in a cocktail dress and heels with a beaded shawl; they met Nick and Donna, themselves sharply dressed for the performance, at a nearby Greek restaurant, after which the foursome walked the six minutes to the Trafalgar Theater on 41st Street.

What Starsky hadn’t counted on, hadn’t even bothered to wonder about, hadn’t given a single thought to, was the plot of the Harold Pinter play they were about to see. When he noticed the neon-lit marquee as they approached, the play’s title jumped out at him and threw an unexpected punch to his gut:

‘Betrayal.’

As they entered the building, he was distracted from his tormenting thoughts by his mother’s mentions of the actors involved; there was no doubt it was a well-cast production: Blythe Danner, Roy Scheider, and Raul Julia were its main stars. And their seats were good ones, too: they had a clear view of the stage, and were closer to it than anyone but Nick expected.

But when Starsky opened his ‘Playbill’ and read the play’s synopsis, it pushed the knife in deeper: “An extramarital affair between Emma and Jerry—who is the best friend of Emma’s husband, Robert—is examined in backwards chronology.”

The lights suddenly dimmed, the curtains rolled up, and the play began. Unfortunately, it was full of what Starsky expected to see: lies, deceit, and twists of betrayal and infidelity leapfrogging over each other.

Although a lot of the story wasn’t even close to his situation with Hutch—there hadn’t been an extramarital affair—its overall message was the same: Hutch had abandoned Starsky to a fate he never deserved; Hutch dismissed, humiliated, and diminished him. Starsky wasn’t wrong in leaving Hutch. He’d been betrayed.

Worse than all of that, Starsky had to fight off the queasy feeling that Hutch was seated right there beside him, still defending his actions, and forcing Starsky to relive his pain. That’s what hurt most: Hutch not listening to him—not even caring enough to hear a word he said.

When the play finally ended more than a couple of hours later, and the group was outside in cool, fresh air, Starsky could breathe again, but he wasn’t any less shaken. It was Hutch, not he, who should have been in the audience. Maybe if Hutch had attended the play, he’d finally be able to see the damage he’d done to their lives.

“That was kind of sad, but funny, too,” Dorothy said as they walked to the hotel; Nick and Donna would escort her and Starsky to the lobby before returning to Brooklyn by metro. But before anyone else could offer up a review of the play, Dorothy added her thoughts on one of the actors. “Of course, Roy Scheider sure is a sexy man.”

In one sentence, she’d taken the conversation into a completely different direction.

“Mom!” Nick complained. “Do you have to be so gross?”

If Nick‘s mother rattled him over her attraction to a well-known actor, Starsky shuddered to imagine what Nick would think if he knew his brother had bedded two men.

“It’s just a fact of life, honey,” Dorothy playfully argued with him. “I’ve been on my own for a quarter century; I’m entitled to a risqué thought now and then.”

“Yeah?” Nick continued to whine. “Well, keep it to yourself, will ya? Mothers aren’t supposed to talk about things like that.”

Starsky gave Donna a knowing wink.

The group planned to meet for breakfast in the morning before Starsky ‘returned to Los Angeles’ and his mother to Miami, so they said their goodnights with hugs and kisses in the hotel lobby and then went their separate ways.

Once settled in their room for the night—Starsky still in his suit, sans his tie, and Dorothy having changed into satin pajamas—they sat on the sofa, side-by-side, and talked about life in Miami. It was his turn to use the bathroom, but he preferred to talk more to his mother; he was feeling vulnerable.

Dorothy seemed happy in her Florida residence. She spoke excitedly about how she and Rose had decorated their apartment. If Starsky’s mother could be content in a brand new place after 60 years in a different one, then he could find a level of contentment wherever he decided to land. That notion helped him breathe easier for the first time since he’d left Hutch.

“We’ve seen more of you in six months,” Dorothy noted, “than we have in six years.” It was an innocent comment; Nick had made a similar one during dinner, and both immediate members of his family seemed happy to be blessed by Starsky’s recently frequent visits—but Dorothy startled Starsky as they sat on the sofa that night by asking, “Do you want to tell me what’s going on in your life in such a way that you can spend more time here on the East Coast with us?”

Starsky choked on a light laugh. He’d been caught off-guard. He didn’t know what to say, having to think quick about his reasons. But as he shifted on the sofa to better face his mother, and looked into her patient and always forgiving eyes, he knew one thing: he couldn’t tell her another lie, not a single one more, especially not to her face. He’d never lied to her, not even as a boy, but that changed over the past seven months; every conversation he had with her in that time contained at least one outright falsehood.

She affectionately patted his knee. “You don’t have to tell me, Davey,” she reassured him. “I haven’t wanted to pry, but a lot of the time I hear traffic and noise on the line and I can’t help but think you’re not home when you call me.”

Home. Starsky was definitely far from it—in distance and in his heart. He flashed on that big beautiful house he and Hutch had bought—the open floor plan, large yard, spacious rooms—and all of his dreams that had come with it, now shattered. For seven months, he’d been a nomad, kind of homeless, lost in more ways than just the physical. Hutch was well into another relationship, a committed one, having no doubt made love to his wife, and probably often—given Hutch’s sex drive—husband and wife building a life together with baby-to-be.

Where did that leave Starsky? Homeless. Alone. Lonely. But mostly heartbroken.

“When I came out of that coma,” he said, easing into his truth, instinctively feeling his way along, and breaking eye contact with his mother so he could find the strength to speak without tears, “there was only one other person in the room. And I knew in that moment—I mean, I really knew then—who had my back.”

“He’s always had your back,” Dorothy knowingly reminded him.

If only her observation were true. “I went to live with him after I got out of the hospital,” he explained, “because I still needed someone to help me do simple life things, you know? He bought our groceries and made our meals and paid the bills and helped me to walk again and to drive and to just be … normal.”

A soft affection for her son’s partner appeared in Dorothy’s eyes. “We all knew you were in the best hands. We didn’t have to worry about you.”

“I didn’t, either,” Starsky admitted, looking up at her and feeling the grief well up in his chest. “He’d take a bullet for me.” Would he ever find anyone again who’d do such a thing for him, who’d love him that much? “Ma, I want to tell you what happened, but I’m afraid you’ll think less of me.” In his heart-of-hearts, he believed she’d never disown him, no matter what he did, but she might see him differently, and he couldn’t bear it if she did.

“You can tell me anything,” Dorothy reminded him, softly, with sincerity. “No matter what it is, I would never think less of you, honey. There isn’t anything you could do to change that; you’re my baby boy.”

Did Dorothy know what she was saying? Did she share Starsky’s previous discomfort with homosexuality? Had she imagined everything her son could have done that would warrant such a promise? She’d already forgiven him for the people he had to kill in the line of duty. What could be worse? Moreover, what could he have done to or with Hutch that would have been graver than murdering someone?

It was true that he didn’t have to tell his mother every detail about his breakup with Hutch, but as the hurt intensified inside him, the need to absolve himself took precedence. Tears came reluctantly into his eyes; he bit his lip and didn’t leave eye contact with her as he tried to find his voice.

“Oh, darling,” she said, reaching for him. “Whatever you’re going through, please know I’m here for you.” She embraced him as he surrendered into her arms, and then begged the question. “Did he hurt you, sweetheart?”

Maybe he and Hutch had hurt each other. Maybe he’d been wrong to leave. Maybe he’d misjudged the situation. Maybe he should go home, patch it up, make it work. It wasn’t too late to bite the bullet—endure the jealousy and the pain—was it? Never in his life did he feel more confused.

“He only had the one bed and he gave it to me,” he told her, his voice breaking, overwhelmed by the idea that his mother could shed light in his growing darkness and provide him with the salvation he desperately needed. He felt her fingers gently combing his hair, comforting strokes that empowered him to say more of what he wanted. “I made him sleep with me so I didn’t put him out; he didn’t want to, but you know how I can be.”

Starsky had always known he could push Hutch into places Hutch didn’t want to go; Hutch was weak when it came to Starsky’s wishes, and sometimes Starsky just couldn’t help but to take advantage of that unspoken fact.

“I woke up one morning and he was laying there, looking at me, like he’d been watching me sleep, and I could see in his eyes … all the love in the world.”

Nothing in his mother’s touch changed; could he take that extra step and tell her what he’d done? How could he expect open honesty from his male lover and not practice it himself?

“I kissed him,” he bravely said, not ashamed, and lifting out of her arms so he could show her, “right over his heart, I mean,” tapping the center of his chest. “I didn’t know any other way to tell him I heard him.”

“Your action spoke louder than words,” Dorothy concluded in a soft voice. A smile came to her lips; she was visibly moved by her son’s act of love and it shined in her eyes.

“And then…” He stumbled.

“I think I know what happened next,” she gently replied when he hesitated. “You don’t have to tell me more.”

Starsky blinked for the second time; he hadn’t known until that night just how insightful his mother was—perhaps she had always been wiser than he realized. But he didn’t want her to get the wrong idea, either. “I’m not gay, mom—and not that that matters—but neither is he.”

“No,” she agreed, “but yours and his is an unconventional love story.”

Maybe she misunderstood—or maybe she didn’t. He needed to clarify, for himself, if for no other reason than to remove any ambiguity going forward. “I mean, I’m straight, but … I … I still pleasured him. I wanted to.”

Nothing in his mother’s expression changed; she gently squeezed his knee, lovingly and without prejudice, her voice still kind and gentle, with a warm understanding. “Because you love him—and he let you because he loves you.”

“We’ve never loved anyone more than we did each other.”

“Who you would become together was inevitable,” she said, decidedly. “I am not surprised and I am not shocked.”

Starsky wiped his wet eyes, but the tears spilled just the same. He couldn’t believe how welcomed and safe he felt in his mother’s presence; all those months of lying, trying to hide the truth, when he never needed to, at least not from her.

“We bought a house together,” he continued, realizing he didn’t have to say anything else about the nature of his intimate relationship with Hutch; she understood. “We bought a big bed, too,” he added with a sad laugh. “We were going to set up our lives, live happily ever after.”

“What changed all of that?”

“He traded me in for a woman he got pregnant, said she could live with us, sleep in our bed—with him in it and me in another room.” Starsky couldn’t really fault Hutch for his loyalty to mother-and-child; he just wished Hutch had been more loyal to his partner. “He said he could bed me when she wasn’t around—and then he married her the week after I left him.”

“Oh, David,” Dorothy said, her voice breaking with a great sadness for her son. “I’m so sorry, honey. You must have been so hurt by that, so humiliated and embarrassed. But when you say you left him…”

“I quit my job, moved out of my apartment—without him knowing I did—on the day we were going to move in together. I wrote off my half of the house and left him my car, and I’ve been on the road in a truck I bought and living in hotels around the country ever since.”

Dorothy quietly gasped. “When did this happen?”

“Seven months ago. I’ve been staying out-of-touch with him on purpose. No forwarding address. No phone.”

The only addresses Hutch could send mail to were Nick’s apartment and, since February, to Dorothy’s new address in Florida. A few weeks prior, Starsky had mailed an address change to Dobey in case one was necessary for any closing official business; he simply sent an empty envelope to the precinct, addressed ‘confidentially’ to Dobey, with Nick’s return address in the upper left-hand corner of the envelope.

“I’ve been calling you from pay phones all this time,” Starsky confessed. “I’m not sure, but I figure those are less likely to be traced—and even if they can be, it would be a hassle.”

Dorothy lightly sighed. “Oh, darling,” she said, apologetically, “if I’d only known. I could have been there for you all this time.”

“I didn’t want to put you in the middle.”

“I’m always here for you—on your side.”

Her promise had just been proven. She was visibly upset by Starsky’s anguish, and not at all by his actions with another man.

“I’m sorry I lied to you, mommy,” he cried—new tears flowing, that time from the guilt he felt. “I was afraid you’d disown me for what I’d done with him—or you wouldn’t understand—and I couldn’t explain why I left him without lying to you.” In the eyes of others, he wouldn’t have abandoned Hutch for any other reason besides some official change in their partnership—or his broken heart, but how to explain that level of heartache? Only soulmates could love that deeply and be that hurt; Hutch was his partner, not his everything—as far as the world knew.

“Shh,” she ordered him in a way only a mother could. “Your private life was none of my business; you have nothing to be sorry for. I’ve sensed something has been wrong in your life for a while now, that’s all.”

“I could have just said it was none of your business,” he replied with an insincere laugh, knowing those were words he’d never say to his mother. “I’m sorry I lied.”

Dorothy had moved past her son’s apologies; her interests were in his ongoing pain. “And I suppose that’s why Hutch was in New York in September,” she concluded on her own, “staying overnight in my apartment, and that’s why he was in Oregon on Thanksgiving without you, and why he called me on Christmas, too; he was trying to find you.”

Starsky blinked back his tears. “He called you on Christmas?”

Her expression seemed to sober as if she’d said more than she planned, but she nonetheless explained herself. “I wasn’t going to tell you because I had told him in that call that you had gone back to Los Angeles to spend the rest of Christmas Day with him—and I had ruined the surprise. But, yes, he called Christmas morning. Looking back, I see now that he was only fact-finding.”

Starsky had told Nick in January that he didn’t want to hear whether Hutch called again, but he wanted to know about his mother’s experience, mainly for some kind of closure. “Have you heard from him lately?”

“No.”

It had been four months, then, since Hutch had contacted Dorothy; had it been the same amount of time for Nick, and Nick simply honored Starsky’s wish not to say? Or maybe Hutch had finally given up on his quest to have the last word in his split with Starsky. What was the point, after all? Was it finally over for them? Still, Starsky would wait until after the end of May to relax his guard—and that was probably overkill.

“So you’re no longer together,” Dorothy surmised, her words unintentionally triggering more tears in Starsky’s eyes.

He fidgeted with a shoelace and had to look away if he was going to have any success at controlling the way he felt. But he failed. He could no longer keep his heartache from bursting through. He leaned forward and fell helplessly into his mother’s lap, held her close and tightly, closed his eyes, and silently cried. “He was the greatest thrill of my life,” he swore, his heart filled with an unending pain. “There’ll never be another like him.”

* * *

Lisa Drive itself was as beautiful as the surrounding countryside: mature shade trees littered park-like grounds along the route and cast long, late afternoon shadows over the landscape; some home perimeters were enclosed by three-rail wooden horse fencing, but no sign of animals. It was a peaceful community, with plenty of room between houses, yet still keeping its friendly, family feel.

Starsky turned right onto Sweetwater that early May day, dutifully following the directions he’d been given by the landowner. The street was narrower, the houses now smaller, but the beauty of the surrounding properties was no less peaceful than the previous road, and he immediately found himself privileged to be able to spend time in that tranquil neighborhood.

Starsky had been having breakfast with his mom and Nick in Times Square after Nick got off work the morning following their attendance at the Broadway play, and he was joking with Nick that he might just move back to New York City. Internally, Starsky did wish he’d given consideration to buying his family’s home when Dorothy put it up for sale to move to Miami, but alas, it was not meant to be; he couldn’t afford what she would need to buy elsewhere. He would need to find another place to live.

Nick called Starsky’s bluff and dared him to return to the Big Apple, and then earnestly began to read classified apartment rental ads from the section of the newspaper he’d brought with him from ‘The New York Times.’

Dorothy was quiet throughout the banter between her sons, but she knew Starsky’s private story and probably didn’t want to say or suggest the wrong thing in light of it. Starsky listened to Nick’s suggestions, but he realized it was a long-shot to rent someplace and not have to give his name and Social Security number for credit and background checks.

But then Nick hit on something interesting: an ad which read, “Rent to own. House in the country. Deal for man with tools. Call for details.” Although Nick passed it off as ‘weird,’ Starsky asked him to write down the phone number so he could find out what kind of special deal he might be able to make.

He was still in New York City after he’d seen his mom off at the JFK airport, said goodbye to his brother, and found a payphone at Penn Station where he had a moment of privacy and quiet, to connect with Nancy Domato, an older woman who lived in the Hamptons. He spoke with her for about 15 minutes in which he learned basic details about the ‘deal for man with tools.’

The faded-yellow, three-bedroom, 2.5-bath house was actually in Redland, Maryland, and was a ‘lesser’ home from the one Nancy lived in—which was one of the reasons she herself didn’t want it. She’d inherited the house from her former husband who had no other family heirs, and it needed an upgrade before she could sell it. She hoped to find someone to trade rent on the place for repairs within a six-month window, after which the tenant would be given right-of-first-refusal to buy.

Aside from the proposition, Starsky was intrigued by the notion that he might be able to trade more than rent for labor; he could possibly retain his privacy: not have to sign a publicly available contract and continue to stay off the radar for a while longer. But the only way to do that was to meet Nancy in person.

So he drove the nearly two hours to the Hamptons and met Nancy at an Italian restaurant where she bought him lunch and discussed the situation. Starsky hoped his charm would convince her to give him the key to the house—assuming it wasn’t that bad of a fixer-upper—so he didn’t have to forfeit information that would expose him to the cunning mind of a police detective.

The meeting was productive for both of them: to begin, she brought her last known pictures of the property and outlined the upgrades she thought the house would need. There would be obvious repairs, but the house would also need a new paint job, inside and out, new floors, and a patio deck.

Starsky thought he could go even further with some custom touches, but he didn’t boast. He was upfront with her that he’d built bookcases and helped a friend with a fence, that he could easily fix doorknobs and change out plumbing and light fixtures, and that he could definitely clean up the property—at least make it worth her while to let him ‘paint and polish’ the place suitable enough for a sale. He could tell that his charm—and directness—won her over when she excitedly squeezed his hand and told him how relieved she was to find someone she believed she could trust.

He was then able to prove with a single phone call, alongside his California driver’s license, that he was who he said he was and had done what he said he’d done for the past decade. He didn’t lie to her when he told her he’d quit his job as an L.A. police detective, but that he didn’t want his former boss or colleagues to know where he was. He explained that the split with his superior had been amicable, but that he wanted a clean break from Ken Hutchinson, his partner of 10 years for ‘personal differences.’

Nancy, a woman in her early 60s, just beginning to gray, dressed nicely, and appearing the part of a Hamptons wife and debutante—as well as treated like one—gladly made the single phone call to Capt. Harold Dobey right there from their table, and asked to speak with Det. David Starsky.

“Unfortunately, he no longer works for us,” Dobey had told her, but he added that he was sure he had other detectives who might be able to meet her needs.

“He’s the blond, yes?” she’d replied, pushing Dobey for more details about the young man who sat across from her at the linen-draped table, dressed casually in jeans and a long-sleeved denim shirt.

“The blond was his partner, Ken Hutchinson,” Dobey informed her. “Is he the one you’re looking for? Starsky is dark-haired.”

“Brown eyes?”

“Blue.”

“Late 50s?”

“Mid-thirties.”

She told Dobey she obviously had Starsky confused with someone else, apologized for the inconvenience, and told the Captain that she’d look elsewhere for the detective, a man she said that she’d once employed to solve her missing sister’s case. Dobey offered assistance, but understood why he couldn’t do more to help her after he learned she was actually living in Long Island.

Starsky was impressed by Nancy’s clever ruse, not having expected her to go all-out in defending his privacy, and knew right away that he and she would be compatible as tenant-landlord at least for the next six months. She freely gave Starsky the door keys, along with printed directions to the property, and told him to call her from the still-active house phone when he arrived—to confirm whether they wanted to proceed with the deal they’d made. But he was 100% certain he would take the offer even before he left the restaurant.

The agreed-upon plan was that she would pay all the utility bills and allow him to live in the house rent-free in exchange for improvement upgrades provided that he purchased any tools he might need and all of the repair and upgrade materials the house would require; he should keep all of his receipts.

When the time came to sell the house, he would have the right-of-first-refusal to buy it, so that gave him months to decide whether he wanted to stay on. She added that she really didn’t have time to drive to Maryland, not even to visit by train, so she appreciated any updates he might give her about his progress over the coming months, and he promised he’d keep in regular contact.

After leaving The Hamptons, Starsky drove the more the 6.5 hours to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, bypassing New York City traffic, and stayed overnight in a rest area halfway to the historic town. He ate breakfast in a local diner that next morning, and then walked around Gettysburg’s historic streets, window-shopping. It was time to start thinking about new clothes for his new life.

Before noon, he retrieved his trailer from its storage, hitched it to his Dodge truck, and then drove an easy 1.5-hours to Redland. As soon as he arrived in town, he stopped by a grocery store, parked his rig under shade trees away from most of the cars, and leisurely entered the building to pick up the essentials: fresh and canned food, condiments and other pantry staples, coffee and beer, and the standard toiletries. For the first time in more than seven months, he was about to live somewhere he could call home.

* * *

Starsky’s rent-to-own house had obviously been a bit neglected; it exuded a subtle vibe of abandonment without looking shabby: overgrown bushes and flower beds, an expansive lawn that needed mowing, storm debris scattered about the driveway and pathways; the house exterior, as well as most of the interior, was painted in bland colors, and not a single item of outdoor living was on the front porch or in the backyard—nothing that would indicate that anyone was living there.

Expectedly, the house itself was unfurnished, sans a patio chair left inside near the kitchen counter telephone. Like Starsky himself, the premises had been forsaken for some time. But he also knew he had something to work with—even if he didn’t do much to the property, whatever he did would be enough to prepare it for sale.

After emptying his trailer of its few things—his wicker chair, boxes of books and car models, VHS tapes and utensils, and the like—he parked it in the garage and kept his Dodge truck in the driveway. He had a lot to do just to live in the house.

The first expensive thing he bought was a bed—this one with a full-size mattress (as a kind of touché to Hutch)—along with a frame, headboard, and box spring. He also bought linens, pillows, and blankets—both light and heavyweight—as well as a winter bedspread, just to cover all of his weather bases.

He brought his bedroom furniture and stash back to the house by himself, and set up the bed in the master, dressed it in clean sheets and pillowcases, and finally had somewhere to rest his head—having spent the first two nights at the house sleeping in the driveway on the padded bench seat of his truck; it was either that or an un-cushioned floor, carpet notwithstanding.

He then bought a sofa for the living room, searched for and found his serape in a medium-sized box after the couch was delivered, and draped it over the back. He positioned his wicker chair beside the sofa facing the large window to the porch, and finally had a place to sit, to drink his coffee in the morning, and to read his paper; mostly, he dreamt about what he’d do next with his rental house. Those musings spared him from thinking too much about his previous house plans with Hutch.

On the third day, Starsky was surprised and pleased to find a riding lawnmower—filled with plenty of fuel—in the 10×15-foot shed at the back of the property after first determining that it belonged with the house, and then spent a couple of hours mowing the large yard. He rather liked the task, despite the warm weather: wearing shorts, a tee-shirt, hiking boots, and a cowboy hat, he felt enormous pride as the master of his new kingdom.

When he was done mowing the lawn, he noticed the neighbor’s grass was then a bit higher than maybe it should be, so he stopped next door before he put his mower away to ask if the homeowner would mind if he mowed it pro bono.

He was greeted by an elderly man—probably in his eighties—with grey hair, wearing glasses, slender build, and using a cane. Starsky was surprised to see him, having imagined something completely different, though he couldn’t say why he expected someone younger. The old man introduced himself as Darren Mackey and was thrilled to be asked to have his yard kept up.

“My gardener had to quit a couple of weeks ago,” Mackey sadly explained, opening the door and stepping out onto the porch, “because his mom got sick and he left town.” Mackey’s nursemaid visited him every afternoon, he added, “so not to worry about me,” but Starsky still told Mackey to be sure to call on him if he needed anything.

Starsky then spent the rest of the month shopping for kitchenware and other necessities, such as towels and new TVs: one for the living room, the other for the bedroom. He even bought a small one for the kitchen counter—to keep him company while he prepared meals, something he really hadn’t mastered, but hoped to learn. Other than Nick and his mother, Starsky didn’t have contact with people beyond the strangers he met at the stores he shopped—them, and Mr. Mackey, his next-door neighbor.

So it came as a surprise when he heard a woman’s voice behind him just as he stepped back from the newly painted front door to admire his handiwork.

“That looks good!” she said, approaching him from the driveway.

He glanced over his shoulder to see a young woman in a soft blue summer dress and sandals nearing the bottom of the porch steps. “You think so?” he playfully asked, not missing a beat as he turned to face her; he assumed she was a neighbor because he didn’t hear or see a vehicle in the drive—besides his truck.

He also didn’t miss that she was of average height with long, layered black hair, parted on one side, seemed comfortable in her slender yet curvy build, and was probably in her mid- to late-twenties. She was, objectively speaking, a rather beautiful woman—right there on his property, smiling at up at him as she studied the red door he’d just painted. “I like it myself,” he said, not sure in that moment if he meant the paint job or the beauty who’d purposefully arrived to see him; she carried a small paper plate of cookies covered in cling wrap.

“A perfect shade of red,” she agreed, shifting her eyes from the door to his face. “You’ve brought the place to life.”

He’d only just begun that endeavor, having already pulled up the carpets in the house, cut the sizable pieces into manageable ones, carried them and the soiled carpet pad to his truck, loaded the bed, and hauled it all to the neighborhood dump. While he was buying the paint for the interior walls, he remembered that he’d always wanted a red front door, so he guessed on the shade and the amount to buy, and both his hunches seemed to pay off.

“I’m Kayla,” the woman said, coming up the steps. “I couldn’t help but notice you’ve been helping Mr. Mackey with some of his yard care, and then I saw you painting the door, so I finally decided you must be the new homeowner—and I want to welcome you to the neighborhood.”

Starsky noticed Kayla’s emerald green eyes under high-arched dark eyebrows, and couldn’t help but think she had to be of East Indian or deeper European descent; her skin tone was only a couple of shades darker than his own—but definitely a far cry from Hutch’s porcelain color. She didn’t speak with an accent, Starsky noted, so he may have to rule out the Indian or Asian part of her heritage, and think more along the lines of Middle Eastern or Greek, maybe even Egyptian. She should be in movies.

When she extended the plate of cookies to him, he wiped his hands on his jeans shorts, apologized for not being able to shake her hand, and introduced himself as “Dane Skyler.” He was still obviously wary. Would he ever overcome his paranoia, settle down or in, and live a comfortable life? “You didn’t have to,” he said, eyeing the freshly baked cookies and feeling glad she did, “but you’ll get no argument here. Thank you.”

“I live in the house on the other side of the street from Mr. Mackey,” she explained, pointing to a small house further down the road. “I have a bird’s eye view of his property, so I keep an eye on him as much as possible. He’s 94 next month.”

Starsky had guessed Mackey’s age to be somewhere in his 80s; boy, was he wrong. He felt awkward, too. She was so young and beautiful and neatly dressed; he was in shorts, an abused tee-shirt, and sock-less hiking boots. He hadn’t shaved in several days and didn’t bathe that morning, choosing to get to work stripping the carpets out of the house before it got any hotter outside. But he didn’t know why he cared, either. Maybe she was just a reminder that life was passing him by—at breakneck speed.

“I guess that’ll be two of us,” he suggested, about keeping an eye on their elderly neighbor. “He said he has a caregiver in the afternoons.”

“She comes closer to evening—when he begins to sundown—and stays overnight; makes his dinner and breakfast, keeps him company.”

“When he ‘sundowns’?”

“His memory starts to get hazy by end of day.”

“I must be sunrising then,” Starsky said with a self-deprecating laugh, “and it lasts all day.”

She gently laughed with him, obviously not taking him seriously. “The Latham house has been empty for months now,” she noted, referring to the one he’d moved into. “I was about to mow the lawn myself after Mr. Mackey’s landscaper left, so I’m really happy that you beat me to it.”

He couldn’t picture Kayla driving a riding lawnmower. She was more the gentle, delicate kind. He thought about telling her he was only living in the house for six months in exchange for home improvements, and hadn’t decided whether he wanted to buy it, but he decided against giving her any details about his life until he felt more sure of it himself. “It needs a lot of work,” he said instead. “I have big plans.”

He didn’t mean for his comment to scare her away, but maybe she wanted to go—to keep their first meeting short and sweet—because she told him she’d let him get back to his task before the opened can of paint hardened, and that he could call on her anytime, if he needed anything: groceries, a newspaper, some fresh flowers.

He thanked her again for the cookies and then watched her walk back down the steps and across the drive and yard into the direction of her house. He’d now made acquaintances with two people on the country block—and so far, so good that they were personable. Maybe he should seriously consider buying the property when the time came.

* * *

Starsky didn’t hesitate when he chose the laminate wood flooring for the house; he knew right away what he liked and purchased it without a second thought: a deep, distressed brown hickory color to accent the faint maple hues of the wall paint he’d chosen.

But it would be a couple of weeks before the materials would be delivered, so he next hired a service to paint the exterior of the house—using a business recommended to him by the local hardware store—and then he bought enough paint for the inside, along with all the supplies he’d need, deciding to make that a project he’d do by himself.

While he waited those two weeks for the floor delivery, he shopped for gardening supplies and for plants at nurseries; he visited hardware and furniture stores for more tools and household items; he even bought a new wardrobe of comfortable clothes—mostly cotton shorts, tee-shirts, and lightweight loungewear, but also some dressier pants, loafers, and button-downs, dumping his old ones at a local charity. Hutch would fall over dead if he saw Starsky in such finer casual-ware—on his own volition, no less—especially if it wasn’t due to any special event.

After the exterior of the house was power-washed and painted in a soft, warm beige and the painters handsomely tipped with cash and beer, Starsky spent an afternoon painting the front porch rails and corner posts, deciding on a deep forest brown for contrast. In one corner near the front door, he hung wind chimes that he’d found at a local market, and then he bought two cushioned patio chairs and a small table set that he positioned outside the living room windows.

With his new assortment of tools, and using his garage as a workshop—complete with sawhorses he made from a truck-bed full of lumber he bought, and a brand new band saw—he designed his own medium-sized wooden boxes to hang atop the front porch rails. He planted a variety of colorful flowers in them, using all-purpose soil and mulch, and used a metal can to water them. He didn’t know much about the plants he’d chosen, except that they were pretty, but it was a task that made him feel very domestic, nonetheless.

The front of the house was finally done—and in record time, too. Starsky was, without a doubt, on a roll.

Fertilizing and hose-watering the plants along the driveway had eventually paid off, as well, because his dedication to resurrecting them had soon brought them back to life, especially the rose bushes. To finish out the yard, Starsky assembled a large stone bird bath he bought from a nursery surplus store and placed it between the house and the 40-year-old shade tree in the center of the front grassy lawn. It wasn’t long after he filled the bowl with water, using a hose he’d pulled out from the house, that he happily noticed how quickly the resident birds began bathing in it.

His rent-to-own house finally looked lived in. Summer songbirds and the occasional tinkle of wind chimes were the only sounds he heard on some mornings while sitting on his porch in a patio chair, drinking coffee and reading the newspaper, before diving into ‘house work’; the neighborhood was relatively quiet, peaceful and quaint, with seldom any traffic. He felt miles away from Los Angeles in more ways than one.

Time passed without boring him. In the garage, he worked while listening to a music station and, in the house, to talk radio. On the day the laminate floor boxes were delivered, he had removed the baseboards throughout the house and carried them in stacks to his workshop where he sanded and painted them. While they dried, scattered around the garage floor, he painted the walls in the house—first with a roller to get a couple of coats in place rather quickly, and then around the edges of ceilings, windows, and doors using a brush, whistling while he worked. His years of intricately painting small car models had taught him patience, not just skill.

“Did you just get here?” he heard Kayla’s voice ask on an early morning when he clumsily crawled out of his truck in the driveway, disheveled and sleepy-eyed.

Her question made him laugh; he knew she teased him. “I was getting high on paint,” he explained, noticing how neatly she was dressed and groomed, so he straightened his tee-shirt, checked his jeans zipper, and ran his fingers through his wavy hair to tidy himself. “I slept in the truck before the formaldehyde got the better of me.” He could only keep the house windows open for a short while in the mornings; once the day began to heat up, he had to close them and rely on the air conditioner—which was little help in reducing the paint fumes.

“I brought you coffee,” she said, extending a ceramic cup toward him, and eyeing him as if she didn’t believe his excuse for sleeping in his truck. “I know you’re painting inside, but it never occurred to me that I might have to perform mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on you; for the record, I don’t know how—though I wouldn’t mind learning,” she added, as if on playful second thought.

That was the first time he thought Kayla flirted with him; it wouldn’t be the last. He winked at her as he accepted the cup and took a long drink from it; the coffee was hot and sweet. “How did you know I like it with so much cream and sugar, hm?”

“When you showed me the progress you’re making on sanding the kitchen cabinets, I noticed all the things you had on the counter near the kettle.”

“You’d make a great detective,” he said. His own words pained him, but he didn’t let it show. He did miss his job, the one that was really in his blood—and he missed his partner even more. To intercept his sudden melancholic feelings, he kept the focus on her. “So what do you do with your time besides bake cookies for your greedy neighbors?”

“I’m a veterinary assistant on my way to full vet hood.”

Starsky leaned back, gave her a closer look-over, not sure at first if she was pulling his leg, and decided she wasn’t. “I’m impressed.”

“Thank you,” she shyly replied, dramatically batting her green eyes at him, causing him to laugh. “What do you do with your time, Mr. Skyler, when you’re not fixing up your house?”

“I fix up other people’s houses?” he suggested, sipping coffee, and making his answer sound less of a question and more of a statement, so he could forgive himself for the lie. She had called him ‘Mr. Skyler’ affectionately, but he corrected her just the same. “Call me Sky.” At least that part of his alias was the same as his name, and he didn’t have to be so dishonest with his new friend.

“Could I hire you for a thing or two, Sky?”

“Do you have a thing or two that needs fixing?”

“I can probably come up with something.”

“Let me know what and when,” he seriously said, purposefully not fueling her innuendo. “What do you do when you’re not working?” He assumed she had a boyfriend. Maybe even a husband.

She had to think a moment. “Lessee…”

It was in that pause that Starsky noticed again how pretty she was: her curvy body, rounded breasts, smooth, darker skin. On this day, she had pulled her hair back into a ponytail with whispers of hair around her face. She was dressed in brightly colored summer clothes—short-shorts, v-neck tee-shirt showing off a small cleavage, slip-on sandals—and wore turquoise necklaces, dangly earrings, and a silver chain bracelet on her right wrist. Native American jewelry on an East Indian, perhaps?

“I volunteer for a wild cat sanctuary,” she finally said, not noticing his momentary study. “But that’s a lot like work since it involves animal care, so I’m not sure if that answers your question.”

“Wild cats?”

“You know: lions, tigers—”

“Bears, oh my?”

She laughed, tickled, at the same rolling her eyes. “—and mountain lions, bobcats—”

“Oh, yeah? I saw a mountain lion once. A baby one.”

“By itself?”

“It was at a sanctuary.”

“You’ve been to the Maryland Wild Cat Sanctuary?”

“This was at the Hidden Valley Wildlife Sanctuary outside Denver. Spent a weekend there last September,” he proudly said, as if he wasn’t as old and out-of-touch as he feared she might have thought he was. He recalled one of his favorite moments, now poignant and bittersweet. “I got to see them release a bald eagle back into the wild, too,” he said a bit smugly, and drinking what was left of his coffee.

“Then you must have met Alec Henley.”

Starsky nearly spit out his coffee as his heart lurched in his chest; he did choke when it went down his throat the wrong way. He sat up, coughing, immediately telling Kayla that he was okay, and apologized for his accidental swallow. The only other thing Kayla could have said that would have been more jarring was hearing Hutch’s name come out of her mouth. What Starsky needed to know was how much ‘danger-of-exposure’ he might be in. “Have you met him—Alec?”

“Not yet,” Kayla replied, “but I sure want to. He’s one of my heroes—plus he’s handsome—and everything I hope to be someday. I’ve seen him on TV.”

“I don’t know why you’d want to be handsome.”

She laughed, realizing her mistake. “I’m planning to intern at his sanctuary next summer. Maybe he’ll fall in love with me and we’ll live happily ever after saving animals together.”

Starsky’s world had shrunk in an instant, so he tried to derail her. “He’s old enough to be your father.”

“I’ll take him any way I can get him.”

The last thing Starsky wanted to imply was that he was jealous. He needed to change the subject, and yet do it in a way she wouldn’t notice. “Well, I hope you get your wish. I assume you’re not already married?”

“In between romances. Right now, I’d rather concentrate on my career. What about you?”

“Never married. Currently stalled between romances. Concentrating on home improvements.”

She sadly laughed. “That sounds heartbreaking.”

“Not as much as you think.”

He lied.

Time to redirect again. “You strike me as an ambitious young woman, but are you only now hitting drinking age?”

She frowned at him. “I’m 26.”

“Getting old,” he laughed.

“Younger than you,” she teased. “But, anyway, when I’m not at the clinic or in class, I take pictures of animals for sanctuaries and shelters to help them with fundraising.”

“Oh? You’re a photographer?”

“Amateur.”

“But you like cameras,” he concluded, happy to find another subject.

“I’m still learning. What about you?” she wondered, assuming correctly that he had an interest in photography. “All of this yard design tells me you have composition talent.”

“Also an amateur,” he confessed, “but good enough to be proud of my pictures.”

“You’ll have to show me sometime.”

“After the floors are in, I’ll finish unpacking and invite you over to go through my photo albums with me; bring yours along. Maybe we can teach each other something new.” He thought maybe he’d like to pay her back for her hospitality while he was at it. “I’ll make us lunch or something.”

“I’ll bring the cookies.”

“There’s a deal.”

The floor replacement took time, but Starsky made steady progress. He hadn’t realized it himself until then just how good he was with a measuring tape and a jigsaw. The bathrooms had tile floors and nothing to change there, so he began laying the laminate in the master bedroom right outside its bathroom, backing his way out, while he listened to talk radio and stopped only to eat.

He was able to finish the room in a day, with enough time left over to re-install the baseboards, and then he spent the evening re-assembling the bed, so he didn’t have to sleep in his truck again. Other than wall art, his bedroom was relatively complete. He’d been at home improvements for more than three weeks and had made measurable progress. He felt satisfied.

The next task was to lay the floor in the living room. By then, he considered himself fully experienced in locking in the boards, hammering them in place with a rubber mallet, and then figuring out which baseboard went where. After nailing those in, he touched up the nail heads with paint. “Car models,” he reiterated under his breath, feeling pride in his work. “All those times you laughed at me and my ‘stupid hobby,’ Hutch, and meanwhile, I was fine-tuning a new skill.”

Starsky was maybe a better detective than Hutch, too. He’d outsmarted the man, seven months and counting. Hutch had his baby at the end of the previous month, even if the delivery had been late, and Starsky was finally breathing easier.

During the week that Starsky finished the floor replacements, he had to mow the yards again. Each pass he made past the back of the house heightened his determination to create as inviting a patio as he’d made the front porch. Just like he’d planned for the property he and Hutch had briefly owned together, he would build a greenhouse, a couple of raised vegetable beds, a pergola, and eventually a deck—with steps down to the lawn—one big enough for a hot tub, flower boxes, bird feeders, and outdoor furniture: a table and chairs, a covered swing, shade umbrellas, and a barbecue grill. If he couldn’t have those things with Hutch, he would have them by himself.

Kayla brought him a refreshment after he finished mowing Mr. Mackey’s lawn that mid-morning just as Starsky was about to drive the lawnmower home. Instead, he killed its engine and sat on the tractor in the sunshine while he drank the cold, tasty, obviously homemade lemonade, and talked to her about the elderly man’s continuing good health.

“He has more life in him than I do,” Starsky joked. He was visibly sweaty, his skin glistening in the warm sun, and he couldn’t help but notice how young and smooth hers was. “I have to ask,” he said, figuring by then that he could delve into the personal; she’d become a bit of a fixture in his life, visiting him every few days or so. “What’s your heritage?”

“My father, English,” she replied, smiling, as if she was pleased by his question. “My mother, Greek.”

“I would have won some kind of prize,” he said with a laugh, having silently guessed earlier that her ancestors may have hailed from Greece—among all of his other guesses.

“You thought Greek?”

“As one possibility.”

“What about you?” she asked, briefly running a finger over his wet forearm. “Olive skin. Italian, maybe?”

He laughed and rolled the cool glass across his neck. “I do like pasta.”

“But, no?”

“Father, Israeli. Mother, Hungarian.”

“With a surname of Skyler?”

“It’s complicated.”

She wasn’t fazed. “So you must be Jewish?”

“And Christian.”

“Oh, you poor boy!” she laughed. “You must have been so confused growing up.”

“More like I got the best of both worlds. You?”

“I’m a non-believer.”

Hutch would like Kayla. He wasn’t a bonafide atheist, but he appreciated the logic of it more than Starsky was able to. Regardless, Starsky felt confident when he hung his Menorah on the living room wall across from the large windows that his friendliest neighbor wouldn’t object. Next up was an area rug, end tables, lamps, and a coffee table to finish off the set.

By the end of May, Starsky had been going gangbusters on home improvements every single day, so Kayla decided to change his work plans for him that last weekend. “Go with me to Arlington Cemetery for Memorial Day?” she begged him. She told him her father had been a military man and was buried there. “I don’t like to drive into the city by myself and I’d have to take a train, followed by a subway, and then a taxi if I go alone. So, will you? I’ll bake you more cookies,” she promised.

“I’ll do it for free,” he said, appreciatively, figuring he could use the break before re-flooring the other two bedrooms and the hallway, “but keep the cookies coming just the same.” It did occur to him that Kayla probably had a number of friends she could have gone to the Cemetery with, but she was growing fond of him. The feeling was mutual, but he wasn’t sure if it was for the same reasons—or in the same way.

On the morning before their trip to D.C., there was a knock on the front door. Starsky had been sitting at his kitchen counter reading the paper while he had breakfast—a plate of potatoes, fried eggs, and toast that he’d made himself. Hutch would probably have added avocado to the meal—or a complete omelette—and some freshly squeezed orange juice, but the feelings those reminders created in Starsky were thankfully interrupted.

Opening the door, he expected to see Kayla standing there with a big smile and some kind of offering, but instead he was greeted by a woman old enough to be his mother: short gray hair, pretty but aging face, dressed nicely in jeans and a pink blouse.

She promptly introduced herself. “Hi! I’m Gayle Leonard and I live next door to you on the same side of the street.” She pointed to the house on the property beside his. Unable to ignore what she could obviously see inside of his house, she excitedly added, “Oh, my, you’ve done such an incredible job! The yard is so lovely—and what you’ve done to the living room is just gorgeous.”

He couldn’t help but think she’d love to see more. Maybe he’d give her a tour when he was done—just to show off. “Pleasure,” Starsky said with a friendly smile. “Dane Skyler. How may I help you?”

“A little bird told me you’re a bit of a handyman,” she explained, “and now I see for myself that the little bird was right.”

“That little bird wouldn’t happen to be named Kayla, would it?”

Gayle smiled. “My lips are sealed.”

“What do you need?”

“I have the materials,” Gayle assured him, “but I’m too nervous to fix the drawer in the kitchen by myself.”

Hers would end up being one of many small tasks Starsky began to do around the neighborhood—all for middle-aged women. He couldn’t help but think he’d become a novelty. Some of them even wore wedding rings. But they were honest jobs—gate latches, hanging hooks, door hardware replacements, and the like—and he refused payment for all of them, too. In exchange, he’d greet more than just Gayle on his porch; he’d open the door to a wide variety of gifts: cookies and freshly baked bread, lasagna and garlic toast, a basket of fresh fruit. Maybe he’d never have to cook a full meal again.

In the meantime, he was off with Kayla that Memorial Day morning, the two of them in his truck, giving him his first excuse to wear clothes that weren’t needing a washing machine by end of weekend. It was a comfortable partly cloudy day with a high in the mid-70s, and the stop in the Welcome Center was the perfect place and time for a refreshment before they hit the more than 600 acres of park grounds.

Kayla matched him in her linen shorts and cotton, short-sleeved blouse; she wore sandals and jewelry and a summer hat, too. She was the most comfortable with him than she’d ever been, dragging him by his arm out of the visitor building and into the streets of Arlington Cemetery, a bouquet of flowers in her other hand.

“There’s no hurry, is there, Kay?” Starsky joked with her. “I mean, everybody here isn’t going anywhere, are they? They’re all dead, right?”

She punched his shoulder. “My father is one of them.”

“I’m sorry,” he quickly replied, taking her briefly in his arms to sincerely apologize for his insensitivity. “I wasn’t thinking.”

She guided him along, sometimes with her arm hooked in his, other times skipping ahead, calling him a ‘slow-poke,’ and returning with more exciting things to tell him about Arlington Cemetery.

The first main drive intersected with a smaller road that took them to President William Taft’s gravesite—a man who lived and died well before either Starsky and Kayla had been born and one of only two presidents buried at Arlington. Starsky knew little about Taft, but he was impressed by the shrine.

Kayla’s father was buried off Lincoln Drive, not too far of a walk from Taft’s grave. She’d obviously been to the site often because she walked right to it among the rows of identical headstones, laying her flowers before Starsky reached her. He then silently waited to give her time alone with her thoughts while she knelt in the grass. When she eventually looked up at him, she said, “He was only 33 years old.”

Starsky had already read the engraved stone and done the math:

IN MEMORY OF KEITH PEARSON, CAPT, US MARINE CORPS, VIETNAM, APR 17 1934 – OCT 9 1967

“I’m so sorry, Kayla,” he softly said, calculating that her father had passed when she was thirteen. He’d never told her about having lost his own father at age 12—in the line of duty, a kind of military engagement—and just then wasn’t the time to tell her, either. He let her have those moments to herself.

“I barely knew him,” she said. “He’d gone off to war when I was seven—and never came home.”

Much like Starsky’s father, going off to work that fateful day, and never coming home. Starsky had something in common with Kayla that he didn’t know until their visit to the cemetery, and she wouldn’t know for some time.

After they left the PEARSON gravesite, they walked in a warming sun along Sherman Drive for a short distance before turning onto Sheridan, and followed the signs to President John F. Kennedy’s burial grounds. They were quiet along the walk, each lost in their own thoughts, his hands in his shorts’ pockets, her arm tucked inside his. Only then did he notice she still had two red roses in her possession.

When they arrived at the eternal flame along with scores of other tourists, Kayla tossed one of her flowers onto the granite stone that encircled the head of Kennedy’s grave. His thoughts wandered into that terrible day when he heard the sickening news of Kennedy’s murder, and then to his experience in Dallas just a few months earlier. And just like that, without any warning, he left thoughts of history behind and fell into his own feelings of loss—not for his father, but for his partner.

Starsky had traipsed the United States, visiting natural wonders and historic landmarks—and he should have made that trip with Hutch. He missed Hutch so much: the banter, the companionship, the problem-solving, the eating, the sex. The love. It should have been Hutch with him on that Memorial Day at Arlington Cemetery. There was still so much to see and do in their lives, if only Hutch hadn’t demolished their dreams.

Kayla left her final rose on Robert F. Kennedy’s small plaque, a place Starsky wouldn’t have realized was there until he saw her place the flower on the unimposing headstone. ‘Robert Francis Kennedy 1925 1968’ the small, engraved letters read. His was quite humble compared to his brother’s.

It was in that moment, just as he and Kayla turned back to face the view from the Kennedy memorial to the Washington Monument in the distance that Starsky thought he saw Hutch in the crowd. It was a flash of blond hair—the perfect height, a muscled build—that hit Starsky out of the corner of his eye. He looked back in a second, his heart immediately pounding, his skin breaking a nervous sweat, a pit of pure joy commingled with dread punching his gut.

But the image must have been an illusion. There was no Hutch in the crowd. No blond lover of his that he could see in their midst. Starsky’s mind had just played a cruel trick on him.

* * *

It was the recurring lulls in time that were the hardest. Waiting for paint to dry. The sun to set. Dawn. Traveling across the country had kept Starsky busy in mind and body; home improvements were the next thing to occupy his thoughts. But in those quiet moments, in those in-betweens, everything about him circled back to Hutch: all of Starsky’s fondest memories, deepest desires, possible dreams, had been about his partner.

They had entered a relationship together that conquered all others. Never before had Starsky felt that complete—in love or in life. Everything he needed, everything he ever really wanted, he found in Hutch. And he missed him terribly. He missed what he had with him as much as he pined for the life they planned. They had just turned a corner in their lifestyles, in their jobs, and in their way of being in love—when it all came to a crashing and unexpected end.

Sometimes, after waking, but before he found the motivation to get out of bed, Starsky reminisced. On that particular mid-June morning, he replayed the first kiss he’d given Hutch. Starsky had awakened to find Hutch still lying on the bed beside him, watching him, silently communing with him without Starsky knowing he did.

Hutch smiled at him when their blue eyes met—a shy, gentle, inviting smile, one Starsky would never forget, welcoming him into the next day of their lives. “Good morning,” Hutch said in that soft buttery voice. He seemed tempted to touch Starsky, to ease the look of sudden epiphany from Starsky’s face, but maybe something about their proximity on that bed, their still-unprecedented closeness, and especially because of Hutch’s nakedness, Hutch didn’t lift his hand.

But Starsky had read him; he knew what lay deep in Hutch’s heart—even if Hutch didn’t know it in that minute. It wasn’t bravery that compelled Starsky; it was what was necessary. He didn’t use words to greet Hutch in kind; instead, he rose to his elbow, shoved the sheet and blanket to Hutch’s waist, and leaned into him, effectively pushing Hutch into passiveness. Hutch went willingly.

That’s how Starsky knew he was right about how much they loved and trusted each other.

On an inhale, he bent over Hutch, placed his lips against the middle of Hutch’s chest, and gently kissed his warm, bare skin, with softness and at length. The only way Starsky knew how to respond to the magnitude of Hutch’s love was to kiss his heart in reply.

Hutch lightly laughed. “Be careful,” he gently warned, joking with Starsky about how that kiss could be misread.

But Starsky followed his own heart in that moment. He pushed the sheet further down on Hutch, to the middle of his thighs, purposefully exposing his naked body to the cool morning air, to the dawning light, and to obvious further play. He felt Hutch tug on his tee-shirt sleeve—in an apparent but feeble move to stop Starsky; he barely got Starsky’s name past his lips, too, let alone the words he probably wanted to say, something like ‘Starsk, don’t’—but he was too late.

With a soft moan, Starsky inhaled Hutch’s scent as he quite tenderly kissed the crown of his already swelling, unsheathing penis.

That’s how Starsky knew he was right about their deeper desires for each other.

The arousal that memory stirred in Starsky brought anger into his heart at the same time. He resented its futility. Why was he alone on that bed? in that rented house? all those miles away? How could Hutch not have known what he’d done to them?

He missed Hutch’s golden smile, his beautiful face, his annoying impatience, his gentle touch, his irritability over the simplest things. He missed Hutch’s voice, his formidable nature, his convictions of right and wrong. Despite their differences, Starsky was comfortable in his own skin. He let Hutch push him so far before he stood his ground—and Hutch always backed down.

There were things about Hutch that only Starsky knew, and things about himself that only Hutch knew—and they knew they knew it. It was the obvious: Hutch’s heroin addiction, Starsky’s phobia of vampires, those private idiosyncrasies about each other that they kept to themselves, but it went beyond that, too. Only Starsky knew how deep Hutch’s shyness went—and why; only Hutch knew the pain and fear Starsky battled having felt abandoned and discarded after his father died.

In some ways, Starsky and Hutch were undeniably similar, and their ability to converse in an unspoken language with each other proved that point. Starsky never felt more understood—not always appreciated, but at least accepted, faults and all. Hutch would go the ends of the earth for him, give him the shirt off his back, lay down his life, but he had that mean streak, too.

Starsky would trade anything and everything to be belittled by Hutch again—that’s how much he missed the man.

It was Friday morning. Starsky had things to do and no time for trips down Memory Lane. He shuffled off the bed and headed for the kitchen. Another day of avoiding pain was on the calendar—that, and calling his mother later. He decided to make the 20-minute drive out to the Seneca Creek State Park east of Redland, a place he’d discovered on a map, take Kayla with him, find a payphone along the way. He could use her company—and especially the distraction.

“The FBI called,” Dorothy told him, as if it were an every day occurrence.

“What did you do now, ma?” Starsky joked in reply. He leaned into the doorway of the payphone booth, looked back toward his parked truck where Kayla busied herself taking pictures of dandelions growing outside the passenger door while he made contact with his mother.

“You silly boy,” she teased him. “The agent wanted to speak to you. Something about a job opportunity.”

Starsky was suspicious. Was Hutch pretending to be the FBI? Dorothy would recognize Hutch’s voice. Maybe Hutch faked an accent or he put someone else up to the prank call.

“I told him I only had your number in California,” Dorothy continued, “but he said he was unable to reach you there. I didn’t tell him you’re living in Maryland.”

“Because you thought it might be Hutch?”

“Because I won’t be telling anyone about your private life until you tell me I can.”

The love of a mother.

“Did this guy give you a number?”

She relayed it to Starsky; he only wanted to know the area code so he could believe a little of what he was being told. 202. Washington, D.C. “Did he give you a name?”

“Agent Simon Finelli.”

An Italian name, if ever there was one. What was the name of the FBI agent he spoke to about the Federal Witness Protection Program? Ravioli? Was being Italian a requirement to work for the FBI?

He thought for a moment. “What did he specifically want?”

“Just for you to call him back about a job opening.”

“Why me?”

“I don’t know, honey. He said something about the agency looking for decorated detectives—and you must be on a list somewhere.”

Maybe. He might test the number, see if it was legit, but he wasn’t interested in working for the FBI. It was too close to the kind of work he had done in Los Angeles, and he’d be a sitting duck in Hutch’s line of sight. But he promised his mother that he’d look into it, and then answered her question about what he’d been up to since the previous Friday, making the mistake of telling her about his day adventure with Kayla.

“Is this a budding romance I’m hearing about?” Dorothy asked.

“I said she’s a neighbor, mom.”

“A neighbor can be a romance.”

Starsky glanced over at Kayla again; she was kneeling at the back of the truck, appearing to take macro pictures of … gravel? The idea made him chuckle. “She’s a lovely girl,” he admitted. “She’s been a nice distraction, but…”

“But you’re still missing him.”

“I gotta go,” he said, not unkindly. He’d spent the morning thinking about Hutch and he didn’t want to give the man another minute that day, if he could help it. “I promised Kayla a sit-down restaurant dinner”—after a long day in the park.

Starsky began building a wooden deck off the back of the house, having decided he was ready to tackle the next big project—in between his smaller ones of changing door hardware and sink fixtures, installing a bookcase on the side wall in the living room, and hanging pictures and other art in the back bedrooms.

He also took breaks from building the deck to attend to the needs of his neighbors: shelves in a pantry, a porch step repair, the placement of heavy pottery along a driveway. He stayed fed and his gift-giving clients stayed happy. Kayla was actually amused by the number of handyman requests Starsky was getting from their neighbors, telling Starsky he was “the hottest thing on the block since neighbor Margaret gave everyone freshly baked sourdough bread two Christmases ago.”

One evening, after inviting Kayla over to share a spaghetti dinner with him, this one he made himself, he sat on the porch with her, drinking wine, listening to summer insects, and talked about their day—and the weather: it had been unseasonably hot; a pressing heat wave had become national news.

“When you build a greenhouse,” Kayla suggested, knowing he had plans to do just that, “I’ll help you grow things.”

“I welcome the extra hand.”

“I have an orange tree,” she offered. “In the winter, I share the oranges with everyone in the neighborhood who wants them. Maybe we can do that with what we grow in the greenhouse.”

“It’ll have to be a big greenhouse.”

“But what do you think?”

“Okay,” he agreed, sipping wine. He’d had a glass already and was feeling amicable to just about everything. “I was also thinking of planting some fruit trees. Maybe you can help me decide which kind.”

“We obviously don’t need an orange tree.”

“So we’ll plant enough trees between your house and mine to feed everyone a variety of fruit.”

“I like you, Sky.”

He winked at her. “Get in line,” he joked.

“You said a while back that you’ve never been married,” Kayla noted. She sat cross-legged in her patio chair beside the small table between them. String lights draped the perimeter of the porch and a lamppost in front of Mr. Mackey’s house shed the other available light.

“Never found the right girl,” Starsky explained. “Or maybe I’m just not the marrying kind.”

“In thirty-five years, you’ve never met a woman you wanted to marry?”

“Thirty-seven,” he reminded her. “But, yeah, there was a couple of them—but for this reason and that, it didn’t work out.”

She was wordless for a while, as if she contemplated his sorry life. “Is that why you’re here in Redland, starting over?”

“Who said I was starting over?”

“You don’t have any friends visiting,” she noted.

He couldn’t argue that fact, so he didn’t even try.

“Your mom lives in Florida,” she added.

He’d told her that when they visited the Seneca Creek State Park and he called his mother from a payphone.

“You bought all new furniture and a TV and—”

“Okay,” Starsky surrendered, “so you win the Better Detective of the Year Award, yet again.”

“Better? Are you a detective?”

“If I were,” he laughed, feeling almost caught, “I’m saying you’re better.”

“Oh, I see. So that would mean you’re not a very good detective—if you are, in fact, a detective—because if I’m a better detective than you, and I’m not all that great, then you’re an—”

“—idiot—for getting myself into this conversation.”

“Maybe,” she playfully agreed, laughing at him. “But what did you do before you moved into the neighborhood? Have you always been a carpenter?”

He liked the sound of that title. It got him off the hook, too. “Started putting toy car models together when I was eight. From there, I branched into bigger-and-better things.”

“Okay, so why did you end up moving here and starting over?”

“Breakup,” he said, telling her the truth. There were only so many lies to go around and he’d spent them all. “Bad one.”

“Oh. I’m sorry. One of those that ‘didn’t work out’?”

“The one that didn’t work out.”

They lost themselves in silence for a while, but Starsky didn’t want her feeling sorry for him. “Sometimes you think you’re Number One,” he explained, “only to find out that you’re not. Simple as that. I didn’t want to hang around and see it rubbed in my face.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s life.”

“Life sucks sometimes.”

He laughed, sadly. “That, it does. Sometimes.” Life could also be absolutely perfect: lying in Hutch’s arms, for one. Cracking each other up over some stupid thing. Sharing an epiphany on a particular case.

But she was young and he didn’t want his cynicism to influence her. “Sometimes life is great,” he reminded her. “Cowboy movies. Playing ball. Pizza.” He was happy to hear her laugh.

“Puppies,” she added to his list. “Oh, that reminds me! I wanted to ask if you’d go with me to a conference in D.C.? It’s a two-day function, so we’d have to stay overnight. Would you do that with me? I promise to keep my hands to myself.”

He looked over at her, into her sparkling green eyes, and wryly smiled, realizing what he shouldn’t say under the influence, and said instead, “What’s the conference for?”

“Animal rescue. It would probably bore you, but we could see some sights together and eat Ethiopian food afterwards. I know a really good restaurant in Georgetown.” She said she knew the area well because she’d gone to college there.

“When’s the conference?”

“Third weekend this month. June 28, I think.”

Starsky hoped to have the deck built by then. He even ordered a hot tub to be delivered the following week, but he wasn’t sure he’d be using it any time soon: the heat wave had begun to suffocate the country and it was killing people in record numbers.

In the mornings, Starsky used the cooler temperatures to work on the deck and finish the floor replacements in the house. In the hotter part of the day, he painted the doors and drawers of the kitchen cabinets and reinstalled their handles. In the evenings, he sat at his kitchen table, listening to TV, and assembled the parts he’d made for small bird houses, which he hung around the property in the existing trees. He made so many, he had to give a few away, and then hung a larger one on a branch in Mr. Mackey’s front yard, too. Maybe Starsky should open a business selling bird houses and feeders.

Most meals he ate on his own. Sometimes he took food across the way to Mackey’s house and shared a cooked dinner with him. The old man was still of sound mind-and-body, and they often discussed the heat and other news together. Sometimes Mackey would wax nostalgic and give Starsky advice he hadn’t asked for; he listened closely to Mackey’s life tips, but he wasn’t yet sure he could apply any of them. Maybe they would serve a purpose in his later years.

“I don’t think we’re going to grow all that much in the greenhouse this year,” Starsky told Kayla on their way to the D.C. conference. “It’s too late to plant anything in it, even if I could finish it in the next month, don’t you think?”

“We could ask a nursery what they think.”

“Again,” he affectionately noted, briefly patting her hand as they entered the city, “you win the Smarts Championship.”

“I didn’t realize it was a competition,” she replied, rolling her eyes. She had booked them a hotel room with two beds; it was mid-morning and they were just arriving at the conference venue. She brought an overnight backpack; he brought a toiletries bag—even for the restaurant, he was already dressed nice-casual. He would wear the same clothes home.

But had he known what he was about to run into, he may have cared how he looked.

* * *

Starsky and Kayla walked in the hot sun along Constitution Avenue toward the Lincoln Memorial. “I saw on the news that Congress is going to take two acres—around here somewhere—to make a Vietnam memorial,” Starsky said, glancing over to the National Mall’s Reflection Pool as he wondered where it might go. “It’s long overdue if you ask me.”

“Maybe they’ll include my father somehow,” Kayla replied. “I hope they do.”

“I hope so, too,” Starsky echoed, wiping the light sweat from his brow as they left the blazing sun and crossed a grassy field; he welcomed the cooler temperature under the large shade trees. “I was in the Army. Did I tell you that?”

“You didn’t,” Kayla said, genuinely surprised to hear it as they approached a wall of people at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial, one that spilled onto both sides of the Reflection Pool. “Every day I find another fascinating layer to you, Mr. Sky; so much left to learn.”

“Just like a smelly onion,” he joked.

“Were you in Vietnam?”

“Almost, but no. I lucked out,” he added, regarding military service in general—and doing his best to avoid thoughts of Hutch. He should be seeing the Fourth of July fireworks with his partner. Hutch should have been the one doing everything in life with Starsky.

Kayla squeezed him closer as they navigated their way through the packed crowd; a cacophony of traffic, commingled voices, dueling music, and the occasional roar of an overhead airplane on its way to the national airport filled the void.

When they reached the Lincoln Memorial, Kayla took Starsky’s hand and led him up to the second landing, niching out a small area on the west side of the Memorial at the edge of the steps.

“I brought a bag of dried fruit and a couple of protein bars if you get hungry,” Kayla told him, patting her large handbag. It would be a few hours before the festivities would begin, and she had obviously planned ahead. Starsky wore a baseball cap and sunglasses, Kayla a wide-brimmed straw hat, and they had enough water with them, too.

“There’s plenty to eat around here,” Starsky informed her after spying the numerous food trucks and tents. It was a hot 95 degrees in D.C. that day—with unusually high humidity—and he hoped he survived the experience.

“Have you been here before?” Kayla asked. They sat comfortably on a step despite the hard stone and were shielded from the direct sun by the Memorial’s imposing structure. “We can go inside the monument after the show, if you like.”

“I visited a couple of months ago for the first time,” he told her, “but I would love to see it again—especially at night.” He wondered if Hutch had been to the Lincoln Memorial and then remembered Hutch telling him the story about how he’d spent his 20th birthday on a bus ride from Minnesota to Washington, D.C., in 1963. Hutch and his group of friends happened upon the March on Washington in progress, just in time to hear the forever iconic Martin Luther King.

Starsky was grateful to have his new friend and to share his own experience with her; Kayla had been healing for him, a welcomed companion, not just a distraction, despite that he couldn’t keep from falling into the open-ended emptiness in his soul now and again.

A dozen ambulances were parked along the curb of a surface street beside the Memorial, as were several police cars; there were even a few mounted policemen on duty. Maybe Starsky should learn to ride horses and apply for that job. A police cowboy.

He then saw a young woman in a floral summer dress and a matching red sun hat appear to pass out near a food truck on the lawn below; he would have made an effort to help, but he quickly realized that paramedics were already on their way to her. It was Starsky’s cue to drink water and remember to stay hydrated. Maybe he should train for a job as a medic. He could handle the sight of blood and help people, too.

The fireworks began as promised right on schedule—at 9:09 p.m.—and what a mesmerizing and brilliantly colorful presentation it was! Despite the heat and the crowds—and his ever-pressing loneliness—Starsky had never seen anything as spectacular as the 19-minute fireworks display he witnessed that night: a kaleidoscope of exploding color lighting up the darkening sky against the backdrop of America’s well-lit memorials and monuments.

Every trip Starsky had made into Washington, D.C.—three times in the past eight months—had been memorable. The first time was a visit by himself, an exploration and an experience that killed time and kept him from thinking too much about Hutch; the third time was the day they were having right there on the Fourth of July. But then there was that time in the middle—his second visit—just a week earlier, to an animal rescue conference with Kayla.

THE 2ND ANNUAL ASSOCIATION
OF SANCTUARIES CONFERENCE

It didn’t even click in his brain what he would encounter. Like a lamb to slaughter, Starsky dutifully followed Kayla into a grand ballroom at Tyson’s Corner near Washington, D.C., filled with vendor booths—at least 4 rows in the middle and another that lined the perimeter of the massive room. A large crowd packed the empty spaces. Starsky had no idea just how many people cared about animals—enough to have such a sizable gathering—until he arrived at that event. He was soon caught up in their excitement and couldn’t see everything fast enough.

Kayla had registered for several workshops throughout the day and her first was to begin within 30 minutes of their arrival, so she handed Starsky her satchel and gave him his orders. “This workshop will only bore you,” she said with certainty. “It’s about clinic sanitation and virus control. Maybe you would do me the favor of walking around and collecting all the free brochures?” She planned to take everything home and read through it, but didn’t want to miss a single scrap of paper.

When she left for the 90-minute workshop, leaving Starsky to his task, he went down the first aisle of booths, stopping at each table to scan the merchandise and paraphernalia. A number of vendors sold books, tee-shirts and other clothing, animal toys and treats; others hosted videos on televisions connected to VHS players: scenes of wild animals being rehabilitated played across their screens. Large banners overhead identified a particular organization and its purpose while others were simple, those of a writer selling a new book, or a photographer scheduling photo safaris.

Starsky collected everything he could from Bob Talbot, a young man who apparently photographed orcas in the wild. Starsky had a very in-depth and fascinating conversation with Bob whose images were beyond stunning. Did Starsky still have time to pursue a professional career in photography? Bob insisted it was never too late to pursue a dream. Something else to consider.

Starsky’s task of gathering up as many brochures and other free wares as he could lay his hands on didn’t go as quickly as he thought it would. He couldn’t help but talk at length to people about the things he was seeing, learning, and wondering about. He wasn’t going to be bored, after all—a fear he’d privately entertained when Kayla first invited him to the conference.

There were organizations on site that were devoted to defending whales, others to elephants, and some to big cats. He even stumbled across the Maryland Wild Cat Sanctuary booth, taking their brochures in case Kayla had missed a few when volunteering there. He didn’t want to leave a single stone unturned.

A couple was on hand with what appeared to be the beginnings of their dream to establish the first-ever sanctuary for animals used in entertainment, mainly Asian elephants. Sanctuaries abounded for primates, for dogs and cats, for farmed animals, for parrots, and even for—“Hamsters!” Starsky said when he made his way through the crowd to the next table over. “Who knew they needed to be saved, hm?”

“Cheaper to feed than horses,” the middle-aged woman who attended the booth cracked, giving him a smile. “But yes, you’d be surprised what people dump at animal shelters—and staff doesn’t have the manpower to keep up with the influx of beasties beyond cats and dogs.”

Starsky dug a $5 bill out of his wallet and dropped it in the donation basket. Hamsters were way cuter than he realized—and hers was a cause he felt compelled to support.

“That should feed a little guy for a year,” he supposed, winking at the woman. He knew there was more to caring for hamsters than just food, but it was a start, and she was very appreciative, too.

Starsky had entered an amazing world he hadn’t known existed on that scale. He was mesmerized. Sure, he’d spent a weekend at the—

HIDDEN VALLEY WILDLIFE CENTER
Hidden Valley, Colorado

Starsky stopped dead in his tracks when he turned that corner into the next aisle and serendipitously laid eyes on the banner for the Hidden Valley Wildlife Center. Even after his conversation about Alec Henley with Kayla some weeks earlier, it hadn’t occurred to him that Alec—or at least his organization—would be represented at the conference. Alec was the last person Starsky wanted to see. Alec would be able to tell Hutch about his long-lost partner’s whereabouts.

His heart pounding and his feet moving swiftly through the crowd, Starsky didn’t finish the turn down that aisle; instead, he abruptly walked to the far side of the ballroom to make his escape. He hadn’t seen any sign of Alec in that brief glimpse, but he did see Sarah. “Idiot,” he cussed himself when he finally made it to safety. What was he thinking when he agreed to attend a national conference devoted to animal sanctuaries?

He felt rattled and didn’t fully know what to do—or how he was going to get out of running into Alec at some point during the two-day event. What excuse could Starsky give Kayla about wanting to avoid her hero? He didn’t want to say he was so bored that he’d rather visit the Air and Space Museum; he didn’t want to hurt her feelings about the things that sincerely mattered to her. So what to do?

He did take the risk of picking up the paraphernalia from all the vendors on that last aisle against the wall; he even bought Kayla a tee-shirt with a cat on it that read, “Paws Come With Claws,” an anti-declawing message she was sure to appreciate. Maybe a gift or two might make up for his not having collected everything in the room, and he could figure out later how to get the rest of it.

He checked his watch. Kayla would be unavailable for another 20 minutes. It would be lunchtime then and maybe he could talk her into leaving the venue for a restaurant; she had two more workshops to attend in the afternoon, and then they’d have dinner together at that Ethiopian restaurant in Georgetown that she promised to treat him to. By morning, he should be able to come up with some plan to avoid returning to the conference.

But on his way out of the room that late morning, he was distracted by a booth two tables in from the exit doors. Rather, he was first drawn to the amazingly beautiful photographs of wild horses running free that graced the booth’s back wall—and then to the gentleman in the cowboy hat.

STONY CREEK WILD HORSE SANCTUARY
Dillon, Montana

* * *

“He’s even handsomer in person,” Kayla declared. She was more eager to talk about her hero than she was about the Ethiopian food they’d just been served.

Starsky didn’t want to think about Alec; Alec was supposed to be part of his past. The man in the middle. The man who would be justifiably compelled to tell Hutch he’d seen Starsky that late June weekend in Washington, D.C. Starsky couldn’t afford to give Hutch that lead. Hoping to talk about something else, Starsky avoided eye contact with Kayla and drank from his glass of African honeywine as he searched for a way to redirect the conversation.

“This is almost like drinking juice,” he commented after a long, tasty swallow, and licking his lips, “but with a powerful punch.” The African wine was very sweet and he enjoyed the taste, not just the sudden buzz.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Kayla replied, gently but briefly squeezing Starsky’s forearm, sincerely apologizing. “You’re not jealous, though, are you? Is that why you’re changing the subject? You must know by now that you’re the sexiest man alive.”

He lightly laughed, feeling embarrassed. “I didn’t know that, but if you say so.”

“I do say so.”

She may have been right—in part. Starsky thought back to those farewell minutes at the conference that late morning, the ones he used up when he stopped at the Stony Creek Wild Horse Sanctuary table and talked to the cowboy who supervised the booth. Starsky couldn’t help but be aware of the study the gentleman gave him as he approached—a once-over much like any straight man watching an attractive young woman might take notice.

“Well, hello there,” the cowboy greeted him, putting out his hand as if he were meeting someone he knew. “Dillon Montana.”

Starsky accepted the handshake. “Dane Skyler. Pleasure. So I’m going out on a limb here and assume you have something to do with wild horses,” he joked, feeling a bit intimidated by the man’s confident friendliness.

Dillon was dressed in jeans and a denim shirt with a belt that sported some kind of championship win. Sparkling brown eyes shined under his black cowboy hat, which wasn’t enough to keep Starsky from seeing his short dark hair, speckled with gray, and judging the man’s height to be close to his own, but with a leaner build. Dillon was also clean-shaven and sported a somewhat knowing, but friendly smile.

“Wild horses are in my blood,” Dillon said. He was probably in his fifties given the age on his face. “Our sanctuary homes a couple hundred head on 18,000-acres in Montana.”

Maybe Starsky had misread him. He glanced overhead to the group’s banner and read the town and state again: Dillon, Montana.

Dillon immediately understood Starsky’s confusion. “My real name is Myles West,” he explained, “but when we started out with the organization, people couldn’t remember where we were located, so I started calling myself Dillon Montana as a kind of marketing ploy.”

“Did it work?”

Dillon laughed. “In the beginning. But now it just confuses people and I forget my real name sometimes.”

Starsky had to pull his eyes away because he was beginning to feel uncomfortable from Dillon’s close scrutiny of him. He fished. “When you say ‘we,’ I assume your wife and your family help run that many head on that much land, hm?”

“No wife, no family. Just me and a bunch of volunteers.”

“That sounds like a lot of work just the same,” Starsky replied, fanning through a brochure he’d lifted off the table and only studying the pictures of horses. “But what do wild horses have to be saved from?”

“Cattle ranchers and the U.S. government is all.”

Starsky sharply looked up at him. “How does that make sense?”

“It doesn’t. But, in short, if you eat hamburgers, you support the cattle industry that controls government wildlife agencies and slaughters predators like wolves and mountain lions—as well as removes wild horses from public lands—to make room for cows for cheap beef on the taxpayer dime.”

Dillon said ‘hello’ and ‘thank you’ to a few other people who’d stopped at his booth and taken pamphlets with them—but he didn’t greet any of those passersby with the same enthusiasm as he’d greeted Starsky.

“Wild horses are easy to adopt after they’re rounded up,” Dillon continued, “assuming they are young enough to survive the ordeal—but most of the adoptees end up in slaughterhouses in the long run anyway.”

Starsky put the brochure back on the table. Like the things he’d learned from Alec about bald eagles and roadkill and fur trapping, he felt a bit sick to his stomach. In the past nine months, he’d even been able to leave the violence of city streets behind him.

“I don’t know how you people do it,” he said in a low voice as he fished a $20 bill from his wallet and dropped it in the donation basket. He wasn’t about to let on that he understood the draw, to some degree—having been a person who rescued human beings from rape and attempted murder and drug overdoses and child abuse.

“Well,” Dillon explained after he thanked Starsky for the ‘generous donation,’ “there was a time when the government could legally shoot hundreds of horses from helicopters, so we’ve made some progress.”

“It’s all about the ones you save, I guess,” Starsky remembered. He looked into Dillon’s eyes and tried to silently drive home the point that he understood more than his words let on—and then he collected a small stack of literature from the table, pausing to study some of the photography, too. Wild horses sure were beautiful on a desert landscape.

“What brings you here?” Dillon asked him.

It was the personal question that brought Starsky back to his nagging suspicion that Dillon may have been more interested in him than his support. “I came with a friend,” he said, testing his theory. “She’s in a workshop right now, but asked me to pick up all the brochures and stuff.”

When he glanced up at Dillon again, he noticed the change in Dillon’s expression; there was a kind of resignation on his face, as if he was hiding disappointment. “Do you know about the Hidden Valley Wildlife Center?” Starsky asked.

“Sounds familiar.”

“A guy named Alec Henley runs it.”

“Oh, I’ve heard of him.”

“I think I know what’s happening here,” Starsky said, leveling Dillon’s gaze, and hoping he was being understood without using specific words, “but I’m not what you think I am.”

“I meant no harm.”

“No, no, that’s not where I was going with this. I mean … I’m just saying … if you haven’t met Alec Henley, he’s got a booth on the other side of the room.” He paused to drive home his point; if Dillon didn’t understand him then, he was never going to. “Alec is the kind of man you’re probably looking for.”

Dillon’s face broke into a warm smile and he gave Starsky a knowing wink. “I will have to make my acquaintance then,” he promised with a grateful tip of his hat.

“Don’t tell him I said hello,” Starsky replied as he prepared to depart—and realizing Alec wouldn’t have known who Dane Skyler was, anyway, but maybe Hutch did by then, so Starsky still had to be careful. “I wouldn’t want him to think I set him up.”

Dillon laughed. “My lips are sealed. But, hey,” he added when Starsky turned to leave, his tug stopping Starsky in his tracks as they made eye contact again. “Why are you so … easy about this?”

Starsky returned the wink. “I have a friend,” he said. “I have that kind of a friend.”

He’d come a long way in accepting human sexuality. But…

“I’m not jealous,” Starsky insisted at the restaurant when Kayla accused him of being just that. He wasn’t jealous, was he?

“What then?” she asked, not impatiently.

He couldn’t tell Kayla that he knew Alec enjoyed sex with men more than he did with women. He couldn’t tell her that he’d had a threesome with Alec and another man that had lasted all night—and broke ground on fellatio, anal sex, and rimming. He couldn’t tell her that Alec had decided after that threesome sex to once-again risk a relationship with a male partner, that he was finally willing to be fully himself because they had reminded him of his truer nature.

Those weren’t things Starsky was at liberty to say about another person’s private life, let alone his own, in that instance.

“He’s too old for you,” was all Starsky could think to say—and he didn’t believe that, either. Kayla was much older than her years, and age wasn’t a factor in any adult-consenting relationship anyway.

“You are jealous,” she believed, despite his protest, as if seeing right through his facade. “It’s okay. I won’t talk about him anymore.”

“Don’t do that,” Starsky argued. He didn’t want to limit her, either. “It’s not jealousy,” he repeated himself, that time finding a different excuse. “It’s that I wouldn’t want you falling in love and moving out of the neighborhood.” He kicked himself for saying that, too, because he didn’t yet know if he himself was going to stay in that house.

“If it’s any consolation,” she said, doing her best to ease his apprehension about her leaving him, “my uncle lives in Beltsville, and I have a brother in Chevy Chase. I don’t think I’m going anywhere, but I reserve the right to intern or spend a summer at Alec’s sanctuary. Will you grant me that?”

“Any time. I’ll even grant you permission to bed him if you want. Just don’t stay away too long, okay?”

“Deal,” she said with a laugh. “I’ll always come home to you.”

They could lay the debate to rest, but Starsky wished he could say the same—to Hutch, that he would always go home to him. That had been the plan.

Anger and regret piled on each other inside him again until Kayla broke through his hurt by talking about the food they were about to eat. Lentils and chickpeas, cabbages and potatoes, and a very tasty chicken and egg dish, all spicy and flavorful, served with a spongy flatbread, called injera. These were new tastes for Starsky, and he had Kayla to guide him along. Hutch would kill him if he knew how easily Starsky was trying ethnic foods that he would have refused to eat had Hutch suggested them.

But Hutch wasn’t in his life anymore. Starsky had to make his own way without him, find new things to interest him, carve out a host of possibilities, do stuff he’d never done before. But where and what? If he stayed in the neighborhood, bought the house, remained friends with Kayla, how long was he to keep up the facade? At what point did he stop lying to her about who he was?

He made himself a promise that night. One, that he would tell her the truth about his life if he decided to stay and bought the house. He would come clean, see where that relationship might take them—assuming she wasn’t deeper in love with one of his rivals by then.

In the morning, Starsky made another decision. He wasn’t going to completely run from this obstacle; he’d meet it head-on. He went back to the conference that next day and, with Kayla on his arm, he braved returning to the Hidden Valley Wildlife Center’s booth.

“You don’t have to prove you’re not jealous,” Kayla teased him. “I promise not to fawn all over him.”

“Fawn all over me instead,” Starsky suggested. If Alec saw that, he could report back to Hutch that he’d seen Starsky in Washington, D.C., at a sanctuary conference with a beautiful young woman at his side. Two could play Hutch’s game.

But to Starsky’s surprise and disappointment, neither Sarah nor Alec was on duty. In fact, Starsky didn’t recognize any of the otherwise busy volunteers.

He had to know. “Is Alec here?” he asked when there was a break in the crowd around the table.

“Sarah went looking for him,” the young man told him with a light laugh. “He’s running late this morning.”

“We’ll be back,” Kayla said, dragging Starsky away from the booth. “I’ll come alone so you won’t be so silly.”

Starsky laughed. “It’s not like I haven’t met him before. I just wanted to mark my territory,” he teased. In the end, his impulse was probably a bad one. He hadn’t really thought it through and, had Alec seen Starsky with Kayla and reported it back to Hutch, it would probably only come back to haunt Starsky in ways he least expected. He would have to be more careful.

They spent time together that morning collecting the rest of the paraphernalia in the building until they ended up at the Stony Creek Wild Horse Sanctuary booth. Starsky didn’t see Dillon there, either.

He had to know. “Is Dillon here?” he asked a volunteer at the table.

“Not yet,” the young woman replied, looking around as if she hoped to see him any minute. “He’s running late this morning—for some reason.”

* * *

Starsky began construction on the backyard pergola in late July after he’d designed it on paper while sitting at his small kitchen table. He had made a list of the materials he needed, so he was certain to get everything at once during his trip to the lumber yard and hardware store; having the supplies in hand speeded up the process.

By then, he had also become familiar with the local hardware store owner, a middle-aged, burly man named Roger. Roger was always more than willing to help Starsky find the right tools or nails or to help him troubleshoot issues he might be having, such as something that required a custom joint.

Besides the wood for the pergola, Starsky also needed 2x4s to finish off the deck rails and the planks for the steps down to the lawn. If he did the math correctly, he could use some of the leftover wood or discards for the raised veggie beds.

In the cooler mornings, he worked outside or ran his errands, having decided on the color to paint the deck and pergola, and figuring it had to complement the house exterior. Mid-afternoons were spent replacing inside ceiling fans, swapping out door hardware, and hanging more pictures on walls.

In the evenings, usually after dinner, Starsky fleshed out sketches for the greenhouse. He continued to make bird houses out of his scraps of wood, and he made progress on the built-in bookcases in the living room. Having several projects going at once kept him from being bored or feeling frustrated, but more importantly, they gave him something other than Hutch to think about.

Kayla kept Starsky company, too, sometimes just hanging out with him at the end of the day, talking photography and her work, discussing what he had accomplished since breakfast and what his plans were for the week, and her teasing him about all the projects he’d be doing at her house after he was done with his own.

Starsky learned that Kayla was living in her childhood home, having inherited it five years earlier when her mother passed from a rare kidney disease. Kayla was an adult orphan, she said, and that may—in part—have explained her attraction to Alec, who was just barely, but all the same, old enough to be her father.

Starsky also continued to be the beneficiary of home baked goods and other food: banana nut bread, chocolate chip cookies, fresh figs, leftover birthday cake, and the like—in exchange for the odd handyman job. He’d branched out into the surrounding neighborhood, having gained a reputation for quality work, but also—or so Kayla said—because he was ‘sexy hot.’ He was an alpha male by nature, she often reminded him—formidable yet kind, masculine, and charismatic.

There were instances when he truly was unbearably hot. A national heat wave shortened his time in the mornings for working outside, but that just helped him to gain ground on his inside tasks—with the aid of a work-horse air conditioner.

But one night, when Kayla had gone to visit a girlfriend and Mr. Mackey was entertaining family for the weekend, Starsky felt bored and alone, so he treated himself to a meal at a nearby burger grill. He sat on a stool at the bar and ordered fries and a cheeseburger—reluctantly remembering Dillon’s comments about the cattle industry and its sanctioned destruction of wolves and wild horses. If he stayed in the neighborhood, Kayla just might change every aspect of his life.

“Handyman?” a male voice asked, sounding close by and obviously directed at him.

Starsky looked up from his sketches and calculations and noticed the person sitting diagonally across from him at the corner of the bar. A Caucasian man in his late 40s, clean-shaven, a few inches shorter than Starsky by his calculation. Starsky also realized that the man must have been watching him draw the roof design for his greenhouse on a scrap of paper that the bartender had given him.

“Are you looking for a handyman?” Starsky asked, figuring he should start there. He hoped it was that kind of inquiry, and not that he was being hit on—yet again. If a sexual solicitation was the case, he was going to have to reevaluate the vibe he was apparently but unknowingly emitting.

“Scott Wilson. General contractor,” the man told him. “I couldn’t help but notice your handiwork there,” he added with a chuckle for his own play on words. “I guessed you might be ‘handy with a hammer.’”

“And nails. Don’t forget the nails.”

Scott laughed. He sat alone, nursing a beer. “I don’t know about you, but I have nightmares about nails.”

Starsky had begun to do similarly with all of his hammering and construction. “Dane Skyler,” he introduced himself in kind. “I’m remodeling a house on Sweetwater Drive.”

“You must be the guy known as Sky then? I’ve heard about you.”

“I don’t deserve my reputation, I assure you.”

“All good things I hear.”

“Exactly. Paid in food, that’s how good I am.” He smiled at his own sarcasm.

“Not a bad way to make a living,” Scott argued with a light laugh. “I know the house, too. Drove by there a couple of weeks ago, but you weren’t around.”

“Was I hiding?”

“The old man next door said if your truck wasn’t in the driveway, you weren’t home.”

“Remind me to have a word with him,” Starsky joked. “He’s going to get me robbed.”

Scott was visibly amused. “Nah. He knows me. Your secret is safe. I asked him to give you my card, but maybe he forgot.”

“At his age, we should probably expect that.”

They talked about the price of lumber, the improvements Starsky was still making on the house, and the small residential development that Scott had snagged as its general contractor. “If you’re interested in work paid in cash,” Scott told him, “I’ll hire you. I did peek into the living room window and saw what you’ve done so far in the Sweetwater house—not counting what you’ve accomplished outside—and your reputation actually owes you.”

Starsky should probably get blinds for that window; he often walked around the house in the nude. “I’m not licensed,” he admitted.

“If you’re interested in that, too, I can help you get started,” Scott promised; he slid his business card over to Starsky. “Just keep me in mind.”

Starsky couldn’t know that he was about to make yet another mistake in his effort to avoid being found by Hutch. He would learn, in due time, that he wasn’t the better detective between them after all.

As July rolled into August, the heat wave began to claim lives in the hundreds across the nation. Starsky wasn’t worried about himself, but he was careful, too. He was able to keep hydrated with water—and Kayla’s fresh lemonade; together they made frequent visits to see Old Man Mackey to make sure he was all right. And, even though it was still hot after the sun went down, Starsky and Kayla would sit on the porch—his or hers—and share a cool glass of iced tea with fresh lemon. They also listened to crickets and watched fireflies while they talked about mostly trivial things, unwinding together at end of day.

“I’ve been hired by a general contractor to help build some houses,” Starsky told her one night. They were seated on her porch because she had made dinner for him after he finished his built-in living room shelves—paint and decor included. “I’ve applied for a temporary license, too, so I’ll be legal while I work toward a permanent one.”

Using an alias on the application was probably going to end up rejecting his effort to get a license, but he may have put enough time between that and the year he’d given himself to live under an assumed name before going back to his real one. He could probably talk Scott into forgiving him and letting him try again to be legal.

“You’re legal all right,” Kayla said, giggling, flirting with him.

He rolled his eyes. “I guess they’ve already framed and finished sheet-rocking everything. Scott likes what I’ve done to my house, so he wants me to start building bookcases and decks and sanding cabinets.”

“Are you sure you know how to do those things?” she teased.

“What can’t I do, hm?” he bragged.

“I know what you haven’t done.”

He walked right into her trap—and really couldn’t afford to be caught. “I’m going to learn a lot, that’s for sure,” he said, redirecting. “Scott thinks the development will be finished come end of September.”

“Ooh, a paying job.”

“I hope it’s cooler then and we can start building your outdoor shed after that, if you still want one.”

“Oh, yes! I’ll pay you a year’s worth of your favorite cookies.”

“Better than cash,” Starsky swore, smacking his lips.

On a moonless mid-August night, he sat alone on his deck, admiring the work he’d done: its level floor, the overhead pergola—draped in amber-glow string lights—and the potted flowers in boxes along the deck’s perimeter. Steps down to the lawn were aimed toward the raised vegetable beds—not yet planted—and joined a path that would eventually meander out to the someday greenhouse.

Did Hutch fulfill his dreams for his own place? Did he have a deck installed? Were there vegetable and flower gardens throughout the yard? Did he have that gazebo Starsky dreamed of building? Was there a hot tub? What else would Hutch have done to his beautiful house? Anything? Or was he too busy with his job and busier with his wife and newborn baby to get anything accomplished on the property itself?

Hutch deserved to lose out on all the things Starsky would have done to the house; he’d caused their split, after all.

But what difference did it make? Why did Starsky even care anymore? Why did he care about anything? Even the work he’d done on his rented house came with a certain degree of emptiness. Everything seemed meaningless.

He nursed a glass of wine, listened to music from inside the house and to the nighttime insects, and drowned himself in his sorrow and his loneliness, using alcohol as his drug of choice. Maybe he should stop pretending life would someday be good again and just call it quits.

But before he got any further into his despair, Kayla unexpectedly appeared from around the corner of the house. She had an uncanny way of distracting him when it seemed to matter most.

“There you are!” she exclaimed, joining him on the deck, comfortably sitting in an adjacent chair, and immediately holding out her hand to ask for the wine glass. After he gave it to her and she drank from it, she handed it back to him. “Why are you all by yourself out here drinking the night away?”

“Finished the dishes … put the leftovers away … thought I’d relax a while.”

For several minutes, they listened to the soft music from inside the house, appreciating it together. “I was feeling lonely, too,” she admitted, intuitively. “Sometimes life feels like all work and no play.”

He studied her—the way the amber light reflected in her pretty eyes, the glow it cast over her smooth skin, the way she was dressed, in shorts and a loose blouse. A beautiful woman like herself shouldn’t ever feel lonely—but who was he to talk? He’d never felt lonelier in his life.

“We should put things in perspective,” he decided, rising to his feet. He left the glass on the small patio table between the two chairs; it was his turn to hold out his hand. “C’mon, let’s do something in the bigger picture.”

When he clasped her fingers and tugged her out of her chair, he led her off the deck and into the backyard. Arriving a good ways out, but not so far that they couldn’t still hear music, he released her hand and sat down in the grass. “I should do this more often myself,” he said, lying back on the cushioned ground and looking up at the nighttime sky, his hands clasped behind his head.

She joined him. “I thought you were going to ask me to dance,” she admitted, lying close beside him, “but this is the next best thing.”

They looked up into a black dome unbelievably filled with countless stars.

“Sometimes you just have to see life from the edge of time,” he said, allowing his mind to drift as far back as the Big Bang. “Tens of thousands of galaxies … billions of stars…”

“We should get a telescope!”

“I had one once,” Starsky remembered. “Time to replace it, I think.”

They shared their limited knowledge of astronomy and their same desire to learn more, and agreed to invest in a telescope together—one they would shop for and decide on before the summer was over and while the skies were still clear.

Starsky reminded her that he was about to have a job which would end sometime in late September, but between her work and his, they would find the time to embark into a new adventure that would be both fascinating and keep life in perspective along the way.

“Let’s stop being lonely,” he said.

“Let’s.”

He would at least try.

“So if you weren’t licensed before you moved here,” she asked, rolling onto her side and up against him, “then what else were you doing with yourself when you weren’t doing … wood and paint stuff?”

It was an honest question, and he knew she’d innocently asked it, too. But it put him at a crossroads. How much longer would he hold out on who he was, what he did, and what he’d done? To keep from raising suspicion, but also to be honest with a person who was fast becoming his friend and companion—and who knew what else?—he answered her truthfully.

“My father was a police officer in Brooklyn,” he explained, going back to the beginning, and enjoying the feel of another body against his own, despite the added warmth of an even warmer day. “He was killed in the line of duty when I was 12.”

“Oh, no!”

“It was a lifetime ago.”

“But still so very sad,” she decided, further snuggling into him, resting her arm on his chest, and tapping his cheek with a finger. She got her wish when their eyes met—which was for him to stop watching the sky and to look at her instead. “I’m sorry to hear about your father,” she softly said. “I didn’t know you lost yours around the same age that I lost mine. How come you didn’t say anything about your dad when we were at Arlington?”

“I didn’t want to take away from what you were feeling. Besides, your loss was more recent than mine.”

“But it’s a hurt that will last forever.”

Despite the pain of losing his father, losing Hutch hurt more. Much more. But Starsky wouldn’t reveal that detail. Some things just couldn’t be explained.

“All the stuff we have in common, Sky.”

There was quite a list, he silently admitted: home and yard, food and wine, music and stargazing. Life tragedies. Personality compatibility. She was pretty, too, and she thought he was ‘sexy hot.’ Mutual physical attraction? Maybe. Even as far as they were from the house, he could see the light shining in her eyes. She was young, but an old soul. Sweet, feminine voice. A woman. Maybe he should chalk his homosexual relationship with Hutch up to a temporary lapse of reason, and get back to his DNA.

“Next question,” she giggled, holding his chin to keep him looking at her. “How come you’ve never kissed me, Mr. Sky?”

He enjoyed the feel of her, the look of her, the femininity snug to his masculinity. It had been a long time… But how to explain it? Before he could think of anything to say, she had another question.

“Is it because we’re neighbors?”

“Well, that could be a problem … but—”

“Is it the age difference?” she blurted.

“I’m not old enough to be your father,” he laughed, “so I’ve got that going for me.”

“Do you not find me attractive?”

He looked more closely into her eyes, seeing more deeply into her soul. What could possibly be unattractive about her? She checked off all the boxes: beauty, intelligence, kindness, confidence, self-sufficient, young, mentally sound—and accessible; she lived right across the street.

“You had to think about it,” Kayla noted, releasing his chin, sounding disappointed, but she didn’t pull away from him.

“You’re beautiful,” Starsky quickly said, removing his hand from behind his head to comb the hair from her face, and gently stroke her cheek. “A man would be insane—or gay—not to be attracted to you.”

“But?”

There was that ‘but…’ again.

“But that breakup I had … it was a … hard one. Never been that … hurt … before.”

“And you’re gun shy or it’s that you still have a broken heart?”

“I’m a broken man, Kay. Times it feels like it’ll last forever; other times … I’m so angry, I promise myself not to waste another second on it.”

“So it’s not me?”

“It’s never been you. I need more time to get out from under, know what I mean? I’m not thinking straight”—in more ways than one. “But I want to be clear on this point, too, so there’s no misunderstanding; I don’t want to lead you on, either: I’m not sure I will ever be unbroken.” Even his voice cracked when he bared his soul just then.

“I’m very sorry, Sky. I understand. What made her so special to you that it could hurt forever?”

“I was in and out of relationships that ended for this, that, and another reason,” he said, doing his best to explain. “It turned out that the person I’d been looking for all my life had been right there with me all along. More fantastic than that, it ended up being a mutual realization. For the first time in my life, I finally had everything I needed—or ever wanted. I was a better man. I was complete.”

“I remember you said that she traded you in for someone else?”

“Yeah. I guess the realization wasn’t mutual after all.”

* * *

“Hutch?”

“Yeah, buddy?”

“Happy birthday.”

“I didn’t think you’d forget.”

Would Starsky ever forget? He was about to dial that last number when he realized he wanted to forget. Nothing would change—except Starsky would be made the fool again by reaching for something he couldn’t have. He hung up the receiver, leaned back into the sofa, audibly sighed.

Maybe he should just call and ask Hutch about the baby, ignore the fact that it was Hutch’s birthday, make him believe Starsky had forgotten the date and serendipitously made the phone call. A back-handed gesture.

“So what did you have, hm?”

“A human being.”

Starsky laughed. Hutch and his sarcasm. “Boy or girl?”

Starsky guessed a girl and wondered how that would affect Hutch’s parental feelings. Hutch was always soft on children, but mostly girls because girls were more vulnerable than boys. He’d have to live with two women, though—go through those growing pains in the years to come. Nah. Hutch should have a boy—someone to play ball with and go camping with, all the things Hutch would do with Starsky but would have to do now by proxy.

Maybe Starsky shouldn’t ask about the baby. What if the baby had been miscarried or born without a head or something? Maybe Starsky should stick to an easier question.

“How’s married life?”

“Good, good, real good.”

“That didn’t sound convincing.”

“She’s a good cook, a good mom, a good—”

“You’re not going to say she’s a good lover; no one compares to me when it comes to fucking you.”

“Well, she’s good, you’re great.”

Not so great, Starsky decided—or they’d still be together. He leaned forward to push the phone away on the coffee table.

On that day, Hutch’s birthday, Starsky was a month shy of a year from the Sunday he’d left Hutch. Had it really been that long? Feelings change. Values differ. Maybe there was something salvageable now. He picked up the receiver again to dial the 10-digit number.

“Hello?”

“Hutch?”

“Yeah, buddy?”

“Do you see things different these days? Do you wish you’d chosen me when you had the chance?”

What was the point? Who was Starsky kidding besides himself? Nothing would have changed. She was pregnant, so Hutch chose her; they were married, living the life. Hutch wasn’t getting laid every day, granted, but he made up for it with the house improvements and the cozy family unit, and the raising of a precious child.

Starsky put the receiver back. “Never mind, Hutch,” he said under his breath. So much for wishing Hutch a happy birthday.

It was Hutch’s fault. He took the single most significant relationship in his life and shoved it off a cliff. Couldn’t he see what he was losing? Exhausted, contented, and completely drained, they were to sleep peacefully in each other’s arms every night. Sex would be the norm in the mornings, followed by pancakes, omelettes, and coffee, and they’d be energized and ready to work for the day.

That was the plan. Hutch botched it. Big time.

Starsky brought his sight into the space before him, but his vision blurred. How their lives had changed in so many ways in those few months after the parking lot ambush. Weeks had turned into months of recovery and therapy; there was jubilation when Starsky went to live with Hutch after Starsky’s release from the hospital; and there was the unexpected turn in their relationship shortly thereafter, one filled with sensuality and sexuality and intimate excitement in ways neither of them ever imagined.

There was the trip to Colorado, where they watched an endangered bald eagle return to the sky and later spent a night having sex with another man. There was their return to California, the enormous payout by the Department for Starsky’s injuries, and the house purchase, the plans: fruit trees and vegetable gardens and a hot tub…

Hutch had accepted Starsky’s invitation into their sexual life. It was a reluctant beginning, but once committed, Hutch was more than enthusiastically immersed in their new way of relating. He never had a single thought about it being unnatural, or misguided, or against the grain of his soul—or so he’d made Starsky believe.

Looking back, both his emotional and physical love with Hutch was the most satisfying relationship Starsky ever experienced. He couldn’t love the man enough, be more dazzled by his animalism, feel deeper in love than he was—and he was certain it was reciprocated. Starsky believed that with every beat of his heart.

It had to be so: because they crossed a hardwired line in themselves to become one with each other. Hutch’s nudity, his visible arousal and his desire, actually turned Starsky on. As he lay on the sofa that early evening, the day of Hutch’s 37th birthday, Starsky recalled how mesmerized he was by the unexpected neediness he felt for Hutch’s maleness.

And Hutch blew it. He took a wrecking ball to it in the most hurtful and callous way. He didn’t deserve a Happy Birthday phone call from Starsky. He didn’t deserve Starsky. And to prove it, Starsky put the receiver back in its cradle before he dialed that last number—again.

He eventually retreated to his back on the sofa, dressed in jeans shorts and a cotton shirt, no shoes, the telephone now on his belly, his eyes fixed on the ceiling, seeing nothing. How long was he going to miss Hutch—his smile, his blue eyes, his soft voice, charisma, trust, love—and especially his touch?

Nearly a year earlier, they were wrapped in each other’s arms, loving and laughing, brainstorming and bantering, feeling forever bonded in every possible way. So how was it possible that they had separated until the end of time? Had Hutch’s wrongdoing been that wrong? If Starsky could see Hutch again, reason with him, lay hands on him one more time, would it make a difference? Could Starsky not try, despite how demoralized he was that very minute?

Didn’t Hutch love him as much as Hutch said he did?

Well, that was the past, Starsky decided. It should be over. When Hutch’s birthday ended, that would be the last of it. He would have made his point, shelved that relationship, had an excuse to put ‘the way things were’ behind him. In another month, Starsky wouldn’t have to call his mother from pay phones; he could go back to using his name, register his truck, stop looking over his shoulder. He might even buy that house, adopt a dog—kiss Kayla.

It had been an interesting almost-year. The places he’d been, the history he’d learned, the people he’d met. How often in life did one get to wipe the slate completely clean and start over? All was not for naught.

To make sure he didn’t have another weak moment in his decision, Starsky got off the couch, went outside into a cooling-off evening to walk around the country block. He could kill a half hour, put his mind right, realize that he didn’t have to make a phone call just because it was Hutch’s birthday. So what if it were? He didn’t need an excuse to call Hutch if calling Hutch was what he wanted to do.

And apparently, it wasn’t—or he’d have done it. Instead, he went on that walk, said hello to the few neighbors he’d gotten to know in the four months he’d lived in the neighborhood. He took notice of the yards he passed and how they were landscaped and maintained. He checked out the vehicles in driveways and wondered if he’d ever go back to driving a car, keep his truck as backup for his new job.

Mr. Mackey had become a friend of Starsky’s, despite that he had fewer years ahead of him than behind. Kayla was Starsky’s friend, too, a special one, a romantic possibility—assuming Starsky would ever be interested in a relationship again.

Though the construction crew guys worked together, the daily routine was gather every Thursday night at a local bar or pizza joint. Scott even picked Starsky up on work days; he lived several streets over from Starsky, and the housing development they were building near the Shady Grove Middle School was along the route from his house past Starsky’s; that, and he didn’t want to bother neighbors too much by taking up all of their valuable curbside parking spots.

Despite not planning to have friends, or even his own house at the time, Starsky realized how things were finding their own paths through his life. He called the property owner regularly and sent her house and yard pictures in the mail, showing off his progress, and they spoke several times about the distinct possibility that Starsky would buy the house at the end of his six months in October.

Nancy said she hoped he’d buy it—if for no other reason, she told him one night, than because he’d invested a lot more of his time and energy into improving the place than she expected. She even hinted at selling him the property for less than market value. How could Starsky possibly decline that offer when the time came?

He was mostly busy with the housing development—sanding and painting kitchen and bathroom cabinets, cutting wood for the decks, helping to hang doors and install their hardware, and a plethora of other construction tasks too numerous to list. He brought his own skills to the project, coupled with his innate ability to learn quickly, and was taught a lot more along the way. In another month, he could apply for an independent contractor’s license under his legal name, and make a career out of carpentry.

That would show Hutch. Hutch never believed Starsky was capable of amazing things with just a few tools and nails.

“Suppose we build a house right here and hide out for the rest of our lives?” Starsky had suggested, hugging Hutch’s naked body closer and softly kissing his bare shoulder. They were alone in the Colorado grass high above Dream Lake in the Rocky Mountain National Park under a beautiful blue sky. “Go off-grid, if you know what I mean.”

“‘Off-grid,’” Hutch chuckled. “You’re reading the wrong shit again.”

“It means to leave—”

“I can figure out what it means.”

“So that’s what we do, Hutch: say goodbye to the world and live here among the birds and the bees—and do what they do.”

“Eat bugs and drink flower nectar?”

Starsky insisted he could build them a house; just turn him loose and he’d get it done.

“Okay,” Hutch said, continuing the debate, “so where do you plan to get the building materials?” He wasn’t thrilled with Starsky’s idea that he could cut down the surrounding trees for wood. “They’re not Legos, Starsk.”

No matter how Starsky tried to sell Hutch the idea, Hutch wasn’t buying. The playful argument ended when Hutch dismissed Starsky’s romantic plan to live off-grid as “bogus from the start.”

“Okay, so maybe we don’t escape to this exact spot—”

“You can’t even pitch a tent here without a permit.”

“So we find a different place, but the point is still that we hide away from the world.”

“But why would we?”

“I’m saying if we wanted to, we could.”

If only they had.

“All right, Starsky. Let’s say we buy a place—maybe that house we like in L.A. with the big back yard so we can—”

“—plant fruit trees and build veggie boxes and put a hot tub on the deck—”

“—‘hide out’ the way you’re suggesting,” Hutch continued, ignoring Starsky’s commentary, “and assuming all of our needs are met, we’re as happy as—”

“—the birds and the bees,” Starsky concluded.

“Do you really think you’ll be satisfied living a do-nothing life?”

Starsky went quiet on him for a while as he genuinely searched for that answer. After a couple of minutes, he deeply sighed. “Yeah, I hear what you’re saying. I guess we still have to do what’s in our blood to do.”

What Hutch never knew, could never know, was that hammers and nails and ‘putting stuff together’ was also in Starsky’s blood. Too bad Starsky couldn’t prove that to him.

He’d proven it to Scott. Scott was continually impressed by how quickly Starsky learned new tasks, and—for an amateur—that his work was professional.

Scott was married with three children, two of them twins, and seemed happy enough, but he also appreciated time off with his crew, and he especially got along well with Starsky. Neither of them were hot-headed or arrogant, both had a sense of responsibility that superseded most others, and they shared similar tastes in food, sports, and … paint colors.

Starsky was looking forward to the fall. If he bought the house, there would be additional things he’d do to what would then be his own place. A hot tub, for sure. Reconstruct the fireplace—and buy a winter’s worth of firewood. There would be hot chocolate and hearty soups and sweatshirts—all of which were already appetizing. He’d have an excuse to cuddle with Kayla under a blanket and watch old westerns.

All things he planned to do with Hutch.

But the holidays would belong to Starsky again. He could reclaim a certain freedom. Visit his mother in Florida. Go home for Christmas. The only trouble Starsky could see on the horizon was how his new friends were going to feel when they found out his name wasn’t Dane Skyler. Could they possibly trust him after that? Would they understand and forgive his desire to ‘hide out’ all those months from his ex-partner?

He’d never tell them he’d escaped a homosexual relationship, so he still had something to keep secret, but what kind of life was that? Why should he dream about a peaceful future when he didn’t really deserve one? Maybe he should start over someplace else, clean the slate, but under his own name and with his new freedom—in a way he would deserve.

It was the day after the heat wave broke, a Thursday late afternoon, eleven days into September, and life was about to take another unexpected turn—this one bringing him to his knees. Again.

The boys had cut out for the day, off to celebrate the end of a brutally hot summer, headed for beer and hamburgers at a nearby bar and grill—the same one where Starsky had met Scott. On that day, the entire group of them piled into a single pickup truck, already drunk, it seemed, on the news that temperatures would return to normal. But when Starsky was about to climb over the tailgate and wedge himself into the bed of the truck, he noticed the older man across the street wrestling with a garden hose.

“Just a minute,” he told Scott, climbing down off the bumper. As he went around the back of the vehicle to cross the street, he heard Scott call out to him from the open passenger window.

“C’mon, Sky, you can’t be everybody’s handyman. We’re hungry!”

But Starsky knew the neighbor—even one as far from his house as this one; he’d seen him in the yard on several occasions, doing his own maintenance, having a difficult time with a few things. Starsky couldn’t help but to eventually make his acquaintance—he’d spent a decade in service to others—explaining that he worked on the houses across the street, and he’d be happy to help out. The older man was a bit overweight, late 60s/early 70s maybe, suffered from arthritis, and was named Bill.

One mid-afternoon in late August, Starsky had helped Bill repair a leak in his irrigation line. There was no way Bill could have done it himself; he didn’t have the tools necessary to cut out a section of the hard plastic pipe in order to rejoin the two new ends with a coupler. On an early September morning, Starsky helped Bill plant a young tree in the middle of his front yard, into a hole Bill said had taken days to dig.

But on this late afternoon, Starsky had noticed Bill struggling with wrapping his hose around the holder that was attached to an exterior house wall, and he couldn’t ignore it. “I’ll just be a minute,” Starsky said to Scott and the other boys as he crossed the street. “Hold your horsepower.” He’d heard them rev the engine as they joked about leaving Starsky behind.

Bill was appreciative. “I know it don’t seem like much,” he said in a weaker voice than Starsky had heard him speak in the past, “but I can’t get this thing to wrap without a kink in it.” He stepped back to watch Starsky easily do it for him.

“Some of the problem,” Starsky noted, “is that there’s a screw loose on the rack. It’s not stationery anymore. I’ll fix it tomorrow when I come to work.” He figured Bill wasn’t going to use the hose until then anyway.

Just as he finished the task and stepped back to give Bill a slap on the back and wish him a good evening, Starsky heard his crew pull up to the curb in their rumbling truck at the bottom of the driveway.

“C’mon, Sky, let’s go!” a colleague yelled at him. “We ain’t got all night!”

Another laughed. “Oh, we got all night. I’m not going home until the sun rises. But I’m hungry! Sky, get in or be left behind!”

It was all in good fun; it had only taken Starsky a few minutes to wrap Bill’s hose. He rolled his eyes to let Bill know that his friends weren’t serious about abandoning him and reminded Bill that he’d be back in the morning.

“I can’t thank you enough, son,” Bill said with gratitude.

And that’s when Starsky turned away from the house and toward the street and felt a sudden rush of a candy apple red devour him whole—stopping him dead in his tracks.

* * *

CHAPTER 3: THE COMING HOME

Defeated.

Outrun.

That was the initial overwhelming feeling Starsky experienced when all the other conflicting and confounding emotions ravaged his broken heart.

He’d felt the color first: a rush of candy apple red. Next, the presence of the car—the one with a white stripe—parked behind a nondescript pickup truck along the curb under large shade trees, as if it had materialized out of thin air. How did he not see or hear a rumbling Torino when he walked across the street to Bill’s house?

As Starsky sought out the next thing he subconsciously encountered, every new and remaining emotion hit him at lightning speed and at the same time as he unexpectedly laid eyes on the man he would have once died for.

His legs went weak, his heart pounded; he heard his own breath. The only thing to keep him standing was the fact that his reality was actually parked at the bottom of the driveway in a black pickup truck filled with his impatient coworkers, playfully cajoling him into joining them.

But it was Ken Hutchinson who stood there on the sidewalk just a few feet from the car’s bumper, facing him, meeting Starsky’s eyes with a mutual intensity of disbelief and desperation. It was Ken Hutchinson who stood there and turned Starsky’s life upside down for the second time.

But it couldn’t be Hutch, not really; Starsky must be dreaming. It couldn’t be Hutch because Hutch wasn’t supposed to be standing there, alive and in the flesh—and well within Starsky’s reach.

The picture of Hutch came further into focus: a tall, lean, muscled man; translucent blond hair, hands tucked inside his jeans back pockets, short-sleeved cotton shirt, sky blue like the color of his eyes—ones Starsky could see even from a few yards away—opened several buttons down, hairless chest, familiar and once-belonging to Starsky. A tentative posture, as if Hutch didn’t know whether he should be there at all, and yet he’d followed a compulsion to that very spot despite his misgivings.

Starsky was speechless, pulled at by the construction crew eager for food and drink, but riveted in place by Ken Hutchinson, himself seemingly as stunned and paralyzed as Starsky had become in an unexpected instant. Sweat broke over Starsky’s skin, a kind of hot flash, an emerging panic. He might just fall to his knees.

—

Hutch didn’t know what to do. He didn’t know whether he should get out of the car and approach Starsky while he was fixing an older man’s garden hose, or if he should just follow Starsky home, corner him in a more private, personal, intimate environment. But when the truck of men pulled up to the driveway and began calling Starsky over, Hutch panicked. All Starsky had to do was easily climb into the bed of the pickup and the driver could speed away—purposefully leaving Hutch behind in a wake of devastating disappointment.

So Hutch got out of the car with its key still in the ignition and walked around its front to the sidewalk, took a step up onto the curb, and felt the blood drain to his feet as his heart noticeably pounded; he heard his own heavy breath. A visible tremble overtook him as perspiration dampened his skin, a kind of flash fever. He might just pass out.

A moment later, Starsky turned away from the house, toward the truck, and then—as if Hutch himself had physically intercepted him—he stopped dead in his tracks. He turned his head and their eyes met—for the first time in nearly a year; a look of mutual intensity filled with disbelief and desperation passed between them. Hutch had finally made eye contact with the man he would die for.

The picture of Starsky was both beautiful and terrifying: a tanned and muscled man; dark wavy hair, wearing jeans, work boots, and a short-sleeved tee-shirt, deep blue like the color of his fiery eyes—ones Hutch could see even from a few yards away—familiar and once-belonging to Hutch. A fight-or-flight posture, suspended animation, as if Starsky didn’t know whether he should run or stand his ground.

Hutch had to swallow the lump in his throat before he could say the five words he’d spent almost a year practicing; any other words might prove fatal. The palpable dismay on Starsky’s face told Hutch to tread carefully; he was not welcome.

“I just need five minutes,” Hutch managed to say, his voice breaking as he spoke. He never dreamed he’d feel so weak and undeserving, and he didn’t dare move a step closer. Starsky just might bolt away—and shatter Hutch’s heart for the second time.

—

Starsky was at another crossroads. He could leave that minute with the boys; it was as easy as climbing into the bed of the pickup and the driver speeding away—without even knowing Hutch had been left in the dust. But Starsky’s mind raced: if Hutch had found him in such an obscure place as a housing development in a Redland, Maryland, suburb, then he certainly knew where Starsky was living, what he was driving, and the alias he’d been using.

He broke eye contact with Hutch, reluctantly gave his attention to Scott. “I’ll catch up with you guys at the bar,” he said, firm in his decision. “I have a ride.”

Scott turned in his seat, hung his arm out the open window, and briefly looked over his shoulder to where he obviously saw Hutch standing. “Are you sure?” he asked Starsky, raising an eyebrow of concern.

“I’m sure.”

“Add another pal to the bar tab then?”

“No,” Starsky said with certainty. He waved them on and looked back at Hutch as the truck sped away from the curb. Starsky was on his own; it was his turn to do or say something. He forced himself into that inevitable walk to the car, one that felt like a lengthening eternity with every step he made. As he passed Hutch, still holding eye contact, he gruffly said, “You have seven minutes.”

It was everything in Starsky’s willpower to not punch Hutch in the face as he walked past him. It was even more than sheer determination that he didn’t take the man into his arms and hold him so fiercely no one and no thing could pry them apart. Starsky despised his mixed feelings, but this moment wasn’t his to direct.

—

A familiar aroma of sweat and cologne wafted into Hutch’s space when Starsky walked past him. He thought—at least he hoped, prayed, silently begged—that Starsky would embrace him as he got close, but Starsky didn’t. “You have seven minutes,” was all Starsky said, his eyes and expression as firm as his voice.

When Hutch heard the car door open behind him, he audibly exhaled, and then pushed himself forward to cross in front of the car to the driver’s side. A wave of nostalgia, nearly breaking through his stoic facade, washed over him as he got into the car and closed the door, turned the key in the ignition, heard the rumble of the engine, and felt Starsky’s long-lost presence right there beside him.

Tears unexpectedly pooled in his eyes and he couldn’t see for a moment, despite blinking them back—or at least trying to. If he even glanced at Starsky, he was sure to lose the grip on his emotions, so he bit down hard.

—

“Turn right at the stop sign,” Starsky ordered him with a hint of annoyance. The crew pickup was nowhere in sight, so he was going to have to give directions. It was Hutch who was supposed to be talking. “And then left at the second light.”

Starsky sat stone-faced in the passenger seat and looked out the window, not seeing the passing scenery. Everything inside him was at odds with itself. He couldn’t pinpoint a single worthy emotion. But he could scream if he weren’t careful; instead, he pressed back on his anger and his bewilderment and tried to find some redeeming value to the surreal experience between them. There was a time when it was all so natural.

—

Hutch had seven minutes and yet he couldn’t find his voice to take advantage of even one of them. His vision had blurred behind the wetness in his eyes and it was all he could do to concentrate on his driving. There was also a sudden tightness in his chest. Maybe he was having a heart attack.

When he approached the first stop sign, he couldn’t remember which way to turn until Starsky repeated the directions. Silence in the car was deafening. All that spent time, all that meticulous preparation, all that coveted hope that he would be given just one more chance to tell Starsky what he wanted Starsky so desperately to know—to tell him how sorry he was, how stupid he had been, and that he’d never do anything as cruel as that again—was for naught.

All Hutch could bring himself to do was to tightly grip the steering wheel and consciously keep his eyes on the road.

—

Starsky had waited long enough. He finally glanced over at Hutch to see why the man had wasted valuable minutes. To his chagrin, he saw a single tear on Hutch’s cheek.

“Fuck the bar,” Starsky angrily said. “Turn right into the next driveway.”

They soon entered the parking lot of a small strip mall off Muncaster Mill Road.

“We’ll go in there,” Starsky said, pointing to the Pizza Hut. “You’ve got 12 minutes—after that I’m going to be eating and I don’t want to hear another goddamn thing you have to say.”

* * *

Starsky was just about to leave the car after Hutch parked in an open space in front of the pizza parlor and killed its engine, but his impulse got the better of him. Before either of them could exit the vehicle, he faced Hutch to confront him with the overwhelming disappointment and anger he felt.

“And another thing, Hutch,” he snarled, as if he’d said more to Hutch on that brief drive from the construction site to the restaurant besides giving Hutch directions, “for the record, you don’t have any right hunting me down like this. I thought I made it clear that I didn’t want to see you again.” His voice wavered when he spoke, but it was no less determined. “You had no right to look for me.”

“I’m sorry,” Hutch quietly said—and not without his own break on words.

“You think you can just show up out of the blue and act like nothing happened between us?”

“I’m sorry, Starsk.”

“What is it you want from me, huh? We were done. You don’t get to waltz back into my life. I started over when you went your way and I went mine.”

Hutch didn’t say anything that time, but he held eye contact, despite Starsky’s fiery glare and hostile demeanor.

“Do you have any idea how you made me feel?” Starsky angrily added. He pressed back on the urge to cry; he wasn’t feeling weak or sentimental or sad. His emotions were ruled by rage. “You wanted me to take another bed in the house. You’d get to play married man with a woman and I’d get to be the side dish. Do you know how cheap that made me feel?”

Hutch had turned in his seat to face Starsky, seeming to brave it; a look of desperation still filled his expression. “I’m sorry, Starsky.”

“You have no right to be here. None.”

Hutch visibly bit his lip. There weren’t any words he could say that Starsky wanted to hear—and he knew it.

“I walked again because of you,” Starsky said, surrendering to the pain that memory caused him, a wetness pooling in his eyes as his voice trembled. “I got back into living because of you.”

Hutch appeared petrified; he knew what he was being told. No doubt he’d come all that way to find Starsky and was realizing why he wasn’t welcome.

“I came out of a coma because of you,” Starsky reminded him, feeling flushed. “That’s how much you meant to me. You were my will to live.”

“Oh, Starsk.”

“And what was I to you, hm? The back-up plan, that’s what.”

Hutch subtlety shook his head; had he been more obvious, Starsky would have punched him, for sure—and they both knew it.

“You insulted me,” Starsky said, no longer hiding the hurt in his voice.

“I know I did. I’m sorry.”

“You and she were going to sleep in our bed and you expected me to be happy about that?”

“No.”

“You dismissed me like yesterday’s garbage.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I don’t want your goddamn sorry. Stop saying that. I don’t even know why you’re here. You didn’t want me then, so do you just happen to be in town or something?”

“No.”

“You broke me, Hutch.”

Hutch seemed paralyzed against the driver’s side door. “I know I did. I’m…”

Starsky didn’t back down. “It’s been everything I have in me to keep one day ahead of it all this time, know what I mean?”

Hutch’s lips parted as he breathed in deeply, but he didn’t answer.

“I’m finally starting over,” Starsky said, “and then you show up to fuck it up.”

Hutch closed his mouth, seemed to bite down on replying. Anything he said could ignite a fire he couldn’t suppress.

“Why would you treat me like that, hm?” Starsky continued, feeling the weight of his loss. “Why would you make me feel like shit? Didn’t I mean more to you than that? I thought I did.”

Hutch could only speak with his eyes. If Starsky could read him, if he could give Hutch just a moment’s reprieve to hear why he’d driven all those miles to find Starsky, he might discover a reason to keep from reliving the hurt Hutch had caused him.

So purely from his own self-preservation, Starsky backed off. What was the point of unloading on Hutch? It didn’t change anything. It didn’t change the past. And Hutch certainly didn’t deserve to know Starsky’s feelings. But Starsky should hear Hutch out and then be done with running. Hutch could officially go his way again, and Starsky his own.

“You broke my heart, Hutch,” he said, turning away as he lifted the door handle with trembling fingers. “There’s no coming back from that.” He left the car and slammed the door shut after his parting shot. “Let’s eat. I’m hungry.”

As Starsky approached the building, he heard Hutch get out of the car behind him and follow him up onto the sidewalk. Without opening the door into the restaurant for Hutch—as he had done more times than he’d ever be able to remember in the decade they’d been in each other’s lives—Starsky entered ahead of him instead. The aroma of pizza and beer wafted throughout the room and immediately cornered him, reminding him that he was in public, and sparing him from showing his emotional hurt in front of strangers.

“Take that booth in the corner,” he told Hutch, pointing to the one by the window. The place was relatively empty at that time of day and they had their choice of tables. “I’ll order.”

Starsky didn’t look to see whether Hutch followed instructions, but he no longer felt Hutch’s presence beside him. At the counter, relieved to have a moment to himself, he ordered a pizza and two beers to be delivered to their booth.

“And could you do me a favor?” he asked the young waitress, not really noticing her; his mind was preoccupied with someone else. “Would you call Pete’s Bar & Grill and have them tell Scott that … Sky … won’t be joining them tonight after all? Tell him I’ll see him at work in the morning.”

He was fairly sure she said she’d be happy to relay the message, and then he went to the men’s room to both empty his bladder and to regain his composure. A splash of cold water should do the trick. When he returned to the dining room, he saw Hutch seated in the corner booth at the window, facing the wall side.

For a moment, Starsky imagined that Hutch might have been giving him time to escape if that’s what Starsky wanted; Hutch wouldn’t be able to see Starsky leave the restaurant from where he sat. But Starsky also figured that Hutch knew where he lived. Until they settled this long-overdue argument, Starsky would never be able to move on. He was willing to face it for that reason alone.

He joined Hutch in the booth, across from him, glad to have the parking lot views to escape Hutch’s eyes when he needed to.

But they sat in silence for a minute just looking at each other. Hutch’s apprehension was still visible on his face; he was obviously not comfortable, but he wasn’t running, either. He kept eye contact despite his apparent uneasiness.

Starsky looked him over. Hutch hadn’t aged in that year, not really. His hair was shorter. He seemed thinner. But those blue eyes were as Starsky remembered them, albeit filled with a kind of dread and passiveness. Hutch was dressed in a blue shirt, opened partway, and he wore a watch that Starsky only then noticed. A Yamamoto Reflex with a platinum band. He looked back into Hutch’s eyes without comment.

“You look good,” Hutch said, his voice soft, but uneven.

“Is that part of your 12 minutes?”

“No.”

“Then keep what you think about me to yourself.”

Hutch bit his lip.

“You have 12 minutes, starting now,” Starsky said, pretending to check his watch. He figured he’d cut Hutch off after the food arrived. By then, Hutch should have said all he’d come to say—he’d only asked for five minutes and Starsky had given him seven more.

“Okay,” Hutch said, wringing his hands and breaking eye contact to search the air for his starting position. When he seemed to have found it, he looked back at Starsky. “I’ve wanted you to know that I … I mean, when you left, right before you left, I…”

“Seems you should have this speech memorized by now.”

Hutch didn’t flinch. “I came to understand what you were telling me. No. I mean to say … after I had time on my own to think about everything, I decided to…” A sigh of frustration came out of him.

The beer arrived, two cold glasses of it, giving Hutch a slight reprieve, especially after Starsky told him to, “Drink some of that and calm the fuck down.”

Hutch actually did as suggested and drank nearly half of his beer in one gulp.

Starsky didn’t touch his. He was feeling anxious and hurt, and wanted the night to be over before the pizza was brought to their table.

Hutch heavily exhaled, licked beer off his lips, set the glass down, and twirled it on the checkered tablecloth with both hands. He tried again. “That day … you know … when we were all to meet for lunch at the house.”

“Which day?”

“The day you left.”

“Oh, that day. Yeah?”

“Well, if you remember, we were to talk about the moving plans.”

Starsky barely remembered. He’d spent that day in a completely different frame of mind—including the days leading up to it, but he took Hutch at his word. “Okay.”

“I stopped by the pizza joint near where we were living—”

“The one by Venice Place?”

“Yeah. And I ordered a pizza to take to the house.”

“Sounds logical.”

Hutch didn’t even hint at a smile to Starsky’s wisecrack. He seemed to still be searching for the right words. “While I was sitting at the table waiting for the pizza … it hit me what I’d done.”

“Done?”

“To you. To us.”

“On what day?”

“The day you left.”

“Okay.”

“The guy brought over the pizza,” Hutch explained. “He set it down on the table. Large box.”

“For three of us.”

“Right. I told him he’d made a mistake. I hadn’t ordered a large pizza. You and I never order a large pizza. He checked the ticket and corrected me—and that’s when it hit me.”

“That you had ordered a large pizza after all?”

“And that I didn’t want to.”

They momentarily stalled, together, on that note—for their own reasons. For Starsky, he was reminded of all the times Hutch told him he didn’t want the situation they were in, but didn’t have another choice. And no matter how many times Starsky told him how it ‘should’ be, Hutch kept asking him, “Have you got a better idea?”

That question pinched another nerve just remembering it.

“I wanted to order the medium-sized pizza,” Hutch continued, sounding more sure of himself. “I wanted what was ours. The house was ours. The bed was ours. The life we were planning and the one we had was ours.”

“I tried to tell you that.”

“I know.”

“And, so?”

“So I made a decision right then. I decided to go to the house, meet both of you there, and tell her that you and I were in the relationship I wanted, and that it was our house, our bed, and our life together, yours and mine.”

“The stuff I kept telling you to tell her.”

“Yeah.”

Starsky felt flushed again. What was Hutch really saying? “You were going to tell her about us? about us being … you know … in love and that?”

“Yeah. I was going to tell her I’d made a mistake when I said we should get married and live in the house and have you take a room down the hall.”

A mistake.

“Well, let me back up,” Hutch said, retracing his steps. “I did tell her that I’d made a mistake.”

“When did you tell her that?”

“When I got to the house with the pizza. She was hungry. Wanted to eat. I said we had to wait for you, that I had something to tell you both. But you didn’t show up, so after an hour of waiting, she decided to eat without you, and demanded that I tell her what I’d been waiting on you to say.”

“So you told her then?”

“I told her everything—including that I’d still be there for her and the baby, that I wasn’t going to abandon her, that I’d help her out financially, that I’d buy her a house if—”

“Wait. So you told her she couldn’t even live with us?”

“I told her it was our dream house, yours and mine, our bedroom, our lives—”

“Yeah, but I mean, just like that, you were moving her out? Hadn’t she already brought some stuff over?”

“You’re missing my point, Starsk.”

Maybe Starsky was trying to avoid it. What Hutch was telling him—what Starsky could read between the lines—was that Hutch had done exactly what Starsky had wanted him to do, except he did it … while Starsky was driving out of Los Angeles?

“I came to this decision,” Hutch admitted, “an hour … two hours too late. You were already gone.”

They held lingering eye contact.

Starsky didn’t know how to feel in that moment. He was angry, but he was scared, too, and he didn’t fully know why. Maybe it was because Hutch had told him what he’d come to tell him, but it was still too late. Damage had been done. Hutch had already broken him and there was no going back.

“I know I hurt you,” Hutch further confessed. “I mean, I didn’t realize it at the time. I was so fucked up myself that I couldn’t think straight. And I’m not saying that to excuse myself, Starsk. I’m just explaining what took me so long—and that I know how much I hurt you.”

There was something comforting in Hutch’s confession. Starsky finally felt seen by him, albeit long after he needed the validation. There was no getting around that.

“You fought me, Hutch.”

“I know I did.”

“You argued with me.”

“I was looking for an out.”

“I gave you one. I kept telling you what you needed to do.”

“I realize that now.”

“You made me feel dispensable.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You kept asking me if I had a better idea—and I didn’t. It was the right idea, Hutch; that’s why you came to it … eventually.”

“I know that, too.”

“But it doesn’t change the fact that you pushed me out the door.”

“I know it doesn’t.”

“So what’s the point of all this, hm?”

“I wanted you to know how sorry I am.”

“To make yourself feel better?”

Hutch momentarily bit his lip again. “Maybe. Maybe just to make you understand.”

“So I’ll what? take you back? be treated like second-rate by you and then say ‘no harm, no foul’ after you’ve come to your senses?”

“I haven’t been that arrogant. I haven’t once thought about you taking me back. I’ve just wanted you to know I know I hurt you and that I’m sorry I did. Okay, maybe it makes me feel … maybe I just want forgiveness for having hurt the person I’ve trusted and loved and wanted more than anyone else in my life.”

That was the crux of it, right there, Starsky thought. How could Hutch have hurt that person he’d just described as the one who meant the most to him?

“I don’t know that I can forgive you,” he said, not meaning to sound unkind, but not letting go of his pain, either. “You have to know how hurt I was, so much that I walked away from the very thing I had for you that you claim to have had for me.”

“I still have it for you.”

Starsky refused to accept Hutch’s affection. “You have no right to say all this shit now.”

“Maybe I don’t. But there’s a reason you gave me five … twelve minutes to speak my mind.”

“Yeah—so we can be officially done with this.”

Hutch closed his mouth, broke eye contact, drank beer, seemed to stew in a new pain—one Starsky could feel.

“You know that feeling you’re having right now?” he asked Hutch, forcing Hutch to meet his eyes again. “That’s how I felt when you pushed me out of the room.” He meant it figuratively. “And then you just kept pushing.”

“It took me a long time to figure out what I was looking for,” Hutch quickly said, obviously taking advantage of his remaining minutes. “When I kept asking you if you had a better idea, I wasn’t meaning to run over your feelings the way I did. I wasn’t asking that question so I could win the argument. I wasn’t looking to do things my way.”

“What then?”

“I wanted permission from you.”

“To do what?”

“To not marry her.”

Starsky blinked and sat back against the booth seat. He still hadn’t touched his beer. “You wanted permission from me to not marry her?”

“I wanted permission to be selfish.”

“You thought I’d think less of you if you did things the way I kept telling you we should do them?”

“I got her pregnant, Starsk.”

“Last I looked, it takes two people to do that.”

“She’d be an unwed mother.”

“And probably a good one just the same.”

“I wanted permission to ‘push her out of the room,’ not you.”

“You wouldn’t have left her in the cold, Hutch. You’d have set her up.”

“That’s what I told her on the day you left, but before that … I couldn’t not do right by her.”

“Because?”

“It was my fault that she nearly got killed.”

Starsky finally understood, but he wouldn’t appease guilt he didn’t think was justified. “You were doing your job,” he reminded Hutch.

“If I’d gone home when she asked me to, he’d have never had the opportunity to take that bat to her.”

“She didn’t want to marry a cop, Hutch. She wanted a husband. There were going to be a thousand nights like that one when you weren’t going to get home in time for dinner.”

Hutch was visibly emotional. Even his voice sounded as if he were close to crying—right there at the table.

“What nerve did I just hit?” Starsky asked, concerned for the first time about Hutch’s feelings.

“The one where I’m realizing that this conversation we’re having right now is the one I needed then.”

Starsky had just argued against Abby on Hutch’s behalf. He felt so choked up himself that he finally drank beer to wash it away. “I’m going to say this again,” he repeated himself. “What happened to her that night wasn’t your fault. You were doing your job. Can’t you see that she obviously forgave you for it?”

“How do you figure that?”

“She invited herself to your place to ‘tidy it up’ before I got out of rehab so it was ready for me. The two of you rekindled—at least for that one weekend night.”

Hutch wiped his eye. “I didn’t cheat on you.”

“I know you didn’t.”

“I didn’t cheat on her, either.”

“It was bad timing, Hutch. She spent a weekend with you and then I moved in a few weeks later—and then I moved on you one morning in a way we’ll never forget.”

It was also the first time Starsky realized he’d let go of some of his pain. He remembered that unbelievably enormous love that made them both cross a line.

“Two weeks after that,” he continued, keeping focused, “she shows up pregnant. Remind me again how you told me about that?”

“I asked you what you call two people who use the rhythm method.”

“And I said, ‘stupid.’”

“I replied, “That, and parents.”

“And that’s when everything got turned upside down.”

“And inside out.”

It was also at that very moment that their pizza was delivered. A Super Supreme with extra cheese, smelling delicious and steaming hot. A medium-sized pizza.

They both saw it together and looked up at each other after the waitress left them to themselves. They made eye contact, held it, understood what the other was thinking and feeling in that moment. If Starsky allowed himself, he might just feel as if the world had turned right side up and outside in again.

* * *

“Is that all you wanted, Hutch? to explain yourself and say you’re sorry?”

“It’s all I’ve hoped for.”

“You drove all this way just to do that?”

Hutch was disappointed to hear that Starsky didn’t think his year-long endeavor had value. “It was worth it to me,” he explained, seeking some sympathy, even if only a little.

“I mean, you don’t think we’re getting back together, do you?” Starsky flippantly asked, picking up his first slice of pizza and positioning it on a paper napkin. He made determined eye contact. “You don’t have that wish, not after all that’s been said and done between us, right?”

Hutch pressed his lips closed to keep from speaking his heart to a man who apparently wasn’t interested in reconciliation despite that Hutch had made it known—more than once—that he wasn’t asking for one. Of course, he’d give anything to have Starsky back. A lot more had gone down ‘between us’ in a decade than just the previous twelve months. How could Starsky dismiss all those years of having each other’s backs?

On closer examination, though, Hutch realized the question wasn’t about what he felt, but what he thought. “Like I said,” he reiterated, repressing his stupid urge to cry, “it was important to me that you know I never meant to hurt you.”

“Okay,” Starsky said, as if satisfied with the answer before he began eating. “But, for the record, there’s no coming back from the kind of trust you broke.” His tone was even, not unkind, but his words were accusatory.

Hutch couldn’t ignore them; they hurt in a very different way. They were both guilty of hurting the other. “We broke that trust together,” he argued.

“When?” Starsky asked, abruptly looking at him. He swallowed his food and drank beer, not leaving the stare he gave Hutch. “You’re the one who made her a priority over me.”

“Because I thought I could.”

“You didn’t get that permission from me.”

“I’m not saying I did.” Hutch didn’t want to throw punches, but he wanted Starsky to understand more than what met the eye. “Having said that, in a way, you did grant me the privilege to walk over you.”

Hutch couldn’t believe he was actually sitting across the table from Starsky after hunting for the man for less than two weeks shy of a year. It was surreal at times to be looking back into those beautiful blue eyes, that handsome yet scruffy face, the dark wavy hair he’d once lovingly combed with his fingers.

On that day, Starsky wore jeans and a deep-blue short-sleeved tee-shirt, soiled by sweat stains and dirt, but it still brought out the shine in his eyes. It was painful to remember how close they’d been, how deeply in love they were together, and just how far apart they’d become.

But the last thing Hutch wanted in those delicate minutes was to give Starsky another reason to run. He tread lightly.

“I believed you with all my heart, Starsk, when you promised me—repeatedly—that there wasn’t anything I could say or do that would make you leave me.”

Starsky seemed to search for a time when he told Hutch he’d never abandon him, and then said, bewildered, “So you took advantage of that?”

“I did.”

Starsky momentarily froze—as if he didn’t expect Hutch to admit to such a thing.

“I took you for granted,” Hutch further confessed, “and I took advantage of taking you for granted. I honestly believed I could lay out this plan for wife and family—and us—and never once think I’d lose you in it. If I’d thought for a second that you’d leave me, I would have folded in the blink of an eye.”

“You say that now.”

“What I’m telling you is that we broke the trust between us—together. You can never trust me again not to make you feel less than you deserve to feel and I can never trust you not to leave me, at least not without notice. You never even gave me a chance.”

Before Starsky could protest his part in that scenario, Hutch quickly added, “So, you’re right: there’s no coming back from that; I’m not here to talk you into anything. I said what I came to say.”

Starsky quietly studied him; his brow was furrowed and a sort of hostility lined his expression, but it was more that he seemed confused than confounded. Did he appreciate what Hutch was telling him? Did he believe him?

Starsky answered that silent question as his demeanor softened. “I still trust your word—for whatever that’s worth.”

“I suppose that’s why you took me at mine when I shuffled you off to a bedroom down the hall.”

“Yeah.”

“But had I known I was pushing you out of the house—and out of my life—I’d have never taken that stand. I hope you trust my word on that, too.”

Starsky ate in silence for a minute. “I guess so.”

“That’s better than ‘no.’”

“You let me fall, Hutch.” He’d posed a statement, not a question.

“You could have given me a heads up, Starsk,” Hutch said in kind.

“I thought about it, Hutch, but I decided against an ultimatum. I didn’t want to influence you. By leaving you to your own decision, I would learn what you really wanted.”

“I wish you had influenced me—because, like I said earlier, what I really wanted was an out, one so big I didn’t have to feel guilty letting her down again—especially over something as important as having my baby.”

“Don’t fool yourself, Blondie. You would never have fallen for an ‘it’s either her or me’ threat.”

“I would have if I’d known you were serious.”

“I argued with you about this for days and got nowhere.”

“You never said you’d leave me if I didn’t change the plan.”

“Humor me then, Hutchinson. How could I have given you an ultimatum you’d have believed and not hated me for, hm?”

* * *

Starsky’s Torino wasn’t in the driveway when Hutch pulled up to the canyon road apartment that mid-Sunday afternoon. He parked his Ford alongside the curb in front of the building in the only open spot—ahead of a red pickup truck and its attached trailer—just in case Starsky had simply run off to purchase more packing tape and would return at any moment. But as Hutch exited the car and bolted up the stairs, he abruptly stopped midway when he realized Starsky was actually sitting on the top step.

No car in the driveway. A stillness in the air. Starsky alone on the steps.

“What gives?” Hutch asked. He walked the remaining steps to just below his partner and looked up at him. “Why so glum, pal?”

“I left something inside for you,” Starsky told him, sounding somber. He leaned to one side to allow Hutch to pass him, but mostly to encourage Hutch to go into the apartment for that ‘something’ he’d left for him.

When Hutch ascended the remaining steps, passing Starsky along the way, and opened the apartment door, he found the place utterly empty. Other than the telephone on the floor in the living room, still plugged into the wall, and a phone book beside it, the entire apartment seemed stripped bare.

“What the hell?” Hutch blurted under his breath. What exactly could Starsky have left for him in that barren hellscape?

The only thing it could be was a large, thick Manila envelope on the floor next to the phone—the thing Hutch first thought was a phone book. He walked over and picked it up. On the front of the bulky envelope, in Starsky’s black-inked handwriting, was a neatly printed, unassuming ‘HUTCH.’

That’s when Hutch’s confusion turned to a deeper anxious concern.

He was nowhere near as prepared to leave Venice Place. He hadn’t even moved any of his fragile items; he planned, instead, to move them in the morning, then to rent the U-Haul truck, and—with Starsky’s help—to pack it full of his stuff before driving over to Starsky’s apartment to load him up, too. But it seemed Starsky had beaten him to the second part of that plan.

Hutch also remembered telling Starsky these very specific instructions when he helped his partner pack boxes of books and other things while visiting him the night before. Granted, Hutch was a bit behind in the boxing of his own stuff, but not enough to make Starsky think there should be such a drastic change in plans, especially one they hadn’t strategically discussed.

So Hutch returned to the landing—feeling a bit trepidatious. Starsky had since moved against the outside railing to allow Hutch to walk back down the stairs—or to sit beside him; Hutch was no longer sure, but he chose the latter. He sat shoulder-to-shoulder, hip-to-hip, and knee-to-knee to Starsky, the way they often did. “What’s going on?” he timidly asked as he opened the unsealed envelope.

“Read it and see for yourself.”

Hutch didn’t like the tone of Starsky’s voice, but, apparently, he was only going to get answers from inside the package—which contained a set of car keys, several envelopes, and what appeared to be a billfold. Hutch recognized the key ring to Starsky’s Torino, but dropped it back into the envelope when he figured there was an explanation somewhere else in the mix. He soon found it: the small piece of pink paper with a blue trim known to the state of California as a vehicle title—signed off on it by ‘David Starsky.’

“What’s this about?” Hutch asked, pushing the car title back into the envelope. “You don’t want the Striped Tomato anymore?”

Starsky didn’t answer him.

After half a minute, Hutch reluctantly pulled the next thing out of the envelope: Starsky’s billfold, the one containing his police I.D. and badge.

“My resignation letter’s in there, too, addressed to Dobey,” Starsky said, seeming to spare Hutch the trouble. “So is a ‘Quit Claim Deed’ to the house—notarized.”

Hutch was finally and officially alarmed. “What’s going on, Starsk?”

“Read my note.”

When Hutch removed the Hallmark card from its own envelope, he found an artsy black-and-white drawing of a trio of zebras on its front, and its inside flap—originally blank—was filled in with a message in Starsky’s handwriting, in seemingly careful lettering, presumably so there would be no misreads.

“Read it to yourself,” Starsky told him.

Hutch.

I’ll be brief and to the point. I thought I could live the life you’ve planned for us, but I can’t. Faking who we are together isn’t something I can do. It will only lead to more resentment and frustration and unfulfilled happiness. I know you know this to be true.

Hutch choked back the absolute dread he suddenly felt. His stomach had already formed an ever-tightening knot.

Instead, I’m choosing a life that we both would least expect. So don’t waste your time looking for me. I’ve left no trail. And, besides that, I don’t want to be found, least of all by you.

“Oh, Starsk,” Hutch said, pleadingly. He couldn’t possibly be reading a goodbye letter.

Love your family. Do your job. Live the next chapter of your life to its fullest—and know that I found a way to do the same.

All was not lost. We had a good run.

Your pal,
Starsk

Hutch’s heart pounded and his breath was shallow and hyper-rapid at the same time. When Starsky didn’t say anything else, Hutch inserted the card back into its envelope, and hoped to learn he’d just been cruelly pranked.

“This is about the baby?” he wondered, unable to quiet the tremble in his voice.

“I don’t care what you do about the baby. This is about you and me—what was you and me, anyway—and that I’m not willing to go along with your plan for the happy couple and their kid.”

“C’mon, you know it’s not like that.”

“I’m not going to argue about it anymore, Hutch. I’ve said what I’ve said and I’ve done what I’ve done.”

“Where’s your stuff?”

Hutch thought if he asked about Starsky’s belongings, he might just be able to stall him or talk him out of something or make him see just how stupid he was behaving.

“My truck,” Starsky said, pointing to the red Dodge parked along the curb behind Hutch’s car, “and all the stuff that matters to me is in the trailer.”

“You’re not serious.”

“What more do you need to know to believe I am?”

“You’re not going to leave me—just like that.”

“I almost did. I’ve been sitting here for an hour talking myself into driving away, but then decided to give you one more chance to change your mind.”

Hutch was flustered. In disbelief. And monumentally confused. “How can I? I got her pregnant, Starsk.”

“Last I looked, it takes two people to do that.”

“She’ll be an unwed mother.”

“And probably a good one just the same.”

“She’ll hate me.”

“That’s not my problem. It shouldn’t be yours, either—not when it comes to us.”

“You forget it was my fault that she nearly got killed.”

“You were doing your job,” Starsky firmly reminded him.

“If I’d gone home when she asked me to, he’d have never had the opportunity to take a bat to her.”

“She doesn’t want to marry a cop, Hutch. She wants a husband. There are going to be a thousand nights like that one when you aren’t going to get home in time for dinner.”

“You’re asking me to choose between you and my kid. Why would you do that?”

“I’m asking no such thing. I’m saying … either change the plan—to it being our house and our lives—or I’m leaving. I’m gassed up and ready to go. It’s your decision at this point.”

“Don’t do this to us.”

“My words exactly, partner.”

“If I tell her about us, she’ll—”

“Don’t tell her about us. We aren’t any of her business. Lie to her, if you have to. Remind her that she doesn’t want to be married to a cop, that you’re not in love with her, that the master bedroom is mine and I’m not willing to give it up, but more than that, that you don’t want to ruffle my feathers by bringing a wife and kid into our house. I don’t mind being the fall guy.”

“I can’t leave her hanging.”

“Of course you won’t. We’ll buy her a house—together, if you need the money. Marry her, if you have to. But it’s our lives in that bed in our house. I don’t want anybody else there. I’m not going to live in hiding.”

Hutch tightly gripped the Manila envelope in both hands and was reminded of its contents. Starsky really was prepared to leave him. How was that even possible—especially after all of Starsky’s promises to the contrary? Yet the stark evidence was there: the resignation letter and his badge, the forfeiture of their new house, the completely empty apartment, the car keys and transfer title, that new truck and trailer.

“You should’ve said all of this to me before you went through the trouble of setting up an escape plan,” Hutch berated him. He was running out of ways to make Starsky stay.

“You weren’t listening to my side of things or I would have.”

“Well, shit, this is undeniably a moot argument,” Hutch realized, tossing the envelope out in front of him and watching it land a few steps below. “I don’t know why I ever got into this conversation with you in the first place.” Rather, he did, but he finally recognized it had been driven by his guilt over his responsibilities to a woman and an unplanned child.

“I don’t know what moot means,” Starsky said, wringing his hands, “and I’m not interested in you explaining it to me, either. Just tell me what it’s gonna be—your way or mine?”

“It means—and to borrow a line from my partner—it’s going to be … like always and no questions asked … it’s going to be ‘me and thee.’”

Starsky audibly sighed, as if he’d been holding his breath the entire time. “You owe me an apology, Hutch.”

Hutch pulled Starsky into a one-arm embrace, himself feeling overwhelmed by the surrealness of that moment, by the grip of fear he hadn’t realized he only then escaped, a kind of all-consuming panic. Had he really come that close to never holding Starsky in his arms again? “I owe you more than an apology, Starsk; I owe you a thousand of them.”

“Yeah. I’ll make you pay.”

* * *

“You’re going to piss me off if it had been that easy,” Starsky said, about the ultimatum fantasy Hutch had just played out for him.

“I guess we’ll never know.”

“Maybe I shouldn’t have cared why you would choose me. I mean, I wanted it to be a decision you came to so I could believe you really wanted me, but maybe I was too stupid and hurt to know you did—and you were just going through some fucked-up shit.”

“I guess we’ll never know that, either.”

“Well, in a way, we do. You changed your mind on that day I left. That’s something.”

“Is it?”

Hutch sure hoped it mattered, but Starsky still hadn’t said he forgave Hutch for the hell he’d put them through, for the hurt he caused his partner, for the insult and the pain—all those lonely months.

“So what did you have—” Starsky asked, seeming to dismiss the ‘coulda/woulda’ part of their discussion as if it no longer mattered.

“Huh?”

“—and don’t say a human being.”

“What?”

“I mean, is it a boy or a girl?”

“Oh,” Hutch said, realizing what Starsky was asking. “It was neither.”

“You mean it was born without a head or something?”

Hutch squinted at him; he couldn’t help but think Starsky was purposefully nonsensical, but maybe he didn’t know how to ask about a delicate matter like a newborn baby?

“Sorry,” Starsky said, noticing Hutch’s wordless reprimand. “I was thinking about a conversation I had with myself a while back.”

“You should have kept it to yourself.”

“Yeah, so … what happened?”

“False pregnancy.”

“You mean she faked it?”

Hutch shook his head. “I mean the pregnancy was a false positive.”

“You know that doesn’t make sense.”

Hutch didn’t want to laugh. They were still on thin ice with each other, or so he felt; he didn’t even feel like eating. The beer had given him courage, but it would wear off soon enough. “It means it’s a psychiatric and physiological pregnancy,” he explained, “but not an actual pregnancy; there is no zygote, no embryo, no fetus.”

“You sure did clear that up,” Starsky said with sarcasm. He placed a second slice of pizza on a paper napkin he’d pulled out of the dispenser, and then ran the salt shaker over it several times. “All I’m wondering, Hutch … is … was she pregnant or was she just faking it?”

“Neither.”

Starsky looked sharply at him. “Oh. You’re saying she had a miscarriage.”

“I’m saying you’re not listening. She wasn’t pregnant—how many times do I have to tell you that?—but she didn’t fake it, either. She had all the symptoms of being pregnant, yet wasn’t.”

“Is that even possible?”

“Apparently, it is. There’s even a medical term for it, but don’t ask me to remember it.”

“Okay, okay,” Starsky impatiently said to escape that part of the conversation. “So when did you find out she wasn’t, you know, falsifying the record?”

Hutch sighed, but he answered Starsky without taking the bait. “Sometime around mid-October.”

Starsky stopped mid-chew, blinked, seemed to calculate, and then said, “Did you stay married then?”

“I didn’t get married.”

“I thought you were getting married that last weekend in September.”

“That was the original plan.”

“But you didn’t know she wasn’t pregnant until a few weeks later, if I’m hearing you right.”

“You haven’t heard me right since you opened this dialogue,” Hutch said, feeling safe enough to return the hard time he decided Starsky was giving him. “I didn’t get married. I didn’t have a kid.”

“But I’m saying your timeline is off.”

“It’s not.”

“So you didn’t get married before you didn’t know you weren’t having a baby?”

Hutch had to rewind the question in his mind and still decided to figure he knew what Starsky was asking him. “When I told her about the relationship between you and me, she made it clear she never wanted to see me again.”

Starsky stopped eating and sat back against the booth, his eyes not leaving Hutch’s, as if he waited for Hutch to explain things in a way he was having trouble deciphering.

“I told you then that she wouldn’t accept us,” Hutch reminded him, “or want any part of me—if she knew about our deeper relationship, which is one of the reasons I didn’t want to tell her.”

“You told her about us and she left you over that—still thinking she was pregnant?”

“Yeah,” Hutch said, realizing that’s exactly what had happened. “Remember? I was afraid of losing the rights to my kid if she knew about us; had she actually been pregnant, I would have.”

Starsky barely nodded; he seemed lost in a different thought, but didn’t express it. “So she called off the wedding and—”

“There wasn’t going to be a ‘wedding’; it was technically a court-elopement.”

“—that never happened.”

“Yeah, like the pregnancy, it never happened.”

“When did she tell you she didn’t want to see you again?”

“The day I told her about you and me—the day you left.”

“Wait. You’re saying … she left you—and I left you—on the same day?”

Hutch would never forget that day, but not because Abby had left him—for the second time. “She said she’d do everything in her power to get full custody of the baby because my ‘immoral behavior’ wasn’t anything she wanted to subject a child to.”

“‘Immoral behavior,’” Starsky said, seeming to mull it over as if he could somehow find it a better place in his mouth—but then didn’t. “Weird, huh, Hutch? You and me—in love with each other, willing to die for each other—and you marrying her out of duty, not love, because you accidentally thought you got yourselves pregnant, but it’s you and me who are the immoral ones?”

That conversation was a deep dive Hutch wasn’t prepared to take. He’d said his peace to Starsky: explained himself, his journey from stupid-to-his-senses, and apologized for the pain and grief he’d caused the person he loved most. But there was no ‘welcoming door’ back in—and not that he expected one, either. Still, he didn’t have much else to say, and he certainly didn’t want to get bogged down in useless definitions of love and loyalty.

He watched Starsky eat, instead.

After a minute, Starsky noticed Hutch, too. “Aren’t you hungry?” he asked, reaching for more pizza.

Reluctantly, Hutch took a slice of pizza to Starsky’s now third one, and slowly ate it. He still felt raw, unsettled, awkward—and that he was someplace he wasn’t wanted to be. But Starsky was eating and, no doubt, his focus was on his food and his stomach. When he was done, Hutch could learn what came next.

“I’m sorry she left you, Hutch,” Starsky finally said, breaking the silence between them. “I mean that.”

“Thank you, but I’m not sorry.”

What Hutch really wanted was for Starsky to feel sorry for Starsky leaving him.

“Do you think she was lying to you?” Starsky asked, earnestly chewing, just like old times—except for that chasm still stretched out between them.

“What would she lie to me about? being pregnant?”

“That, or not being pregnant. Either one.”

“She may be many things, but I don’t think she’s a liar. Besides, I had to drop some stuff off at her place that she’d left behind at the house—maybe five months later—and saw her just long enough to notice she definitely wasn’t pregnant.”

Starsky nodded, broke eye contact, stared at the table, seemed to lay that notion to rest, when he then asked, “What have you been doing with yourself all this time, hm?”

“Looking for you.”

Starsky glanced up at him. “Well, not every day, right? I mean, you’ve been up to other stuff, too.”

“A couple of things, but mostly looking for you.”

Starsky was halfway through his slice of pizza when he set it down and momentarily braced against the table as if to steel himself from what he was hearing. “Mom said you came to New York City.”

“A few times.”

“A few times?”

If only Starsky knew how far and wide Hutch’s search had taken him, he might be impressed, but Hutch was almost embarrassed to admit it, so he didn’t elaborate.

“Mom moved to Florida.”

“Yeah.”

“You know that?”

“The petsitter told me.”

Starsky again nodded, as if remembering. “When you stayed overnight in Mom’s place.” It wasn’t a question.

“Yeah.”

“Did you go to Florida, too?”

Hutch took a bite of pizza so he had a moment to think before answering.

“Never mind,” Starsky said, assuming Hutch’s answer. Perhaps if he gave Hutch’s experience some thought, he might feel sorry for him, too, and neither of them wanted that. “But how’d you end up finding me?”

“A combination of factors.”

“Like?”

“Phone records and area codes. A truck purchase. Bill of Sale alias. Hardware stores.”

Starsky resumed eating. “You’re smarter than Sherlock Holmes.”

“If that were true, I’d have never fucked up the way I did in the first place.”

* * *

“I saw the Grand Canyon.”

The last thing Hutch thought he’d be talking to Starsky about were the nation’s national parks.

“Did ya, now?”

Starsky was on his fourth slice of pizza; Hutch had just finished his first. “I know you’ve been there before,” Starsky noted. “Back when you were a kid.”

“Parents took us.”

“You remember it?”

“Unforgettable.”

“Yeah, well, you should have been there with me when I saw it.”

“Because?”

“Because you should have been there with me,” was all Starsky explained—as if to remind Hutch that he had cheated his partner out of much more than a bedroom and a house.

“I’m sorry,” Hutch quietly said. Yet another thing he’d deprived Starsky. He was about to suggest they return sometime—together—but then realized he could no longer make such plans. “Why did you happen to be at the Grand Canyon?” he asked instead.

“It was on my way to … well, eventually, to here.”

Hutch watched Starsky eat; the man had an appetite. Working all day in the hot sun had to take its toll. Well, that, and Starsky was notoriously always hungry. Some things, besides the Grand Canyon, Hutch would never forget.

“So you took the southern route across, huh?” Hutch assumed.

“I guess so. Arizona. New Mexico. Texas. But then I aimed up to New York from Dallas.”

“How long did the overall trip take you?”

Hutch didn’t know what else to do except throw out the stupid questions that came to mind, ones whose answers he didn’t really care about. He also didn’t know why Starsky was telling him those details. Was there more to rub in? all the things Hutch should have done?

“I think I made it across in seven days,” Starsky replied, pausing to silently calculate time before he answered. “I stopped a lot along the way. Slept in my truck. Seedy motels. Historic places.”

That explained why Starsky called his mother from Kentucky so late in the week after he’d left Los Angeles; he’d taken his time to drive across the country.

“You slept in historic places or you saw historic places?”

“Both.”

“How did you beat the heat?”

“Air conditioner,” Starsky said with a roll of his eyes. But he quickly backed up and sounded friendlier in his clarification. “During the really hot parts of the day, I’d stop at a museum or a diner or someplace like that. It was okay.”

Hutch didn’t tell Starsky how many times he’d crossed the country over the past year; he’d be embarrassed to say so. If he’d been as smart as Simon Finelli, he could have figured out the area code situation early on and found Starsky in a matter of weeks, not months.

Starsky pushed the pizza pan toward Hutch. “C’mon. Have another slice. If you don’t, I’m liable to eat the rest of what’s left.” There was still half a pizza to be consumed.

“I’m watching my weight,” Hutch lied, but he reluctantly pulled another slice of pizza onto his paper napkin.

“That’s not true,” Starsky said. He poured a small amount of his own beer into Hutch’s glass. “You’re just nervous.”

Hutch wasn’t sure he was nervous, but he definitely felt … off. He’d searched for Starsky for nearly a year, finally found him, told him what he’d waited months to tell him, hoped to be forgiven, and then there he was, discussing cross-country travel with Starsky while drinking beer and eating pizza. It seemed too easy. Something was brewing. A payback. Starsky was setting him up for some kind of let down.

“I thought I might do some Park Ranger work,” Starsky explained, returning to his original comment about the Grand Canyon. “Not sure it’d be in a canyon with all those sheer cliffs, but it could be someplace like … Gettysburg. Ever been there?”

“No.” Another place he and Starsky could have gone—had they stayed together. “I assume you went?”

“Stayed in a hotel that was once a Confederate hospital-turned-Underground Railroad. Talk about a touché, hm?”

Hutch was impressed to learn that trivia. It also made him pine for the lost opportunity to have experienced it with Starsky. Was that why Starsky was mentioning his sightseeing excursions? to make Hutch realize every single moment he’d missed out on?

“Then I thought maybe I might go to school and get a teaching degree,” Starsky continued, seeming to enjoy the taste of his pizza as well as his recent considerations. “History teacher.”

Hutch studied him, noting how often Starsky comfortably met his eyes, how casual he seemed, reminiscing, but there was a hammer in there somewhere—sure to strike a blow.

“You’d make a good history teacher,” Hutch said with certainty. “They say ‘we teach best what we most need to learn.’”

Starsky paused long enough to replay the adage in his head, then nodded. “I like that, Hutch. ‘We teach best what we most need to learn.’ Maybe that’s why I was really into all the historic places I stopped to see. Dealey Plaza, you know, where—”

“Yeah, I know it.”

“Been there?”

“No.”

“Sad and shameful all at the same time. I couldn’t get into the Book Suppository, the place, you know, where—”

“I know what happened there, but I’m familiar with it as the Book Depository.”

“Suppository. Depository. What’s the difference?”

“One is a place where books are deposited; the other is an enema.”

Starsky frowned before he shook his head. “You just can’t help yourself, can ya, Hutch?”

“I’m trying.”

“Eat something.”

Hutch finally began eating his second slice of pizza. “What else did you see?” He should push Starsky into revealing his end goal and get it over with to spare Hutch further anxiety.

“Lincoln’s birthplace, for one. Gettysburg, but I already told you that. Damn. Lots of places, really. None coming to me now except the usual suspects: Jefferson’s house, you know, like that.”

“Monticello?”

“Yeah. Have you been there?”

“No.”

“There’s a lot to see in this country.”

“It sounds like you stayed busy.”

“Yeah. Doing my best to stay one step ahead of my…”

“… ahead of your…?”

“…old life.”

Their past.

Maybe that was the point of Starsky’s telling of his cross-country excursion: to remind Hutch he was well into his ‘new life’ and no longer wanted or needed his previous one. It began at the Grand Canyon. From the Grand Canyon to a little house in Redland, Maryland. Quite the trip.

Starsky wasn’t done. “I’ve seen a lot around D.C., too. Seen much there?”

“Quite a bit of it lately,” Hutch admitted, drinking the beer Starsky had poured for him, and noticing again Starsky’s deep blue eyes. So in love they’d been. “I’ve visited all of the must-sees.”

“Time out while looking for me?”

Hutch didn’t want to divulge too much of his past year’s efforts because he didn’t want Starsky to use them against him. But he couldn’t lie, either. “I’ve been staying locally with a friend off-and-on since last year. Took the D.C. tour with him and then some.”

Starsky perked up. “You have a new friend?”

“Did I say new?”

“You never mentioned a D.C. friend before.”

Hutch couldn’t argue, so he changed the subject instead. “In fact, I thought I saw you on Memorial Day near the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.”

Starsky stopped chewing and leaned back against the booth. He stared at Hutch, appearing stunned. “I was there on Memorial Day.”

Hutch’s turn to sit back, feeling slammed. Had he food in his mouth, he would’ve choked. “Seriously?”

“I thought I saw you there, too,” Starsky claimed.

“You must be kidding.”

“I swear. I was there that day with my new friend, Kayla.”

Hutch remembered Kayla; she was the young woman he’d met who’d given him Starsky’s whereabouts that afternoon. Without her intervention, Hutch would have had to stake out Starsky’s house.

But Starsky seemed more interested in why Hutch was in Washington, D.C., making new friends, than he was by the distinct possibility that they were in Arlington Cemetery at the same time and may have even seen each other. “What brought you to D.C. in such a way that you met a new friend?”

“I started working part-time for the FBI.”

Starsky laughed and resumed eating. He apparently didn’t believe Hutch.

“My friend is Special Agent Simon Finelli. I met him a year ago on a federal case in California.”

“That name sounds familiar,” Starsky said in a low voice, searching the air for answers as he sipped beer.

“Because he called your mom,” Hutch reminded him, “and told her to tell you that the agency was looking for good cops.”

Starsky made firmer eye contact with Hutch. “That’s right. I remember now. I wondered if you were up to something.”

“It apparently didn’t work.”

“I actually thought I might call the number and see if I was right—or if the FBI really was hunting.”

Hutch sealed his lips. He didn’t want to get in deeper than he already was; he still had a hunch Starsky was going to land a few punches—physically or emotionally, or both.

“So, let me get this straight,” Starsky said, obviously thinking further. “You called on the FBI to look for me?”

“No holds barred.”

“How did you manage to get your friend interested in my sorry ass?”

“Missing persons case.”

Starsky frowned, broke eye contact, seemed frustrated, and didn’t finish the last few bites of his pizza slice. Instead, he called the waitress over and asked for a ‘doggie box.’ “That’s why you made friends with the Italian?” he wondered, sounding as if he had just solved his own case.

Hutch didn’t laugh. He knew Starsky was feeling angry, maybe even betrayed in some way. “I first went to work with him on the west coast tracking an interstate serial killer.”

“Oh? Is that why you were in Oregon?”

“That’s where we caught him.”

Starsky looked Hutch over as if to better understand Hutch’s journey without Hutch having to fill in the blanks. “That was some accomplishment, Hutch. I actually called the Oregon number you gave my mom—too late to reach you—and talked to the homeowner; he filled me in on the details.” He ignored Hutch’s raised eyebrow. “But I didn’t realize you were working with the FBI at the time.”

Normally, Starsky would be interested in knowing more about a solved case, especially one as significant as that one, but Starsky was sending the message—on purpose or unintentionally—that he no longer cared about law enforcement. Or maybe he just didn’t want to give Hutch more credit than he deserved—as a kind of punishment.

The waitress brought Starsky his ‘doggie box’; after he put what was left of the pizza into the box, he got out of the booth and stood. “We’re done here, right?” he asked—but he sounded dismayed, annoyed, flustered, as if he was finally glad to be ‘done’; Hutch could take him home, drop him off, and it could officially be over between them.

Hutch thought back to their last meaningful exchange, and remembered that they had talked about Hutch leveraging the FBI to hunt for Starsky. He figured Starsky was angry about that, not appreciating the tools Hutch had used to find him after being told not to. Hutch should have just said what he’d come to say—“I’m sorry I hurt you”—and left it at that. But he was feeling desperate and greedy, wanting Starsky’s forgiveness, and those were the wrong ways to close that chapter on their lives.

Starsky patted his jeans pockets as if he searched for car keys—and then realized he didn’t have any. “I guess you know the way to my house, hm?”

“Not in the dark,” Hutch said.

“Well, let’s go then. I’ll drive.”

* * *

“You can’t see it from here,” Starsky said, “but I painted the front door red.” He had just stopped the Torino in the driveway, turned off the ignition, and killed the engine. Even if he’d kept the headlights on, they wouldn’t have shined onto the very front of the house, so Starsky told Hutch about the door instead of showing him—as if he didn’t plan to take Hutch up onto the porch for any reason, least of all to invite him in.

“I saw it earlier today,” Hutch told him, feeling disappointed as he sat there with a leftover pizza box in his lap, but reminding himself he’d gotten what he’d come for, so he should stop hoping for more, even an extra smidgeon of a moment.

“Oh, yeah? You came by the house?”

“I met Kayla. She told me where you were working.”

“Damn these neighbors,” Starsky said, not seriously. “They’re giving away the farm.” He exited the car and pocketed its keys. “C’mon. I’ll show you what else I’ve done.”

Hutch got out of the car with the pizza box and dutifully followed Starsky up the steps and onto the porch. He waited more than a minute—momentarily in the mostly dark—for Starsky to find the front door’s keyhole with his house key, and listened to Starsky cuss while he fumbled with the lock. A surreal and unexpected moment. Hutch was being invited into the house.

He was also relieved to have the extra minutes to spend with Starsky, but he still felt that Starsky was letting him in on every detail of the past year so Hutch could stop wondering what his former partner was doing and return home without any further reason to be in his life.

After Starsky succeeded in unlocking the door, he entered the living room ahead of Hutch, and turned on the porch light—after the fact—as well as a floor lamp from switches on the wall. He then tossed the keys into a ceramic bowl on top of the nearby foyer table. “I practically gutted this place and started over with a clean slate.”

Hutch paused on entry—immediately overwhelmed by the inviting beauty of Starsky’s new home. An overhead ceiling fan cooled the room while dark wood floors played off light beige walls, trimmed in off-white baseboards, door jambs, and window frames. Comfortable furniture—a full-length sofa, upholstered armchair, and Starsky’s familiar wicker chair—embraced a wood-burning fireplace, itself dressed in a warm red-and-black brick hearth and distressed wood mantle.

In the middle of the setting, an almost finished car model was on display in the center of the coffee table. Hutch had already peered into the house earlier that afternoon, but seeing it at nighttime—lit in lamp glow—was an entirely different picture.

Starsky closed the front door, took the pizza box from Hutch, and disappeared into the kitchen, leaving Hutch to himself in the living room where he continued to admire the ambiance. It didn’t get past Hutch that this was where Starsky now lived: in his own space, decorated his way, upgraded from apartment dwelling, with all the custom perks affording a homeowner—3,000 miles from Los Angeles.

There were only a few knickknacks around; the majority of textures and contrasting colors were provided by the framed and canvas art on the walls, large prints that filled their spaces, and pulled the room together. Hutch couldn’t have designed such an environment, try as he might and despite his own talents, so he wondered how much Kayla may have played a part. How close were she and Starsky anyway?

“You did all of this?” Hutch asked when Starsky joined him. Hutch couldn’t help but notice how relaxed Starsky seemed in his own home—especially with Hutch there. Starsky seemed to fit right in, too, despite the house’s cleanliness and his contrasting visible dirt and grime. Maybe all that time off from police work had given Starsky the opportunity to discover home decor preferences he didn’t have before.

Starsky also looked healthy; he’d been physically working for months, Hutch assumed; he was well-muscled, strong, and male—a couple days beard growth was a good look on him. Hutch wished he had the privilege of studying Starsky’s appearance at length, as well as more closely, but he barely felt invited into Starsky’s life, so he didn’t dare.

“Yep, I did all of it,” Starsky proudly said. “I installed the floors and baseboards, painted the walls, hung the pictures, designed and built the bookcases, all that.” He led Hutch down the hallway, showing him each of the two guest bedrooms, their new furniture—beds, dressers, nightstands, full-length mirrors—and the shared bathroom, all neatly decorated with coordinating colors, artwork, and shiny stainless hardware, hinges, and doorknobs.

He eventually took Hutch into the master bedroom. “It’s still a work in progress,” Starsky explained, “but this is the room I want to be special, so it’s going to be the last to make pretty. You’ll just have to picture it like the rest of the house.”

Hutch noticed the room’s bare walls—and a full-sized bed with a wrought-iron headboard, haphazardly made, its pillows and comforter in warm colors of browns, reds, and ivories. A lone antique chest of drawers was across the room near the window, and a TV on a footlocker was against the opposite wall; there was a single nightstand to the left of the bed, with a Tiffany table lamp—the only light to come on when Starsky flicked the switch by the door.

“I turned all my outlets into hot plugs,” he said, showing off his handiwork with a couple of flicks of the lamp and how it was tied into the wall switch. “I did all the ceiling fans, too.”

“You’re an electrician now?”

“It’s just a matter of turning off the power to the house,” Starsky told him, pushing past Hutch to leave the bedroom as he headed back toward the living room, “and matching up the wires.”

He made it sound so simple.

Hutch followed him into the kitchen, tagging along like a puppy dog being shown the human living quarters before ultimately being chained up outside. But Hutch wouldn’t trade it for the world; every minute he was permitted to spend with Starsky were privileged ones.

A lamp on the counter in the corner near the sink gave off the same amount of light from a stove hood, but was warmer in its glow. A small dining room table nearby was littered with papers, clipboards, a couple of wooden rulers, some pens and pencils in various colors, and a clear tape dispenser. It was actually the only cluttered place in the house; the rest of the home was quite tidy—even for Starsky.

“That’s where I do all my fabulous design work,” Starsky explained with a chuckle when he noticed Hutch studying it. “I’ll clean that up when my work is done.” He opened the refrigerator. “Beer?”

Hutch hesitated. He didn’t want to misread the situation. Was Starsky just being polite? Or was he expecting Hutch to stay a while? Hutch didn’t want to lose track of his purpose, either. “Coke, if you have it.”

Starsky removed two glass bottles of Coca-Cola from a refrigerator door shelf, retrieved an opener from a drawer, used a tug of his head to coax Hutch into following him again, and headed for the backyard through the living room slider. “I’d turn on some music, but it’s too much of a pain in the ass,” Starsky complained. “I have to figure out a better way to rig the system.”

Music. Beer. A visit to the backyard…

“I built the deck,” Starsky bragged when they stepped outside; the night was still warm, but not hot. He handed Hutch a cold bottle of Coke and then turned on the string lights that were hung around the top of the pergola, their soft white glow revealing the considerable size and quality construction of the wooden deck, complete with its painted handrails and clay flower pots. “I built the overhead, too.”

Maybe Starsky wanted to rub it into Hutch’s face that he’d gone on to have the things he wanted in life and didn’t need Hutch to get them for him. Or maybe Starsky was just proud of his accomplishments. Or maybe he simply wanted to share his creations with the man he’d once loved more than any other person on earth. Close that chapter. Be on their separate ways.

“I’m overwhelmed,” Hutch said, honestly. “I’m truly impressed. You’ve outdone yourself.”

Starsky sat in the patio chair to the left of the small outdoor table, and popped the lid on his soda bottle. “Like I said, it’s still a work in progress.”

“I can’t imagine what else you have left to do.”

“Greenhouse,” Starsky replied, pointing with the bottle opener into the darkness toward the back of the yard. “I already have the lumber out there, but this housing job got in the way.”

“You’ll get to it,” Hutch was sure. He wasn’t jealous, but he did feel minimized. Starsky really didn’t need him. He’d moved on. But despite those feelings of melancholy, Hutch sat in the nearby chair, and opened his Coke bottle after Starsky handed him the cap remover.

“Starsky, the farmer, huh?” Hutch noted, and not with sarcasm.

“I’ve met a few of the people who live around here; they bring me food in exchange for odd jobs, you know, fixing stuff—”

“Like you did for the older man this afternoon, helping him out with a hose?”

“Like that. But around here, it’s mostly older women—older horny women.” He sadly laughed. “Well, anyway, I figure if I build a greenhouse, everyone in the neighborhood will help keep it up and harvest the stuff, know what I mean?”

“Good plan. A community project. Sit back and reap the rewards.” He nursed the soda, barely tasting it, and imagined Starsky’s life—all neatly laid out there without him.

“Remember when we were at Dream Lake in Colorado?” Starsky asked, not realizing he’d startled Hutch as much as he did with that question. “Remember when I said I could build us a house up there, but you didn’t believe me?”

“I believed you,” Hutch argued, trying not to burst out with a disbelieving laugh. Little did Starsky know that it was Hutch’s second visit to Dream Lake that enabled Hutch to figure out the kind of work Starsky was doing—and to follow that trail right onto his backyard deck. “I just took exception to how you were going to get the building supplies up the side of that mountain.”

“But don’t you think I could have found a way to do that, too, hm? I mean, I’m good at whatever I set my mind to.”

“No argument here.”

“Well, I just wanted you to see what I’m capable of; lay that to rest.”

There it was: the reason Starsky brought Hutch home. To prove himself. To show Hutch he wasn’t the loser Hutch must have thought he was. To rub it in that he didn’t need Hutch or his misguided opinions.

“Tell me about Kayla,” Hutch suggested, hoping to change the subject to something else besides Hutch’s failings. “She lives nearby?”

“Across the street and two houses down.”

Hutch waited for more details, but none came.

So they sat in silence for a couple of minutes, listening to the choruses of crickets, studying the light and shadows over the deck, admiring the nighttime sky and its stars, drinking their sodas, aware of each other.

But Hutch could barely breathe. He walked a thin line between grief and relief and didn’t know which one would win the debate. Should he plan a strategic departure to keep from overstaying his welcome?

It was Starsky who abruptly stood and set his Coke bottle on the table. “I’ve got to get out of these clothes,” he said, stepping past Hutch on his way into the house. “Make yourself at home.”

Four words. ‘Make yourself at home.’ He didn’t say a different four words: ‘Get the hell out.’ So Hutch tried to do just that: relax. He drew long breaths, drank the Coca-Cola, trying to taste it, settled into his cushioned chair, allowed himself to further admire Starsky’s work. The pergola was a nice touch, especially all lit up the way it was; the deck was solid, cut to perfection, and the right size for its space at the back of the house.

A couple of minutes later, Hutch heard the distinct sound of water splashing on tile—in what was presumably the master shower. More conflicting thoughts crowded his mind. Starsky hadn’t asked him to join him; there was a time when he would have insisted. Starsky probably always showered after a long day’s work in the sun; this wasn’t anything new and not something Hutch should read into, one way or another.

But he so desperately wanted to. At the same time, he should be ecstatic that he had learned where Starsky lived, where he ate, slept, got dressed, watched TV, went to work—and that his year’s long search was finally over. Hutch could stop wondering. Maybe this is what he needed so he could return to Simon’s house—and eventually to his own—and put his relationship with David Starsky behind him, finally and completely.

Hutch also knew life would never be the same again. It would never be as rewarding, filled with implicit trust and unconditional love, as those precious years with Starsky had been. Hutch knew he could never be as liberated with another human being; his bond with Starsky was like no other, built on shared life-and-death experiences, held together by mutual respect and loyalty, love and attraction. Rather, it had been those things—once upon a time.

Hutch didn’t feel sorry for himself—he was lucky to have the time he did, past and present—but he was keenly aware of what he’d lost, and the role he’d played in it. There was plenty of time to be sad, to be devastated, actually, but that night wasn’t it. On that night, he needed to enjoy every single moment with Starsky while he had them.

If by some miracle, Starsky invited Hutch back into his life, it still wouldn’t be the same. Trust had been broken. Love had been directed elsewhere. They no longer fought crime together; it wouldn’t be a ‘them-and-us against the world’; it would never be a ‘me-and-thee’ life they shared. The past was past, no matter what the future might bring. Or so Hutch told himself. He didn’t quite believe any of it.

In the meantime, the water was turned off and the songs of crickets filled in the new silence. Some beer earlier and soda later and Hutch needed a bathroom. While he waited for Starsky to return, he left the deck and walked out into the yard, found a private place in the dark near that large stack of lumber, unzipped his jeans, pulled out his penis, and urinated in the grass.

Another surreal moment.

As he walked back to the house, he heard Starsky’s voice inside, calling out to him.

“Want some pizza, Hutch?”

The invite was suspicious, but Hutch was hungry. He hadn’t eaten much that evening. When he entered the kitchen, he found Starsky shoving what was left of their pizza into the oven with just the light from that lone lamp to see what was where.

“What are you doing?” Hutch asked, stopping at the counter, and noticing Starsky had changed clothes into an untucked short-sleeved shirt and a pair of denim shorts—and was barefoot.

Starsky straightened after he closed the oven door and faced Hutch. His hair was damp and, despite the long day he’d had, he looked refreshed. “I’m doing what it looks like I’m doing,” he said with purpose. “Heating up cold pizza. You gotta be hungry by now.”

“C’mon, Starsk, you know what I mean. What are you doing?”

Starsky locked eyes with him. It was apparent he understood Hutch’s question, but he seemed resistant to answer it.

Hutch tried another way. “Tell me what’s going through your head. I don’t want to guess.”

“Nothing. I’m brain-dead.”

“You know this is all too comfortable.”

“You showed up. We’re still hungry. We’re going to eat something.”

“And then?”

It was a question Hutch had ached to ask since the moment their eyes met on the sidewalk earlier that afternoon; what did it all mean? What was the end purpose of this reunion? Was the gain only what Hutch wanted out of it? to say he was sorry, maybe be forgiven, and return to his life, alone? Or did Starsky have some idea of his own, even if it wasn’t what Hutch wanted? Couldn’t he at least tell Hutch what was in his mind?

“I don’t know, Hutch,” Starsky said in a very soft voice—almost as if he was really confused about his thoughts, desires, wants. “You showed up here out of the blue … I’m just trying to keep up.”

Hutch couldn’t help but notice the shine in Starsky’s eyes and he wasn’t sure if it was from a deep emotional place in his heart or simply the light from a lone kitchen counter lamp. But Hutch knew where the next step for himself should be, so he began there.

“Can you find it in yourself to forgive me?”

Starsky broke eye contact, stared into no place for half a minute, then looked back into Hutch’s eyes. “It’s not because I know now why you did what you did that I can forgive you; it’s because I’ve always loved you. That’s never changed—even after all this shit went down.” His voice broke on his words, though his posture remained defiant. “But I can’t let you back in, Hutch, if that’s what you’re wanting. Can’t you see that?”

Hutch couldn’t help how he suddenly felt. He found himself metaphorically in that very moment on the steps of Starsky’s apartment in his ultimatum fantasy, and that he had no choice but to fight for what belonged to him, even if it was a losing battle. Starsky was leaving him—only this time Hutch knew it. “Why can’t you take me back?” he argued, feeling flush with a returning apprehension. “Maybe it’s not for everything we had before, but it could be for more than helping you eat pizza.”

Starsky backed to the refrigerator, as if that was as far as he could physically go without leaving the room or the house or the state. But he didn’t answer.

“Is there somebody else in your life that you’d rather have?” Hutch pointedly asked him.

“No.”

On that, Starsky seemed certain.

Hutch crowded him by taking a step forward. “Do you think you can’t trust me again … anymore?”

“I don’t know that I ever stopped trusting you,” Starsky admitted. He locked his hands behind his butt against the appliance, seemed to settle, appeared to acquiesce. “I mean, after you explained it to me, I realized the trust was there all along. You were right that we both forgot about it.”

Not in nearly a year did Hutch finally feel as strong as he did just then; without saying it, Starsky had just forgiven him. “So what is it then?”

Starsky looked away to find that answer before he returned to Hutch’s eyes. “If I let you back in,” he explained, feeling his way along, his face expressing a pain he couldn’t seem to put into words, “it means that I would have…”

“Would have … what, Starsk?”

“…failed.”

“At what?”

“Leaving you.”

Hutch straightened. He was bewildered, but no less pursuant. “That’s what’s in our way?”

“Don’t you see, Hutch? I was as guilty as you were in breaking up with you. I could’ve given you an ultimatum. I could’ve stuck around and found another way into your life as the primary person. I could’ve fought for us harder.”

“Same.”

“Yeah, well, I have a new house with friends in the neighborhood, a good and honest job, a new truck, pretty pictures on painted walls, but it’s not the life I wanted, Hutch. I’d give anything for the life I wanted. Instead, I wasted a year of our lives.”

“So we share the blame—each in our very own unique and special way.” He didn’t intend to be sarcastic, but he was feeling hopeful for the first time; Starsky was actually admitting to wanting a reconciliation—if he could just get past his newly found guilt.

“I mean, I could have done better, Hutch. I’m good at whatever I set my mind to.”

“Well, not everything.”

“That’s not what you said a while ago.”

“I forgot to factor in your ability … rather, your lack of ability to hide from me.”

“But you cheated,” Starsky complained. “You called the FBI in to help you.”

“So … what you’re saying, Starsk, is … clever me.”

Starsky rolled his eyes. It broke him out of the painful look he’d had on his face up until then, as if he were … softening. “You’re saying we’re both to blame,” Starsky concluded, “and we both want what we had, but we both wasted a year feeling like shit.” It wasn’t a question.

“That pretty much sums it up,” Hutch said.

“So what next, Blond Boy?”

“I have an idea,” Hutch said, snapping his fingers as he turned away from Starsky and went to the refrigerator. “You get the pizza, I’ll get the beer, and we’ll meet at the dining room table. Come with an open mind.”

* * *

“Nice table,” Hutch said, apparently noticing its farmhouse style, grooved planks, and solid construction.

“I made it myself,” Starsky told him, feeling proud again. He brought the leftover pizza to the table on a round wooden cutting board, grateful to see that Hutch had neatly stacked and moved his papers and office supplies to one side so as to not soil or disorder them.

“I even used my scraps of wood to do it,” Starsky added, a bit smugly; not even he could believe he’d been that smart. And, despite Hutch telling him he’d never doubted Starsky’s abilities with a hammer and nails, Starsky wanted to be sure he was appropriately recognized for his cleverness and skill. “I made the cutting board, too.”

“You’re a genius.”

“Don’t mock me. I’m so good, I’m now building houses.”

“I wasn’t patronizing you, Starsk,” Hutch corrected him. “I really am impressed to see the work you’ve done. You did more than just piece this table together.” He sat in a chair to Starsky’s left and pushed an opened beer bottle to Starsky’s place setting. “It’s a work of art—and I mean that.”

He ran his hand and his eyes over the sanded and varnished wood grain, seeming to marvel at its custom textures and the pleasing visual of its unique beauty. “Makes my nook table seem like a cheap knockoff one would only buy in a clearance sale at K-Mart.”

“Don’t insult that table,” Starsky warned him. He remembered it both well and fondly. “I’d have eventually built us a bigger one, but we would have found some other use for the old thing. There are a lot of memories in those four legs.” Homemade breakfasts. Beer respites. Christmas dinners.

Hutch didn’t appear predictably sentimental; instead, he was busy with a piece of paper and two pens, strategically placing them on the table between himself and Starsky. While Starsky set a small plate in front of each of them, Hutch drew a line down the center of the paper. At the top of the left-hand column, he wrote HUTCH, and above the other, STARSKY.

“What are you doing?” Starsky asked, puzzled. He pulled slices of hot pizza off the cutting board and onto each of their plates, figuring he would only eat a single slice; Hutch should eat a lot more than he’d eaten at the restaurant, so Starsky was prepared to leave the rest for him—without Hutch knowing he would.

And truth be told—though he wasn’t sure he would ever admit it, at least not then—Starsky wanted Hutch to stay, for a while anyway. Deep down, he hoped Hutch had wisdom and insight that would make some sense of the past year—and turn their worlds completely right side up.

“To borrow a line from you,” Hutch said, taking his first bite of food and chewing while he spoke, “‘what does it look like I’m doing?’”

“It looks like you’ve made a scorecard.”

Hutch rolled his head as if to say he was impressed Starsky had figured it out. “We both know what a shitty year it was,” Hutch explained. “We each went through our own brand of hell.” He looked at Starsky. “Anger. Frustration. Hurt. Guilt. Loneliness. Am I missing anything?”

“Second-guessing,” was the first thing to come to Starsky’s mind. “I did a lot of that.” But he thought of a couple of other feelings, too. “Hopelessness. Depression.”

Hutch was momentarily wordless. “Yeah,” he slowly said, “so why belabor those, right?”

“Meaning … we don’t talk about our shitty year?”

“For this exercise, let’s not.”

“But you hurt me, Hutch. Why sweep that under the rug?”

“I’m not minimizing any of it and I’m not saying we should never talk about it. But God knows we were both hurt.”

“You were still playing policeman while I was replacing carpet.”

“Don’t kid yourself. I was mainly looking for you.”

“Not every day.”

“Every day,” Hutch said, adamantly.

“Some days you were catching serial killers.”

“One.”

“That still took time, research, detective work.”

“And every day I also made phone calls—to airlines and storage units and police stations and hotels, and so on. Every day I planned the next day’s hunt for you, brainstormed possibilities and strategies, logistics and itineraries—on my own and with my partner.”

Starsky didn’t like hearing Hutch use ‘partner’ to describe someone else, but they were no longer partners, so he should stop caring. “Okay, so you spent a year looking for me—”

“Every day—since the day you left.”

Starsky felt a sudden pang of empathy that he didn’t want to feel. He’d been the wounded one, not Hutch. “Okay, I get that now. Honest, I do. But I was the one who was mostly hurt.”

“Which one of us was hurt more is up for debate. Granted, I was responsible for—”

“Exactly. It’s because of your decision that I got hurt more, right?”

“I might beg to differ.”

“How can you say that, hm? Humor me this once.”

Hutch didn’t. One of the many things Starsky loved about Hutch was his ability to stand his ground. “You knew all along where I was,” Hutch reminded him. “You were the one who could pick up the phone and call—or just show up—whenever the mood struck. You were the one with the power to turn it all around at any minute of any given day.”

Starsky knew he could have changed the outcome of their situation, but he’d never considered it a ‘power’ before.

“I almost did call you,” he admitted. He didn’t want to seem weak, but they were being honest with each other, so he continued. What did he have to lose? “I almost called you several times, in fact. One time I called that number in Oregon, but you had already left.” That’s where Starsky had learned about Hutch’s new partner—Simon, was it? “And I dialed most of the 10 numbers at your house, a few times, then hung up before I got to the last one—on your birthday.”

Hutch audibly sighed and looked Starsky in the eye. He was quietly unreadable. “And me,” he finally said, maybe confessing, laying bare his own weakness, “flying back across the country the day before so I could be there just in case you called. Which one of us got hurt more? Debatable, but I rest my case.”

Starsky wasn’t willing to surrender, though he would at least commit to the facts. “Okay, I’ll give you this much, Hutch. We both got really hurt.”

“That’s all I was saying, Starsk.”

“So what’s your plan then, hm?”

“Simply that we take a different approach to this lost year of ours—at least for the next half hour.”

“In what way?”

“We list the positives.”

“Our lost year had positives?”

“Who knows? Maybe we’ll surprise ourselves.”

Starsky reluctantly agreed to play along. He leaned his elbows on the table and studied the mostly blank sheet of paper. “Okay. I guess there might be some.” None came to his mind right then, but he was game to make the effort in finding at least one item to put on the list.

“I’ll go first,” Hutch suggested.

Starsky watched Hutch write something in the left-hand column, but he had to cock his head to read it when Hutch was finished. He also noticed Hutch’s familiar handwriting on the page; he would have known it anywhere—and it surprised him to realize how much he had missed the little things about Hutch.

‘I helped catch an interstate serial killer.’

“That’s positive,” Starsky had to admit. He better understood the purpose of the task. He almost felt excited then, as if it might absolve him of his own stupidity. “I really am proud of you for catching that fucker.”

“Thank you,” Hutch sweetly said. “I’m proud of my role in catching him, too. Now, your turn.”

Starsky picked up his designated pen; he didn’t have to think long to add an item to his column.

‘I saw the Grand Canyon.’

“Always a positive.”

“Top that!”

Hutch rolled his eyes. “I’m not sure I can, so I’ll aim low instead.”

While Hutch was writing his next item, Starsky studied Hutch’s hands—their familiarity, strong fingers, clean-cut nails, the way he held the pen. Those hands had joined him in countless fist fights and weapons draws over the years—and they’d once-upon-a-time pleasured him, too.

‘I got a new watch,’ Hutch had written.

‘I’m about to get a new watch,’ Starsky wrote, laughing as he did. “You do owe me one.”

Hutch unfastened the ‘Yamamoto Reflex with a platinum band’ he was wearing and laid it on the table at Starsky’s place setting. “Done.”

Starsky would have declined the gift had he won it in a game of chess against Hutch, but he really did love the watch, and Hutch really did owe him one. Besides, Starsky was 100% sure it was meant for him. Without arguing the matter, Starsky picked it up and attached it to his left wrist behind the one he already wore. “Now I’ll be doubly on time.”

“As if that’s even possible, Starsk,” Hutch mumbled.

That was another thing Starsky had missed: being affectionately called ‘Starsk’—even when Hutch was just tolerating him.

They ate pizza—Hutch eventually consuming what remained of it—and drank their respective beer, finishing one each before Starsky politely retrieved and opened another one for Hutch, having decided that he himself had two too many that night. While they took turns listing their positives, Starsky realized he was caving, and he really wanted to keep a sober mind.

‘I learned a lot about the Federal Highways Administration,’ Hutch had written.

“Sounds boring,” Starsky whined.

“But it’s not.”

Hutch went on to explain, in fair detail, what he learned about the national highway system—including its history and future plans, sounding fascinated by it all—but Starsky barely heard a word. He was immersed in silent study, keenly watching Hutch’s mannerisms and his expressions, listening to the sound of his voice, feeling his immediate presence, and not believing, all over again, that they were actually there, in the same room, sharing the same moments—alone, together.

Hutch was dressed in a short-sleeve, partly unbuttoned sky blue shirt, and belted jeans. He wore his class ring, but no longer his new watch. His hair was shorter than the last time Starsky had seen him, and he seemed thinner—as if he barely ate that past year; maybe the most he’d eaten at one time was just then, that very night, because his year-long search was over and he could finally relax.

But Starsky was wrong about that last detail.

‘I ate a lot of homemade Italian food,’ Hutch wrote.

Probably cooked up by his friend, Simon, but Starsky didn’t ask. They were on a different mission.

‘I bought a new truck.’

“A nice one, too, Starsk.”

“I think so.”

‘I didn’t get married.’

Starsky laughed, but only sadly.

‘I saw where Kennedy was shot,’ Starsky wrote. “But I’m not sure that’s a positive,” he said upon reflection. “Well, I guess the positive is I visited a significant moment in U.S. history and it piqued my interest to learn more.”

“That counts,” Hutch insisted. “Learning new things is positive.” ‘I learned all about national bus, train, and airline schedules.’

Starsky repressed a chuckle; he didn’t want to laugh at Hutch’s dogged experience, but that one seemed rather sad, too. He couldn’t believe they were actually sitting there together, in Starsky’s new house, engaging in such an exercise, reliving a hurtful separation, but now finding the bright side underneath that pain.

Starsky was at least proud of his personal accomplishments. ‘I camped in the wilderness a few times—and lived to tell the tale.’

“No Satanic cults?”

“No. But definitely some weirdos.”

“No bears?”

“None.”

‘I made a friend in Simon.’

‘I got you beat. Three new friends. Kayla. Scott. Mr. Mackey.’

“You’ve always been the more personable one between us,” Hutch said with a wink. He went on to write, ‘Attended a Broadway play in New York City.’

‘Same.’

‘Got hired part-time by the FBI.’

‘Got called by the FBI.’

Hutch laughed. “How’s that a positive, Starsk?”

Starsky scratched out the line and reworded it.

‘Didn’t get arrested by the FBI.’

They both chuckled over that one.

“Not yet anyway,” Hutch teased him.

The sound of Hutch’s light laugh, his voice, and all the words he wasn’t saying played on Starsky’s sentiments. He’d really missed the man—even more than he already knew he did.

‘Went to a massive gay parade in D.C.’ Hutch wrote next.

Starsky stalled on that note, tripping over the serendipity. “I can’t believe this,” he slowly said, writing in his own column, ‘I was there, too.’

Hutch quickly looked at him. They held each other’s eyes; no words necessary. Crossed paths again. “I’d have given anything to have spent that day with you,” Hutch said, sounding emotional.

“Same,” Starsky confessed, fighting his own feelings. “I went to a bar afterward … not too far from the Memorial … tried to call you … chickened out and hung up when I got the answering machine. Little did I know you were in D.C. at the time—at the parade, no less.”

“Me, too: at a bar afterward,” Hutch noted. “A bar near the Memorial and maybe close to where you were when you made that call, I’m guessing.”

“I know this is a list of positives,” Starsky sadly said, feeling a bit defeated, “but I’m only seeing the negatives—all the times we missed each other.”

“But the odds were eventually in our favor, Starsk.”

“Okay. That’s a positive.”

They continued.

‘Learned all about area codes,” Hutch listed.

‘Learned—no matter how hard you try—you can’t outsmart the FBI.’

Hutch’s laugh was in earnest that time; he sounded relaxed—and that made Starsky breathe deeply and slowly exhale. Maybe things would be okay, for then at least.

‘Found out, the hard way,’ Hutch wrote, ‘that I really would go to the ends of the world for you.’

Starsky read those words and paused. Then he looked at Hutch, deeply into his eyes. There was a time when they said so much to each other without a sound between them. Was Hutch waiting on him? Starsky couldn’t help but notice how beautiful Hutch was—still, always. Those blue eyes, that perfect face, his muscle and his maleness, his determination. They’d been such a formidable team.

But how was Starsky to trust Hutch again? What if there were to be another ‘special situation’ in which Hutch chose something or someone else over his partner? In that same instant, Starsky also realized he’d broken Hutch’s heart, too—by leaving him, especially the way he did. Hutch was right; they’d both suffered a loss—and the point of the ‘positives’ exercise was to find some redeeming value to the year-long pain they’d experienced, alone, together.

Hutch was removing Starsky’s remaining obstacle to rekindling their friendship.

“Top that?” Hutch playfully asked, breaking the silence between them. He would go to the ends of the world to find Starsky; he’d proven it—by sitting there, in Starsky’s house, at the table with him, sharing food and drink, and exchanging the pieces of their lives that they’d experienced in the absence of the other.

Having run out of space on the paper, Starsky turned it over, drew a line down its center, listed their names at the top of each column, and then wrote his next positive. While he was writing, and despite his focus, he listened to Hutch beside him, eating, breathing, moving. They were subtle but comforting sounds; familiar, like old times. Hutch was present: the man Starsky had trusted the most, respected the most, wanted and needed more than anything and anyone else—ever. No dream, this.

“A novel isn’t required, Starsky,” Hutch reminded him when Starsky spent more time than usual writing his latest positive. “Save it for your memoirs.”

“Patience is a virtue,” Starsky retaliated.

“But I’m a heathen.”

Starsky laughed and finally set down his pen.

Hutch followed the last of his pizza with some beer, and then turned the paper toward himself to better read Starsky’s lengthier note. When he finished, he seemed choked up, didn’t look at Starsky, stared at the words, was obviously no longer reading them, and was speechless.

Starsky had written:

‘I learned that you can stand on the edge of the Grand Canyon and get dropped to your knees by its sheer size and unbelievable beauty—and still know it could be better had you been seeing it with the person you loved the most in all the world.’

“I didn’t mean to make you all sentimental,” Starsky truthfully said when Hutch wouldn’t look at him. But he couldn’t hide from his own truth, either. He could no longer deny his heart, try as he might. He reached over and gently combed Hutch’s blond hair with his fingers, enjoying its feel, the touch, Hutch’s familiar warmth.

“I’ve missed you so much,” Starsky confessed, clasping the back of Hutch’s neck and tugging him into making eye contact.

Hutch had been right when he said, “You were the one with the power to turn it all around.”

Starsky still had that power—and he was finally willing to use it.

* * *

Hutch ate the last of his pizza, followed it with the rest of his beer, and then read Starsky’s latest ‘positive’ item.

‘I learned that you can stand on the edge of the Grand Canyon and get dropped to your knees by its sheer size and unbelievable beauty—and know it could still be better had you been seeing it with the person you loved the most in all the world.’

Tears pooled in Hutch’s eyes and momentarily blurred his vision. He couldn’t look at Starsky; he’d been both humbled and ashamed—for depriving Starsky of a moment such as that one, and because Starsky had just compared his love for Hutch to the enormity of the Grand Canyon—and then some.

“I didn’t mean to make you all sentimental,” Starsky said, sounding genuinely sorry, but he seemed to fall for his own sentiment at the same time. “I’ve missed you so much.”

Hutch’s emotions intensified when he felt Starsky’s fingers affectionately comb through his hair. When Starsky clasped the back of his neck and gently tugged, Hutch looked over at him. They locked eyes, his own filled with unrepressed tears—and Starsky seeming to unexpectedly empathize with him. “I’m sorry,” Hutch managed to say. He’d been sorry every day for just shy of a year.

“I’m sorry, too,” Starsky quietly said. “You didn’t break us up all on your own.”

“But I’m the one—”

“Hey, c’mon,” Starsky interrupted him, lightly stroking Hutch’s cheek before dropping his hand. “Let’s be done with this shit, hm?”

“I’ll never forgive myself—”

“But you have to, don’t you see? I know more today than I knew then, and I honestly can’t believe how stupid and short-sighted I was. We’ve already decided that we are both guilty.”

“One of us more than the other.”

“I’m saying, we’re cheating ourselves if we let this drag on.”

Hutch acquiesced; he desperately wanted to. “I guess we’ve done enough living in the past to last a lifetime.”

“Right? And it’s more than us just wanting to be together. We belong to each other. That was my point from the beginning, a year ago, I mean—and it still holds true.”

“The very thing I was afraid of, Starsk—when we crossed that line into sex—was that we couldn’t withstand that kind of togetherness. If we hadn’t been romantic, you could’ve easily accepted her in my life, even if you thought it was a bad idea. But every relationship we’ve had like that always ended for one reason or another. And ours did, too.”

“Ours isn’t over. You made sure of that.”

Hutch quietly laughed as he wiped another tear from his eye. Starsky was right: Hutch had made sure of it; he’d spent a year hunting for Starsky, and would have kept looking had he not found him when he did. Maybe their relationship would be the exception to the rule. “I’ll do whatever I have to do to keep from losing you,” Hutch swore. “I’ll never make that mistake again.”

“I won’t be so easily put off,” Starsky promised in kind. “If I have to punch you in the face, I’ll do that, too. But what are you saying, Hutch? You would want us to go back to being friends and partners and leave the best sex of our lives behind?”

Hutch softly snorted. “You know that wouldn’t be possible. It wouldn’t be for me, anyway.”

“I’m glad to hear you say that,” Starsky replied with a gentle smile. He leaned across that corner of the table, and pulled Hutch back into his life purely with the wanting look in his eyes.

After nearly a year of separation, of disappointment and loss, of loneliness and pining, of desperation and despair, their lips finally touched. The kiss was unexpectedly sensual and long-lasting, filled with familiarity and desire, and brought on by something deeper in them both; a mutual and necessary forgiveness. Hutch could feel his own surrender, not just the increasing warmth that radiated from his forever partner.

The sound and the smell of Starsky, the feel of his mouth and his skin, his deep breathing and soft moan, his closed eyes as he immersed himself in the kiss, the faint hint of his cologne, that and more, and Hutch knew he’d finally come home. The hunt was officially over.

It was Starsky who eventually broke from the kiss. He sat back in his chair, licked his lips, visibly exhaled, and kindly smiled at Hutch—as if to say he understood the meaning in their touch as much as Hutch did. “I have to turn off the patio lights,” Starsky said, explaining why he’d broken them apart—and wiping a visible tear from his eye.

“Look at us tough guys,” Hutch said, sadly laughing at them as he dried his own eyes with the palms of his hands. “A couple of crying babies.” He didn’t really believe it. A great love like theirs, on the verge of being rekindled, was no small thing. “When I found you this afternoon, I really didn’t expect anything more than to lay eyes on you. To get to talk to you was a gift I didn’t deserve. But this … this isn’t anything I ever thought I’d do with you again.”

“I can say what you just said, 100%—except the part about me being a baby.”

Hutch lightly laughed; Starsky’s playfulness was his demonstrative forgiveness; that, and the kiss, and then Starsky squeezing Hutch’s arm as he rose from the table and turned on his heel.

Hutch watched him walk away, noticing his overall build, the sexy shape of his buttocks, the strength in his legs, how tanned and muscled he was, more than Hutch had ever seen him before, but not without that familiar, hip-first strut of his. Some things would never change—that walk, for one. His love for the man, another.

After Starsky disappeared from view, Hutch took their plates and the two empty beer bottles to the sink. A certain kind of longed-for closeness was within reach, and he was anxious to experience it.

Though he was unfamiliar with the house layout, he easily found his way into the master bedroom—where he stripped out of his clothes. He could hear Starsky in the other room—sounding as if he was locking doors, turning off lights, and doing whatever else was part of his nightly ritual.

While the water in the shower heated up, Hutch found an unwrapped toothbrush in a lower bathroom drawer; he took it, with a spot of toothpaste, into the shower with him, feeling hopeful for the first time in months. ‘To lay eyes on Starsky’ was all he truly allowed himself to want; that he was about to lie intimately in the man’s arms was well beyond belief. Only hours earlier, he didn’t even know where Starsky was.

Starsky came into the bathroom while Hutch was showering and used the time to brush his teeth. He didn’t say anything while he was in the room, and he didn’t stay long, either. Hutch quickly washed, despite wanting to relax under the hot water to soothe his tired mind and aching muscles. Until that moment, he hadn’t realized how tense he’d been.

He also didn’t have any clean clothes to change into, and he hadn’t slept in pajamas or shorts since he was in high school, so he towel-dried himself, patted some of Starsky’s cologne on his neck and chest, and went into the bedroom, completely undressed. A ceiling fan cooled his steaming skin.

Starsky was sitting up against the headboard on the far side of the mattress, his lower half covered in a sheet, his knees bent, and a clipboard and pencil on his lap. A lone lamp atop the nightstand on Starsky’s side of the bed shed the only light in the room. The man appeared relaxed, as if he were unwinding at the end of a long day by escaping into his upcoming tasks.

But was Hutch the only naked one in the room? As he stopped beside the bed, fully nude, he felt a bit embarrassed. He and Starsky once slept naked together, but a year had passed and maybe Starsky had gone back to his old ways.

Starsky sensed Hutch’s stall and looked up at him—then dropped his eyes to scan Hutch’s body, momentarily lingering on his phallus with no visible reaction. But when he went back to his sketching, pencil in hand, he nonchalantly said, “I’m happy to see you haven’t changed.”

Hutch crawled under the sheet and up against him. “I’m assuming you haven’t changed, either—but you are tanner,” he joked. He noticed the tan line on Starsky’s arms where his short-sleeve tee-shirt would have been worn, and around his neck to the shave line. But Starsky was still hairy chested, and his profile was perfect, and his eyelashes as thick as they’d ever been, and his voice just as masculine.

He also felt warm to the touch as Hutch pressed up against him, rested his head on Starsky’s shoulder, was aware of Starsky’s bare hip, discovering Starsky’s nudity, and set his eyes on the clipboard. “Greenhouse?” he guessed. Starsky had made coming to bed together for the first time in a year a very easy thing to do.

“Still trying to figure out if I should put the door on this end or that one,” Starsky explained, pointing to both sides of the blueprint. “Most of the neighbors that I’m hoping will use it live on my street.”

“So why not put a door at both ends?”

Starsky sighed, frustrated. “Dammit. Why didn’t I think of that?” He added a new doorway into his plan. “I’ve been racking my brain over this for days.”

If he knew how many things Hutch wished he’d thought of sooner, Starsky wouldn’t be so irritated with himself.

“Looks like a big one,” Hutch noted.

Starsky went on to explain why he’d designed such a large structure and where he’d place it in the yard, and again how he hoped the neighbors would fill it and the veggie beds with plants and keep them all maintained. He would simply be the builder and the provider—and reap the rewards of their farming efforts. “I like the putting-it-together part more than the figuring out what to plant and how and when to water it parts.”

“Take advantage of the customers,” Hutch quipped in agreement.

“Yeah, and I’ll also plant some fruit trees. Make some benches. A pathway. Maybe that little gazebo I talked about. Like I was saying earlier, turn this plot of land into a small community farm.”

“It’s an impressive project,” Hutch observed. He didn’t just mean Starsky’s donation to the neighborhood. “You’ve really taken this rural lifestyle to heart.”

“Yeah, but I don’t know if I’m staying here.”

Hutch’s heart sank. He felt a minor surge of panic. But before he could say anything, Starsky explained himself—not realizing he’d momentarily rattled Hutch the way he had.

“I’m in a rent-to-own situation. The homeowner lives in New York; the Hamptons. She inherited the house from her ex-husband and wanted it fixed up before she sells it, so she traded me free rent in exchange for home improvement work.”

“Oh.”

“But she said, given how much I’ve done to the place—‘above the call of duty’—she’ll offer me a ‘real deal’ next month when our ‘lease’ is up.”

“I see.”

“I like the place. A lot. But I’ve felt … you know … homeless—despite this nice house.”

“Because you’re just renting? I mean, how’s that any different from an apartment?”

“Because home is where the heart is.”

He turned his head and playfully winked at Hutch. Then he set the clipboard and pencil on the nightstand beside him, gently causing Hutch to let him go, and finally lay down on the mattress. “Fun fact, partner,” he said, facing Hutch as he pulled the sheet over his hip, “my heart is with you.”

Hutch shyly smiled at him as he too scooted down on the bed, hugged his pillow, and looked longingly into Starsky’s bedroom blue eyes. “I’ll go wherever you want to go,” Hutch told him, glancing at Starsky’s haired chest. He still couldn’t believe he was lying in bed with Starsky—and especially that Starsky had invited him to do so. “I’ll go wherever you tell me to go, too,” Hutch added with a light laugh. “Hell comes to mind.”

“You’ll have to get there on your own. But here on Earth, you can spend life with me in Heaven.” He smiled—that boyish, closed-lips Starsky smile.

Hutch’s heart melted. “It sure feels like Heaven tonight.”

Starsky lightly hit the tip of Hutch’s nose; his version of a playful shyness. “So what have you done to that California house, hm? Did you get it all set up and homey?”

“Not even without the heart.”

“What?”

“Home is where the heart is—and it was never home after you left.”

“So you didn’t do anything to it?”

“I haven’t even unpacked from the move out of Venice Place.”

“You’re not serious.”

“Oh, I unpacked some clothes and dishes, and the day-to-day stuff I needed to live on, but that’s about it.”

Starsky looked Hutch over as if he could find the truth hidden on him somewhere—but then didn’t because Hutch wasn’t lying to him. “I really fucked you up,” he decided, not proudly.

“Not as much as I fucked you up—enough to leave me.”

Neither Hutch nor Starsky began a dialogue about what either of them would do with the two houses between them—assuming they would even live together again. Too soon to know anything. Hutch could barely believe he was spending the night, let alone a lifetime.

A minute passed. Starsky tried a smile as his eyes slowly closed and then sleepily opened again. He was visibly exhausted.

Hutch didn’t want to sleep, either. He was afraid the entire afternoon, and especially the evening, would have been a dream. But Starsky was probably even more tired than Hutch; he’d spent the day working outside in the hot sun, and then made it through a very unexpected and emotionally exhausting reunion with Hutch.

“I told my mother about us,” Starsky said, briefly sealing his lips as if he may have done the wrong thing for Hutch.

“You told your mother about ‘us’ us?”

“Yeah. I told her about ‘us’ us.”

“And?”

“She surprised me.”

“Because she … accepted us?”

“As if it was the most natural thing in the world for her to do.”

Hutch was pleased to hear it; Starsky probably needed to talk to someone, and who better than his mother? They’d been close for a lifetime. He ran his fingers through Starsky’s curly dark hair. “Did you tell Nick?”

“I figured what he doesn’t know won’t hurt him. Besides, I had no need to tell him.” Starsky caught Hutch’s hand in his own and sweetly kissed the inside of his palm. “But I couldn’t lie to my mother.”

“Lying to one’s mother can get you to hell faster than a speeding bullet,” Hutch noted after Starsky let him go.

“For sure. She loves you, too, Hutch. She was heartbroken for us both.”

Hutch was sorry to hear that; he’d hurt more people than he’d realized. “I told Dobey about us,” he admitted—to slightly change the subject. Starsky’s eyes were a deep blue in the amber light of the table lamp, even though it was behind him. Hutch would never tire of looking at the man’s whiskering face.

“You told Dobey about ‘us’ us?”

“Yeah. I told Dobey about ‘us’ us.”

Starsky leaned back, appearing shocked. “And?”

“He surprised me.”

Starsky laughed with disbelief—such a familiar sound. “No shit?”

“Said he guessed as much after we gave him a tour of the house and he saw the one bed—and two toothbrushes in the cup on the master bathroom sink.”

Starsky laughed again, amused and a bit embarrassed. “I guess we weren’t at our best detecting.”

“I guess not. You’d expect by then we knew how to think like a criminal.”

“Even the stupid ones,” Starsky joked. “But he’s okay with it?”

“More than okay. He was helpful, too.”

Starsky seemed pleased. “I guess I underestimated him. Did you tell Huggy?”

“I did. You weren’t there to stop me.”

“How’d he take it?”

“In stride.”

“It doesn’t sound like he cared all that much, hm?”

“He probably suspected us all along.”

They looked at each other in silence for a minute. Starsky’s eyes closed again and then slowly reopened. “You’ll still be here in the morning, won’t you, Hutch?” It wasn’t a serious question, more playful in tone, too, telling Hutch he was ready to sleep.

“I’ll stay until morning so long as you don’t snore. Here’s hoping you’re still a silent sleeper.”

Starsky chuckled and finally closed his eyes. He clasped Hutch’s forearm. “Kiss me goodnight, Hutchinson.”

Hutch leaned forward and touched Starsky’s lips with his own, a soft, gentle, affectionate kiss, hearing them both inhale each other’s scented breath, hesitating for a moment to feel each other’s warm and sensual flesh; it was an unbelievably natural way to end their day.

But they desperately needed sleep, so Hutch pulled away. He rose to his elbow, reached across Starsky, felt the man’s face momentarily buried against his chest—a warm skin-to-warmer skin contact—and turned off the lamp. Then he rolled over, away from Starsky, taking Starsky’s arm with him to wrap the man around himself.

“I can’t believe we’re here,” Hutch said in a very soft voice, tenderly kissing Starsky’s fingers, feeling that urge to cry again. He still couldn’t grasp the reality that he was snug to Starsky’s nude body, Starsky’s flaccid penis and sac to Hutch’s buttocks, his belly and chest to Hutch’s back, one leg hooked over Hutch’s calves, his arm around Hutch, strong and protective—and Hutch feeling safe and wanted, knowing he was home—where their hearts belonged.

Starsky kissed Hutch’s shoulder and squeezed him closer. “Instead of taking blame for driving us apart,” he sleepily said, “you can take credit for bringing us back together—and better late than never. This is, without a doubt, Hutch, one of the happiest days of my life.”

* * *

Hutch woke just before dawn—when the arriving light had begun to ease the darkness. He opened his eyes to see Starsky beside him on the mattress, asleep. Starsky’s eyes were closed and his breathing was deep and slow; his arms folded to his chest, his hands tucked under his chin, as if he hoped to never leave dreamland.

It was the first time Hutch had a minute to truly bathe in the miracle of Starsky’s presence. There Starsky was: audibly inhaling, slowly … a breath that was followed by a pause in which he seemed not to move … and then the inevitable exhale, long and deep.

Hutch couldn’t see enough: the narrow shape of Starsky’s nose, his thinner lips, closed and relaxed, the birthmark beneath his right eye. Thick, black eyelashes. Dark brown, naturally wavy, but mussed hair, recently cut, falling over his forehead. Emerging black whiskers shadowed his cheeks, chin, around his mouth, under his nose. The dark hair on his tanned forearms, the muscled bicep. His perfect fingers, trimmed nails. The ever-so-slight pulse beneath the skin on his neck, his life blood.

Hutch was tempted to touch him, to feel Starsky’s warmth and aliveness at his fingertips, but he didn’t want to wake him. Theirs had been an exhausting and emotional journey, and Starsky should sleep for as long as he needed it.

Hutch never dreamed he’d be with Starsky in the same bed again, listening to Starsky’s precious sleep-driven breathing … and Hutch knowing—in his heart-of-hearts and in the deepest parts of his soul—that no one could replace Starsky, that life hadn’t been worth living without him, and that he didn’t want or need anything or anyone else for as long as he himself was alive. Hutch had gotten lucky.

Starsky opened his eyes. Their light-filled blue made contact with Hutch, not precipitously, not with alarm or startle, but as if Starsky had heard or felt or sensed Hutch’s sentimental emotions, and he was stirred out of slumber by them.

Hutch smiled at him—a shy, gentle smile, welcoming Starsky into the first day of the rest of their lives. “Good morning,” he said softly. The wordless reply was reminiscent of a different morning more than a year earlier.

Hutch rose to his elbow. He pushed the sheet to Starsky’s waist and leaned into him, effectively pushing Starsky onto his back. “Remember when you kissed me here?” He bent over Starsky, placed his lips against the middle of Starsky’s chest, and gently kissed his warm and haired skin.

Starsky giggled—maybe from the memory, maybe from the touch, maybe from both of those things. “I remember.”

“You didn’t kiss me here,” Hutch said, kissing Starsky’s lips, and indulging them both in such a way that Starsky couldn’t agree or disagree except maybe with an approving moan or a disgusted grunt. He did respond in kind, though. Their kiss was sensual and sexy, wet and soft, arousing and affectionate, each tasting the other’s mouth behind closed eyes.

“But you did kiss me,” Hutch added after he broke away from both the kissing and the wanting look in Starsky’s smiling eyes to kiss Starsky’s navel instead—and then the tip of his appreciatively already engorging penis, “… here.”

Starsky abruptly inhaled. “Oh,” he blurted, seeming to have not expected the touch, but probably anticipating it. “I …” He never finished his sentence.

Hutch kissed along the length of Star­sky’s hardening shaft, around its swelling head, up its tumescent sides, and back again, enjoying its manly scent and shape. With closed eyes, he could still see with his tongue and his fingers, and from Starsky’s heating firmness.

The pleasure he gave came naturally for Hutch, as if he’d never missed a moment. He listened to Starsky’s responding moans and their shared heavy breaths while he sucked and licked and kissed Starsky’s penis—as if making up for lost time; he didn’t love any­thing or anyone more—because he didn’t and because he couldn’t—and it came through in his touch.

Starsky loosely gripped Hutch’s hair. “That feels good, Hutch. I love you so much.”

Hutch momentarily lost his rhythm. He’d been emotionally moved, but didn’t want to interrupt his lover’s pleasure by responding—not with words, anyway. He pulled Starsky’s penis away from his haired belly, and used his saliva and Starsky’s pre-cum to fully enclose the rigid shaft in his hand to deliver what he knew would be very pleasing strokes—in tandem with his wet, viscous mouth.

“Oh, Hutch,” Starsky repeatedly whispered, breathing heavily, and tightening his grip on Hutch’s hair. “I’ve missed this so much.” With each inevitable upstroke, Hutch’s slick, warm hand and lips, and his licking tongue along his penis’s length, and Starsky yelped, a familiar sound interrupted purely by his sudden need to gulp another breath.

With titillating, unhurried practice, Hutch fell into what he believed was a perfectly delivered rhythm of sensations. He found it by listening to Starsky’s breaths, to his moans, to his few words, to Starsky’s taste and his hardness.

All of those cues told Hutch how deeply to take him, how long to hold him, how to pace him—and especially when to tantalize his fren­ulum, that ultra-sensitive smoothness at the base of his crown where it joined the underside of his shaft—and to do it over and over and over again. The sexiness of Starsky’s euphoria hardened Hutch in return.

Maybe it had been some time since Starsky had enjoyed the oral pleasure of sex; maybe it was simply because he was uniting with Hutch after a year’s painful absence and they were finally back to sexually engaging each other, picking up where they’d left off, and he was overly excited. Whatever it was, Starsky didn’t last as long as Hutch expected he could—nor as much as Hutch hoped he would. Hutch felt he’d barely begun to please his man—or so memory served.

But Starsky’s ejaculation came on suddenly. He tightly held Hutch’s head, preventing him from providing further strokes; his moans intensified as the crest overtook him. “Oh, Hutch, oh, I’m coming!” he cried out. “I’m coming!”

And come he did. Hutch felt the pulsating warmth of semen fill his mouth before he even realized Starsky had been overwhelmed. Starsky physically spasmed and whimpered with each wave of pleasure he experienced in that initial and then those final moments. Hutch couldn’t remember the volume of cum being as much as it was that morning; had he forgotten or had Starsky simply stored it up since the previous September? Starsky couldn’t possibly have deprived himself of sex all those many months.

Hutch didn’t have time to feel guilty; a wave of irrepressible sexual arousal and orgasmic titillation rose up in him and overtook all thought; he swallowed Starsky’s semen, spurred by its sexual context and its unique taste, and thought he might climax before he could even lay a hand on himself.

He let Starsky go, crawled up on him, lay against him, buried his face in Starsky’s neck, smelling his perspiration and cologne, while he thrust his own erection up and down Starsky’s muscled thigh.

Starsky was still breathing heavily when Hutch’s breath became plainly audible and his own moans filled the room with a new sound. Hutch couldn’t wait for anything else. It was enough to experience his self-induced ejaculation alongside his man, to finally be one with him again, to hear Starsky’s breath, smell his skin, know that he’d been welcomed all the way home.

Starsky’s hands caressed his back, arm, and thigh, adding new sensations and pleasures to Hutch’s already excited engagement. “Let me,” Starsky insisted, gripping one of Hutch’s bared buttocks, as if to compel him, but he never got the chance to handle Hutch’s penis.

Hutch crested and then spilled; creamy white semen erupted between them inside their snug position, and he immediately used the viscous deposit to heighten the intensity of his orgasm in those final thrusts of ecstasy against Starsky’s leg. He loudly moaned and he laughed and his heart noticeably pounded and he desperately sucked in air as if he might never breathe again.

After a few final pelvic squeezes to fully empty his sac, each soliciting a moan from the pleasure they gave him, he then slumped into Starsky, and inevitably calmed his breath. “I love you so much, too,” he said, kissing Starsky’s warm neck, licking his salty skin, and hearing Starsky’s tickled laugh in soft reply. Hutch couldn’t love him more. “Please don’t ever leave me again.”

Perhaps he wouldn’t be given such a gift as that one.

Hutch didn’t realize he’d fallen asleep so soon and so deeply after their lovemaking, still draped over Starsky, but somewhere in the time that followed, Starsky had slipped out from under him while he lay sleeping. Knocks at the front door had eventually awakened Hutch, but he was a guest in that house, and he was only minutes awake, so he didn’t answer it. He only noticed that Starsky was gone and no one seemed to have greeted the visitor. By the time Hutch could even think of it, that person had obviously left the premises.

After a while, the house seemed rather … empty.

“Starsky?” he called several times when he rushed off the bed and, stark naked, went through the house looking for him. Starsky was nowhere to be found. And he wasn’t anywhere in the yard as far as Hutch could tell from the windows. In the driveway, Starsky’s striped tomato and his new truck were parked side-by-side; keys to both were in the bowl on top of the foyer table.

But on the kitchen counter was a note on a small piece of yellow paper—in Starsky’s handwriting, reminiscent of that goodbye card he’d left for Hutch a year earlier, and hitting Hutch all over again with a moment of panic.

‘H,’ it read. ‘There’s half an omelette in the fridge for you. Make your own toast. I’ll be home in time for dinner. 5-6p. -S.’

So much for thinking Starsky was the one who needed sleep. The clock on the kitchen wall told Hutch it was nearing 10 a.m. Starsky had long ago gone to work.

It was also time Hutch stopped fearing the worst.

* * *

“Hutch!”

Even though Simon knew Hutch would be stopping over to have lunch with him—but also to pick up his suitcase—and despite having seen him just the day before when Hutch had returned to Simon’s house to get Starsky’s car because he believed he was about to find him, Simon was still that excited to see his friend. He grabbed Hutch in the doorway and tightly hugged him, repeatedly kissed the side of his face, and joyfully laughed. “I’m so goddamn happy for you!”

Hutch was just as thrilled to be greeted the way he was; Simon had helped him to locate Starsky, after all. Together they’d solved the ‘missing persons case.’

Having read Starsky’s note on the kitchen counter that mid-morning and, after realizing that Starsky had gone to work for the day, Hutch spied the touch-tone telephone on the wall near the refrigerator on his way out of the room to shower and dress. Curious as to whether the phone actually worked—in light of Starsky’s payphone calls to his mother—Hutch picked up the receiver and held it to his ear.

A dial tone told him it was a live line. He then punched in Simon’s office number and listened to it ringing. When Simon answered, Hutch better understood the lengths to which Starsky had gone to avoid being found; he wouldn’t even use the house phone to call his mother, preferring to drive miles elsewhere to make those calls. But Hutch bypassed the painful feelings those thoughts inspired in him mainly because he’d longed to make such a call.

“We found him!” Hutch excitedly told Simon the second he heard Simon’s voice on the line; Hutch hadn’t been able to call Starsky when he helped to catch a serial killer and say, ‘We got him!’ but he was finally able to make such a call to Simon to let Simon know the search for Starsky was over.

Simon laughed. “I figured you’d found him when you didn’t come back to the house last night. He was either going to kill you and bury the body somewhere, or you were going to surface sometime after a night of … wild … um … you know.”

“It’s called sex.”

“Yeah, I guess it is,” Simon said with a laugh.

“But we had a lot to talk about,” Hutch explained, “so the ‘wildness’ didn’t start until this morning.”

“Better late than never,” Simon chuckled. “Are you calling from a payphone?”

“He has a live line in the house—probably registered to the woman who owns the place.”

“Oh. But he apparently didn’t use it to call his mother. Is he there now?”

“He went to work.”

“Work?”

“He got a job in construction helping to build a housing development.”

“Whoa. I didn’t see that coming.”

“Left me a love letter, too: he’ll be home in time for dinner.”

Hutch silently re-read the note Starsky had overtly positioned on the kitchen counter, his mind tracking back more than once to the word ‘home.’

“You’re going to have to fill me in on everything,” Simon insisted. “I’m so happy for you, Hutch.” He then invited Hutch to have lunch at his house when he learned that Hutch planned to drive over that early afternoon for his clothes and toiletries. “I’m going to take the rest of the day off,” Simon said. “We have a lot to catch up on.”

First, Hutch showered and shaved, noticing that both a razor and a can of shaving cream had been left on the bathroom counter—as if Starsky had finally done likewise. Hutch then dressed in the bedroom, pulling on his jeans, but borrowing a pair of clean socks from Starsky’s dresser drawer rather than reuse his own. He decided to wear one of Starsky’s tee-shirts, too—something cooler than the button-down he’d worn the day before.

In the second drawer in the dresser, Hutch found Starsky’s blue TAKE A HIKE tee-shirt, the one he’d bought for himself a year ago when they were in Yosemite. But there was also a forest green tee-shirt in the drawer that read YOSEMITE. Starsky had given Hutch a similar tee-shirt. “This one seems more like you,” he’d said, holding it up to Hutch in the souvenir shop so they could see how the graphic of Half Dome lay across Hutch’s chest.

Had Starsky visited Yosemite on his way out of Los Angeles that fateful Sunday before heading south again to the Grand Canyon, and bought an identical YOSEMITE tee-shirt in that same gift shop? Or had Starsky taken Hutch’s shirt when he returned to Venice Place that terrible day to pick up his personal belongings while he knew Hutch was at the house with Abby waiting for him to join them?

If Starsky did take Hutch’s shirt, did he do it by accident or on purpose? If it were on purpose, why would he take it? because he’d paid for it and he didn’t want Hutch to have anything he’d bought for him? Was he that petty?

Hutch didn’t think so. The only other explanations—if Starsky had knowingly taken the shirt—was that he couldn’t remember he’d given Hutch the shirt, or he wanted to own something that personally belonged to Hutch, a memento of their time in the grass at Cook’s Meadow. Hutch also remembered that Starsky had left his bulky cardigan on Hutch’s bed that day. Did he leave that sweater for the same reason? to give Hutch a personal keepsake in return?

Hutch didn’t know what to believe, but he chose to wear the YOSEMITE shirt rather than a plain tee-shirt. After he pulled it over his head and finished dressing, an impulse struck him—and he went to Starsky’s closet, opened both accordion doors at once, and quietly gasped. Sure enough, as he had only then suspected, right there in plain sight to the left of Starsky‘s clothes was Hutch’s letterman jacket.

The discovery took his breath away.

Hutch no longer wondered. Starsky had taken those items for his personal possessions—to remember the experiences and times he and Hutch had been partners, friends, and lovers. For the same reason, Hutch hadn’t sold the Striped Tomato.

Now he followed Simon into his kitchen where Simon had already begun preparing their lunch. He was excited about giving Simon a blow-by-blow of the previous late afternoon and evening, especially because he knew how much Simon wanted to hear it.

“That’s a lot of food you’re making for lunch,” Hutch noted as he leaned against the counter near the stove and watched Simon cover a pan of freshly made lasagna in tin foil. “I don’t think I can eat more than the eggplant Parmesan sandwich you’ve already put on the plate.”

Simon lightly laughed. “The sandwiches are leftover from last night that we’ll have for lunch. The lasagna is something for you to take back. Just bake it about 45 minutes. You don’t even have to tell him I made it.” He put the covered pan into a paper bag he’d previously set on the counter. “There’s garlic bread in there, too. Broil it for a few minutes. A fresh salad—but you’ll have to provide your own dressing. And a couple of cannolis I bought at the Italian deli on my way home today.”

Hutch pushed off the counter and took Simon into his arms. “You’re a good soul,” he said, tightly squeezing him in a warm embrace, inhaling his cologne and his warmth. “I don’t know how I’ll ever be able to repay you—for everything.”

“Just be happy,” Simon insisted after Hutch finally released him and he could finish packing Hutch’s take home bag. “Let’s eat now so you’ll be hungry later. We’ll have a sandwich and a little wine. Sound good?”

“Sounds delicious,” Hutch agreed, helping Simon carry their plates to the table. The food smelled enticing—as usual—and was warm; homemade marinara sauce and melted cheese oozed from the sides of the roasted eggplant and caramelized onion sandwiches. Simon poured the wine.

After they settled at the table, Simon also toasted him. “To love,” he said with a smile. “You boys are such an inspiration to me.”

They touched glasses and then drank.

“I really can’t thank you enough,” Hutch said, genuinely at a loss for words. “I couldn’t have found him without you.”

“You would have. I just helped you find him sooner.”

“Sooner meant everything to me.”

Simon had done so much for him: invited him into his home, made him part of his family, respected his work, wined and dined him, helped him find Starsky. How could Hutch ever return such a favor as that one?

“Just don’t be a stranger,” Simon implored him. “I know you’re off on a new life of sorts. I know he’s your Number One. But before you tell me all about how the reunion went down, promise me you’ll find time now-and-then to hang out with your old pal.”

“A promise I know I can keep,” Hutch replied, certain of it. “Maybe we’ll meet on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial every July 4 and watch the fireworks just to catch up—and if Starsky decides to stay around here, then you and I will see each other a lot more often, too. I’ll need the escape. I can only take so much of that guy,” he joked.

“You have to bring him around soon. I really want to meet the man who stole your heart and made you search an entire nation to find him.”

“Right now, honestly, I don’t know what’s what or where or how. Everything is still in his court—where we live, what we do, how we get on with it. But he’ll want to meet you, too, especially after he learns why you mean so much to me.”

Simon patted Hutch’s hand with affection and gratitude. “If I’m lucky, I can talk you guys into working for the FBI. I’ll see you all the time then.”

“Starsky and me … FBI partners? or you and—”

“You guys can’t be anything but partners. Special agents for the FBI. I can probably make a good case to my superiors to bring you both on board together. Say you’ll at least consider it.”

Hutch felt choked up all over again as he looked deeply into Simon’s brown eyes. “Your generosity never ceases to amaze me.”

“What can I say, Hutch, hm? I’m Italian. I’m romantic to the core.”

* * *

“Your friend is still here?”

Starsky was about to exit Scott’s truck when Scott noticed the Ford Torino in Starsky’s driveway and was naturally curious.

“I think so,” Starsky impulsively replied, remaining seated.

“I mean, his car is still here,” Scott said. He was dropping Starsky at his house that early Friday evening. “Nice wheels, too.”

“Yeah … um … about that … it’s actually my car.”

Scott looked over at him, surprised.

“He drove it out for me from Los Angeles,” Starsky explained. He thought about exiting Scott’s truck without another word about his new situation, but something nagged at him. Maybe it was his conscience or maybe it was just time to put the past—and all of its bumps in the road—behind him. “He and I were police partners,” he proudly said, “undercover detectives for the LAPD.”

“Seriously?”

“Ten years. But we had a … major … disagreement about something, and I dumped just about everything I owned on the spur of the moment and came out here.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Scott said. He’d left his engine running, but seemed to settle in his seat as if he expected—or even hoped—to learn more. “So policing is what you did before you took up using power tools?”

Starsky looked Scott in the eye, not knowing what the truth would do to their lives or their friendship, but he couldn’t not be honest with him. “I’ve always been a bit of a handyman. I enjoy putting things together. It’s kind of like detective work,” he added with a playful laugh. “Solving cases is sort of like ‘putting things together,’ know what I mean?”

“I can see that. And it explains a lot about you, too.”

“How do you figure?”

“You’ve always struck me as too smart to be just another guy hammering nails all his life.”

“You’re smart.”

“Not like you are. You’re quick on the draw, no pun intended. You have an eye for things the rest of us don’t. I’m seeing you now—and in a good way. So … apparently you guys buried the hatchet?”

“We decided we were both stupid. Ten years on the job softened our brains.”

“What kinds of cases?”

“Violent crime.”

“Like murders and rapes and that?”

“Yeah, like those things—and child abuse and drug deals, and sometimes guard duty and missing persons, but mostly violent crime cases.”

Scott whistled. “That would rattle anyone after a while. Is he still a police officer or did he quit and take up some other ‘sport,’ too?”

Starsky lightly laughed. He knew Scott well enough to know his boss was impressed by him, but also curious, and not wanting to pry too much, either, so he delicately asked questions.

“Hutch is now working part-time for the FBI,” Starsky said. He couldn’t believe himself what he just said. Hutch was working for the FBI! Together, he and Scott paused to reflect on that significant tidbit. But there was more to the story.

“I knew he’d try to find me after I left, so I did my best to leave L.A. without a trace. Turns out he’s a better detective than I am—because here he is, a year later, in my driveway.”

“So he just showed up?”

“Like I said … a good detective.”

Starsky knew Hutch had the help of the FBI, but he was now certain Hutch would have eventually found him; Hutch helped to catch an interstate serial killer after all. Starsky also remembered his mother telling him that Hutch had actually been the one to solve that case.

“So what now?” Scott wondered. “Are you going to stick around and keep your day job or go work for the FBI?”

“I really don’t know, Boss. But right now I think I’m just going to hear him out. It’s really too soon to tell.”

“You miss the old work,” Scott assumed.

“Sometimes.”

“Maybe more than you realize?”

“Maybe so.”

Scott may not have been as sharp as a decorated undercover detective, but he had wisdom Starsky didn’t have.

“There’s one thing I have to tell you,” Starsky said as he readied to leave the truck; partly he didn’t want to keep Scott from going home to his family, but mostly he wanted to get into the house and be with Hutch. “My name isn’t Dane Skyler. It’s David Starsky.”

Scott leaned back, looked Starsky over as if searching for a reason Starsky had lied to him about his name, but didn’t ask. He probably expected Starsky would tell him anyway.

“I used an alias to keep one step ahead of Hutch. I figured he’d stop looking for me after a year’s time and I could go back to living under my real name. But I was wrong about his determination.”

“That’s a lot to take in,” Scott admitted with a disbelieving sigh. “I’m … speechless.”

“Everything I’ve told you is true except my name. I wasn’t thinking too far down the road when I got here. I didn’t expect to make friends in the neighborhood. I didn’t need the job, but I wanted it. Something else to do besides fix up this house. So it all got ahead of me. I’m sorry about that.”

“I believe you,” Scott promised. “Like I said, you seem more the undercover cop type than you do a carpenter,” he sadly laughed, “but you’re good at that, too. So is your alias the reason your application was denied when you went in for a contractor’s license?”

“I did give them a fake name and a bogus social security number.”

“To keep me happy by trying to get a license.”

“I didn’t want you to be suspicious of me.”

“You’d have passed if you’d only been up front on that score,” Scott also assumed.

“I think so.”

“Going undercover is in your blood.”

“When you put it like that.”

“Well, maybe you’ll decide to try again. I’m going to hope so. I’d hate to lose you.”

“You’ve been good to me,” Starsky told him. “I won’t leave you hanging on this job; that much I know.”

When Starsky finally opened the door and got out of the truck, he turned back to Scott, and asked, “See you on Monday?” He wouldn’t abandon Scott, especially when they were so close to finishing the housing job—but he didn’t want to be fired, either. His ego couldn’t withstand it.

“You can’t get paid if you don’t do the work,” Scott reminded him with a wink and a soft smile. “I’ll see you on Monday … Starsky.”

* * *

“I see you’ve gone through my dresser,” Starsky said with a hint of sarcasm when he entered the kitchen that evening. He’d obviously noticed right away that Hutch was wearing his own YOSEMITE tee-shirt. Despite Starsky’s playful annoyance, he quite seriously grabbed Hutch in his arms, held him close, kissed his face, and moaned with pleasure.

“I’ve been through your closet, too,” Hutch quietly replied. He squeezed Starsky even closer, inhaling a scent of sweat commingled with his earlier cologne; the aroma was primal and aroused him. When the hug ended, he held Starsky at arm’s length, looked deeply into his blue eyes, noticed he had indeed shaved that morning—though still looked scruffy—and added, “But it’s still too warm to wear my jacket.”

Starsky’s expression immediately sobered when he realized Hutch had discovered the letterman’s abduction, but he seemed to play down his visible embarrassment by justifying his action. “I didn’t think the clotheshorse would miss it.”

“I didn’t know it was gone,” Hutch confessed, letting Starsky go, but he knew they both appreciated Starsky’s sentimental reasons for hijacking Hutch’s clothes. He straightened and faced Starsky. “On the plus side, I have a few more clothes here than I knew I did. Maybe I’ll stay through the fall so I can wear them all,” he joked.

Starsky smirked at him. “Those are the only two things I took, I swear. Don’t flatter yourself too much.”

Oh, but there was more. Hutch had returned from Simon’s house that mid-afternoon with his and Starsky’s dinner in a large paper bag, but also with his suitcase of clothes and personal care items. He placed the entire food bag in the refrigerator until closer to dinner time, and then carried his small suitcase to the bedroom where he laid it on the bed to unpack it.

After storing his smaller toiletries in the master bathroom medicine cabinet, he organized the larger ones in the second drawer down, dropped his toothbrush into the cup, and placed his bottle of cologne on the counter, but otherwise did his best to keep his things out of Starsky’s way.

Hutch still wasn’t sure whether Starsky expected they would live together or if he should take the guest bathroom as his own while he was there. They’d obviously returned to their relationship, but they had yet to discuss a living arrangement.

Hutch then took his small bundle of clothes to the dresser and was surprised to find the drawers crammed with Starsky’s tee-shirts, jeans, shorts, and sweaters. The man had apparently bought more clothes since he’d left Los Angeles.

But there was room in the bottom drawer—enough for Hutch’s tee-shirts and jeans—assuming that he could find a new home for a shoebox of papers stored in it. He’d brought several button-down shirts still on hangers from Simon‘s house, but never expected to be clothed for fall and winter until after he’d made another trip to California. And he hadn’t wanted to move into Simon’s house, despite the invitation, because he didn’t know where he’d be in the long run. Only then did he realize how much of a nomad he’d become.

And he really didn’t intend to see the contents of that shoebox, either. But when he set it on the bed to first fold his clothes into the dresser before finding a place for the box, the box tipped and the lid accidentally opened; a few of its items fell onto the mattress: an assortment of postcards.

One card was a picture of the Grand Canyon at sunset. Another, a historic desert hotel. A third was on its face—and Hutch couldn’t help but notice that the back of the postcard had been filled out in Starsky’s handwriting, both in the message space and also in the address area.

The recipient of the postcard was ‘Mr. Ken Hutchinson’—and underneath his name was their new house address.

A quick look-through the remaining postcards and Hutch discovered that they’d all been addressed to him. The messages were basically the same: “Hey, Buddy. I spent a couple of hours here today. Learned a lot and I thought I already knew everything. It’s not the same without you, though.” “Hey, Champ. I didn’t think I’d ever see this place, not in a million years, but here I am. We should have traveled more together. I miss the arguments about what I know and what you think you know. ‘Moose elk’ do exist!” “Hey, Blondie. You heard the old saying, but it turns out it’s true: ‘Wish you were here.’” All were signed, “Love” or “Missing you,” and ‘Starsk’ or sometimes just, ‘Me.’

More than his letterman jacket, the box of postcards broke Hutch. Starsky never wanted to leave him. That’s why he’d taken a few of Hutch’s clothes; it’s why Starsky had selected, paid for, and written never-mailed postcards to Hutch. Starsky didn’t want to go; he’d been run out of town, pining for Hutch with every mile he drove in the opposite direction, missing and needing him—but unable to bring himself to let Hutch know it. In his own way, Starsky had taken Hutch with him.

“Oh, Starsk,” Hutch whispered. His own heart was heavy. He never meant to hurt Starsky. That was the last thing he could ever do and only then by pure accident. How could he have been so blind to his actions and how Starsky was feeling? In light of Starsky’s forgiveness and a box of un-mailed postcards, Hutch never felt as loved as he did in that moment—and never more undeserving.

Later in the kitchen, after Starsky had returned from a long day’s work, tightly hugged his man hello, and learned that Hutch had found the YOSEMITE tee-shirt and the letterman jacket, Hutch didn’t have the heart to tell him he’d also found the box of postcards. Starsky had been revealed enough for one day.

“What’s for dinner?” Starsky asked, eagerly eyeing the colorful salad in a large bowl on the counter. “I mean, besides all the green stuff.”

Hutch rolled his eyes. “You’ll be happy to know the main entree is lasagna with a homemade marinara sauce. Add to that garlic Italian bread, steamed asparagus in a balsamic glaze, vintage Cabernet, and fresh-baked cannolis for dessert.”

“Let’s have those first,” Starsky suggested. He stole a tomato wedge from the salad, quickly ate it, licked his fingers afterward, kissed Hutch on the cheek, and turned to leave the kitchen. “I have to get the stink off me,” he explained, “but I’ll be as good as new in time to eat.”

Hutch didn’t give him that time. After Starsky left the room, Hutch put the salad into the refrigerator, slid the covered lasagna pan into the oven, set the stove timer for 40 minutes, and was only a minute behind Starsky into the bathroom.

Starsky was already in the shower, the water was steaming hot, and Hutch was eager to get his hands on the wet naked man behind its glass doors.

“We have about half an hour,” he told Starsky as he entered the stall after having stripped out of his clothes on his way through the bedroom. He no sooner closed the shower door than Starsky grabbed Hutch’s face with wet hands and pulled him into a passionate kiss.

* * *

“I’ve been waiting for this all goddamn day,” Starsky whispered between fervent kisses all over Hutch’s face—his eyes, cheeks, lips, nose. He reveled in Hutch’s giggles, too—proof that Hutch felt welcomed and loved and that he was a spontaneously willing partner, again.

They soaped each other up—from the tops of their heads to the bottoms of their feet, and every inch in between, front and back, mostly laughing as they did so, stealing kisses and caresses along the way, with playful tickles and teasing strokes of sexual affection, all while making eager and knowing eye contact.

After rinsing, Starsky pulled Hutch by his arm and turned him toward the wall under the shower head, nudged him into bending over beneath the water stream—just enough—and got behind him. In a reach-around, he fondled Hutch’s penis, mostly flaccid at first, as if Hutch had been emotionally enjoying the play between them more than he was aroused by it.

Starsky watched trickles of hot water roll of Hutch’s bared back, over his hips and buttocks. He pressed into Hutch and gently pumped his lover’s enlarging penis in slow, but firm and slippery strokes. His own penis had quickly stiffened. It had been a year since he’d experienced intercourse, and he was both anxious and excited to get on with it.

“Careful,” Hutch reminded him, dampening Starsky’s exuberance with a single word. “It’s been a while and feels like the first time.”

“Except this time we know it fits,” Starsky quipped.

Hutch laughed as if he didn’t want to find it funny, but couldn’t help himself.

Starsky was actually glad to hear it had been ‘a while’ for Hutch, though he didn’t know how long that ‘while’ had been. Those details were irrelevant—at least for the moment. He didn’t want to think about Hutch’s sex life without him; he was fast becoming eager to feel his own flesh inside Hutch—and jealousy be damned.

With the help of a healthy squeeze from the bottle of hair conditioner he’d grabbed off the shower shelf, and smearing it over Hutch’s backside, Starsky slid the entire length of his penis slowly into the crevice of Hutch’s buttocks, enjoying the slippery slide of his heated skin against his partner’s warmth and the titillating sensation it gave him. He then pushed into the indentation on the return slide and found the opening he sought with its tip.

The tight ring barely allowed his crown to make itself known—despite the lubrication—and he was afraid to apply further pressure when he met its resistance. He squeezed and pumped Hutch’s hardening penis, heard his responsive moan of pleasure, and tried the entry again—that time with a certain degree of reassurance.

“Are you okay?” he still had to ask, less than half way inside. “I’m not hurting you, am I?” The last thing he wanted was to cause Hutch any pain, especially because all he himself could feel was pleasure.

“It’s good,” Hutch promised. He’d braced against the tile wall, seemed prepared to withstand the full brunt of Starsky’s enjoyment, and not just by his firm stance, legs slightly apart, but in his apparent arousal and want, too. Their labored breathing and their soft moans and Hutch’s erection were all the proof Starsky needed to proceed.

He covered Hutch’s glistening shoulders and back of his neck with wet, stimulating kisses, and continued to reach around him, to stroke Hutch’s wet, warm shaft as he slowly pushed in further, discovering a much more accommodating entry. Starsky heeded Hutch’s earlier advice and made it a slow penetration—carefully driving all the way in until the fronts of his thighs met the backs of Hutch’s legs; he was eventually swallowed up inside the man and could go no further.

“That feels good, Hutch,” he whispered in Hutch’s ear, enjoying their warmth and the excitement between them. He especially loved the feel and the look of his entire penis buried deep inside his lover, engorged and throbbing with sexual want—and Hutch being so receptive of him. “You still okay?”

“Your dick feels good, Starsk,” Hutch insisted. He hung his head; maybe he watched Starsky stroke his penis; maybe he closed his eyes and simply concentrated on the physical sensations of those strokes—the ones on his shaft, its head, his sensitive scrotum, and the long stroke inside him. Whatever was in his sight or even just in his mind’s eye, Hutch moaned with encouraging approval as his erection noticeably swelled.

Starsky hadn’t forgotten Hutch’s above-average size, but he was again amazed by it. He fondled its full head on an upstroke, squeezing and caressing its meaty firmness, and wished he could suck on it, too; there was nothing more intimate to him than the feel of Hutch’s sexy hot flesh in his mouth and knowing his man was basking in absolute bliss. Those desires ratcheted Starsky’s desire higher.

The bathroom became filled with steam and his breathless, audible kisses—over Hutch’s back, his shoulders, his wet hair—coupled with the sound of endless running water; low-level grunts, occasional giggles, and quiet laughter added into the mix. Both men were enjoying themselves and each other.

“I’ve missed us so much,” Starsky managed to say. He couldn’t believe they were together again. He was mesmerized and privileged. But he also felt something else: grief. Shame. Sorrow and disbelief. How had it been earthly possible for him to have walked out on Hutch, forever lost him in one moment, to making love with him again in the next—and all in the same lifetime?

Hutch reached back and caressed Starsky’s leg, breaking into his thoughts and taking his attention elsewhere. “Hey, stud,” Hutch said in a soft voice beneath the sound of splashing water, “are you okay?” His turn to ask.

Starsky realized he’d stalled, that he’d been distracted by his regrets and his stupidity. He blinked away the water from his eyes—and maybe a few sentimental tears as well.

“Don’t leave me hanging,” Hutch teased him. “C’mon, boy, pick up the pace.”

Starsky obliged. He didn’t want to let Hutch down. After a series of longer strokes, that inevitable powerful urge to climax finally began to overtake him. He couldn’t concentrate on two things at once. He had no choice but to let go of pleasuring Hutch and take care of himself instead. So he leaned back, gripped Hutch’s hips with both hands, focused primarily on building his own pleasure—and tantalized himself with visuals of his own rigid cock repeatedly disappearing inside his partner, each thrust more pleasurable than the one before it.

He closed his eyes at times to enjoy the exquisiteness of every physical sensation, surrendering to thoughtless-ness, listening only to the rhythmic slaps of his wet skin against Hutch’s slick warmth, a stimulating sound and feel that increased in speed and intensified his pleasure as he deeply thrust into Hutch. Starsky was soon driven purely by want and the need for impending satisfaction. And all he could manage to tell Hutch, on those few times he found clarity of mind and the strength to speak, was how much he loved him.

“I feel so good, Hutch,” he whispered as he accelerated the pace of his penetrating strokes. “I love you so much.” Not in what seemed like a lifetime had he imagined he’d be making love with Ken Hutchinson again. He could barely believe it then. He couldn’t even remember a time when he told a woman he loved her in the middle of sex. For once, his feelings outweighed his sex drive—because Hutch was so beautiful: aroused and excited, pumping himself in rhythm to Starsky’s penetrating strokes.

Hutch’s smooth skin shined under the flow of steamy water, his wet blond hair was plastered to his head, his muscled arms and his cushioning buttocks were a sight to behold, his receptiveness and reciprocating pleasure ratcheted up Starsky’s urgency, and Hutch shared it all with Starsky as if they’d never been apart. They had experienced so much together, from every spectrum of life’s experiences. Love was simply the ultimate engagement.

It brought on the inescapable. “I’m gonna come,” Starsky blurted as the crest of his climax overtook him. “I can’t hold out.”

“It’s okay,” Hutch said, panting between each word—and empathizing with Starsky’s desire. It should never have surprised Starsky that Hutch could read him better than he could himself. No one else gave him the liberty and acceptance of his sexuality the way Hutch did for him.

“Do you love me, Hutch?” Starsky asked, knowing he was loved, but wanting to hear it in his final plunges; he was sure those words would give his orgasm an intense ending. “You love me, doncha?”

“More than life itself,” Hutch swore. He let go of himself and braced against the wall, pushing his hips out to give Starsky a deeper penetration on that last hard entry. “I love you more than anything.”

“Oh!” Starsky softly cried, his voice filled with emotion; the world shut down behind his closed eyes and he locked his pelvis against Hutch’s butt to fire his cock deep inside him, completely emptying his sac, each spasm of orgasmic pleasure more coveted than the previous one.

Hutch broke into a steady cadence of, “Oh, oh, oh,” as he returned to furiously pumping himself, a rhythmic rocking against Starsky that miraculously brought Starsky to his senses in an instant—and just in time.

When he was able to catch his breath, barely opening his eyes, Starsky sensed that Hutch had neared the beginning of his own ejaculation. “Don’t touch that!” he ordered, grabbing Hutch’s hand and holding it against the wall to make his point. “Let it go.”

Hutch was not happy. He grunted, a long groan of disappointment, but he was in no state to figure out what had just happened to him—or hadn’t happened, when he apparently expected it would.

“I want us to go the bed,” Starsky explained, breathlessly. He was recovering from his own orgasm, and could barely think straight. Only when he realized that he was still inside Hutch did he understand how stupid he sounded. He laughed. “I guess I should let you up first.”

Sounding confused, Hutch said, “I thought you just came.”

“I did.”

“Then let me come.”

“I want to be the one to finish you.”

“Then do it here,” Hutch impatiently argued, obviously hoping to at least resume masturbating, but in no position not to follow Starsky’s instruction; he didn’t even take himself in hand again.

Starsky gripped Hutch’s hips as he carefully withdrew, watching as his cock slowly emerged from inside Hutch—its base to its tip. It amazed him how much his man had taken; Starsky couldn’t remember a time when he was as swollen as he’d been during that round. Hutch really did turn him on.

“I want to give you what you gave me this morning,” Starsky furthered when he fully slipped out of Hutch’s warm body. He then pulled Hutch up and turned him back against the opposing wall. “C’mon,” he added, making eye contact, and relishing the wild look on Hutch’s face, “you didn’t come all this way just to get yourself off.”

“I wasn’t on my own, Starsk. You were about to fuck the cum out of me and I was so close. I was just helping it along.”

“Well, don’t, okay?” Starsky complained. He quickly washed his own fading erection before he turned off the water. He then kissed Hutch’s lips in the hope that he could dissolve his apparent dismay, but he wasn’t sure he succeeded. “Let me suck the cum out of you instead, hm?”

Hutch seemed to reluctantly surrender; a subtle nod signaled his obedience. “I don’t suppose a man can argue against an offer like that.”

“Nope,” Starsky said, opening the shower door while he held onto Hutch and pulled him away from the wall. His own legs felt unsteady. “A man sure can’t.” He hungrily licked his lips when he deliberately laid eyes on how hard and swollen, dripping wet and glistening Hutch’s enlarged cock appeared. They were both about to get their wish.

* * *

Hutch abruptly stopped in the doorway just as he was about to enter the room because he was surprised to find Starsky, half-dressed, asleep on the bed, his feet on the floor.

Hutch had bolted into the kitchen just a few minutes before—his wits having returned in record time following his fellatio-induced orgasm—because he somehow heard the stove timer buzz from the kitchen. He wasn’t about to burn Simon’s lasagna. But he decided it could benefit from another 10 minutes in the oven, so he reset the timer, and returned to the bedroom to get dressed.

That’s when he found Starsky, seeming more wiped out than Hutch had been. Starsky had at least put on a shirt—albeit still unbuttoned—before he obviously fell asleep mid-way into dressing himself.

Hutch then walked to the dresser. He decided on a clean pair of blue cotton shorts from his stash in the bottom drawer, and the un-matching green YOSEMITE tee-shirt he’d earlier flung onto the room chair on his way into the shower. Once dressed, he went to the nightstand to look for a bottle of almond oil, purely for future play. He wanted to know where Starsky kept it, and he was certain Starsky had to have some. Hutch hadn’t found any in the refrigerator, and the nightstand drawer also turned out to be empty—except for a piece of jewelry Hutch almost didn’t notice.

He was about to close the drawer when the lone necklace in a small ceramic bowl caught his eye. It was his own, after all—one he’d bought for himself a couple of years earlier when he and Starsky attended the annual Renaissance Pleasure Faire in Agoura on a weekend they had off. Hutch carefully lifted it out of the drawer to examine it more closely.

Sure enough: two charms made of ivory—one in the shape of a crescent moon with a profiled face, and the other of a small star—were tied to a thin, soft, light brown nylon cord, a design by Christopher Miller, and obviously not new. Hutch was 100% certain it was his. Like his letterman jacket and the YOSEMITE tee-shirt, he simply didn’t know it had been missing.

Rather, that it had been re-homed.

He clasped the necklace around his neck and closed the nightstand drawer. Drawing a breath, he stepped closer to Starsky, stood beside him, watched him for a minute. There that boy was: in deep sleep, wearing nothing but an unbuttoned blue shirt, naked otherwise, apparently having sat on the bed to dress, but only got so far before he laid back on the mattress and fell asleep.

Hutch was amused, but also touched. Starsky had spent the day working, after which he had mounted Hutch in the shower, and then performed fellatio on him when they went to the bed. Starsky was understandably exhausted.

He was beautiful, too: that head of dark damp hair, his casual nudity, undeniable maleness, primal masculinity; his athletic build and his strong muscle, his haired olive skin—from his chest to his groin. Starsky’s hands, slender fingers, hairy arms, relaxed at his sides, bare feet on the floor; hairy legs. His penis—its size, even flaccid, was still visually pleasing, its proportional shape, nested against his tight sac, resting on his legs. A sexy man. And those sultry blue eyes—now closed—were they open.

There was one way to see them. Hutch snapped the elastic band on his own shorts so it snapped against his belly and made a sharp sound. Starsky didn’t budge. His breathing was proof of deeper sleep. But the lasagna was about to come out of the oven, and Hutch really wanted to eat, to enjoy good food and wine at the end of their first day back together, to commune with his long-lost lover, now found. There was plenty of time to sleep at the end of their lives.

‘I’ve missed us so much,’ Hutch remembered Starsky telling him in the shower—right smack in the middle of making love. Hutch didn’t know what to say at the time; he was speechless. To feel what Starsky obviously felt in that moment told Hutch his partner was more emotionally involved in the sex they were having than Hutch realized he’d been up until then. Starsky had missed Hutch as much as he’d missed Starsky; they both missed ‘us.’

Hutch wanted more than just food; he wanted to be with Starsky. He couldn’t wait, so he nudged Starsky’s knee with his own. “Hey, buddy. Are you going to sleep all night?”

Starsky stirred and turned his head toward Hutch as he slowly opened his ‘sultry blue eyes.’

“Are you hungry?” Hutch asked, hoping Starsky was at least interested in being awake for a while longer.

Starsky smiled at him—a big Starsky smile, close-lipped, eyes sparkling, and not because he was hungry and wanted to eat, but because he’d just made eye contact with Hutch. It was that kind of smile. A very happy boy smile.

Hutch returned it. “Don’t go back to sleep, cupcake,” he affectionately begged him, giving Starsky a quick kiss before he headed for the kitchen at the sound of the stove timer buzz, “but do put on some pants.”

* * *

“This is really good, Hutch. You’ve outdone yourself.”

Hutch had completely cleared the table, set it up with plates, utensils, paper napkins, and glasses, and lit the only pillar candle he could find while Starsky eventually roused, got dressed in jeans shorts, and buttoned his shirt before joining him. He arrived just as Hutch brought the hot pan of lasagna over to the table and set it on the oven mitt to protect Starsky’s beautiful handiwork.

Starsky noticed Hutch’s thoughtfulness and thanked him for it as he planted a kiss on Hutch’s cheek. He then told Hutch how ‘delicious’ the entire house smelled.

Hutch couldn’t take credit. “Simon made dinner.”

“Simon?” Starsky asked, sitting down to eat. He immediately crunched into a piece of garlic toast and approvingly flashed his eyebrows at Hutch while he chewed.

Hutch squinted at him. “Are you purposely not remembering Simon?”

“Oh, Simon!” Starsky realized—or at least pretended to. “I remember now. Your other boyfriend. Well, I guess I owe him a big thank you for tonight’s meal, hm?” He ate a bite of lasagna, his eyes widening in amazement as if it had melted in his mouth. “This tastes better than it smells! I mean, it’s really, really good, like Italy Italian good.”

“He’s not my boyfriend.”

“I have to meet him someday.”

“He’s not my boyfriend, Starsk.”

“Well, he’s your … partner.”

“He’s my partner at the FBI.”

“So, do I get to meet him?”

Hutch began eating. “Maybe he’ll invite us to lunch. He’s hoping to meet you, too.”

“Perfect!”

But Hutch wasn’t impressed. He looked over at Starsky, held eye contact. He could verbalize his thoughts, but he didn’t want to start an argument; he just needed Starsky to know he didn’t believe he was as nonchalant about Hutch’s other partner as he tried to sound—and that Hutch was on to him.

Starsky swallowed what was in his mouth and cleared his throat. “Okay,” he surrendered, obviously reading into Hutch’s silence. “I guess it’s that I don’t like that you have a partner—and it isn’t me. And, more than that, it’s my fault.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“In a way, it is.”

Hutch aimed at a different target. “Simon is my partner at the FBI,” he reiterated, speaking softly. “But you’re my … everything else.”

Starsky gently smiled. “I like that, Hutch. I like that I’m your everything else.”

“Scratch that,” Hutch decided instead. “You’re my everything, period.”

“Everything ‘else’ is okay, too,” Starsky said, blowing him an air kiss. “I don’t mean to put your partner down.”

“I wouldn’t let you. The cold hard truth is that I would have found you with or without him, but he helped me to find you sooner—much, much sooner.”

“You’re right, Hutch. I’m sorry.”

“And he’s my friend,” Hutch added, not defensively. He simply wanted Starsky to understand the relationship he had with his FBI partner.

“And a damn good chef,” Starsky furthered—sincerely. “I owe him. For more than the food.”

“He’ll be happy with just a ‘thank you.’”

Starsky then dropped his line of sight to Hutch’s moon and star necklace—and realized that Hutch had found it in the nightstand drawer. He seemed to choke, lowered his eyes to his food plate, and quickly went back to eating.

Nor did Hutch want to put Starsky on the spot. “I was looking for some of that almond oil we kept on hand, but—”

“I don’t have any.”

“Used it all up?”

“Left it at your place.”

“A year ago?”

“That’s the last time I was at your place.”

“Didn’t think you’d need it?”

“Didn’t need it,” Starsky said, firmly, but with a hint of sarcasm. “I’m not into guys. Just you,” he added with a wink.

Hutch didn’t ask about girlfriends; he didn’t want to know. “We should get some then.”

They continued eating, talking instead about Starsky’s job. He didn’t think Scott would need him past the end of the next three weeks, explaining to Hutch where the crew would be in the construction phase at that time.

He also boasted about Scott telling him that afternoon how smart he was when Scott learned Starsky’s true identity, and that Scott had always assumed Starsky had done something else in life besides handyman work.

“You can’t hide your I.Q.,” Hutch said, toasting Starsky with his first glass of wine. “It’s the one thing I admire about you.”

“The one thing is all?”

“Did I say one?” Hutch joked. “One of at least three things,” he further teased him.

They talked about food, the weather, movies, politics, and music, and Starsky’s truck. After dinner, while Hutch put away the leftover food, Starsky carried the plate of cannolis, the remaining half bottle of wine, and their two glasses into the living room, telling Hutch he’d meet him there after a brief bathroom break—and to bring the candle.

Hutch was already sitting on one end of the sofa when Starsky joined him at the other. He had divided the Cabernet evenly into their glasses, so they toasted each other, lip-kissed, and then drank wine and ate cannolis.

“Simon is a baker, too?” Starsky wondered, obviously enjoying the quality taste of the Italian pastry as he licked his fingers clean.

“He bought those from a deli on his way home this afternoon.”

“Oh. So … he didn’t come here; you went there?”

“To pick up my clothes and toothbrush.”

“And that’s when he made dinner for us?”

“Including the salad.”

“He does love you,” Starsky decided after thinking for a moment. “That’s okay. No one knows more than me that you’re lovable.”

Hutch smiled at him. “I can say the same in reverse.”

A floor lamp across the room and the candle Hutch had brought from the dining table to the coffee table were the only lights to break the growing darkness—those, and a lamppost outside and across the street along with a beam of light from the waxing crescent moon coming in through the curtain-less windows.

They’d already physically spent themselves in the shower and on the bed, and Starsky had worked all day, too, so they were relaxed on the sofa, unhurried, enjoying mundane conversation and each other’s company without any sexual tension between them. After some time, Hutch picked up Starsky’s right foot and set it in his lap, gently forcing Starsky to turn on the sofa toward him.

“Maybe we’ll find time to do some sightseeing together,” Hutch suggested, kneading Starsky’s toes, and noticing the small smile as it emerged on his partner’s lips; Starsky was immediately enjoying the massage. “You can take me places you’ve been so we can experience them together,” Hutch told him, “but we can find new things to see and do, too.”

“I’d like that,” Starsky said. “We should do the big stuff over together—the Grand Canyon and Gettysburg—but there are some places I’ve been that I’d never want to go back to again.”

“Did you have any trouble along the way?”

“Just podunk towns, know what I mean? Watering holes. Hicks,” he said with a laugh. He relaxed further into the foot massage. “The occasional weirdo.”

“But nothing confrontational or dangerous, right?”

“I got hit on a few times, if that’s what you mean—mostly women.”

“Mostly?”

“Well, I mean, there was this whacked out guy in Quartzsite in Arizona who bothered me and I had to pull one on him, but not anyone I couldn’t handle.”

Hutch blinked. Where had he heard ‘Quartzsite’ before? Then he remembered—and it floored him. His mind raced ahead into his thoughts faster than he could figure out where they were leading him.

“Did I say something bad?” Starsky asked; he’d noticed Hutch’s pause because it interrupted his foot massage. “C’mon, you know I’m not saying a guy who hits on me is a weirdo, but this dude was creepy—”

“Quartzsite,” Hutch repeated. He stared at Starsky, hoping the words would emerge in a way he thought they might, but he couldn’t decide on his question. “When were you there?”

“First night I left L.A. There’s a major campsite right off the highway and there was this gay party going on behind the—”

“And you ran into a guy wearing a black eye patch?”

Starsky closed his mouth, studied Hutch. He was obviously confused by how intuitive Hutch had become in that moment, or he thought Hutch was some kind of psychic. “Yeah. I did. The whacko I was telling you about. He hit on me, but I—”

“And you called the L.A. police from Phoenix the next day to report him?”

“How do you know this?”

“You called that guy in to LAPD—”

“Because Phoenix PD wouldn’t take me seriously—”

“—and he committed a murder in Quartzsite the next night.”

They were both speechless in that moment—for different reasons. In Hutch’s mind, at least, Starsky had narrowly escaped a killer.

“Are you shitting me, Hutch? He killed somebody?” He was visibly incensed, confused, dismayed. “How do you know this?”

“Because he was the serial killer we cornered in Oregon—one person for every interstate highway in the nation whose number was divisible by 5 and leaving each victim at a mile marker on that highway as a body count. Fifteen by the time we stopped him.”

“I should have taken that fucker out when my gut told me he was suspicious.”

“You’d turned in your weapon.”

“I got my hands on another one before I left. You can never be too careful. In fact, my Glock was the only way I could get him to back off.”

Hutch realized that’s what Starsky meant when he said he had to ‘pull one on him.’ He was also pleased to hear that Starsky had been carrying. “That killer was the reason the FBI came to California, the reason I met Simon, the reason they hired me to help them—at first to solve one of his murders near L.A.”

“But you’re as smart as they are, maybe smarter, and you kept digging, hm?”

“When I discovered how he was selecting his targets, I was hired permanently part-time; I figured out where he would strike next—and, sure enough, we caught him in Ashland before he could claim another victim.”

It was Starsky’s turn to blink, visibly jolted out of his calm. “So you’re saying that, because of my phone call, you were able to get involved in that case—and solve it.”

“I’m saying you helped us solve that case by involving yourself. We’d have never figured it out if you hadn’t made that call from Phoenix—at least not when we did.”

Starsky both smiled and frowned at once; an unusual expression of pride and horror mixed together, like he didn’t know what to feel except … all of it.

“You didn’t know it then, Starsk, but you had just laid the groundwork for me finding you,” Hutch hypothesized. “You sealed your own fate that day.”

“Holy shit. I did!” Starsky realized, laughing. “On Day One of my trip, no less. All that scheming for nothing. I must’ve done that unconsciously.”

“You mean subconsciously.”

“Whatever. It got you here. It was my plan all along,” Starsky joked.

Hutch resumed the foot massage. “We crossed paths within days of each other without knowing it.”

“Like we did at Arlington Cemetery on Memorial Day, hm?”

“Like that day. So now I’m compelled to ask: where were you on the Fourth of July?”

“The Lincoln Memorial—to watch the fireworks.”

“As … on the steps of the Memorial?”

“At the top of the steps. Jesus, where were you?”

“First landing up from the bottom.”

They stared at each other a minute longer.

“You were in Oregon on Thanksgiving,” Starsky recalled, “which means I could have been with mom and not worried about you knocking on the door. Do I have that right?”

“You do.”

“So, that was stupid of me.”

“Or me—for being in Oregon.”

Starsky sighed. “Mom said you called Christmas morning and she told you I was going back to L.A. to surprise you—but really I went to D.C. I could have stayed in New York and finished Christmas with my mom, hm?”

Hutch continued to massage Starsky’s foot, himself enjoying the warmth of Starsky’s skin—and the smile underneath the facade that it gave his partner. “I was actually in New York City staking out your mom’s house when I made that call to your mother—but she said you had just left for the airport.”

Starsky stalled, studied Hutch; perhaps he was feeling overwhelmed by the times they’d nearly run into each other over the course of a year—and didn’t know it. Or maybe he was simply amazed by how dedicated Hutch had been in looking for him. Or maybe he was hating himself for all the times he avoided Hutch when, in the end, he didn’t need to; they were destined to be together again. Whatever he was thinking or feeling, he didn’t express it. He didn’t have to.

“So I caught the first flight home,” Hutch confessed, reliving over again how stupid he felt on that morning, to rush back to Los Angeles in the desperate hope that Starsky really would return to surprise him on Christmas Day. “I set the table for a night of romance … and then waited for you to show up, but…”

They both knew that score.

“That’s sad, Hutch.”

“More than you know.”

“So, you were alone at Christmas,” Starsky concluded.

“Lonely, too.”

“And there I was, picturing you in the lap of homey luxury with a big old Christmas tree all lit up and lots of presents. Did you spend any of it with Dobey or Huggy?”

“Party of two, just me and myself. No tree. No presents.”

“I’m sorry, Hutch.”

“I guess I had it coming to me.”

“I told my mom I was going to see you that afternoon, but I went to a D.C. hotel instead. I’m sorry I did that to us.”

“I’m sorry I gave you reason to.”

They were silent for half a minute before Hutch added, “Water over the dam.”

“Yeah,” Starsky agreed, sighing. “Or under the bridge. In any case, long gone.”

Hutch asked for Starsky’s other foot; both men were on the sofa then, facing each other, Starsky’s feet in Hutch’s lap while Hutch kneaded his partner’s ankle, heel, and toes, Hutch’s leg tucked under himself, his other foot on the floor. They were slouched into opposite ends of the couch, relaxed, despite the sometimes painful dialogue they were sharing.

Starsky had stopped at half a glass of wine, leaving it on the coffee table, and Hutch drank from it on occasion, pausing the foot massage to take a sip. Each time he returned to kneading Starsky, Starsky seemed to sink further into the sofa cushions.

“Do you have to get up early again tomorrow morning?” Hutch asked. He thought he should let Starsky go to bed when he noticed that sleepy-eyed look on Starsky’s face. “You want to be as sharp as a tack and careful where you swing that hammer.”

Starsky lightly laughed. “Tomorrow is Saturday. We don’t work weekends. I get to sleep in,” he said with a raise of an eyebrow.

“Good to know,” Hutch noted. Morning sex was definitely on the calendar and that time it would last a lot longer for both of them. “Do me a favor then?”

“Name it.”

“Unbutton your shirt.”

Starsky cocked his head, seemed to wait for something; an explanation? a reason? But when Hutch didn’t say anything else, Starsky gently laughed and slowly unbuttoned his shirt. “Are you hoping to see girl titties?”

“Ha. Not on you.”

“What then?”

“A man can’t enjoy the look of his man just for the pleasure of it?” He still couldn’t believe they were together again.

Starsky pulled open his shirt and revealed his hairy chest. He held eye contact with Hutch. “Like what you see?”

“I do.”

Hutch did. Starsky was so very … male. “You’ll always be the more masculine one between us.”

“And you like that about me.”

“I love it about you.”

“Well, it’s not like you don’t have a dick, you know.”

“Your point?”

“I’m not sure one of us is more masculine than the other when we both have cock-a-doodles.”

Hutch laughed. “Masculinity isn’t just a body part.”

“It’s a hairy chest?”

“It’s … primal. You’re more primal than I am.”

Starsky combed his chest hair. “And this rug proves it?”

“Will you just let me enjoy myself?”

“You’re a masculine man, too,” Starsky insisted. “You’re primal. The way you suck my cock. That’s pretty animal, don’t you think? The way you protect others. How tough you are. You’re strong and courageous and manly. A leader.”

Hutch ignored him. He concentrated on pleasing the arch and ball of Starsky’s foot, watched himself doing it, and occasionally stole glances of Starsky’s hairy body, his chest and nipples, his shaved neck and face, those blue eyes. Starsky was probably feeling self-conscious in those initial moments, on display as he was, so Hutch didn’t want to explain it further. He simply immersed himself in the experience. There was no one more beautiful to him than David Starsky.

“What say we talk about the proverbial elephant in the room?” Hutch suggested after a couple of minutes. He lifted his eyes from scanning Starsky’s legs, up over his hairy chest, and made eye contact. “Now that I have you relaxed and malleable,” he quipped, “let’s have that conversation.”

“Malleable?”

“Putty in my hands.”

“I’ve been that for the last ten years.”

Hutch scoffed, remembering all the times Starsky had pushed back on him, but he appreciated the compliment, too. “As I said earlier, I brought my clothes and my toothbrush over today.”

Starsky studied him for half a second. “Okay.”

“I put my toothbrush in the bathroom counter cup alongside yours and my clothes in the bottom drawer of your dresser.”

“What did you do with the box that was in there?”

“Top shelf of the closet,” Hutch said. He didn’t let on that he knew the contents of the box—and Starsky didn’t, either. Hutch then dropped his gaze back to the foot massage, giving each foot a final pat—and then stopped, but he held onto Starsky’s feet, enjoying their warmth in his hands. “Do me another favor?”

“Name it.”

“Unzip your shorts.”

Hutch didn’t get any pushback that time. Starsky unbuttoned and unzipped his jeans shorts, revealing his flat hairy belly and patch of black pubic hair. But he did comment on Hutch’s earlier statement. “Are you hoping to see an elephant-sized cock?”

Hutch laughed. “Hardly.”

“So what’s the elephant in the room then, hm?”

“Oh, that.” Hutch remembered. He had been distracted. “Well, I’m saying that I moved my stuff over from Simon’s house to … here.”

Starsky seemed amused, as if he didn’t know what Hutch was trying to tell him, and didn’t want to admit he didn’t know. “Okay.” He was sleepy tired and not thinking strategically.

Hutch bent forward and ran his fingers through Starsky’s chest hair down to his belly. “I just love this look,” he softly said, sitting back again. “You’re all man and all mine. Take those off for me, will ya?” He tugged on the hem of Starsky’s shorts.

Starsky lifted his hips and pulled them off. “You know I can’t get it up again so soon, right?”

“You’re not alone in that,” Hutch admitted with a touch of disappointment for them both. “But I’m not after sex. Just let me see your dick, okay? Let me look at you. Can you do that much for me, huh, can ya?” he asked, faking impatience and annoyance. “Let me see you. I want to know this is real.”

Starsky laughed at him and tossed his shorts onto the coffee table, careful not to hit the wine glass. “I’m real alright, but ain’t nobody ever just wanted to look at me,” he explained. “Do you want me to take my shirt off, too?”

“No, but leave it unbuttoned.”

Starsky opened it further and pushed his left foot into the space between Hutch and the back of the sofa; his other was again in Hutch’s lap, and his legs were slightly apart. “I still don’t see the elephant.”

Hutch drew a breath as he laid eyes on Starsky’s flaccid penis; it pointed toward his left hip. Beneath it, his sac rested on his legs. A beautiful torso, Hutch also noted: Starsky’s haired chest and belly, that strip of hair from his navel to his pubic hair, his skin tone and hairy legs. Once again, he savored the look of Starsky’s penis, and then Starsky’s handsome face—those eyes. A sexy man.

“The elephant, Hutch,” Starsky reminded him, nudging Hutch’s knee with his leg. “Tell me about the elephant.”

“I moved out of Simon’s house.”

“Yeah, I got that part.”

“I … moved into … your house,” he said, stealing a glance at Starsky’s resting penis, its smooth shaft and meaty crown, noticing its flaccid girth and—

“Well, where else would you go?”

“I guess I don’t know.”

“What’s the problem then?”

Hutch broke completely away from admiring Starsky’s physique and looked more determinedly into his eyes. “I presumed a lot.”

“How do you figure?”

“You didn’t invite me to move in.”

“You have to be kidding, right? You don’t really think you needed an invitation.”

“I didn’t think that, but then I rethought it.”

“You mean you overthought it.”

“I guess I did.”

“I’m sorry you thought even for a second that that wasn’t the plan.”

“It’s your house.”

“Not really. Not unless I want it to be—and only if we want it to be—but that’s beside the point.”

Then was definitely not the time to discuss their future plans. Starsky was tired and Hutch was too relaxed to think clearly. He merely wanted to address his concern about taking liberties he hadn’t first discussed with Starsky.

“So maybe you need to hear me say this,” Starsky assumed. “Here goes and listen carefully. I forgive you. I even forgive me for the stupid thing we did that cost us both. Do you hear that part?”

Hutch nodded, feeling shy and stupid and reprimanded all at once.

“Wherever I am,” Starsky said, nudging Hutch again to get his full attention, “is where you are—and vice versa. Neither one of us wants to be somewhere else. Do you know how hurt I’d be if you said you were going to stay at Simon’s house—or anyplace else?”

Hutch hadn’t thought that far into his uncertainties. “Yeah, okay.”

“You did the right thing,” Starsky insisted, jokingly adding, “for once.”

“Okay,” Hutch said again, accepting all he’d heard. He allowed himself to break eye contact and look Starsky over yet again, indulging himself in the picture of his half-naked man lying on the sofa, stretched out before him. Hutch didn’t know when he’d ever stop feeling as elated as he was to be with Starsky again, but he would forever be aware of his privilege. The man was his everything—from his best friend to his partner to his lover and his soulmate and all things in between and all they implied.

“Will you kiss me now?” Starsky softly asked, his voice as masculine as the rest of him.

Hutch pushed himself forward, awkwardly straddling Starsky on the sofa, the two of them laughing about the limited space and their determination to make it work. Hutch paused long enough to kiss the tip of Starsky’s penis, briefly feeling its softness and its warmth with his tongue, electrifying him. He wished they were both refueled for sex right there on the sofa, but alas…

Starsky giggled. “I didn’t mean kiss me there.”

After their lips finally met and they kissed and then kissed again, Hutch said, “I know that’s not what you meant, but I couldn’t help myself. Your body is one of my weaknesses.”

Starsky wrapped Hutch in his arms, forcing Hutch into lying against him from head to foot, wedging Hutch between himself and the back of the sofa. “We’re not going anywhere without each other ever again,” he promised. “You heard me say that part, too, right?”

Hutch laughed, closed his eyes, buried his face against Starsky’s warm neck, and deeply inhaled those familiar scents of his cologne and skin. “I heard you, buddy,” he said, abandoning his remaining apprehensions in his exhale, “loud and clear.”

Starsky slowly let out a sigh as he contentedly snuggled into Hutch, briefly combing Hutch’s hair and kissing his cheek. And then, just like that—as if everything was finally at peace in the entire world—and with Hutch lying against him, the two of them stretched across the length of the sofa, Hutch dressed and Starsky in just his unbuttoned shirt, Starsky fell right to sleep.

* * *

“Wait until Simon hears how you cook with olive oil.”

Hutch laughed and tousled Starsky’s hair. “I think I’ll spare him the gory details.”

Hutch had awakened that morning beside Starsky; his boy was on his side facing away from him. They’d slept together on the sofa the previous evening for over an hour before Hutch woke them both up and coaxed Starsky into going to bed with him instead.

Hutch stopped in the guest bathroom on his way to the bedroom, and heard Starsky in the master bathroom at the same time, but by the time Hutch arrived in the room to undress and get into bed, Starsky had beat him there. He was even already asleep on top of the sheet—on his stomach, still just wearing his unbuttoned shirt.

In the morning, early sunlight filtered through the thin curtain on the only window in the bedroom, and cast a shaft of bright yellow across Starsky’s dark hair. Hutch couldn’t help himself; he ran his fingers through its waves of curls, igniting his desires, and then snuggled into Starsky, wrapping him inside his arms and legs while kissing his neck, feeling his warm buttocks against his own belly, and fully waking him in the snug spooning.

Starsky hadn’t missed a beat. He pressed Hutch’s fingers to his lips, grunted a cheerful hello, and kissed them. He eventually climbed to his hands and knees without a word between them, inviting Hutch into mounting him from behind. But several awkward, difficult, maybe even painful, attempts later, and Hutch gave up on the penetrating entry. Not even his saliva seemed to do the trick.

“Maybe I’m too excited and in a hurry.”

“It’s just been a while, like you said in the shower,” Starsky explained in a sleepy voice. “It’s me. Come around to the front and I’ll suck you nice. Then you do me.”

“We both want a good fuck, don’t we?” Hutch debated him. It had been a year for Hutch without intercourse; it sounded like it may have been likewise for Starsky, at least as the one on the receiving end of it. So Hutch had an idea. He patted Starsky’s butt as he left the bed, held onto his own erection to keep it from bouncing around, quickly went into the kitchen, and returned with the bottle of extra virgin olive oil he’d found in a cabinet near the stove.

Starsky was still on his knees, his face down in his pillow, his shirt pushed up onto his neck, exposing his bare shoulders and rounded buttocks—a visual that excited Hutch further. He stood beside the bed—in Starsky’s line of sight—and coated his own penis with the oil. When he set the bottle on the nightstand, Starsky apparently spied it and burst out with a laugh.

The oil made it easier for Hutch to enter him when he finally did, but he was still careful—until he sensed that Starsky was fully relaxed and he could aggressively take him. Those thrusts put Hutch over the edge sooner than he had hoped. But, after his long-sought ejaculation, he withdrew as carefully as he’d entered, and fell to the mattress on his back, breathing heavily, to bask in the aftermath of his orgasm, doing his best to keep his wits about him so he could finish Starsky the right way.

“Hold on there, Romeo,” he said. “Bring that pretty boy over here and let’s get him off with some kisses and licks.” But Starsky didn’t seem to hear him, so Hutch had to catch him in time—pushing Starsky onto his side to take over Starsky’s masturbation with fellatio instead.

When they both ended up flat on their backs after mutual orgasms, sweating and laughing and breathing hard, they soon fell into a light dose. Maybe fifteen minutes later, Hutch eventually emerged from his nap and rolled onto his side, propped his head in his hand, and tickled Starsky into joining him in precious eye contact.

That’s when Starsky slowly opened his eyes, smiled at Hutch, and teasingly told him Simon would be horror-struck to learn what Hutch had done with olive oil.

“And that reminds me,” Hutch said. “We need some almond oil. There’s no way I’m giving you head with olive oil; I don’t care how virgin-extra it is.”

“You like olives.”

“Not as much as almonds.”

“Then let’s go out and get some today,” Starsky suggested, pulling Hutch into a brief kiss, and then licking his lips afterward. “But I don’t mind the taste of my dick, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“I love the taste of your dick, but why argue with tried-and-true?”

Starsky was silent a moment, looking into Hutch’s eyes, then seemed to rally courage. “So … how about that other elephant in the room, hm?”

“Back to talking about my dick, are we?”

Starsky smirked at him. “I’m talking about sex—with other people—this past year.”

Hutch realized Starsky had been serious and felt ashamed for misunderstanding him and treating his concern so lightly. “Oh.”

“I haven’t had sex,” Starsky admitted first. “Not with anyone. I haven’t even played with myself. I guess I just haven’t been in the mood.”

Hutch didn’t know how to reply without hurting Starsky.

“It’s okay if you’ve had sex without me,” Starsky reassured him, sounding sincere. “I’m the one who left you, remember? But I keep telling myself I don’t want to know if you’ve had sex, and yet I keep wondering if you’ve had sex and then telling myself I don’t want to know, so I may as well know and stop wondering.”

“Sound logic,” Hutch playfully commented. He broke eye contact to seek out the kindest words he could find to tell it. “I … I guess I had sex with someone … once.”

“That’s an interesting answer.”

Hutch looked into Starsky’s eyes again and shyly smiled. “It was the day after the day after my birthday. You hadn’t called, so I told myself you really weren’t coming back and I should get on with my life.”

“You waited that long, hm? Almost a year from the day I left.”

“Yeah, that played a role in it, too.”

“Your birthday was just a couple of weeks ago,” Starsky calculated.

“Well, I wasn’t planning to have sex. I just wanted to be with someone who knew us both and who might help make sense of things for me. I was really hurting. The day after my birthday, I went to Colorado on an impulse.”

Before Hutch could say more, Starsky beat him to it. “You went to see Alec.”

“For a couple of reasons besides the one I just mentioned. The other was that it was a perfect place to get away from Los Angeles and New York City and Miami and every plane ride in between.”

“You wanted to be in peaceful wilderness, too,” Starsky assumed, adding softly, “I wouldn’t expect less from my boy.”

He was so forgiving.

“Anyway, long story short, I fell asleep on Alec’s bed the first night—while he was doing the social thing with sanctuary visitors—and I slept like no tomorrow.”

“You needed it.”

“More than I knew I did.”

The double bed had them lying close enough to each other, feeling connected, but Hutch held onto Starsky’s arm just the same—as if he could hold him there in case Starsky thought about leaving in light of the news Hutch confessed to.

“I took a tour of that new hospital the next day—they call it ‘The Hutch’—and then a hike with the crowd. After the potluck and the marshmallow roast that night, he and I went back to the bungalow. Had a real long talk—about you, about you and me, about how I was going to get over you.”

“I can see it didn’t work,” Starsky noted, not facetiously as he affectionately stroked Hutch’s cheek. “I’m glad your talk failed; I mean, in that sense.”

“Me, too.”

“So what happened next, Hutch? I wouldn’t ask for specific details, but you said you ‘guessed’ you had sex with someone.”

“We went to our separate beds; that was the plan. But then I called him to my room and asked if we could … you know … blow each other.”

Starsky raised an eyebrow. “You started it?”

“I thought it might snap me out of thinking about you once and for all.”

“And he agreed to it, right? I mean, what man wouldn’t?”

“The truth is closer to I talked him into it.”

“Oh.”

“But … I couldn’t finish.”

“You couldn’t finish him off?”

“I couldn’t let him finish me off.”

“Wait,” Starsky said, blinking. “Are you telling me that he went down on you, but you couldn’t come?”

“I couldn’t stop thinking about you; felt like I was cheating.”

“Back up. Hear what I’m asking. You’re saying you didn’t finish getting a blow job because you were thinking about me?”

Hutch shrugged, looking into Starsky’s blue eyes, hoping to implore him. “I don’t know any other way to say it, Starsk.”

“And Alec Henley was the one giving you that blow job?”

Hutch squinted at him. “Are you missing part of my replay?”

“I’m saying … you stopped a blow job Alec Henley was giving you—the guy with the silver tongue—in the middle of that blow job because you were thinking about me?”

Hutch laughed. “I’m fairly sure you didn’t use ‘silver tongue’ correctly, but to answer the question, yeah, I couldn’t come. I stopped him mid-way. What aren’t you hearing me say?”

Starsky pulled Hutch into a tight embrace and gently kissed his face. “You really do love me. That’s better than you not having had sex all that time. That’s a powerful urge you had to overcome, but your love for me was greater.” When he let Hutch go, he kissed his mouth, and then said, “I’m now really glad I asked about your sex life.”

“I did finish him,” Hutch further confessed with a bit of shame. “I didn’t want to be a prick-teaser. But he would only let me hand-job him.”

“Because he knew how much you love me.”

“I’m sure of it.”

Starsky’s eyes sparkled; he did seem genuinely relieved and pleased to learn about Hutch’s sex life—or lack of one—over the past year. “Alec is a true friend. I guess he’s doing okay?”

Hutch remembered a detail he thought Starsky might find interesting. “He said he met someone a few months back, someone he’s very excited about, a relationship he’s hoping becomes a lot more involved than it already is.”

“But he still went to bed with you? You must be his kryptonite.”

“They’re in love, but separated by a couple of states. I have faith he’ll work it out. He’s really into this guy. Couldn’t stop talking about him.”

“Yeah? What makes this one so special?”

“He’s a cowboy in Montana who rescues wild horses.”

Starsky snorted a laugh.

“What’s so funny about that?”

“His boyfriend’s name wouldn’t happen to be Dillon Montana, would it?”

Hutch leaned back, studied Starsky for a moment, wondering how Starsky knew about Dillon. Had Starsky also made contact with Alec and Alec hadn’t told Hutch he had—even after promising Hutch that he would?

“Yeah, Dillon Montana,” Hutch said. “Runs a wild horse sanctuary in—”

“Dillon, Montana.”

Hutch was still dismayed. “Tell me what you know and how you know it.”

Starsky gave him every detail about how he and Kayla had attended the 2nd Annual Association of Sanctuaries Conference in Tysons Corner outside D.C.—from avoiding Alec’s booth at the event the first day so he wouldn’t run into him and have his cover blown, to meeting Dillon on his way out of the ballroom. Starsky went on to say he believed Dillon hit on him, so he told Dillon that Alec was more his type and that Dillon should make his acquaintance.

“I guess he did,” Hutch said, confirming it. “Alec said he met him at that conference.”

They wordlessly told each other that they realized yet again how their paths had crossed, even without the other being there.

“David Starsky,” Hutch eventually said, “The Matchmaker.”

“I’ll thank Simon for his role in getting you and me back together. Alec can thank me for getting him together with Dillon.”

Hutch lightly laughed. “You can thank Alec for our reunion, too.”

“For? not letting you go down on him because he knew how much we loved each other?”

“That, but also for talking me into returning to Dream Lake in the Rocky Mountain National Park while I was there. He said the mountain would speak to me—and it did. I figured out what you must be doing with your life and I could start looking in all the right places for once.”

“How’d you come to that?”

“I recalled you going on and on about building a house on the very spot where we were making out in the grass.”

Starsky’s expression told Hutch he remembered. “So, from there…?”

“I went back to L.A. and read through the classifieds looking for handymen—and then pickup trucks. Angela showed me the sales receipt; you made the ‘mistake’ of giving her your alias and the precinct’s address as your own, and I knew then I was finally on the right path.”

“Moron,” Starsky quietly chastised himself with a roll of his eyes. He protectively crossed his arms. “Well, in my defense,” he said on second thought, “I’m glad I was that stupid.”

“Yeah, Starsk. Me, too. I’m glad you were that stupid.”

* * *

“Starsky!” Hutch yelled into the house.

It was after their morning sex—followed by a filling breakfast of pancakes and eggs—that Hutch ended up on a cushioned patio chair on the porch, soaking in the fresh air and birdsongs. He decided that calling Starsky through the opened front door had to be a faster way to force the boy outside rather than use energy that he himself didn’t have to get up and physically fetch him.

Dressed in jeans and a green tee-shirt, shoes instead of sandals, and sunglasses, Hutch had just finished reading the day-old newspaper. He was feeling exceptionally lazy that mid-morning; all the sex in the past 24 hours was catching up with him—that, and not having to search for Starsky any longer enabled him to be completely relaxed.

“What?!” Starsky yelled back from deep inside the kitchen—and sounding a wee bit distracted. “I gotta…”

“Get your sweet ass out here!”

“I’m busy making a list!”

“He’s busy making a list,” Hutch dryly told Kayla with a roll of his eyes. She’d arrived just minutes earlier; Hutch spotted her coming across the street toward Starsky’s house, wearing a blue sundress, sandals, and a lightweight white cardigan sweater.

He was reminded again of Kayla’s youthful beauty, her exotic features, her long and luxurious hair pulled back into a ponytail, and momentarily found it amazing that Starsky hadn’t romantically pursued her. Maybe he and Starsky really were that much in love. They’d each stayed true to the other in their own ways during a year’s separation.

Hutch had greeted Kayla with a friendly ‘good morning’ when she stopped at the bottom of the steps and smiled up at him.

“I’m trying not to intrude,” she politely said, “but then I thought you might be here for a while and I wanted to say hello again.”

“You’re not intruding,” Hutch immediately insisted. He offered her a chair on the porch, but she said she preferred to stand in the warming sun. “Just think of me as household decor,” he kidded, “and make yourself at home.”

“I was happy to see you found him. My directions to his work place must have been good ones.”

“They were perfect. Thank you.”

She had no idea how grateful Hutch felt, and he didn’t have the words at that moment to express his gratitude. ‘Thank you’ seemed so lame, but what else could he say?

“How long have you known each other?” she wondered.

“Oh, I’d say about ten years now? As far back as our days in the police academy. I can’t believe I still put up with him,” he chuckled.

She cocked her head, seemed puzzled at first, but then told Hutch how happy she was that Starsky had moved into the neighborhood. Not only had Starsky become a good friend, but he was helping her look after next-door Mr. Mackey. She also told Hutch about Starsky’s promise to build her a deck and to volunteer certain tasks at the wild cat sanctuary she volunteered for. “I know he’s busy, but I plan to hold him to his promises.”

“As you should,” Hutch said with conviction.

She giggled. “You’re a policeman?”

“Detective.”

“Oh? Like Sherlock Holmes then?”

“Not as smart,” he wisecracked. “But smarter than Starsky.”

That’s when he called Starsky to the porch. The second time he called, Hutch got a more affectionate reply.

“Hold your horses, Boner Boy!”

Hutch laughed as he shook his head to let Kayla know he didn’t appreciate the nickname, that they both knew Starsky sometimes acted like a junior high dropout, but he wasn’t fazed. “C’mon, Starsk!”

“In a minute, goddammit!” was the more playful retort. “We need peanut butter! I’ve got to write it down!”

“But there’s someone here to see you!” Hutch informed him.

“It’s okay,” Kayla said. “I can wait.”

Hutch winked at her when they finally heard movement inside the house and knew Starsky was on his way. “He doesn’t always come when I call,” Hutch pretended to complain, “but he’s more than happy to show up if it means he’ll get to see someone else.” He said it playfully, but he was dismayed by Kayla’s look of confusion. Or maybe it was concern. She didn’t actually believe Hutch’s sarcasm, did she?

Starsky eventually emerged from the house and stepped onto the porch.

Hutch looked up at him. “You proved my point,” he jokingly said, noticing again that Starsky was dressed in jeans and a blue tee-shirt, and wearing sandals. He looked cool, much more refreshed than Hutch felt, but neither Starsky nor Kayla found Hutch amusing—and he didn’t know why.

“Kayla,” Starsky said under his breath, as if surprised to see her, but why would he be? He regularly spent time with her, and Hutch had been at the house for less than a couple of days. How long could they have possibly been apart?

“Why did he call you ‘Starsky’?” Kayla pointedly asked. Her eye contact with Starsky was also intense. “You answered to it, too. Twice.” She obviously felt it was more expedient to ask Starsky directly than to ask Hutch; she didn’t know Hutch, so why trust him with the answer?

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” Hutch quickly said, realizing his mortal mistake, and sincerely apologizing for it. “I was just … playing off the last three letters of his name … and—”

“Shut your mouth,” Starsky snapped at him with a warning glance. “Don’t say another word.” He looked back at Kayla. “I can explain.”

“He said you met at a police academy ten years ago,” Kayla continued, her voice noticeably unsteady.

Starsky sighed, sounding frustrated, appearing it, too, with dropped shoulders and a tucked chin. He walked down the three steps and stood in front of her. “I’ve been using a fake name to protect myself from—”

“Your name isn’t Dane Skyler?” she asked, seeming suddenly emotional.

“It’s David Starsky. Same initials, for what that’s worth.”

She was momentarily speechless, not just unamused. “And you’re a police officer?”

“I was an undercover detective, but I resigned from the Force a year ago. Hutch was my partner.”

Hutch could feel the tension in the air, despite Starsky’s attempt to loosen it. It was Hutch’s fault; he’d caused it.

“So you lied to me about your name?” Kayla asked, now on the verge of tears. She’d crossed her arms as if to keep her feelings safe. “And all these months, you never said anything about being a police officer even when you told me about your dad. Was he really a cop or was that a lie, too?”

“I didn’t lie to you about anything except my name,” Starsky insisted, trying to touch her arm, but she stepped back out of his reach. “Hutch and I had a problem,” he tried to further clarify. “I broke up with him and left—lived under an alias for the past year so he couldn’t find me. But he—”

“You ‘broke up’ with him?”

“He’s the one … the one I told you about … the one who busted my heart into a million pieces.”

Hutch drew a breath, leaned back in his chair, dropped his eyes; he couldn’t bear witness to Starsky’s confession, not in light of hearing him tell it to someone who was obviously and justifiably hurt by it. But Hutch was paralyzed, too; he couldn’t leave the porch, and them to their privacy; his departure would seem all too cowardly.

“Are you telling me you’re gay?” Kayla asked; she didn’t sound accusatory, nor judgmental, but she was definitely dismayed, confused, and hurt.

“Am I gay? I don’t know, Kayla. Honestly, I don’t. I guess it depends on who you ask.”

Hutch hoped Starsky wasn’t planning to mention their threesome with Alec Henley; that was a much more complicated matter.

“What I can tell you, Kayla,” Starsky said, “is that, if I am gay, it’s only for Hutch—and that relationship began a year ago. I didn’t lie to you about—”

“You didn’t tell me your breakup was with a man.”

“I didn’t say it was with a woman, either. I was careful about that.”

“So that’s the kind of friendship we have? One where you’re careful? Because you don’t trust me?”

Before Starsky could say anything else, Hutch heard Kayla turn and run away, back toward her house. He looked up in time to see Starsky take a few steps after her and then abandon the chase before he reached the driveway. He did call her name a couple of times, but Kayla didn’t turn around; she didn’t even slow down.

Frustrated, Starsky returned to the porch. He didn’t make eye contact with Hutch. When Hutch began to apologize again for his role in blowing Starsky’s cover and causing that painful exchange, Starsky cut him off. “Give me a minute,” he said as he disappeared into the house.

When was Hutch going to learn to keep his mouth shut? Why didn’t he realize sooner that Kayla didn’t yet know Starsky’s true identity? Where did he lose sight of his partner’s friendship with a woman who apparently once trusted him and maybe even desired him?

Starsky returned to the porch a minute later with a set of keys. He closed the front door, tapped Hutch’s knee as he walked by him, and said, “C’mon, let’s go.”

Hutch followed him off the porch and out to the car; Starsky got into the driver’s seat, and Hutch into the passenger’s, and they closed their doors at the same time. A chill went down Hutch’s spine. He looked over at Starsky; Starsky looked over at him. They couldn’t see each other’s eyes behind their sunglasses, but Hutch knew they were experiencing the same moment.

“Just like old times,” Starsky said, proving it.

“Just like old times,” Hutch echoed.

They’d been in the car together already—when Hutch drove them to the pizza parlor the night they reunited, and again when Starsky drove them to his house afterward—but this time it was without the tension between them. Somehow, in some way—because things were as they should be—the sound in the car when they both closed their doors that morning was different. Familiar. Special. Home.

“Take this,” Starsky said, shoving a piece of paper into Hutch’s hands; he turned the ignition and then backed the Torino into the street. “Add some stuff to it.” At the bottom of the driveway, he shifted the gear into park, pulled a pen out of his back jeans pocket, and handed it to Hutch. “Leave no grocery shelf unturned.”

Before Hutch could even look at the list, Starsky held his attention by not driving forward; they sat in an idling car.

“I left a year ago because I didn’t want to live a lie,” Starsky quietly explained, “and then, there I was, living one for the past year. Don’t take responsibility for what just happened between me and Kayla. You pulled off the Band-Aid, but I’m the one who opened the wound.”

Hutch could tell from Starsky’s low voice that he was serious, so Hutch agreed to let it go; what Starsky wanted in that moment was paramount to him. “Okay.”

“I’m not going to apologize for being myself,” Starsky continued, “or blame you for being yourself. I’m not going to be sorry about who we are. I’m sorry for what I didn’t tell her and how I hurt her, but I’ll handle it from here, okay?”

“Okay,” Hutch said again.

“So let’s move ahead, shall we?”

He warmly smiled at Hutch before he finally stepped on the gas. “Hurry up and write down some stuff we’re going to need at the market; it’s not that far from here. You haven’t got much time.”

Hutch looked back to the list. He drew a long breath and then slowly let it out, purging the difficulty of that morning in his exhale. “Refresh my memory, Starsk: have you always been a grocery list-maker?”

“Not ones as long as that one,” Starsky admitted, “but you’re here now, and I’m out of everything, so we have a lot to get.”

“Why don’t we just go down each aisle and pick out what we need?”

“We might forget some things or not see them.”

“Speak for yourself.”

“I’m speaking for us, partner.”

Together again.

“‘Ice cream. Hot fudge. Peanut butter. Potato chips,’” Hutch read on the list—underneath toilet paper and beer. “I’ll write down some real food,” he decided, compromising. “That way you get your list and I can keep from being malnourished.”

“If I was going to buy health food, numb nuts, then why would I need you, hm?”

Hutch clapped back, enjoying the morning banter. “Shall I make a list of all the reasons you need me?”

“Nah,” Starsky replied, blowing an air kiss in Hutch’s direction as he kept his eyes on the road. “I’ll settle for just the Top 100.”

* * *

“What are you doing?”

Starsky grumbled incoherently as he fussed around in his closet. “Looking for a box,” he impatiently said.

Hutch knew which one. “I put it on the top shelf.” He lay on the bed, on his side, temple propped in his palm, nude under the sheet pulled to his waist, and watched Starsky rummage through his things.

It was a nice view: Starsky’s backside, albeit dressed in his tight-fitting denim shorts and loose tee-shirt, and barefoot, but the shape of his butt and his tanned legs and the back of his head were pleasing to look at just the same. “It’s right there in front of your face, Mr. Magoo.”

“Oh,” Starsky cheerfully said when he spied it. He quickly grabbed the shoebox and brought it to the bed, clumsily climbing onto the mattress. “I want to show you something,” he said with a hint of excitement. He sat cross-legged up against the bend in Hutch’s groin, and opened the box.

Hutch didn’t let on that he knew about its contents, having accidentally dropped a few of the postcards on the bed when making room for his clothes in Starsky’s dresser the day before. His man was much too excited to rain on that parade. “Pictures you took?”

“I didn’t take that many,” Starsky complained, attempting to organize the postcards in his hands. “I was afraid my camera might get stolen, so I kept it locked in the trailer. Stupid me.”

“So no pictures of the Grand Canyon?”

“Wouldn’t have mattered; no way you can capture that place in a picture. But I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know.”

“Have you ever?”

Starsky punched Hutch’s hip with his elbow to retaliate for the dig. “But that reminds me. You wouldn’t happen to know where that picture of you and me at my mom’s Thanksgiving dinner some years back happens to be, would you?”

“I would.”

“I thought so.”

Starsky didn’t ask Hutch to produce it; he apparently just wanted to know Hutch had been sentimental enough to take it from Dorothy’s apartment when he wormed his way in with hopes of learning something about Starsky’s whereabouts.

Hutch watched him shuffle the postcards, presumably putting them in the order he bought them. He also studied Starsky’s profile, the length of his dark eyelashes, his long nose, the shape of his cheek. But he decided against running his fingers through Starsky’s hair; Starsky was intent on composing his postcards and wouldn’t appreciate the interruption.

“How’d these all get rearranged, hm? Did you look through these?”

“Invade your privacy, Starsk? What do you take me for?”

“Well, you stole that picture from my mom, so who knows what you’re capable of anymore.” He said it with a chuckle, as if proud of his insult.

It was early evening; Hutch had made dinner from the abundance of groceries they’d purchased earlier in the day. Once the store items had been put away, Starsky left to see Kayla after he and Hutch ate an eclectic lunch together, and then he and Starsky spent the afternoon on housework—both the cleaning kind and the minor handyman tasks.

Hutch was first to shower and get into bed, turning out the lights except the lamp on the nightstand, and looking forward to a more relaxed sexual experience—especially since they’d bought an abundant supply of almond oil—but Starsky obviously had other plans.

“Well, anyway,” Starsky explained after settling on the order of his postcards, “I bought these on my way out here.” He showed Hutch one with a desert campsite of RVs and tents under a dusky sky and full moon. “That’s Quartzsite,” he explained. “This is where that serial killer … well … anyway … you can see it’s out in the middle of nowhere.” He let Hutch study it for a moment.

“You spent your first night there?” Hutch recalled. He draped his forearm over Starsky’s knee so he could hold the card along with Starsky, as if to share the moment, but mostly he enjoyed the warmth of Starsky’s haired skin against his own.

“Yeah. Slept in my truck there. I should have taken a picture of that.” He then turned the postcard over and read what he’d written on it months earlier. “‘Hey, Hutch. You don’t know camping in the wild-ness’—I couldn’t spell wilderness—‘until you’ve pitched a tent in the Arizona desert. I think I heard wolves howling. Maybe werewolves?’” He laughed.

“Yeah, probably werewolves since—”

“Shut up.” He posed the next postcard, one of the Grand Canyon at sunrise. “This place knocked me to my knees,” he admitted, his voice low as he remembered the moment. On the back, he read, “‘I have no words, Hutch, so I’ll leave this blank.’” After a momentary pause, he added, “I figured you’d know what I meant.”

“I do,” Hutch softly said, feeling choked up when he imagined Starsky on his knees at the edge of the Grand Canyon—wishing Hutch could have been with him at the time. Hutch wishing the same.

Starsky lingered on the front of the card, then hit Hutch on the top of his head with it, and tossed it back into the box. “Let’s move on.”

And so the time went: Starsky showing Hutch every postcard he’d bought along his drive from Los Angeles to Maryland—and every detour in between. He read the postscripts out loud, sometimes without much reflection, but often with a drawn-out pause, as if reliving the moments or feeling the loss or fighting off regrets.

“I didn’t mail them for two reasons,” he confessed when he finished.

“I can guess both of them.”

“You think so, Sherlock?”

“One, I’d know from the postmark where you’d been; might figure out where you were going.”

“And two?”

“You hated me.”

“I was hurt,” Starsky corrected him. “Don’t ever forget that part. I never hated you.”

Hutch squeezed Starsky’s leg, feeling its muscle despite the gentle affection. “I wouldn’t have blamed you if you did.”

“Well, you don’t get to not blame me because I didn’t hate you,” Starsky said as he neatly placed the postcards into the box. “Wait. What’s this?” he asked, pulling something else out. “Oh, yeah. You won’t believe it, Hutch, but I went to a Broadway play.” He showed Hutch his ‘Playbill.’

Hutch choked on a breath when he saw its familiar cover. A black-and-white art graphic of a silhouetted man facing a man to his left and a woman to his right appeared above the play’s title: ‘Betrayal. Trafalgar Theatre.’

Hutch was stunned into silence.

Starsky flipped through its pages. “You’da been proud of me,” he predicted. “Me at a Broadway play. Can you picture it? Went with my mother and Nick and his girlfriend, Donna. Mom got a little weird over Roy Scheider,” he laughed with the memory, “but … anyway … you should have been at that play, Hutch. It reminded me of our … situation.”

“What night were you there?” Hutch asked when he found his courage. It couldn’t be what he imagined.

“Let’s see.” On the back of the pamphlet, Starsky read his notes. “‘Saturday, April 26, 1980.’”

It was everything Hutch imagined and more than he could believe.

“I’m not saying you betrayed me,” Starsky quickly said, still flipping through the ‘Playbill’ pages. “I’m just saying it was about, you know, third parties and bad decisions and such.”

Hutch would never forget how he felt that night, channeling Starsky, imagining that his partner was in the audience with him, forcing every painful word and notion into his head to make him pay for the hurt he’d caused. And there Starsky was: in the audience that night.

“What?” Starsky asked when Hutch didn’t say more; they locked eyes in the amber glow of a lone nightstand lamp. Then he seemed to do some mental detective work and came to his own inevitable conclusion. “You’re not saying you were there, too, are you?”

“Saturday night, April 26. Clear view of the stage, up close.”

They were speechless—again.

Starsky was first to swallow his disbelief. “I had this uneasy feeling all night that you were in the room.”

“Same.”

“Jesus. What ever made us think for a goddamn second that we could go into our lives without each other, hm?”

“My stupidity.”

“We have that in common.”

“One of us more than the other.”

Starsky thought for half a minute. Hutch expected him to comment further about their collective stupidity, but instead, he said, “I told Kayla about us when I went over to her house today.”

“You told Kayla about ‘us’ us?”

“I told her about ‘us’ us. I wanted her to know why she couldn’t have me.” He didn’t say it with any sort of smugness, but as fact. “First I told her that you and I were hired together as partners and that, for about ten years, we survived car chases and fist fights, stakeouts and shootouts, solved murder and rape cases, stopped child abuse, arrested drug dealers, caught serial killers, fought among ourselves, and laid down our lives for each other.”

“That, we did, partner. Don’t forget we also saved lives—including our own.”

“Yeah. I told her we did everything else together, too: food and concerts and camping and double dates and movies and fishing and all things in between—except sex, which was something we got from women.”

“Until that changed.”

“That’s what I told her. ‘Until that changed.’ Exact words I used. I said I was in love with you—probably since the day we met. I told her you’re in love with me and that those facts are never going to change and I don’t think we’ll ever be apart again.”

“Not if I can help it.”

“Or me, either.”

Starsky suddenly hid his face behind his hands.

“Hey. What’s the matter, Starsk?”

Starsky’s breath was labored. Was he crying?

Hutch squeezed Starsky’s arm to get his attention, but it didn’t work. “Hey, c’mon. That was a lovely picture you painted of us. It should make you smile.”

Was Starsky missing whatever he may have ended with Kayla? Was he remembering all over again how deeply Hutch had hurt him?

“Starsk?” Hutch tried again, caressing Starsky’s leg, hoping for a reaction.

Starsky dropped his hands from his face and shoved the shoebox out of his way to push Hutch onto his back. Tears had pooled in his eyes.

“What’s wrong, sweetheart?” Hutch softly asked. He stroked Starsky’s cheek, held eye contact with those sorry-filled blue eyes, himself feeling overwhelmingly confused and concerned. What had he done or said to cause Starsky’s emotional break?

“Oh, Hutch,” was all Starsky said. He cradled Hutch’s head in his hands and kissed Hutch’s face, his nose and mouth, his forehead and cheeks—not for sex, but out of deep and warm affection. After a minute, he seemed to collect himself, leaned away, and gazed into Hutch’s eyes.

“Talk to me, Starsk,” Hutch begged him in the pause.

Starsky finally did.

“After all that, after all we’d been through together and everything we meant to each other, after knowing I would die for you and die without you, I still can’t believe that I thought my best course of action was to leave you.”

* * *

EPILOGUE: A NEW BEGINNING

“Thanks for dinner,” Starsky said, raising his wine glass toward Hutch in a friendly toast. “Simon might be better at Italian food than you are, but overall, you’re my favorite lay … I mean, chef.”

Hutch lightly laughed and then drank to the salutation. “I do make a mean peanut butter-and-jelly sandwich.”

“And give one hell of a blowjob.”

They sat on the porch that warm Sunday evening to share an after-dinner drink and watch the fireflies, having spent the day in the backyard, rearranging the deck, deciding where Starsky should build the greenhouse, and mowing two lawns—the one at Starsky’s house and the other at Mr. Mackey’s. Hutch helped by pruning bushes at both residences, and was later introduced to Mackey who invited them in for a cool beer each and some stories.

A long, hot day working in the sun, a refreshing shower, an early dinner, and a shared bottle of red wine, were the perfect set-up to relaxing on the porch, overlooking green grass and large shade trees. Hutch was certainly in his element, Starsky decided, and that was good enough for him, too.

“But speaking of Simon,” Hutch said, drawing Starsky’s attention away from his study of the front yard, “he and his partner have asked us to dinner Friday night. Simon is really excited about meeting you.”

Starsky looked over at Hutch. “I thought you were his partner.”

“Part-time. Certain cases. But his legit partner is Joe Razolli. Younger guy. By the book.”

“Razolli. Where do I know that name?”

“How would I know?”

“I wasn’t asking you,” Starsky replied with a roll of his eyes. “But I’ve heard that name before. Oh, I know!” he said with a snap of his fingers. “He’s the guy I talked to at the FBI when I first got out here. I remember it because he had an Italian name if ever there was one: sounded like ravioli.”

Hutch didn’t laugh; he seemed set on a different point. “You were looking for FBI work?”

“Witness protection,” Starsky purposefully muttered, lowering his voice to ease the blow. “But it didn’t pan out because I learned law enforcement could still get access to my records.”

“Where there’s a will, there’s a way,” Hutch presumed.

“Yeah, and funny thing: turned out I was being tracked by someone in law enforcement.” He glanced at Hutch to make sure his partner wasn’t offended by his attempt to seek federal protection from him.

“So … you could run, but you couldn’t hide,” Hutch concluded with a slight scowl. And that was all there was to his reaction: not much of one.

“But what it means, Hutch, is that we sort of crossed paths at the FBI—twice now. The serial killer thing. And your partner ran into your other partner’s partner.”

“I actually followed that line of logic.”

“Good,” Starsky said, finishing his wine and setting his glass beside the empty bottle on the small patio table between them—as his way of closing that conversation. The past needed to stay in the past, and he was doing his best to keep it there. He then noticed Kayla had just crossed the street and was headed toward his house. “Buckle up, Boyfriend,” he said, pointing her out to Hutch. “She’s on her way over.”

“You didn’t finish telling me how that ended yesterday—just that you’d told her about ‘us’ us,” Hutch reminded him. “Is she on the warpath?”

“I explained a lot. She cried a lot. In the end, I told her if she wanted me to leave the neighborhood, I would, but that my feelings for her haven’t changed—and I was really sorry I hurt her. Because I am.”

“So maybe she’s on her way over to evict you?”

Starsky grunted. He was prepared for his fate. “Where I go, you go, Hutch.”

“I beg to differ, pal. It’s more like, where I go, you go.”

Starsky grinned. “And that’s all we need to know.”

Kayla stopped at the bottom of the steps carrying a sealed food container. When Starsky smiled at her, she came up onto the porch. “Good evening, boys,” she said, looking at both of them, but her eyes were mostly on Starsky. “I made some cookies for the clinic and have some extras for you—assuming you like peanut butter?”

“He eats it out of the jar by the spoonful,” Hutch told her. “We had to buy a case of it this morning and he’s already gone through half of it.”

Kayla frowned at Starsky, pretending to be disgusted, but addressed Hutch. “He said you’re a good cook and I should stop by at mealtimes now-and-then for proof.”

“I must be good,” Hutch concluded. “He eats what I make and never complains.”

“I don’t want to waste food and hurt his feelings,” Starsky explained.

“He’s rude, too,” Hutch joked. “But of course you’re welcome to stop by any time, Kayla. I’ll be sure to make enough just in case.”

“He also said it would be a nice way to get to know you better,” Kayla furthered.

Hutch seemed visibly appreciative. “It works both ways.”

“We just had dinner,” Starsky injected, “but would you care to join us for some vino? I can open another bottle; your choice.” He couldn’t help but think that Kayla was telling him in a roundabout way that she hoped he would stay in the neighborhood.

Maybe she’d seen Starsky and Hutch taking care of Mr. Mackey’s lawn and bushes earlier and was reminded of what great neighbors they made.

Or perhaps she simply decided she’d rather have Starsky any way she could get him rather than not have him at all. It was a lesson he tried to teach her during their emotional conversation the day before—wishing he’d given himself that same advice about Hutch the previous September.

But she declined the drink. “Maybe some other time. I wanted to bring you cookies before my girlfriend comes over to watch a movie with me.” She handed the food container to Starsky. “Don’t forget to return the bowl.”

“I won’t—if you promise to fill it as soon as I bring it back.”

She laughed. “I’ll see what I can do.”

After she left the men to themselves, Starsky looked over at Hutch. For a minute, he savored the picture of his partner sitting in the patio chair, slouched and relaxed, holding a glass of wine in his lap with both hands, outstretched legs, dressed in clean cotton shorts and tee-shirt, barefoot, having sex-showered with Starsky that late afternoon, now gazing onto the yard.

Hutch would never not be beautiful. All male and smart, formidable and kind—right there in person and belonging only to Starsky in the end. That Hutch loved Starsky with all his heart was simply icing on a chocolate cake.

They were together again. Forever, as far as Starsky was concerned—and he believed Hutch felt the same way. “Hey,” he said, getting Hutch’s attention.

Hutch looked back at him and smiled when their eyes met. “Hey, yourself.”

“It begs the question.”

“What does?”

“About where we’re going to land.”

“No place in particular?”

“I mean, what we’re going to do with our lives and where we’re going to do it.”

Hutch thought a moment and then said, “Here’s as good a place as any, don’t you think?”

“We also have a big beautiful house in sunny California waiting for us.”

“Waiting for us to sell it, maybe. Here we have a kind of house-in-the-country—with custom touches, no less.”

Starsky was proud of his work; he could tell Hutch was proud of him, too. “True. But you can’t have a backyard fence out here; no way to get into our hot tub naked without being seen.”

“I’m sure you could build a privacy fence around the tub. Where there’s a will, there’s a way?”

“I could. But there’s no snow in Los Angeles.”

“Be nice to have a change of seasons, wouldn’t it? Cozy up to the fireplace, roast marshmallows, read you some bedtime stories, give you a foot massage, and suck your dick?”

Starsky lightly laughed. “That does sound appetizing.” He knew they were just throwing out the pros and cons of either coast in the country, but at some point they would have to settle into one place or the other. “We’d miss Dobey and Huggy.”

“We have new friends here. You and yours, me and mine. Besides, we can always pay the Golden State a visit now and then—and maybe finance Dobey’s trip out here to celebrate after he retires, and bring Huggy along. I would bet he’d love that. Our families are closer, too.”

“Yeah. Okay. Suppose then we sold the L.A. house. How would that look, hm?”

“We could drive your truck out there, do some of that sightseeing we want to do along the way, pack my stuff into your trailer, hire a realtor to handle the sale, tie up a few loose ends, and return on a different route to see even more sites on the way back. Voila.”

“Or simpler still: we just pack me up here and drive across country, move into our California house, and never have to shovel snow.”

Hutch smiled. Without words, he reminded Starsky that they’d both shoveled snow in their childhoods and it wasn’t a deal-breaker. “Good reason to just hunker down with that fireplace—suck more cock.”

“I’m not against cock-sucking in front of a fire, but we can have sex anywhere. I think we’ve proven that by now.”

“But we haven’t yet had sex in front of a roaring fire in your custom-touched home to seal the deal. Seems we ought to at least do that sometime.”

Starsky laughed, but thought further into their future. “We could probably get our old jobs back if we wanted them,” he assumed. “Dobey would make sure of that.”

“Or maybe we work together as partners—special agents—at the FBI instead. I have some pull there.”

“Well, I do like the sound of that,” Starsky admitted. He wondered what kind of federal jobs those would be and realized learning something new, while bringing their experience to the table, might be a more interesting adventure in law enforcement. They were in Devil’s Advocate mode, however, so he picked up where he left off. “But the commute from here to FBI Headquarters is 40 minutes one way.”

“Thirty in L.A. So it’s only ten minutes longer.”

“Higher fuel costs.”

“Through beautiful country.”

Starsky had run out of suppositions. “Lots to think about, Hutch.”

“Well, my gut tells me that you should buy this house, Starsk. No rush to sell the one in California. Get your hands on this one that you’ve put so much work into. Buys us time, too. If we decide to sell the one here, you’ll make a profit on the house; if we sell there, we at least break even on our investment. Or maybe we keep both houses and split our time between local and national law enforcement.”

“Damn, Hutch. That actually sounds like a smart idea—but only if we buy this house together because I’m doing everything from here on out with you, not separate from you.”

Hutch’s expression softened. He lifted his glass in a quiet toast. “The feeling is mutual, sweetheart.”

Starsky smiled at him. In the end, he did trust Hutch, implicitly. He did respect him. He did love him. He knew Hutch trusted, respected, and loved him in kind. They were permanently bonded, having always been meant for each other, not able to live without the other one. That much they’d finally come to understand—and proven.

Life was about to be everything they wanted.

“Well, I may not know much, Hutch, but I do know one thing for certain.”

“Yeah, buddy? What’s that?”

Starsky blew him an air kiss. “We’re gonna need a bigger bed.”

* * *

THE END