Tibetan Hut Theory

Unforeseen circumstances force Starsky and Hutch to be guests at the Dobey house at Christmas. The partners remind each other in their own ways what is most important in life.

This story was originally posted in December 2005 at the Love of Me and Thee list as part of the Secret Santa program.

“Put that thing down,” Hutch whispered urgently.

Kneeling on the twin bed’s pillow, Starsky teetered under the weight of a massive painting framed in thick faux gold. “I’ll put it down on the floor,” Starsky answered, not whispering, “when I can work out the next part.”

“Next part?” Hutch tossed an anxious look at the door, but his eyes had a mind of their own and didn’t want to spend too much time away from the enticing spectacle of Starsky in obscenely tight underwear, all his muscles emphasized by his awkward position and straining arms. If Starsky’s herky-jerky movements were any indication, the “next part” involved backing away from the wall without toppling to the floor and doing a good latke impersonation under the heavy artwork.

“Here, let me help,” Hutch said, taking mercy, but Starsky’s sideways glare kept him glued to his own bed.

“Never you mind. Your fault I’m having to do this.” With the concentrated expression of a brain surgeon in the OR, Starsky moved backward inch by inch on his knees.

“My fault? Why is it my fault that you’re rearranging artwork?”

“You won’t let me sleep over there with you, that’s why.”

Hutch looked up at the matching painting a few feet above his own headboard. “You’re the one afraid of a harmless–”

“Harmless, hell! I’m tellin’ you, this thing was poised to drop in the middle of the night, and the results wouldn’t be pretty. Yours isn’t wobbly. But even for my safety’s sake–” Starsky wavered, and Hutch cringed, expecting both man and painting to end up in a noisy crash on the floor. Equilibrium regained, Starsky maneuvered around to face him and carefully lowered the painting. “Even for my safety,” he continued breathlessly, “you won’t let me in your bed. On a night like tonight, for crying out loud!”

Hutch rolled his eyes. “You’re the sexiest pouter alive, Starsky, but it won’t work this time. We’re in the captain’s house.”

“And Dobey’s not dumb. We’ve had the same address for six months; you think he hasn’t figured by now that we didn’t move in together to form a commune?”

Hutch felt a mournful pang at the mention of their address. “Sure he’s figured it out, which makes it even more telling that he showed us to the room with paintings of ballerinas posing in full regalia over each bed!”

The outrageous remark in Hutch’s alarmed voice did more than the outsized painting to knock Starsky off balance. Dangerously close to pitching off the bed and landing on the ballerinas that had caused the uproar, Starsky never took his astonished eyes off his partner, but his natural agility saved him yet again. Hutch took a deep breath in relief when the painting rested safely against the small chest-of-drawers between the two beds.

Starsky turned his attention to the relocated artwork. Then he burst out laughing. “That’s what’s got you uptight? He meant nothing by it, dummy.”

“Oh, really? I’ll have you know the Dobeys have two spare rooms.”

“Yeah, and the one downstairs has a double bed.” Starsky sat cross-legged in the center of the bed and lazily cracked the knuckles on his right hand. “He couldn’t put us in there. He’d be admitting to us that he knows.”

Hutch rolled onto his back and pulled the thick quilt up to his chest. “Then we’ll just protect his deniability.”

“Come on, Hutch.” Starsky’s dejected groan was overly loud in the small room. “You’re miles away.”

Hutch hid a smile. “If I let you in this bed, you’d never behave yourself.”

“Much you know. I’m beat to a frazzle.” A hearty yawn corroborated the remark.

Hearing the change in voice indicating real weariness, Hutch turned on his side and searched Starsky’s face for signs of anything other than normal fatigue and adrenaline letdown after their traumatic evening. “If I let you in this bed, I’d never behave.”

The glimmer of a grin in the bedside lamp’s soft glow reassured Hutch. Starsky made a show of smothering a yawn. “Hot for me, you hunk of burnin’ blond? If you’re really feeling the need, I’m sure I can work up the energy.”

“I’m sure you could work up more than the energy. Should’ve thought of this when you jumped at Edith’s offer.”

“But…but…” Starsky waved his hand at the door. “You saw her. She was about to cry over us. Tomorrow we can make a speech about inconveniencing them and go find a hotel, and when Huggy gets back into town, he’ll find us a good place to crash, but I couldn’t turn Edith down on Christmas Eve.”

“I better never hear you call me ‘softie’ again.”

Starsky’s mutterings were explicit as he pulled back the quilt to slip beneath the sheets. Hutch tried not to watch the graceful lengthening of Starsky’s body, all languid movement backed by sinewy muscle. He slapped at the lamp until he found the switch. Blinded in the first moments of pitch darkness, unable to see his partner, Hutch felt like a sunflower denied daylight. “Starsk?”

A mere grunt answered him.

“It’ll be all right,” Hutch offered tenderly. “It’s going to be…okay. Everything.”

“Sure.”

“No matter what comes down, we have each other.”

“Yeah, even if we are four feet apart like Ward and June Cleaver. Or Ozzie and Harriet.”

“It could’ve been worse.” Hutch was irrationally grateful his eyes were adjusting in the shimmer of moonlight to make out the lump of covers that was Starsky.

“Right. Dobey could’ve put us in separate rooms.”

“Damn it, Starsky, I’m talking about the reason we’re here in the first place!”

The lump moved, and Starsky’s face peeked out of the quilted cave. “I know. That’s over and done. Can’t be undone. I’m talking about the here and now.”

Hutch became aware of a chill in his fingers and toes and the sensation of cottony fuzziness surrounding his head. Starsky was watching him intently. Starsky. His best friend, his hearth and home, his only real treasure. The fuzziness cleared, and through the dissipating chill, Hutch heard his inner voice start to sing to its mate in Starsky’s death-defying heart. “I think there’s room over here for two. If you scrunch in really tight.”

“Now you’re talking!” Starsky’s scramble into Hutch’s bed slammed the headboard against the wall. “Don’t worry,” Starsky soothed him. “Wasn’t as loud as you think. Rosie probably thinks Santa’s sleigh is landing on the roof.”

“And Cal?” Hutch urged his intimate organs to make like the mouse in the famous Christmas poem when Starsky started the scrunching, twining their legs and burrowing down on his stomach with his left arm draped over Hutch’s chest.

“Cal’s one of those bull-by-the-horns college freshmen now. You saw the look he gave us when we got here tonight. He would’ve asked us which one likes it on top, but he didn’t want his momma rushed to the hospital with a stroke.”

“If he’d asked us that, you would’ve been rushing me to the hospital with a stroke.”

Starsky raised his head from the pillow, and his bedmate trembled under those knowing eyes. “You’re acting like you’ve had one already. Your arms paralyzed or something?”

Hutch immediately latched his arms around his lover and trembled again because Starsky was in the final phase of snuggling for maximum comfort. A rumble in the darkness suggested Starsky’s body was more concerned with satisfying a different need.

“Starving,” Starsky muttered.

“Starsky, if you’re thinking about a fridge raid, just forget it.”

“Edith said to make ourselves at home.”

“Yes, and she and Dobey are probably still in the living room putting together Rosie’s stereo cabinet. They’ll want to talk to us about…everything…and I just don’t feel like being sociable right now.” Starsky’s stomach growled its protest, and Hutch groaned. “I swear, your timing!”

“Don’t start. First we got called back in on the stakeout assist just after we sat down to dinner, then some blond turkey–who’ll remain nameless to protect the guilty–dropped our takeout bags when Alvaro showed at the dock, and before we could even get through our prelim arrest reports, we got the call.”

The call. Hutch didn’t want to think about the call. “If you want to lay blame for the great takeout fiasco, look in the wall mirror over there. You were out of the car faster than greased lightning and I was left to secure the vehicle and alert the black-and-whites all while trying to teleport myself to your location before you could get yourself in over your curly little head.”

“Say that with a little more condescension, I dare ya. The point of a stakeout is to catch the guy you’re staking out, right? Correct me if I’m wrong here. And if I have to be on a Christmas Eve stakeout instead of making love to my partner by candlelight under the Christmas tree, I damn well intend to the nail the bastard.”

“Not that nailing him is much consolation now.” Hutch sighed. “Why are we doing this?”

“Sparring’s more fun than looking for patterns on the spackled ceiling.”

“A channel for post-trauma energy,” Hutch added. “Or am I the only one feeling that?”

Starsky pressed sizable proof of his own desperation against Hutch’s thigh. “Listen, man’a mine, I wanna fuck you all the way through the floor and into the Christmas tree downstairs, but it’s kinda hard to protect Dobey’s deniability with you screaming ‘God I love your cock,’ and there’s no Santa’s sleigh explanation for that one!”

The thought of Starsky claiming him under Dobey’s roof was so alluring that Hutch’s buttocks clenched and his leg muscles tried to turn him over on their own accord, his heart contributing another rush of blood to his already granite erection. Before his head could join the mutiny against common sense, Hutch scooted out from under Starsky’s weight. He misjudged the remaining bed space. Strong arms pulled him back from the impending fall. “Thanks,” Hutch said when his heart bid farewell to his vocal chords.

“Were you diving headfirst out of bed because you hate the idea or because you love it?”

Hutch never underestimated the seriousness of a furrowed brow, unsmiling Starsky. “I wish you could be halfway up my ass by now.”

Happiness turned Starsky’s face into a sexy nightlight, his smile totally out of proportion to what Hutch considered a basic truth, and he seemed to be holding in exuberant shouts as if he’d had the gift of a Ferrari sprung on him in the Library of Congress. With a lingering gaze at the door, Starsky exhaled harshly and clucked his tongue in disappointment. “Raid the fridge with me?”

“Good idea.” Out of bed and hobbling in the dim lamplight over to their meager store of worldly goods, Hutch noticed a new predicament. “Not a good idea.”

“What?” Starsky asked, voice muffled by the sweatshirt over his head.

Hutch stared at Starsky’s swollen crotch. “We can’t go downstairs looking like we’re about to debut with the Bay City All Male Revue.”

Starsky lifted the hem of sweatshirt for a look. Hutch had to adjust himself under the almost tangible caress of Starsky’s eyes. Always practical when Hutch was too flustered for analytical thought, Starsky ducked completely out of the sweatshirt and tossed it to him. “Give me your sweater.”

“What good will that do?”

“This sweatshirt’s long on me, so it’ll just come down over you. Your sweater won’t do the trick for you, but it’ll probably cover me.”

“Just barely,” Hutch argued, but he handed over the sweater. He held Starsky’s sweatshirt to his face and breathed deep, but he brought it down quickly, wanting a full view of the inspiring sight taking shape four feet away. The beige V-neck sweater in combination with Starsky’s favorite jeans warranted a fashion photography set-up with a cityscape backdrop and fan-blown wind. “You think you’re clever, don’t you?”

Starsky was patting his hair down and paused with his palms on the back of his head, arms raised in an unstudied erotic pose, completing the illusion of a male model seducing the camera. “Huh?”

Hutch shrugged into the sweatshirt, tugging the hem down over his zipper-straining erection. Just his luck to be wearing the beige slacks with the faulty zipper that needed repair every two weeks. “You looking like that, me wearing your scent. You’re trying to keep me hard, don’t deny it. I know all your wiles by now, friend.”

“Hutch. You’re acting weird. Can we go get some food now before my stomach busts its way out and heads downstairs without us?”

Shushing each other with warning hisses and forefingers to lips, they managed to avoid the one step that always creaked through its carpet padding, but two steps from the middle landing they encountered a streak of white-and-black fur where fur shouldn’t be expected, much less fur in motion, and had to clutch at each other for shared balance.

Heavy footsteps from the living room brought Dobey to the stairs before his guests could detangle themselves. Noise from above alerted them to Cal’s arrival at the upstairs hallway railing. In addition to sweatpants and Lakers t-shirt, Cal indeed wore a smirk ten years his senior. Hutch didn’t go so far as to push Starsky away, but his hurried release of his partner’s supportive arms had to look much the same, and he burned with anger that he felt like a cliché movie felon caught in the glare of a police spotlight against a wall.

Cal was still smirking, damn the boy.

Starsky caught Cal’s eye, matched his smirk, and said, “We both do.”

Dobey had to wonder why his son was suddenly the caricature of a boy caught thinking about sex in church, but he only asked Starsky, “You both do what?”

Cal had vanished, driven back to his room by Starsky’s uncanny mind reading, and Hutch was on the verge of screaming inside, but Starsky, cool as icebox lemonade, shrugged away the question and gestured at their feet. “What the heck was that?”

Dobey came bounding up the stairs. “That was a cat. You’ve never seen a cat before?”

“You don’t have a cat,” Hutch said, and fielded a “Good one, Blondie” look from Starsky, who pulled him to the side out of Captain Battering Ram’s way.

“We do now,” Dobey huffed. “Rosie’s been burning our ears off with cat, cat, cat, so we got her a kitten. We’ve been keeping the little troublemaker in my study until tomorrow morning, but I went in there without thinking and she got by me.”

Edith made the next appearance. In the way of happily married women, hair curlers and well lived-in flannel dressing gown only enhanced her beauty, and Dobey’s face softened. Cuddling a white-and-black furball to her chest, she didn’t act surprised at the congregation on the stairs. “She found her way to our room, Harold. Thank goodness she’s not a crier or the surprise would’ve been spoiled. You can bet Rosie’s only pretending to sleep right now. You boys need something?”

“We were planning a raid on your fridge,” Hutch admitted.

Ever the natural hostess, Edith maneuvered by Dobey and showed her approval with a pat on Hutch’s back and a squeeze of Starsky’s shoulder. “I’m glad. You were too upset to eat when you got here…understandably so, but I was still worried. Let me help you find something. Harold can take care of our little friend here.”

Subtle and gentle punishment for his thoughtlessness in aiding the kitten’s escape, and Dobey clearly knew it. He accepted the kitten in his hands, a new father learning to hold his two-day-old, and glared Starsky into silence.

~*~

Lured to the kitchen by the aroma of leftovers, Dobey found Starsky putting away a meatloaf sandwich and Hutch pretending to have an appetite for pumpkin-nut bread. Edith smiled on sight of her husband. “I was just telling the boys I’m going to have to turn in. But you’ll up for awhile yet?”

“Yes, I have one more shelf to go on the stereo cabinet.”

“We’d be glad to help you with that,” Hutch offered, nibbling one more corner off his pumpkin bread while Edith was still looking on. Dobey appreciated the small kindness. Hutch was in no frame of mind to enjoy the world’s rarest delicacy, and yet he wouldn’t allow his hostess to go to bed worrying that his littlest need wasn’t met.

“Thank you, Hutchinson, but I can take care of it. Goodnight, baby,” he said to his wife, slipping his arm around her waist and granting her a soft kiss to her upturned cheek. On her way by, she patted his chest the way he liked, and he caught Hutch giving Starsky a soft smile, somehow more blatant with no mustache to obscure the curve of his lips. The image of their accidental embrace in the stairwell broadsided him. He wanted to take refuge in front of the late night TV broadcast of some foreign choir and orchestra’s Handel’s Messiah, but he needed questions answered first, and he had never run from anything involving these men. The indomitable, irreplaceable Zebra Three.

He fixed himself a cup of coffee and brought it over to the breakfast nook table. “I know we haven’t had a chance to talk, so lay it out for me now. What happened?”

“Christmas lights,” Starsky said.

Dobey looked at Hutch. “Didn’t I hear you two arguing about decorations in the squad room the other day? Thought you decided against putting lights on your house.”

“The neighbors,” Hutch explained. “Everything from giant lawn reindeer to a complete Santa-in-his-sleigh set-up on the roof. It’s a wonder they didn’t knock out a grid on the city’s power circuit, and it’s a shame they didn’t. Then there wouldn’t have been….”

Hutch averted his face. Focused on his partner’s profile, Starsky winced. Oddly enough, Dobey relaxed. This instinctive sharing of each other’s pain was nothing new for his detectives, and the familiarity put him at ease. “What’s the damage?”

“The Stewarts’ place is a total loss, but the family got out okay, thank God. By the time we could get there from Metro–” Again Hutch broke off mid-sentence, and this time Starsky clasped his upper arm, squeezing lightly until Hutch made eye contact. “The wind’s been up tonight, but even so, with quick Fire Department response, we should have gotten off easy.”

“But you didn’t.”

Hutch shook his head wearily. “There was a malfunction. A delay in getting the right water pressure, and then the opposite. A flood. No telling how the insurance adjuster will detail it, but what the fire didn’t do, the water damage finished.”

Dobey could tell neither man wanted to itemize their losses. He planned to slip away after Christmas breakfast and view the scene for himself. “I know you have next week off. You’re welcome to stay here, but if you’d like some help making last-minute travel arrangements–” He saw Starsky’s face stiffen, and Hutch’s eyes showed a vulnerability that went beyond the damage earthly elements could do.

Dobey regretted his careless offer. He should have guessed, knowing they had requested vacation time without plans to leave Bay City. They weren’t welcome with their families, a rift so complete that an exception wouldn’t be made even in the face of their misfortune.

He had never found it easy to bear the injustice that his best men with their bone-deep integrity and selflessness had the hardest road to walk, both on the job and in their personal lives. “As I said, you’re welcome here.”

“Thanks, Captain.” Hutch’s smile barely parted his lips. “But we’ll manage without crowding you. You get so little time with your family; they need every bit of you when you do, especially around the holidays.”

Starsky nodded his agreement, offering a twin smile to Hutch’s. The faint midnight gong of Edith’s grandfather clock in the living room announced the first Christmas of the 1980s, and Dobey took his untouched coffee over to the sink to dump it. “Time for me to finish Rosie’s stereo cabinet. I’m sorry. I know that’s not much, but there it is.”

But he didn’t return to the living room, lingering instead by the half-bath in the back hallway, out of sight but not earshot from the breakfast nook.

He knew he shouldn’t let himself hear something he’d have to deny later.

He knew eavesdropping was beneath him.

He couldn’t walk away.

After an expected silence, Hutch spoke first. “Starsky, rushing home with you tonight, I couldn’t think about anything but you. I still had you. Nothing else mattered. Nothing but your hand in mine, gripping my fingers, rubbing my palm with your thumb. I can still feel it. I was glad we had to stop at traffic lights, because it was easier to hear your breathing. Maybe the experts would call that shock–”

“You love me.”

“Damn right I do. Then we got here and I turned into an ass. All that shit about ballerinas. I’m ashamed I could even think of letting you sleep in that other bed.”

Starsky chuckled. “Now that was shock.”

“How could you tell it wasn’t just me being an ass?”

“I love you.”

“Yes, you do, lucky me. Why aren’t you acting all spacey?”

“Alice Adams.”

“I take it back, Starsk. You are in shock.”

“No, really. I ever tell you about a girl I knew in sixth grade, name of Alice Adams?”

“No. Wait a second. Yeah…two-hundred pounds, horn rims and acne? Married the doctor. Or the guy she married became a doctor, that’s it.” Hutch laughed. “She’s the one that got you playing those endless what-if games.”

“Yeah. Smart girl, Alice. I’ll never forget overhearing her in the lunch room with some of her brainy pals talking about the Tibetan hut theory.”

“I don’t remember running across that one in school.”

“Nah, it’s something Alice made up. She said she’d know her soul mate when she found the one person she could spend fifty years with in a Tibetan hut three-quarters up the side of Everest. I guess for Alice that was the most remote, unforgiving location she could think of. Her theory was the person would have to be someone you never got tired of talking to, listening to, someone you’d always want to be close to, and who’d make being stranded in the wilderness worthwhile. Someone you’d have fun fighting with. The one person you’d want by your side when you got sick and the only living beings around were yaks. Someone who’d still cuddle up to you to keep you warm when it was too hard to get enough hot water for baths and you started to smell like a yak. Someone who could be the only family you’d ever need. You get the picture.”

“It’s one hell of a beautiful picture, Starsky.”

“Put me in that Tibetan hut three-quarters up the side of Everest, and you’re the one I’d want with me, Hutch. You’re the only person I’ve ever felt that way about. You’ve shown me time and again I’m the only one you’ve ever felt that way about. Long as we have that, we’re richer than Sultans who could afford to use hundred-dollar bills for toilet paper.”

“I’d be honored to share that shack with you three-quarters up the side of Everest, and anybody who doesn’t like it can just take the fast train.”

Dobey reflected on an unwed Jewish girl with a child in her womb and a betrothed who turned his back on his society’s censure to take her for his wife, starting a life with her that would bring them more hardship and tears than earthly joy…and influence the course of Western civilization. He knew with certainty borne of some source far greater than himself that the love professed in his lowly kitchen would give the world hope worthy of that other couple’s triumph in a lowly stable.

“But let there be more joy, for these two, and fewer tears,” he whispered.

With a mission to fulfill before he could tune in for the Hallelujah Chorus and nail the last shelf into Rosie’s cabinet, Dobey went in search of spare Christmas decorations.

~*~

“We’re seeing things,” Hutch said. “Collective hallucination. Or wishful thinking.”

“Collective wishful thinking?”

“Well, we do everything else collectively.”

Grinning at him, Starsky fingered a leaf of the greenery bunched with a red ribbon, taped to the inside of their door just beneath the lintel. “Nope. It’s real. I mean it’s really there. It’s plastic, actually, but it’s mistletoe all right.”

“It wasn’t there when we first got here tonight. Or was I more out of it than I thought?”

“No, this is new. Trust me. I never let good mistletoe go to waste with you around.”

“Edith maybe?” Hutch checked the door’s lock, and Starsky knew he was going to get a Christmas kiss after all.

“I don’t think so, partner. Cal, neither. He thinks he’s such a man-of-the-world. Kid’s probably sleeping with his head under his pillow and hoping like hell his dad doesn’t ask him what I was talking about earlier.”

“Why’d you do that to the poor guy, Starsk?”

“Because you were about to turn into a puddle on the stairs or run screaming out the front door. You needed a little backup, and that’s my department.”

Hutch came to him then, pressing him gently against the closed door, cradling his jaw in hands roughened by passion Starsky could feel in the racing pulse point of Hutch’s fingers. He slipped his arms around Hutch’s waist and drew him in tight, wanting to make the kiss a full body event; a taste of the lovemaking he knew wasn’t included in the mistletoe’s license. But Hutch’s kisses were offering the impossible. Starsky had to swallow a telltale groan in the middle of we’re-gonna-get-it-on frenching.

Painful twitching below his waist made Starsky slide to the side out of the insistent embrace. “God knows I love your mouth about as much as I love you, but have mercy on my balls, hm? Blue’s not a Christmas color, and we’ve already celebrated Chanukah.”

Those beautiful lips nestled up to his ear and whispered, “You said something earlier about fucking me through the floor? Settle for fucking me on the floor?”

“We’re still in Dobey’s house.”

“No, we’re not.”

“We’re not? Hutch, I think you’re doing the shock thing again.”

“We’re in a Tibetan hut, three-quarters up the side of Everest.” Already out of Starsky’s sweatshirt, Hutch divested him of the sweater and Starsky watched while he made a nest of the clothes and their jackets, finishing with pillows from the bed. “Soul mates who need to keep each other warm. The bonus is, we don’t smell like yaks.”

Starsky sniffed his own armpit. “That peach soap Edith keeps in the guest shower.” Hutch stretched out on the nest of their clothes, propped comfortably against the pillows, and opened his arms. Starsky wanted more than anything to dive into the offered shelter. “We’re missing a key ingredient, schweetheart.”

“I love your mouth, too, Starsk, wherever you use it on me.”

Starsky had to clutch himself through his jeans. “You’d let me do that?”

“You can’t hike all the way down Everest to the nearest drugstore for lube. I’m no impossibly tight virgin, you softhearted guy, and you of all people know exactly how not to hurt me. You’re my Tibetan hut mate. It’s Christmas, and all we have is each other, so let’s have all of each other.”

Starsky dropped to his knees and crawled over to his hut mate’s waiting arms. “You know you get loud when I let loose, man’a mine, and I’m liable to really let loose.”

Hutch’s eyes were beautiful in their tenderness, his hands velvety on Starsky’s back, and his smile provided all the warmth their hut needed. “I won’t scream ‘God I love your cock,’ but I might just moan a little.”

“Rosie’ll probably think it’s Santa straining to fit down the chimney.”

They shared their laughter in a kiss that gave no concession to the Himalayan altitude.

~*~

Humming the Hallelujah Chorus under his breath, Dobey looked in on his daughter. Her rhythmic breathing testified to deep slumber and comfortable dreams. Knowing his college-age son would shout at him, Dobey risked peeking in Cal’s room. He did a double take, thinking Cal had snuck out and left a pillow decoy in the bed, but his boy was there, with his head buried under a pillow. Shaking his head at the weirdness of teenagers, he went to the bed and pulled the pillow free before his boy smothered himself. Cal snorted and half-turned but did not wake. Dobey tiptoed from the room, closing the door behind him. He paused outside the guest room, hoping to hear the silence of sleep. They needed their rest, not to burn the midnight oil worrying over future plans. Just when he’dsatisfied himself that silence reigned, a soft sound hastened Dobey down the hall.

It would be a long time before he could address his curly-haired detective without hearing “Sta-ah-h-rrr-sky” in the one tone of Hutchinson’s voice he had never really needed to know about…

…but he couldn’t complain when he’d asked God to give them more joy than tears.