Unbreakable

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PROLOGUE

It wasn’t like David Starsky to not beat him to the precinct every day—which made that particular Monday morning out of the ordinary by his car’s notable absence from the parking lot when Ken Hutchinson, him­self late for work, walked into the squad room and headed for their community desk. He asked a couple of the seated officers if they’d seen Starsky that morning; perhaps he’d gotten a ride to work instead and had since stepped out for a visit to the men’s room or, as was his nature, to one of the many candy vending machines in the building.

But no one had seen him. And—unlike Hutch—they weren’t all that con­cerned about not having seen him, either. One of his colleagues even rolled his eyes. “You remind me of that dysfunctional elephant,” he said, “you know the one: He had super-huge big ears that enabled him to fly, but he couldn’t get airborne without his magic feather clamped pathe­tically in his trunk.”

“You mean Disney’s Dumbo,” another chimed in.

“Yeah, that’s it. Dumbo. Starsky and Dumbo.”

A third joined the needling. “But it could work both ways, too. Star­sky is just as dysfunctional without Hutch. You sure you guys ain’t light in the loafers?”

Hutch glared at his detractors. He couldn’t explain it to them, that feeling he had in the pit of his stomach that morning, a queasy intuition that something was, indeed, genuinely wrong, because he did know Star­sky that well after all their years together, and if no one had seen him, something had happened that required he be seen. That, or Starsky didn’t want to face Hutch that morning—given their experience two nights earlier.

Hutch didn’t verbalize his hunch to his colleagues that his partner was in trouble, particularly in light of the details that gave it to him, but he did have a comeback to his fellow officers’ jabs. “In the end, the ele­phant did fly,” he reminded them, “which made him the most gifted pach­yderm on the planet.” He felt momentarily distracted from his con­cern about Starsky’s tardiness when he stumped them with his word choice in reference to elephants. “Look it up,” he suggested to their abrupt silence, “if you can figure out how to spell it, that is.” He gestured toward a well-used dictionary and then turned his back to fetch a cup of coffee which he hoped would drown the returning nag in his stomach. But he hadn’t removed his jacket; something told him he wouldn’t stay at headquarters for long.

Captain Dobey emerged from his office and spied Hutch. “Find your partner,” he gruffly told him as he patted his enlarged belly with the hope it would ease his distracting hunger. “The two of you get your asses in here.” He was in a particularly bad mood that morning because he was on yet another diet. He then disappeared behind the closing door as quickly as he’d appeared.

“We were just talking about their asses, weren’t we?” the officers’ razzing of Hutch continued.

Hutch was no pacifist. He could hold his own with anyone. But he really only had one goal in mind and that was to follow the Captain’s orders and find his partner. He joined his senior in the man’s small office, without knocking, and began his investigation. “Starsky call in sick today?” he asked. He tried a sip of coffee, but it was too hot to drink.

Dobey shot an annoyed glance at him. “Wouldn’t you be the first to know?”

Hutch would have been, but he wanted to rule out all the possibilities, as any good detective would. By Dobey’s reply, he knew not to follow that lead. Instead, he called Starsky at home from the Captain’s phone, but didn’t reach him, so he left a message on Starsky’s brand new gadget: His answering machine. “Where’s my magic feather, buddy? Call me—or I’m going to drive over there and personally drag your lazy ass out of bed.”

“When did you see him last?” Dobey asked.

Hutch was too embarrassed to say. His had been an unprecedented and awkward weekend. He feared any mention of it would bring an inter­rogation that wasn’t anyone’s business but his own—well, his and Star­sky’s—but by avoiding the Captain’s question, he simply triggered another.

“You have seen him,” Dobey insisted. “All I’m asking is when you saw him last.”

“Yesterday afternoon.”

“You didn’t see him last night?”

It was, admittedly, a perfectly innocent question; he and Starsky often spent their meal times together, as well as their work hours. “I had a date,” Hutch explained. The entire memory of the weekend haunted him, and he felt anxious to speak even a little of it. “He dropped me at a friend’s apartment yesterday afternoon and drove away. That was the last I saw him.”

Dobey didn’t ask why Hutch hadn’t driven himself to his date. “So maybe he had a date, too,” he theorized. “Maybe he’s hung-over. Or still in bed. Or both.”

“Maybe.”

Or maybe—despite that it appeared they’d ended that afternoon with a clean slate—Starsky had second thoughts about what they’d done together Saturday night, the night of a mutual friend’s wedding, and he didn’t want to confront Hutch that Monday morning. And that’s why Hutch felt even more attuned to Starsky’s absence, because he himself had had second thoughts. And third thoughts. And four … He wondered how he would face Starsky.

“Why would you be looking like the cat who’s eaten the canary?” Dobey noted. “Scratch that. I don’t want to know. And I don’t want to know why you’re dressed like that. Just find him and fix whatever’s wrong between you two, and in the meantime, keep your personal lives to yourselves.”

Hutch briefly looked himself over, remembering only then that he’d dressed the afternoon before in Starsky’s clothes—and wore them to work that morning. “I went straight from the wedding on Saturday,” he explained, “to Starsky’s after-party and then didn’t go home last night, either.”

“I said I didn’t want to hear it.”

“I thought it best that I didn’t come to work in a tux and his were the only clothes—”

“Get out!” Dobey barked.

* * *

ENDLESS PURSUIT

When Hutch turned onto Starsky’s street, he noticed right away that Starsky’s apple red and white-striped Ford Gran Torino was parked in the tree-covered driveway, just as it usually was when he pulled up to the residence.

The landscaping at the new house was as peaceful as was the day’s weather; cloudless blue skies harmonized with the sweet voices of singing birds. He and Starsky had gone the extra mile and bought full-grown trees for the yard and already it was home to sparrows and finch­es; they welcomed Hutch’s arrival. If only they—and the beauty of the yard itself, with its freshly mown lawn and brilliantly colored flowers—could have killed Hutch’s apprehension.

He anxiously knocked, but didn’t wait long enough for Starsky to answer before he used his own key. Only a peaceful house welcomed him with its bright, light colors and textures, tiled floors and clean, beige carpets, and its somewhat new and comfortable furniture. “Starsk?” He searched the house then with every expectation that he’d find the man somewhere in it, even if Starsky hid from him on purpose.

But there was no reply.

And no Starsky.

Hutch checked every room in the house, going as far as to look in several closets, too. “Hey, c’mon, buddy boy,” he finally coaxed him. “Show your ugly mug. Let’s put this thing on the table and work it through one more time.” He didn’t like confrontation, but it was better than any long-term awkwardness between them.

Then he froze and listened hard.

Not a sound. Not a rustle. Not even a grunt.

The house was eerily empty.

His heart sank, so he looked for Starsky’s pistol and holster, simply because he was already in the bedroom, and which was right where he hoped it wouldn’t be: On the shelf inside the walk-in closet. He emptied the handgun of its bullets, draped the holster over his shoulder, and pocketed the ammunition.

If Starsky had been dating anyone, Hutch imagined she’d have picked him up in her car, which would explain why the Torino was still in the driveway—and he’d have another number to call to reach Starsky. But there wasn’t anyone in Starsky’s life at that time, at least not as of that Sunday afternoon. Not anyone Hutch knew about, anyway—which, in the end, didn’t mean much, given that Starsky had become somewhat of a player in the past few years, having sworn off relationships in general since his last failed one.

Still, Starsky wouldn’t have left his keys and wallet behind, which Hutch found on the foyer table, containing less than forty dollars in cash—and Starsky’s badge—in that large ceramic bowl Emma had given him for his birthday the year prior, right where Starsky always dropped his wallet and keys upon his arrival. Hutch exhaled his discomfort as he pushed away Emma’s memory—or, more specifically, the memory of her intimacy with Starsky—and refocused his search.

He shoved Starsky’s wallet into his back jeans pocket and dropped the car keys into a front one. Then he searched his mind for a missing item, reexamined the details of the most recent cases they’d closed, and tried to figure out what lead Starsky may have taken—without his car, his badge, or his handgun—or what clues he may have followed—on foot. On foot and without his keys or his wallet.

And without his partner.

Hutch then realized he had to stop taking Starsky’s absence person­ally. It couldn’t be related to him and he knew that because, underneath all his concern and worry, he’d held onto the items he’d found, as if, deep down, he suspected Starsky wouldn’t come back for them and, by holding onto them, he held onto Starsky. By proxy.

After hearing the message recorded by Starsky’s answering machine, of his own that morning in search of his partner, Hutch examined the front door for signs of a break-in. There were none. He went back through the house to check windows and test door locks. All were as they should have been, which left him puzzled. He cussed himself for entering the house without first trying the door handle; perhaps the front door had been unlocked. Starsky had innocently taken off for something to eat or to fetch a newspaper and left his keys behind because he would­n’t have needed them upon his return—if he’d left the door unlocked. But that didn’t explain why he’d gone off without his wallet or his cash, unless he simply grabbed a couple of bills and took off with those. Hutch would never know whether the front door had been locked or unlocked when he arrived—and that irritated him.

But it also wasn’t like Starsky to leave a house unlocked with a load­ed pistol in it.

Hutch went back to his midnight blue truck to take a spin around the neighborhood, to drive past the local strip mall with its diners, newspaper stands, and coffee shops, but when he climbed into the cab, he discov­ered a small, handwritten note on the driver’s seat—which read: “weve got ur bum buddy. Thot u mite like 2 c the fun hes having. Turn on his video playr. njoy.” Hutch had nothing but bad feelings all morning and, in those isolated moments as he stared at the ominous message, he felt them more keenly—that time, apparently, for sound reason.

With a pounding heart, he quickly left his truck to look both ways up the street in search of anything out of the ordinary, only to find it somewhat abandoned. He then raced back into the house, next into the living room, and frantically searched, momentarily frustrated, for the TV’s power knob before his fingers instinctively found and turned it. A black-and-white Cary Grant movie sprang to the screen until he anxious­ly punched the player’s display panel and, accidentally, but with intent, activated it. The machine loaded the tape cassette it housed and inter­rupted the light-hearted romp with one of Hollywood’s most charismatic actors by full-color, out-of-focus and indecipherable images of god-knew-what as the camera sought its target. But, even despite the confus­ing video, the audio was clear. And chilling.

He unmistakably heard Starsky—out of breath and exhausted—plead with someone not to touch him, followed by the sound of a sharp, skin-to-skin slap. A male voice angrily reprimanded him. “I’ll do as I please, Starsky,” it said, “or haven’t you figured that out by now?”

The desperate tone in Starsky’s voice caused Hutch to bend over and hold his knees to keep from dropping to them. For all he knew, he was about to watch a snuff film—the videotaped murder of the single most important person in the world to him—and he had to be ready for it. As if it were possible to prepare for such a thing.

He lifted his head to look at the television screen when he heard more of Starsky’s genuine begging—and was distracted from his own physical sick reaction by his effort to decipher the startling images he then witnessed.

And they computed.

Bound by thick rope, Starsky was tied to something off-camera and overhead, stretched in such a way that, if he were to lose his ability to stand, he’d hang from the ceiling by his bloody wrists. He appeared to have been beaten—bruised and lacerated—about his face and neck; his lip and nose bled. He was tightly blindfolded by a nondescript black rag and was mostly nude; he’d been stripped of his clothing, with the excep­tion of his shirt, which had been torn open and exposed what was private from his dark-haired chest to his groin.

The image was shocking, alarming, enraging, and frightening all at once. Hutch was numbed at first—and violated, though it would take months for him to understand how.

Two masked and darkly clothed men circled and taunted Starsky. They punched him in the stomach, repeatedly slapped his face, and otherwise kept him guessing about where and how they would next hurt him with each strike. The heavier of the two men spoke. “I’d tape your fucking mouth shut again,” he told Starsky, “but I’m enjoying your little girl whimpering too much to make the effort.”

Hutch cussed under his breath, what little of it he could catch. In all the years he’d known Starsky, and all they’d been through together at and in the hands of the bad guys, he’d never seen his partner so vulner­able and helpless as he was then—not even when he rescued him in the nick of time from being tied inside that remnant of an old zoo cage, about to die at the hands and sharpened knives of those kidnapping cult­ists. All Starsky could do to protect himself now, as then, was to verbally protest—and it had gone, no doubt, from his self-defensive macho sar­casm to his then desperate, plaintive, almost crying sort of pleas, which—coupled with Starsky’s appearance—confirmed that his captors had tormented him long before they’d turned on the camera.

The high-ceilinged room in which they filmed their attack appeared to be inside an empty warehouse, dressed in chipped and worn green paint, with a row of non-see-through glassed windows along the rear wall; it was dark outside, nighttime still, the night before, no doubt, or very early that Monday morning. There were blurred city lights beyond the windows and one pane of glass, in particular, was cracked. The room was dirty and artificially lit, as if the power to the building itself had been disconnected and the captors had brought their own lighting.

Hutch briefly focused on the warehouse room because he was unable to endure the degree of desperation to which they’d driven Starsky, or to manage the boiling rage and fear that watching the video caused him. But he’d be damned not to watch, to not witness that for which he otherwise had not the stomach or the heart to lay eyes on, for he couldn’t abandon Starsky to such a fate alone.

Wordlessly, one of the men drew a hunting knife and, for a split second, and in what felt like an eternity, Hutch thought he would cut or stab Starsky with it, but instead he severed the rope that bound Starsky to the ceiling. Starsky fell helplessly to his knees. The video followed his action—which told Hutch there was yet another person in the room.

Then the two men on camera wrestled their victim to the cold cement floor, brutalized his naked skin against its unyielding rock-hard surface, forced him onto his belly, despite his frantic resistance, his pleading with them, his kicking and his panicked struggle, and his then pitiful protests of “please, please don’t, please don’t, don’t do this.”

Starsky fought as hard as he could, with every ounce of muscle he had, but he was no match for the two of his attackers, from an ordeal he’d already suffered, and because they were, together, much stronger than he was. “Let me go,” he managed to say between desperate pants. “I haven’t seen you. You could let me go and that’s the end of it.” And, then, despite how vain it was, he added, “Please.”

Hutch braced himself. He hadn’t forgotten the men were armed with a serrated knife.

But the heavier-set assailant—the one who’d pinned Starsky’s naked legs between his own there on the floor, no doubt scraping Starsky’s knees against it, the one who’d verbally assaulted Starsky already—drew a different weapon. As his co-conspirator mounted Starsky’s shoulders to pin him tightly to the floor, the other forcefully slapped Starsky’s bared backside; the sound of it echoed in the otherwise empty room. “Take it like a man,” he ordered, and he cussed when his prisoner helplessly struggled under a repeated blow. The assailant unzipped his jeans and tugged his erection from the fly. “Your asshole ain’t your partner’s anymore,” he growled, “or have you forgotten that already?”

“Oh, he remembers,” the other said with a laugh. “He ain’t never gon­na forget tonight.” From his pants pocket, he removed a small paste or gel tube and pulled off the cap with his teeth. He, too, cussed when Starsky struggled under them and nearly knocked them off his back. They worked quickly in retaliation; the fat one gripped Starsky’s butt­ocks, one cheek in each of his hands, and exposed Starsky’s anus so his comrade could squeeze some of the tube’s contents directly onto their target.

“Be glad we’re makin’ this easy for you,” he snarled.

The reality was they made it easier for themselves.

Hutch audibly cussed. He broke a sweat and visibly shook. It was apparent then, from Starsky’s desperate struggle and his verbally broken esteem, by the way he’d been bound and stripped, by the words he’d vainly used to stop them, from the way they had tackled him to the floor, restrained and prepared him, that they had forcibly sodomized him once already—and they were about to do it again, that time on camera.

Starsky fought the sensation and the impending action with all the muscle he had in him. He fought physically and he fought verbally, though he didn’t use a single word; the noise he filled the room with were guttural sounds that would chill any spine—and his whines, coup­led with his failed resistance, simply made his attackers laugh at him when they subdued him again.

Hutch watched every frame. He heard every cry, every painful groan, followed by the unmistakable sounds of gratification from both masked men as the one anally penetrated and repeatedly thrust into his partner with his large, hardened penis, into Hutch’s best friend, into his brother by fate, into the single most important person in the world to him, while Starsky—blindfolded and bound—cried loudly in serious pain, and con­tinued to struggle and beg his attackers, to no avail, to relent and release him.

“Oh, yeah, baby,” the one told the other, “fuck that fag good.”

The minutes were eternities. Hutch was riveted by the horror played out before him; he had to know what happened to his partner, despite how gut-wrenching it was to witness—for no other reason than he’d be damned if Starsky had undergone that attack completely alone. And he watched with the unparalleled hope that some clue, some piece of evidence, some sign might emerge to help him find Starsky and put an end to the violence he’d already sustained and maybe still endured.

The abuser slammed his hips against Starsky’s buttocks one final time and ejaculated deeply inside him, forcefully and with malice. He moaned with pleasure and laughed as he drove home the inexplicable hate and sheer disgust he felt for his victim with every nuance he could manage.

Starsky cried a painful, agonized utterance of a sound as he help­lessly succumbed to the violent attack, a wretched cry unlike anything Hutch had heard before, one he wished he hadn’t heard, and one he would never forget.

The attacker withdrew at the last second—perhaps to show off the evidence of his success—and allowed his remaining semen to pulse onto Starsky’s lower back. “Take that, you goddamned piece of shit,” he said, belying his words with moans of distinct pleasure.

Hutch seethed with rage, with rage and with unspeakable grief. He dropped to his knees before the television and gripped its stand to keep from collapsing further. He didn’t avert his eyes as much as he desper­ately wanted to. He couldn’t not look. He couldn’t not absorb every visual and sound to its end, every paint chip in that room, every camera angle, every shaft of light, every depraved action, in the absolute deter­mination to find some lead that would tell him what was to happen next—and where to find Starsky in the meantime.

The men released their prisoner and got to their feet. The one who’d sodomized Starsky slapped his backside again, that time the way a horseman might smack his mount, to convey that he had been pleased with the ride.

Starsky’s respiration was hard and heavy; his belly heaved with every rapid and deep breath he took. Though bound, he dropped his hands over the back of his neck to shield his face behind his arms, as if the blindfold was not enough to hide him from the reality of his painful and humiliating ordeal.

The attacker zipped his pants and then kicked Starsky’s thigh. “You cocksucker,” he said, heatedly. He punched him again with his booted foot, hard enough to force Starsky onto his side and to draw into himself as much as he could, his knees to his chest. “There’s a price to pay for resisting arrest,” the assailant warned him. “Let that be a lesson to you and your fucking buddy, you arrogant shit.”

Hutch couldn’t help but think Starsky’s attackers were cops, but that intuition was the insult to injury he couldn’t accept at that moment, lest it completely annihilate him.

“That’s funny,” the cameraman said; the voice identified him as male—and he sounded louder than the others, given that he was closer to the microphone. “His ‘fucking buddy.’ Get it? His fucking buddy and the buddy he fucks—all in the same guy.”

“That’s how I meant it, you moron,” his cohort replied. He ap­proached the camera, got as close to it with his masked face as he could, and then said—to Hutch, no doubt, “Is that how it’s done, asshole? Is that how you treat your little friend when you’re off-duty? Are you having fun with us yet?” He laughed. “We’re just getting warmed up, copper, so stay tuned for more.”

The video ended and the television screen blackened.

Stunned, Hutch climbed weakly to his feet and visibly trembled as he rose. His legs buckled, but he caught himself at the last second and miraculously stood. Then he managed to reach the bathroom, lift the toilet seat in the nick of time, and get sick to his stomach.

* * * 

THE TIES THAT BIND

“Talk to me,” Hutch ordered with a reserved anticipation. He had paced and spun enough times in the hallway to confuse himself about any practical direction to take, so answering the phone seemed the only concrete thing to do.

Captain Dobey unexpectedly shot firm questions at him. “Have you found your partner yet? What’s taking you boys so long? You’re not playing games with me again, are you?”

Hutch hadn’t expected to hear from his superior. It hadn’t occurred to him that Dobey would hunt them down. All he could think to say to the man was, “We need a missing persons A.B.P. on Starsky right away.” He didn’t mean to tell the captain his job or to not explain himself, but he wasn’t prepared to tell the truth. When he consciously realized the police were about to be involved, he searched for a hand towel in the kitchen as far as the phone line would allow. “And we need a forensics team at the house—”

“Starsky’s house?” Dobey asked, anxiously alarmed. “You need the team where you are, right? where I’ve called you?”

“Yes, Starsky’s house,” Hutch confirmed. He found a towel and finished his request. “And, then, Captain, if you can get me all the cops you can spare—and the dogs and helicopters to go with them—I need you to search every empty warehouse in the city—”

“I’ll call you right back,” Dobey said. He temporarily ended the call, during which time Hutch removed and pocketed the tape cassette, and then wiped the player clean of fingerprints, an action that went com­pletely against his instincts. He tucked the towel into his jacket pocket.

Dobey called him back. “You got your A.P.B. and your team is on the way,” he told him. “This warehouse thing: Is this some hunch of yours? And if it isn’t, tell me why it isn’t.”

Hutch didn’t explain how he knew, just what he knew. “The ware­house has green-painted interior walls. No power—or none was used anyway. Cement floors.” He pushed his memory for more details. “The windows … about four feet from the floor to as high as the ceiling, a long row of them, maybe 30 feet, non-clear glass, and you can see city lights beyond them; no other building in its view. But, shit, they’ve probably moved him,” he said on further thought. “They strike me as professionals. They got into and out of his house without a mark. It’s all I have, Captain.”

“They?”

A siren wailed in the far distance. “Three men, two of them Cauca­sian,” Hutch said, “and one of those is heavyset.”

“How do you know all this?”

“I just know it,” Hutch replied.

“Hutch,” Dobey warned him.

Hutch heard the sirens grow closer. He didn’t want to be at the house when the cops arrived; he hoped to avoid an interrogation. “I can’t tell you more than I’ve told you,” he impatiently said.

A deafening silence expectedly shattered the line.

“Can’t or won’t?” Dobey then asked.

Hutch had never lied to his superior, but on that day, under those circumstances, he again ignored his instincts and did the unthinkable. “Can’t,” he said.

* * *

Hutch drove for hours. He drove all day and stopped only to case out abandoned warehouses. He drove around them, up into them, along­side them, and looked for telltale signs of familiar green paint or cracked windowpanes. He drove doggedly, walked miles inside filthy and rat-, debris-, and roach-ridden warehouses, climbed dozens of stairs, crawled into basements, hoisted himself onto dumpsters and pushed his way past blocked doorways—all to no success. Not even a glimmer of the image of that room, burned forever in his memory, appeared along the hunt.

Dobey called him on occasion to tell him a helicopter had spotted similar window patterns; Hutch and other cops called to the scenes made concerted efforts to get to such places, only to find them as unfruitful as any other. Starsky’s abductors had covered all their tracks. Eventually, the early morning sun gave way to a warmer late afternoon and further spurred Hutch’s desperation. He began to break windows, kick in doors, and lose his temper with those assisting him. His comrades remained silent, though, out of respect and empathy for him; they took notes about each illegal action and the locations for damage repairs, but mostly, they willingly helped him gain access to every single empty room he wanted into, while he felt the pressure from the quickly fading day and the dark shadow of those haunting images.

It was nearing dusk when Hutch received a radio call from a fellow officer that they had found what they thought was the room Dobey had described to them—but they didn’t find Starsky. Hutch couldn’t get to the warehouse fast enough and he drove short of reckless. His truck tires skidded to a halt in the gravel outside the building where a trio of cop cars had assembled, their red and blue lights flashing. After hurriedly leaving the truck, a handful of officers followed him inside, illuminating the way with powerful flashlights.

The chipped green paint on the walls was a color Hutch would never forget, and he was certain they had the right place as they guided him to the far side of the building, the area with a view to the city. He entered the room with his heart in his throat and recognized the unmistakable row of windows along the back wall, including the cracked pane, as well as the dirty cement floor upon which they’d forced Starsky and brutal­ized him. But there was no Starsky, and seemingly no significant evid­ence that he’d even been there.

Hutch asked for a flashlight and shined it at the high ceiling. He ignored the questions from his peers about what he looked for until he found it: A meat-plant-sized hook that had recently been bolted into a wooden beam, the one they’d hung Starsky from. In the echoing room, he ordered police to remove it for forensics evidence. Then he told a few of them to search the rest of the building, though he suspected they wouldn’t find anything, least of all Starsky, while other cops remained in the room with him and followed him closely as he examined the floor with the flashlight. He paused one of them to stay out of his way. “Blood,” he said, as he knelt and pointed to a spot. “Probably Starsky’s,” he added, since Starsky was the only one he’d seen wounded, “so collect it just the same.”

A cop called for forensics assistance.

Hutch continued to search, but didn’t find anything else. Perhaps in the light of day, they’d find more, but for then, he abandoned the room and joined in the building’s search. His heart pounded; he prayed with every fiber of his soul that they’d find Starsky somewhere on the premise—bruised, beaten, abused, hungry, but at least found.

The search, however, turned up empty.

When Hutch stepped into the outside air, he struggled to keep from losing a grip on his despair. He was surrounded by colleagues, after all, and to do as he wished—which was to drop to his knees and weep right there in the stony gravel—would only degrade the importance of their desperate manhunt. He soberly walked to his truck, physically weary and emotionally worn, so much that he didn’t have the strength to climb into his vehicle. He stood outside it instead and leaned against the rear bumper.

A cop approached him, one he knew and trusted. “Captain’s ordered me to order you to take a break,” the younger man said, “to eat some­thing.”

Light shone in Hutch’s blue eyes as he met those of the messenger’s. It was a light that reflected his regret for not being able to heed the order at that minute. “Don’t take it personally,” he said.

“Dobey told me you wouldn’t eat candy,” the cop continued, “but may­be you’ll make an exception under the circumstances.” He handed Hutch a chocolate bar with almonds. “Do it and keep peace in the family.” The uniform made the effort of levity with the hope Hutch would follow orders.

Hutch reluctantly accepted the chocolate and slowly opened its wrapper. If nothing else, it would give him the blood sugar he needed, and the strength to at least crawl into his truck. He ate, not tasting it, and surveyed the parking lot while he listened to the car doors close as cops got back into their vehicles and then drove away, onto the next warehouse.

As night threatened darkness, a forensics team scoured the gravel for signs of distinguishing tire tracks, and German shepherd dogs sniffed around the building. It amazed Hutch all over again how any evidence could be found with a dog’s nose or a gravel pattern. Maybe he and Starsky should have gone into that division of investigation and left the actual confrontations with bad guys in the hands of the more capable cops, the up-and-coming young ones. He looked at the officer who stood near him, a man in his mid-twenties. Let him put in a decade of running down the perpetrators. Had Hutch and Starsky done it sooner, they’d be home then or at some local sports game.

Anywhere, but there.

Hutch looked up at the darkening sky. “I’m sorry,” he whispered, as if Starsky could somehow hear him through the cosmos and the apology would give him some flash of comfort wherever he was. Hutch did feel sorry—sorry for what Starsky had endured, sorry for whatever Starsky would yet endure, and especially sorry for not having done a damn thing to prevent or stop any of it.

* * *

Hutch was parked outside yet another nondescript warehouse when he woke early that next morning, but he hadn’t been asleep for long; the sun had just risen. Dobey had given him a fresh shift of officers the night before, and they were as helpful and obligatory as his previous charges, but they couldn’t get any closer to Starsky than Hutch had. As he squint­ed in the blue-yellow light, he realized a small piece of paper had been slipped under a wiper blade on the windshield.

He clumsily opened the door, nearly stumbled to his knees as he got out of the truck, snatched the note, and leaned against the front fender to keep his balance.

“chek his mailbx,” the note read. “we made u a 2nd tape mor fun then the last.”

Hutch felt the earth spin so fast it left him reeling in its wake. He quickly looked around him, expecting to find evidence of a messenger, but there was only one other car near him, a marked police car, and two officers leaned outside it, drinking cups of steaming coffee. Hutch rub­bed his face, feeling enormously light-headed and nauseated, and then managed the strength to walk over to them.

They greeted him with friendly, but reserved hellos. It was, after all, another grim day.

“Did you guys see anyone near my truck?” he asked them.

They hadn’t, but didn’t wonder why he wanted to know.

“Did any other cops stop by this morning?” he further asked.

None they had seen; they’d only been there about twenty minutes.

Hutch noted the names on their badges and then told them he needed to go home for a short while.

“Do you want an escort?” one asked. “Some personal body armor?”

It would have been a good idea, but Hutch decided against it. “I have a home security system,” he lied, and then fleshed the lie further by saying, “and two German shepherd guard dogs to feed.”

“Should you send someone else to take care of them?”

“They’re guard dogs,” Hutch reiterated. “No one can get near them without me—or my permission. If you don’t hear from me in a couple of hours, come look for me, but I’m sure I’ll be fine.” He was cognizant of the fact that the note had set him up for an ambush, but it was a risk he willingly took.

* * *

Starsky’s second night in the hands of his attackers was more brutal than his first. Maybe it was because no one had come for him and he felt alone to completely fend for himself. Maybe it was because he wouldn’t get out of the situation alive if he didn’t do anything and everything to save his life, no matter the cost. Or maybe he couldn’t withstand another second of their cruelty and he was prepared to die in order to end it. What­ever the reason, on that second night, he fought with more effort and strength than Hutch would have thought possible, given the beatings and the forced sodomy Starsky had already endured. But fight he did.

He was still blindfolded and bound, that time with his hands behind his back—and he was apparently weakened and injured, as was evid­enced by his breathlessness and by the blood on his face and shirt, but he wasn’t tied to anything in the room. He did know what was about to befall him again, so he dedicated all of his remaining muscle into resist­ing and fending off every hand they laid on him.

“Can’t you let me go?” he plaintively argued with a hoarse, but nervous voice. “You’ve made your point.”

“It’s not you we’re making it for,” came the cryptic reply.

Starsky was wordless, then; his fight purely physical and determined to prevent their attack. He sensed where and when they approached him, and then he lashed out with his feet in a fruitless effort to stop them.

The attackers found his effort comical; one told him he “wasted” his time. In the end, Starsky was still no match for them. All he managed to do was lengthen and perhaps change the nature of his ordeal—and get severely punished for it. The three darkly-clothed and masked men, on camera and on cue, themselves as wordless, slammed Starsky against a windowless wall, literally knocked the breath out of him, and brutally beat him with their fists. One of them aggressively kneed his exposed genitalia and Starsky dropped to the floor like a bag of sand—which was right where they wanted him—miserably groaning.

With the camera on a tripod or a table or a box, all three men were then able to take turns sodomizing their nearly nude captive. Two of them pinned Starsky beneath them while a third forcefully penetrated and ejaculated deep inside him—and then they changed places. None of the men spoke and, despite their labored breathing and moans of pleas­ure, they seemed bent on finishing a job that night more than they drove home a point.

The heavier attacker, the one who’d sodomized Starsky on video the night before, the one who’d taunted Hutch at the video’s end, was the only one to eventually speak. He ordered the other two to lift Starsky to his knees—which they did—and then he attempted to force his blood-stained erection into Starsky’s mouth.

“Suck me,” he demanded. “Do me like you do your partner, and if you bite me, I’ll do you likewise.”

Another attacker roughly grabbed a handful of Starsky’s dark hair and pulled his head up and back, and the attempt to make Starsky accept the other resumed. But Starsky fought it; he fought it with what little he had left to fight. He clamped his mouth tightly shut, sucking in labored breaths and his desperate need for large gulps of air through his nose instead, and he squirmed as violently as he could in their grasp. It was the only battle he won, but simply because of his timing. His attacker got riled then and slapped Starsky’s cheek instead, as hard as he could, right before he fully ejaculated on Starsky’s face.

Hutch’s resolve was in shambles. If heartbreak could physically hurt, Hutch’s was in flames and the burn was unbearable. Tears blurred his vision, but not soon enough to erase the image of the attacker’s thick, white ejaculate pulsing in aimless squirts onto Starsky’s face—or Star­sky’s struggle to pull himself away and avoid the sensation, as well as the humiliation, but without an ounce of success. Only when it ended did Starsky open his mouth—and that was purely to suck in the air he des­per­ately needed.

The men released him, roughly shoved him to the floor, and left him to lie in his own blood and their semen, while they turned off the camera. If they’d killed him right then, wouldn’t they have filmed that, too? Or did they kill him in private?

Hutch clamped his jaw and tightly closed his eyes. He hid his face behind a fist, but none of his self-defensive posturing kept his pressing tears at bay. He sat on the living room sofa, bent forward, elbows on knees, and silently sobbed for a minute. He’d never felt more impotent, more grief-stricken, or more helplessly desperate, than he did then.

* * *

Captain Dobey was quite fond of Hutch and Starsky, his most effec­tive detectives, and he loved them as if they were the sons he’d never had. Though he was barely old enough to be their father, and often passed on his paternal wisdom, the boys treated him more like a favorite uncle. They teased him about his weight, his African American heritage, and his age—and practical jokes at his expense were not outside their moral sphere, either. So on that day, in particular, Dobey was as beside himself with fear as was Hutch, though Dobey knew a lot less about the situation than he imagined his cop knew.

While Dobey gave explicit orders over the phone to his command regarding the ongoing search for Starsky, Hutch sat in a chair on the other side of the captain’s desk and contemplated what he thought his own direction should be. He was hungry, but didn’t feel like eating; exhausted, but couldn’t sleep. Instead, he rehashed the events of the past thirty hours in search of a loophole or an overlooked clue from a differ­ent perspective and attempted to crawl into the perverted minds of Starsky’s attackers in order to guess their next move.

Dobey cradled his phone. He sat with his shirt sleeves rolled up, his arms crossed, and stared at Hutch. “What you thinking?” he finally asked his subordinate.

“I’m thinking he’ll never be the same,” Hutch impulsively replied. The revelation had even taken him by surprise. He had flashed to the previous weekend, to Saturday, the day of their friend’s wedding, and saw Starsky in his mind, dressed in a tuxedo for the first time in a long while and looking mighty sharp. Starsky stood straighter, appeared more confident, like he’d risen in class somehow simply by what he wore that day. His dark brown hair and blue eyes danced with his innocent smile. And though he’d been a child of the streets, was often crass compared to Hutch’s classier approach to life, Starsky had been quite the gentleman that day, greeting women, young and old, the way he did, with grace and poise, like an Englishman from the 14th century may have done.

At least he was royalty till he began drinking, Hutch remembered—and then the real Starsky began to seep through with every sip of cham­pagne he downed. It made Hutch chuckle even then, despite the imme­diate dilemma at hand, when he recalled Starsky’s gyrating display as he tried to coax Hutch into a public dance with him.

Dobey broke into Hutch’s thoughts. “What’s so amusing?”

“Starsky.” He didn’t give details, but his stomach returned to sick.

Dobey had a few of his own private recollections. “A regular clown,” he noted. “A silly guy, wouldn’t you say? Wisecracking, naive, and silly. But serious when he needs to be—lethally so sometimes.”

Hutch agreed. Starsky brought out the silliness in Hutch, too. Look­ing back, he couldn’t recall a single other human being with whom he’d shared such playful times. “Those days are over,” he said aloud, pressing against his nausea. “My guess is—if he gets to live through this—he’ll mostly be ‘lethally serious.’”

“We both know you’re keeping something from me,” Dobey said. “Tell me what’s happened to him.”

“I can’t.”

“Tell me why you can’t tell me.”

Hutch looked at the captain as if the answer was obvious. “I can’t,” he finally said, having to voice it, cracking on each word.

“I have an uneasy feeling it’s not that you can’t, but that you won’t.”

Hutch ignored his superior’s legitimate suspicion. “Why am I here?” he impatiently asked instead. “I have a partner to find.”

“You’re here because Internal Affairs needs to see you.”

“I haven’t got time for this shit,” Hutch said as he got to his feet. But he was immediately interrupted from leaving the office when a lean, suited gentleman came into the room and cut him off from the pass.

He introduced himself to Dobey, then to Hutch, and shook both their hands. “Wade Davis,” he said. He was a handsome, younger man, clean-cut and well-groomed, with a firm grip. He flashed an empathetic, disarming smile under his dark eyes and hair.

Hutch noticed Davis didn’t wear a wedding band, but he appeared the part of the suburban husband with a wife and a couple of kids at home, a nice job, a house, and a car. Or maybe Hutch was simply his usual cynical self around Internal Affairs. He dropped the assessment. He was angry because the meeting interrupted his search for Starsky, so he returned to his chair and reluctantly sat in it. “Can we make this quick?” he gruffly asked. “I have to get back on the street—more than you’ll ever know how much.”

“Let me help you find him,” Davis begged, as if Hutch had tried to stop him. He instinctively knew that cops weren’t eager to talk to him, but—having spent hours deep in his research—this was one cop he wanted to find. “You look like hell,” he commented, noticing Hutch’s rumpled clothes. “You can’t do this alone.”

Hutch didn’t explain his appearance.

“Who do you think would want to hurt him?” Davis asked when he didn’t get a reply from the blond cop.

“Someone he hurt,” Hutch theorized. His thought was impulsive, not founded in fact, and made him resent the comment. “I don’t know,” he added. “I can’t imagine anyone—lately, anyway—who’d want to hurt him.” Especially the way they had.

“Is Starsky a homosexual?” Davis bluntly asked.

Hutch shot a glare at Davis, taken aback by the question, but he didn’t ferret its origin because he was anxious to get back to the hunt for Starsky. “Neither am I,” he said. He hoped to alter Davis’ direction, fueled by his anger. “How’s that relevant even if he were?”

“The DNA results are back from the crime scene,” the agent told them. He looked for a moment at Dobey to gauge his response. “Star­sky’s blood,” he said. “Someone else’s semen. We’re comparing it now to our database.”

Hutch mentally cussed himself. He hadn’t planned on anyone finding that sort of evidence. DNA testing was relatively new—and none had yet been used to solve crime investigations, just paternity suits; therefore, semen DNA had been around a while. In his frantic effort to locate Starsky, Hutch couldn’t rationally give his partner a sound defense. Only then did he recall that Starsky had been kicked hard that first night, after the attacker had ejaculated on his back—which made Starsky roll to his side; the evidence got left there then, there on the floor where Hutch had ordered a forensics officer to sample the blood.

Davis didn’t hesitate. “How’d you know where to look for him?”

“I had a premonition,” Hutch dryly replied. He still didn’t understand the thread of questions. Everything felt like a trap, and he wasn’t of calm mind, so he didn’t feel safe answering anything.

Davis straightened. “Was there really a kidnapping?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Dobey barked.

Hutch knew. “It means he’s wondering if the semen found at the scene is mine.”

Davis directed his inquiry at Hutch. “You and your partner into something highly personal, depraved, and private?”

“That question actually makes me want to hurt you,” Hutch retal­iated. He couldn’t afford to waste a single second on stupid suppositions; Starsky had to be found and he had to be found immediately.

Dobey, too, was annoyed. “Why would a homosexual relationship between anyone be ‘depraved’?” He’d never been suspicious of his cops, but they were teased enough about it already and he felt a need to squash the judgement.

Davis explained himself. “I say depraved because apparently there’s blood involved.”

“For the sake of argument,” Hutch theorized, “why would I have the entire police force out looking for him if I wanted to conceal any of this depravity he and I share?”

Davis shrugged. “From what I’ve learned about you,” he said, not care­fully, “I doubt you’re going to tell me what I want to know. I’m fish­ing, that’s all. I figure if I provoke you, I might learn something I didn’t plan to.”

“Figure on your own time.”

“I want to like you,” Davis emphatically told Hutch. “Not everything I’ve learned about you has been negative. I think you’re a dedicated, pas­sionate, and highly effective detective, and you’ve got an impressive record to prove it. So does your partner. But, unlike you, from what I’ve learned, he strikes me as a likable guy.”

Hutch gave Davis the confirming crack of a forced smile. “I could care less if you like me,” he said, and got to his feet. “The only thing I give a shit about is my partner and you’ve already wasted my time.” He pushed past Davis, didn’t say a word to Dobey, and abruptly left the room.

* * *

The early morning’s breeze cooled the sweat in Hutch’s palms and passed through his old, dark green-and-off-white baseball jacket, the only garment that was his, having found it in his truck, with a similar effect. He, in his vehicle, and other cops in their cars, were parked along a ridge inside the county line that next sunrise while they waited to hear from their superior about where they were to search. It had been a long, painful, fruitless night, one that had utterly exhausted him.

He got out of his vehicle that morning, stood on the road shoulder, and gazed toward the smog-blanketed horizon. He ached, in his muscles and in his heart, and he felt anxious to get moving again. But they’d run out of ideas, with the exception that he would backtrack over his back­tracks. If Dobey didn’t have any new place to search, that’s what he’d do.

The night had passed and whatever violence Starsky had endured during its long, dark hours was over. Was he even alive? Would another note mysteriously arrive? Would the cat-and-mouse nightmare end only when the attackers decided it would?

Would they ever be done with Starsky?

“Zebra Three,” came the call over the radio in Dobey’s un-telling voice. “Hutch! Are you there?”

Hutch’s heart raced. Would he receive good news—or terminal news, the kind of news that would end his own life?

It was neither. When he answered the call, Dobey told him he’d received an un-mailed note at headquarters, which he read aloud to Hutch, pointing out the misspellings.

“24201 loleta av glendale. u best hurry. ur boyfrend is mitey hungry.”

* * *

Hutch asked Dobey to let him arrive at the address before other police were notified, but Dobey would have none of it. “I’ve already sent them,” came the disappointing follow-up comment. “I don’t want you there by yourself. Don’t be stupid, Hutch.”

An ambulance arrived at the scene just as Hutch did, as did two marked police cars; the parking lot was ablaze with flashing lights. Two medics removed a stretcher from the rear of the medical van as Hutch skidded his truck to an abrupt stop beside it and bolted from his vehicle with its engine still running. Two more police cars lurched into the lot while sirens wailed in the distance.

As Hutch ran by the paramedics, he grabbed a folded sheet from the foot of the stretcher and then hurried into the dark building. At the oppo­site end of the hallway, he saw a few policemen enter to search the empty rooms. They shone their flashlights into the musty interiors while pure­bred dogs sniffed the floor boards and dragged their handlers behind them. It had been a familiar sight to Hutch over the past two days, to see all the commotion and the urgent action played out before him, only to come up empty-handed in the end.

While most of his colleagues searched the ground floor, Hutch bolted up a flight of stairs, followed closely by two cops. He slid on the tile floor by the first room he passed, and then abruptly backtracked, grabbed its handle, and—while the cops tackled the adjacent rooms—he swung open the heavy door. Sunlight from adjacent windows twinkled the dust in the air.

That’s where he found Starsky—on the floor inside that large empty room, with his back against a northern wall, on his side, his knees drawn to his chest. A black canvas hood covered his head. Despite the noise in the doorway, he didn’t show signs that he heard it. The fear that Starsky was dead kept Hutch from approaching too fast, but the urgency to fin­ally have him in his possession kept him from lagging. As his footsteps closed in on the crumpled body that lay on the cold tile floor, he saw Starsky lift his head and strain to decipher the meaning of the sounds he heard.

The enormous relief that Starsky was alive consumed Hutch, but the sight of his bloodied and bruised partner, shivering cold and stripped down to his torn and soiled shirt, with his head covered in a black hood tied securely around his neck, his bared legs and buttocks visible in the light, kept Hutch from momentarily attending to him.

Starsky’s bound wrists were chained to the wall behind him; he reeked of urine, blood, and sweat—and semen. Hutch didn’t know how or whether to touch him; he didn’t know if Starsky was broken, or how severely he’d been injured, or what to treat first. But he subconsciously felt the folded sheet tucked under his arm, the one he’d taken from the stretcher, and he quickly used it to cover Starsky’s bare legs and hips.

His action was a regrettable mistake.

When Starsky felt the fall of the cloth touch him, he grunted with resistance and lashed out with his feet, fighting violently against his restraints to fend off the assault—as he perceived it.

“It’s me,” Hutch said quickly, then more loudly the second time. He withdrew his effort to cover Starsky and cussed himself for not having said what Starsky needed most to hear: That he’d been found and that he was safe. Hutch had been too stunned to speak, a speechlessness that emotionally injured his partner. Starsky then kicked Hutch’s shin with all his might, but the blow was benign, evidence of his physically weak­ened state. “It’s me,” Hutch said again. He was frustrated by Star­sky’s inability to know who ‘me’ was. “It’s Hutch.”

Starsky paused at the sound of the voice and the clarity of that word. He grunted a sort of whimper then, an undeniably muffled, but begging sound.

“Yeah, it’s me,” Hutch said quickly. He realized Starsky couldn’t speak, was probably unable to speak, but he was relieved Starsky hadn’t been so severely damaged he couldn’t remember him. “I’m going to cover you,” he said. He then knelt and more gently dropped the sheet over him, blanketing him in time, too, because a few cops entered the room behind him. He quickly motioned them to stop in their tracks, to give him a minute alone with his partner, and they obliged and lingered patiently in the doorway.

Starsky struggled to free his hands, but couldn’t.

“Don’t move,” Hutch softly told him. “Let me do this.” He untied the stubborn knot from the hood over Starsky’s head and carefully removed it; it, too, stank strongly of urine. Starsky’s face was unshaved, bloody, bruised, swollen, and dirty, soiled with more than the filth from the floor—and his mouth was covered with a piece of grey duct tape. His blue eyes were exceptionally weary, delirious, and full of fear still, even after they met Hutch’s. But, despite how exhausted and beaten Starsky appeared, Hutch hadn’t seen anything more beautiful. Starsky was alive—battered, yes, but alive.

Hutch didn’t know what to do first—except that he would need Starsky’s assistance, so he carefully removed the tape from his mouth, trying unsuccessfully not to injure him further than he’d already been hurt. A severe cut dressed Starsky’s cheek near the corner of his mouth, one that would probably need stitches, and he groaned in pain when Hutch pulled the last of the tape from his face.

“I’m sorry,” Hutch whispered. He knew Starsky had to be relieved to get it removed, despite the pain it caused him.

Starsky squinted in what was bright light for him as he strained to see Hutch in the room, even though he felt Hutch pressed to him there on the floor. “Help me,” he managed to say, his voice heavy, desperate, cracked; he pleaded with Hutch, as if his partner might abandon him.

Hutch realized that Starsky had been bound with rope, but also hand­cuffed to a chain that was eye-bolted to the wall. He unclipped the chain to allow Starsky’s arms to relax behind him, but the movement made Starsky groan again. Hutch then noticed that his right arm was swollen and he assumed it was broken. “We’re going to the hospital,” he said. He gingerly untied and removed the rope from Starsky’s bloodied and burned wrists, careful not to injure his arm further. Then he retrieved his handcuff keys from his hip pocket to unlock the cuffs.

But he only got one of them opened when Starsky—finally free of a restraint—frantically grabbed Hutch with the hand of his unbroken arm, and inadvertently prevented Hutch from removing the other cuff.

“Help me,” Starsky begged again. He grasped Hutch’s jeans and grip­ped its seam inside Hutch’s thigh in a tight fist. “Please help me.”

It was obvious Starsky was still panicked, that he was terrified his assail­ants would return at any minute and the ordeal of his capture and its torture would resume. Hutch didn’t move fast enough for him, nor had Hutch’s presence convinced Starsky that the immediate nightmare had ended.

Hutch snapped his fingers and signaled for the cops to allow the medics to approach. They had waited in the doorway for his cue and then came as ordered. “We’re going to put you on a stretcher,” Hutch told Star­sky, “and then we’re going to the hospital. I’m not letting you out of my sight. Do you hear me?”

Starsky dropped his head to the floor. “Cover me,” he hoarsely said.

“You’re covered,” Hutch reminded him. He tucked the sheet more closely around him. No one but Hutch knew that Starsky was mostly nude.

“All of me,” Starsky replied, closing his eyes.

Maybe Starsky couldn’t handle the light, or maybe he was ashamed of his condition. Whatever his reason, Hutch pulled the sheet to the top of Starsky’s head to cover his face. He realized only then that Starsky still tightly gripped the inside of his leg, so he squeezed Starsky’s hand there to let him know he wouldn’t leave without him. “It’s over, Starsk. We’re going home.”

As the medics prepared the stretcher, one of them asked Starsky to try to lie on his back, but Starsky didn’t move.

“Transfer him in the position he’s in—if you can,” Hutch said. “I think his right arm is broken. And, if you boys wouldn’t mind giving him the exam in the van, I’d like to get him off this cold floor and into someplace private first.”

“No problem,” one told him. The medics recognized a police and media circus when they saw one. They unfolded a lightweight blanket over Starsky and then lifted him onto the stretcher as he groaned in pain.

Starsky had to let go of Hutch’s leg when he was moved from the floor to the gurney, but he blindly fumbled for Hutch, repeatedly called his name, and attempted to take a hold of him again. When Hutch tried to remove the remaining handcuff bracelet, as his way of letting Starsky know he hadn’t disappeared, telling him to “be still while I take this off you,” Starsky grabbed Hutch’s wrist and held on tightly. “Don’t let go,” he told Hutch. “Don’t you dare let go of me.”

It was Starsky who had a hold of Hutch—but Hutch understood. He abandoned the cuff removal and instead gripped Starsky’s forearm in return to let him know he wouldn’t let go.

And so they left the building—down the flight of stairs, through the hallways to the outside parking lot, and into the rear of the waiting ambulance—clenched wrist to wrist.

* * *

“Can you give me a warm, wet towel?”

Hutch had convinced the medics to leave any close examination of Starsky’s wounds to the doctor, but he agreed to let them hydrate him and to acquire the necessary vitals to prepare the emergency room for their arrival. They were quick to give Hutch the towel he wanted, too. “And might you happen to have a DNA swab on board?” he further asked.

After a brief hunt through side compartments, a medic handed him a plastic-bagged kit.

Hutch sat at the head of the stretcher beside a blanketed Starsky, as he’d done in times past, too, when Starsky had been deathly ill, and specifically that one time because he’d been purposefully poisoned. “They’re going to stick you with a needle to get fluid back in your veins,” Hutch told him. “You’re thirsty, aren’t ya?” he joked, but it didn’t even make him laugh, and he felt stupid and ashamed for thinking he could lessen the gravity of Starsky’s nightmare by being cheerful in tone.

Starsky tightly closed his eyes when the sheet and blanket were pull­ed away from his face, but Hutch tucked them under his chin so he would still feel covered. Pain outlined Starsky’s expression as he was fit­ted with a hydration bag; he tolerated the sting of the needle prick into the back of his hand, the one with the handcuff still attached to it—the same hand he used to grip Hutch’s thigh again.

The medics listened to Starsky’s respiration and his heartbeat through a stethoscope, but they postponed blood pressure tests and wound treatment because Hutch asked them to; it was only another fifteen minutes to the hospital.

While they aided Starsky, Hutch removed the items from the DNA kit. He first swabbed Starsky’s face with the cotton-tipped sticks, using all of them to scrape what he could see—and what he couldn’t—from Starsky’s battered and bruised skin. After he placed the swabs back into the bag, sealed and pocketed it, he used the warm, wet towel to gently wipe around Starsky’s eyes, cheeks, and nose with it. He was careful not to touch the lacerations around Starsky’s lips and chin—where the assail­ants had punched him—and one deep cut on his cheek, in parti­cu­lar, but he got as close to their edges as possible with a cleansing cloth. He would leave the wound dressing—and the stitches—to the hospital nurses.

Then he asked for a disinfecting towelette and was quickly handed one of those, too, along with another clean, wet, warm towel. He re-wiped Starsky’s face to remove the last of the blood and dirt and semen caked there. When he finished, he washed Starsky’s face a third time, more tenderly and with thoroughness, certain he’d erased the physical evid­ence of a painfully degrading experience—and assuming Starsky knew he had because Starsky turned his face toward Hutch to enable his partner to better wash him. He seemed to desperately relish the cleans­ing, despite his weariness. In some small way, it salvaged what was left of his dignity. Or at least Hutch hoped it had. In reality, Starsky’s basin of dignity was empty. It would take a long, hot shower to cleanse him of the stench, and a lifetime of infinite showers to cleanse him of the memory.

Starsky tightened his grip on Hutch’s leg. “Cover me,” he said in a hushed voice when Hutch finished bathing him.

Hutch pulled the sheet and blanket back over Starsky’s head and exhaled his own pain in the protective veil. He then asked for a dry washcloth. While the medic retrieved one for him, Hutch pocketed the hand towel he’d initially used to wash Starsky. He gave the other one back to the medic so there’d be little suspicion, took the dry one he just got handed, and—braving his action—slipped it under the covers to wipe as much of Starsky’s torso, hip, and legs with it as he could under the awkward circumstances. No doubt it appeared strange to anyone watching, but he couldn’t not do it. He needed as much physical evid­ence as he could gather—particularly before the hospital bathed Starsky—and he didn’t want to ask anyone to get it for him. That Starsky toler­ated the otherwise ‘covert’ wipe down of his nude body, under the cloak of the sheet and blanket, told Hutch that Starsky understood his inten­tions. Or so that was how Hutch read it. It was the watchful medics who concerned him. He glanced at them while he shoved the washcloth into his inside jacket pocket and then shrugged to convey he knew it looked odd, but he wouldn’t explain it.

While one medic busily made notes on a clipboard as they sped toward the hospital—not having seen Hutch’s action—the other looked into his eyes and smiled a sincerely empathetic smile, one that seemed to reply that there’d be no need for an explanation because no questions would be asked. Whatever was between Ken Hutchinson and David Starsky was their business; their hold on each other that morning had spoken volumes.

* * *

“It’s not how it looks,” Hutch quickly explained. He noticed the emer­gency room doctor, a tall, lean, friendly looking, graying man in his fifties, freeze in his tracks after he pulled back the curtain and found two men there, one on a gurney, completely hidden under a blanket and wearing a handcuff, and another who stood close to him—each gripping the other’s forearm.

“I don’t judge,” was the firm reply. He introduced himself as “Dr. Randall Mitchell,” and warmly shook Hutch’s hand in exchange for “Detective Ken Hutchinson. He’s Detective David Starsky. But, just the same,” Hutch clarified, “it’s not as it appears.” He explained that Starsky was the reported “missing cop who had just been found.”

Mitchell had already learned the facts from the gathering of police and media outside his hospital doors. He was more interested in the im­me­diate situation. “Staff tells me you won’t let anyone touch your part­ner besides a doctor. What’s the problem?”

Hutch showed off the grip Starsky had on him. “I don’t suppose you could give him something,” he quietly proposed, “you know, to sedate him, help him sleep? I don’t think he’s going to let go any other way. And then I’ll talk to you.”

* * *

Dr. Mitchell found Hutch in the hallway later that afternoon, rela­tively alone; the guards outside Starsky’s hospital door were seated nearby so Hutch could watch the room by himself and they could watch him. Mitchell sat in a chair beside him. “Do you think you’ll go home and get some needed sleep?” he asked.

Hutch shrugged. “It’s a big empty house,” he said.

“You boys live together?”

“No, but we both got new houses. They’re not homes yet.”

“So you feel homeless?”

“Except here,” Hutch said, meaning close to Starsky.

“You’ve known him a long time,” Mitchell guessed.

“A decade now. I don’t know how I lived without him before that.” He glanced at the doctor, and then added, “I’m a wealthy man, doc. There’s a person in my life who’s taken bullets for me.”

“I envy you.”

Hutch internally lost the battle with his guilt. “Don’t,” he said. “I never got the chance to intercept this for him.”

Mitchell sat silently with Hutch for a few minutes before he spoke again. “Your partner needed surgery,” he finally said, “to repair where they penetrated—where they ruptured—him, but it’s a resilient part of the body; it’ll heal quickly.” He didn’t want the other cops to hear him, so he spoke in a low voice and without details in regard to Starsky’s most personal injury, but he was more specific about the others. “He’s severely dehydrated. We set his broken arm, stitched a laceration on his cheek, cleaned up his cuts and abrasions. Nothing we can do for his bust­ed rib, but none of his organs were punctured. He’s going to need pain medication for a while just the same—and a lot of it. He took some severe punches. It’s obvious they wasted him.”

Hutch repressed his anger with a deep breath.

“What happened to him isn’t public knowledge,” Mitchell surmised. “You wouldn’t let the medics look at him, and we honored your request not to take any DNA samples, so I imagine that not even your colleagues will have the details.”

“I was lucky to find him before they did.”

“I’m going out on a limb here for you,” Mitchell said. “Well, more for him—because of the way he hung onto you when you guys arrived here. That, and because I trust your motives. So … for the record … I didn’t log the anal surgery on his chart, but if the police talk to the nurses who are treating him, they’ll know he was at least severely beaten—and broken. The rapes simply won’t be documented, but the evidence of that injury is there, just so you know.”

“I appreciate your help,” Hutch replied. “I’m not trying to sweep this thing under the rug. I’m simply stalling for time. I want Starsky to have some say in what goes public and what doesn’t, that’s all.”

* * *

Home is where the heart is.

That was how the doctor woke Hutch that evening when he shook him gently as Hutch slept in the hallway chair. Mitchell said quietly, “Home is where the heart is.”

Hutch squinted at him under the fluorescent lights.

“I had another bed delivered to David’s room,” Mitchell said. “Why don’t you get some rest there?” He helped Hutch to his feet. “It’s as close to home as I could get you,” he added.

Hutch appreciated the kindness. “You couldn’t get closer if you tried.” He shook Mitchell’s hand and returned a salute to one of the cop guards before he entered Starsky’s room. The overhead lights were off, but a lone corner floor lamp shed enough light for him to see what he wanted most to see: His partner, safe and resting.

Starsky was asleep on the bed closest to the door; he lay on his side and turned toward the wall. Hutch could tell that his face had been shaved, his hair had been washed, and he’d been dressed in sterile hos­pital pajamas. His right arm, the broken one, had been splinted, and the bed sheet and blanket were tucked around him. Starsky didn’t hear Hutch enter; he was still too drugged, traumatized, and exhausted to wake.

But he was alive and—unlike the image Hutch still had of him through that hallway hospital window when Starsky got shot in the back multiple times and was unconscious, in a coma, in fact, kept alive by ven­tilators and intensive care nurses—this picture was at least hopeful from the beginning.

Hutch stood beside the bed for a minute and listened to Starsky’s res­piration; it was void of the recorded panting and heaviness he’d heard in it on those videocassettes over the past couple of days. Or of Starsky’s begging earlier that day to not be abandoned in the warehouse. The now-sleeping sound of Starsky’s breathing made Hutch draw in his own relax­ing breath—and to let go of the underlying tension that had pinched his stomach for as long. He removed his jacket, his gun and holster, and his shoes, and hid them on the floor under the bed Mitchell had delivered for him. Then he wearily climbed onto the mattress, fully dressed, sank into the pillow, and watched his partner’s back for another minute before he blissfully closed his eyes.

* * *

Hutch woke early that next morning and found Starsky still asleep, so he put on his shoes, gathered his belongings from under the bed, and walked into the hallway. When asked, the cop guards pointed him in the direction of the gift shop, and there he bought a toothbrush and paste, then used a men’s room to relieve and wash himself. It refreshed him to finally rinse off the sweat and the dirt he’d literally rolled in during his warehouse searches.

After he emerged from the restroom, both Capt. Dobey and Internal Affairs Agent Wade Davis waited for him. Davis had brought him a bagel and coffee as a “peace offering” and apologized for his abrupt and uncharacteristic questions the day before. He told Hutch he simply wanted to solicit information, but had admittedly gone about it the wrong way. He asked for a second chance to explain what he looked for and why.

Dobey nudged Hutch into accepting the agent’s apology—and into joining them outside the emergency room doors in a private area among the quiet trees where birds sang sweet melodies that were a far cry from the previous four mornings. Hutch welcomed the warming sun and the reprieve it gave him. He and Davis sat on a picnic table and Dobey on one of its benches while Hutch slowly ate the bagel and drank his coffee.

“Do you ever go home?” Davis asked Hutch, tugging his chin toward Hutch’s crumpled clothes. “Or is that your Columbo look?” Davis wore a two-piece suit, that time without a tie, and he appeared more relaxed. Even his tone of voice and playfulness conveyed his willingness to allow Hutch his sensibilities, but he was no less firm. When all he got was a smirk from the detective, he said what he’d come to say. “I’ve inter­viewed everyone in your precinct to learn what I could about you and David, hoping a lead would materialize. I have my hunches, so if you’ll walk me through this, it might help us both.”

Hutch looked toward the hospital building and imagined Starsky asleep in his bed, safe under police guard. He trusted Dobey’s choice of officers outside Starsky’s room—and he himself had time to kill. All that, and he was hungry, so time to eat was appreciated, too.

“I’m not going to be delicate,” Davis promised him. “You say you and David aren’t gay, but—”

“Who’d know better than us what we are?” Hutch interrupted him, “or what we’re not?”

“I didn’t mean to accuse you.”

“I don’t feel accused. I simply … inquired.”

Davis paused his interrogation to answer Hutch’s rhetorical question. “No one would know better than the two of you what and what you’re not, and I’ll trust that you’re telling me the truth when you say neither you nor he are gay. But what I really want to know is: Are you aware others believe the two of you are?”

Hutch looked squarely at Davis, gave his question some thought, and then said, “I’m not aware of that, no. I’m fully aware that we’re raz­zed by our peers about our sexual preference—for each other—but we’ve never taken it seriously. At least, I’ve never taken it seriously; I don’t think my partner ever has, either.” He realized he didn’t know if Starsky ever had. Starsky seemed to throw as many verbal punches as he received and never appeared to be put off by any of them. “But your point,” Hutch noted, “is that some of our colleagues actually think we’re gay.”

“Yes.”

Dobey grunted, the first sound he’d made. “I never heard anyone say they thought that.”

“Would they?” Davis asked him. “Would they tell their superior officer they thought so? Maybe if you point-blank ask them, you’ll hear the answers I’ve heard.”

“Answers like what?” Dobey wondered.

“Your colleagues respect you,” Davis said to Hutch, “though, honest­ly, they tend to like your partner more.”

“Not news,” Hutch said. “Even I like him more.”

“And a number of people think just that: That you ‘like’ him more than you should.”

“I see,” Hutch said, as if he cared. “So, what is the legal limit?”

Dobey laughed, but Davis  knew Hutch wasn’t frivolous. “Some said they think there’s an underlying sexual tension between the two of you,” he told him. “Others believe you’re an actual couple, and a few think you simply ‘flaunt’ your friendship in inappropriate ways—which makes them uncomfortable.”

“That might be true,” Dobey explained. “These men put their hands on everybody—either with concern because the person’s a victim, or with, shall we say, a certain level of ‘roughness’ because the person’s a bonafide suspect. They’re comfortable in their own skin and with their own power and they touch everybody. Naturally, when it comes to touch­ing someone they care about—in this case, each other—the contact is all that more obvious, but that’s all it is.”

Hutch was impressed by Dobey’s perceptions of him and Starsky. None of what they talked about that morning had ever been a topic of conversation in the ten years he and Starsky had worked together. He found the analysis fascinating.

“It’s irrelevant,” Davis noted. “I’m not interested in what’s true. I’m interested in what’s perceived and how that perception may have played a role in your partner’s abduction and assault. Since I believe—based on the forensics evidence to date—that David was also sexually assaulted, I’m looking for a motive.”

“You can’t prove he was sexually assaulted,” Hutch argued.

“Can’t I?” Davis replied. When Hutch didn’t comment, he added, “Regardless, I want to know what’s made some people ‘uncomfortable’ so I can track the person who may have felt a need to ‘reprimand’ the behavior.”

Some reprimand, Hutch dryly thought. “And that behavior would be, what?” he wondered.

Davis leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, his feet on the bench below, and momentarily watched an ambulance, without its lights or siren, pull up to the emergency room entrance. It gave him a minute to gather his thoughts.

“A couple of incidents come to mind,” he finally said. “One was: A few of your colleagues came to work one early morning, around 5:30 or so, and found you and Starsky in the hallway near the candy machine, eating M&Ms.”

Hutch couldn’t help but smile when Davis recalled the memory for him.

“You sat on the floor; your partner lay on his back and used your knee for a pillow,” Davis said. “Do you recall that incident? Your grin tells me you do.”

“It was funny,” Hutch explained, “and I’m remembering that it was funny.” He sensed Davis waited for him to clarify, so he did. “We’d been up all night working, as we sometimes do, and we were a bit overly tired. Starsky went off to find something to eat—as he often does—and ended up—as usual—at one of the vending machines in the building.” Hutch would never be able to break Starsky of his sugar addiction, try as he might. “He didn’t return after a while, so I went looking for him. I found him kneeling on the floor in front of the vender trying to get his arm out of the dispensing slot; he’d gotten stuck in it—and it wasn’t the first time.”

Dobey burst with a laugh as he pictured the image Hutch had drawn.

“As we tried to pry him loose,” Hutch remembered, “we got to laugh­ing, you know, like slap-happy laughing—also something we tend to regularly do.” He laughed then, though he quickly repressed it because their laughing jags were contagious even when they weren’t actually hav­ing one, and he was afraid the memory would force him into one right then. He took a bite of bagel to momentarily stall himself. “Any­way, we finally got him unstuck,” he said after he swallowed, “but we ended up falling on our butts there in the hallway and we were too damned tired to get up. He had miraculously held onto the bag of candy he’d gone after, so we sat there—could only have been a couple of min­utes—while he, not me, ate the M&Ms. It was a fraction of a slice of our lives, that’s all. I couldn’t even tell you who passed in the hall and saw us there because it was irrelevant at the time.”

“Did he actually use your knee ‘for a pillow’?”

“I’m sure he did.”

“Does he do that often, too?”

“I suppose he does.”

“Do you ever use his knee for a pillow?”

Hutch shrugged, thinking back. “I’m sure I probably have. His knee, his leg, his arm, his butt. We’re not afraid of each other,” he explained.

“What about another time,” Davis asked, recalling an additional ‘incident,’ “when you came into the squad room one morning and sat on the edge of the conference table. He arrived a couple of minutes later, got him­self a cup of coffee, pulled up a chair pretty much between your legs, and then used your thigh as an armrest while he read the paper, prac­tically sitting in your lap? Do you recall that time?”

Hutch gave it thought, then shrugged again. “Can’t say I remember it, but I wouldn’t say we never did it. We’ve been in a lot tighter situa­tions and hung onto and leaned into and draped over and fell onto and have grabbed and helped stand and have handled each other every which way you can probably think of—except as lovers. Does that plutonic way of touching each other make us gay? No. Not by my definition any­way.”

“What’s your definition of gay?”

“A sexual or romantic attraction to one’s own gender—and that’s not something he and I feel for each other, let alone other men. Do others think he and I are gay? You say so. But that’s their problem.”

“Unless someone or someones out there believe the two of you have flaunted their definition of gay—and then it’s your problem.”

“What other definition of gay is there?”

“Repressed feelings, perhaps.”

“I know we haven’t got those for each other, either, so stop trying to turn this into something it isn’t.”

“I’m not trying anything,” Davis said. “I’m telling you how some peo­ple around you see the two of you.”

Hutch didn’t think Davis threatened him; he simply hadn’t given his physical contact with Starsky any consideration before. “I’ve never viewed how he and I treat each other as something we ‘flaunt,’” he said. “It’s simply the way we are. I haven’t been conscious of it—till now.” He watched the ambulance pull away from the hospital and allowed his mind to drift. “We’re with each other in public the way we’re with each other in private. We haven’t got anything to hide.”

The three men digested the dialogue for a minute as they finished their breakfasts, listened to the birds, enjoyed the quiet, and watched the comings and goings at the hospital entrance, and then Hutch posed his own question. “Who in that squad room thinks Starsky and I flaunt our affection for each other?”

“A couple of people,” Davis replied. “Officers Stewart and Kurtz are two of them. Officer Rosemary Fisher thinks you and your partner are ‘intimately close,’ but she wouldn’t expound. I haven’t interviewed anyone outside your precinct yet.”

Hutch gave thought to the individuals Davis had listed; none of those named had even teased him and Starsky about their sexual orientation, which made him wonder if they were silent on the matter because they took it seriously, as opposed to the other cops, who he truly believed razzed him and Starsky out of pure play. But were Stewart and Kurtz cap­able of committing such a crime against Starsky?

“What do you think?” Dobey asked him, as he read Hutch’s mind.

“It’s hard to imagine,” Hutch admitted, “but somebody did it.”

“We’ll see what the DNA profiles tell us,” Davis submitted. “In the meantime, imagine how some of that physical contact between the two of you may have been misread and subsequently spurred a hate crime.”

A hate crime. Given what Hutch had seen on those tapes, how could what they’d done to Starsky be anything except hate? But against whom? Him and Starsky? Or just Starsky? “It’s not you we’re making it for,” he then recalled hearing from the second videocassette when Starsky tried to convince his attackers they had made their point. Did they get even with Hutch by using—or, rather, abusing—Starsky? And, if so, what had he specifically done, and to whom, to warrant such revenge?

“I’ll put my mind on it,” he agreed. He was anxious then to get back to Starsky’s room. He got off the table, stood tall, and stretched. “Thanks for the bagel,” he told Davis. “It’s on me next time.”

* * *

Starsky woke only a couple of times during that day, for which nei­ther Hutch was present. He hated his own timing. He was told by Star­sky’s nurses that Starsky was still very much drugged, very much de­hy­drated and exhausted, and that Hutch should try to be more patient. But he wanted more than to see Starsky; he wanted to talk to him, to reconnect with him, to feel a part of him again.

And that was something he had trouble being patient for.

But, in the end, he wound up watching television in the hospital room from a corner chair for most of that afternoon while Starsky slept, and then he himself fell asleep early that evening on the neighboring bed.

* * *

The light in the room softened as early morning broke, and Hutch woke to the busy sound of nurses attending to Starsky, to monitoring his vitals, and helping him with a bedpan. From Starsky’s respiration, his wordlessness, and his occasional groan, Hutch knew Starsky was still tired and in pain. He himself woke feeling sluggish and needing more sleep, so he turned away, his back to Starsky’s bed and the things going on there, to give Starsky his privacy, and to daydream for a while longer—about nothing in particular and everything in general. When he finally realized the nurses had left, and the room had returned to quiet, Hutch rolled over, expecting to find Starsky awake and communicative, but Starsky was neither. He had gone back to sleep.

Hutch’s work partner, his best friend, and his brother-by-fate, had been through much more than any human being should have had to endure. Some of Starsky’s wounds were plainly visible: Scrapes on his hands, bruises and lacerations on his face, rope burns on his wrists, but the deeper, more serious wounds weren’t visible to the naked eye. They would require more than sutures and antibiotic creams. Would Starsky survive the attacks? Would he come out the other side that same playful, sarcastic, romantic, spontaneous, naive, empathetic human being Hutch had grown to know and love?

Or had they broken him beyond repair?

Hutch watched Starsky sleep; Starsky was oblivious, at least then, to the emotional struggle that lay ahead for him in the days, months, and years to come. For those minutes, at least, Starsky was somewhere else altogether—and Hutch savored the time. He studied the familiar shape of Starsky’s fingers—sans his father’s ring, which he must have lost dur­ing the attacks—his rope-burned wrists, his defining nose, the stitched laceration on his cheek, his eyelashes, thick and black …

“You have such beautiful eyes,” he remembered Emma tell Starsky. He did have beautiful eyes; they were warm blue in color, heavy-lidded, which made them appear sultry and romantic, and—like Hutch was with his own—Starsky was able to say so much with them. He had a way of looking into a person, not through them, to convey that whoever looked back was safe with him. Starsky liked to make people feel safe. He was good at it. Just with his eyes.

“What about me?” Hutch had asked her, feeling jealous. Emma was a mutual friend of theirs, but Hutch secretly wanted her for himself—if it wouldn’t bother Starsky; in hindsight, it didn’t, but on that night, Hutch played for keeps. The three of them sat on the sofa in Starsky’s new house, as close as three people could get to each other without being in each other’s laps, and enjoyed the snugness between them. Starsky had taken off his shoes and propped his feet on a sofa pillow he’d set on the coffee table. In doing so—and given that he was drunk—he inadvertent­ly leaned into Emma and shoved her into a delighted Hutch. When she playfully pushed them both away, Starsky locked eyes with her and laughed like the boy he’d never grown out of. “And here I was thinking you were fond of me,” he told her.

That’s when she told him he had “such beautiful eyes.”

Hutch, still pressed up to her, nudged her with his elbow. “What about me? What do I have that’s beautiful?”

She gently nudged him back. “Your beautiful remains to be seen,” she coyly said.

“Oh?” he teased. “Then, why wait? May I expose, I mean, may I show you what that is right now?”

They laughed; she leaned into him, rubbed his nose with her own, and stole a brief, friendly kiss from his lips. “Don’t let me stop you,” she encouraged him.

“No fair,” Starsky interrupted them. He pulled Emma back to him and pretended to be disappointed that she hadn’t noticed he had “beau­tiful things that remain to be seen, too.”

The jealousy Hutch felt as he remembered that night caused him to abruptly return his focus to Starsky’s face as he lay there, broken and bruised, on that hospital bed, and realized only then that his line of sight had drifted with his thoughts. So, naturally, Hutch was startled and delighted and filled with pain and relieved beyond words to discover that Starsky had since opened those ‘beautiful eyes’ and looked right back at him.

“Hey, buddy,” Hutch said impulsively and with deep affection. He wanted to jump up and dance he was so moved to find Starsky awake, but Starsky was the dancer, not he, and Hutch didn’t want to break the contact he’d made for fear he’d lose it.

“Hey,” came Starsky’s hoarsely summoned reply.

Their “heys” spoke volumes and always had.

And, then, just like that, they didn’t speak for a few minutes; they simply watched each other, never left eye contact, and said so much in the exchange that passed between them: Remorse, relief, trust, safety, grief, love, understanding. Sorry.

If he could erase the last few days, Hutch would have given anything to have done so. If he could have traded places, he would have—and never looked back. He was the emotionally strong one, after all, and some­how it seemed he’d have been better equipped to overcome the ordeal than would Starsky; Hutch would purge himself sooner of the burden, whereas Starsky was likely to repress it or analyze it to no end. Hutch tried to convey by the sleepy gaze that had joined them that early morning, alone in a hospital room, after one of the most trying experi­ences of their lives, that it should have been he in Starsky’s place. But he didn’t think Starsky heard him.

“Did you get those clothes out of my hamper?” Starsky asked in a low voice, subdued but making an effort to sound cheerful.

“You were there when I got them,” Hutch reminded him. “In fact, you gave them to me—from your closet.”

“They look slept in.”

“They’ve been slept in.”

“That explains it,” Starsky mumbled, trying to laugh.

“Do you need anything?” Hutch asked.

Starsky broke their eye contact to search the air for an answer. He couldn’t think of anything and eventually looked back at Hutch. “No,” he said. “You?”

Starsky’s interest in Hutch’s welfare, even if only playfully, and especially in light of the grave nature of his own injuries, made Hutch part with a quiet chuckle. “No,” he said, too. He’d learned all over again what mattered most to him, what he needed, in the end.

“What day is it?” Starsky asked. He’d lost track of time. He’d lost track of his life.

“Friday. You’ve been asleep since Wednesday morning.”

The notation first alarmed and then puzzled Starsky—and yet he felt he could sleep another week, too. He tried to stretch, but soon found his wounds—particularly the cracked rib—and the sharp, sudden pain stalled him. “Fuck!” he cussed, then asked, “What did the doctor say?” Maybe he had more broken than he remembered.

“He said you’ll live,” Hutch replied.

He appeared pleased with his answer, but Starsky didn’t appreciate the prognosis. “Did he have any good news?” he asked with a groan.

“He said you’ll heal just fine in due time.”

“Due time,” Starsky muttered, thinking about it. He was aware that his entire body felt broken. “How many decades did he say?”

“A fraction of this one,” Hutch calculated.

They didn’t talk for a minute. Starsky watched Hutch and wondered what he knew, what he thought, what it meant that he was even there in the room with him that morning, having apparently spent the night at the hospital. Had the doctor told Hutch everything about his patient, or were some of Starsky’s injuries so personal that he’d kept them confidential—as Starsky hoped he had? He would word his question carefully so he didn’t give anything away and, at the same time, find out what Hutch knew.

“Did he tell you all the ways I got hurt?”

Hutch didn’t want to embarrass Starsky, so he answered as carefully as he felt the question had been asked, given that they spoke about an enormously delicate subject. “The only thing he mentioned that I didn’t already know was that you had a broken rib.”

Starsky squinted as he assimilated the reply. The catch lay in what Hutch “already” knew. But he couldn’t have known what Starsky didn’t want him to know. How could he? Hutch hadn’t examined Starsky’s injuries that morning when he found him; he didn’t even allow the med­ics in the ambulance to examine him. Starsky imagined, though, that Hutch suspected how else he may have been injured—he’d found Star­sky stripped from the waist down, after all—but suspecting something and knowing it were two different things. It wasn’t that Starsky didn’t want Hutch to ever know, but that he wanted to be the one to tell him—unless telling him would destroy them.

Starsky was satisfied for then with Hutch’s answer, so he abandoned the subject. Besides, Hutch didn’t appear to know what had happened to him because Starsky seemed his usual, natural self. He sleepily closed his eyes for a second, then opened them when he realized he didn’t want to sleep. Laying eyes on Hutch had taken priority. “What you in for?”

Hutch, as lightly, replied. “A frontal lobotomy.”

Starsky gave him a slight nod, then grimaced from the pain it caused him. He pushed past it. “I thought you had one of those already.”

“Nah. You’re confusing it with that simple nip-and-tuck of the cere­bral cortex I had a few months ago.”

Starsky didn’t miss the opportunity to return the play, despite the beatings he’d taken earlier in the week. “And yet you’ve seemed all this time to have had a lobotomy.”

Hutch grunted at him. Despite the jabs, he never tired of Starsky’s. “What you in for?” Hutch returned the play. He didn’t expect, or even want, to have a serious conversation, and he didn’t think he broached one, but for a second he was nervous that maybe he’d accidentally crossed the line with his question.

Starsky browsed the air again for an elusive answer. He settled with something closer to truth than fiction. “More than you know,” he said. He leveled Hutch’s eyes to convey his conviction.

“More than I know?” Hutch wondered. He stretched as he settled into their dialogue. “Or more than you wish I knew?” He did wonder if Starsky would talk to him about it, would ever want to, not that it would make him feel less worthy than he wanted to feel if Starsky didn’t, but he was curious just the same.

Starsky tried for a moment to get comfortable on the bed and then abandoned the effort. “I’m in for more than you know,” he repeated.

It saddened and sickened Hutch to think Starsky had undergone more than he knew Starsky had. But, of course, he had; Hutch had only witnessed two hours of the forty-eight Starsky had been missing. “You can tell me anything,” he reminded his partner. “Anytime you’re ready.”

Starsky’s eyes, those ‘beautiful’ blue eyes, seemed to smile then, pleased to hear what he already knew. “You can tell me anything, too,” he replied. He shifted on the bed and finally found a supportive position that didn’t pain him. “But you can start now.” He pulled the bed dressing up under his arms as he prepared himself for Hutch’s confessions.

“What’s to tell?” Hutch asked.

“Sunday night,” Starsky said. “That date of yours.”

“You actually remember I had a date with Emma that night?” It was, after all, the night Starsky had been abducted.

“You were like a dog in rut all day,” Starsky managed to say. “How could I forget?”

How could Starsky have remembered, given what he’d been through? That was the question, but Hutch didn’t pursue the reasoning. “Dogs don’t rut,” he dryly informed him. “My Sunday night,” he then ex­plained, “got sidetracked by my Monday morning when you showed up missing. Seems we ought to start there first.”

“Let’s not,” Starsky said. He drove home how much he didn’t want to talk about what had happened to him by the firm look in his eyes.

Hutch would honor the delay, but the interrogation was inevitable. “You’ll let me know when you want to go over it?”

Starsky grimaced for half a second from a sharp pain in his rib cage before he eased it and parted with an effort-filled smile. “You’ll be the first to know.” It was an attempt at a smile because Hutch was always the first to know about anything in Starsky’s life. And vice versa. He sleepily winked at Hutch. “Humor me.”

Hutch traded his concern over Starsky for the discomfort of his own. “When I got to her apartment,” he fondly recalled, “she’d already lit candles.”

“She wasted no time.”

“There was a fire in the fireplace. Some of my favorite music was play­ing. The lights were down low. We were going to have dinner at that Italian restaurant you recommended there on the corner, remem­ber?”

“The one where I got shot?”

“No, not that one. Of course, not that one. The one a couple blocks from there.”

Starsky remembered the other one and nodded to say he did.

“She made dinner instead,” Hutch explained, “but we had dessert first.”

Starsky smiled, more sincerely then. “Was it as good as you hoped it would be?” His voice was still hoarse, but he was able to speak more fluidly—and he liked thinking about something else, something roman­tic, because—more than Hutch—he was a hopeless one.

Hutch thought a moment before he answered. Was it as good as he hoped it would be? “It was necessary,” he said, defining it.

They looked at each other while Starsky sized up Hutch’s choice of words. Then Starsky said, “You’re still unhappy about what we did Sat­ur­day night.”

“What does Saturday night—and what we did—have to do with Sun­day night and what Emma and I did?”

“Everything.”

Sometimes Hutch hated how well Starsky knew him. “You told me the next morning that you don’t remember the details of what happened Saturday night.”

“I’m not saying I remember them now, either,” Starsky said, “but that wasn’t my point. You’re bummed still.”

“And on what do you base that perception?” Despite the awkward conversation, Hutch was pleased to have it; it had become a typical dialogue between them and made him feel at home in that hospital room.

“Because I know you,” Starsky said flatly.

“You think so?”

Starsky lifted his arm, groaned from the pain of his action, and then dropped his eyes to his hand. “Like the back of my—Oh, shit,” he said, when he planned to pretend he’d been bruised, but then actually saw an abrasion there, “where’d that come from?”

Hutch sharply bit his tongue. His impulse was to affectionately call Starsky “an asshole” for teasing him, or to “fuck you”—a crack he was known to make—but neither were appropriate, and either would have been immeasurably hurtful and degrading in light of the circumstances. And right then, right smack in the middle of the spontaneous, special, affectionate moments they finally had, Hutch recognized that he himself had been wounded—and how. By repressing his words, he’d given up a piece of himself because of what those men had done to his partner.

And he wasn’t able, despite the recognition, to stop the tears that suddenly welled in his eyes, but he avoided looking at Starsky, knowing that even that reaction had been seen, felt, misread, and hurtful. Still, he couldn’t help himself.

“Hey, man,” he heard Starsky call him.

Hutch looked back at Starsky and locked in that profoundly visual exchange they’d so often shared over the years. He was sorry that he couldn’t apologize, or explain himself, or speak at all.

“You’re right,” Starsky solemnly answered his silence. “It’s too soon for this.”

* * *

Dressed still in Starsky’s jeans and a tee-shirt, Hutch accepted the small plastic bag of toiletries from the attending nurse when she came into the room to give her patient a sponge bath.

“You should clean up, too,” she advised him, eyeing his attire. “There’s also a razor in there.” She told him he could use the attached bath­room as soon as she finished bathing Starsky, but Hutch chose to use the one in the hallway. He immediately ran into his captain, who slowly paced outside the door, and was invited by him to a cafeteria breakfast, so Hutch escaped into a bathroom along the way to relieve himself, brush his teeth, wash his face, and comb his hair; he saved the shave for later. Then he dutifully followed Dobey into the cafeteria, and fast be­came unimpressed by his food choices.

Dobey ordered him to eat something substantial. “You can go back to your healthy lifestyle another day,” he cracked.

“This is a hospital,” Hutch reminded him. “Shouldn’t I be able to get my ‘healthy lifestyle’ here?” He and Starsky shared a light supper on their beds the night before. He read Starsky the first chapter from the Agatha Christie novel, Death on the Nile—which immensely pleased Starsky, just to lie comfortably and listen to the sound of Hutch’s soft, soothing voice. And then they watched part of an old western afterward.

“Am I going to have to sneak Starsky outta here just to nurse him back to health?” Hutch asked Dobey.

Dobey chuckled. “Maybe.” He eagerly eyed the greasy sausages and syrupy waffles.

Hutch ordered an English muffin and coffee. He found a banana in a basket at the checkout; it would be enough to hold him for a while and oblige his superior to eat something more than a piece of bread. But Dobey filled his plate with just about everything he could fit on it and told Hutch he’d get back to his diet as soon as Hutch could get back to his “carrots.” “And maybe you ought to consider going home for a change of clothes,” Dobey said, admonishingly.

“Can you smell me?”

“Not yet. But I’m tired of looking at the same outfit, especially from my only clothes-horse detective.”

They sat at a table along the back wall of the cafeteria, someplace semi-private. Dobey wanted to know if Starsky had told Hutch anything about the attack.

“Just that he doesn’t want to talk about it,” Hutch said. “He’ll let me know when.”

“So, nothing? Not even a hint of anything?”

“The only thing he wanted to talk about was my date Sunday night.”

Dobey realized he wouldn’t get any information, so he decided to follow Starsky’s lead. “How was your date Sunday night?”

“Grand,” Hutch replied, and he wasn’t facetious, “but I’ve been treat­ing her like I could care less since Monday morning.” He’d talked to her by phone only once since Starsky’s abduction, to let her know that both he and Starsky were alive. “I can’t seem to find my old self.”

“Who could under similar circumstances?” Dobey asked. He passed on more of his paternal wisdom. “If she’s got the heart worthy of yours, she’ll understand why you haven’t been Mr. Romance lately.”

Hutch drank coffee and thought about the past few days. He still wished he could have been attentive to her; she was, after all, his brand new lover.

Dobey had less interest in his food than usual; Starsky was his priority, too. “When does your partner go home?”

“Doc says he’ll release him in a couple of days. He wants to make certain he’s hydrated and infection-free before turning him loose.”

“Infection-free?” Dobey wondered.

“Yeah, you know, that he didn’t get pneumonia or anything strange like that.” He didn’t tell Dobey that a few of those blood draws would also test Starsky for sexually transmitted diseases.

Out of the corner of their eyes, they saw the approaching figure and looked to see Davis on a beeline toward them. “There goes breakfast,” Hutch muttered. He talked while he ate his muffin. “Don’t expect me to placate this guy. I have this aversion to three-piece suits. It’s nothing personal.”

Dobey grunted when he realized he himself wore a three-piece suit. “He’s young,” he defended Davis when he decided defending himself wasn’t worth the effort. “He means well, even if he doesn’t always han­dle it well. He’ll learn. But why would I expect you to be different to him than you are to anyone else?”

Hutch sneered. “I’m not a bad guy,” he asserted, “despite what peo­ple say.”

“You’re a bad guy to the bad guys and it makes you tough with everybody. I wouldn’t want it any other way. If the world had more ass-kickers like you and your partner in it, it wouldn’t be in the mess it’s in.”

“But isn’t that the problem? Too much ass-kicking in the world?”

“Ass-kicking for the right cause, on the right side of the law,” Dobey clarified, “well, that’s just beauty in motion, as much as I hate to admit it. And if you tell anyone I said that, I’ll kick your ass.”

Davis arrived at their table and apologized for the intrusion. He pulled up a chair without an invitation, sat down, and faced Hutch. “Do you ever pick up your messages? I’ve left a half dozen of them at your squad room.”

Hutch hadn’t been to headquarters; he hadn’t even been home. “I’ve been at the hospital,” he explained. “Besides, I thought no answer was an answer.”

“You’ve been at the hospital all this time? 24/7?”

“Am I breaking some law doing so?”

Davis didn’t reply. He didn’t want to be confrontational. He tried humor instead. “Get yourself an answering machine. And maybe you should fire your tailor while you’re at it, too.”

“I like the lived-in look.”

When humor didn’t work, Davis went for deadly serious. He leaned on the table and lowered his voice. “Here’s the latest: Your partner’s house hasn’t turned up any forensics evidence, but—as you know—we did find some at that first warehouse: Starsky’s blood, somebody else’s semen.” He firmly looked at Hutch. “Not yours.”

Hutch realized that his DNA profile had been part of Davis’ inves­tigation, and he raised an eyebrow at the agent. “Well, what do you know?” he quipped. “I’m not as depraved as you feared.”

“There was also blood and semen at the Loleta Avenue crime scene, the one where he was found. His blood. Urine and semen from two others. Also not his or yours.”

Hutch stopped chewing. The agent was closer to knowing what hap­pened to Starsky than he hoped. He left half his English muffin on his plate, leaned back in his chair, and looked briefly at his captain, who simply shrugged at him. “And?” he encouraged Davis.

“And I’d like you to talk to me,” Davis said. His deep brown eyes gave power to his words. “My next step is to subpoena Starsky’s hospital records—but I’d rather hear it from you.”

Hutch sipped coffee and didn’t leave Davis’ stare. “This is where I ask, ‘Hear what from me?’” but they both knew then, for certain, that Hutch knew more than he let on.

“I think you know he was forcibly sodomized,” Davis charged, “and/ or forcibly orally copulated.” He wasn’t obnoxious, just blunt.

“‘Forcibly orally copulated.’ Is that the legal term for a forced blow job or just your delicate way of putting things?”

“That’s the legal definition,” Davis explained. “Do you want me to be delicate?”

Hutch answered the question with a question. “How would I know whether Starsky was forcibly sodomized or ‘forcibly orally copulated’? For that matter, how would you know?”

“I don’t know, but you found him. You’ve talked to the doctor. You’re the only one talking to your partner.”

“So you talk to the doctor,” Hutch suggested. “You talk to Starsky.”

“I want you to trust me. I want us to work with, not against, each other.”

“I’ll trust you after you’ve earned it,” Hutch said.

Davis pulled his chair closer to the table and leaned in. Then he confided in Hutch, and didn’t care that Dobey heard, either. “My baby sister was gang-raped,” he quietly confided. “She was abducted by two guys in a van from a grocery store parking lot and—over the course of four days—they repeatedly raped her and then dumped her in a field outside town.”

Hutch looked steadily at Davis. He saw the man’s pain in his eyes, the empathy a brother had for his younger sister, the hurt he himself felt for his own brother, the one he’d acquired by fate.

“I get why you don’t want to tell me what it is I think you know,” Davis added, “but you’re not alone here.”

Hutch glanced at Dobey. None of them had joined the police force because they liked the uniforms; they joined because they believed in justice. Davis had that in common with him, and now he shared being a relative of a rape victim with him, as well.

“It’s a logical assumption to connect blood and semen at the crime scenes to a sexual assault on your partner,” Dobey explained to Hutch. “I’ve already done it myself.”

“None of the evidence so far proves anything,” Hutch warily said, “except that Starsky was abducted.”

“And beat to shit,” Dobey reminded him.

Hutch didn’t comment.

“How would you explain the semen at the scene?” Davis asked.

“Um … the guys who grabbed him got their balls off holding him prisoner?” Hutch pretended to guess. He knew it was stupid and unrea­sonable, so he defended his remarks. “Listen, the worst thing these guys did to him was kidnap him; that alone is a life sentence.”

“That’s the worst thing they did to him under penalty of law,” Davis agreed, and he knew Hutch had chosen his words carefully. “But you know they did much worse to him.”

“Do I?”

“Don’t you?” Davis assumed. He was direct because he’d already learned to hold his ground with the detective.

“Makes no matter,” Hutch argued. “Even if your suspicions are cor­rect, the worse thing you suspect they did to him under penalty of law will only net them nine to ten years.” He presented a litany of other char­g­es that carried much stiffer sentences than forcible sodomy, particularly if they were accumulative. “Unlawful entry. Kidnapping. Kidnapping a police officer. Kidnapping with intent to do bodily harm. False impri­sonment. Assault and battery on a police officer. Criminal threats of great bodily harm. Conspiracy to commit kidnapping and battery. Assault with intent to commit a felony. Offenses against public justice too numerous to list. And, if you can prove they left him for dead, you can tack attempt­ed murder to that list—”

“Knowing how your partner was attacked and knowing why he was attacked,” Davis said, cutting him off, “all serve to help us find who attacked him—and you know that, so c’mon, don’t play games with me. I didn’t get assigned to this case because I have some special talent with sexually assaulted victims. I don’t. I haven’t even been able to help my sister all that much. I got this case, in particular, because the victim is a police officer, because he’s one of our own. That it’s possible—that it’s likely—he’s also a sexual assault victim makes it all the more important to me personally that the sick fucks who attacked him get their due.”

Hutch would tell the police anything they wanted or needed to hear if he thought it would help Starsky, but it was Starsky’s decision to tell anyone about the rapes. And Hutch would honor that, at all costs. If the police found out about the sodomy on their own, then so be it, but Hutch wouldn’t help them—even if it assuaged Wade Davis’ guilt.

“If you think you’re protecting him from some embarrassment, some public ridicule, you’d be right,” Davis said, as he read Hutch’s mind. Then he quickly added his own rebuttal. “But if you think you’re sparing him some future grief, or jeopardizing some healing process, or betray­ing some trust that’ll sever the friendship I know you have with him—sim­ply because you helped to bring his attackers to justice—then you’d be wrong.”

He tapped the tabletop when he saw that Hutch’s focus had drifted, and got his attention again. “No amount of public scrutiny, no courtroom drama, no confrontation with his reality is going to take him any lower than he’s already fallen,” Davis said. “Trust me, Hutch. I believe I know what happened to him—and therefore I can tell you that your partner’s self-identity has been permanently annihilated. The only thing—the one-and-only thing—that’s going to give him back any sense of personal power is his and yours and our bringing these assholes up on charges.”

“Suppose I kill the fuckers,” Hutch offered, heatedly, “and we bypass an expensive and embarrassing trial? That’ll give Starsky back his personal power.”

“I didn’t hear that,” Dobey injected.

“I’ll tell you this much,” Hutch said. “I’ll do whatever I can to help you nail this scum and to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that they kid­napped and assaulted Detective David Starsky. On those charges alone, the sons-of-bitches go up for life. What more do you need than that?”

“I need to know why,” Davis reiterated, “and I need to know how—so I can figure out who. Confirm or deny: Was he sexually assaulted?”

Silence hung between them for a minute before Davis realized Hutch wouldn’t cooperate. He posed an offer; he was sincere about catching the culprits and he wanted Hutch to know he was. “Tell me how I can help you help me.”

“Give him some time, for crissakes,” Hutch said flatly.

“How much?”

Hutch thought about what was reasonable and then pushed beyond it. “Two weeks.”

“Tall order. What can you give me in trade?”

“What I know—but not how I know it.”

“We have a deal,” Davis confirmed. “Two weeks from today to your­selves in exchange for what you know.”

“But not how I know it.”

“But not how you know it,” Davis agreed.

“There were three of them,” Hutch then confessed, “all masked and relatively the same height, say, five-ten, five-eleven, one of them heavier set, maybe forty pounds overweight, and all Caucasian.” He iterated that the assailants must have personally known Starsky somehow because the men had used his name.

Davis sat back, alarmed and surprised at once. “You’ve seen these guys,” he surmised, and he searched Hutch’s clothes with his eyes as if he could find the unspoken answer there.

“I told you I’d tell you what I know,” Hutch reminded him, “but not how I know it.”

Dobey was immediately perplexed and angry. “So you’ve needed police protection all this time,” he exclaimed. “You know better, Hutch,” he warned him. “Don’t fuck this up more than you may have already.”

Hutch heard the warning, but he didn’t respond to it.

“What else have you got?” Davis asked.

“Nothing more—that I can remember.” He feigned memory loss.

Davis was dismayed, but he surrendered to the deal he’d made with Hutch—and then let it go.

Dobey was also annoyed, but realized he shouldn’t expect anything different from Hutch; his two top detectives would look out for each other first and foremost. He injected a question while Davis searched his own mind for an opening. “Did they call him David or Starsky?”

The question had merit. “Starsky,” Hutch remembered.

“Those closest to him call him Starsky, is that right?” Davis asked.

“And those closest still call him David,” Hutch added. “Or Dave.”

“What do you call him?”

“My partner.”

“Who’s closer to him than you?”

“The women he beds,” Hutch said. He couldn’t help himself. Some­times his nature had a way of seeping in. “That’s an obvious fact—espe­cially now that you know he and I aren’t gay.”

His quip broke the tension enough to cause Davis to bite the inside of his cheek in a gesture of ‘touché.’ “I’m guessing it’s because you two don’t socialize much outside the inner circle that the rumor got started that these guys might be cops.”

“Is that the rumor?” Hutch asked.

“But they must not be ours,” Dobey contended, “because the DNA profiles don’t match any—”

“The tests are still underway,” Davis explained. “I’m not ruling out one of ours. If I end up having to subpoena your phone records,” he asked Hutch, “will I find any connection between you and the assailants there?”

“Not a one.”

“So I’ll assume you met them in person?” Davis asked. “Or that they sent you a photograph?” That was more likely, he thought.

Hutch shrugged as if he were clueless. “Can’t remember.”

Dobey whistled through his teeth. “Be careful, Hutch,” he reissued his warning. “Don’t tamper with state’s evidence or obstruct justice.”

“Looks like he’s already done that,” Davis said, disappointed.

Hutch glanced first at his captain. That time he heard and acknowl­edged the warning, but he didn’t respond, not verbally anyway. He knew what he was up against and he willingly accepted the consequences. He conveyed his cooperation to Dobey with his eyes. Then he gave Davis his attention. “Are you charging me with obstruction and tampering?”

Davis thought a minute. He didn’t want to lose ground, but he didn’t want Hutch to think he was a push-over, either. “Not yet,” he finally said. “Maybe not ever,” he added quickly, “but definitely not yet.”

Dobey shook his head to let Hutch know he thought he’d acted unwisely. “Just be careful.”

“How did they contact you?” Davis asked Hutch, “the same way they contacted Dobey; left you a note or two?”

“Okay. They did do that, yes.”

“Did you destroy those?”

“Can’t remember.”

“What did their notes tell you?” Davis asked, frustrated.

Hutch couldn’t tell them that the notes had directed him to the video they’d taken of themselves brutalizing Starsky, so he gave Davis the gist. “Just that they had him—to teach him and me a lesson.”

“And what lesson was that?”

“I’m still not clear on the message.”

Davis squinted at Hutch for a minute to flush more truth from him before he abandoned the useless query. “You’ve got two weeks—and only because you asked for it. In the meantime, you tell me whatever you learn that helps me nail these assholes. I’m proceeding full-bore with my investigation and I’m factoring into the equation that David Starsky was sexually assaulted. Don’t waste my time, Hutch. It’s your time, too. If I’m headed in the wrong direction, tell me now.”

Hutch was trapped. To lie was to hurt Starsky by slowing the investi­gation and delaying justice; to tell the truth was to betray Starsky by exposing his privacy. He decided to say nothing, even though his non-answer was probably an answer. Besides, the pact he’d made with Davis was more than Hutch expected; Davis didn’t need any deal in order to proceed because he had the full breadth of the law behind his investi­gation. He simply looked to bridge a gap and Hutch appreciated it. What Hutch got out of cooperating with Davis—and what Starsky would get out of it—was time.

And, for then, time was everything.

Davis read Hutch’s non-verbal reply as an affirmative. He then re­moved an envelope from his inside jacket pocket and handed it to Hutch.

“What’s this?” Hutch asked.

“A gift. You can have this one to do with however you wish. Keep it as a reminder of my good faith. Or burn it. Whatever. I don’t care.” He got to his feet. “I trust I won’t have to get another one at the end of two weeks.” He told Hutch to meet with him in the morning, said his good­bye to Dobey, and then left them.

Hutch opened the envelope and removed the document. He read the title page and then sniggered, sort of sadly and with relief.

“What is it?” Dobey asked.

“A subpoena for Starsky’s hospital records.”

Hutch would eventually burn it.

“We all know you’re hiding something, Hutch,” Dobey sternly said. “And we all suspect what it is. Don’t underestimate us. If you didn’t have something you didn’t want us to know, you wouldn’t be relieved to have that document in your hand.”

Hutch surrendered as far as he could. He trusted Dobey almost as much as he trusted Starsky. “What happened to my partner has got to be his choice to make public—and I’m going to do everything in my power to stand by that.”

Dobey appreciated the candor, even as incomplete as it was. “I under­stand,” he said. “And I’ll do everything in my power to help you both. Just don’t play us for fools, okay?”

* * *

The look of relief and alarm on Starsky’s face startled Hutch when he stepped back into the hospital room. He tried to diffuse it with the calming “Hey” with which they were known to greet each other, but all he got back was a demanding, “Where have you been?”

“I was having a so-called breakfast with our captain,” Hutch ex­plained. He understood then why Starsky had been concerned. “You know there are two uniforms outside your door, right?”

“I didn’t know.”

“Twenty-four-seven,” Hutch said. He approached the bed and stop­ped near Starsky. “I assumed you knew,” he said in an apologetic voice.

Starsky wouldn’t look at him. “You assume a lot.”

“It’s the detective in me.”

“It’s the idiot in you,” Starsky chided him. He surrendered then to Hutch’s promise about security and finally made eye contact. “Did you bring me anything from the cafeteria?”

“There wasn’t anything worth bringing.”

“They didn’t have bacon and eggs?”

“You want bacon and eggs? I’ll go get bacon and eggs. You know I’d do anything for you—even something as unethical as that is for me.”

“I know you would,” Starsky said. Then, with a light growl, he added, “You’re off the hook. What I want and what the doctor will let me have aren’t the same anyway.”

Hutch was relieved to hear it. “He wants you to eat healthy.”

“He wants me to eat …”

Hutch waited for the rest of Starsky’s sentence, but had to ask, “What?” to get it.

“Soft food,” was the answer.

Hutch didn’t need to ask why, but he did feel the need to confess. He walked to his own bed, which had been made in his absence, sat on the edge of the mattress, and faced Starsky. “I also had breakfast with Inter­nal Affairs.”

“Now that explains why you’ve been gone so long,” Starsky said dry­ly. “So?”

Hutch examined a number of ways to lead into what he needed to say, but abandoned them; why he’d done what he’d done wasn’t as rele­vant as what he’d done. “I made a deal with the I.A. agent to tell him what I know about who hurt you in exchange for his leaving us alone for the next two weeks. I won’t tell him everything, though. He doesn’t need to know everything to catch these motherfucking shitheads.”

“Okay,” came the unexpected reply.

“Okay? Is it okay?”

Starsky was tired. “You did what you thought best,” he said sincerely, “and that’s always been okay with me.” He didn’t imagine Hutch knew much about his attackers to begin with—nor all that much about the attacks themselves.

Hutch always had Starsky’s support, but these were no ordinary cir­cumstances. Or maybe Starsky didn’t have any fight left in him. Or maybe Starsky didn’t care anymore. Either way, Hutch was relieved not to have emotionally damaged him—or their friendship—by acting with­out Starsky’s approval, but still he was dismayed by Starsky’s non­chalance.

Or maybe he didn’t give Starsky enough credit. Maybe Starsky knew, like he knew, that the facts would eventually surface, and that the only path to the men who attacked him was through it. He chose to push, then, for the unknown details. “Can we talk about some of it while the trail’s hot?”

Starsky lay on his bed still battered, still bandaged and bruised. He eyed Hutch carefully, as if Hutch was actually capable of hurting him further and he needed to protect himself. He found his way. “It’ll depend on the question.”

“Fair enough,” Hutch said. He stood, took off his jacket, and tossed it onto the foot of his bed while he verbalized the initial thought that came to mind. “Let’s start with how they got into your house.” He re­moved his holster and figured the action would strip him of any appear­ance of authority, or that the distraction would enable Starsky to take that first painful step into the memory of his ordeal.

“It was going on eleven,” Starsky recalled, his voice subdued as he tread lightly even with himself, “and I heard a knock at the door.”

Hutch tucked his holster and pistol under the bed. “Were you sleeping at the time?”

“I was watching a Glenn Ford movie,” Starsky replied, briefly notic­ing that Hutch had concealed his belongings, as if he planned to stay a while. “Do you need to know the name of it?”

Hutch faced him when he heard the sarcasm. “You don’t have to talk to me. We can do it later when you’re not tired.”

“I have the right to remain silent?”

Hutch sat again on the edge of his mattress. His mind swam through a number of replies, but settled with conviction on, “You have the right to remain silent, but you know you’re not under arrest.” He looked sadly at Starsky when he realized tears rimmed those “beautiful eyes.”

“I feel stupid,” Starsky explained. His voice broke and he silently cussed himself for being emotional.

“You feel stupid,” Hutch assumed with understanding, “because, when you heard the knock, you opened the door without verifying who it was.”

“I was being lazy, so I said, ‘Who’s there?’” Starsky wiped his eyes with his sleeve to get ahead of his shame. “Then I heard a voice say, ‘Ken.’”

Ken. Hutch never called himself Ken. Not to Starsky, anyway. Ken was something Starsky rarely called him—and usually out of sarcasm or affection. ‘Starsky and Hutch.’ That was the play that even fellow cops used when they teased them about their suspected liaison, that their names, together, even sounded gay.

“I wasn’t thinking,” Starsky explained, as he acknowledged what Hutch already had. “I was tired and I wasn’t thinking. I said, ‘Use your key,’ and I heard him say, ‘I lost it.’ So I answered the door.” He looked at Hutch then, an unspoken intensity in his eyes, one that begged Hutch to forgive him for such a stupid thing he’d done.

“What happened next?”

“They shoved me to the floor and handcuffed me.”

“Did you think they were police?”

“They were masked, so I didn’t think for a second that it was some legal, but mistaken arrest. My first thought was that it was a home inva­sion until I remembered they knew your name. Don’t you want to know how many of them there were?”

Hutch thought he knew how many there were, but from Starsky’s question, he wondered if there were others he didn’t know about. “How many?”

“Three.”

“Tell me something I don’t know.”

“They were mean,” Starsky replied dryly. He didn’t really hear what Hutch had just said; he was focused instead on what he wanted to say, but his follow-up comment was anything but sarcastic. “They were evil.”

Those weren’t the details Hutch hoped to solicit. He silently noted that Starsky’s sarcasm was simply a defensive posture, so he’d have to be more skilled than usual at ignoring it. “You saw them for at least a second. What did you see?”

Starsky rolled onto his back, grimaced with pain when he did, and searched the ceiling for the details of his memory. “They wore dark clothes and masks. One is fat. I don’t think any of them were armed; they didn’t use a weapon on me except their muscle.”

“Voice. Cadence.”

“Nothing particular—but if I heard any of them again, I’d recognize their voices.” He’d never forget their sounds, from their grunts to their moans, either.

None of what Starsky had told him was anything Hutch didn’t know. He needed something new. “They handcuffed you, and then?”

“They taped my mouth shut, pulled a hood over my head, and drag­ged me out to their car. The engine was running when we got to it. I was in the back with two of them. And don’t ask if I fought with them, either. I didn’t just roll over and play dead.”

“I know you didn’t. I know you fought. I know you fought hard.”

Starsky was relieved to hear Hutch say so, even if Hutch didn’t really believe it. He didn’t want his partner to think he’d allowed what had hap­pened to him without serious resistance.

“Did they say anything to you?” Hutch further wondered.

“Not a word.”

“Did they say anything to each other?”

“Nothing telling,” Starsky recalled. “Just orders … ‘turn here,’ ‘park there,’ kind of stuff.”

“How long was the ride?”

Starsky shrugged and winced, then cussed under his breath for caus­ing himself the pain. “Forty, forty-five minutes maybe. Surface streets, I think, given the starts and stops. Stoplights or stop signs, I couldn’t tell. There was no rhyme or reason to it.”

“And then?”

“And then we stopped someplace, some empty building they drag­ged me into; it echoed. I didn’t hear anything of any significance, you know, trains or airliners or dump trucks, or whatever. Just big and empty and relatively noiseless—unless you count the stray cats and the rats.”

Hutch didn’t count them; he ignored Starsky’s derision. “And they’re still not talking to you or to each other?”

“No.”

“How long after they got you there did they first attack you?”

Starsky looked at him, puzzled, not certain why he’d been asked that question, though he knew Hutch knew he’d been beaten—at least once. “They didn’t waste time,” he finally answered, figuring that furthering the conversation would clarify Hutch’s odd questions for him.

“Did you ever see them during the attacks themselves?”

“They used the hood for a blindfold when they fucked with me,” Starsky said. “Then they duct-taped my mouth again and made the blind­fold back into a hood when they left me each night. I didn’t see them or a ray of light till you found me.”

“Why remove the duct tape while you were with them?” Hutch’s question came purely from wondering if the assailants wanted Starsky to speak to them, but he didn’t realize until it was too late that he’d put Starsky in the position of telling him he’d been forced to ‘orally copu­late’ them. “I mean … what did they want you tell them?” He had to tres­pass lightly. He already knew the nature of the attacks; he simply wanted to know the sequence, to track the steps the assailants had made, the purpose of their words, to find a pattern, a clue, some evidence that would put and keep him on their trail. But maybe Starsky wouldn’t see it that way and he’d shut down the conversation before Hutch could learn the things he needed to know.

“They left the blindfold on because they obviously didn’t want me to see them, but they took the tape off each time they fucked with me so I … so I … could answer their stupid questions.”

“What questions?”

“I don’t remember,” came the soft reply. It wasn’t a complete lie. It wasn’t a lie at all, really. It was more his effort to mislead Hutch because he didn’t want to tell him the real reason behind their access to his mouth.

Hutch tried a different line of questions. “Did one, two, or all three of them attack you that first night?”

Another odd question. If Starsky was blindfolded, how could he possibly know whether all three men attacked him? And why couldn’t Hutch figure out the answer to that question on his own? Why did he seem so suspicious? Or maybe Starsky just felt paranoid.

“My turn, my turn,” he remembered each of them saying, but how to answer that question without letting Hutch know how he knew? He chose his words carefully. “I think they all wanted in on the action.” He then laughed at himself, a sad laugh at his stupidity, his absurdity, and explained what he knew and believed about that first night. “The one guy, the one who did most of the talking, he said they were all going to teach me a lesson.”

“Which was?”

“He didn’t say, but he did say that you buying me that new house was ‘the straw that broke the camel’s back.’” Tears came into his eyes again as he looked at Hutch and silently begged for his forgiveness. “And I said to him, ‘Maybe if you’re nice to me, Hutch will buy you a new house, too.’”

“Jesus,” Hutch said under his breath.

“Yeah, I know,” Starsky agreed. “What kind of an idiot makes a crack like that to a group of thugs who’ve broken into his house in the middle of the night and already beat the shit out of him once? Me and my stupid mouth.” He awkwardly lifted his arm, complicated by the tubes attached to it, and wiped his eyes on his pajama sleeve. Angry at himself, then, he gave the attackers justification. “Who wouldn’t have done to me what they did?”

“They were going to do what they did, regardless.”

“You think so?”

“Besides,” Hutch added as he attempted to ease Starsky’s unfounded guilt, “you were blindfolded and bound at the time; you played to win and it was the only punch you had to throw.”

“What would you have done?”

Hutch leaned back on his mattress and never left eye contact with him. “I’d have thrown as many punches as I could have, too.”

“You wouldn’t have kept your mouth shut?”

“Me?” Hutch said with a light laugh.

“Oh, right, no, not you,” Starsky remembered, and he tried a chuckle himself. He needed the reminder. It lightened the moment.

Hutch was relieved for it. “Did you tell anyone I bought you a house?”

“No.”

“No one?”

“No one.”

“You didn’t tell your brother, your mother?”

“I told them I got a new house, but not that you had bought it for me. I didn’t tell anyone you bought me the house because I didn’t think it sounded …”

“Straight?”

“Yeah, straight,” Starsky said with a sad laugh. “Jesus, man, what’s wrong with people anyway? If we were women, they’d never question it. But, I didn’t tell anyone. Not a soul. You?”

“No—and for the same reason. It’s a private matter, as far as I’m con­cerned.”

“I thought maybe one of the guys might have been Emma’s brother,” Starsky unexpectedly said.

The thought made Hutch’s heart pound; he hated the idea that some­one in ‘the family’s would cause such grievous harm. “Why do you think that?”

“I thought maybe I was being punished for what we did Saturday night, and because I couldn’t think of any other reason these guys would have done me the kind of harm they did. It was payback for that three-way of ours.”

Hutch felt that familiar pang of embarrassment and shame when that ‘three-way’ of theirs was mentioned. He was envious that Starsky could talk about it so freely, but then Starsky couldn’t remember any of that night so maybe that’s why it came so easy for him. Hutch wished he couldn’t remember any of it, either. He shrugged it off to ask, “Have you ever met Emma’s brother?”

“A couple of times.”

“When you saw them for that split second after you opened the door, did any of them resemble him in dark clothes?”

“I don’t know. Only the one guy is fat; the other two are relatively

… average. Maybe he got two of his buddies to go in on the payback—which means they’re coming after you, you know.”

Hutch put Starsky’s mind to rest. “Dobey just saddled me with police protection.”

“Don’t get rid of it any time soon.”

“So you think Emma’s brother might be involved?”

“I thought maybe, but I don’t know now. I can’t imagine him having that kind of venom for me, or us, even if he knew his sister had done what she did with us. And then I can’t imagine her telling him, either. And if she didn’t tell him, he’d have no way of knowing. And then there’s the house thing, you know, that you bought me the house, that they knew you had, and that it was the straw …”

“You think these guys are cops? Did they ever say anything to make you think they might be?”

“They did and they didn’t. They’d say things to each other that sound­ed ‘police’-like, but then I thought maybe they baited me or tried to throw me off track. I don’t know. I can’t tell you what you want to know. Every second that went by—every second that goes by—I get more confused about what I thought and what I think.”

“On that first night,” Hutch refocused, “they attacked you more than once?”

Yet another question around whose answer Starsky felt a need to tread. He didn’t understand why Hutch would ask him about repeated attacks. “Are you guessing?”

“I’m wanting to know.”

“Well, yeah, a few times. I mean, if you’re asking if they hurt me once that first night and then came back and did it again and again, yeah, a few times.” He was satisfied with his answer and so it seemed Hutch was, too.

“And after the attacks, they left you in the building? They stayed with you there for a while? Or they took you someplace else right after?” Rape one place; overnight in another. He knew Starsky had been moved to another warehouse, but he didn’t know how long after the rapes they’d relocated him.

“They dragged me back to the car and then to some other building.”

“How long was the ride from one to the other that night?”

“About half an hour.”

“And at the other building, what then?”

“They just …” Starsky paused in his answer and swallowed a pang of hurt that had suddenly welled in him before he could finish his sent­ence. “They just left me there.”

“Tied or chained to something—”

“Well, yeah—until the next night—or else I would have left there on my own, shithead.”

Hutch’s interrupted comment was a statement, not a question, but he understood where Starsky’s sarcasm came from, so he let the reprimand go. “So, for roughly twenty to twenty-two hours, they left you tied and alone?”

Starsky nodded; he couldn’t speak at that moment. The pain of those haunting memories paralyzed him.

“Did they feed you?”

“No.”

“Did they give you water?”

“No.”

“They left you tied up without food or water, nearly stripped of your clothes, blindfolded and cold, till they returned the following night for the next round of attacks?”

“That’s the size of it,” Starsky managed to say. He started to ask Hutch a question, to have him define what he meant by ‘attack,’ but then changed his mind because he was afraid it would open a line of questions he wasn’t prepared to answer. “The drive each time was maybe twenty minutes, half hour. I thought they would finally dump me somewhere and be done with me.”

Hutch remembered, from the videotape, what they did with him instead. And he could see it then in Starsky’s eyes, too, that look of gen­uine fear, that time mixed with embarrassment and shame and guilt, all the things Hutch wished he could erase for Starsky with a single stroke. “Did they break your arm that night, the second night?” he asked.

“They broke my rib the second night and my arm that next night. I remember it well.”

“That next night?” And then it struck Hutch and it hit hard: There had been a third night of recorded beatings and rapes, all burned to a VHS tape like the previous two nights had been. He’d been so traumatized himself that he didn’t remember it till just then. He had confiscated the tape from Starsky’s mailbox, but he never watched it; Dobey had radioed him to give him an address, and he’d found Starsky before he had to watch the grisly details of that previous night. Had they tortured Starsky even more than they had the first two nights? “The third night was a repeat performance?”

“Pretty much—except they broke my arm then.”

Dismayed to remember Starsky had gone through that nightmare three nights, he was moved to ask, “Did they ever threaten to kill you?”

“Not in so many words, but I thought they would.” And then, just like that, without warning, Starsky rolled away from Hutch, turned his back as he faced the wall, and uttered, “I wish they had.” He buried his face and head in his arms, the hard splint holding his broken bone was unable to absorb his tears, and he cried, and not like a woman, but like a man, like a deeply wounded one, like a human being who’d been stripped of all his dignity and self-respect, his strength and his will, and who could take no more of the life that had become his.

Hutch got off his bed and sat on Starsky’s beside him; he squeezed Starsky’s shoulder. “I’m not the vigilante type,” he reminded his partner, “but these fuckers had better hope the police get to them before I do. I’m going to bury them alive and read them their rights later.”

It didn’t deter Starsky’s grief. He wept. Everything he’d held at bay—his shame, guilt, fear, embarrassment, grief, helplessness, pain, and even the realization that he couldn’t tell Hutch what had happened to him, and yet needed to—all came through in his sobs.

Hutch dropped his forehead to Starsky’s shoulder and pressed up against him as much as he could without hurting him. It was the only way he knew to tell Starsky that he wouldn’t go anywhere, that he’d be there for him just as he’d been there for him in times past. He rubbed Starsky’s back. “I don’t know how anyone overcomes this,” he said. “For the life of me, I don’t know what words are necessary to help you put one foot in front of the other again.” He listened to Starsky’s labored respiration and his sobs. “But I imagine it has to begin here, by this very thing, by letting it out. So let it out, buddy boy. Let it all go.”

Starsky couldn’t but release himself; it had overwhelmed him, de­spite Hutch’s physical reassuring closeness and his necessary affection.

The pain Starsky apparently felt caused a similar and deep pain in Hutch’s heart, one he himself had carried since that Monday morning. They had been through a lot together—good, bad, awkward, difficult, necessary, inexplicable, painful—but they always found a way to pull each other up and out of it. On this day, however, Hutch didn’t know how. Except to listen. And to feel what his brother-by-fate must have felt, as if sharing the pain would ease his partner’s burden somehow.

“I’d trade places with you in a heartbeat and never look back,” he told Starsky with sincerity. He closed his eyes and pressed himself closer. “In a heartbeat.”

Starsky abruptly quieted when he heard Hutch’s words. “Don’t say what you can’t know you’re saying,” he hoarsely said.

“I know what I’m saying,” Hutch whispered. “And I’m not taking it back.”

* * *

“Are you staying again tonight?”

Hutch and Starsky had lazily watched an episode of Perry Mason later that afternoon. When it ended—and without moving his eyes from the TV screen—Starsky asked Hutch about his plans.

“If you want me to,” Hutch replied, “I will.”

“I want you to.”

Hutch looked at him, but Starsky didn’t return the contact. “Would you mind if I cut out for a while and went home for a change of clothes?”

“You don’t like my tee-shirt?” Starsky joked.

“It’s beginning to smell; even I can’t miss it.”

“I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that,” Starsky further teased him, “but don’t out-dress me, okay? I feel stupid enough in this … what­ever it is …”

“Any particular thing you’d like me to bring back?”

“Chocolate. That’s soft food, isn’t it?”

“Sure. I suppose ‘soft’ is anything you can drink or suck down.”

Hutch was embarrassed the second the words left his mouth; he realized they could have easily been misconstrued, misunderstood, mis-intended. He felt flushed and apologetic, but was too ashamed to express it and silently hoped Starsky hadn’t noticed his poor choice of words.

“Relax already,” Starsky told him. “I really don’t remember Saturday night. If you hadn’t told me what I’d done, I wouldn’t know what I’d done and you wouldn’t be walking on eggshells in front of me every damn­ed second.”

Hutch didn’t have the guts to tell Starsky that his embarrassment hadn’t originated from what he and Starsky had done with Emma Satur­day night, but from what those vile men had done to Starsky. Hutch drop­ped the subject, lest he get himself in deeper. “Chocolate it is,” was all he said.

* * *

“I’m Dr. Earl Harwood.”

The young, dark-haired physician in the white lab coat never made the effort to shake Starsky’s hand when he introduced himself; he could tell his patient didn’t have the ability to oblige. “I’ve been taking care of you since you were moved out of Intensive Care,” he told Starsky. “It’s good to see you awake for a change.”

Starsky playfully smirked at him.

“How are you feeling?”

“Hungry,” Starsky replied.

Harwood picked up Starsky’s medical chart from the clip at the foot of the bed and studied it for a minute. “Don’t you get enough to eat?”

“There’s plenty of food—if you like jello and rice pudding. Can’t some­one bring me a steak?”

“If only,” Harwood mumbled to himself, amused. He told Starsky it would take a while to heal that ‘delicate’ part of the body, and that he should consider his hospital stay a forced vacation.

“My dream vacation would be filled with steak,” Starsky said.

The doctor smiled at him. “I’m happy to see you’re feeling better.” He monitored Starsky’s blood pressure and pulse while Starsky watched him perform the tests.

“Have you talked to my partner?” Starsky asked.

“About what?”

“About, you know, what happened to me, how I got hurt and all that.”

“I figured that was your business. Did you want me to tell him?”

“No. I was just curious about what he knew.”

They were silent while the blood pressure sleeve squeezed around Starsky’s arm and was then released, and Harwood keenly watched the reading.

“Did he ask about it?” Starsky wondered when the test was over.

“Did he ask about what?”

“What happened to me.”

“He hasn’t, no,” Harwood assured him. “But I wasn’t on duty when you arrived at the hospital. Dr. Randall Mitchell was the Emergency Room physician that morning.”

Starsky hadn’t seen the admitting doctor; he didn’t even know there’d been one. “If my partner asked Mitchell about what happened to me, what would the doc tell him?”

Harwood removed the pressure sleeve from Starsky’s arm. “De­pends.”

“On what?”

“Are you married to Hutch?”

Starsky grunted at the absurdity of the question.

Harwood winked at him. When he didn’t get a verbal answer from Starsky, he answered the question seriously. “Mitchell wouldn’t tell Hutch more than what’s Hutch’s business to know.”

“And what business would that be?”

Harwood gave Starsky a truthful answer, despite that it was one Starsky hoped for. “He’d have told Hutch that you had some broken bones, that you were dehydrated and needed stitches—but I doubt he would have told him anything else—unless Hutch is your husband—”

“That’s as unfunny as it is illegal.”

“—or your brother.”

“He’s my partner. That’s closer than a brother.”

Harwood was impressed, but it didn’t change the facts. “Well, under the law, unless he’s married to you or a blood relative, Hutch isn’t entit­led to know the personal nature of your injuries.”

“And if Hutch asks you what happened to me?”

“I’ll tell him you’re awake and he should ask you himself.”

Starsky thought for a minute while he watched Harwood make notes in his chart. He wondered if Mitchell had said more than he normally would have said to a patient’s friend—under the circumstances. But then he remembered that Hutch said the admitting doctor hadn’t told him anything about Starsky’s ordeal that Hutch “didn’t already know.”

“Here’s the thing,” Harwood said. “I know what your injuries are, but even I can only assume how you got them. I suspect Mitchell didn’t say a word to your partner. Oh, I’m sure he mentioned you had a busted rib and a broken arm and were dehydrated. But that other thing, that’s a personal matter, don’t you think?”

Starsky did think. Sometimes. Other times, he wasn’t so certain.

* * *

Starsky was angry out of fear. “Where the hell have you been?”

“I went home,” Hutch reminded him. “It’s more than a three-hour roundtrip from here. And I told you why. Shaved, showered, changed clothes, and—”

“Did you get laid along the way or something? You’ve been gone almost all day, about five hours now.”

Hutch didn’t answer the question; he posed his own. “Were you worried about me? Don’t be. I had a police escort.”

Starsky pulled the blanket closer to his chin. “Yeah, well, I’m not sure I trust those guys all that much.”

Hutch wasn’t sure he did, either; they’d only ever trusted each other, but he trusted the cops Dobey assigned him because he knew Dobey was on heightened alert, too. He dropped his backpack on the bed, the one Dr. Mitchell had given him. “Emma made you dinner,” he said. He emptied the bag’s contents onto the mattress.

“So you did get laid,” Starsky noted with a friendlier tone.

Maybe Starsky didn’t mind that Hutch had gotten laid, least of all with Emma.  Hutch didn’t know anymore whether Starsky pretended to feel better than he did or if he only felt all right when Hutch was around. None of that mattered at the moment. He felt guilty for enjoying himself earlier, especially the way he had, and in light of the ordeal his partner had endured only a few days earlier. And he didn’t know how to respond to Starsky’s crack, so he didn’t say anything, but he didn’t move, either. His guilt had momentarily paralyzed him.

“Cheap shot,” Starsky admitted. He apologized for the jab. “I was wor­ried about you, that’s all. I’m pretty useless in here and I imagine all kinds of things. So, then, she made me dinner?”

“She made you dinner.” Hutch echoed him. He then picked up the ther­mos and set it on the table near Starsky’s bed. “Homemade tomato soup and soy chocolate banana pudding. Soft food. Are you hungry?”

“I will be.”

Hutch sensed Starsky’s unspoken reluctance. Was it because Emma had made the meal and it wasn’t processed enough for Starsky’s taste? Was it because he’d recently eaten? Or did Starsky have something else on his mind, something that distracted him from food? “What is it?” Hutch asked.

“Some things you said.”

Hutch sat on his mattress and looked into Starsky’s sleepy blue eyes. He should have trusted his hunch that Starsky was troubled. “What things?”

“About what you know happened to me.”

“When did I say that?”

“Earlier.”

Starsky was vague—as usual, so Hutch rolled his eyes and sought a dif­fer­ent target. “What about whatever I said?”

“More happened to me than you know did,” Starsky explained, “and I know you suspect what else may have happened to me beyond what you know—and you want it confirmed or denied. I suppose one day I’ll tell you everything, but I’d like to do it in my own way on my own time.”

Hutch nodded that he understood.

“I know that sounds secretive and it doesn’t help you with your investigation,” Starsky added. “I also know you want to nail these guys, but I’m not ready to talk about it yet, not the way you wish I would.”

“Okay.”

“I’m having a harder time with it than it shows,” Starsky said, and his voice cracked when he spoke.

“I figured as much.”

“So if we could just be buddies, for a while, that would help me more than trying to nail these guys right now.”

“Understood.” Hutch appreciated Starsky’s honesty, his frankness—and that he needed Hutch’s friendship more than he wanted to catch the men who’d brutalized him. “But you do want to get these guys, right? One way or another?”

“Eventually,” Starsky said. “Not right now. Right now I just want to be …” He probed his mind and found a word. “Normal.”

Hutch grunted. “You? Normal? That’s a downright scary concept. You get that, don’t you, pal?”

“Yeah, like that,” Starsky said about Hutch’s put-down. He enjoyed—needed—Hutch’s playfulness. He returned the warm look he’d gotten. “Can we just be like that for a while?”

“We sure can,” Hutch said.

“That means you have to stop worrying about every little thing you say to me—including about this Emma thing, this thing we did Saturday night—”

“That you don’t remember,” Hutch reminded him.

“Right. That I don’t even remember, so why care about it? And you’ve got to let go of this investigation of yours into what happened to me. Let’s just be us for now, okay? I kick your ass and you try kicking mine—you know, like the way it’s always been.”

Hutch laughed at him. “Is that the way it’s always been?”

Starsky found a more comfortable position to lie in. “You know it is,” he mumbled, “so accept the truth for what it is.”

“Dream on.”

“Speaking of chocolate,” Starsky said, to change the subject, “did you bring me any that isn’t soy?”

“Oh, right,” Hutch remembered. He opened the bag of Kisses he’d brought and tossed one at Starsky. “There,” he said. “You can’t say I never gave you a kiss.”

The second Hutch said it, he realized what he’d said and shot an abrupt glance at Starsky, who had himself realized what Hutch had said, and fired back a similar, startled look. The moment erased the present and stripped them of all thought except the one they came to together. They were taken back three years to a moment neither of them would ever forget, to one of the most personal experiences they’d ever had with each other.

And then, just like that—and together—they burst out laughing.

Hutch had kissed Starsky—a personal, private, spontaneous, intim­ate, passion-filled kiss, one they hadn’t revisited till that very moment. Its memory was as precious then as the kiss itself had been.

Starsky tossed the chocolate back at Hutch and hit him in the cheek with it. He threw it to reprimand his buddy for having caused him to laugh as hard as he did, because the action made his broken rib hurt. “You asshole,” he affectionately cussed.

“Yeah?” Hutch said, still laughing, “well, I hear you’re a bigger one than I am, so what does that make you?”

“Your superior,” Starsky replied, and that time he cussed himself for making them laugh. “Knock it off,” he warned. He was aware, as much as Hutch was aware, that Starsky was perceived as the nicer one between them, which made their play that afternoon all the more funny to them.

“Let me rephrase myself, then,” Hutch said. He tossed a handful of Kisses at Starsky. “I meant to say I’m not a hit-and-run guy; you can no longer claim that I didn’t follow up our first kiss with a bunch of little kisses since.”

“Yeah, but it took you three years,” Starsky dryly noted. He opened one of the chocolates, ate it, and savored its feel and taste. “That first kiss was better,” he finally admitted as he reflected on the memory they shared inside that air conditioning shaft three years earlier.

“How so?”

“I’m not going to remember this kiss past today,” Starsky imagined. “But that other kiss, that first one, the one in the ceiling, well, that one will be memorable for a lifetime.”

“Good to know I beat out Hershey’s,” Hutch mused. He prepared a bowl of soup for his partner while Starsky hunted and found another chocolate on his blanket and ate it, too. And then another.

“I give you this much, though,” Starsky said on second thought.

“What’s that?”

“Your kisses—in all their forms—are dee-licious.”

And they broke out laughing again.

* * *

“What brings you to the office?” Dobey asked. “It’s Saturday morn­ing and you’re off duty. Go home.”

“Davis,” Hutch replied. He slumped into the chair in front of the captain’s desk and relaxed for a minute. “I thought I’d check in with you first.” He told his superior what he’d learned from Starsky, particularly that the attackers had known that he’d bought a house for his partner—and that it had been the ‘straw that broke the camel’s back.’

“You bought that house for Starsky?” Dobey asked. He paused his paper­work to look at Hutch.

It was a question Hutch wanted to hear. Apparently it wasn’t com­mon knowledge, which was good. “I bought him the house,” he admit­ted. “I bought us both new houses and I bought myself a new truck; I’d have gotten him a new car, too, but I couldn’t pry him off the Striped Tom­ato. There. Now you know everything. But none of that means we’re gay.”

Dobey rolled his eyes. “If you bought Starsky a house, then … I think we’re overpaying you,” he joked.

“My great Uncle Ted died last fall and I was his sole heir,” Hutch reminded his captain. “The check arrived in time for the holidays; it was my Christmas present.”

“I’m sorry for him, glad for you. There’s a point to this.”

“That neither Starsky nor I told anyone I’d bought him that house.”

Dobey abandoned his paperwork altogether. The plot had just thick­ened. If his men had never told anyone, then how could anyone know?

“Yeah,” Hutch said, “exactly.”

“I’m giving you and your partner a month’s leave,” Dobey told him. He didn’t like what he’d just learned and he wasn’t certain he should trust his own judgment anymore. He’d rather turn his boys loose and let them find their own way. “You’re no longer legally on this case, so go to your meeting with Davis as a witness only, do you hear me?”

It was an order Hutch had hoped for. “Aye-aye, Captain.”

* * *

“I bring another peace offering,” Davis said. He set a small bottle of orange juice in front of Hutch and pushed it toward him. “I hear you’re into health food.”

“You’re into sick food?” Hutch quipped. He reached for the juice and smirked at Davis as he delivered the touché. Then he apologized by way of an explanation. “I couldn’t help myself.”

Davis actually enjoyed Hutch’s humor. He popped open a root beer. “Right you are,” he said. He leaned back in his chair and put his feet on the table.

“Right, you’re into sick food?” Hutch wondered, and nodded at the soda, “or, right, you know I couldn’t help myself?”

Davis laughed. “Either works.”

They sat in an interrogation room, the two of them, and indulged the relay. Hutch liked Davis’ comfort with him and Davis appreciated Hutch’s newly-found freedom from the intense grip of the past couple of days.

While Hutch drank the juice, he told Davis what little he’d learned from Starsky about his abduction and attacks, and that the assailants knew he’d bought a house for Starsky, even though neither of them had told anyone about the purchase. Maybe Starsky was reluctant—for what­ever reason—to ‘nail’ the bad guys any time soon, but Hutch was deter­mined to catch them, and at nearly any cost.

“You bought your partner a house?” Davis asked, on cue.

“I did.”

“Meaning you paid for it?”

“That’s what I meant.”

Davis was impressed. “Cash?”

“From an inheritance,” Hutch explained.

Davis thought a minute about how it may have played into the crime. “You paid for the house, but it’s his house. You on the deed or just him?”

“Just him, but I get the house if anything happens to him.”

“By way of?”

“His will.”

Davis absorbed it further. He didn’t believe he pulled the truth from Hutch, but he did suspect that Hutch wasn’t comfortable talking about the house sale. Or maybe the cop was embarrassed to disclose the inti­mate legal setup between himself and his partner. “How would anyone know you were related to that house then?” Davis asked.

“The only way I can figure it is … they got their hands on the sale con­tract,” Hutch imagined. “Like I said, though, I paid cash for it so there’s not a bank loan against it. I’m guessing they dug it out of the title company somehow when they went looking for Starsky—or when they went looking for me, for that matter.”

Davis wrote down the real estate firm’s name and address when Hutch gave it to him. “That’s some brotherhood you’ve got there,” he noted under his breath.

“Buying him a house proves it?” Hutch asked.

Davis looked at him. “Wouldn’t you say so?”

“I think it says it least of all. I think our willingness—and all those times we put it on the line—to take a bullet for each other says a lot more about our brotherhood than any house sale.” He got to his feet. “I hope you get a lead from that, in any case; you know that.”

Davis stood, too. “I do know that. I also think what you really want from me is to help you kill the motherfuckers.”

Hutch didn’t commit.

“That’s what I’d want,” Davis confessed, “especially in light of how you obviously feel about him.” He stopped Hutch from leaving with his next comment. “I’m envious. I had a partner once, but I still can’t imag­ine anyone ever willingly taking a bullet for me. We weren’t that close, I guess.”

“I couldn’t imagine it, either,” Hutch said. He thought back over those ten years. “But then he did it one day, long ago, just like that, and he’s done it since when the need has presented itself.”

“And you for him?”

“Yep. And me for him.”

* * *

Hutch returned to Starsky’s hospital room that afternoon earlier than he’d told Starsky he would—so he was proud of himself for not having worried his partner. But he unexpectedly found Starsky under his blank­ets; Starsky faced the wall and hid behind his arms. He hadn’t heard Hutch enter—because Hutch’s entry was buried under the sound of Star­sky’s crying.

Hutch stood at the foot of the bed and listened to his sobs for a min­ute. Should he leave him lie, alone? Should he try to comfort him? Could he comfort him? He quietly dropped his backpack to the floor and grip­ped the bed’s footboard because he found it harder to leave than to stay.

After another minute, he could no longer bear Starsky’s grief, so he gently squeezed Starsky’s ankle through the blanket.

Starsky abruptly stopped crying when he felt Hutch’s grip, but he didn’t move; he didn’t come out of hiding to openly acknowledge him, even though he knew it was Hutch there.

“Hey. It’s not so easy being normal, is it?” Hutch quietly asked.

“Shit, no,” came the subdued reply.

Hutch squeezed him again. “But don’t you give up trying, buddy boy.”

Starsky remained hidden behind his arms.

“I’m sure all that pain medication you’re taking doesn’t help how you feel, either,” Hutch reasoned. “That shit can actually make you more depressed.”

“I can’t believe I’m a basket case.”

Hutch could believe it. He gently shook Starsky’s foot. “Can I get you anything?”

“Some of those Kisses,” Starsky replied.

Hutch picked up his backpack, walked to his own bed, emptied its contents onto the mattress, and quickly found the bag of chocolates. Star­sky rolled over to face him when he heard Hutch rummage through his things, so Hutch tossed him the entire bag of the candies.

“Those are the kind you were hoping for, right?” Hutch asked. He made Starsky laugh and that pleased him. Then he pushed away the junk on his bed, lay down on the mattress, covered his eyes in the bend of his elbow, and audibly sighed. For a few minutes, the room was quiet. He heard Starsky retrieve a Kiss from the bag, remove it from its wrapper, and then eat it before he retrieved and ate another. “Are you hungry?” he finally asked. He didn’t want Starsky to fill up on chocolate.

“This will do for now. Did Emma make me dinner again?”

“I didn’t see her,” Hutch answered. He lowered his arm, opened his eyes, and melted further into his pillow. He didn’t realize how muscle-sore he was until then and how much he needed an actual massage. “I spent the day with Grace,” he added, looking over at Starsky. He hoped Starsky would interrogate him about it so he could talk about her with him.

“You spent the day with Grace?” came the perfect question. “Doing what?”

“Moving you out of your house and into mine.”

Hutch wondered what Starsky’s reaction would be to already have moved him—and without his permission—but if he knew the man at all, he imagined Starsky would process it within the context of the bigger picture and agree it was the right thing to do. Starsky would be more inter­ested in Grace—if Hutch knew Starsky at all.

“Did you tell her you’ve been trying to get me to live with you since the day we met?” Starsky asked.

“If that were true, I’d have told her that. Besides, it’s only till you’re back on your feet.”

“So, how did you explain why you moved me?”

“I didn’t.”

“And she didn’t think that was strange, given that I have a brand new house of my own?”

“I didn’t know she knew you had a new house, but I think she was glad,” Hutch cracked, “because she figured she’d be invited to my farm more often than you’ve invited her to your house—and she’ll finally get to see you outside the office.”

“I’ve never invited her to my house,” Starsky noted.

“Exactly.”

Hutch closed his eyes and rested for a few minutes as he listened to Starsky eat more chocolate. He was happy with the way the conversation had gone, that Starsky was comfortable, maybe even relieved, to be spending the next few months at Hutch’s farm, and that Hutch had open­ed the door for Grace’s visit. “You can tell her you moved in with me because you need a nurse for a while,” Hutch figured.

“How is she?”

“Grace?”

“My car,” Starsky sarcastically replied. “Yes, Grace.”

“She’s happy. I left her and Anne at the house unpacking my truck. I drove your car back here—and your car, I’m proud to say, is happy, too. It likes me.”

“Who’s Anne?” Starsky asked.

“Wade Davis’ sister.”

Hutch had met her in the hallway outside Grace’s office door; Davis wanted to put a face on the rape victim in his own family. She, too, was young and sweet and—

“Who’s Wade Davis?” Starsky asked, breaking into Hutch’s thoughts.

“Internal Affairs,” Hutch reminded him. “I told you about him, but those painkillers you’re on apparently have made you forget.”

The room got quiet again. For a minute, Hutch dozed. He woke to the sound of his name.

“Hey,” Starsky added, “look at me.”

Hutch opened his eyes and turned his head to meet Starsky’s gaze. It made him roll onto his side and prop his temple in his hand to let Starsky know he had his undivided attention. Starsky’s eyes were slightl­y swollen and red. He’d been crying longer than Hutch realized he had. “What do you need?” Hutch asked.

“I thought we were going to save the revenge for another day,” Starsky said.

“I promised Davis a meeting before you and I made that deal. And I needed to see Dobey. He officially took me off your case.”

“It’s about time you got off my case.”

“Then he put us both on a month’s leave,” Hutch said.

“He put you and Davis on a month’s leave?”

“No, dimwit, he put you and me on a month’s leave.”

“And you thought it would be fun if you and me spend it at your ranch with a couple of girls?”

“Well, when you put it like that …” Hutch tried a smile. Starsky knew Emma was Hutch’s girlfriend and Hutch wasn’t on the prowl, but just the same, Hutch clarified it for him, lest his partner get the wrong idea. “Actually, I need you to help me plant some trees.”

“You forgot I have a broken arm.”

“I remember. What I’ll need from you is advice.”

Starsky grunted. His expression had softened; Hutch’s answers consoled him. “Dobey put us on a month’s leave over this thing?”

“Do you need more time? I’ll get it for you if you need it.”

Starsky laughed at the notion. “It seems strange to shelve both of us for that long, that’s all. I’ve been through worse and he gave me less time off.”

“Really? You’ve been through worse?”

“As far as he knows.”

“He suspects what I know,” Hutch said apologetically.

“I’ve been through worse than you know,” Starsky said. He averted his eyes for a second, ashamed to have disclosed that much, but he came back to Hutch’s gaze when he heard his partner speak.

“I can’t imagine anything worse,” Hutch replied. “You can’t possibly mean what you just said.”

“You haven’t been with me every second of my life,” Starsky ex­plained. Before Hutch could say more, Starsky cut him off. “Can we not talk about this now? My fault. I keep thinking I can run full steam into my life, but I can’t. Not yet.”

It made Hutch sick again to think Starsky had been through worse than he’d seen on those videotapes. He dreaded knowing about whatever the attackers had filmed that third night. How else had they hurt Starsky? And why would Starsky think Hutch hadn’t seen that video, that third one? Or had they done worse things to him off-camera? Or maybe Star­sky meant he’d been sexually abused as a child, long before he met Hutch. That disappointed Hutch, if for no other reason than he prided himself for knowing all there was to know about Starsky—or at least he assumed he did.

He gave Starsky what he asked for. “So … do you want to watch a movie or something?”

Starsky threw a chocolate Kiss at Hutch and hit him the forehead. “Tell me about Grace,” he said.

Hutch rubbed his skin where the candy had hit him. “For a guy with a fractured arm,” he noted, “you’ve got one hell of a pitch.”

“My right arm is broken,” Starsky said, “and I’m left-handed.”

That, Hutch had always known. “I keep telling you there are ways to rectify that defect.”

“Grace,” Starsky focused, ignoring the barb.

“I told you: She’s happy.”

“Why did you use her for your dirty deed?”

“She caught me in the hallway outside Dobey’s office and wanted to know if there was anything she could do to help you. The woman loves you, you know.”

Starsky pressed his lips and studied Hutch’s face for a second. When he decided Hutch was serious, he quietly said, “I love her back.”

“Yeah, but she loves you romantically.”

“No accounting for taste.”

“She’s a special woman,” Hutch said, having been reminded himself earlier that day. Grace had intercepted him in the hallway, her eyes red and swollen from her crying, begging to know how she could help Star­sky. Her empathy and concern were traits in a woman Hutch wished on Starsky from as far back as he’d known him.

“You still trying to get me to lay her?” Starsky asked.

Hutch was no longer trite. “I’ve never wanted you to lay her. I’ve wanted you to want to know her better. The fact that you keep asking about her and the fact that you haven’t laid her in two years of knowing her tells me she means more to you than you’ll admit to yourself.”

Starsky popped an unwrapped chocolate in his mouth and sucked on it till it was gone before he confessed, “It’s too late now, anyway.” His voice was subdued and sorry. He played for a second with the tube that connected him to his hydration bag and didn’t look at Hutch. “Not that I’m feeling sorry for myself or anything,” he sadly laughed.

Hutch waited for an explanation before he finally asked for one. “Too late now, for why?” Dr. Mitchell had specifically told him there hadn’t been any damage to Starsky’s genitalia—despite that the attackers had kicked him in the groin so hard they dropped him to the floor—so what had those men done to him that would have prohibited Starsky from having a romantic relationship? Had they done something even more psychologically damaging to him that third night of attacks, or did Star­sky mean he was emotionally unable to be in a relationship—and for­ever would be?

Starsky tried to convey the obvious with his eyes, but when Hutch didn’t grasp their message, he verbalized it. “I’m broken,” he said. “Simple as that.”

“Physically broken?”

“Sort of. They beat the heart right out of me.”

Hutch studied Starsky, his ‘beautiful’ eyes, despite their pain, and the bruises and swelling on his face, the stitched laceration, his cut-up nose and lips, his tired expression, the way he lay so frailly on that hos­pital bed, an arm cast and several needles imbedded in the back of his hand, in those silly pajamas under a lightweight blanket. Starsky did appear the broken man.

But Hutch also knew Starsky—and had known him for a long time—through some very trying and life-changing experiences. And from it all, Hutch had come to believe that Starsky had more inner strength than Starsky even knew he had, that he was a man of great resilience, an enor­mous will, and a most forgiving heart. Starsky would find his way out, somehow, someway. Hutch was sure of it. He couldn’t allow himself to believe that his brother-by-fate had been forever broken; to embrace that idea would be to break Hutch as gravely.

“You’re unbreakable,” he told Starsky.

“Says you,” Starsky replied.

“I’ve seen you snap in half and come out swinging.”

“I was younger then.”

“You’re still young,” Hutch said.

“Why do you insist on countering everything I say?” Starsky asked.

“I’m your voice of reason.”

Starsky lay on his side, his cheek in his pillow, clutched his Hershey’s Kisses bag, and intently watched Hutch. He played the past decade of his life through his mind in those minutes and weighed Hutch’s insight and accuracy skills, Hutch’s affection for him and his determination to help him through such a painful time.

Then he quietly repeated Hutch’s words, almost to himself. “My ‘voice of reason,’” he echoed, mulling it over. Then, sleepily, and with a slight nod and a wry smile, he concluded, “That you are, buddy—and don’t you ever forget it.”

* * *

“Then maybe you can tell me how soon I can get all these tubes and needles out of me,” Starsky said to Dr. Mitchell after the physician introduced himself as the Emergency Room doctor on duty the morning Starsky had been admitted, “so I can take Hutch out for pizza.”

Mitchell was quite pleased to see the two men there, each on a bed, totally relaxed by the other’s company. He smiled at them, winked at Hutch, and then answered Starsky’s question. “I was under the impres­sion your partner doesn’t eat pizza.”

“That’s irrelevant,” Starsky said. “He always finds something to eat wherever we go, but I need pizza; that’s the main thing.”

Mitchell chuckled. “You can have pizza a week from now,” he prom­ised him. “And you’ll wear that cast for about a month, too, maybe longer, in case Dr. Harwood hasn’t told you that yet.”

“He has.”

Mitchell stood between the two beds with his arms crossed over his chest, dressed in his white coat, a stethoscope draped around his neck. “To answer your question, I hear you’re getting out of here tomorrow,” he added. “You’re an adult; you can make your own decisions then.”

“Am I?”

“An adult?”

“Getting out of here tomorrow?”

“I believe so,” Mitchell said with a wink again at Hutch; he got back a smile from the tall blond. “I’m trusting you to keep his diet on track,” he told Hutch.

“He’s blown it already,” Starsky noted. “I’ve had an entire bag of choc­olate in the past twenty-four hours—and he’s the one who gave it to me.”

“Such sacrifice for you,” Mitchell said.

“It’s a sad state of affairs,” Hutch commented, “when chocolate is healthier for a patient in a hospital than the food it serves.” He lay on his back with his hands on his belly, his ankles crossed, and watched the doctor enjoy them.

“You don’t think macaroni-and-cheese is health food?” Mitchell joked. He didn’t believe it, either.

“So what are you saying?” Starsky asked, feigning confusion. “No pizza?”

“No pizza.”

“What will they give him for dinner tonight?” Hutch wondered. “More of that creamed asparagus crap?”

Mitchell nudged Hutch’s bed and ignored the question for one of his own. “What did you serve him last night? I heard you brought in a home­made meal.”

“Tomato soup,” Starsky quickly answered. He pulled his blankets closer. “It was good, but it wasn’t very filling.”

“I had to find something you’d eat,” Hutch explained. “You think because food is organic or healthy, it’s diseased or rancid. I figured tom­ato soup was something you’d eat because it was as close to Ketchup as I could get.”

“Fuck you,” Starsky mumbled.

“In your dreams, buddy boy.”

Mitchell laughed, heartily. “You guys are going to be just fine after all. I had my doubts for a while, but you’re both going to be all right.”

“You see?” Hutch said to Starsky. “I told you I was the voice of reason.”

“It doesn’t make you any less of an asshole,” Starsky playfully replied.

“Male bonding,” Mitchell noted. He affectionately shook his head.  “If I didn’t know better,” he innocently remarked, “I’d wonder if you were married.” The room grew abruptly quiet and he noticed it. “I’m sorry. That was an inappropriate thing to say.”

Only under the circumstances, Hutch thought.

“We’re razzed like that all the time at our precinct,” Starsky said aloud and dryly, “but, here I was, thinking you had sworn to some oath to ease pain.”

* * *

Why it hit him then, Hutch couldn’t say. All he knew was that, as soon as Starsky had fallen asleep, he replayed those last few days in his mind. He wound them along a timeline like any good detective would have done in search of an elusive clue. Except he didn’t fact-find; he wal­lowed. Sunk, at least—and fast.

The wedding had been beautiful—as weddings often were. But this ceremony had been extra special, even for Hutch; this one had been for a mutual friend of his and Starsky’s, and they were ecstatic for the groom because they’d known him for years as sort of a kid brother. It was as if, somehow, the boy got married for them by proxy so they never had to.

Hutch and Starsky drank champagne and danced with just about every able and willing woman at the reception—young, old, married, racial. Starsky even tried to dance with Hutch, who wouldn’t cooperate, and they both once danced with Emma at the same time—an unknow­able harbinger of things to come. She had been invited to the party, too, acquainted with the bride through her salon, and it happened that she was also friends with Hutch and Starsky—closer friends, closer than any of them realized that Saturday afternoon.

The flirt began early in the evening and, at some point, stopped being a game; it got so serious, the three eventually left the party in Starsky’s car and drove to his house with the nonverbal understanding that she and Hutch would jump in his truck and go someplace where they could share more than wine. At least, Hutch thought that was the plan—or hoped it was; he was aroused and wanting long before he got to the house—because Emma encouraged him.

It didn’t occur to Hutch until the flirts turned to actual touching right there in Starsky’s living room that she had encouraged Starsky to share more than wine with her, too.

Hutch had wanted to make love with Emma long before that night. For some reason, for some reason even then, he didn’t know why he hadn’t initiated a romantic liaison with her; perhaps because the three of them were such good friends, he didn’t feel it was his place to make any sexual overture, that to do so was to violate the friendship she also had with Starsky. But looking back, Hutch didn’t know why he felt that way. Starsky was much less interested in her than Hutch was—because Starsky had slowly grown disinterested in relationships in general, even short-term ones, as the years rolled by.

But there they were that night, at Starsky’s new house, drinking more alcohol, eating what Starsky considered wholesome snacks, and Hutch trying to keep up with the fun—until he found himself competing with Starsky for Emma’s friendly attention. And though Starsky purely made effort for the pleasure of the game or the chase, Hutch was in it to win. If anyone would have Emma, it would be him. He was the one who actu­ally desired her.

In the end, both Hutch and Starsky had her that night, together, at the same time, though in different ways. Starsky thoroughly enjoyed what Emma did for him—from the neck massage to the fellatio—but he insisted that Hutch “wait your turn, cowboy” when Hutch seemed to get impatient. Emma compelled Hutch not to; she wanted to “feel you both inside me at once,” she said, and she got her wish when Hutch obliged her—out of fear he’d get left behind, by his need to covet her, and fueled by his unexpected anger that caused him to take what he felt was already his. He made love that night without love—and it still haunted him.

That Starsky couldn’t remember the next morning what he’d done the night before did ease the weight of Hutch’s guilt and embarrassment, but it hadn’t erased it. Nor had it demolished his resentment. He thought it had.

The following afternoon, on that lazy Sunday, he bared his soul to Starsky and told him how he felt and why—and then the two of them assim­ilated it like the grown men they were, like the friends they’d been, packaged it, packed it, and stored it away. “It never happened,” Starsky had said—because he couldn’t remember it. “It’s as if I was never there.”

Hutch went on that night to Emma’s apartment, into a one-on-one with her, to make up, he thought, for the unplanned events between the three of them, to remind himself he could still love her, not just take her, that he could forgive Starsky and forgive himself and forgive her for some­thing he believed none of them would have done had they been sober.

Maybe that would have been the end of it that Monday morning had Starsky not shown up missing. His absence in the squad room long after he should have been at work made Hutch question why Starsky hadn’t arrived—and Hutch hated himself for that, too. He assumed Starsky avoided him and he believed it all the way up to driving to Starsky’s house that morning only to find Starsky had been abducted during the night instead.

How petty of Hutch to have been absorbed by his own unfounded feelings of victimization while Starsky underwent the most brutal act of violence ever leveled at him. How small of Hutch to have been con­cerned about his own righteousness while Starsky frantically fought for his life.

Hutch heard voices in the hall then, doctors being paged, nurses being summoned. It brought him temporarily back into that hospital room. He listened for a minute to Starsky’s breathing, to his sleeping in the bed nearby, a bed lit by the machines that still monitored his pulse and blood pressure, his respiration and temperature. This man Hutch had felt compelled to dominate when it came to Emma still lay there badly beaten and broken, a man he’d have gladly given Emma to if he’d been asked, a man he’d give up his life for—even if he weren’t asked.

Hutch could still hear, in the back of his mind, Starsky’s painful groan as some sick, vile excuse for a human being anally penetrated him, violently and repeatedly thrust into him, into his powerless victim, like some depraved animal might have done, or something beyond ani­mal, something closer to monster. Starsky, alone and hungry, helpless and no doubt terrified, blindfolded and tightly bound, humiliated, already wounded and in pain, struggled against the unyielding rope and the muscle that held him, and vainly resisted the violation with his gut-wrench­ing groan and physical shudder as the attacker literally ripped him open.

Something about sex as a weapon made it more sinister than any wea­pon void of sex. Had they held Starsky down and cut him with a knife, despite its exquisitely sharp pain and bloody aftermath, would seem less depraved somehow. Or was that merely Hutch’s personal neur­osis, one fueled by a desensitization to the sort of everyday violence he’d witnessed and fought to end over the course of his career? Had he grown that callous to violence in general that it took something out of the ‘norm’ to move him? Men rape women every day. Men rape children every day. But it isn’t every day that men sexually assault men.

Or is it?

Maybe Hutch was too hard on himself; maybe there was something above and beyond what was acceptable in the human condition. And these men knew it—and these men used it against Starsky for just that purpose, to cut much further into his core than any knife could have sliced him. They did it with such glee, too. Hutch recalled their verbal abuse, the laughing at Starsky’s efforts to defend himself, the degrading act of ejaculating on Starsky’s face, or worse—perhaps they succeeded in making Starsky fellate them—during that third night of attacks.

Hutch couldn’t even mentally picture such an experience, though he did try that night, and he tried only because he wanted to know how it felt to be Starsky, as if knowing would help him save Starsky’s dignity. But he couldn’t stomach it; he could barely muster the strength to imag­ine the visuals and sounds he had seen and heard, let alone imagine beyond them.

But Starsky had endured them.

And he had permanently endured them. He would never be able to erase the pain, humiliation, fear, and helplessness he suffered at their hands. He would not be the person he was before those attacks, which made his concerted but failed effort earlier that day as he lay on that hos­pital bed to find some sort of normalcy in his life all the more heart­breaking.

Hutch did feel sorry for Starsky—and he felt sorry for that, too.

He broke a sob then and tried to stop it before he was able. But it was the leak in the dam and there was no turning back. In the dim light of the hospital room, with his brother-by-fate lying in the bed beside his, Hutch finally lost his composure. And he lost it good. Had he the strength to have left the room just then, he would have, but his feelings of anger and grief overpowered and paralyzed him. He cried. For himself. For Star­sky. For the way things were.

But he cried only for a couple of minutes—because he heard Starsky roll over in his bed and Hutch knew he had to stop himself at any cost, lest he injure his partner further by the breakdown. He opened his mouth and inhaled an arresting breath in order to kill his emotion.

But it was too late.

“Hey,” he heard Starsky say, concerned. “What are you doing over there?”

Hutch settled on a harmless reply. “Sleeping.”

“And I woke you somehow?” Starsky asked.

Hutch didn’t reply.

“It didn’t sound like snoring,” Starsky said to provoke an answer.

“How would you know what snoring sounds like?” Hutch asked. He wiped his eyes and tried a laugh.

“I’ve heard you sleep before,” Starsky answered. “We’re inseparable, remember? There isn’t anything about you that I don’t know.”

Hutch grunted. “Go back to sleep.”

Starsky turned on his bed lamp. “C’mon, man. Talk to me. Did you and Emma have some falling out or something that you need to get off your chest?”

“No.”

“No, you didn’t have a falling out—or, no, you don’t want to talk about it?”

“No, we didn’t have a falling out—therefore, my dear Watson, there isn’t anything to talk about. I’m tired. Overly tired is all, I guess. The days are catching up with me.” He stared at the ceiling and hoped Star­sky would go back to sleep.

Instead, a lengthy silence hung in the room, save the muffled voices from the hall.

Starsky moved, seemed to settle. “They catch up with me sometimes, too,” he said.

Hutch turned his head then, looked over at Starsky, and found his partner closely watching him, his temple propped in his hand.

Starsky’s face was lit by a night lamp that reflected the sincerity in his blue eyes. “You were scared for me,” he quietly said.

Hutch rolled onto his side to face him and set his temple in his palm, too. He thought for a second, then confessed, “Yes.”

“And you were scared for you,” Starsky imagined.

“Mostly you,” Hutch answered sincerely, “but, yes, for me, too.”

“You looked for me.”

“Everywhere I could think to look—and then some.”

“I’m here now,” Starsky reminded him, but Hutch cut him off before Starsky could say what Hutch knew Starsky would say next.

“All is not well that ends well,” Hutch countered.

“It is if we want it to be.”

“No, Starsk,” Hutch regretfully replied, “that’s the thing: it has noth­ing to do with what we want. It’s not the way it should be; it’s the way it is. Not all is well—because it isn’t over yet.”

* * *

Hutch saw his property through Starsky’s eyes as he drove them onto it in Starsky’s so-familiar, white-striped, red car. The farm’s new spring grass, budding trees, and brightly blooming flowers along the driveway greeted them—and he was impressed all over again by it. Another beau­tiful morning. So much had transpired, but for the first time, it felt like home; he had Starsky with him.

As they rode up to the house, Starsky noticed the cop car as it pulled passed them in the drive and parked nearby. The residence was secure—and Starsky was calmed by that. “An amazing place,” he admitted. “I haven’t seen it since you moved in.”

Hutch turned off the ignition. “When you saw it last it was bare trees and mud.” It had been less than a week since Starsky’s abduction, but more than a month since Starsky’s visit to the farm.

“I remember,” Starsky said as he looked around; he didn’t leave the vehicle. His casted arm was in a sling, so he waited for Hutch to open the passenger door for him. “You still like the place?”

“I love it,” Hutch said, “but it needs more flowers and lots more trees. A garden. A greenhouse. You know. All that.”

“All that,” Starsky mulled. He scanned the quaint, one-story ranch house with its wrap-around porch, the very virtue that had sealed the deal for Hutch, but he remembered it yellow. “Did you repaint?”

“Green’s better, isn’t it?”

Starsky thought so. “Tell me again how many acres you have?” He couldn’t remember.

“Ten.”

“Ten,” Starsky echoed.

Hutch removed the key from the ignition and used Starsky’s question to revisit an offer he’d made him months earlier. “You could sell your house,” he encouraged him, “and we’ll build you one here, right over there, across the drive.”

Starsky couldn’t wait any longer; he awkwardly opened the passen­ger door with his left hand. Hutch’s question made him nervous. “What would people think then?”

Hutch caught Starsky by his arm and stopped him before he could get out of the car. “Since when do you give a shit what people think?”

“Careful there,” Starsky warned. “That’s my good arm.”

Hutch didn’t let go.

“I don’t give a shit what people think,” Starsky surrendered. He hoped he’d be released by the confession, “but we do have to be careful now.”

Hutch was inexplicably wounded and scared—and didn’t know why. “You think that’s the reason they came after you? Because of the way we are?”

“Yeah,” Starsky answered flatly. His blue eyes were as firm as his voice. “Don’t you think that’s why, too? You bought me a house, after all.”

Hutch panicked. “Even if they went after you because of the way we are doesn’t mean we have to stop being Us.”

Defensively, Starsky said, “You say that because they didn’t do to you what they did to me.”

Hutch implored Starsky with his words and the sound of his voice and a firmer grip to appreciate what he tried to tell him, that they had so much to lose, much more than they could ever gain again, something precious and priceless. He hoped he didn’t sound trite. “If they destroy Us,” he said, “then they will have done to me what they did to you.”

“You don’t know what you’re saying,” Starsky replied with con­tempt. He pulled his arm free from Hutch’s grip, got out of the car, closed the door, then turned back to Hutch, leaned in the car’s open window, and stared at him. Hutch couldn’t possibly have known what he said, Starsky thought. Hutch could only have meant it figuratively.

“I forgive you for that crack,” Starsky decided on second thought, and he said it seriously and without malice, but he followed it with a hurtful and stern warning, more hurtful than even he knew he delivered it, “but don’t you ever make a comparison like that again or I’ll lay you flat.”

That was the first time—and it wouldn’t be the last—that Hutch felt Starsky divorce himself further from what Hutch believed had once been their impenetrable and seemingly unbreakable bond.

* * *

SLOWLY FALLING

They stood beside each other, dressed in lounge wear and socks, Starsky in Hutch’s favorite blue sweatsuit and Hutch in sweat pants and a flannel shirt. The kitchen was dark, save the light from the refrigerator interior that broke the blackness. There they stood, silently amused at themselves as they studied the open refrigerator’s clean fullness in the other­wise unlit room: Its avocados and oranges, lettuces and juices, breads and condiments.

It was later than the usual dinnertime, but Starsky had spent much of the afternoon and early evening napping, and Hutch didn’t have the heart to wake him. Now Starsky was hungry and on the prowl.

“What do you think?” Hutch said after a few minutes. “Quite a shock to your sensibilities to see so much organic color, huh?”

Starsky grunted. “It’s too pretty to eat. When did you take time to buy all this stuff?”

“I didn’t. Grace and Anna must’ve stocked it.”

“The older you get, the farther you seem to fall into this crazy diet of yours—and now you’ve got them falling for it.”

“It’s not a diet. It’s a lifestyle.”

“Says you,” Starsky mumbled.

Hutch had given him a tour of the house and the grounds shortly after their arrival at the farm that morning. Dobey had promised them one more week of police protection, but Starsky still asked for the where­abouts of his police pistol and whether it was loaded, which it was.  Hutch had stored it in Starsky’s closet on the top shelf, the way Starsky had kept it at his own home. He had gone out of his way to make Starsky feel safe at the farm, not just comfortable.

Grace and Anne had gone out of their way, too, to make Starsky’s room his sanctuary. They had filled the closet and dresser with his clothes, dressed the bed in his own comforter and pillows, hung pictures from his house on its walls, including in the hallway and guest bathroom, and stacked his numerous knickknacks in the bookcase. Starsky recog­nized his things right away and appreciated the girls’ efforts.

He was then able to focus on his stomach.

“I’ll make you a salad,” Hutch decided.

Starsky studied the refrigerator a minute longer and then lightly hit Hutch with his elbow. “There’s really no meat or dairy in there?”

“Nope,” Hutch said, proudly, then added, “You won’t miss that shit, anyway. You don’t know it, but your body is craving something healthy, and it’s soft food for now, too, remember? Digestible food.”

“Wish I could forget. If I have to drink another bowl of soup, I’m going on a hunger strike.”

“It’s just a while longer,” Hutch placated him. He removed an avo­cado and a tomato, a head of lettuce and cucumber, a bottle of non-dairy ranch dressing and, with his arms full, was still able to turn on the over­head light. “We can have a fruit dessert before you hit the hay,” he prom­ised. He set the items on the counter and rummaged in a drawer for a knife.

“Are you sure you’re not gay?” Starsky asked.

“Only for you, buddy boy,” Hutch joked—and gave him a wink.

Starsky eventually closed the refrigerator door and leaned with one good arm on the counter to watch Hutch. Without looking at him, he anxiously asked, “Have you wondered why the doctor wants me to eat ‘soft’ food?”

Hutch gave him the obvious answer. “So it passes easier.”

“Yeah. But don’t you wonder why it needs to pass easier?”

Maybe Starsky looked for some other kind of answer, something more specific; maybe he wanted Hutch to explain it to him in biological detail, as if Hutch knew how the human colon worked. But Hutch didn’t want to embarrass him, so he finally said, “I’m sure the doc’s got his reasons.”

“Right. But … you haven’t wondered?” He was anxious when he imagined Hutch was suspicious.

Hutch sliced the tomato on a cutting board. “You got slammed. You went without food and water for so long, and you were dehydrated, he wants to make sure you gradually get the right stuff so as to not overdo it—or injure yourself.”

Starsky dropped the subject. Getting even that close to divulging his secret had made his heart pound and his palms sweat. He didn’t know if he’d ever be able to talk to Hutch about what had specifically hap­pened to him because it terrified him to even hint at it. He wished Hutch already knew the details, so he didn’t have to tell him—or that he could give him enough hints, like the ones he just had, to ease into a dialogue about it. On the other hand, he wasn’t ready to talk, not in detail, not to the degree Hutch would want to. Such a conversation would bring it back to life. It was just as well that the topic didn’t get broached.

He watched Hutch slice the tomato and then peel the avocado. “Can I help?”

“There’s a colander in the cupboard by the stove,” Hutch said. “Put it in the sink for me.”

Every muscle in Starsky’s body ached, but he wanted to feel useful more than he wanted to avoid pain, so he found the colander and set it in the sink. It was a minor thing, but it empowered him. “What are we going to do with a month off—I mean, besides plant trees?”

Hutch didn’t know. He chopped avocado and cucumber. Normally, he’d throw in some onion and nuts, bell pepper and shredded carrots, but he decided to keep it lighter than light.

Starsky leaned on the counter near him. “Seriously.” He wanted an answer.

“I have dozens of pictures to hang,” Hutch finally replied, “and a garden to plant and a greenhouse to build, remember?”

Starsky groaned. “I’m not going to be any use to you.”

“The porch needs sealant,” Hutch added. “Then there’s the land­scap­ing—like we did at your house, only with a lot more ground to cover.”

“You’re not hearing me,” Starsky complained. “I’m not much help.”

“Moral support,” Hutch reminded him.

“Okay. And you’re going to do all that in a month?”

“Sure. Why not? Don’t want you to get bored.”

Starsky sadly laughed. “Too late.”

Hutch retrieved a serving bowl and pushed the veggies off the cutting board into it. “Maybe the question should be, ‘What do you want to do for a month?’”

“Go to Bolivia. See if we can find Butch Cassidy.”

Hutch straightened and looked at him for validation. “Seriously? I mean, the part about Bolivia?”

“Then how about a trip to the mountains for a while, but someplace where there aren’t any bears?”

“All right; if such a place exists. Say third week out? You’ll be strong­er by then.” Or did Starsky want to run away, mostly to hide?

Starsky carried the salad bowl to the opposite counter when Hutch took the head of lettuce to the sink for washing, and then he picked out and ate tomato wedges while he waited for his meal. The fruit tasted un­usually sweet.

They didn’t talk for about ten minutes, not until Hutch had retrieved the bowl of veggies from Starsky, added the lettuce, sprinkled it all with the salad dressing, tossed it, and then reset the bowl on the counter in front of him. He noted Starsky’s slinged right arm, gave him the fork, and said, “Being left-handed has finally paid off for ya.” After he saw the smirk he expected, he told Starsky, “You can have all of it. I already ate.”

The dish was at least colorful, Starsky noted. He’d been suspicious about the non-dairy dressing, but he found the salad much tastier than he expected and silently reprimanded himself for doubting Hutch’s skill with food. He ate slowly to savor the texture of something other than ap­ple­sauce and soup. And there was something to the salad’s organic feel, to its vibrancy and its freshness, that made him momentarily feel as if he actually helped himself heal.

“Do you think there’s anything I could tell you,” he asked, avoiding Hutch’s eyes, “that would make you think less of me?” He ate while leaned against the counter for strength.

Hutch was nervous about the implications of the question. He tried levity. “Like, you hate the salad?”

Starsky’s tired eyes met Hutch’s friendly blue ones. “Did you really think I was going there with that?”

Hutch’s seriousness surfaced. “I was lightening the weight of that question because I thought the answer went without saying.”

“It doesn’t.”

“I think you know me by now. I think you know me, period.”

“This isn’t about you.”

“Then let me say it,” Hutch obliged him. “There isn’t anything you could tell me that would make me think less of you—short of you tortur­ing animals or abusing women and children, that is.”

Starsky stopped eating and stared into his bowl. “That went without saying,” he mumbled, appreciating Hutch’s light-hearted conditions, because they both knew Starsky would never indulge such behavior. “But I wonder …”

“Don’t wonder,” Hutch assured him. He squeezed Starsky’s forearm to drive home his sincerity. “But don’t keep me in suspense. Tell me what you’re afraid I might think less of you about.” He couldn’t think of a single thing Starsky could tell him that would change how he felt about him, but it troubled him that Starsky thought there might be.

Starsky stalled. Why did he feel he had to tell Hutch anything? Or did he simply want to? Would it cleanse him of the rapes to purge his soul with words? Suppose it would?

But suppose Hutch would be so shocked to learn what had happened to Starsky that he’d fall apart in front of him? Or maybe Hutch would be so disgusted, he’d never look at Starsky the same way again. Maybe he would be so disappointed in Starsky’s ability to defend himself against such a vile attack in the first place that Hutch wouldn’t trust him anymore—especially during those times when they seriously needed each other to watch the other’s back. The secret revealed could destroy their working relationship at the least, their trust and friendship at the most. Was it worth that remote risk?

Hutch nudged Starsky’s chin to get him to look at him, but failed. “C’mon,” he said, “Tell me. It’s me you’re talking to, remember?”

Starsky realized he couldn’t verbalize the words, let alone gather the courage to say them even if he knew which ones to use. He resented himself for his compulsion to tell Hutch what he seemed to want to tell him, especially after he asked Hutch not to talk about it a day earlier. Was it because it was a day later and he was stronger already? Or did he want Hutch to know the truth so Hutch would hold him like the frail person he’d become and give him hope, help him erase the pain and the memory, enable Hutch to avoid inadvertently hurting him—and then find and seriously punish the men who attacked him?

“The salad,” Starsky said instead, choosing silence over his fear of losing Hutch. “It tastes better than I thought it would.”

* * *

“What are we doing here at two a.m.?” Starsky asked. He followed Hutch down the discount store aisle, limped along behind him with his arm in a sling, and wondered why Hutch failed to notice how much effort it took him to keep up. “Can we come back at a human hour?”

“Where’s your sense of adventure?” Hutch joked. He slowed his pace to let Starsky catch him. “Need a crutch?”

“I need my bed.”

Hutch took him by the arm and led him around the corner to another aisle, to the one he’d aimed for. “Would you feel more grounded pushing a cart?” He released Starsky when he found the wall of electronics adap­ters.

The store was comfortably deserted and much of its florescent light­ing had been dimmed, which made the shopping trip somewhat relax­ing, as if time stood still.

Hutch searched the product display for a coaxial coupler. It was then he noticed someone near him and looked to see. A woman he didn’t recognize was several yards from him, holding a basket. She was young, pretty, and seemed pleased to see him—or, rather, to see him and Starsky, as she eyed them both.

“Hello,” she said.

“Hi,” he replied.

Starsky stepped beside him, nodded a hello, and studied her, too.

Shyly, she resumed her shopping.

“I get it now, you handsome guy,” Starsky teased. He stood even closer to Hutch so only Hutch would hear him. “It’s what’s on the shelves and what’s in the aisles at this godforsaken hour that brings you here.”

Hutch was bent on repairing Starsky’s dignity, so he said, “She was looking at both of us, wasn’t she?”

“Don’t start that again,” Starsky warned him, referencing their threesome with Emma, not to mention their dispute over Kira some three years earlier.

They broke up laughing; Hutch’s comment had been truly innocent in the context of their unprecedented week, which made it more entert­aining. But the laughter hurt Starsky’s rib and he lightly punched Hutch to force him to stop prodding him. “Get what you came for and let’s get out of here.” The woman had wandered away, so what was the point in stay­ing longer?

Hutch still smiled while he studied the wall. He liked that they had found laughter in something that had haunted him so much since the previous weekend. And he was glad to hear Starsky laugh, too; they would have to do more of it, despite the rib pain.

But as liberating as the moment was, it was short-lived. It ended abruptly when three young men appeared in the aisle, wrestling and laugh­ing among themselves. Their presence suddenly altered Starsky’s demeanor. He nervously stepped to Hutch’s off-side, to put his partner between himself and the men. It was a noticeable maneuver, one that hap­pened so quickly, Hutch instinctively reached for his pistol, which wasn’t there to begin with and, luckily, he didn’t need.

All three men were short in comparison to Starsky’s assailants—and none of them was fat. They didn’t even pay Starsky and Hutch any atten­tion whatsoever.

Starsky’s heart pounded. He cussed himself for his unfounded reaction and caught his breath at the same time he caught Hutch’s eye. “Sorry,” he said between quiet pants, ashamed for the concern he saw fired back in those blue eyes. “False alarm.”

The men busily compared phone adapters.

Starsky keenly watched them, despite that he no longer felt they were a threat; he didn’t recognize a single voice. But when Hutch took his chin and turned his face to get his attention, Starsky instinctively reacted to that, too, and quickly pulled out of Hutch’s hand. “Don’t,” he said.

“Don’t?”

“Don’t touch me,” Starsky clarified. He knew he hurt Hutch, but he wasn’t able to help himself. “Not here. Not now. Not in front of these guys.”

“I’m sorry you feel that way, buddy boy,” Hutch said. The rejection wounded Hutch on several levels, and he couldn’t keep it to himself. Their brotherhood seemed to be dissolving before his eyes and there wasn’t anything he could do about it.

Starsky shrugged at him, held his friend’s desperate stare with his own, and felt as helpless. “I’m sorry I feel that way, too.”

* * *

“Have you read all those books?”

Hutch surveyed the living room shelves to see what Starsky meant. “I think you asked me that at my last house,” he remembered.

“It looks like more books here,” Starsky noted. He slouched in the armchair after dinner, his feet on the footstool, while they watched Glenn Ford in Experiment in Terror. Again.

Hutch sprawled on the sofa and wondered what Starsky had found so boring about the film that he’d been distracted by the bookshelves. “I have all my books in one room now,” he figured, “which might make it look like I have more of them.”

Starsky then watched the movie for a minute before he said, “That didn’t really answer my question, though.”

“If I’ve read all those books? What? You think I collect them as home decor?”

“I collect old movies,” Starsky debated him, “but I don’t always watch them.”

“That’s because you’re strange.”

Hutch had actually enjoyed the day, the first one void of anything emotional. That Emma had unexpectedly stopped by that morning and then ended up in his bed making love to him didn’t hurt the day, either.

It was also the first time since their three-way rendezvous that Star­sky and Emma were in the same room again. The only strain they felt came from knowing Hutch wasn’t completely comfortable with all of them together—or at least Starsky and Emma suspected he wasn’t; they gave each other a brief embrace, shared small talk, and then relatively ignored each other the rest of the morning. It did seem to put Hutch at ease.

After she’d gone, Starsky kept Hutch company while Hutch finished the gym equipment installation—he bolted together a weight bench—and then the two of them lunched on the porch, shared a light meal of hum­mus and warm bread, a Greek salad, and organic mashed potatoes. They didn’t do much that afternoon; Starsky busied himself in his room for a while; he reorganized his clothes and alphabetized his few movies. Everything he did took him extra long to do, but he had very few com­plaints, even of the physical kind. For a while, there was some sem­blance of peace in the house.

After dinner, Hutch sliced bananas into vanilla rice cream, a dessert Starsky actually liked, despite the non-dairy ingredients. Maybe Hutch’s lifestyle choices hadn’t been so terrible after all, though Starsky would still have devoured a double cheeseburger at the drop of a hat if he was offered one. In the end, it was just as well. Everything he consumed gave him added strength.

Good food. A peaceful day. A Glenn Ford movie.

“Is that the same TV?” he asked.

“That’s my new one,” Hutch said. “Bigger screen.”

“I thought so. Neat.”

“Are you bored with the movie? Do you want to watch something else?”

“I never get tired of it,” Starsky admitted. “It’s like an old friend. I just wondered about your books and your TV. What about this chair I’m sitting on? Is it new?”

Hutch growled at him when he realized Starsky was going to com­ment on everything in the room. “Stop fucking with me.”

Starsky was as pleased with himself for provoking Hutch as much as he was content in the position he’d found, one that didn’t hurt his ribs. He rather liked the chair. He might get one for himself someday, that and a bigger-screened TV. He went back to watching the movie.

He didn’t care to be anywhere else, doing anything else.

* * *

Captain Dobey was the first to greet Starsky that beautiful spring Sun­day morning. With Starsky’s permission, Hutch invited Dobey, Grace, Davis, and Davis’ sister, Anne, to a brunch at the farm. The pur­pose of the gathering was to introduce Davis to Starsky—and vice versa—on the promise that the Internal Affairs agent wouldn’t make the visit an interrogation. Hutch thought it would be a more relaxing affair if he invited friends and colleagues to one of his and Emma’s healthy, organic breakfasts.

It was the first time Hutch saw Davis in jeans and a polo shirt and not in his three-piece suit and tie. And it was the second time he got a vibe from Anne that she was attracted to him, despite that she knew about—and had just met—his girlfriend.

Dobey found Starsky in the kitchen; he had kept Emma company while she finished the meal preparation and Hutch greeted his guests. Dobey hadn’t seen Starsky since before he disappeared and he’d never gone into the hospital room. His instinct and his assumptions told him his officer had been sexually assaulted and he was determined to give Starsky as much alone time and privacy as possible. But, in the bright kitchen on that peaceful Sunday morning, Dobey couldn’t control his emotion when he laid eyes on the still-bandaged and bruised man he’d grown to love as a son. He held him in a light embrace to hide his sorry. “You’re a sight for sore eyes,” he told Starsky. He released him and add­ed, “If there’s anything you need, you ask me for it. You boys aren’t in this alone.”

Starsky saluted Dobey with his left hand and attempted to lift the right one, the one in the sling. “Don’t suppose you could give me a new arm,” he joked.

“Would if I could.”

Hutch pulled Dobey away to introduce him to Emma, and Dobey eag­erly followed, given that the path was in the direction of the deli­cious-smelling food. It was only then that Starsky understood why Hutch had interrupted them.

He unexpectedly saw Grace when his view cleared.

She had patiently waited for the captain to move out of her line of vi­sion, too; she stood a few feet away, and then waited for Starsky to invite her closer. But she wasn’t prepared for what she’d see, either. Starsky, though dressed in clean jeans and an open-collared shirt, with a relatively new haircut and clean-shaven, stood against the counter with his broken arm in a sling. His face was still bruised in places and a slowly healing laceration dressed his cheek. More than that, it was what she didn’t see. The light in his eyes was dim, despite that he smiled at her when he looked at her. He appeared withdrawn—and tired—as if he’d been beat­en nearly to death. The attacks had occurred two weeks earlier and she shuddered to think how he looked then.

“Grace,” Starsky exclaimed; the sight of her took his breath away. He pulled her up close in his one good arm when she got within reach. He couldn’t explain it to himself in a million years, the feeling she’d given him by the very sight of her, but he was disarmed and empowered at once; she was, after all, by profession, a woman who consoled rape vic­tims. He relaxed in the halo of her warmth and felt suddenly at home in her presence, at ease, at peace for a while with the way things were. “I wouldn’t have agreed to this breakfast,” he kindly told her, “if you hadn’t said you’d come. What would be the fun in seeing anyone but you?”

“None,” she playfully replied as she squeezed him close. She’d never felt such affection for a man before—nor from one—and didn’t think she’d ever get the chance to tell him why. But holding onto him seemed the best way to express her deep fondness for him. “Is there anything I can do for you?”

“You did it,” he said. “You arrived.”

He’d had a desire to “hold her safe” since the day he’d met her; some­­thing in her eyes seemed to fire a certain innocence and vulner­ability that needed his muscle and his heart. But now it was his turn to be held safe—and somehow, for some reason, she was the person most able to make him feel that way. Maybe it was because Hutch was busy with his guests and Starsky had to socialize on his own again. Whatever the reason, there he stood with Grace—and relished every second of it. They talked to each other in hushed tones while they reacquainted them­selves, as if they were the only two people in the room. Starsky had always been fond of her and he felt more bonded to her then. She gave him an inexplicable emotional security he sorely needed. But in the mid­dle of their intimacy, he instantly froze when he accidentally saw Wade Davis enter the room.

Davis saw the abrupt look he got from Starsky—as did Emma.

As did Hutch.

Starsky’s blood palpably pulsed in his veins as the adrenalin rushed to every point in his body. His palms broke a sweat and his respiration, at first, was interrupted, and then resumed in earnest. The tightness in his throat and chest made him feel suffocated. And perhaps he would have bolted from the room—fought or flew—had Hutch not understood, in a second, why Starsky reacted the way he had and, as suddenly, inter­cepted the escape.

“Wade Davis,” Hutch quickly said to introduce the agent to Starsky. “Internal Affairs.”

Of course it was, Starsky silently cussed himself. He felt dizzy then as the unspent adrenalin searched for an outlet. He was suddenly weak and held tighter to Grace so he wouldn’t collapse. She squeezed him to let him know she was there to help him, but Starsky still couldn’t take the agent’s hand when Davis stepped close enough. He couldn’t phys­ically make the effort, though he did manage a nonchalant response. “I was expecting a suit,” he said.

Davis tried a smile. It hadn’t gotten past him that Starsky had been momentarily terrified. It actually made him feel for the guy, though he couldn’t say so. He was surprised himself because he expected to see a different man from the one he saw. From his research, Davis had pegged Starsky as a tough guy with a strong demeanor. But he could tell, from that brief and subtle exchange, that Starsky had been wounded beyond the physical; he’d been weakened—and more than Davis expected he’d been. He quietly introduced his sister, Anne, and then told Starsky, “You’ve been a figment of my imagination for the past couple of weeks. I appreciate your agreeing to meet me.”

“You’re not seeing me at my best,” Starsky defended himself while his heart rate slowly returned to normal. He only trusted Davis because Hutch did.

“You get your arm back,” Davis assured him, “and the world will turn right-side-up again.” He didn’t really believe it; he knew all too well what sort of struggle lay ahead for Starsky, but he wanted to comfort him, especially after what he’d just witnessed. “There’s nothing like waking up every morning with a handicap. I once broke both my legs in a skiing accident.”

Starsky winced.

“Now look at me.” Davis danced a couple of steps in place and made everyone in the room laugh at him. “A tango master.”

Anne rolled her eyes. “He can’t even square dance.”

“He can take lessons from Starsky, then,” Hutch said. “He’s a pretty good dancer; it’s in his blood.” He remembered the last time he watched Starsky dance, that night at their friend’s wedding when Starsky also tried to get Hutch to dance with him. Maybe Starsky would never feel like dancing again. The thought troubled Hutch; he squeezed Starsky’s shoulder to assure himself that his buddy would someday want to. “Shall we throw on some music?” he suggested. “Get your rhythm going?”

Starsky shrugged Hutch’s hand off him. “Don’t,” he said in a low voice.

“Don’t? No music?”

“Don’t … touch me,” Starsky warned him.

“Oh, that don’t.”

Hutch said it lightly so the others wouldn’t know he’d been hurt and embarrassed by Starsky’s reprimand, but internally he felt the painful sting of the rejection. The only way he could recover from it and appear the perfect host was to invite everyone to dish up their breakfasts and take their seats at the table.

Davis told Starsky it had been his pleasure to meet him; he extended his left hand to accommodate Starsky’s good one. Starsky let go of Grace long enough to make the grasp, a firm, reassuring grip that Starsky appre­ciated in light of Davis’ attempt to make him feel better about having a broken arm. But in doing so, Starsky inadvertently exposed his wrist—and Grace saw the rope burns.

The evidence that Starsky had been bound—and bound to the point of a struggle that caused such bruising and tearing of his flesh—made her want to weep; she held back the audible sobs, but her pain was evident on her face and in her eyes as she gently caressed his healing wounds. “I’m sorry,” she said when he looked at her. “It hurts so much to imagine what happened to you.”

“Don’t imagine,” he said. He didn’t want her to feel his pain. He gingerly removed his broken arm from its sling to completely hold her in his arms. She buried her face in his shoulder, held him desperately about his waist, and quietly cried.

“It’s not as bad as it looks,” he promised her. The rope burns around his wrists had actually been the least of his injuries, but they were, ad­mittedly, the most unsightly—and the most telling of his ordeal. “Don’t let me hurt you, Grace,” he whispered. He possessively hugged her to him. “Pardon my selfishness, but I need you to save me. I need to be ‘saved by Grace.’”

His playful affection made her stop crying long enough to lift her face and look into his eyes. “Do you? Do you need me to save you?”

He didn’t know how she could, but he knew he wanted her to try. “If you can’t save me, who can?”

Starsky knew the second he said it that it was the wrong thing to say because, when he lifted his eyes by sheer accident, they collided with Hutch’s hurt expression. Starsky could tell by the fierce look on his partner’s face that his words had been the injury to the earlier wound of rejection he’d already inflicted on him.

Hutch nodded at him, not to say he accepted being passed over, but to say he understood that Starsky needed to make it through his ordeal the best way for himself, despite the hurt it caused Hutch. “Can I at least get you something to eat?” he asked Starsky, swallowing his pride, and was then relieved when Starsky agreed to let him do that much.

* * *

The feast was bountiful: Syrupy waffles and homemade cinnamon rolls, fresh fruit salads and an assortment of nuts, juices, and potatoes, cereals and almond milk, muffins and melons. There was no missing the bacon, not even for Captain Dobey; he ate everything with pleasure and told Emma she should try her hand at a restaurant.

Starsky winked at Grace, who sat near the end of the table on the oppo­site side. He hoped he conveyed by the affection that he wished he could trade places with Dobey so he could sit across from her, but that he didn’t have the courage to bump his ranking officer. Besides, he felt a need to repair damage he’d done to Hutch, and since Hutch had liter­ally dished out his breakfast and carried his plate to the table for him, he sat at the other end of the table beside his partner instead.

Grace smiled at him to let him know she appreciated his attention.

Hutch witnessed their silent exchange. In the end, if Grace could save Starsky, Hutch was all for it.

“You’re beautiful,” Hutch then heard Anne say and he looked at her to find she stared at him. He stopped chewing, not knowing how to reply.

“I don’t mean any disrespect,” she quickly added. “It’s just some­thing I notice, you know, as an artist. Your face is flawless. You’re the perfect height and weight, have a perfect nose and chin, almost-translu­cent blond hair, and kind blue eyes. They’re a window to your soul. Are you Norwegian?”

“He’s American,” Starsky answered for him. He found the young woman’s bravado refreshing and amusing at the same time. He smiled at her when she glanced at him, but then she took him by surprise, too.

“You’re sensual,” she told Starsky. “There’s an undeniable sensuality and sexuality to your manner and look, and those sultry blue eyes have got to be immortalized sometime. You have the perfect build and a sort of animal magnetism I would love to capture on film and in paint.”

The two cops stared blankly at her, neither of them knowing what to say, too stunned by the compliments to even thank her.

Davis tried to see what his sister saw—in an effort to find some lead he had missed.

“I always said,” Emma injected, “that they’d be the perfect man if science could fuse them together.”

Hutch and Starsky turned their heads in unison and looked blankly at her. Given the affair they’d had with her only a couple of weeks earl­ier, together, Emma’s comment made them as uncomfortable as Anne’s innocently explicit portrayal of them.

Emma covered for her slip. “I mean, they’re more than eye candy,” she explained to Anne. “I’ve heard them tell stories about ‘bad guy cap­tures’ that speak to the seamless choreography of their teamwork.”

“I wasn’t hitting on either of you,” Anne avowed. She wasn’t; she would never do such a thing to the women in her midst, let alone to Grace, her counselor, whom she needed and adored. “Truth be told, I’m nervous telling you both that much.” She chose to explain herself further. “I’m scared of men, but—as an artist—I couldn’t resist sharing with you why I think both of you are beautiful.”

Starsky met Anne’s soft expression with a serious look. “You’re scared of men?”

“I had a rough time once,” she said. She alluded to the details of her personal nightmare by her follow up comment. “That’s why I’m in coun­seling with Grace.”

Starsky felt instantly bonded to her, a kindred spirit of sorts, someone who could know what he’d been through, right there in the room with him, though he didn’t have the guts or the intention of ever sharing it with her. Just to lay eyes on someone who’d suffered the same pain and hum­il­iation he had was enough to console him somehow.

At least, for that moment, Starsky felt a little less isolated.

But what Starsky didn’t know—didn’t yet and couldn’t know—was that there was another rape survivor seated at the table that late spring morning.

Not counting Anne. Nor himself.

And not counting Hutch—by proxy.

* * *

Davis appeared to enjoy the relaxation of a brunch on a ten-acre farm in the country, with family and new friends, but really he was busy at work, mentally taking inventory of everything he saw and heard around him. Mostly, he was keenly tuned to David Starsky and he used his sister’s observation to flesh out what he assessed on his own. The young cop, known affectionately as ‘Starsky,’ definitely had a certain animal magnetism, a charm, as it were, that seeped above the surface, despite his injuries and his trauma. It was in his manner, a very masculine friend­liness, and in his expression, a sort of boyish relating, and a palpable inno­cence, though Davis knew Starsky wasn’t an unmarred man—espe­cially under the present circumstances.

He could tell that Starsky and Hutch needed each other, respected and loved each other, were comfortable and ‘unafraid’ of each other, as Hutch had once described it, but Davis couldn’t help but sense that Hutch needed and respected and loved Starsky more than the reverse—if only by an incremental degree. That made Hutch more emotionally vulnerable, in Davis’ mind, and Starsky stronger in that regard. So why would the assailants have chosen to attack Starsky instead of Hutch? That was the question Davis was bent on answering.

Colleague descriptions of the cops were still fresh in his memory. He recalled that some had said the boys “flaunted” their friendship, but Davis thought he actually saw an interplay that would have caused such an assessment—and he didn’t think it was “flaunted.”

Starsky had been the last to receive his breakfast and, given that he only had one good arm, Hutch helped him get it. While the others seated themselves and eagerly filled their plates with the rest of the offerings at the table, Hutch stood with Starsky at the stove. He spooned sautéed vegetables onto a dish until Starsky told him he’d given him enough.

“But pick out those bell peppers,” Starsky ordered.

“You pick them out,” Hutch said. “I refuse to take out things you should eat.”

“Where’s your loyalty?”

“To your health.”

Starsky grunted. “I’ll have some potatoes,” he said. He nudged Hutch into spooning the hash browns onto his plate, “but I guess you’ll be leav­ing the onions in.”

“You guessed right,” Hutch said.

“I don’t see what makes onions healthy.”

“That’s because you’re an idiot,” Hutch chided him. “Try reading books sometime. Onions are a great source of vitamins A and E; they’re antioxidants—and they strengthen the lungs and cleanse the colon.”

“You’re making that shit up,” Starsky replied.

The two of them busted up laughing at Starsky’s pun.

What Davis saw in that relay told him volumes. Neither Hutch nor Starsky seemed to notice that anyone else was in the room with them; they related only to each other—a coaction spawned from their unusu­ally tight bond. Or maybe because of it. They stood closer than most straight men might have stood. They made more eye contact than most straight men might have made. And one took care of the other as if he didn’t care about anyone else.

Could they have done the things Davis had been told? Used each other for pillows or sat in each other’s laps? He was certain they could have done those things—and more. They seemed that familiar with each other, as if nothing in the world made them happier than to be right there, where they were, with the other.

But right there was all they were. They were nowhere else. They weren’t in the rest of the room with anyone else. They weren’t involved with anything beyond the thing they did at that very moment with each other. No flaunting. Just being. But being in a way that, to the suspicious mind, appeared friendlier than two straight men were allowed to be. As Hutch had once asked Davis, “What is the legal limit?”

There had been a limit, though. Davis saw it earlier when Hutch put his hand on Starsky’s shoulder as they talked about Starsky’s passion for dancing—and Starsky had shrugged it away. That seemed out of character, and he could tell by the look in Hutch’s eyes that Starsky had hurt him in the rejection. Why had Starsky shunned the very man who, a few minutes later, he stood so close to at the stove and shared laughter with as if no one else on earth existed?

Maybe it was because—at the stove—they were alone in the world together, and in that ‘alone place together’ they were purely themselves, whereas minutes earlier, they had been the center of attention—and atten­tion was something Starsky sorely wanted to avoid.

To be noticed was to be threatened.

To be noticed was to be punished.

To be noticed was to be humiliated and degraded and violated.

While Davis watched the privately shared, purely spontaneous and liberated moments between Hutch and Starsky, he mulled over the evidence in the case: Blood, urine, semen. With the exception of the blood evidence, the urine and semen pointed to unknown others; Starsky no doubt had been sexually assaulted.

And his buddy, Ken Hutchinson, the one Starsky was quite deeply bonded to, was the other one who’d been assaulted—because to harm one of them was to harm both of them.

* * *

“What do you do for fun?” Davis asked Starsky.

“He watches Glenn Ford movies,” Hutch answered for his partner. He slowly ate a cinnamon roll and tried to remind Davis by answering for Starsky that they’d agreed there would be ‘no questions asked.’

Davis shrugged at him to convey he didn’t realize personal questions were off the table—and that he was sorry he breached the agreement.

Grace asked Starsky instead. “Do you like Glenn Ford movies?”

Starsky never tired of looking at her. He smiled and felt shy when he imagined that Hutch might be right, that Grace romantically loved him, she so many years younger than he was, and he so clueless all that time. “I do like Glenn Ford movies,” he confessed—and subsequently felt stup­id for dating himself where she was concerned. “He was the ultimate good guy.”

Grace fantasized about watching a Ford movie with him. David Starsky and Glenn Ford had similar virtues. “He was very handsome, debonair, and romantic, too,” she said, suspecting she pleased Starsky by knowing who Glenn Ford, despite her age, or because of it.

“He was the real McCoy,” Dobey noted. “My favorites were his westerns. 3:10 to Yuma. The Cowboy. Americano. You, Starsky?”

Starsky didn’t leave Grace’s eye contact. “I prefer his romances.”

She smiled at his reply, certain he had directed it at her.

“You would,” Hutch laughed. He lightly pinched Starsky’s thigh and got his attention, “but it doesn’t explain why we’re always watching his crime dramas.”

“I don’t want you to get the wrong idea,” Starsky replied, looking at him.

The group laughed.

But when the laughter subsided, Starsky told Hutch, “So, if you lay a hand on me one more time today, I’m going to do the Glenn Ford thing and put a bullet in your ass.”

Hutch knew Starsky’s warning wasn’t in play—though everyone but Davis and he laughed—because they could tell by the look in Starsky’s eyes and from the serious tone of Starsky’s voice that there had been no levity in his reprimand, despite how it may have appeared to others.

Hutch avoided Starsky’s glare and stared at the tabletop, but he didn’t see it. And he didn’t fully understand the rules, either. The people in the room were friends and family—with the exception of Wade Davis, but he was no threat—so Hutch didn’t completely appreciate when and where and how he was allowed to touch Starsky. Or maybe that was it: he wasn’t allowed. Not then. Not ever again—and because of that terri­ble thing that happened.

The notion struck him hard. He half-listened to the dialogue and laughter that ensued. His brunch endeavor had turned into a fatal mis­take. Emma patted his hand when she sensed his wounded pride—was it pride? or was it merely that he was wounded?—and he forced a smile at her to tell her he appreciated the effort. But it didn’t ease the choke in his throat. He heard Anne laugh at something Starsky said and he pretended to find humor in it, too, though he hadn’t heard a word.

Then he accidentally made eye contact with Davis.

The agent looked at him, watched him, as it were, intently and with empathy. While Starsky entertained the guests, Davis filtered two words through to Hutch. “He’s …” was one word he used before he paused, waited for more laughter, and then added, “lost.”

“As in cause?” Hutch queried his unexpected ally. “A lost cause?”

“No,” Davis replied more fluidly. “As in confused.”

Hutch understood, but it still didn’t soothe his fear and his helpless­ness. He couldn’t explain to anyone—not to anyone anymore, it seemed—that he felt he lost something he’d never have again with another human being, and that none of it had been his fault, despite that Starsky seemed to want him to believe it was.

“The trick,” Davis further explained, “is not to follow him.”

Starsky overheard the tail end of Davis’s private conversation with Hutch and confronted them both. “The trick is not to follow him, who? Me?” He pointed the question at Davis, but the agent didn’t answer him.

Hutch took his plate to the sink. Out of his inability to kill his own pain, he stood a moment in the kitchen, looked out its window into the landscape, and threw the hurt back into Starsky’s lap. “Yeah, you.”

“And the trick is not to follow me where?” Starsky asked him.

“Anywhere. The trick is not to follow you anywhere.”

“You don’t trust me?”

Not being trusted again was one of Starsky’s biggest fears.

Hutch hated the tension between himself and Starsky. He hated his own hurt. He hated his urges to hurt back. He hated hearing the sudden fear and desperation in Starsky’s voice. He hated his ability to withstand anything David Starsky threw at him except the disintegration of their friendship. He hated that he didn’t have the patience required of him to help Starsky through the worst experience of his lifetime. He hated that he couldn’t tell Starsky all he hated.

“I trust you,” he declared, his back to Starsky. The last thing he want­ed was to give Starsky another reason to feel he deserved the punishment those men dealt him. “What I don’t trust are your cinematic prefer­ences.”

There was light laughter in the room.

“But that’s not what you said,” Starsky argued. “You said you would­n’t follow me anywhere.”

The room grew abruptly quiet.

Hutch finally turned around and bravely faced the table. Starsky looked as desperate as his voice sounded, so all eyes were on Hutch. What he would say next would make or break the outcome of that morn­ing—and whether Starsky would recover from what Starsky feared was happening between them—which wasn’t the same thing Hutch feared was happening. Starsky was afraid Hutch would never trust him again; Hutch feared the dissolution of their brotherhood. They were both scared. Hutch could lie. He could joke. He could evade the request to answer. Or he could tell the truth. The truth was something he always told Starsky.

Who at that table wouldn’t understand the truth?

“I pissed you off,” he reminded Starsky. “Seems I have a habit of it lately.” He steadied himself against the counter. “Davis reminded me that you’re going through a rough time still and the ‘trick’ is for me ‘not to follow’ you into a similar rough time with my own self-centered pet­tiness—or I can’t help you out of it.”

“These things,” Grace said, carefully, “are roller coaster rides through every human emotion. There are raw nerves all around.”

Starsky looked at her. He couldn’t help but wonder what Grace meant about ‘these things.’ Did she suspect what had happened to him? Did everyone at that table suspect as much? He felt vulnerable and in­stantly steeled himself, retaliating the best way he knew how. “Or maybe it’s that Hutch needs to keep his mouth shut,” he said.

“No doubt,” Dobey cracked, seeking levity.

But none came.

The truth hadn’t worked and Hutch burned with pain. Did the heart really ache like that when it was broken? He watched Starsky play with an orange peel on his plate and avoid eye contact with him. Then Hutch glanced at Emma, who pursed her lips, not knowing what to say, and further at Davis, who raised an eyebrow and slowly exhaled.

“I’d follow you anywhere,” Hutch told Starsky. He reached for the most personal thing between them. “I once followed you into an air conditioning shaft, remember?” He had kissed lips with Starsky in that duct maze. “And we got stuck in it for over an hour. Do you remember what you told me when we were in there?”

If it was possible to salvage the day, that memory would do it.

Starsky stopped toying with the rind and stared at his plate. He remembered what Hutch wanted him to remember, that he had told Hutch nothing could ever destroy their brotherhood. But Starsky could­n’t imagine then, in that maze of tunnels, the nightmare he only recently had survived, and one he wished he hadn’t. He’d made his promise in that aluminum shaft based on missing information. And he could lie right then and tell Hutch he stood by that belief, that they were still un­breakable, but he’d only lied to Hutch once.

He wasn’t about to tell any more lies. Instead, all he said was, “It was me who followed you in that air conditioning shaft, not the other way around.”

Hutch laughed a disbelievingly, sad, sort of angry, laugh when Star­sky avoided what he desperately needed him to acknowledge. “You’re wrong about that, buddy boy,” he said, “and you know you are.” And then he packed up his hurt and left the room.

* * *

“Grab that shovel,” Hutch ordered Starsky, “and give me a hand digging this hole.”

Hutch had dragged two shovels and a pick to the backyard, along with the 25-gallon tree he’d purchased the day before, and then talked Starsky into joining him. It was yet another beautiful late spring morning.

Starsky stood near Hutch and snorted at him.

“C’mon,” Hutch pushed him. “Help me out. I’m not paying your food bill for nothing.”

Starsky cradled his slinged arm. “You know I can’t help you.”

“I don’t know that.”

Hutch lifted the pick and broke the soil with it. “You’re always touting the talents of the left-handed,” he reminded Starsky.

“We’re not that gifted,” Starsky complained. He surveyed the back­yard and noticed what he didn’t see. “I thought you and Emma went to the nursery yesterday to buy a bunch of fruit trees.”

“We ran out of time.”

“You ran out of time to buy trees at a nursery? I thought we were retired. Temporarily.”

“We got sidetracked,” Hutch explained. He paused for a second before he hit the dirt again with the pick. “We sat in the parking lot too long, so I only got this shade tree.”

“You sat in the parking lot? Or you jumped each other in the truck in the parking lot?”

Hutch straightened and looked at him. “Actually, we sat in the truck in the parking lot and decided to cool it for a while. She wants me to focus on getting you better.” He carefully worded his reason. It was the truth, but he didn’t want it to sound like pity. “Given that thing between the three of us a few weeks back,” he added, “she thought it best if we simplified things for now—and I agreed with her.”

Starsky didn’t know if he should feel guilty. He didn’t want to be in the way of Hutch’s relationship with Emma.

“It’s my fault,” Hutch said, to put Starsky’s mind to rest. “I’ve com­plicated things. You know I’m good at that.”

Starsky did. “But it’s a complicated situation, too,” he empathized.

Hutch couldn’t disagree. He went back to breaking the ground and finally made headway. “If it’s solid,” he commented, about his relation­ship with Emma, “we’ll work it out in the long run, and if it’s not, then so be the loss.” He dropped the pick to take another break. “You okay with that?”

They made eye contact.

Starsky heard more than Hutch’s words. “I’m okay if you’re okay,” he said, “and I assume you’re okay because it didn’t end badly.”

“It didn’t end. It’s just on hold.”

Starsky accepted what Hutch told him.

“So,” Hutch said, as he put the past behind him and focused on the present, “pick up a goddamned shovel and help me dig this out.”

“I can’t.”

“Because?”

Starsky cocked his head at Hutch to express his displeasure with the question.

“You’ve got two arms,” Hutch argued, “and one of them is your ‘good’ one, the equivalent of my right arm.”

“And you think you could dig a hole with a shovel using one arm?” Starsky asked with disbelief.

“That’s irrelevant,” Hutch answered. “I don’t have a bad arm. Therefore, Watson, I don’t need to dig with one arm. You’ve only got one good arm—so you get to dig with one arm. Some help here is better than none.”

“I can’t dig a hole with one arm,” Starsky said, flustered. “No one can, not the kind of hole you’re needing to dig anyway. I could maybe do a little hole for a flower or something. But I can’t help you dig tree holes.”

“Well, what can you do around here?”

Starsky had only been at Hutch’s farm for a couple of weeks. His arm was still cast, the stitches on his cheek had since been removed, but his rib still pained him if he was careless. He resented Hutch’s pressure on him to deliver more than he could. “Maybe I should move back to my own house,” he cracked. He didn’t want to; in fact, he’d probably move into a hotel first than go back to that house. The place wasn’t safe yet and represented so much.

Hutch shrugged, as if he didn’t care whether Starsky moved back. He got busy again digging the hole for his shade tree. After a couple of minutes, he stopped to catch his breath, stood tall, and faced Starsky. “Can you push a wheelbarrow then?”

“Fuck you,” Starsky retaliated. It was a self-defense reaction. He knew Hutch baited him, but he couldn’t figure out why. He racked his mind in search of his partner’s direction, but realized how weak his brain was, too.

Hutch wasn’t fazed. “Can you make us dinner?”

“I can’t even open a can of soup,” Starsky defended himself.

“No?”

“What’s your point?” Starsky angrily asked.

“That you’re useless?”

“Like I said: Fuck you.”

Hutch smirked at Starsky and went back to digging.

No doubt Hutch abused Starsky because he had rejected Hutch’s physical affection, in front of others, no less. “Stop taking this out on me,” Starsky compelled him, “and tell me what it is you want me to know so I don’t have to guess.”

Hutch paused and leaned at the end of his shovel’s handle. He ig­nored what Starsky thought motivated him. “You can’t dig a hole. You can’t push a wheelbarrow. You can’t even open a can of soup.”

“And that ain’t all,” Starsky reminded him.

“You probably couldn’t defend yourself, then,” Hutch imagined, “if a couple of guys showed up here with the intent purpose of beating the hell out of you.”

The idea of it made Starsky’s heart race. “Are you trying to make me feel like shit? Is that what you want?”

Hutch also ignored Starsky’s questions. “You used to be as com­petent as I am,” he noted. “You … a real tough guy.”

Starsky looked long into Hutch’s eyes and felt hurt then by what he thought Hutch told him. It had been enough to feel his own helplessness and to fear Hutch would lose faith and trust in him for it; it was another to actually hear Hutch degrade him.

“I could dig a hole with a broken arm,” Hutch said flatly. “I could push a wheelbarrow with it, too. Make dinner. Hell, I could at least open a can of soup. And I could easily fight off a couple of guys if I had to.”

Starsky squinted at him. He knew for certain then that he had been prodded into some truth he hadn’t yet discovered. He anticipated that Hutch didn’t try to degrade him, but to teach him something instead. “You’re superhuman?”

“Yeah, I’m superhuman,” Hutch agreed. He returned to his hole-digging task. “And you’re just human. What’s it like being that imper­fect?”

“It depends on who your friends are,” Starsky sneered.

“You must feel totally incompetent.”

Starsky did, but didn’t say so.

“You must feel downright useless,” Hutch imagined aloud.

That, too, Starsky thought.

“And, in feeling useless,” Hutch said, “you probably feel helpless. You can’t even feed yourself. You definitely can’t defend yourself.”

Hutch hit too close to home. Starsky pressed against his emotion to protect himself from his partner’s digging more than a hole in the ground.

Hutch laughed, lightly, and not with amusement. “If you went from ‘tough guy’ to defenseless,” he assumed, “that could only leave you feeling scared—especially since those guys are still out there.”

Terrified, Starsky thought, as he listened carefully. Maybe Hutch had something to tell him that would actually help to calm his fear, but he couldn’t imagine what.

Hutch paused and then straightened. “You? Scared?”

Starsky couldn’t admit it, but he couldn’t deny it, either. He stared at Hutch and saw the warmth in Hutch’s face, despite the degrading words. Or maybe because of them. “Suppose I was?” Starsky finally asked. “Sup­pose I was scared?”

“I know you,” Hutch replied. “If you were scared, you’d probably think something really stupid.”

“What stupid thing would I think?”

“You’d probably think you’re a coward.”

Tears welled in Starsky’s eyes, but they never spilled. He realized in that moment that Hutch had known all along how he felt—and had set him up to help him understand that thinking he was a coward was ‘stupid.’ Starsky was physically wounded, which made him vulnerable, which, in turn, frightened him because he knew he couldn’t defend himself. And feeling frightened had made him feel like a coward. That was the stupid part. To not feel scared would have made him super­human and, that, neither of them were. How he felt was perfectly natural—except the conclusion he’d come to.

“What would you tell a friend of yours,” Starsky hypothesized, “if he thought he was a coward?” He needed Hutch’s assurance that he wasn’t a loser.

Hutch examined the question before he found his answer. “I’d tell him that the real cowardice would be in his inability to accept his absolutely justifiably founded fear.” He turned back to digging. “If he couldn’t accept why he’s scared—given the circumstances that made him feel that way—I’d tell him—because of those circumstances—to at least forgive himself for it.”

* * *

Hutch heard it from the other room: Starsky getting sick to his stom­ach down the hall. It was a terrible sound, that of someone he cared deeply about, throwing up in the bathroom toilet, behind a closed door, alone and feeling wretched.

Starsky and he rarely got sick like that. They were exceptionally heal­thy men; not even stomach flus made them vomit. In fact, the last time he remembered Starsky throwing up was years ago after he drank all that moonshine and nearly got sick in the car; he got sick in the street instead. So when Hutch heard that terrible sound, the retching and the miserable groan that accompanied it, he felt sick to his stomach, too. He sat, not reading the newspaper on his lap, in the candlelight, on the sofa, and reluctantly listened to a sound he hated to hear. It was another one of those moments in life when he didn’t want Starsky to be alone with his pain. His heart broke for him, as deep an ache as the one he could hear emptying Starsky’s stomach in the hallway bathroom.

But Hutch couldn’t sit still when he heard the crash, the sound of glass breaking, the thud of weight hitting a wall or a floor or both, a force­ful slam that followed the pause between itself and the last of Starsky’s audible groans. Hutch bolted to his feet and ran to the bath­room. As he neared, he heard Starsky cuss—and knew Starsky was, at least, alive.

Without knocking, Hutch threw open the door.

The first thing he looked for was Starsky—who he found on the floor, near the toilet, wedged somewhat between it and the bathtub. Star­sky sat on his butt, in jeans and an unbuttoned shirt, barefoot, one arm hung over the closed-lid toilet seat, the palm of his other, the one in the cast, was braced on the tiled floor near his feet. He appeared poised to flee if necessary. He was still bandaged. He was still broken. But he also looked bewildered, beaten, and intensely scared.

Starsky locked eyes with him.

Was he indeed terrified?

“It’s me,” Hutch softly said, dismayed. He didn’t think Starsky rec­og­nized him; he believed he’d startled Starsky so unexpectedly that Starsky was paralyzed by the intrusion. Hutch waited for settlement. When it didn’t come, he said it again. “It’s me, buddy.”

Starsky’s expression softened, but barely noticeably. “I know,” he fin­ally said. His voice was slightly hoarse. He wiped his mouth on his sleeve and didn’t break eye contact with Hutch. “You don’t think I know who you are?”

Hutch had apparently misread him. “You look like a cornered ani­mal,” he explained.

Starsky pressed the lever on the toilet tank to flush its contents. He was embarrassed. Again. “I was having a private moment,” he told Hutch without looking at him. He felt compelled to explain why he’d been so unnerved by Hutch’s burst into the room.

“It was private till you broke something,” Hutch argued. He glanced around the bathroom then and discovered the partially shattered mirror above the sinks. Shards of glass lay on the counter and on the floor. A towel rack had been ripped from the wall and hung by one end to loos­ened screws. There was a wet towel near the toilet stem. But Starsky didn’t appear to be injured—at least not from whatever he’d done to the bathroom that night. Previous cuts and lacerations were all Hutch could see and he hated that they’d become that familiar to him.

Starsky shrugged at Hutch when they looked at each other again. “I’ll pay to have it fixed,” he said about the damage he’d done. “I just

…” He didn’t explain further.

He didn’t have to.

Hutch sank to the floor inside the doorway, his back against its frame, his knees bent to his chest. He watched Starsky.

Starsky watched him.

They were on the same level with each other, there on the cool tile, with broken glass on the floor between them.

“All that rage will make you sick,” Hutch said.

Starsky couldn’t explain how he felt, but he didn’t think it was rage. It was the secret itself that made him sick. The paradox was that Hutch could help him purge it, if only Starsky had the guts to tell Hutch what had happened to him.

Instead, he said nothing.

Hutch tried again. “Suppose we talk about it?” It was more of a sug­gestion and less of a question.

Starsky didn’t want to talk about it, not the things Hutch wanted to explore, not the details; it was enough that he had nightmares and flashes of memory, disturbing reminders of how viciously he’d been violated, in what ways, and how ashamed he was for all of it. But maybe he could talk to Hutch about what was left of him.

“They took everything from me,” he said in a low voice. His words cracked when he spoke and only then did he realize how emotional he was. He hated to feel sorry for himself.

“Not everything,” Hutch assured him. He could see the pain in Star­sky’s eyes. He didn’t say it to patronize Starsky; he said what he said as matter of fact. “They didn’t take me from you.”

“Not yet, they haven’t,” Starsky said ominously.

“You think they’re out to nail me, too?” Hutch asked. What did Star­sky know that he was only then disclosing?

Starsky didn’t explain it; he realized Hutch had misunderstood him. But Hutch’s question was frightening by its own admission. “I think they’d be happy to kill us both,” he replied. “Promise me you’ll be care­ful.”

“Do I need to be—for some specific reason you’re not telling me?”

“No. Just be careful because you should be—as long as they’re out there.”

Hutch studied Starsky’s defensive posture and his solemn demeanor. “There’s something you’re not telling me,” he decided. “Why don’t you get it off your chest and let me wrestle it with you?”

“I don’t feel strong enough,” Starsky said.

“You were strong enough to bust up the bathroom,” Hutch reminded him. He did it to lighten the moment—and he succeeded.

Starsky relaxed, settled against the porcelain tub behind him. “I can’t stand looking at myself,” he said impulsively.

It explained the broken mirror.

“You’ll get your face back,” Hutch reassured him. “Time heals all wounds, remember?”

“I can’t stand being with myself,” Starsky clarified.

Hutch understood as well as anyone who had not been through such an ordeal. But he’d witnessed it and that was something few people ever saw. He, too, had flashes of disturbing reminders. He understood that Starsky felt ashamed.

“They can only take what you let them take,” he told Starsky. “You can only feel responsible if you excuse them for their accountability. Your identity, your self-esteem, your actions … those belong to you. Okay, so you opened the door that night. Your responsibility ended there.”

“Not if I opened the door and allowed the rest of what happened to me to happen to me,” Starsky said. With his eyes, he begged Hutch to save him from his own hurtful perceptions; he didn’t want to believe what he said.

“Is that what you did, Starsk? Did you allow what they did to you?”

“No,” Starsky said emphatically. “I’ve told you that.”

“Exactly. Your accountability ended when you opened the door. Opening the door was a mistake. It wasn’t permission.”

Tears pooled in Starsky’s eyes; he was ashamed of his apparent emotion, too, and lowered his sight to the broken glass between them. But Hutch was right: None of what Starsky had done those nights was ‘permission.’

He rubbed his eyes to rid them of their tears and to ease his noticeable headache. But there would be no ignoring Hutch; there he sat in the doorway, on the floor, settled as if he’d never move. Starsky made eye contact with those blue eyes again and surrendered to their invitation.

“I feel as if I’ll always feel sick,” he said. “I think I’ll always feel stupid for the mistake I made. I’m terrified that I will never rise above this.”

Hutch heard him. He nodded to let Starsky know he’d heard him. He didn’t want Starsky’s bravery to go unanswered. But then he said what Starsky didn’t expect; he said, “None of those things you imagine you’ll feel forever will last that long.”

Starsky laughed a disbelieving laugh. Hutch was so sure of himself. “How do you know that? You have a crystal ball or something?”

Hutch eased into an affectionate smile. “I know because ‘always’ and ‘never’ are absolutes—and there are no absolutes, except the absol­ute that there are no absolutes. Nothing is forever, Starsk. Nothing. Not how you feel. Not our lives. Not the sun in the sky. Hell, not even the universe, for that matter.”

“Well, aren’t you the cheerful one,” Starsky noted dryly.

Hutch laughed. “Just putting it all in perspective for you, buddy.”

There was much truth to what Hutch had told him; Starsky knew it. Its reminder comforted him. He drew a deep breath and slowly exhaled. “I have a long way to go,” he realized, barely audibly, as he made the effort to look forward.

“That much is true,” Hutch said. “But it’s not the same as you’ll always feel sick or stupid or that you should be terrified that you won’t rise above this. You’ll rise above this,” he said on second thought. “Look how far you’ve come already.”

Starsky scoffed at him.

“What did the doc tell you?” Hutch asked, as if he couldn’t remem­ber, and then did. “Didn’t he say you’ve already put on seven pounds?”

Starsky used the notation to cheer himself, even if it was only for another night. “So imagine how much I’d gain back,” he said, “if you let me eat real ice cream.”

* * *

“Peanut butter cookies should fatten me up,” Starsky decidedly noted. He hungrily reached for one from Grace’s basket, then ate it while he looked at her and saw beauty he hadn’t noticed before. He couldn’t help but be mesmerized by her sun-lit green eyes and how fondly they admired him. She appeared so young and yet she had a depth of soul not commiserate with her age. “How old are you, anyway?” he impulsively asked. It wasn’t a question he’d ask any woman, but Grace had been his friend for two years and she looked enough younger than he was to feel safe asking her.

“Twenty-eight,” she said proudly. “You’re twelve years older than I am. Or will be in a few weeks.”

He was impressed that she knew. Her age explained her youthful looks, too. He munched a cookie, enjoyed the taste, and examined her more fondly. “How’d you get to be so wise then? You’re just a baby.”

“I may be younger and I may be wise, but I’ve always looked up to you.”

“Because I’m so handsome?”

That he was, she thought, with his bedroom blue eyes and his dark hair, and that patch of curls that peeked above his shirt collar. But she also loved the shape of his face and his fingers, his build and his sensu­ality. But, mostly, she loved his soul.

When she didn’t answer right away, he apologized. “I’m being silly,” he noted.

Oh, and how she loved his silliness, too. “I’m glad you feel good,” she said. “You know I’ve been concerned about you.”

“I do know,” he admitted, explaining why he’d apologized, “and I’m trying to avoid feeling like a stupid victim at the same time.” He played off the word ‘stupid’ that Hutch had used earlier in reference to Starsky’s unwarranted belief that he was a coward, but Grace read it differently.

“What’s stupid about being a victim?” she asked.

He averted his eyes and shook his head. “That’s not what I meant.” On second thought, still not looking at her, and not even sure why he was about to say what he did—perhaps because she made her living coun­seling victims and she’d appreciate what he thought—he said, “or maybe it is what I meant. I was stupid because I opened the door that night even though I knew better. That’s how they nailed me, you know. I let them in to help themselves.”

“How did you know better?”

He finally locked eyes with her and shrugged again as he summoned his confession. “When I heard the knock at the door, I asked who it was and I heard a guy say, ‘Ken.’ Hutch never calls himself Ken. It struck me odd, but I ignored it. And I was too lazy to get up, so I told him to use his key. He said he’d lost it. Hutch is too … organized, to say it politely, to lose his keys. Trust me.”

He examined that pivotal moment more closely. “And lastly, he was on a first date at Emma’s house. I dropped him there myself, so I knew he didn’t have a car; she planned to give him a ride to his truck in the morning.” He looked at Grace as if it was obvious. “All of the signs were there and I ignored them. I knew better—so that makes me a stupid victim.”

She nodded that she understood, which was a reaction he didn’t expect, she could tell. “That makes me a stupid victim, too,” she said, “because I once opened a door.”

He wasn’t sure he understood what she told him. “You once opened a door,” he asked, seeking clarification, “and became a victim … of?” It wasn’t that he meant to pry; he simply wanted to understand. He wasn’t prepared for her answer.

“Rape,” she said.

Starsky was stunned, shaken to his core, not because he believed for a second that she knew he was also a sexually assaulted victim, but be­cause she was one herself. The idea of it sickened him, shocked him, and broke his heart for her. How couldn’t he have known? not made the connection? He’d brought many a rape victim to her office door and had sat alone with her at times talking about some of those cases, as if he and she were the unharmed ones, when all along she had been traumatized by rape herself. He was terrified for a moment that he’d said the wrong thing in the past, that he’d been less than kind, less than empathetic, because he was often angry and publicly vocal when rape victims re­fused to name or prosecute their attackers.

But Grace didn’t look at him like he’d done wrong. She remained the gentle soul toward him that she’d always been—which was why he was more enraged in those minutes to know someone had harmed her in such a vile way, she a special friend of his, she a tender young woman, regard­less.

“I’m sorry,” he said after finding his voice. “I’m sorry for what happened to you and I’m sorry I didn’t know till now. I could have been a better friend had I known.” And he was certain he could have been, especially then, especially then because he understood something he hadn’t before: He understood—clearly and precisely and all too pain­fully—the damage such violence caused its victims. Had that been its purpose?

“Please don’t be sorry,” she said. “It’s one of the last things I’d want you to feel.”

What he wanted was to hold her, but couldn’t, not certain he should. What would he want from her if she knew what had happened to him? And then he knew.

He’d want to be heard.

“What say we take a trip out to the north forty?” he appealed to her, getting to his feet. “Bring your basket because I plan to eat all those cookies before you leave. Hutch didn’t say I couldn’t have them.”

“He doesn’t know I brought them. He doesn’t even know I’m here.”

“Better yet,” Starsky said with a laugh. He carried her basket; they stepped off the porch and walked up the driveway to where the gravel met the grass. He didn’t think to ask before they got there whether she could sit on the ground in her dress, but she assured him she could—she achingly wanted to—so she sat before he did.

“Hutch has such a lovely place,” she commented as she surveyed the landscape.

Starsky was slower to sit. Every muscle in his body still throbbed—and some more than others. He gingerly sat cross-legged in front of her and tried unsuccessfully not to wince. “It’s an age thing,” he joked, knowing she didn’t believe him. “I used to take a beating and could keep on dancing.”

“You’ll dance again,” she assured him.

He’d made certain to sit where the police security could still see him—and he them—but far enough away that neither they nor Hutch could hear their confessions. He didn’t ask Grace about the details of her attack; it wasn’t his business. But he wanted to take them someplace private in case she wanted to tell him, someplace he could talk to her, in return, if he wanted to.

He retrieved another cookie from the basket and held it out for her. “Sure you don’t want one?” When she shook her head, he took a bite instead. “They’re damn good,” he nodded, eating. “One of your hidden talents.”

“Cookies are easy.”

“Says you.”

“I was twelve,” she said, not easing into what she wanted him to know, “and my parents had gone out of town for the weekend; they left my older brother, Michael, in charge.”

Starsky’s chewing slowed. He didn’t leave the look in her eyes. “You were raped when you were twelve?” It was the injury to injury he could barely withstand and he blanched when she nodded.

“Michael invited everyone he could think of to a party he wasn’t al­lowed to have,” she recalled, “some college guys he knew.” She re­flected back to that night—a return she’d often made over the course of those sixteen years since—and relayed the details as quickly as possible, so as to not injure Starsky with their disturbing images. “I was upstairs when one of them came to my bedroom,” she said. “I opened the door. It was loud, tremendously noisy downstairs from all the people and the music, so he was able to rape and sodomize me for nearly an hour with­out anyone hearing me cry.”

“Jesus,” Starsky whispered. His heart pounded and his head spun. He didn’t finish the cookie and unconsciously dropped his hand to his knee. He couldn’t look at Grace for a second. It was too painful to imagine—to know in his heart and mind—the visuals, feelings, and thoughts such an attack on a young girl triggered in him.

“I’ve never told that to anyone before.”

Starsky was too stunned to be flattered. He was seething and speech­less, light-headed, and filled with rage.

And pain.

And it wasn’t for himself that time.

He couldn’t not hold her. Though it physically hurt him, he grasped her hand, pulled her toward him, and drew her into his arms. Then he took her with him when he lay back in the grass. He held her as tightly as he could with the one good arm he had and kissed her hair. A tear spilled on his cheek and he was glad she couldn’t see it. He didn’t want her to think he was sorry for her, but sorry was definitely what he felt.

He thought he’d burst with tears, but he fought them. “Grace,” he whispered. It was all he could think to say. He knew the terror she’d felt, the pain she’d suffered, the shame and the guilt and all the embarrass­ment spawned from such trauma. He knew the morass because it was his, too. But to have been so young, so naive, to have been a trusting child, and to have had one’s innocence destroyed in the blink of an eye, was more than he himself had endured. It was no wonder Grace Woods was an old soul; she’d lived a thousand lifetimes since then.

She gently pushed enough out of his arm to look at him. Lying beside him there in the grass was the most special moment of her life. It was the last expected thing and one of her most treasured fantasies—though not for the reasons they were together on that afternoon. She wiped the tear from his cheek. “Aside from the lives I’ve helped along the way,” she gently said, “the thing that has helped me most to bear this cross has been you.”

That made no sense to him. He’d only been in her life for two years and the rape had occurred more than a decade earlier. He gazed into her soft eyes and waited for her to explain.

“There are three kinds of men in the world,” she said. “There are those who commit such acts, and there are those—the majority of men—who are complacent about such crimes.” She returned the grateful warmth in his eyes. “And then there are men like you,” she said, pleased all over again to have known him, “who are outraged.”

“I understand why it’s important that someone be outraged,” he said. “I get it now.” Who would be outraged for him? Would Hutch? Or would Hutch judge him? Maybe only Grace could empathize—though his rage for victims of violent crimes hadn’t been birthed having become one. He’d simply never understood the minds of the serial offenders.

Grace was cupped in the bend of his elbow, held close to him by him. He stroked her hair and cheek and drew a deep breath for a second and before he stated the obvious. “Your attacker was never caught,” he surmised, “because you never told anyone till now what happened to you.”

She answered him with silence.

“Do you know who he is?” Starsky asked.

“A friend of my Michael’s,” she said. “They’re still friends. In fact, they’re business partners.”

“Fuck that,” he cussed, and then apologized for his obscenity.

“Michael doesn’t know,” she defended her brother.

“He should know.”

But then Starsky caught himself. He had done again what he’d always done: Tried to make others do what he believed was right, not what they were emotionally capable of doing. “Scratch that,” he said on second thought. “I can no longer judge.” And then he explored a darker side. “May I ask how this has affected your personal relationships?”

He realized he’d asked her a private question, one he mainly wanted to know for himself, for how the attack on him might affect his private life, not with Grace, but with anyone, and quickly added, “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to; I won’t be hurt if you don’t.” He didn’t think there was anything more personal than what she’d already told him, but she’d offered that information; his question was a direct solicitation.

“It hasn’t,” she said with conviction. “What I mean is that I haven’t had any ‘personal’ relationships to be affected.”

He brushed her hair behind her ear to see her face more clearly as he pursued an explanation. “Because you aren’t all that invested in the men you’ve been with?”

“I haven’t been with any men,” she admitted.

He never pegged her for gay and the idea was disappointing; if she was gay, there’d never be more affection between them than what they shared that day. “Women then?”

“No women. No men.”

He blinked. He didn’t want to be unclear. “Then you’re saying you’ve never had a boyfriend? You’ve never had sex?”

“This is as close to a man as I’ve ever been,” she said. She pressed herself along his length and anxiously trembled with her admission.

“Grace,” he begged her, “tell me that isn’t true.”

“I can’t,” she promised him. “But I’m glad you’re the first.”

He was keenly aware then that she touched him, that she was pressed to him, that her hand rested on his belly and gently held the rope-burned wrist of his broken arm. If he heard her right, she touched a man that way for the very first time in her life. It deeply saddened him as much as it flattered him. “You haven’t been waiting for me, have you?”

“Not waiting for you,” she corrected him, blushing. “But I’ve been wishing for you.”

The abused, young, soulful, pretty, kind woman in his arms was one who’d never known intimacy, who had respected and needed him for his validation, and who had secretly admired and wanted him for a couple of years. And during that time, without thinking, he’d escorted woman after woman into that police building, one semi-romantic fling after another, marching them from the parking lot into the hallways and back again, right past Grace’s window where, no doubt, she saw every one. How ignorant, callous, and indifferent to Grace’s desire had he been?

“That’s the saddest story I’ve ever heard,” he said quietly.

“It gets sadder.”

He looked abruptly at her, not certain he wanted to know, but he asked just the same. “How could it possibly be sadder?”

“This man I’ve been wishing for … well … I believe he was injured the way I was in that upstairs bedroom on that night so long ago and stupidly opened that door. He and I have that in common.”

Starsky’s heart pounded again. She’d caught him completely off-guard that time. Did she know something he didn’t know she knew or was she that intuitive? He wasn’t certain how to reply to her; to say any­thing could give himself away and, yet, so what if he did?

“He also doesn’t yet believe he can talk to me,” she added, squeezing him close.

“Why would you think the man you’ve been wishing for has been hurt that way? Maybe I just got badly beat up.”

Grace accepted in that moment that his injuries had been limited to assault and battery, and the resignation shone in her eyes. “No more talk of it, then,” she said.

Was that the friendship he wanted with her? Was he that scared, ashamed, embarrassed, guilty—even with someone who had been rav­aged by rape and sodomy? They shared the same injury. She wasn’t wrong to suspect it. He was wrong to pretend otherwise. “There’s some­one very important to me,” he reminded her, “someone more important to me than anyone has ever been—or ever will be.”

“I know,” she said quietly.

“I don’t mean a woman.”

“I know that, too,” she added, trying a smile.

“Then you know why I have to tell him first.”

Starsky may as well have confirmed for her that he’d been raped. Grace had counseled many rape victims over the short course of her career, but this was no ordinary case; David Starsky was the man she was in love with. She swallowed her grief for him and followed his lead. “I thought you would have told Hutch by now.”

“I want to tell him,” he said. He pressed his lips together to stall his sudden hurt. “But I don’t know how. I want to and I know I can, but I don’t know how.”

“You don’t know because you’re afraid. What are you afraid of?”

He looked into her eyes. The healer. “That he’ll think less of me, somehow, because I should have fought harder or resisted better—or that I’m to blame because I shouldn’t have opened the door that night in the first place. It would kill me if he said something like, ‘How could you let this happen to you?’ As if I caused or allowed it. He says he doesn’t blame me, but he doesn’t know all the facts.”

“That’s not what you’re afraid of. Tell me what you’re afraid of.”

He looked at her, half-smiled, amused almost, as if she knew him better than he knew himself. But maybe she did. He tested a different answer then and allowed her to take him further into his mind. “I’m afraid he won’t understand it. I didn’t understand it myself, I mean, you know, thinking all this time that rape was actually a crime of sex. And if he doesn’t understand the difference—”

“That’s not what you’re afraid of, either,” she said, interrupting him. “Tell me what you’re really, deep down, afraid of.”

He almost laughed that time, but couldn’t find the humor. What answer did she look for? If Hutch thought less of him, or if Hutch didn’t understand the distinction between sex and violence, then—

Starsky understood. He choked on the words when he voiced what scared him most. “I’m afraid I’ll lose him.”

Grace didn’t give him long to feel the pain of that fear. “In your heart of hearts, do you really think you’d lose him over this?”

“I don’t think I could lose him over anything. But that’s actually my head thinking there, not my heart. My heart fears.”

“This friendship, this bond, you have with Hutch, is it a head thing or a heart thing?”

She posed the most intriguing questions and he loved her for it. “It’s a heart thing,” he said without hesitation, exhaling his apprehensions.

The vulnerability between them was the purest Grace had ever exper­ienced with a man and that it was with David Starsky, the one she’d ad­mir­ed and secretly desired for so long, made it even more precious.

And exhilarating.

She impulsively acted on her emotions—and surprised herself and him by kissing his lips. Not in a thousand lifetimes did she think she had such courage. It was a soft, quick kiss, so fast she didn’t get a chance to physically feel it, but she flushed afterward, and felt silly, and happy, and terribly sad for some reason. At first she thought she should apolo­gize, but Starsky smiled happily at her and she couldn’t brave the words. “What?” she said to his otherwise silent response.

“That’s the second most memorable kiss of my life,” he replied. “I know where it came from, how it got here, and I’m flattered and honored and happy for you—and me—to have had it.”

She giggled. “Only the second most memorable?”

“I got the first most memorable kiss of my life,” he confided to her, “from the most important person in the world to me.”

She giggled again with the idea. “You don’t mean …”

“I do mean.”

“How was his better?”

“I didn’t say it was better,” he corrected her, laughing. “It was the most memorable.”

“Because you love him and he you?”

“Because he’s a guy, I guess—and my partner.”

“Does he secretly want you?”

“It’s no secret,” he said with another laugh.

“He’s not gay,” she assumed.

“He says the kiss was the deciding factor.” He flashed back to that sur­prisingly amazing moment. “And so his kiss meant as much to him as yours did for you—for a different reason.”

* * *

“This sure showed us,” Starsky mumbled, disappointed by their decision to break into the after-hours warehouse that night in search of case clues—and accidentally getting locked in. “When you do some­thing illegal, you get your ass kicked one way or another.”

“The payoff was worth it,” Hutch decided. “We can add yet another adventure to our list.”

“It’s too long already.”

“Then settle for being glad the air conditioner isn’t running tonight.”

“You and your positive attitude … and never mind that we’re in this situation in the first place.”

They had been trapped in the small office for a good couple of hours that weekend before they decided it was better to risk life and limb and crawl into another—presumably unlocked—office, via the building’s air conditioning duct. It took some doing, but they were able to even­tually pry off the vent and climb into the aluminum shaft. Instead of escaping, though, they got lost as they crawled around the tight spaces—and Starsky began to feel claustrophobic. Despite finding two vents in the ceiling from which to exit the maze of tunnels, they were unable to budge them. Hutch suggested they continue to search, that the odds of finding someplace to escape grew in their favor with each turn they made.

Starsky didn’t believe him, but he appreciated Hutch’s effort to keep him from panicking. He thought they should return to the room they’d been trapped in, that someone would find them there soon enough, while the “adventure at hand” would only shorten their lives and leave their corpses forever abandoned in the rat trap in which they’d been caught.

“Well, not forever,” Hutch corrected him. “I mean, it is an air condi­tioning shaft, after all. The stench of our decomposing bodies will waft through this entire building and get us out of here sooner than that.”

Starsky called Hutch a “son-of-a-bitch” under his breath and Hutch punched the bottom of Starsky’s shoe in retaliation while Starsky led them in the tunnels. “If I get out of this alive,” Starsky promised, crawl­ing along on his belly with an occasional whistle to keep himself cheered, “I’m going to be the one to kick your ass.”

“If we get out of this alive,” Hutch replied, laughing, “I’m going to help you kick my ass.”

“You’ll change your mind when I’ve beaten you to within an inch of your life,” Starsky warned him. “You’re going to think this was an easier way to die.”

“Killed by rat maze,” Hutch mulled.

They eventually followed the brighter light and found a third vent into an office room below. The grate was already somewhat loosened and it gave Starsky hope that he could work it free or punch it out. But he wasn’t able. He was tired, demoralized, and a little slap happy, all at the same time. Hutch proposed that they try to kick it out, but that required backtracking to get them both turned around and Starsky wasn’t too pleased to do that then. So Hutch said he’d give the effort an honest try.

Starsky rolled onto his back, pressed the top of his head against the grill, and took a few relaxing breaths of fresh air. Maybe if he could keep his composure, as well as muster some strength, they’d be better able to free themselves. That was his plan, anyway.

Of course, the shaft was quite narrow and Hutch had to practically crawl on Starsky to get to their possible escape route since Starsky hadn’t wanted to retrace their steps to some intersection in order to let Hutch get to the grate before him. But the two of them, panting and wedged into the same space, broke Starsky’s effort to relax. “Hell with death by rat maze,” he said, then laughed. “How’s this going to look when they find us?”

“Like we had a good time before we died,” Hutch said. They laughed like they hadn’t heard anything funnier. And they knew they were punch-drunk, laughing at nothing, but it somehow released them from the idea that they were permanently trapped.

Hutch gripped the mesh and violently rattled the grill. He thought he could pry it off if he abused it enough. They were lucky, he said, to have found one that already hung by its screws, because if that vent was tough, they could never have removed the others, no matter how hard they tried. He repeatedly hit the grate with his fist and, with each blow, he felt the metal plate give way a little bit more.

After a minute, he was consciously aware that he was pressed up against Starsky. If the shaft were even an inch narrower, he’d have been on top of his partner; as it was, he lay snugly against him—while he paused to examine the situation. The office light filtered through the vent and onto Starsky’s face and he thought Starsky appeared anxiously tired.

“You’re not really going to panic, are ya?” Hutch asked. “We’re almost free.”

“You said that half an hour ago,” Starsky reminded him.

“That’s what I meant by ‘almost.’”

“Fuck you.”

“Fuck me? I’m the one who’s going to get us out of this mess.”

“You’re the one who got us into this mess!” Starsky said, accusingly.

And they broke out laughing—and not because it was funny.

When their laughter stopped, they patiently looked at each other. Was it because they were in that predicament that Hutch felt all the closer to his partner, or was he simply faced, yet again, with that personal, private nagging in the back of his mind, the one that had made him wonder on several occasions if he wasn’t drawn to Starsky in more ways than he thought he was—especially after having recently and nearly lost Starsky to otherwise multiple bullet wounds? Maybe it was just gratefulness he felt not to have had to bury him.

“Get back to work,” Starsky said, and then scoldingly added, “and stop looking at me like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like you’re thinking about doing what you’re thinking about doing.” He didn’t avert his eyes, but he was sure he was about to be engaged by Hutch in a way he’d never been. It didn’t scare him. In fact, he thought it was comical. He laughed with Hutch because they both knew what seemed to be transpiring between them and they were equ­al­ly helpless to avoid it.

“Don’t look at you like I’m about to lay one on ya?” Hutch pretended to wonder. Laughing still with Starsky, he said, “Is it the look that’s troubling you? Or is it the action that will follow the look?” Before Starsky could reply, Hutch followed his impulse. He kissed Starsky—a brief, unfeeling, somewhat forced, purely meaningless kiss, his mouth to Starsky’s mouth—during which the two of them laughed, making it more of a contact action than an actual intimate encounter.

“You son-of-a-bitch,” Starsky affectionately cussed. He laughed as he raised his arm and tried to punch Hutch’s shoulder, but he couldn’t reach him, wedged as he was against the side of the tunnel. “Help!” he called out to no one. “I’m stuck in a rat trap with a sex predator!”

“Dream on,” Hutch razzed him.

They laughed like boys. Then the laughter ended, abruptly, and they looked at each other again—intently.

Hutch noticed the way the light from the vent grid lit Starsky’s face in a criss-crossing pattern, at the way his partner eyed him, as if Starsky waited for Hutch’s next move, not afraid of it, not resistant to it, and almost expected it. The notion made Hutch’s heart pound. Had he been granted permission to follow his deeper impulse? He decided not to give it thought; to do so would be to lose the moment. Starsky would let him know if he crossed the line.

Because he was snug against Starsky, the move Hutch made was a small one; there wasn’t any distance between them, so there wasn’t much space to close. He had just touched Starsky’s mouth with his own, a taboo contact he’d never made with any man in his lifetime, and it hadn’t deterred him. It hadn’t aroused him, either—he didn’t think—but he was curious about how it would feel to more intimately kiss the person he was closest to—a person he’d give up his life for.

So that’s what he did. He kissed Starsky—bent over and kissed him. His lips touched Starsky’s at first rather tentatively, then with a certain confidence, and finally with the freedom he gave himself to fully feel the contact, as well as Starsky’s warmth and their friendship that allowed it.

Starsky didn’t resist. He didn’t even react. He was, initially and mo­mentarily, stunned, even though he predicted the kiss, but then it quickly became an affectionate engagement—from someone he dearly loved. He was also curious about why he’d been kissed and where Hutch imagined it would lead, so he allowed the experiment by way of his pass­iveness.

The kiss lasted longer than either of them expected. Hutch pushed beyond his awkwardness and apprehension; Starsky’s submissiveness gave him rein to do that. But once past it, Hutch indulged himself. He closed his eyes to thoroughly isolate the touch of their lips—to keenly feel the pleasure of the flesh contact itself—and was determined to get some response from Starsky—either way. He completely abandoned any notion that he offended his partner, or that he had crossed over a line into something repulsively taboo, or that it meant more than it meant at the time of its engagement.

He kissed Starsky at length and with feeling, with passion and out of pure love and possession, with warm kisses, with moist kisses. He then encouraged Starsky to respond to him by making each release and next kiss more sensual than the last, the way he might try to break the resolve of a woman who eluded him—except that Starsky hadn’t resisted; he simply hadn’t reacted.

Hutch breathed heavily and his heart pounded. He smelled Starsky’s mouth, which hinted of the apple Starsky had earlier eaten, and he was exhilarated by the aliveness of Starsky’s skin, and he allowed those things to drive him. Perhaps it was his audible breathing that broke Star­sky’s will—it was, after all, rather primal and aggressive in its cad­ence.

Starsky had two choices: He could fight off the increasingly powerful advance—or he could indulge it. He chose the latter for the sake of fate. Who would know, but them? Other than conditioned taboo and un­founded fear, Starsky didn’t have reason not to; he wasn’t afraid of Hutch any more than Hutch was afraid of him. He finally returned the kisses, each one of them, and equally delivered their intensity in reply, a passionate fulfillment that aroused him, and pushed him further into the experience as they filled the narrow shaft with their quiet kissing smacks and fierce breathing.

Hutch hit the line he pursued, the one that would permanently define who he was and redefine who they were together. He’d never been un­certain of his sexuality—or afraid of anyone else’s, for that matter—and he wasn’t apprehensive of retaliation, either, but he realized in an instant that he wasn’t prepared to change the nature of their friendship. That was something they should do with foresight, if ever they were to do it.

He abruptly withdrew and quickly made eye contact in the dim light to measure Starsky’s overall evaluation of their actions. They were word­less and took the time to catch their breaths. After a minute, Hutch lightly laughed. “I’ve often wondered what that would feel like,” he said.

Starsky raised an eyebrow at him. “Seriously?” He knew how he felt about it himself, at least at that time, and he wasn’t sure he was happy with the feeling.

“Yeah, seriously,” Hutch said. “In moments like this, when we’ve been up against each other or we’re in the middle of something horrific, sometimes I get to feeling needy for salvage—like in a tourniquet situ­ation, for example,” and the idea made them both laugh at Hutch’s absurdity, that he had wondered how it would feel to kiss Starsky if one of them might bleed to death.

“Sometimes I’ve questioned this thing we’ve got, this brotherhood,” Hutch said, trying again to explain, “and where does it really come from? Am I drawn to you in other ways besides friends and partners? Like that. Haven’t you ever wondered?”

Starsky laughed at him. “No, man, not once.” But now he wondered why he’d been aroused by the kissing. Shouldn’t he have been offended instead? Wouldn’t he have killed any other man for making such a pass? Wouldn’t he have never indulged it—even with Hutch?

There wasn’t any time to assimilate the answers. They busted out laughing because Hutch had shared something extremely personal with Starsky while he thought his partner may have felt the same way, only to learn he never had. But Hutch wasn’t embarrassed and he didn’t wish he hadn’t confessed.

“But, seriously, what do you think?” Starsky asked. “Are you a homo sexual?” He purposely broke the word into two so Hutch would give him credit for not using the word ‘queer.’ Besides, whatever Hutch’s experience was, it would be the one he should adopt, too.

“No,” Hutch replied with conviction.

“You’re not queer?” Starsky asked for clarification. “How do you know that, especially after what you just did?”

“Because I’m not attracted to men,” Hutch said, as matter-of-factly.

“Then why did you kiss me?”

“To test whether I’m attracted to you.”

“So, you wonder if you’re queer?” He used the word that time, thinking Hutch hadn’t understood him the first time.

“Were you listening?” Hutch reprimanded him. “I’m not attracted to men. But maybe I’ve been attracted to you.”

Starsky didn’t appreciate the distinction. “So … are you attracted to me … like that?”

“I don’t think so,” Hutch said, honestly.

“How would you know if you was?”

“If I was? I’d have gotten a hard-on a minute ago.”

“So?” Starsky asked emphatically. “Did ya?” If Hutch had, and he wasn’t gay, then it would ease Starsky out of his own unexpected ques­tioning about himself.

Hutch had to think back. He wasn’t sure. Finally, he settled on a more accurate answer. “I did feel a bit stimulated.” He laughed, shyly.

“I’ve never, not once,” Starsky said, “wondered if you was a homo, but if you’re going to get ‘stimulated’ around me, I best start watching my back.”

“I don’t want you to do that,” Hutch begged him. “Don’t be afraid of what I just did.”

Starsky watched Hutch’s blue eyes, the light that sparkled in them, and how genuinely he wanted Starsky to believe him. He returned the honesty.

“We love each other,” Starsky said, when he finally found the right words, “and we trust each other. We’ve been through a lot together, more in one event than some people ever have their whole lives. We might fight and fuck it up sometimes and wish we could go our separate ways, have normal lives and all that, but we’ll never mess with Us because Us is something bigger than you and me. Us is who we are. Nothing can come between Us—not even something like that if something like that was possible. It’s hard to explain,” he said on second thought.

“I get it,” Hutch replied. “We’ve had our down times, times that would have been deal-breakers between anyone else, but none of it has been enough to destroy who we are together.”

“Exactly—except I’d have to watch my back if you was queer,” Star­sky said again with a laugh.

“Did it scare the shit out of you?”

“I figured you were scared enough for the both of us.”

“At first. Did it make you sick? Turn you off?”

Starsky couldn’t answer right away because he couldn’t not laugh about what he planned to say, especially knowing how Hutch would re­act, that he would find it hilarious, too, but he eventually got out the words. “It gave me a raging hard-on.”

It wasn’t true that it had been raging; maybe it had only been as ‘stim­ulated’ as Hutch, which reprieved Starsky from having felt aroused at all, but the two of them laughed till they couldn’t, just from the idea of it all.

“You asshole,” Hutch affectionately chided him. “Now I’m going to have to watch my back.”

* * *

Starsky found his partner in the master bedroom, on the bedside neare­st the bathroom door, dressed comfortably in sweat pants and a flannel shirt, sitting up against the headboard, reading a magazine. Star­sky didn’t ask if he could enter the room, but he was welcomed just the same.

“Grace left already?” Hutch assumed.

Starsky carefully sat on the side of the mattress at the foot of the bed near Hutch’s socked feet. “I told her you kissed me,” he confessed.

“And that made her leave?” Hutch joked.

“It definitely made her laugh.”

“Why did you tell her that?”

“Because she kissed me,” Starsky explained. “I’m such a kissable guy, I guess.” In fact, she’d kissed him more than once, and at length, too. Friendly kisses. Fond kisses. Newborn kisses.

“And the other reason?” Hutch asked.

Starsky turned his head and looked at Hutch. “It was her very first kiss—so, naturally, it meant a lot to her. It reminded me of ours.”

“So now she thinks you’re gay?” Hutch teased him.

Starsky returned the jab. “She thinks you’re queer,” he said. “You kissed me, remember?”

“I’m sure she’s heard worse,” Hutch imagined. He wasn’t offended. He had never been ashamed of or embarrassed by what he’d done, by what they’d done, in that air conditioning shaft those three years ago, least of all knowing Grace knew.

Grace had certainly heard a lot worse, Starsky thought. She’d also been through worse than he had. He couldn’t get past that she’d been raped so young. At least he had some understanding about what hap­pened to him at the time, even if he didn’t know how it would end, if he would survive it. But a child’s terror had to have been viciously more cruel. He looked back at the floor. “I have a legal question for you,” he said.

“I’m no lawyer,” Hutch reminded him.

“I’m not looking for legal advice. I want your personal opinion about something.”

Hutch closed his magazine.

As carefully as he’d sat at the foot of the bed, Starsky asked, “What’s your take on the definition of rape in this state?” He didn’t look at Hutch. He sat quietly, stared briefly at the photo of the two of them that Hutch kept on his nightstand, and then looked at the floor again.

“The legal definition?” Hutch thought a moment. “Our state’s legal def­inition of rape is the forcible penetration of a penis into a vagina, ‘however slightly,’ I believe is the phrase.”

“So,” Starsky stated the obvious, “a man can only rape a woman.”

Hutch looked at Starsky’s profile and noticed, even from there, how tired he seemed. He imagined Starsky already knew the legal definition of rape, but that he sought validation or strategy, and Hutch was willing to help him figure it. “Yeah,” he said, “a man can only rape a woman—by legal definition.”

“By that definition, then,” Starsky calculated, “it isn’t rape if he only penetrated her ass—with force, I mean; you know, against her will.”

“Right. That wouldn’t be rape by legal definition.” He tried to detect Starsky’s direction, but couldn’t, so he offered what else he knew. “Sod­omy is legal among adults in this state—as of 1976—unless it’s forced. If it’s forced, I believe the legal term is some creative thing like ‘forcible sodomy,’ which simply carries a heftier penalty than does consensual sodomy.”

“What do you mean by sodomy?”

“Anal sex. Or, in this case, if it’s forced, forcible anal penetration.”

With visible physical discomfort, Starsky lay back on the bed, rested his feet on the floor, and stared at the ceiling. He allowed his sore body to settle, and then dropped his arm over Hutch’s ankles while he sank into the cushion of the mattress. He hugged Hutch’s feet to him, tucked under his arm, and thought further. “So, basically, it’s all about which hole he forces his dick into,” he noted, dryly, “not that he forces her.”

Hutch couldn’t disagree. “That’s what it boils down to.” He also notic­ed that Starsky touched him—something he hadn’t done since the kid­napping.

“A man can’t rape a man,” Starsky said.

“Not in this state, not by legal definition, no.”

Starsky closed his eyes and exhaled to purge himself of the dismay the conversation had caused him and then squeezed Hutch to him under his arm to let him know he appreciated his input.

Hutch waited for Starsky to elaborate, but when he didn’t say another word, Hutch added, “If you asked me what I thought personally, I’d say the system sucks. I mean, we don’t call it one thing if someone murders someone with a knife and another thing if they murder someone with a handgun. The end result is the same: The person was murdered. But for some sick reason, it’s rape if a man forcibly uses his dick against a vagina and it’s ‘forcible sodomy’ if he uses it against an anus—even if they’re both on the same person.”

Starsky opened his eyes and turned his head against the mattress to look at Hutch. He found his partner keenly watching him. “And why wouldn’t they be separate crimes?” he asked. He knew why in his own mind, but he wanted to hear Hutch’s explanation.

“Because the intent of the perpetrator is identical in either case,” Hutch said, “and the damage to the victim is the same whether she’s forcibly vaginally or forcibly anally violated.”

Starsky silently agreed. “And the perp’s intent in either case?”

“To degrade and humiliate.”

Which was how Starsky felt: Degraded and humiliated—but also ashamed and guilty and embarrassed and physically abused. And sometimes still very much scared. “And the damage to the victim?” he then asked, wondering what Hutch imagined it was.

Hutch searched the air for a minute to find that answer. “Fear. Dis­trust. Shame. A life-long smashing of one’s self-esteem and identity.” He looked into Starsky’s eyes and hoped he was heard, that his partner would know that he knew how Starsky felt as much as was possible to know from someone who’d never experienced it. He appreciated that Starsky wanted to talk to him about the things they discussed and he figured the easiest way for Starsky to do it was to talk about it in ‘third-party’ terms. Maybe if Starsky felt safer inside Hutch’s ethical realm, Starsky would brave telling him whatever it was those men had done to him that they didn’t record. Hutch suspected one thing they could have videotaped—perhaps they’d finally succeeded in forcing Starsky to fell­ate one or all of them—but that would have been on footage he hadn’t yet seen, or might never see, so he broached that subject from its edge.

“Then there’s that other ‘sexual’ violation,” he said, “you know, the one they term ‘forcible oral copulation.’”

Starsky looked away. He knew what it meant, but he couldn’t allow himself to even remember a second of his experience with it. He fleshed Hutch further. “How would you rank all those things if you made the law?”

“Rape.”

“If a man forced himself into a woman’s ass—and did nothing else to her—you’d call that rape?” Starsky asked.

“Yes. Murder is murder, regardless of the weapon. And rape is rape regardless of the, um, ‘hole.’”

“And if a man forced himself into a man’s ass, you’d call that rape, too, then?”

“Absolutely.”

Starsky would say the same. He was relieved to know Hutch would, too. He thought they’d been on that same page all those years together, but it had never mattered then whether they were. In Hutch’s mind—if he knew—Starsky had been raped. And that was enough for Starsky to know at that moment—because that’s how he felt he’d been attacked, despite the legal definition.

But he also knew if he didn’t tell Hutch, then Hutch would no longer know him. The only way to know Starsky from the first night he’d been attacked was to know what had happened to him. To not tell Hutch would be to live the rest of his life inside a lie, and that would put him outside of the most special and important friendship he’d ever known. He couldn’t live with that loss, so he tried a back door approach into telling Hutch the truth.

“A guy getting raped,” he said, “I mean, by our definition, he’d have to be a pussy, I guess.”

“Is that what you think?” Hutch asked. He already knew Starsky thought of himself as a coward; it saddened him to think Starsky also thought of himself as a loser and not a victim. Or a survivor.

Starsky stared at the ceiling. What did he think of male rape victims? “A guy should know better,” he decided, thinking aloud. “A guy should­n’t let himself get into a situation like that.”

“Yeah,” Hutch said dryly, “that should be something only women do.”

Starsky turned his head again and looked at Hutch when he heard his sarcasm. “I’m just saying,” he explained, “that you can understand how a woman can get overpowered, but—”

“But now we’re back to superhuman men,” Hutch said.

Starsky held eye contact with him. He liked what he heard. But would Hutch feel differently if he knew that man who’d been over­powered and raped was his partner of ten years? “There’s something I want to tell you,” he finally said. His heart pounded and his stomach tightened as he finally braved the words he’d wanted to tell Hutch since the morning he’d been found. “Those guys … they did more to me than beat the shit out of me and break some bones.”

Hutch was relieved to hear Starsky talk to him about it; it eased his own guilt for appearing to have left Starsky alone all that time with the isolation of his experience. He felt nothing but absolute empathy for his partner. “Yeah, I know,” he said.

Hutch was somewhat the presumptuous type; it was the detective in him, but his answer still startled Starsky. “You mean to say you suspect what they did,” he corrected him, “because of this conversation we’re having.”

“No, Starsk,” Hutch countered him, puzzled. “I meant what I said.”

“How can you know all they did to me?”

“I don’t know all they did to you, but I know they did more than beat the shit out of you and break some bones. I know they sexually assaulted you, that they raped you—by our definition.”

Starsky was floored. “And you know that based on what?”

“Based on what I saw. Obviously.”

“But that’s to assume,” Starsky argued, “based on what you saw.” He was frustrated with Hutch’s answers; the conversation, as he’d imagined it, hadn’t gone as planned. He felt patronized. “So you saw what? that I had been stripped naked? a specific injury I had? And from that you assumed and now think you know I was sexually assaulted?” He raised his voice to tell Hutch he wasn’t happy with his self-righteous assump­tion. Starsky wanted Hutch’s empathy, not his authority.

Hutch choked. His head swam and he felt suddenly weak. He was thankful he already sat or he may have fallen. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. Tears burned his eyes.

Starsky’s confusion magnified. “You’re sorry? For what?”

“For knowing that you don’t know I know,” he replied sadly, “and for assuming all along that you knew I did.”

Starsky shook Hutch’s foot under his arm. “You have a way of not making sense,” he noted. He felt angry, but scared, too, and didn’t know why. Maybe it was the wetness in Hutch’s eyes, the tension on Hutch’s face, the tone of voice Hutch had used to apologize. There was some­thing more at play than Starsky realized, and it deeply troubled him. Maybe Hutch knew what had happened to him because a doctor had shared those details with Hutch, after all. But Hutch had a different explanation—and one Starsky could never have guessed.

“I know what happened to you,” Hutch told him, as clearly as he could say it, so there’d be no further misunderstandings, “because I saw what happened to you.” He paused for a second to gather his strength and to summon the ability to stop the bleeding when he broke Starsky’s heart with his disclosure. “And I saw what happened to you because they filmed what they did to you and left me the video—while you were still in their possession. I watched it for clues. I had no idea what I would see. What I saw sickened me—and broke me, too.”

Starsky squinted at Hutch while his heart pounded and his breath became audible—and he thought he might get sick to his stomach again for the second time that week.

“I don’t know, for the life of me, why I thought you knew that,” Hutch added. “I guess because you were there or that one of them told you or—” Hutch realized how foolish and stupid he’d been, especially for a cop. “But, of course, they wouldn’t have wanted you to know, lest you said something incriminating they couldn’t have edited without having to reshoot.”

Starsky didn’t know how to feel and he couldn’t get past his physical reaction to figure it out, either. He’d already been humiliated as far as a human could be, hadn’t he? Was it possible to fall further into the abyss?

He avoided Hutch’s eyes and awkwardly lifted himself from the mattress. Then he sat for a minute in the silence of the room and held his head in his hand. If he could find some strength, if he could assimilate what he’d heard long enough to get a grip on it, he might know how to react. But the feelings were too intense to overcome. He rose slowly to his feet, didn’t look at Hutch, and rallied the physical ability to leave the room.

“Give me a minute,” he managed to say, only because he knew it would keep Hutch from following him. In the hallway, right outside the bedroom door, he leaned against the wall, bent over, and held his trembling knee to keep from collapsing.

He couldn’t believe it. He didn’t want to believe it. He had been so humiliated, so degraded and demoralized and reduced to a whimpering coward—and someone, someone as important to him as Ken Hutchin­son was to him, had seen, not just heard about, but actually witnessed his debasing. How was he ever supposed to look himself—or Hutch—in the eye again?

* * *

Hutch joined Starsky on the front porch. It was early evening.

Starsky sat on the top step, bent forward, and hugged himself. He contemplated the parked police car in the driveway while he ignored—or it seemed to Hutch that he ignored—Hutch’s presence.

So Hutch sat on the step beside Starsky, leaned into him as he did, and gently pushed him to get his attention off the cops. “Hey, buddy,” he said affectionately. He wanted Starsky to know that nothing had changed between them.

Starsky lowered his focus to the bottom of the steps. “Do you think you could not sit so close to me,” he cautioned in a low voice, “so they can’t see us be here like that?” He motioned a finger at the police car.

Hutch glanced at the vehicle and hoped the distraction would erase the pain he suddenly felt. Sitting close and touching each other—the way they had only minutes earlier on Hutch’s bed when Starsky held Hutch’s feet under his arm—had been second nature to them. On further thought, it had been their nature, no second involved—and they had never cared what anyone thought or what anyone saw. It wasn’t as if they’d ever inappropriately touched each other in public—or private, for that matter—with the exception of that kiss in the air conditioning shaft. But that had been purely their moment and it was understood, by both of them, that it wasn’t the kind of relating they’d do in private again, let alone in public.

By his suggestion that Hutch not sit so close to him in front of their fellow police officers, Starsky had reduced that physical affection between them to a second nature action. Actually, Starsky had reduced it even more, to something self-conscious and taboo—and that simply broke Hutch’s heart, despite that he understood it. Starsky’s fear could be justified, but it didn’t diminish the hurt it caused.

Hutch obliged him and lowered himself to the next step, pressed up against the rail, and faced Starsky instead. “C’mon,” he coaxed him. “Look at me. You’ve been able to look at me since Day One; nothing’s changed.”

“I didn’t know then what I know now,” Starsky explained, still averting his eyes.

“But I’ve known,” Hutch argued, “and it hasn’t made a damn bit of difference to me.”

“I can’t help but think you’re kidding yourself.”

“About what?”

Starsky stared at the ground. “Somewhere in all you saw,” he said, “you had to have thought, even a little, that I could have fought harder, resisted better, escaped somehow, or—”

“Not once did I think that. You didn’t stand a chance.”

“Or that I could have said something different to them, something to have stopped them, talked my way out of—”

“Not for a second did that cross my mind,” Hutch interrupted him again. “They weren’t interested in what you had to say. They had a job to do and they were determined to do it. Nothing but success was going to stop them.”

“You must have been embarrassed for me,” Starsky figured.

“Embarrassed for you? Not even a little. It broke my heart to watch them do what they did to you.”

Starsky didn’t know if he believed Hutch and Hutch knew he didn’t know, because Hutch offered him an idea. “Imagine it’s me who was kid­napped,” he said. “Imagine it was me on that videotape. You’re the one watching it. Are you embarrassed for me? Is that what you’d feel?”

Starsky did what Hutch proposed—to salvage himself. He imagined watching Hutch be raped by three men, but the mental picture was so disturbing, he had to look away from it. “It would make me sick,” he said.

“Watching the act would make you sick,” Hutch assured him; he hadn’t forgotten his own initial reaction. “But don’t lose sight—while you’re watching it—of me. It’s me there at their mercy—and they have none.”

Starsky felt rage then. That anyone would do that to his buddy—to the person who mattered most to him, to the man who’d more than once laid down his life for him, to his hero—filled him with rage, just the way he’d felt it when Hutch was abducted and hooked on heroin by his cap­tors. But something else. He searched the gravel at the bottom of the steps for a word to describe what he felt. He imagined beyond the act of forced sodomy, of rape, beyond the physical pain and Hutch’s fear, and was able, just for a second, but it was long enough, to glimpse the emo­tional damage and its permanent depth those men unleashed on their victim.

“Grief,” Starsky said when he recognized the feeling then. He under­stood. “I’d be sick—for you.” Like he was over Hutch’s heroin attack, so much that he was pleased he’d killed those men.

“Are you embarrassed for me?” Hutch asked.

“No.”

“Could I have fought harder, resisted better, talked my way out of it somehow?”

“Apparently not.”

“Would you think me a coward?”

Nothing could make Starsky think Hutch was a coward. Starsky knew him too well, had seen too much over those ten years, and he im­plicitly trusted Hutch’s courage, having depended on it in life-and-death situations. “No,” he said. “Not for a second.”

“And if I was sitting here with a broken arm and a busted rib, feeling justifiably demoralized and degraded, would you expect me to be brave?”

Hutch had made his point. Starsky laughed, lightly. He shook his head at himself and then lightened the weight of the moment. “I’d expect you to at least dig a tree-sized hole with a normal-sized shovel.”

“That’s because you’d be the superhuman and you’d expect more from we mere mortals, more than we could give.”

Starsky finally glanced at Hutch and made eye contact. “Yeah, that’d be true,” he played along. When he absorbed enough warmth from Hutch’s blue eyes, he looked out into the approaching night. They were silent for a while as they enjoyed the peaceful growing dusk and listened to the crickets and the occasional bird that flew by.

Starsky’s thoughts then turned to the evidence. “You and who else watched that video?”

“No one else,” Hutch said. He was prepared to answer any of Star­sky’s questions. “No one even knows the tapes exist, except you and me—and those who made them.”

“How did you manage to keep them from the police?”

“I tampered with evidence and told lies. No one knows about the video,” he repeated. “And they never have to know.”

Starsky stared at him. “Don’t risk your career or your freedom for me.”

“Too late.”

Starsky didn’t trust Hutch’s assessment. Forensic science had come a long way since the day they were sworn into office. “Where are the tapes now?”

“In the kitchen,” Hutch said, “on top of one of the cabinets near the ceiling.” He shrugged. “I figured that was one place they might not look—in case they went looking. And I only kept them so you could decide what should be done with them.”

Hutch then told Starsky everything he knew. He told him about the blood and semen evidence that had been found at the crime scenes, about the pending subpoena for Starsky’s hospital records, about the hand­written notes Hutch had received, that there were three videotapes and Hutch had only watched the first two because he was given Starsky’s whereabouts before he had to witness the third one, about the searches he and the police had made and how Starsky had been found, and what Hutch imagined the upcoming course of action would be by the police. He gave Starsky even the smallest details and he didn’t mince words.

Starsky listened, riveted. It was a lot to absorb, but he made the effort. He was relieved he and Hutch had tripped over the misunderstanding they’d had, despite how much it pained him to learn the details. At least Starsky knew where things stood; he’d made a career out of gathering facts. Hutch had known all along how Starsky had been attacked—he knew it vividly, he knew it in a way Starsky couldn’t even imagine Hutch knew it, as a witness, as it were. They’d had conversations about the nature of the attacks without knowing the other didn’t know what the other knew. Or didn’t know. If Starsky gave it thought from a different perspective, it might have been funny.

But it was too grave to find humor in it.

“You asked me once if there was anything you could tell me that would make me think less of you,” Hutch reminded him. “I said there wasn’t. I still say. If you want to tell me what’s on that third videotape, you’re welcome to. It won’t change anything. You have to trust that by now.”

Starsky lifted his eyes to Hutch’s, into an expression that conveyed the truth beyond any words: After all, Hutch sat there, still offering his devoted loyalty, and he’d already seen the video. Starsky hadn’t realized all that time that Hutch spoke in turn, not out of it, when they talked about the attacks. The understanding caused him to remember something else Hutch had said.

“When we were in the hospital,” Starsky recalled, “you said you’d trade places with me ‘in a heartbeat and never look back’ if it meant I didn’t have to go through a second of what I did.”

“I remember.”

“I told you not to say that, that you didn’t know what you were saying. But you said it—fully knowing what you were saying.”

“And I’ll say it again.”

Tears came to Starsky’s eyes and he quickly wiped them from his face. “Jesus,” he whispered. “I don’t think I could say that to you if the tables were turned.” He felt guilty and ashamed for that, too. “I don’t think I would go through that for anything or anybody.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Hutch reminded him. He offered him a warm smile in the hope it eased his partner’s pain. “This Us thing isn’t a com­petition.”

It never had been, but Starsky thought it was at least equal.

They didn’t talk again for a while, each of them lost in their own thoughts. Hutch was certain Starsky had crawled out from under his self-deprecating abuse, but he knew Starsky hadn’t yet recovered from his fear.

And then there was that matter of their physical affection.

“I’ve seen others touch you,” Hutch said. “And sometimes I can touch you and you don’t react; other times I touch you and you do. Is it the way I do it that bothers you? Or is it your mood at the time?”

“They’re not a threat to me,” Starsky explained, but he didn’t do a good job of it. He knew it sounded as if he meant Hutch was a threat to him and that wasn’t Starsky’s intention. He retried explaining it. “I believe this attack on me was because of the way we are when we’re together in our alone place.”

“Because of Us,” Hutch clarified.

“Yeah. Because of Us. Somebody saw us do something they thought was immoral and thought we needed a lesson in manners.”

“And you’re afraid someone will see us do something like that again, whatever it was, and give you a refresher course.”

Intellectually, Starsky knew it was unlikely, but emotionally, he couldn’t risk it. He replied with a shrug.

“But who at that brunch would have hurt you?” Hutch asked.

“No one, probably,” Starsky said. “But I don’t know Davis. Not that he’d hurt me, but he might factor Us into his investigation and his picture of us.”

Davis already had, Hutch knew, but not the way Starsky feared. He thought about what Starsky told him and, though he didn’t agree with the assessment, he at least understood it. “So hands off you in public, no matter who that public is?” Hutch asked. “Or keep my hands to myself unless ‘the public’ is someone we consider family? Or you touch me when you feel it’s appropriate, but I don’t touch you at all—no matter where we are, alone together or otherwise?”

Starsky looked up the driveway. Hutch’s questions hurt him almost as much as the attacks had—and he didn’t know why that was so. They deeply and instantly cut into him and triggered tears he tried to hide by averting his eyes. “Fuck,” he whispered, ashamed of his seemingly endless emotional weakness.

Hutch couldn’t help but feel he’d said the wrong thing, though he didn’t know what specifically. He simply tried to find a way to keep from injuring Starsky, or from doing things that made his partner feel threatened. “Let me make it easy for you, then,” he said, and he said it with all the conviction in his heart, despite that it was a great sacrifice for him, one of the biggest he’d ever made. “I’m going to keep my hands to myself—at all times, anywhere, whether we’re alone or we’re not,” he offered. “You can go forward into your life from this day on and not have the worry that someone is going to make you pay again for the way we are—or were, as the case will now be.”

But Hutch’s sacrifice, his proposition, only broke Starsky further.

Starsky dropped his head and buried his face in his arms as he cried. It was a loss he didn’t think he’d survive. To lose Hutch’s physical affec­tion was to lose Hutch to some degree, to lose a part of the You of You and Me that had defined Us to him. He’d come face-to-face with the real damage of the violence he’d endured. Hadn’t he told that to Grace, that his biggest fear was losing Hutch? If Hutch couldn’t touch him, he would lose Hutch—and yet he didn’t know what else he could do. To allow Hutch to touch him was to invite more violence—and he knew he wouldn’t survive that, either.

“It won’t be easy,” Hutch agreed. He listened to his partner’s sobs, to Starsky’s ultimate breakdown, as he sat near him, not close enough to touch him. “My instinct is to hold you tight, right now, this very minute, to let you know I’m here for you. Well, I’m here for you, buddy boy. I just won’t show it.” He wanted to cry, too, to weep, really, but he stood strong for his partner’s sake. He got to his feet, stepped up to the porch, and stopped near Starsky. “It won’t be easy,” he repeated, “but it’ll get easier in time—for both of us. Your safety—and your emotional security—are more important to me than whatever it is we lost because of it.”

The chasm had opened completely—and Starsky fell.

What they’d lost was enormous.

Hutch would have stayed with him, would have held and consoled him, would have fought to pull him back from the brink with him, but he was afraid he’d have his own personal breakdown if he stayed a second longer, and he didn’t want to complicate the matter more than he already had.

“I don’t see any other way around it,” he explained. He choked on his words. “It’s not that I’m punishing you, Starsk. You’ve already told me a couple of times to keep my hands to myself and I’ve been too dense to get it till now.” He waited for Starsky to change his mind, but all Starsky did was continue to cry.

So Hutch went into the house to arrest his wounded pride before it got the best of him—and to deal privately with his own loss—leaving a grieving Starsky on the steps in the growing darkness.

And not knowing just how alone he’d left him.

* * *

SAVED BY GRACE

Hutch’s truck was missing from the driveway that late afternoon, which Starsky noticed when he walked Grace to her car after yet another visit from her—and said goodbye—so she could get back in time for an appointment. As she drove away, he noticed that the police cars were gone, too. He remembered that Dobey hadn’t planned to keep them there beyond the end of the week, but their absence still made him nervous, especially since Hutch couldn’t be found anywhere on the premises.

So Starsky logged a mental note about where he kept his pistol and then made himself a sandwich while he waited for his partner’s return. The task, though simple for anyone else, turned out to be an ordeal in more ways than one. First, Starsky couldn’t find a single cold cut. But he found soy cheddar cheese, tomatoes, lettuce, avocado, and some sort of non-dairy mayonnaise, which he tasted first before he spread it on the bread. With a swab of mustard, his sandwich was finally ready to eat, but he continued to dream about hamburgers.

Then he made another sandwich—in case Hutch came home and was hungry, too.

There Starsky stood in the kitchen, for the first time at the house with­out another human being on the property—not locked in his room—and clumsily made sandwiches. Despite the minor setbacks and the fact that he was conscious of his solitude, he was proud of himself. It was a far cry from the afternoon Hutch went with Emma to the nursery and Star­sky stayed holed up in his bedroom with his pistol, a security guard outside, and still jumped at every sound he heard.

As he basked in his self-confidence that afternoon, and right after he’d prepared Hutch’s sandwich, a key sounded in the front door. He hadn’t heard Hutch’s truck arrive, so he cautiously went to investigate—just in time to see Hutch emerge from outside.

Hutch’s presence relieved the last of Starsky’s anxiety. He leaned against the wall and noted Hutch’s demeanor, his easy-going, un-rushed nature, but when Hutch caught sight of Starsky near the kitchen entrance, watching him back, he instantly sobered.

“Hey,” Hutch said. He was immediately reserved, no smile.

“Hey,” Starsky replied.

Hutch started toward the bedroom, but Starsky stopped him when he told him he’d made him a sandwich—at which point Hutch silently agreed to follow Starsky to the kitchen.

Starsky asked him where he’d been all afternoon.

“Had an appointment with Dobey,” Hutch said. “I left you a note on the coffee table.”

“I didn’t get that far into the house,” Starsky explained. He watched Hutch retrieve a beer from the refrigerator. “What business did you have with Dobey?”

Hutch popped the lid on the bottle. “Police business, what else?” he quipped. “He wanted to talk about our jobs.”

Starsky handed Hutch a plate with a sandwich on it and was pleased Hutch took it. He didn’t want to eat alone. “Did you tell him I don’t want my job back?”

“I did.”

Starsky stood near a counter, ate his sandwich from there, and found that first bite as tasty as he hoped, but his stomach had begun to ache from the apprehension he felt over Hutch’s demeanor and about Hutch’s conversation with Dobey. Starsky had to pry loose the information. “And?”

“And he said he’d give you indefinite leave with pay,” Hutch said. He set his beer bottle on the counter, found his own first bite of sandwich surprisingly good, and forced a wink at Starsky to let him know he approved. “You either return to the job or quit. Until then, consider yourself ‘on leave with benefits.’” He noticed Starsky’s tension and was sure he’d caused it. He just couldn’t bring himself to act any friendlier than he felt.

“And you?” Starsky asked. “What about your job?”

Hutch retrieved another beer from the refrigerator, opened it, and handed it to Starsky. There was a time, not long ago, when they would have shared the same bottle—and they both knew it. They both recog­nized Hutch’s offer as half-hearted.

“My job? Well, I don’t need the money,” Hutch theorized, “but I go to work on Monday, part-time. It’ll be good for me to do something use­ful.”

Starsky studied Hutch’s posture and his seemingly forced expres­sions. He couldn’t pinpoint any one thing; it was an overall gut feeling he had that Hutch didn’t return to work because he wanted the job all that badly, but because he wanted to get away from the somberness that had infused his home. “I can leave any time you want me to,” Starsky told him.

Hutch stopped eating his sandwich and looked Starsky steadily in the eye.

They didn’t say anything to each other for nearly a minute.

Then Starsky broke the tension when he drank a sip of beer, though he didn’t leave eye contact. “Are you having trouble asking me to go?”

“No.”

“You didn’t answer my question right away.”

“I was sizing up where it came from.”

“Things don’t seem all that good between us,” Starsky explained. It was a stupid thing to say in light of the obvious.

Hutch resumed eating. Defensively, he glanced away from Starsky and replied, “Things have been worse between us and we’ve been all right.”

“Have they? Have they been worse?”

They both knew they hadn’t. The one thing they’d never lost before—until then—was their physical connection and affection.

Hutch struggled to find something to say that he was allowed to say. He wanted to feel sorry for himself. He wanted to knock sense into Star­sky. He wanted to make his partner as angry as he was about the way things had gone down, and especially to feel rage for the men who’d attacked him. He and Starsky should be out there at that very minute kicking in every door they could find that might turn up some lead.

“I don’t want you to go,” Hutch honestly said. It was the only “want” he felt he was permitted.

They didn’t talk further. They ate their sandwiches and drank their beers, and stared into places beyond the kitchen floor and the kitchen walls. And then they put away the produce, canned their empty beer bottles, rinsed off a couple of plates, and left the room, first one, and then the other.

* * *

Starsky understood Hutch’s love of trees all the more that next morning when they went to the nursery together. While Hutch placed an order for a family fruit and nut orchard, Starsky wandered off among the rows of trees. Birds sang and insects buzzed. It was a peaceful week­end morning and it smelled fresh and alive. He was amazed by how many varieties of the same type of trees were available for sale. A peach had always been a peach to him, but he learned from a passerby that there were at least two thousand different kinds. When he was close enough at one point to hear Hutch discuss species of shade trees and decorative grasses with a worker, he chuckled to himself that maybe his partner really was gay after all.

“Where’d you learn all this shit about fauna?” he asked Hutch as he stood near him at a display board that featured the latest sale of cherry trees in all their varieties.

“It’s flora, not fauna,” Hutch corrected him, “and I’ve always had a thing for green. But I learned more when we did your place. You don’t think I threw any old tree into that ground, do you?”

“I did.”

“Trust me with your life, but not your landscaping?”

“Priorities,” Starsky mumbled.

At the counter, Hutch handed Starsky a trowel. “Think you can man­age that?”

“Not for digging tree holes,” Starsky complained.

“You can help me pot some things for the greenhouse.”

“What greenhouse?”

“The one you’ll help me build, remember?”

Starsky thought it was Hutch’s way of telling him he didn’t have plans to see Starsky leave his farm any time soon. “Oh, right, I remem­ber,” Starsky said dryly. He set the trowel on the counter so the clerk could ring it up with Hutch’s trees. “I’m the one who’s going to tell you where to pound the nails.”

Normally, a crack like that would have brought a round of laughter as they played off its implications, but neither of them touched it. Instead, they grew silent, each reminded of the delicate nature of the situation and the tear it had ripped between them. Hutch paid for his ‘fauna,’ arranged to have the trees delivered, and walked with Starsky to his truck.

Inside the cab, Hutch’s thoughts turned to the future to break the silence. “How’s Grace?”

“Wise beyond her years,” Starsky immediately answered. He watched the scenery outside his window. He hadn’t stopped thinking about her since her visit the day before, the one where she arrived while he napped and Hutch had secretly allowed her into the house. When Starsky felt a movement on his bed, he opened his eyes and found Grace lying beside him—with a sweet smile. “Who let the mouse in with the cat?” he had quipped.

“You weren’t disappointed, then,” Hutch said, bringing Starsky’s thoughts inside the truck to the present moment, “that I let her into your room?”

“Hardly.”

It wasn’t any of Hutch’s business and he was prepared to hear so, but he was still curious. “She as fond of you now as she was back when?”

Starsky laughed lightly to let Hutch know he heard the veiled insult. “The more time she spends with me,” he defended himself, “the more in love with me she gets.”

“No kidding?”

“No kidding.”

Starsky wasn’t serious. He wasn’t that flippant about Grace’s feel­ings. “But you were right,” he said. “She wants me. And now I want her. Who knows, though?”

“Who knows what?”

“Whether it can work.”

“Why wouldn’t it?”

Starsky watched the outside pass by his window. Then his stare came inward, into his lap, and he rode a while not seeing. He didn’t know how to explain it even if he wanted to—and he wanted to.

Hutch looked over at Starsky after hearing his silence. He thought Starsky might not tell him whether he had sex with Grace, but he didn’t think Starsky wouldn’t talk to him about his feelings for her—and that seemed to be where the conversation had ended.

“Doctor told me those guys didn’t hurt you that way,” Hutch said.

Starsky lifted his head and made eye contact with Hutch before he had to focus on the road again. “What way?” Before Hutch could answer, Starsky realized what Hutch meant. “I’m not saying my dick doesn’t work,” he clarified. “Or, hell, maybe it doesn’t. What I’m saying is, well, it’s a delicate situation—hers and mine—and maybe too com­plicated in the long run.”

“Everything’s complicated,” Hutch reminded him. “This thing between Emma and me. This thing between you and me. This job thing. This fucking tree purchase. Did I get the right kind of nectarines?”

“Go to hell,” Starsky affectionately told him. He looked out the window again and watched the scenery as he posed his thoughts. “She’s never had sex before,” he finally confided, “and if she stays with me, she may never.”

“So no sex yesterday?”

“No.”

“What about a fondle?”

“No fondles. Some kissing, but that was all. And it probably wasn’t all that good for her anyway. I’m being too careful.”

“Do you have to look at everything from a negative perspective?”

“What you call negative,” Starsky said, “I call reality.”

“And what you often call realistic, I call bullshit,” Hutch argued. “But that’s beside the point. My next question is, Grace has never had sex?”

“I told you she had her first kiss with me.”

“I thought you meant her first kiss with you, not her first kiss ever.”

Funny how Hutch had interpreted that, Starsky thought. It was an honest assumption. Grace was a beautiful, young, sensual woman. In another life, she’d have probably been married with children by her age.

“How old is she?” Hutch asked, as if he’d read Starsky’s mind.

“Twenty-eight.”

Hutch thought for a while as he drove. He wondered what sort of life Grace had led or what kinds of morals she held that would have prevented her from a sexual connection with anyone along the way. And he was impressed that she’d been hired so young by the county police department to counsel victims of violence and—

It hit him.

Grace was herself a rape victim.

He looked abruptly at Starsky and hoped his suspicions would somehow be validated or denied without his having to ask.

Starsky read his mind and fired back a telling nod. “Do you get it now, Sherlock?” he asked dryly.

“Yeah. I get it,” Hutch said. “Jesus, man,” he added with a dis­believing laugh, “you really do know how to complicate your life.”

And then, because of the tragedy of it all, because of the strain be­tween them and their unending, open wounds, because of the wall they felt they helplessly headed into, because of the stupidity and cruelty of life itself—and it was either that or cry—they broke out laughing.

* * *

The auger arrived on schedule, so Starsky sat on the porch and nursed a lemonade while he watched Hutch give instructions to the dig­ger. He was close enough to hear their voices, but far enough away that he couldn’t decipher words. Hutch planted the fruit orchard in front of the house to give it even more privacy from the road, and planned to grow a nut orchard in the back for likewise. Starsky thought it a good idea; it was the least he could do, to offer his support to Hutch’s plans. He wished he could do more. Dig a hole. Nail a board. Punch somebody.

The unexpected urge made his heart race. He could only think of three people he’d want to hit and to do so required that he be faced with them again. That notion made his heart pound.

He watched Hutch show the digger where to first position the auger; he and Hutch had earlier marked off the spots in white spray paint. The auger certainly beat that pick-and-shovel method.

Hutch joined Starsky on the porch afterward and broke Starsky’s wandering thoughts. “I’ll have him dig the holes in the back before he leaves,” Hutch said, “and especially the larger ones for the shade trees around the house. May as well take advantage.”

Starsky agreed. He offered the lemonade glass to Hutch.

Hutch wanted to have some, but then he made a brief exchange of eye contact with Starsky and declined it. Their no-touch way of relating had gone beyond the physical. Hutch didn’t want to share, either. Maybe he thought it was too close to the closeness he was no longer allowed. Starsky could ask him, but it wasn’t the right time, given the immediate construction work on the place and its distraction. And it was just as well because the tree delivery arrived right then, too. If Grace would show up, Starsky thought, Hutch could play with his trees and Starsky could play with her.

He’d give anything for a reprieve.

* * *

“How is he?”

Hutch accepted the egg salad sandwich Davis gave him, even though he no longer ate eggs. Davis tried, so Hutch would try, too. Besides, the economic damage had been done and there was no sense in wasting it. That, and he was hungry. “Let’s say he appears a lot better than he is,” he finally said. “Seems his days are filled with starts and stops and lots of stalls in between.”

“Has he said anything about the attacks?”

“No more than I’ve already told you,” Hutch said, honestly.

They sat outside, across the street from the police station, in a city park, and shared lunch. Davis had told Hutch he’d interviewed every single cop in the precinct, and several others in neighboring divisions, but he hadn’t found a single promising lead. He was frustrated. He needed to talk to Starsky or the investigation could stall.

Davis ate his roast beef sandwich in between bites of potato chips. “Is your partner seeing Grace Woods?”

“You mean, professionally?” Hutch asked, then answered, “What­ever he’s telling her, you’re not going to get anything out of her about it. They were close friends even before this happened.”

“I don’t get it,” Davis professed, sounding as frustrated as he felt. “There’s not a single DNA match to any of our cops. No recently re­leased convicts or arrests you boys made that would have triggered an attack. And you guys have so few friends. Of those, they all have un­impeachable alibis.”

“Imagine that.”

Davis gave Hutch his notebook and recommended that he help him figure a new direction—so, while they ate, Hutch browsed the pages of notations scribbled there in Davis’ handwriting. He was impressed by the detective’s thoroughness and by how neatly he wrapped each lead into a dead end.

“Suppose I call Dave in for a deposition?” Davis forewarned.

“Suppose you stick to calling him Starsky instead?”

“Duly noted. Or I subpoena him? Would he talk if he was forced?”

Hutch read some of the notes in the margin, the ones Davis had written beside Stewart and Kurtz’s names. “Gay is a choice,” he read in one part, figuring Davis meant those were the cops’ warped views about the homosexual lifestyle.

He finally heard Davis’ question, and then said, “If you’re going to pressure him, give me a week to try it myself. I haven’t pried, but I’d rather pry before you do.” He knew his and Starsky’s time was up in the deal he’d initially made with Davis and that he pushed it even then.

“I’ll give you till Wednesday,” Davis compromised.

“I suspect neither of us will learn anything new,” Hutch said with a certain disappointment. “Starsky never saw the assailants. Maybe you should investigate who’d want to hurt me instead.”

“I have.”

Hutch looked at him. “And?”

“Same results. You guys don’t know too many people separately.”

Hutch had never considered that detail; it was strange to see his life through someone else’s eyes. He read Rosemary Fisher’s name in Davis’ notes and laughed at the absurdity. “You tested Fisher’s DNA?”

“Had to,” Davis grumbled, “lest we get charged with sexual discrim­ination or some stupid thing like that.”

“Taxpayer money put to good use yet again,” Hutch mumbled. He was surprised then to see Emma’s brother’s name on the list and he asked Davis what he’d learned about him.

“He’s clean,” Davis said. “Everyone’s clean. That’s the problem.”

“What about you?”

“Don’t be a smart ass.”

“Too late,” Hutch said with humor. He ate chips and finished reading Davis’ notes before he closed the book. Nothing in them triggered more than the few questions he’d already asked.

Except the one that impulsively came to him right then.

“Is Officer Fisher married?”

Davis stopped chewing and looked sharply at him. “Don’t tell me you thought of that just now.”

“Because you know she is and you’ve already checked out her hus­band?”

“Because I know she is,” Davis shamefully confessed, “and I haven’t checked him out.”

* * *

Starsky hunted for his partner till he found him on the back porch, sitting in the moonlit dark, smoking a cigarette.

“I think those are illegal,” Starsky pointed out to him.

Hutch didn’t respond, so Starsky sat in a neighboring chair and put his feet up on a nearby bench. “I may have to arrest you.” He tried, at least, to be friendly, but Hutch had avoided him most of the day since his return from work. He also hadn’t called Starsky for dinner; Starsky had to make his own.

“It’s a Marlboro,” Hutch assured him. He didn’t offer Starsky a hit and trusted that Starsky noted again that he didn’t share.

“You don’t smoke,” Starsky reminded him.

“I’m changing my life—starting today.”

“With bad habits?” Starsky playfully asked.

“You know what they say about the definition of insanity,” Hutch mused. “It’s doing the same thing over and over and hoping for different results. I figure if I do the opposite of my gut instinct from now on, things will start to work out for me.” Actually, one of the delivery men had offered Hutch a cigarette; he didn’t smoke and never had, but he accept­ed it to temporarily distract himself from his real life.

“You’re not serious,” Starsky said.

Hutch pulled a drag on the cigarette and exhaled the smoke. “Isn’t it obvious that I am? Once I figured out how it’s done …”

Starsky was keenly aware of Hutch’s somber mood and sarcasm. He didn’t know what to say back to it, so he didn’t say anything. They look­ed at the moon for a while—until Starsky lost his patience with Hutch’s reserve. “I thought we were getting along all right lately, you know?”

“You thought that?” Hutch laughed at him. “You should leave the thinking to me.”

“We worked on planting those trees yesterday,” Starsky reminded him. “We had a few laughs.”

“It’s definitely laughable,” Hutch said, dryly. “I’m glad you’re having a good time.”

“What’s pissed you off today—I mean, more than usual?”

Hutch exchanged eye contact with Starsky for a few seconds and then looked away. He didn’t answer.

“Talk to me,” Starsky encouraged him. “I’m still your partner.”

“Are you?” Hutch knew he had to pry into Starsky’s memory before Wade Davis did. “Then, how about I talk to you when you start talking to me?”

“About what?”

“About anything that matters.”

Starsky felt he’d walked into an ambush. He wasn’t afraid of Hutch, but he was afraid of where Hutch wanted him to go.

“All I get are hints,” Hutch explained, looking back into Starsky’s eyes. “When you want to fill me in, I’ll fill you in. In the meantime, leave me and my new life alone.”

“You play the good cop and you do it well,” Starsky said, “but your bad cop act isn’t cutting it with me.”

“Fuck you,” Hutch retaliated. He knew precisely what he said and it got the response he wanted, too.

“Somebody already has.”

“So tell me about it.”

“What’s to tell?” Starsky said. “You’ve seen all there is to tell.”

Hutch nudged Starsky to the edge. “Seeing it and knowing how you feel about it are two different things.”

“Well, how the fuck do you think I feel?” Starsky shot back. “How would you feel?”

“It didn’t happen to me,” came the just as angry reply, “but I’m left wanting to kill the motherfuckers. How about you?”

Starsky got to his feet. He trembled with a burst of anger and hurt for being pushed by Hutch. “I don’t know what I want.” He didn’t know. And he didn’t know when or if he’d ever know.

“Well, I know what I want,” Hutch said. “Why don’t you help me get what I want?”

Starsky exhaled and walked to the patio rail. He tucked his hands in his sweat pants pockets and looked up at the moon. “I’m not going to help you kill anybody,” he said in a low voice.

Hutch reined in his anger. “Help me kick their asses then.”

“I don’t know who they are,” Starsky swore. He laughed at the notion that he hid anything from Hutch. Hutch certainly already knew what there was to know, didn’t he? “You think I’m sitting on details so I can get to them before you kill them or something?”

“I think you don’t want to remember the details.”

Starsky faced Hutch and surrendered. “You’re right. I don’t want to remember the details. But it’s not like any unknown fact will get you—or us—any closer to knowing who they are.”

“How sure are you of that? Every crime has a lead somewhere. You don’t think we can unravel it together?”

Starsky didn’t answer. He wasn’t as sure as he thought he was, and he knew Hutch knew it. So he went over it again. “There were three of them. One fatter than the others. They made this whole thing about you and me, so they only spoke to me when they were fucking me … and, even then, it was to mock me—and all crass shit.”

“Like what?”

“Like, you know, to ‘take it like a man’ and to do them like I ‘do’ you and calling me ‘good queer boy’ when I did things their way. You heard them. You know what they said.”

“Remind me again.”

Starsky was furious when he spoke, but he did it because he hoped Hutch had a point to what he wanted from him. “Like, to get on my knees when I was told, so they could have ‘better access’… Crap like that.”

Things they must have told Starsky that last night, Hutch realized, perhaps things they’d said to him on the third videotape, the one Hutch hadn’t watched.

“I don’t have anything else,” Starsky implored him. He was frus­trated and helpless, but he no longer thought Hutch baited him. “Watch that last video. Maybe you’ll find your answer there.”

Hutch sucked another puff, exhaled it slowly, and sent his own frus­tration out with the smoke. He wouldn’t watch that third video for all the money in the world—unless he absolutely had to. “Why don’t you tell me what’s on it so I don’t have to watch it?”

“Same shit, different day.”

“They broke your arm. What happened?”

“I wouldn’t cooperate.”

“Not news.”

“I threatened them with bodily harm and, when that failed, I gave them a flat-out, ‘No.’”

Hutch suspected the answer to his question even before he asked it. “What did they want you to do?”

“What do you think they wanted?” Starsky retaliated. He was put off by the questions.

“You tell me. I wasn’t there.”

Starsky lifted back his head to hide his face in the dark for a minute. He knew Hutch was right to push for every detail; he’d have done it himself, but he couldn’t bear the admittance of the answers. He gave Hutch a vague reply. “The one said his girlfriend hadn’t done that for him in years.”

“One of them had a girlfriend? Which one?”

“I wasn’t about to take care of him,” Starsky explained himself.

“Which one had a girlfriend?”

“I don’t know. One of them, but not the lead guy. Whoever it was, I wouldn’t suck him off, so he broke my arm.”

Hutch stored the detail. “Any of them mention a wife?”

“No.”

“After they broke your arm, what happened?”

Starsky dropped his hands from his pockets to his sides and stared at Hutch. “Why are you pushing me? Why can’t we do this some other time, when I’m stronger, huh?”

“Answer to me or answer to the police, dipshit,” Hutch warned him. “They’re not going to wait.” He didn’t let up on Starsky. “You wouldn’t jerk the guy off. How could you? You were handcuffed.”

“Not at the time.”

“Why’d they free your hands?”

“So I would wank them. Jesus, do I have to walk you through every fucking step?”

“That’d be great.” Hutch ignored Starsky’s glare. “They wanted hand jobs? Did they want blow jobs, too?”

“Doesn’t everybody?”

“Well, you’re using words like ‘suck,’ ‘jerk,’ and ‘wank’; so which is it? They wanted hand jobs, blow jobs, both?”

“You figure it out.”

“I’m not the enemy here, pal,” Hutch reminded him. He gave Starsky as deep a stare as the one he got. “They freed you so you could give them hand jobs,” he surmised; they didn’t need Starsky’s hands if they simply wanted fellatio, did they? “You resisted and one of them retal­iated by breaking your arm.”

“No shit, Sherlock.”

“And after they broke your arm? What then?”

Starsky felt Hutch had punched him the gut. Maybe Hutch tried to get even for the breakdown between them. Maybe he just wanted to know the details because he was truly in pursuit of all the clues he could get. Whatever his motive, Starsky felt Hutch had lost sight of the person he interrogated. So he punched back. “You realize none of this is any of your business.”

Hutch knew Starsky too well not to notice he’d hurt him. Tough love. He’d never been a fan of it. But if he could make Starsky angry enough, if he could only push Starsky into giving him more details, they could get past the pain sooner. “Don’t ask me to talk to you then if you’re not willing to talk to me.”

“Yeah, like, you’ve got anything half as personal to tell me.”

Hutch backed down. Starsky was right. Hadn’t that been Hutch’s intent all along? to protect Starsky from exposing himself more than he’d already been? Hutch closed his mouth in shame.

“Watch the damn video,” Starsky heatedly advised him. “I’m sure all the answers to your questions are there. Leave me out of it.”

Hutch raised his hand to pause Starsky, to stop Starsky’s anger and his hurt before they were further compounded. “Okay,” he surrendered. “You win. You’re right.” He noticed Starsky swallow his emotion as he reeled it in. “Then let’s analyze something else instead, okay? Let’s talk about why they let you go. They did this terrible thing to you and then they let you go. Why would they do that, do you think?”

Starsky stepped closer and watched Hutch smoke. It annoyed him, but he ignored it to ask his own question. “You mean, why’d they let me go instead of kill me?”

“Why do you think?”

“There wasn’t anything left to do with me but kill me—and they weren’t killers.”

“Just rapists?”

“It happens.” Starsky lifted his head again and stared at the stars for a minute. He hated talking about what had happened to him, even to anal­yze it. He hated every bit of it. “C’mon, man, what do you want from me?”

Hutch continued to pressure him. “Did they not think they’d leave so much DNA behind? If they were cops, they’d have been more careful.”

“Like you said … I don’t think they saw the bigger picture,” Starsky concluded. “I think this was about you and me and they figured you and me weren’t going to tell anyone.”

“And we haven’t. Well, I haven’t anyway.” He imagined Starsky may have told Grace.

“They’re not cops,” Starsky said with certainty. It was just a hunch.

“We think they might be cops’ husbands,” Hutch said. He dismissed Starsky’s intuition and instead surprised him with his own hunch. “At least we think it might be one particular cop’s husband—and a couple of his friends.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Officer Rosemary Fisher. She’s married.”

Starsky thought back to their squad room and how often he passed by her, how seldom they spoke, how shy she seemed to him, especially for a police officer, but he’d never thought her demeanor proved she disliked him. Or that she disliked Hutch. In fact, like most people around them, Starsky thought Rosemary was fond of the two of them—despite her aloofness.

“She likes me,” Starsky decided on second thought. “I mean, she doesn’t have it in for me. Or you.”

“Maybe she likes us a little too much. She goes home and tells her husband all about Starsky and Hutch. He takes all he can take from her schoolgirl crush, so he visits now and again and sees for himself what she’s so fond of. He doesn’t like what he sees, so he learns what he can about us, and then strikes. Have you ever met him?”

“No. And all maybes. Have you talked to him?”

“He’s on a fishing trip somewhere in the wilderness,” Hutch said, with disappointment. “He’ll be back a week from this coming weekend.”

It was another surreal feeling to possibly put a name, a face, a person, to one of the men behind the masks. Somehow it made the attacks seem less intangible, though Starsky couldn’t understand why that might be. Maybe it made one of them reachable. Maybe he’d get a chance to deliv­er a punch after all.

“There’s more,” Hutch said. He smoked slowly and stared past Star­sky at the moon before catching Starsky’s eye. “Her husband is over­weight and he works as a nightshift security guard—in the warehouse district.”

Starsky was too stunned to speak. Was it possible they were that close to finding his attackers? He reached for Hutch’s cigarette for that same distraction, but Hutch didn’t release it to him. Hutch wouldn’t even share something with him that he never did himself till that night.

“I’m clean,” Starsky promised. “At least, so far.” He’d been blood-tested after the attacks and retested the day Grace had napped with him, in fact. But maybe that’s why Hutch wouldn’t share with him, because he was afraid Starsky had picked up a sexually transmitted virus, or worse. “One more test to go,” Starsky said, “a month from now, and I’m in the clear. But you can’t get anything from me from a cigarette any­way.”

“That never crossed my mind,” Hutch seriously replied. “The reason I’m not accommodating you is because that woman you’re growing close to isn’t going to want to kiss you anymore if you take up smoking.”

Starsky withdrew his request for the cigarette and was inspired by Hutch’s gesture. “Always looking out for me, hm, buddy?”

“Yep. Always,” Hutch replied. He put out the cigarette, glad to be rid of it, by crushing it on the patio floor under his shoe before he stood. His instinct was to take Starsky in his arms and hold him for a minute, to drive home that he’d be there for him, despite the anger and the hurt and the strain between them, but Hutch was still on a mission, one that had failed that night under the starry dome. Instead, before he left Starsky alone on the deck, he destroyed Starsky’s hope that they had breached the chasm between them when he said, “Too bad you’re no longer looking out for me.”

* * *

“What are you doing?” It was obvious to Starsky what Hutch did, but he couldn’t quite believe his suspicions and he wanted confirmation.

“Leaving,” Hutch said. He shoved a couple of tee-shirts into his duffle bag and gathered socks from his dresser. “I’m going to hang at your house for a couple of days,” he explained. He didn’t expect Starsky to catch him in the act and hoped to avoid a confrontation.

Starsky had been left on the patio under a moonlit sky and he was about to be left again, that time for an obvious reason. He didn’t like it. “Seems a little stupid for you to leave your own house just because you’re pissed at me,” he commented. “I can be the one to go, if you want.”

“It’s just for a couple of days,” Hutch reiterated. “You’re better off here and I need some time to myself, that’s all. Besides, it’s easier for me to get to work from there.” He added a clean pair of jeans to his bag collection. “If you need police protection, call Dobey. I’m sure he’ll send a car over. You’ll be fine.”

“I don’t feel fine.” Starsky felt sick, in fact. Not scared, but sick. Heart and stomach sick. “You’re punishing me.”

Hutch zipped his bag closed, straightened, and looked at Starsky. It pained him to see Starsky’s expression of hurt and anger, but he had to go. It was the last tool in his toolbox, in his effort to salvage Starsky. That, and a few parting words. “Funny, isn’t it? because I think it’s you who’s punishing me. But maybe in a couple of days, away from each other, I won’t be so nosy and you won’t have to feel so guarded around me.”

“I’m trying to make my way through the best way I know how,” Starsky defended himself. “Give me more time, will ya?” He didn’t want Hutch to go, not so much because he didn’t want to be alone, but because he felt the chasm between them would only grow deeper—and that scared him more.

“I’m trying to make my way through the best way I know how, too,” Hutch reminded him. “It’s only for a few days. I’ll be back by the week­end. There’s plenty of food. You’ll be fine. You’ll see.” He walked past Starsky and through the bedroom door without touching him.

“Hutch,” Starsky plaintively called in an effort to stop him. His heart raced. “Don’t do this.”

Hutch momentarily halted in his tracks with his back to Starsky. Star­sky’s plea of ‘don’t do this’ was reminiscent of his begging those masked men not to rape him again. Hurting his partner in such a way cut through Hutch like a knife. But he had to go. There was no turning back. He walked on.

He had a soul to save.

And it wasn’t his own.

* * *

Starsky woke in a bad mood after a restless night.  For the first time since he’d been attacked, he felt anger—deep and debilitating. And there was no one there to take it out on—except a toaster, which he smashed to the floor when it failed to cooperate. His arm was still sore, so he had trouble with the simplest of tasks, such as dressing himself and making breakfast. Not that he expected Hutch to take care of him, but he felt more alone with his difficulties.

He was mostly angry at Hutch for leaving him and he was angry at himself for not having somehow stopped the man. He was pissed because he believed Hutch knew exactly what he did when he chose to retreat to Starsky’s house for a few days. He knew Starsky wouldn’t fol­low him there. He knew Starsky was a coward, regardless of whether he forgave it, so Starsky hated Hutch for using his fear against him.

By late morning, Starsky had accomplished little. He’d showered, shaved, dressed, and eaten, a list of personal accomplishments that would normally have taken less than an hour. And then he sat on the porch in a lawn chair and stared at newly planted trees. He had little desire to do anything else. And the weekend seemed so long away.

His thoughts turned inward. Maybe he should move back into his house, get out from under Hutch’s care, get away from the hurt he caused and the hurt that came back to him because of it. On a second thought, Starsky knew he couldn’t go back to that house, to the place that was just a bad memory waiting to annihilate him all over again. Put the house up for sale, give Hutch back his money, and stay at a hotel instead. Spend a couple of weeks or a couple of months there. Maybe move from one location to another to keep them guessing.

His friendship with Hutch was on the ropes, despite its occasional politeness. Hutch was obviously angry, too; Starsky had witnessed it quite clearly the previous night when Hutch implied he wanted Starsky to help him kill the men who’d attacked him.

Why didn’t Starsky have such a desire for retribution?

What was in the way of his own personal rage?

He heard a car turn off the road and into the driveway and it startled him. He wasn’t the startling kind, at least not before the abduction. Since it, he’d only known fear.

Fear. That was the thing in the way.

Those men had temporarily physically injured him, but they’d also permanently emotionally wounded him. Or had they? If he could over­come fear, could he go back to sleeping soundly? Maybe he’d even feel rage for those who’d abused him.

Maybe he’d re-find his brotherhood, too.

He didn’t expect to see Hutch arrive back at the house—and he wasn’t disappointed. He hoped instead that it was Grace who’d come for a visit, but it wasn’t Grace, either; he didn’t recognize the car. He got to his feet and decided to retreat into the house, to where he kept his pistol, if necessary, but he wouldn’t run, not that time. He was too pissed off that morning to give anyone that power.

The nondescript car pulled up to the porch steps, the window came down, and Starsky recognized Wade Davis at the wheel. He gave Starsky a hearty “good morning” and got out of the car.

“What brings you out this way?” Starsky asked.

“Your partner doesn’t answer his phone and I need to talk to him.”

“It must be important for you to drive all this way out here.”

Davis was dressed in civilian clothes and not too thrilled to make a run to the country just to have a brief exchange of words. He squinted up at Starsky from the bottom of the steps. “The boy around?”

“He’s not,” Starsky answered. “He’s at work, I’m thinking.”

Starsky wasn’t about to tell Davis that Hutch had walked out on him the night before and was living at his house.

“Why would he be at work?” Davis asked.

Starsky was confused by the question—why wouldn’t Hutch be at work?—but he didn’t trust Davis enough to get clarification because he didn’t want Davis to know he was confused. He felt vulnerable enough as it was.

Davis glanced around the area and noticed the newly planted trees, heard birds sing, and felt the crispness in the spring air. The farm was a peaceful place. Maybe he didn’t have to leave so soon. He could stay, enjoy the outdoors, and talk to Starsky about all those things he wanted to talk to him about. He wanted to know first what Hutch had learned since he had agreed to let him pry into Starsky’s mind before he would. “I need to talk to him about our approach to Dennis Fisher,” he said.

“Who’s Dennis Fisher?” Starsky asked.

“Rosemary Fisher’s husband.”

Davis realized he didn’t know what Starsky knew and what he didn’t, and he wasn’t sure he should have said anything. He allowed the peace­fulness of the morning to guide his direction. “Officer Fisher,” he clari­fied. “We think her husband may be one of the men who attacked you.”

Starsky remembered. “Hutch is questioning Fisher with you? Did Dobey put him back on my case?”

Davis locked eyes with Starsky again. “No,” he said carefully. He too was confused, uncertain, and frustrated. He followed his gut. “But, then, Hutch isn’t officially on any case anymore. You do know he quit his job a couple of days ago.”

Starsky didn’t know; he was dismayed. “He said he returned part-time.”

Davis shrugged. “Maybe. When I sat in on the meeting, he turned over his badge and resigned. Maybe he and Dobey worked something out later. But, in any event, he’s not officially on your case. He just wants to be there when we question this guy—and I’d like him to be there, too.”

Starsky couldn’t help but think there were things going on that Hutch didn’t want him to know. He wasn’t sure who he believed. His instinct told him to trust Hutch, but he’d already trusted Hutch not to leave him, and Hutch had broken that trust, so who knew whether his partner played games with him on other matters?

Davis sensed Starsky’s uncertainty. “Tell him I stopped by.” He started to get into his car, but changed his mind at the last second. He faced Starsky again. “I don’t suppose you’ll talk to me?” He prayed for the impossible.

Starsky stared at him from the top of the porch. “About what?”

“About everything,” Davis said, and he knew then his effort was futile, but he tried anyway. “Maybe we could sit somewhere private and throw it all on the table. Make sense of it. Just you and me.”

Starsky appreciated Davis’ effort, but he didn’t say a word.

“C’mon,” Davis encouraged him. “Take back your life.” In the end, Davis wanted that for Starsky more than anything.

The idea tempted Starsky. Actually, it was more than tempting. It was painful to imagine how he could possibly take back anything, that he could re-find his courage, his sense of self, his pride. “If I could give you the story in pieces,” he told Davis, “I’d do that. But I talk and it has to be all-or-nothing with you—and I’m not prepared for all.”

“So it’s nothing,” Davis noted. He nodded to himself. Then he aimed high and confided, “I know what you’re hiding.”

Starsky was quicker than Davis was. “Good. Then you don’t need me.”

“My sister’s a rape victim,” Davis said.

“So she said.”

“It’s not like I wouldn’t understand,” Davis explained.

Starsky laughed at him. “If you understood, you wouldn’t ask me to open up about something like that, if something like that was something I had to open up about.”

Davis was at a loss. All he had left in his arsenal were the brutal facts. “You don’t think the Department is going to roll over and play dead on this, do you, Starsky?” He didn’t mean to threaten Starsky, but he was realistic, too, and he wanted Starsky to appreciate the gravity of the situation. “They’re not going to let a group of thugs abduct and abuse their cops and do nothing. At some point you’re not going to have control over what happens on this case. I’m asking you to cooperate now so you have some say down the line.”

“You haven’t got a case without me,” Starsky reminded him.

“I’ve got a circumstantial case,” Davis argued. “It’d be a lot less pain­ful for everyone if we had a cut-and-dry case, but only you can give that to us. Think about it.” He started to get into his car again, but stopped in order to say one final thing. “I know Hutch is the least likable between you two, but I actually like him.”

“He is likable.”

“That’s not what I’d originally heard, but I got to know him better. He deserves his formidable reputation, but he also deserves credit for being sincere.”

“Your point?”

“I don’t want to see him get hurt—I mean, any more than he already is.” He looked into Starsky’s eyes and knew he’d hit a nerve. “I don’t want to see you get hurt any more than you’ve already been hurt, either. But you’re the only one who can avoid all this pain—for everybody. All the wishing in the world isn’t going to make the Department look the other way. And you definitely don’t want it to press charges of obstruction of justice against either of you guys. That would be insult to injury, don’t you think?”

* * *

The day dragged. Starsky watched a couple of old movies on the 19-inch color TV, and he made himself lunch, which was a little easier than breakfast, and it filled him with some sense of pride. By early afternoon, though, he was bored. Armed with his pistol, he took a walk around the property and lost himself in nature’s solitude; that was the highlight of his day. He thought he might get in his car later, for the first time in weeks, and drive into town for hamburgers or pizza; having it delivered was out of the question because he didn’t want strangers on the property while he was there alone, despite his handgun.

He almost called Hutch several times, but changed his mind. There wasn’t anything to tell Hutch that he hadn’t already told him, and there wasn’t a solution in sight, so he didn’t bother the man. He called Grace once, but hung up on her answering machine. He realized at the last second that he didn’t want to use her, not for anything, and having her babysit him was the last thing he’d ask of her.

Instead, he watched more TV, surrendered to a late nap, and con­tinued to dream about going to town for what he called ‘real American food.’ When he woke, he lay on his bed for a while and stared at the ceiling. He wasn’t very motivated to doing much else then, so—in an effort to find something useful to pass the time—he wandered around the house in search of a task, even a small one, and ended up in Hutch’s bedroom purely by circumstance.

The room was as neat as his own, but not as cozy. Most of Starsky’s personal belongings were in his one room, but not so with Hutch’s. In Hutch’s room, there was more floor space and less furniture. It was actu­ally a more inviting room. Starsky had been in it before, but that time he was there on his own. He had a look around, including in Hutch’s closet—where he heard Dobey’s words about his ‘clothes-horse detec­tive’ ring in his mind; all of Hutch’s pressed shirts on hangers, his neatly folded jeans on shelves, his shoes laid out in a row.

Starsky then stood by the bed and noticed how neatly it had been made, too. The same trait that defined Hutch as a meticulous detective was inherent in everything Hutch did. But no doubt the nightstand drawer would be littered with miscellaneous items. Starsky pulled it open and found only a lip balm tube and a picture frame inside, face down. He lifted it, turned it over, and expected to see a photo of Emma, Hutch’s last love, but instead discovered it was of Hutch and himself.

The image—one of Hutch grinning at the camera while he held a beam­ing Starsky in a headlock—jarred him.

Starsky remembered when he’d seen the picture on the nightstand—it was the last time he was in Hutch’s bedroom, the day they talked about California’s legal definition of rape, the day he lay on the bed at Hutch’s feet and confessed to Hutch what had happened to him. The photograph had been so insignificant that it hadn’t even deserved a comment; Hutch keeping a picture of them on his nightstand was one thing, a sort of sweet thing; it was poignant and perfect and so like him, but that Hutch had actually put it away face-down in a drawer was an altogether different thing.

Starsky stared at it till tears pooled in his eyes.

They had something unique. He could see it there on those boys’ faces. And he knew what was in their hearts. Ten years of an unpre­ce­dented and enviable brotherhood. A decade of hanging onto and with each other through bad times and rougher times and times that just stood still. If he took Hutch out of his life, what would he have had all those years? A shell of a one. Together, their lives were richer than he realized before, more rewarding than he could have hoped for; theirs would have been empty lives without the other, a sort of bottomless chasm, devoid of true, unadulterated love and safe companionship and loyal, depend­able refuge.

No one—not even his own flesh and blood, nor a single lover he’d ever had—cared more about him, his welfare, or his aspirations, or be­lieved in him as much, even in his weakest moments, trusted him implicitly and without question, or loved him unconditionally and with­out the taint of culture, bias or gender, than did Ken Hutchinson. And Hutch couldn’t say the same about any other person in his own life, except Starsky.

They had something special, something uncommon, and something extraordinary—a rare respect and need and want for each other that, more than once, more than twice, more than a dozen times throughout their years together, had salvaged and healed them along the way. They enjoyed an exclusive devotion to each other—still.

Their bond wasn’t broken; it was merely—albeit seriously—dam­aged. The crippling blow had come in the form of a vile personal attack, one that would have surely brought any man to his knees, even one as strong as Starsky was then, and driven the other away out of disgust and dismay and disappointment.

But the blow wasn’t deadly because the two in question were like no other. The blow wasn’t lethal. It couldn’t be.

Especially if Starsky had any control over it.

And he was the only one who did.

One of his tears dropped from his eye and melted on the picture frame’s glass. He wiped it away with his thumb, but not very cleanly. It was just as well: It was, in a way, part of the overall picture itself, one that represented their love, their hurt, and their restoration. He didn’t know whether he and Hutch could get back to such a cherished and inno­cent time, to that purely uninhibited way of relating that they had known all along and considered theirs alone, to those liberating laughing grins as were pictured there, but he knew he wanted to; he wanted to more than he ever had.

To not restore themselves, he completely understood then, was to give the men who’d hurt him what they wanted all along. What they wanted was to destroy what they were never capable of having them­selves, as if smashing Starsky and Hutch to smithereens would vindicate their own empty lives somehow.

Starsky set the picture upright on the nightstand again and stood back to look at it. “Partners,” he whispered, as he admired the two of them in the photo. “You lucky dogs.”

If he was ever going to salvage his friendship with Hutch—and over­come his own fear in the journey—he realized he had to go back to that house, back from where he’d been taken, back to where the nightmare had begun, back to the stupid mistake he’d made—because that’s where Hutch was—up that driveway, through the door, beyond the fear, and Starsky would find him.

Just as Hutch had planned it.

* * *

REDEMPTION

Hutch strained to hear what he thought he heard: an unfamiliar-sounding vehicle had arrived in the driveway, and it was definitely not the same rumble as his partner’s. A car door closed and footsteps came up the walkway—also not his partner’s. Moments later, the doorbell rang.

Hutch no longer had his pistol, so he got off the sofa and cautiously walked to the door. “Who’s there?” he asked loudly as he approached.

“Pizza,” came an unfamiliar voice.

Hutch squinted through the door’s peep hole, the one he’d installed the day before, and found what appeared to be a young delivery boy impatiently waiting on the lamp-lit porch. Hutch had only heard one car door close. He’d only heard one set of footsteps. But he was cognizant of the fact that he felt anxious; he remembered what happened to Starsky at that house and then kicked himself for chastising Starsky about his paranoia when Hutch himself had a bit of a scare at that moment. Maybe the house was haunted after all.

“I didn’t order a pizza,” Hutch explained through the closed door.

“No, sir,” came the reply. “A Mr. David Starsky bought it for you. He told me to tell you it’s cheeseless. Um … he also said to tell you it’s better for you than that cigarette you smoked the other night.”

Hutch lightly laughed—and opened the door. Only Starsky knew about Hutch’s cigarette.

The young boy seemed uneasy, as if he wished he were anywhere but at Starsky’s front door. He handed Hutch a plastic bag while he held onto two pizza boxes and explained the bag’s contents. “Napkins, salads, forks,” he said.

“You’ve got two pies there,” Hutch noted.

“Pies, sir?”

“Pizza pies,” Hutch clarified. He apologized for the confusion. “It’s an east coast reference.” Something he’d learned from Starsky.

“One’s yours,” the boy explained, “and the other’s his.” He nodded at someone standing out of Hutch’s view, against the house, near the door.

Hutch expected to see Starsky there when he anxiously leaned around the door frame to have a look—and he wasn’t disappointed. In fact, he was instantly elated instead.

Starsky, his back pressed to the outside wall of the house, flashed him a grin. “Pepperoni with extra cheese on mine,” he said.

The sight of Starsky was as jarring as it was pure relief. Hutch cussed under his breath for the startle and called Starsky a ‘son-of-a-bitch.’

Starsky looked refreshed. His hair was washed, he had shaved, and he was dressed in jeans, an open-collared shirt, and his relatively new leather bomber jacket, having replaced his last, bullet-holed one with something similar. He looked like the David Starsky Hutch was used to seeing, especially all those mornings when Hutch showed up to work and found Starsky in the squad room ready to begin their daily patrol. But, more than that, Starsky appeared to have climbed out of his withdrawal, up and beyond his fear, to re-find his personal strength. He was no longer the guy they’d lost a month earlier in more ways than the physical; the man who stood there, pulling a prank on Hutch, was the Starsky he remembered, the one he called his partner.

Hutch handed the plastic bag back to the delivery boy and told him to take it and the pizzas into the house and to drop everything on the coffee table. Then Hutch stepped outside, close to Starsky, and didn’t expect anything from him except a reply to his cheerful, “Hey.”

But he got more than a verbal response.

Starsky grabbed and pulled Hutch into his arms. He hugged him so tightly, Hutch couldn’t help but seize him desperately in return. Tears pooled in his eyes as he repeatedly called Starsky an ‘asshole’ in affec­tionate cadence. The flesh-and-blood contact was head-and-heart spin­ning and they both laughed, bittersweetly and with gratitude, as they relished the realness in the feel of the other, as if it had been months, not days, since they’d touched.

But more than that, Hutch noticed that Starsky hugged him right there in front of someone. The delivery boy squeezed past them on his way out; he didn’t say a word.

Hutch released Starsky and held him at arm’s length. He saw the wet­ness in Starsky’s eyes. “What took you so long?” he asked; he sound­ed as choked up as Starsky appeared. “I’ve been waiting for you since I got here.”

Starsky tousled Hutch’s hair. “You forgot to tell me where you hid my car keys,” he joked.

“On the hook in the—”

“Yeah, yeah, apparently I found them.” He knew Hutch was too emotional to know he teased him. “As soon as I imagined what an anal-retentive person would have done with them, I found them.”

Hutch then noticed Starsky’s Torino in the dark across the street two houses down and realized why he hadn’t heard it. Starsky must have coasted into the parked spot with the engine off so he could sneak up on Hutch.

“Clever boy,” Hutch said. “You coming in?”

They heard the pizza delivery car ignition start and used it as their cue to leave the porch for the house. It was warmer inside and smelled like fresh pizza. Hutch closed and locked the door while Starsky stood in the living room and glanced around at the place he’d once called home. It looked as he had seen it last.

Hutch hit him in the shoulder as he walked past him. “Take off the jacket and stay a while,” he said. “I’m not eating that second pizza for all the money in the world.”

Starsky removed his jacket and tossed it onto a chair and then followed Hutch into the kitchen. He was impressed by the beauty of the house, having forgotten it so necessarily from the minute he was taken from it. “Nice place,” he commented.

“It is,” Hutch agreed. He opened the refrigerator and retrieved two beers. Then he faced Starsky. It hadn’t escaped him that Starsky had come home—to a place he feared. “I’m proud of you,” he said. Grasping both bottles by their necks, he opened one of them while he approached Starsky.

“I’m proud of me, too,” Starsky said sincerely, leaning in the door­way.

Hutch lifted the opened bottle in a toast. “To courage,” he said. He drank a long swallow and then handed the bottle to Starsky.

“And to something worth fighting for,” Starsky said, taking a drink. He consciously noticed that Hutch had shared the same bottle with him. He also wanted Hutch to know he still believed their friendship was worth fighting for, worth dying for, in fact, and he was certain he con­veyed that sentiment to his partner from the look in his eyes.

He handed Hutch back his beer.

Hutch winked at him and took another drink from it to prove he didn’t think—nor care—if Starsky was infectious. “Me and thee, buddy boy,” he said.

They understood each other.

But it wasn’t enough, not for Starsky. When Hutch began to walk past him through the doorway and into the living room, Starsky tightly gripped the door frame and blocked the pass. “There’s something I want to tell you,” he said, “and I want to do it sober.”

Hutch leaned into Starsky’s arm, rested there, and waited. “You plan­ning to get drunk?” he laughed.

Starsky looked into those same bright, light-reflected blue eyes that he’d earlier seen of the two of them in that photo on Hutch’s nightstand, and knew he had his partner’s full attention, as well as a soul-felt con­nection.

It had taken a lot of courage to drive from the farm to that house; Starsky’s heart was in his throat the entire way there. Calling for a pizza delivery did ease some of that anxiety by forcing another human onto the property in case Hutch wasn’t home when he got there, but it was almost like cheating. He did, however, walk through that front door for the first time in a month, a door he’d last been dragged out of, kicking and scream­ing, with no idea whatsoever of the terrible things that lay ahead for him, though knowing none of it could be good. He patted himself on the back for his return, despite that Hutch had forced him into it; courage requires confronting what one fears. Without fear, Starsky’s return would have been nothing more than a mere visit.

But it would take a different kind of courage to tell Hutch what he’d come to tell him. Not because he hadn’t said it to Hutch before over the years—and Hutch had said the same to him—and not because Starsky felt foolish for saying such a thing to someone who wasn’t a woman, but because he wasn’t completely certain Hutch would appreciate the depth of such simple words on that particular night, in that particular house, in those particular circumstances.

He faced his fear, leveled Hutch’s eyes, and hoped his heart and soul translated through his tone, cadence, volume, and that it transcended his inability to find any other way to convey how he felt.

“I love you,” he said. He didn’t say, “I love you, buddy,” or “I love you, man,” or “You know I love you”—which were the acceptable and shielded ways for one straight man to tell another straight man he loved him. He simply said, “I love you.” How else could he say it? What other words were there? I need you. I can’t live without you. I wouldn’t trade you for anything in all the world. You mean everything to me. I’d sell my soul for you. I’d walk through fire for you. I’d trade my life for yours. I’d even go through this all over again if I had to, if it was to somehow save you.

Such words sounded corny to Starsky. Trite. He couldn’t find any other words, except, “I love you.” But he was sure he’d found the right ones when he saw the tears shimmer again in Hutch’s eyes. Hutch had heard what he said and all the things Starsky hadn’t said that he said, too.

Starsky added to them. “I’m sorry.” He was sorry for having been stup­id. He was sorry for the scare his disappearance during those pain­fully long days and those horrific nights had caused Hutch. He was sorry Hutch had to watch the crimes committed against him. He was sorry for the anger and the hurt and the fear Hutch had endured, the same anger and hurt and fear that had driven Hutch away and unintentionally broken Hutch’s heart. And Starsky was sorry he made Hutch wait so long for him while he himself slowly came up for air and saw the light.

Hutch was speechless; he couldn’t find the strength to reply. He’d been overwhelmed by the volume of words he’d heard in so few.

“And it won’t happen again,” Starsky added. He knew then that there wasn’t anything, not anything, that could get in the way of his brother­hood with Ken Hutchinson. Starsky had been tested and he may have stumbled, but he’d proven himself, too. He’d simply been sidetracked by a horrendous experience.

Hutch finally spoke. “I’m holding you to that last part,” he said. “Be­sides, you won’t have to worry about it happening again because what happened to you was a once-in-a-lifetime ordeal. We’re going to find those assholes and we’re going to hurt them so badly, they can never lay a hand on another person that way for as long as they live.”

Starsky took the beer bottle from Hutch without asking. He drew a swallow and winked at Hutch.

They definitely understood each other.

In the kitchen doorway, they embraced again, held each other at length, pressed tightly and without inhibition and as mightily as they could to the other. In the silence of their coming together, they remade that promise to their long-ago founded friendship.

Hutch eventually let him go. “C’mon, let’s eat. The sooner we get that stink of pepperoni out of this house, the better I’ll enjoy the movie we’re going to watch.”

Starsky followed him into the living room. He did love Hutch. He loved him more than life itself. He stopped in front of the coffee table and watched Hutch take a seat on the sofa and open a pizza box. When Hutch saw the pepperoni pie, he closed the lid and opened the other. “You know,” Starsky said, briefly getting Hutch’s attention, “I told you once that I wouldn’t trade places with you if you’d been the one who’d gone through this thing.”

Hutch paused and looked up at Starsky.

“But I would trade places after all,” Starsky said. “I would go through that again for you. I was willing to come over here and risk being ‘out in the world’ in order to stop this break between us; I was willing to be attacked again, if necessary. You’re worth it. Us is worth it.”

Hutch bit down on his relief. He lowered his eyes and stared at the table until it blurred before him.

“And unlike you,” Starsky added, forcing Hutch to look at him again, “I more than know what I’m saying; I’ve been there once already. So take that with all the weight it carries.”

Hutch was too choked up to respond, so he didn’t.

Starsky sat beside him on the sofa then, right up next to him—shoul­der to shoulder, hip to hip, knee to knee, the way they often sat together—and dragged a piece of the pie from the pepperoni box onto a paper napkin on the table. “I’d do anything for you,” he said, conclusively. “Anything.”

Hutch leaned into Starsky, pressed tightly to him to convey his over­whelming affection. “I can’t say the same,” he joked; he needed to lighten the moment or he’d have a breakdown.

“No?” Starsky asked, dismayed. “You wouldn’t do anything for me?”

“Not anything,” Hutch said. “I mean, I wouldn’t eat pepperoni pizza for you.”

Starsky winked at him as he took a bite of his slice. It was a playful competition. “That’s all right, partner,” he said, “because I love you so much I’d never ask you to.”

* * *

Starsky was in the driveway when Hutch pulled off the paved county road and headed to the house. He was about midway down the drive and emerged from between the trees when he heard a vehicle approach, then stood at the edge of the gravel and waited expectedly for Hutch to stop when he got close enough.

Hutch braked the truck beside Starsky and rolled down the window. “What are you doing?” He noticed that Starsky’s hands and arms were muddy and the hems of his jeans were likewise and wet.

Starsky grasped the truck’s side mirror’s steel brace and rested. “I found a leak in the water line,” he explained. He told Hutch he had been sitting on the porch and saw a stream of water shoot into the air. He was able to figure out how to turn off the irrigation system and then find all the parts to fix the leak, but he didn’t have the muscle to fit the coupler onto the hose.

Hutch turned off the ignition and got out of the truck. He followed Starsky to where the breach had occurred along the tree line and was impressed by how well Starsky had managed the repair, given his still-bandaged arm and busted rib. With a concerted amount of pressure, Hutch snapped the hose into the end of the coupler and the job was done. He explained that there was so much water pumping through the lines that inevitable bursts at the couplers regularly occurred. Sometimes his pump would run for hours before he discovered he even had a leak, so he was quite grateful to have had the second eye.

He walked back to the truck and got into the cab as Starsky followed. “Need a lift?” he asked.

“I’ll walk,” Starsky said. He could use the exercise, even a little of it.

Hutch turned on the ignition as Starsky leaned in the window.

“I meant to tell you that Davis stopped by here a couple of days ago,” Starsky said. “He told me you’d turned in your badge.”

Hutch had nothing but the truth to tell. “I did. I was going to mention it when necessary.” He felt sheepish. “Dobey refused to accept it, though. He said the job is still mine whenever I want it, but, yeah, I turned it in.”

Starsky looked closely at him. “Why’d you do that, cowboy?”

“I don’t want the job if you’re not there. We go back together or we don’t go.”

Starsky would have felt the same way if the tables were turned, so he sent his appreciation for Hutch’s sentiment back to him through the fond look in his deep blue eyes. “So where do you go every morning then?”

“To work,” Hutch said truthfully. He laughed at Starsky’s smirk and then explained himself. “I got a part-time job at that nursery we went to, the one with all the ‘fauna’?”

Starsky punched Hutch’s shoulder. “Smart ass.” Then he stepped away from the truck to let him go.

“Takes one to know one,” Hutch said.

* * *

Hutch woke from his semi-doze with a start when he felt someone kick the bottom of his shoe. He dropped his arm from his forehead, shot open his eyes, and squinted upward, right into Starsky’s smiling face.

The man was cast against a perfect blue sky, but his visible smile abrupt­ly disappeared. “Did I catch you at a bad time?” Starsky asked.

He had.

Hutch had been measuring the area for his vegetable garden, but felt rather lazy, so he ended up in the nearly foot-high spring grass, on his back, with an elbow bent over his eyes to allow his mind to drift with the mesmerizing silence that enveloped him.

He felt isolated there, alone—which gave him two strong wishes. One was that Starsky had helped him take the measurements, that being there doing something as mindless as that task with his partner would have been the perfect ingredient. But since Starsky was probably still with Grace at her house, Hutch couldn’t even ask him. He ended up in the garden area by himself and wished his other wish instead, which was that he had someone as unique as Grace, a woman, a special woman, to help him plant his fruit and vegetables.

Which made him think about Emma—and that led him to realize he wasn’t in love with her, after all.

And that got him to exploring why he wasn’t. There was a time, he thought, when he was mad for her, but that was before the three-way, before his sexual engagement with her and her with Starsky at the same time. That Hutch couldn’t put it behind him, as much as he hoped, as much as he tried, troubled him. He didn’t think he was resentful, nor did he blame anyone, including himself, but maybe it was what he didn’t feel that bothered him, that he was no longer in love with Emma because she, well, because she loved Starsky as much as she apparently did.

Hutch had gotten caught up in the sexual pursuit that night because he believed he could win her over somehow. Instead, he only made a fool of himself. The smart thing would have been to leave the room the second he noticed she unzipped Starsky’s slacks. But that’s not what Hutch did; he decided to stay and out-charm his partner, offer up some sexual technique that would have left Starsky in her wake, to prove that he, not Starsky, was worthy of her undivided attention and affection.

More than a month later, Hutch was still haunted by his failure—or even that he thought that was the way to win her heart. He lay in the spring grass with a perfect blue sky overhead and replayed that night, over and again, in search of some clue, some something he’d forgotten, that might free him from his bad feelings about the whole affair. But the replays only made him feel angrier and more isolated. As the rage built in him, he recognized it as the same feeling he’d had that night the three of them had sex together, but for whom did he feel so jealous?

He could tell by Starsky’s breathing and by his moans of pleasure and even by some of Starsky’s words, that Starsky was close to ejaculating, that Emma had orally aroused him well enough and with the perfect know-how to bring even a drunk man to orgasm in a relatively short period of time.

When Hutch tried to stop them before that happened, Starsky told him to “wait your turn, cowboy,” which, by itself, pissed Hutch off. Emma then asked Hutch to have sex with her while she pleased Starsky, leaving Hutch no recourse but to vaginally enter her from behind, and hope his own penetrating technique would make her focus on him and abandon Starsky in a heartbeat.

But it failed—and miserably.

It was near those final moments that Hutch fought the hardest to pre­vent Starsky’s climax, first with words to divert Emma from her endeav­or, and then physically, by thrusting into her harder and for no other purpose than to distract her, and then desperately abandoning sex altogether to handedly pull her off Starsky at the last second. In the ac­tion, he aggressively gripped her arm—in a way he had never handled a woman.

“You’re hurting me,” she said after she released Starsky. She didn’t have a choice in the matter but to let Starsky go at that point; the pain Hutch caused her forced her to deal with only it. But it was too late; Starsky had climaxed in her mouth, seconds before Hutch could make her stop. And, then, to add injury to insult, Starsky unaffectionately called him a “fucking asshole” for taking Emma from him at such a critical moment.

“You got what you wanted,” Hutch retaliated—as if Starsky had never been entitled to it in the first place. Hutch then pushed Emma on her back, into the sofa cushions, with her head almost in Starsky’s lap, and entered her again, without resistance, from the front that time. His heart pounded and ached at once, but he was determined to convince her that he had much more to offer than Starsky could even dream about.

Emma allowed him a few aggressive thrusts before she braced a hand against his bared chest and calmly told him to “slow down.” Maybe she sensed, or maybe she even knew, why he was upset and behaving the way he was, because she added, intuitively, “Don’t be in a hurry like he was. This feels too good to end so soon.”

Looking back, Hutch believed she lied to him. She defused him was all—and it worked.

Thank god, it worked.

As he lay in the spring grass, he was ashamed of himself all over again for having treated a woman the way he had that night—with such rage in his heart. He hadn’t raped her; none of it had been against her will, but he’d acted in a way he’d never handled a woman before, with an emotion he’d never harbored before, and now felt a shame he’d never imagined before.

He also knew he’d have felt hostile if the tables had been turned, if it had been he who had received oral pleasure from her and Starsky who had intercourse with her.

What about all that troubled him? They were Emma’s friends and had been for a few years, so why had Hutch alone felt entitled to her sexually?

Because he loved her more?

Because he’d always wanted her ‘differently’?

Because he competed with Starsky?

As if there was a competition.

There never had been, not that way. But even Wade Davis had said as much during his investigation, that Starsky’s colleagues liked Starsky more than they liked Hutch, and Hutch himself had said as much, that he liked Starsky more than he liked himself. In Hutch’s mind, Starsky was the better man. Therefore, given a choice, any woman would choose Starsky over him. And that’s exactly what he’d been afraid of that night, that she would enjoy Starsky more than she would enjoy him, and that she’d choose to be closer to Starsky as a consequence.

In the end, though, she didn’t have a choice. She loved them both. It was Hutch who chose for them, it was Hutch who determined she would be sexually exclusive with him and, since she couldn’t decide which of the two she wanted—she wanted them both, after all—then Hutch would choose for her.

As if he wanted a woman on those terms.

And it was at that moment, with that realization, that Starsky had kick­ed the bottom of Hutch’s shoe after he found Hutch on his back in the grass behind the house in the garden area, snapped him out of his semi-doze, his semi-reflection, his semi-emotional roller coaster, and asked him if he’d caught him at a bad time. Starsky’s disappearing smile and his subsequent question had been triggered by the rage, shame, guilt, and jealousy that were written all over Hutch’s face when Hutch opened his eyes with a start and locked on Starsky’s—and all purely by coincid­ence.

Hutch rallied his reply. “No,” he said, “you didn’t catch me at a bad time. I was sleeping and thinking.”

“Thinking? You look more like you’re wanting to take someone apart limb-by-limb—and I appear to be the only one in your line of fire.”

Hutch didn’t want to explain it, not then, anyway. “You’re safe,” he promised Starsky.

Starsky sat beside him, crossed-legged, and close. “Good to know. I was thinking, too.” He was dressed in jeans and a tucked, buttoned, long-sleeved shirt. He appeared well-groomed and refreshed.

Hutch liked Grace’s affect on Starsky; he just wasn’t sure he wanted to hear about her; it might fuel his jealousy or his envy. But he’d chosen not to tell Starsky what he’d been thinking about, so discomfort would be the price he’d pay for his silence.

Starsky didn’t talk about Grace. He said he’d only been back at the farm for an hour, and that he’d sat on the porch for a while, thinking about his own life.

“Must be the weather,” Hutch cracked.

Starsky picked at a blade of grass. He didn’t wait to tell Hutch what had been on his mind. “It hit me last night: If Grace had been the woman we spent that three-way with, I’d have had to kill you by now.”

Hutch was taken aback, not by Starsky’s mock threat, but from the fact that Starsky had been thinking about that very night, the one of their three-way, at the same time Hutch had been thinking about it. “You’re in love with Grace,” he noted. He abandoned all his bad feelings and felt happy for Starsky.

“Yeah. It feels pretty natural,” Starsky admitted. “But that’s not where I was going with this.” He steadily looked at Hutch so Hutch would know how sincere he was. “I realize now how wrong it was for us to share the same woman, a mutual friend of ours, and yours, in parti­cular. I thought it would be okay because we were doing that one to­gether; not like it was with Kira, when we were both … well, anyway, I’ve been meaning to tell you I’m sorry about my role in that thing with Emma. And, yeah, yeah, I know, there are more differences in our friend­ship with Emma than in ours with Grace—”

“In, like, Grace isn’t really even my friend; she’s always been yours.”

“—but I’m sorry just the same,” Starsky continued. “All that hind­sight stuff, and all that justifying crap, well, it doesn’t change the fact that I wish we had it to do over so I could stop it dead in its tracks. I was relieved last night when Grace told me that she didn’t know you well enough to love you. I was happy for me that she didn’t love you, know what I mean?”

Hutch squinted at him in the sunlight. “I do,” he said. He did.

“But Emma loves us and I shouldn’t have fucked with that,” Starsky said, “regardless of all the reasons I was perfectly innocent doing it. That it hurt you, and that it probably still hurts you, makes me sorrier.”

Hutch lifted his head off the grass and locked his hands behind his neck to look more closely at Starsky. “What? Was I thinking out loud or something?”

“That explains it,” Starsky said knowingly.

“Explains what?”

“Why you looked at me a few minutes ago as if you wanted to kill me. You were just thinking about that night, weren’t you?”

“I don’t want to kill you,” Hutch said, not playing, “but yeah, you woke me from thinking about that night. It’s not you. It’s that I want what you have: Someone who wants only me. I’m going to go back to being friends with Emma, not lovers. If I keep wanting her to want only me, I’m going to resent her and me for it. If she loves us as much as she says she does, then none of us lost anything. We had a detour was all.”

Starsky thought it was good thinking. He wanted more for Hutch, too.

A car turned off the road at the far end of the driveway, but it had to get closer before Starsky told Hutch it looked like the one Wade Davis had arrived in a few days earlier when Starsky was alone at the farm. Hutch rolled onto his side to have a better look; together they waited for the intruder to make himself known, suspecting it was Davis.

Indeed, it was Davis who braked to a stop a short distance from the men, and got out of the car. He wore jeans and a crew-neck sweater, not his usual suit and tie, which made Hutch think it was the agent’s day off and he’d come out for a personal visit.

He motioned Davis to join them there in the grass—and when Hutch dropped his arm, it came to rest, purely by accident, over Starsky’s knee. He didn’t notice it, so he didn’t think to remove it when Davis neared.

They exchanged a friendly greeting with each other. It didn’t escape Davis’ eye that neither Hutch nor Starsky repositioned himself when he approached; they were as they had been: Hutch lay on his side with his arm draped over Starsky’s knee—and Starsky sat cross-legged beside him and grasped Hutch’s forearm in one hand to hold him closer, the two of them as casual in body language as they were in their words.

The last time Davis had seen Hutch touch Starsky, Starsky had refused him, but now he got a first-hand glimpse of the way the men normally were with each other. It thrilled, intrigued, and fascinated him all at the same time. He hoped his next move wouldn’t break them apart because the image of the two of them there in the grass, physically engaged, was something he wanted to contemplate for a while, to absorb into his own psyche somehow, to be part of, if he could.

“Mind if I sit?” he tentatively asked.

Hutch glanced at Starsky. He had no qualms about Davis’ presence, but maybe Starsky did, so he left the answer to his partner. Starsky glanced at Hutch; from Hutch’s accepting expression, he read that Davis was trustworthy enough to sit with them, so he motioned for Davis to help himself. It was a nonverbal exchange that had passed between Starsky and Hutch and Davis saw and heard that, too.

Still, Hutch thought Davis was somewhat uncomfortable, but he couldn’t say why, so he took inventory of their surroundings. It was a peaceful spring morning. The air was cool enough for long-sleeved shirts and sweaters. The farm was quiet. Birds sang throughout the trees. The occasional insect buzzed by. The three of them sat in the grass without seemingly a care in the world.

Seemingly.

Hutch reflected. Davis had come specifically to see Starsky, no doubt, to share something with him about the case in question. It was un­fortunate, Hutch thought, because, up till then, the morning had been relatively peaceful and private.

Starsky wasn’t as open as Hutch. He carefully studied Davis to size up the agent’s intention, to assess his proximity. He hugged Hutch’s arm more tightly to his knee and hoped he sent a signal to Davis that his bond to Hutch was impenetrable and that Davis had better not tamper with it.

Davis noted the behavior. He looked at the men, first one and then the other. “Have you guys ever come to blows?”

“Blow jobs?” Starsky asked with a snicker.

“You mean, have we ever actually fought each other?” Hutch clari­fied with a roll of his eyes at Starsky, and then answered, “Hell, yeah.”

“Like cats and dogs,” Starsky echoed.

“Seriously,” Davis challenged them.

“Seriously,” Hutch emphasized. “In those first, what, two-three years we worked together, I think we beat the shit out of each other a few times.”

“Over what?”

“Women,” Starsky said. “Misunderstandings. Strategy disputes. Ego. You name it.”

“And we punched each other on rare occasion after that,” Hutch added, “sometimes out of anger, sometimes strategically on a case to throw the bad guys off track, so they wouldn’t know we were working together.” His turn for a question. “Why do you ask?”

“It’s hard to imagine you guys having a fight; you’re so close now.”

“Maybe that’s why,” Starsky mumbled, mostly to consider it for himself.

“But no serious physical fights in recent years?” Davis asked them.

Starsky and Hutch looked at each other to silently examine their past together; neither could think of a single time they’d raised a fist to the other in recent years—at least not since their wrestle over Kira, and par­ticularly not since that kiss, anyway. They arrived at the same moment in time together, to that kiss, and looked more closely at each other before they busted out laughing.

Davis couldn’t help but laugh at their laughter, though he didn’t know what it was about. “What’s so funny?”

“Inside joke,” Hutch said.

“Real inside,” Starsky added.

“What I wouldn’t give to know,” Davis encouraged them.

“You’ll have to beat it out of us,” Starsky said.

Which reminded Davis of why he’d come to the farm. He broke the cheer with a serious request. “On that note, I need a crime report, Star­sky.” His tone of voice was telling and sounded as sorry as he felt. He didn’t like his job that minute. He didn’t like begging, either. He didn’t like anything about the situation except that he sat with them in the grass on that peaceful spring morning. That part he liked. That part he wished he hadn’t marred. “The case is circumstantial at best,” he continued. “The forensics, coupled with the police reports—you know, the ones that prove the entire Force was out looking for you—might be enough to convince a jury you were kidnapped. I can probably get some hospital record about injuries they treated and press specific assault charges. But if you’ll make a statement, you considerably raise the likelihood of a solid conviction.”

“Did you find these guys already?”

“Not yet.”

“Then what difference does it make?”

The answer seemed obvious to Davis. “If you tell us what happened, we’ll have better leads. Isn’t that how this is done?”

He waited for Starsky’s reply.

Hutch waited.

Starsky gave it thought. Or, rather, he gave replying some thought, not whether he’d make a statement; he already knew where he stood on that matter. Finally, he said, “I invoke my right to remain silent.”

“What about a statement to some specific aspect of the crime?” Davis proffered. “You know, tell us about the kidnapping and the beat­ings?”

“What more is there to tell?” Starsky cracked. He knew Davis suspected, even believed, that he’d been sexually assaulted, but he wasn’t about to confirm it. “I say one thing and you’ll want another thing. I invoke my right to remain silent.”

“The Fifth Amendment was designed to protect those who feel that testifying in a court of law will self-incriminate them,” Davis reminded the men. “But you haven’t done anything wrong, Starsky, therefore you can’t incriminate yourself. Your partner, however, is another matter.” He glanced at Hutch, who still hung an arm over Starsky’s knee. To Starsky, Davis said, “Hutch testifies and he’s liable to self-incriminate. He’d be the one to invoke his right to remain silent.”

“That almost sounded like a threat,” Starsky said.

“It’s not a threat,” Hutch interrupted his partner. His intention wasn’t to defend Davis, but to make certain Starsky understood the facts—to better protect themselves. “They believe I have something to hide—and you don’t.”

“What do you have to hide?” Starsky asked. “What have you done?”

“I made a deal a while back that I would tell them what I knew, but not how I knew it. It was a verbal agreement. But if this goes to trial, I might be pressed to divulge how I knew it—in which case I’d invoke my right to remain silent.” He squinted briefly at Starsky to remind him that he’d also pocketed the videotapes and taken his own DNA samples; tampered with evidence, in other words. When he got back the acknowl­edgement in Starsky’s slight nod, Hutch added, “Still, none of this technical bullshit requires that you make a statement.”

“If we subpoena you,” Davis injected, speaking to Hutch, “because we believe you have more to hide beyond the deal we made, and you refuse to testify, you can be held in contempt of court. You could serve jail time.”

Hutch glanced at Starsky. The consequences, despite their effect on him personally, were Starsky’s to accept.

“You’d go back on your word about that deal you made with him?” Starsky asked Davis, looking at the agent with an accusatory eye.

“My deal with him is irrelevant; I’ll keep it to my dying day, but I’m not the lawyers and the judge.”

“So … you think one of these days you could come out here and bring us some good news?”

Davis didn’t know how to tell Starsky that he’d give anything to have done that. He wanted to sit in the grass with them and do whatever it was they did before he arrived—which apparently was simply to be in the moment with each other—and that seemed like a relaxing thing to do. “What is it you don’t want anyone to know?” he asked.

“I know you’re smart enough not to have asked me that,” Starsky said.

“But if it means the difference between these guys getting locked up for life for the crimes they committed against you—and never to hurt any­one again—and your personal embarrassment, which I’m not taking lightly, isn’t it worth it? Isn’t that what you would have told, say, Grace Woods, if she’d come to you and told you she’d been attacked?” Davis hit much closer to home than he knew. He found the woman he believed Starsky cared most about to make his point.

“If Grace came to me about something like that,” Starsky replied, “I’d personally take care of it.”

“Wait,” Hutch interrupted him. He didn’t want Starsky to say another word till he squashed his unfounded suspicions about something; he was paranoid and he knew it, but just the same, he wanted it answered. “Prove to me you’re not wired,” he ordered Davis.

“He turns in his badge on one Force,” Davis muttered, amused, as he pulled his undershirt out of his belted jeans, “and he becomes private security for another.” He removed his sweater and tee-shirt to show off his bared chest. Then he tossed the clothing to Starsky and watched Star­sky thoroughly feel through it for a hidden microphone or some other recording device. “But that brings up an interesting question,” Davis said. “What would you be willing to tell me off the record?”

“Nothing,” Starsky said. He tossed Davis back his clothes.

“Should you go through his jeans’ pockets?” Hutch suggested. He winked at Davis.

“Are you kidding me?” Starsky joked. “And be arrested for sexually assaulting the Internal Affairs agent who’s investigating what he thinks is a sexual assault?”

Davis didn’t laugh, but he did squeeze the outside of his pockets and his hips and thighs to prove there wasn’t anything there, either; even his car keys remained in the ignition.

“What I was going to say,” Starsky finally told him, trusting they weren’t under surveillance, “is that I don’t think I’ll be as aggressive as I’ve been; I’ll no longer talk victims of violent crimes into making statements, like I used to.”

Davis redressed. “If I don’t come back with a cooperation,” he warned Starsky, sounding as frustrated as he felt, “they’re gonna play hard ball.”

“So you’ve already said,” Starsky remembered. “Then I say, let the games begin.”

Davis sat silently for a while. He felt too sorry to talk—and not sorry for himself, but sorry for what he knew was about to befall Hutch and Starsky, neither of whom he wanted to see hurt. He looked at Hutch. “What do you think he should do?”

Hutch lifted his arm from Starsky’s knee to shoo a small beetle from his face. “I think he should do what’s right for him to do.” He dropped his hand to the grass. “I’ll stand by whatever decision he makes.”

Davis noticed that neither man touched the other at that moment. He didn’t think it was deliberate, but it did break the image he wanted to analyze. Or he thought it had broken it. Instead, it opened the door to something even more intimate between Hutch and Starsky.

Starsky stretched his legs out before him, crossed at the ankles—and then used Hutch’s hip to prop himself; Hutch was snug against Starsky’s lower back. Starsky told Davis, “Whatever the authorities do to me will pale in comparison to what’s already been done to me, so I’m not afraid of the consequences of my not filing a report.”

“Is it that you’d rather see these guys go free so you can ‘take care of it’ your way?” Davis asked.

Starsky didn’t reply; he knew better, and he knew Davis knew he knew better, too. Davis said more than his question; he told Starsky, in unspoken words, that such a plan was foolish, unwise, and criminal. But Starsky didn’t have any plans to take care of his attackers; he simply wanted to put the nightmare behind him and to be left alone to heal his life.

“What about him?” Davis asked. He nodded at Hutch.

“What about him?” Starsky wondered.

“Are you willing to let him pay the consequences of your not filing a report?”

Hutch’s mind raced ahead to see where Davis led them, but he failed before Davis explained it himself.

“They’re gonna want to know what he knows,” Davis told Starsky. “They start digging in that ditch and they’re gonna do whatever they have to do to compel him to come clean—including press charges.”

Before Starsky could answer or get his hackles up, Hutch spoke. “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”

“You may be crossing it sooner than you think,” Davis told him. “And, guys, you gotta know I’m the messenger on this one. What I want is Starsky’s statement. If I can’t get it, they’ll take over the case.”

Starsky didn’t like the predicament. He hated it. That the police would use Hutch against him pissed him off even more. He then rested his elbow on Hutch’s waist and curled up into him, to use Hutch as an emotional shield by physically drawing into him and into Hutch’s inner strength at the same time.

The body language and the bond between the men was apparent. The one lay on his side with his temple in his palm, and the other sat right up against him with his elbow on the man’s waist as he leaned on and into his hip and groin, and the two of them straight as arrows, neither of them proving a point or masking a feeling. They were simply that able to be themselves, right there in front of Davis. In the hung-up male culture of American men, Davis understood one thing: Either such dem­on­strative affection was to be feared or it was to be envied.

He himself envied it.

“How does that feel?” he asked.

“How does what feel?” Hutch wondered.

“That,” Davis said, and he motioned at the two of them, “to hang out and lie on each other like that?”

Hutch turned his head just as Starsky did and met his partner’s eyes. He was keenly aware then that Starsky lay on him, that he used him as he would the back of any sofa, and Starsky was aware he was draped over his partner; he hugged his knee in his free arm and shrugged at Davis because he didn’t have the words to describe it.

Hutch answered for them, just as Starsky expected he would.

“It feels … natural,” Hutch said factly. “It feels human,” he added. Another thought found its way to words. “It feels safe.”

Safe. That was how Davis felt when he sat with them—and it wasn’t a physical safety, so much as it was emotional.

Hutch found another phrase, too. He wasn’t ashamed. “And it feels like home.”

* * *

Starsky stood in front of the refrigerator and stared into the freezer. He clutched the door handle in his hand and, though he didn’t see what he looked for, he was in no hurry to close it. “You’re out of ice cream,” he yelled into the other room, as if telling Hutch would make the dessert materialize somehow in the ice box.

“I don’t buy ice cream,” came the somewhat expected reply.

Starsky finally let the freezer door shut. As he left the room to join Hutch, he muttered his dissatisfaction with his partner’s lifestyle in a few choice words, and then said, “Let’s go get some, then.”

Hutch lowered the paper he read and looked over at Starsky. “I don’t eat ice cream,” he reminded the man.

“Well, who gives a shit?” Starsky replied. He could have sat in his favorite chair, or even taken a seat on the coffee table near Hutch, but in­stead he chose to push Hutch over and sit on the sofa right next to him. He figured he’d have more success coaxing Hutch into a nighttime run into town if he made physical contact. “You can get yourself an ice cream cone,” he prompted him, “without the ice cream.” He leaned shoulder-to-shoulder into his partner.

“Where’s the fun in that?” Hutch asked. He leaned back into Starsky. “Besides, it’s after nine. All the ice cream restaurants are closed by now.”

“Not all,” Starsky said. He nudged Hutch with an elbow. “C’mon. You know you want to watch me eat a chocolate sundae.”

“I didn’t know that.” Hutch enjoyed their play and was in no mood to see it end. He tossed the paper on the coffee table and waited for Starsky’s next move.

Starsky patted Hutch’s knee. “Do you love me?”

“Not enough to indulge your dairy addiction.”

Starsky tried another tactic he was certain would do the job. He got to his feet and reached into his pants pocket for his car keys. “Do you need anything while I’m out then?” When Hutch didn’t answer him, he walked to the front door and pulled his jacket off the coat rack. “I don’t mind making a special trip anywhere to get you whatever you want,” he said. When he slipped on his windbreaker and turned around, he found that Hutch had followed him and got his jacket off the coat rack, too.

“You’re a pain in the ass,” Hutch mumbled under his breath.

Starsky winked at him, knowing Hutch would rather be with him while he ate ice cream than not be with him. “I knew you’d see it my way.”

* * *

Two scoops of maple nut ice cream and chocolate syrup later and Starsky was as content as he could be. He sat at a small sidewalk table and savored every mouthful of his dessert, as well as, and especially, Hutch’s company.

Hutch had ordered a scoop of sorbet, a nondairy treat, and ate his as slowly. They watched passersby for a while without talking all that much. The night was still cool and eating ice cream made it all the colder, but it didn’t dampen their desire to sit at that table long after they con­sumed their treats and enjoy the views of city life.

Then Hutch thought it was time to harass his partner. Starsky looked so strong and content; what better time to rattle his cage? “Do you know the story behind Doyle-Harrison ice cream?” Hutch asked him, pleased to get that sharp look from Starsky’s eye. The bait had been taken.

“I don’t want to know,” Starsky warned him. He propped a foot on a neighboring chair and inhaled a breath of crisp air. The trip to town had proved refreshing. But he was no fool. He knew Hutch was on a mission to pester him. How could anyone as beautiful as Hutch, with those blue eyes and blond hair, strong muscle and imposing height, his warmth and his charm, be such an abuser sometimes?

“The heir to the chain,” Hutch said, ignoring that peeved look that already brewed in Starsky’s blue eyes, “a Mr. Gregory Doyle—that’d be the Doyle part of Doyle-Harrison, mind you—walked away from his inheritance after he visited a dairy farm on his way to learning the busi­ness from the ground up.”

“I said I didn’t want to hear about it, numb nuts,” Starsky replied, squint­ing at him, as if expression alone could stop Hutch in his tracks. It didn’t.

“When Doyle witnessed first-hand the inherent cruelty in dairy farming—along with the filth and disease that go hand-in-hand with it—he turned down the wealth of the Doyle-Harrison empire to instead pur­sue a life of teaching environmental stewardship, sustainable agriculture, and kindness to animals.”

“You read too much.”

“You don’t read enough. Turns out that—”

“Will you shut the fuck up?”

“I simply thought you’d want to know some of the history behind your dependence on cow-mama’s milk.” He knew he’d driven the needle in far enough when he saw Starsky shake his head at him and disgustedly look away into the night. The retort would follow and it didn’t take long.

“You know,” Starsky said, “if you kept your fucking mouth shut once in a while, your friends might like you better.”

“Nah,” Hutch disagreed. “They couldn’t possibly like me more than they already do. How can they improve on perfection?”

Starsky grunted. Truth be told, Hutch was indeed perfect—with the exception of his sometimes mean streak. Despite it, Starsky was lucky to have him, and knew it, but he wasn’t about to admit it, not then.

“Even Wade Davis likes me,” Hutch pointed out. “That proves everything.”

“It proves even he’s got flaws. What’s with him anyway?”

“How do you mean?”

“I remember Internal Affairs going for the jugular, but this guy seems almost fond of us.”

“He is fond of us,” Hutch assured Starsky, but he got serious when he sensed Starsky wouldn’t play anymore. “We’re not the bad guys,” Hutch reminded him, “on top of the fact that you’re likable. And, given what happened to his sister years ago, he has a certain affinity with rape victims.”

Starsky glanced at him. “Meaning he believes they raped me?”

“He suspects.”

“What have you done to counter his suspicion?”

“Not as much as I hoped,” Hutch said sheepishly.

“Well, I can’t help but think he’s got something up his sleeve,” Star­sky said. “It’s been over a month now and he hasn’t slammed me against the wall for not cooperating. He threatens, but he doesn’t follow through.”

“He doesn’t want to follow through. But if he makes an arrest next week after that Dennis Fisher guy comes back from his wilderness trip, we best start thinking about our escape to Bolivia.”

Starsky flashed an eyebrow at him to say he thought it might be a good idea to start thinking about their escape even then, but he wasn’t truly concerned about Internal Affairs playing hard ball with him; he actually expected as much. He also wasn’t concerned about the penalty he faced for refusing to testify. No one could do worse to him than had already been done. “I’m not worried,” he mumbled.

“You know where I stand,” Hutch said. He got the sober look from Starsky’s blue eyes that he’d hoped, that lingering eye contact, and knew his partner understood he’d support any decision Starsky made—including fleeing to Bolivia if they had to. “In the end, Wade Davis will be the least of our worries,” Hutch added. “But he’s not bullshitting. He’s emotionally invested; that’s what he is—and we’re not used to seeing I.A. care about us. Face it, Starsk: Yours is a unique case.”

In the ten years they’d worked together, neither of them had come across a male rape victim—even though they knew such men existed. Their perception was that such incidents occurred in male prison popu­lations, but Starsky had since learned, from Grace, that their perceptions weren’t accurate. The other surprising fact, Starsky recalled, was that most male-on-male rapes were committed by heterosexuals, not gays. Maybe Davis had learned a lot, too. “If he’s not careful,” Starsky noted, “he’ll get demoted to our job.”

They laughed, but there was truth in Starsky’s assessment.

“What about you?” Hutch asked.

“What about me?”

“Do you think about returning to the job?”

Starsky toyed with his ice cream’s plastic spoon while he examined Hutch’s question. “I’m living one day at a time,” he decided, looking back into Hutch’s anticipatory expression. “The thoughts I have for the future are way out there in it.”

“Such as?”

“I see us going into private practice, answering only to ourselves. Do more investigative work and leave the actual arrests and all that to the street cops.”

Hutch pondered the idea in the silence that followed. When he finally came out of his contemplation, he saw that Starsky still looked at him, his chin tucked, as if he waited for an answer. “No more busting heads?” Hutch asked.

“I didn’t say that,” Starsky replied. “I’m just saying, whatever we do, we only answer to ourselves.”

Hutch squinted at him as if he could pull more meaning out of Starsky’s words that way. He thought he knew. “You mean bust more heads—except we do it our way.”

Starsky winked at him. “You’re smart—for a blond.”

“Did you have some heads in mind?” Hutch knew of three, but Star­sky intercepted his assumption.

“Those are too close to home,” Starsky concluded. “We hurt them and we’re first in line as suspects.”

“I think we could do it in a way that would keep us on this side of rea­sonable doubt.”

Starsky wasn’t so certain. “In the meantime,” he said, appreciating Hutch’s cooperative tone, “I have safer fish to fry in mind.”

Hutch’s curiosity was also high. “Who might that be?”

Starsky was sure Hutch would join him in the payback, but he wanted Hutch to know how serious he was about his intent. “Grace’s attacker,” he said quietly.

A wry smile came to Hutch’s face. He liked the idea. A lot. “I take it you know who and where he is?”

Starsky winked at him again. “And you just unveiled irrefutable evid­ence that proves I’m smarter than you—because I’m a brunette.”

A couple of parlor patrons came out of the shop and sat at a neighboring table; their presence forced Hutch and Starsky to abruptly abandon their conversation, but they had a definite understanding—and it pleased Starsky beyond words.

“Speaking of Grace,” Hutch asked, “why aren’t you with her tonight? Can she only take you in small doses?”

“I wanted to spend time with you,” Starsky said. He kissed the air at Hutch.

“You’re full of shit.”

“She’s co-director of some organization that’s having one of its fund­raiser support group things tonight,” Starsky then said.

“What kind of organization?”

“A private group she and another woman started. Something for crime victims,” he clarified. He chose his words carefully to keep the nearby people from deciphering his meaning.

Hutch was as careful. “For the kind of crimes she counsels?”

“Yeah.”

“So why aren’t you there?”

“I’d probably be the only guy in the room,” Starsky explained.

“Do you know that for a fact?”

“No, but if I was …”

“And only victims of such crimes are allowed in the room, so therefore, everyone would assume?”

“I don’t know. I suppose not everyone who goes to those functions are victims of those crimes.”

“Maybe it would help if you went to one,” Hutch recommended.

Starsky didn’t know.

“If it’d ease the pain any,” Hutch further offered, “I’ll go with you. Folks might be more likely to think we were there because we knew some­one who was a victim of such a crime rather than that one of us was. Or we go as the police—on a pretend fact-finding mission—or just say we’re supporting those we defend. That would be believable.”

Starsky thought about it. “Maybe,” he said under his breath. He loved how his brother strove to help him while he admired Hutch’s flawless face in the night lamps. “Thanks for being a pal.”

“It’d be one way to support Grace,” Hutch furthered. That seemed to please Starsky, too. “I have to admit, though,” Hutch added, cracking that beautiful, warm smile, “your suggestion earlier about another way to support Grace has my full and undivided attention and cooperation.”

“And justice for all,” Starsky said, returning the warmth and the affection in his voice, “and better late than never.”

* * *

Their rendezvous in the house gym that next morning was purely accidental. Without a word to each other, they lifted weights and per­formed various exercises. There was an unspoken mutual understanding that they had a new life on the horizon and one that would require their muscle. It was also that they enjoyed the other’s company.

But after a while, Starsky gave up the effort. He lay on his back on a weight bench, his feet on the floor, and stared blankly at the ceiling. He was no longer motivated. He listened to Hutch’s out-of-breath workout and wondered why he bothered. “In the end,” Starsky finally said, “none of this shit matters.”

Hutch seated the triceps bar and straightened. Then he rested a minute while he stood, un-propped, before he asked, “What shit doesn’t matter?”

“This shit. I mean, I can be the strongest I can be—and it won’t be strong enough. If three guys want to take you down, they’re going to take you down, no matter what you think, no matter how strong you are.”

Hutch kicked the foot of the bench Starsky lay on to break his melancholy. “Maybe so, but you can at least get and stay strong enough to keep two guys from taking you down.”

Starsky shifted his eyes to Hutch’s. “Still the voice of reason, hm?”

“You’re not in the mood for this,” Hutch decided, pushing Starsky’s knee. “C’mon, I’ll make you breakfast.” He grabbed a hand towel on his way out of the gym and heard Starsky follow him. “I suppose you want pan­cakes?” Hutch asked, but he already knew the answer.

“Now you’re talking.”

“The things I do for you,” Hutch said. He heard Starsky pull up a bar stool to the kitchen counter and wait for his breakfast—like a kid in a toy store—while he found a skillet, set it on the stove, and then hunted down the pancake mix, other non-animal ingredients, and soy milk. Starsky didn’t seem to notice he wouldn’t get his dairy. Or maybe he noticed and didn’t care. “What are your plans later?” Hutch asked.

“I have a date with Grace.”

To see Starsky get out of the house on his own volition was the first in a series of small steps toward recovery and Hutch was genuinely happy for him.

Starsky’s mind drifted into thoughts of the coming evening while he watched Hutch prepare their breakfast. He was excited about seeing Grace again, but he also felt somewhat apprehensive. When the twinge in his gut got the best of him, he decided to talk to Hutch about it—and he didn’t ease into his question. “Do you think hummers are demeaning to women?”

Hutch glanced at Starsky to get a read of his intent. He could tell Star­sky was serious because there was such a serious expression on his face, which surprised Hutch because Starsky was a rather sexually exper­ienced grown man and should have known the answer to that question for himself by then.

But Hutch answered without jest. “I think anything a woman does to a man that she wants to do to him, and he’s got no problem having done, isn’t demeaning, no.” Maybe his reply was as vague as Starsky’s initial request. He didn’t mean to be elusive, but he was puzzled by Starsky’s question in the first place. “The only way I can imagine a hummer being demeaning to a woman,” he clarified, “is that she does it against her will.”

Is that where Starsky’s query had originated? Had he been forced to ‘orally copulate’ those who attacked him? Hutch had suspected as much, but the idea still made him shudder. He hid his suspicion, and the hope he was wrong about it, by mixing the pancake flour in a bowl with the other ingredients.

“You don’t think some women give hummers because they feel they should,” Starsky asked, “you know, like, it’s what he wants so she may as well give him what he wants and keep peace in the family?”

“Wouldn’t that be against her will then?”

“I suppose.”

“Or maybe she’s giving him what he wants because she cares about him and wants to give to him,” Hutch said on second thought, “even though what she’s giving isn’t what she’d give if he didn’t want it.” He looked over at Starsky and got the disgusted roll of the eyes he expected.

“Can you speak English once in a while?” Starsky asked.

Hutch lit a burner on the stove and adjusted the flame before he gave Starsky his attention again. He leaned on the counter across from him. “Why don’t you speak English?” Hutch admonished him. “Tell me why you’re asking. You must have already figured out the answer to that ques­tion sometime in your life. Or is it that you feel Grace is doing something for you against her will?”

“We haven’t gotten that far,” Starsky said. He wouldn’t hold Hutch’s eye contact for long because he was embarrassed to tell him how sex­ually inactive he’d been with her—especially in light of Grace’s desire for him. Still, it didn’t stop him from pursuing his point. “She hinted that it was something she’d like to do for me sometime.” Then he parted with the truth. “Okay, so it wasn’t a hint; it was a flat-out promise. I’m just not sure how I’m going to feel about it.”

“Because it would be her first time and you don’t want to be the guinea pig?”

“No, not because of that.”

“Because you think she’d be doing it out of obligation?”

“I did make the mistake of telling her I’d like to have that again someday, when I get back to having sex. No wonder, then, she wants to do it for me now.”

“Out of will, it sounds like, not obligation,” Hutch assumed. He turned back to the stove.

“If I hadn’t said anything, though,” Starsky explained, “maybe she wouldn’t want to do it, know what I mean?”

Hutch was about to pour the first batch of pancake mix into the pan when he was struck by the context of Starsky’s difficulty. He could ignore it, but he didn’t want to. If he overstepped the line, Starsky would tell him. He turned off the stove and faced Starsky. His hunch and his ensuing questions were pointed. “I can’t help but think your concern for Grace comes from what happened to you. Maybe you’re not confusing sex with rape, but you’re afraid Grace is going to feel something you felt when you were, what? giving those men head?” He couldn’t not ask. “Did you do that, Starsk?”

Starsky felt instantly anxious. He felt it in his stomach and in the sudden sweat of his palms. He felt the burn in his heart and the fear it caused. The emotions were as strong as they were abrupt. He couldn’t assimilate them fast enough. To relieve them, he opened his mouth to pant off the adrenalin and lowered his eyes again to the kitchen counter. He didn’t want to lie to Hutch, but he didn’t know how to tell the truth—except to say, finally, “Maybe.”

When he heard Starsky’s half-truthful answer, Hutch returned to the counter between them. He was sickened by the idea of Starsky orally copulating any man for any reason, let alone against his will. He stood tall and looked at Starsky, but his partner was unable to look back at him and that made Hutch feel sorry for him. They had talked about it on the moonlit porch, that Starsky’s attackers had unbound his hands so he could give them handjobs, maybe even blowjobs. Starsky had refused and they stomped on his arm till they broke it. But if Hutch heard Starsky correctly that morning, he heard shame. Had the attackers succeeded? Had they forced Starsky instead to orally ejaculate one of them? Starsky was, after all, more frightened that night, more injured, more exhausted and desperate.

Starsky shrugged when he felt Hutch’s penetrating gaze. He heard the absolute quiet in the room. Hutch had once told him nothing he did would change how Hutch felt about him, but this wasn’t on the list at the time of Hutch’s promise. And it was one thing to be forced into—to be forced into, to be forcibly penetrated—and another to be forced into interacting, into performing, as it were, against one’s will.

“Look at me,” Hutch compelled him.

Starsky couldn’t.

The volume of silence intensified.

“C’mon,” Hutch said again. “Look at me. When you look at me, you look in the mirror. If you can’t face yourself, how are you ever going to put it behind you?”

Starsky closed his eyes and felt the burn of his tears. He held tightly to himself and gave time a chance to pass. Hutch was right about one thing: If he couldn’t face it for himself, how would he survive it? He opened his eyes and lifted them to Hutch’s. If ever there was anyone who genuinely cared about him, he could see that person in those blue eyes. Hutch suspected what Starsky had done and yet not a shred of dis­approval or disgust was anywhere on his face. In fact, when Hutch saw the tears rim Starsky’s eyes, Hutch had to bite his lip to hold back his own pain-filled reaction.

“Yeah,” Starsky finally said, “I did what you think I did.”

Hutch wanted more than Starsky’s vagueness. “You sucked one of them off.”

Starsky wiped his eye with a shirt sleeve. “Yeah,” he said again. “I did.”

“Just one?”

Starsky laughed a sad laugh when he realized there were more ques­tions to follow. But they all needed answers, if for no other reason than they enabled him to come to terms with the truth. “All three of them,” he said.

Hutch felt stabbed in the heart all over again. He could vividly pic­ture the three of them forcing Starsky onto his knees and shoving their erections in his face—because he’d seen it. To imagine further that they had succeeded—more than once, more than twice—was too painful to bear. Hutch stayed locked in the eye contact he held with Starsky to keep his strength.

Starsky could remember the smell of the men’s sweaty bodies, still hear their labored breathing, their grunts and their groans, feel their unyielding strength and their depraved determination, all of which boiled his fear to a fever pitch that night. It had been surreal, but the assaults were also a vivid and brutal reality. Their memory kept him from looking at Hutch for long.

“They sat me in some chair they had there,” Starsky recalled as he averted his eyes. “I can’t tell you whether they brought it with them, or …” He shrugged off the minor detail, as he perceived it. “My hands were tied behind my back, behind my back and to the chair.”

“And just wearing your shirt?”

“Just my shirt,” Starsky said.

“So they didn’t redress you after the first time they stripped you or—?”

“They didn’t give a shit about me; they left me each time the way they were done with me.”

“All that time you were missing, you only wore your shirt?”

“I was lucky to have it.”

“The nights were quite cold,” Hutch recalled.

Hutch’s words triggered a sensation in Starsky. “The chair was met­al,” he said. “I remember it was cold, too. But I could barely sit. They fucked and beat me so long that I was, I don’t know, I had a hard time sitting.”

Hutch thought he understood. The doctor had told him Starsky had anal repair surgery; it was why Starsky needed to eat ‘soft’ food. “And they fucked you that night, too, regardless of your injury?”

“No, not that night, not that way, anyway.” He finally looked at Hutch. Somehow the questions and their answers seemed mandatory, and he no longer felt obligated to them, which made them less painful to relay. “That was the thing,” he said. “They didn’t want to fuck me that night because, as one of them put it, I’d become ‘too mutilated and gross’ to fuck me. If you watch that third tape, you’ll hear them use those very words: ‘too mutilated and gross.’”

Hutch crossed his arms to steel himself. The men had created the wretched situation they then used to humiliate Starsky further. Hutch could kill them. He could kill them as easily as he could kill flies.

“They made me a deal,” Starsky continued. “They told me if I sucked them, they wouldn’t fuck me.” He didn’t think he’d ever seen such rage mixed with disgust as he did on Hutch’s face then. Why he ever doubted the man’s love and affection for him, he’d never know. “I didn’t exactly jump at the offer,” Starsky explained as he tried to make light of a grim memory in an effort to calm Hutch’s anger, “so they decided one of them would go out and get some rubbers and they could continue doing things ‘the good old way.’ I knew it was either get fucked in the ass again—which already hurt like you can’t imagine—or blow them.” He shrug­ged, as if the gesture could convey his helplessness at the time and the decision he made based on it. “You have to understand,” he pleaded with Hutch. “I was in dire straits. And I didn’t know I was being taped. I thought what happened there stayed there.”

“Maybe I would have done things differently,” Hutch imagined. His tone tempered. “Maybe I wouldn’t have. Maybe all your decisions were right ones. Maybe they weren’t. There is no point to hindsight. You did what you did at the time because you had to. You were blindfolded and bound, beaten and broken, desperate and scared, injured and helpless. Why do you expect so much from yourself?”

“Because I keep thinking maybe you expect more from me.”

“You know what I think? I thank god you’re alive. I thank the powers-that-be that you’re sitting here now. Do I wish you weren’t tell­ing me this because this wasn’t anything to tell? Hell, yeah. But, c’mon, Starsky, you know me better than to think I expect more from you, or even think less of you—for any reason.”

Starsky knew if the tables were turned, he’d feel as Hutch felt. If he could remember Hutch’s heart of hearts, he could avoid that self-doubt and the fear that came with telling Hutch the truth.

“Why do you suppose they didn’t use condoms all along?” Hutch wondered aloud. “Why wait till they needed them?”

Starsky only had one answer. “I suppose because it was more de­mean­ing to come in me than it was to get off in a rubber.”

It went without saying that they thought it stupid of the assailants to prioritize that desire at the risk of their health; for all they knew, Starsky was contagiously infectious.

“Their urges outweighed the risks, I guess,” Starsky assumed. “I could have passed a virus through my spit, too, if they were using their heads. But they weren’t or they didn’t. I even told them if they stuck a dick in my face, I’d bite it in half, and that didn’t stop them. The one who did most of the talking, he said if I hurt any of them, they’d hurt me the same—and have no problem doing it. They apparently would risk any­thing for the payback.” His idle threats had been just that, though; he didn’t dare injure any of them. “So the first guy stepped up and told me to ‘take it.’” Starsky shrugged to say he didn’t have the words to explain it further, but he knew Hutch understood what happened next.

Hutch didn’t want to picture Starsky sitting on his bloody flesh wounds on that cold metal chair in that empty warehouse room, mostly nude, blindfolded, and seriously injured, taking a penis in his mouth. That wasn’t an image Hutch wanted to have in his memory, but it passed through in an instant just the same and he was conscious of the fact that it would never leave his mind.

“How far did things go?” he asked.

“All the way.”

“And by ‘all the way,’ you mean?”

“What do you think I mean?”

“They came in your mouth or on your face?”

Starsky forced the words. “In my mouth. All three of them—one by one.”

Hutch slowly exhaled. “Did they make you swallow?”

Starsky bit his lip. To have them ejaculate in his mouth was one thing; to have swallowed their semen debased him further. Did Hutch want to know because it helped an investigation, or did he want to know for the sake of knowing?

Hutch read his mind. “If it helps you to purge it by sharing it, tell me; if it doesn’t, then keep it to yourself.”

Starsky thought for a minute in the silence of the room. Then, because he saw the value of sharing it all with Hutch, he said, “It was fuck­ing unreal, you know?” His voice broke when he spoke and he trem­bled with revulsion. “All I could think was, ‘what the fuck?’ The more I resisted them, the more turned on they got. The next thing I know I’ve got a fucking dick in my mouth and this guy’s spillin’.”

He began to visibly cry then with his shame and embarrassment. “It made me wretch—which pissed them off.” He was aware Hutch intense­ly stared at him, but it didn’t deter him. He was emotionally charged and needed to purge. “His cum was in my mouth. It was on my face. I couldn’t see anything because I was blindfolded, but I could feel it and I could smell it. This fucker, he wipes it off my chin and forces it back in my mouth with his goddam filthy hands—said I needed to ‘finish the job the right way’—and he slapped me for fighting him and he kept slapping me till I opened my mouth and took it.”

Hutch wasn’t sorry he asked the question, but the answer was just about more than he could hear. He clamped his jaw and stared at Starsky. He could tell from Starsky’s tears and his trembling voice that Starsky was filled with an enormous pain borne of so many emotions.

“I don’t know that I swallowed anything that first time since most of it was on my face,” Starsky said on reflection. “It was more the point they made, that I was to take him and take him all the way, and if I didn’t do it ‘willingly,’ then I’d have it done for me, but I was going to do it one way or another.” He wiped his eyes on his shirt sleeve, but the tears kept coming. “The lead guy, well, he said he didn’t appreciate the way I’d taken care of his partner; he said something like, ‘You do me with feel­ing, Starsky, like you do Hutch, and you do it right and we’ll let you go.’”

To think he was even remotely connected to the reason they brutal­ized Starsky was injurious in itself. Hutch was about to apologize for it, but Starsky resented his own emotional weakness and hit the counter with his fist. He kept talking.

“That’s when they untied me,” he recalled. “The lead guy wanted to give explicit instructions on how I was to ‘perform’ for him and that he needed my hands.” He wasn’t certain the man was so much out to humil­iate him as he was to get the fellatio of his dreams. The reflection enabled Starsky to better control himself. He wiped his eyes with his hands and then his hands on his jeans to dry his palms. “God, it felt like a lifetime,” he commented in a hushed voice. “He made sure to make it last, and the only way I could get through it was to believe that, when it ended, they’d let me go.”

Hutch was nearly speechless. And numbed. “You needed something to believe in—false or otherwise,” he was able to say.

Starsky looked at Hutch, remembering that Hutch was wiser than he sometimes gave him credit. That’s what made Hutch a good detective, too, even when the truth was hard for him to hear—as it was then. Star­sky wanted—needed—to finish his story so he could move off of it and find something else to chat about with Hutch while they ate pancakes.

“So I took care of him like the ‘good queer boy’ I was,” Starsky said, dryly. He was blunt, but for himself, not for Hutch. “I sucked him off and swallowed the way I was supposed to.” Then he closed his eyes and gave himself a second to let his indignation pass, the one his ugly memory triggered. He heard a loud silence. Hutch didn’t say a word.

After a minute, he looked at Hutch again and said, “That last guy wanted in on the action, but I was expecting them to let me go, like they promised, so I put up another fight. I’d rather they killed me than go through the disgust of it one more time. That’s when they told me I’d ‘misunderstood,’ that I wouldn’t be let go till I took care of all of them.”

He crossed his arms and held onto himself as the horrific flashbacks of hollow sound, rancid smell, and revolting taste mingled in his mind—or maybe there wasn’t much taste; it was just revolting to his senses.

“I clearly remember saying, ‘no,’ so he shoved me out of the chair and onto the floor and stomped on my arm till he broke it.” Starsky rub­bed his healing arm as he tried to soothe the pain of that memory. “He said I wouldn’t be able to jerk you off for a while and that made him feel ‘vindicated’ for my ‘resistance.’” He’d never forget their exact words.

Hutch drew a breath and asked, “And the ‘you’ in your statement meant me, that you wouldn’t be able to jerk me off if you had a broken arm?”

“Yeah, he meant you. No doubt about it.”

“They didn’t know you’re left-handed,” Hutch noted.

“Shit, man, that’s not funny.”

“I didn’t mean it to be funny,” Hutch corrected him. He was in no playful mood, either. “I was simply noticing that they knew we were part­ners, that they knew your name, that they knew where you lived, that they knew I bought you a house, but they didn’t know you well enough to know you’re left-handed.”

Starsky accepted that Hutch didn’t make fun of him. He could tell by the look on Hutch’s face that humor was the last thing in his mind and that Starsky was just hypersensitive. Hutch was simply that detective again, taking inventory of every little detail in the hope it would lead somewhere.

“So you cooperated then and took care of that last guy, too,” Hutch assumed.

“The fat one jumped in to say that killing me wasn’t an option, so if I wanted the easy way out, I wasn’t going to get it. He said if I would take care of business ‘this one time,’ they’d let me go—or I’d just get beat up more. He promised that those were the rules. He promised a couple of times, as if he wanted or needed to convince me, but he wasn’t polite about it; he threatened me into believing him.”

The vivid memories of those debasing acts were daggers in Starsky’s heart. He looked at Hutch, at length, as if by so doing, he could force Hutch to answer his question for him. “How am I supposed to live with this? I mean, really, c’mon, Hutch, how am I supposed to?”

“Like I told you before,” Hutch said. “One foot in front of the other.” It was, in the end, the only course Starsky had available to him. “And then you keep taking steps, you keep walking, and you get as far away from it as you can. It’s called time.”

“Fuck time,” Starsky cussed. “Fuck all of it. Fuck everything.” But he knew Hutch was right. There were no alternatives.

“Or you kill them,” Hutch said. The expression in his blue eyes was piercing. He shook with rage. “We kill them. We hunt them down and we take them out, one by one.”

Starsky looked further down the road. “And when we go to jail, think they’ll let you and me share a cell?”

“Is that what’s stopping you?”

“Isn’t it enough to stop you?”

Hutch laughed—only on second examination. At first, he thought it was a stupid question because he couldn’t imagine anything getting in the way of payback, but in that same split second, he saw it for what it was, and that its answer had gotten past him till then caused him to laugh. Not because he was amused.

If he killed someone, he might go to jail. And that would be about the last time he’d ever get to see Starsky again in any meaningful way. Or sit in the grass with him. Or watch a Glenn Ford movie with him. Or stir up some pancakes with him.

He made firm eye contact with Starsky—but his partner won the argu­ment without a further word. “You’re an asshole, you know that?” Hutch said it affectionately; he was grateful for the light Starsky had shed. “Okay,” he promised. “No killings. But I reserve the right to beat the living shit out of them if I ever get the chance.”

“I’ll help you do it.”

Hutch didn’t take it lightly. He tried to shake the entire conversation and all the images it conjured up by returning to his pancake task. Still, he wanted to answer Starsky’s original question, especially since he understood where it had come from. He turned on the burner again, adjusted the flame, and beat the pancake mixture while he spoke.

“I don’t think anything Grace does to you she’ll do out of obliga­tion,” he said matter-of-factly. “The woman loves you. She’s in love with you. And she wants to make you happy because making you happy makes her happy. Isn’t that what love is? So, my advice to you is: Let her do what she wants to do—and you enjoy every second of it.” He affectionately winked at Starsky. “You see, Starsk,” he kindly added, “in light of the tragic circumstances in your lives, to do differently, well, that would demean the both of you.”

* * *

When Starsky pulled into the driveway, he noticed right away that Hutch sat on the top of the porch steps, reading a newspaper. Hutch may have glanced up and seen him and then returned his attention to his paper, but Starsky never saw Hutch do it. His partner stayed buried in the article he read as Starsky parked behind Hutch’s truck, left the car, and ascended the steps. “What are you doing?” he asked. He sat on the step below Hutch and leaned into Hutch’s thigh.

“I’m doing what it looks like I’m doing,” Hutch answered him.

“You’re reading a paper. I see that,” Starsky defended himself. “But I’m wondering what specific thing you’re reading about.”

“Then why didn’t you ask me what I was reading about instead of what I was doing?”

“Because I figured you’re so smart you knew what I was asking.”

“You figured wrong.”

“Well, whatever. What does what you’re reading about say?”

“Our last case was solved.” It was the case they’d been working on, were in the middle of, when Starsky was abducted. It was the case they didn’t have time to wrap up. Starsky’s case had become their priority.

“Yeah?” Starsky said, intrigued. “Read me what you’re reading.”

While Hutch read the article aloud, Starsky dropped his chin on Hutch’s forearm and listened. Their communion was that second nature thing, that natural way of being between them; Starsky physically touched him, leaned and rested his chin on him, and Hutch hadn’t noticed. He only became aware of it because noticing their intimacy had become a reaction, a forced consciousness, after Starsky was gang-raped and because of Starsky’s fear of retaliation for that behavior. But, on that morning, the time between the physical contact and Hutch’s awareness of it had grown to minutes, not seconds. And he was glad for it. Perhaps someday, it would take hours. Perhaps another day, he’d go back to never noticing. But there they sat on that perfect spring morning: Hutch on the top step of his porch, forearms on thighs, holding a newspaper, reading aloud to Starsky, and Starsky one step below him, pressed up against him, with his chin on Hutch’s forearm, the two of them together.

Hutch also couldn’t help but notice that Starsky appeared relaxed, refreshed, stronger. No doubt it was Grace’s effect. “How’s your arm?” he asked when he finished the article. It had been a while since either of them had talked about Starsky’s physical recovery.

“I can’t put too much weight on it yet,” Starsky said. “Why do you ask, Farmer Brown? You have tree holes that need digging?”

“I can’t ask about your arm without some ulterior motive?”

“You can, but are you?”

“Yeah. I’m asking about your arm because I’m curious about your arm. No ulterior motive.”

Starsky lifted his head and looked up at Hutch and Hutch looked down at him. Their eyes met. Hutch’s seemed unusually blue. They even sparkled. Starsky noticed the sunlight in Hutch’s blond, fly-away hair and how translucent a few stray ones appeared. And he was content with the notion, or, rather, the belief, that Hutch was quite happy to sit there on that porch with him, pressed up against him, despite the antagonizing banter, or maybe because of it, and look back into his eyes.

Such a love they had for each other—and not one Starsky could explain with words, but one he felt enormously fortunate to have. Still.

It made him smile at Hutch, genuinely and with gratitude.

Hutch noticed Starsky’s smile and its reflected light in Starsky’s warm blue eyes. He couldn’t help but return the attention. “What’s that for?” he finally asked, tugging his chin toward Starsky’s smile.

“For being my partner, what else?”

Hutch could tell Starsky’s affection was for real, no pretense, though Hutch didn’t always know how to reply to it—and not because he felt embar­rassed or awkward, but because the affection made him feel with­out words. “I thought maybe you wanted another kiss,” Hutch playfully said.

“Fuck you. I didn’t want that first one,” Starsky reminded him, refer­ring to the time Hutch kissed him in an air conditioning shaft three years earlier.

They broke out laughing.

Starsky then gazed down the driveway, into the past, back to that kiss for a second, and then his mind wound forward through his life—at record speed.

Hutch mentally reached the same place with him, and asked, “How are things with Grace?”

Starsky couldn’t repress his smile when he fondly recalled the night before. He looked back at Hutch and said, “Let’s just say she came through on her promise to make me the guinea pig in her first oral sex experiment.”

“And I take it from your smile,” Hutch noted, “that you survived the ordeal.”

“And had a great time doing it.”

Hutch squeezed Starsky’s bicep. “Good for you, buddy boy. Good for you.”

Starsky then thought about the article. “So Stewart and Kurtz solved our last case without us, hm?” he noted. He was proud of them; it had been a tough one. “Are we to be jealous?”

Hutch closed and folded the newspaper and dropped it on the step between his feet. “I know I am.” He surveyed the yard before them, the growing fruit trees and late spring grass. “At the same time, I like doing nothing, too.” The farm lifestyle suited him. “But I’ll go wherever you want to go and do whatever you want to do. Name it.”

Starsky did. “The Starsky and Hutch Detective Agency.”

Hutch laughed, then pondered the idea. “Let’s do it.”

“I have about three thousand dollars saved,” Starsky told him. “I could live on that for a while to give us time to get our business off the ground.”

“How’d you save $3,000?”

“I have my ways.”

“You’ve been holding out on me.”

“I don’t pay rent anymore, remember? You bought that house flat-out.”

“I remember.” He just hadn’t given much thought to Starsky’s finan­cial situation.

“You need some?” Starsky asked.

“We don’t need money. Keep your savings.”

“You still have inheritance left over after buying two houses, a new truck, a greenhouse, several thousand trees, and a bigger TV?”

Hutch was impressed by the list, though Starsky had exaggerated the number of trees. “Can you believe it?” Hutch whistled. “Money to spare. With what I’ve still got in the bank—not counting the investments—we could live like kings for a decade.”

“We’re living like kings now,” Starsky thought aloud. He felt like royalty, anyway. Hutch sure knew how to take care of him. “If we don’t need money, then what do we need?”

“Someone to put a business together for us, all the state filings and framework, and a public relations plan. Let’s hire ourselves one of them people and go from there.”

“Let’s.”

Hutch imagined he would start first with a business attorney. He liked the idea of the Starsky and Hutch Detective Agency. He could go back to doing what he loved most—except on his, on their, terms. And he’d still have a farm life to spiritually sustain him. Maybe there was a woman out there for him, too, like the kind of woman Starsky had found for himself, but right then, it really didn’t matter if there was or there wasn’t. What mattered then was that Starsky was alive and well, and that he still had Starsky’s friendship and affection, and neither of them having to worry about money.

Life was good. At least it was for then.

In the next second, however, they heard a car turn off the county road and onto the gravel driveway some four hundred feet away. It wasn’t a car either of them recognized, but it resembled the kind of unmarked cars the police drove, so they weren’t too alarmed by its arrival.

Starsky did sit up, though, off of Hutch, and leaned forward, his el­bows on his knees. He didn’t move away from Hutch; he simply re-pos­tured himself to confront the intruder. He was aware that anyone arriving that morning and finding him and Hutch on the top of the steps would note how unusual it was for two men to sit that close together when they had the entire porch—and several chairs and benches—to sit on instead, but he didn’t care.

Not that time. That time, he was purely in confrontational posture.

The car braked to a stop and Wade Davis emerged from the driver’s side. He was followed by Captain Dobey from the back seat and an unknown gentleman from the front passenger’s. All three men closed their car doors and said good morning to Starsky and Hutch. They got back a guarded but courteous welcome.

Davis was dressed in his usual business suit, and appeared, out­wardly, somewhat reserved. Inside, he was a bundle of nerves. “Starsky, Hutch,” he said, “this is my captain, Lewis Greene.” He turned to his superior. “Captain. Detectives David Starsky and Ken Hutchinson.” He purposefully didn’t acknowledge Hutch as a former detective; to him, the man would always carry the distinction.

Greene glanced at Hutch and then at Starsky.

“I’m Starsky,” Starsky told him when he sensed Greene’s confusion, “and he’s Hutch.”

Greene then made eye contact with Starsky. He was as old as Dobey, as wise and experienced, and he had no less respect for fairness and justice, but he had a job to do, and one he didn’t relish, not in this case; these cops were innocent.

Starsky shifted his eyes to Davis. “I suppose you’ve come to ask me what you’ve been asking me since we met.”

“Except I’ve come to ask it officially,” Davis explained.

Starsky eyed Greene then for a second. “I can see that.” It almost amused him, but not quite, to think that Davis needed his ranking officer to do the dirty deed because Davis himself couldn’t do it, or that Greene’s presence might encourage Starsky to change his mind, as if any­thing could hurt him more than those three men had. But the cops played by the book and Starsky would have done as much, so he could­n’t fault them for it. “Then let me answer you officially.” He didn’t wait for Davis’ question. “I choose to remain silent.”

“You’re aware that your right to remain silent only helps you if you fear you might self-incriminate yourself in a court of law,” Davis ex­plained.

“I’m aware.” Starsky knew if he got arrested, he’d need to take the oath, so he operated on that premise, that he was about to be arrested.

Davis didn’t want to see it end the way it would; he wished—he prayed, in fact—that Starsky would at least compromise. “Will you give us a partial statement; the details to particular aspects of the crime?”

“Which crime would that be?” Starsky said to elude him. He was keenly aware that Hutch sat beside him—in silence. But he also knew Hutch was pissed, too, even though it hadn’t yet shown itself. Hutch was angry, Starsky was certain, if for no other reason than the three police officers had marred what had been a perfect day otherwise. Star­sky glanced at Dobey.

His captain stared at the ground with his hands in his suit pockets. He was ashamed. About something. Arresting cops wasn’t his standard, especially ones he respected and revered, such as the way he did Hutch and Starsky.

“How about you make a statement to the crimes of kidnapping, assault and battery?” Davis appealed to him.

“You got that all wrapped up?” Starsky asked flippantly. “Did you bring me a sworn document to prove that your questions and your inves­tigation go no further than that?”

“No. But if that’s what you want.”

“What I want is to be left alone,” Starsky reminded him. “What I want is to put this behind me and get on with my life. What I want you’re not going to give me—which leaves me not wanting to give you what you want.”

There were two ways to look at the men who sat on those porch steps that morning: One was from envy for what they had with each other and the other was because of hate or jealousy because what they had was taboo or immoral or both. Davis found himself on the side of envy; maybe, if he allowed himself the truth, he even valued what they had for each other. He respected it enough to not see it injured, tainted, tested. But the powers-that-be forced his hand and he had to push the words out of his mouth. “You realize your refusal to file a statement could result in charges of interfering with a police investigation, maybe even with con­spiring to withhold state’s evidence?”

“Conspiring?” That accusation was a new one to Starsky—and he didn’t know where it had come from.

“You and your partner know more than you’re telling,” Davis ex­plained.

Starsky laughed at the notion that he and Hutch were guilty of conspiracy to do anything, except maybe bust a few heads that needed busting. “I tell you what,” Starsky offered, “you arrest me if you feel you must. I’m sure that’s why you’re here. Captain Dobey? He came along as a witness—because he believes in his boys that much. But why don’t you guys cut to the chase—or the arrest—and let me take my chances in court?”

“Is that your final answer?” Greene asked him.

“I haven’t done anything,” Starsky insisted with a disbelieving laugh. He didn’t want to get arrested; going through a trial, for any reason, went against everything he hoped to avoid. “In case you’ve forgotten, I’m the one who’s innocent in all this, remember? You’ve got your forensics evidence and you’ve got a suspect and you’ll send him and his buddies to prison for life just on the charge of their having removed me from my house, so why are you hassling me?”

“Because we’ve only got circumstantial evidence. We can’t prove they forcibly removed you from your house. There’s no evidence to that effect. Even the kidnapping charge is weak.”

“Then let’s say it never happened and go our separate ways,” Starsky sarcastically replied.

Hutch could tell Starsky fought for his freedom. He’d already been held prisoner once—the longest three days of his life. And maybe the idea of being in jail even for a day—in with the likes of the kind of men who’d rape men, and often did behind bars—was enough to scare Star­sky that much. Whatever frightened him, Hutch didn’t like it. “Don’t go to jail, partner,” he warned him. “Agree to tell them about the kidnap­ping. Tell them about the assault and battery. They’re willing to take that much.”

“They’re not,” Starsky argued. “You know what they want and I know what they want. But they can’t prove those men did anything to me without my giving them details. And if they get my statement, if they have me confess to being kidnapped and beat to shit, they’re going to have to prove why in a court of law. They’ll have to prove motive.” He knew it went without saying that to prove motive, they would need more than to know Starsky had been kidnapped and beaten.

Davis was about to say something to Starsky when Greene cut him off.  “Here’s what we’ve got, Detective,” he said to Starsky. “On that Mon­day morning, at around nine forty-five, your partner, Ken Hutch­inson, left police headquarters to rouse you from your house when you didn’t show up for work. It was clear to Dobey that he’d left for just that purpose. Forty-nine minutes later, Captain Dobey called him at your house, and Hutch immediately requested an A.P.B. on you.”

Starsky looked into Greene’s eyes. He tried to decipher what the I.A. captain implied.

“What Hutch did in those forty-nine minutes, I don’t know,” Greene admitted.

Starsky and Hutch knew that Hutch had watched a video during that time.

“I assume he was analyzing the note and a photo he must have received and planning his strategy,” Greene surmised, “because he did tell Dobey that he wanted a forensics team sent to your house—along with all the cops and helicopters and police dogs we could spare, to begin looking for you in an abandoned warehouse—which he described in finite detail.”

Starsky had never given thought before to Hutch’s initial sequence of events that morning. It had a chilling effect on him. It caused him one more kind of pain he wasn’t prepared for—Hutch’s pain that morning, his partner’s fear and desperation and the actions they spurred. He was aware again that Hutch sat beside him there on the porch steps and that they were still in that nightmare together.

The Internal Affairs captain continued. “The crime scene we found that evening matched Hutch’s description to a tee, right down to the broken window. The following morning, around six-thirty, Hutch received yet another note; he says he found it on his windshield. Less than a minute later, he told two uniformed police officers that he had to return home to feed his dogs—and he was gone nearly two and a half hours. C’mon, Starsky. From what I’ve learned, this guy wouldn’t have stopped looking for you to do anything else—even if he had dogs. Or even if his own life depended on it. So, where’d he really go that morn­ing?”

“Where do you think he went?” Starsky asked. The conversation itself was antagonizing, but he didn’t think the cops were there to hurt him, just to flush the truth, and he wanted to know what they thought that truth was.

“I think he went where that note instructed him to go,” came the reply. “Where do I think he went, specifically? I don’t know. I can’t say. But it wasn’t home to feed dogs.”

Starsky remembered that Hutch had told him he’d gone back to his house to watch the second videotape. No one could prove, and therefore no one should claim, that Hutch went anywhere except home, but of course, the cops couldn’t prove that he hadn’t, either.

Only Hutch could prove that—if he hadn’t destroyed the notes he’d gotten. And only Hutch knew whether he had destroyed them, and Hutch didn’t say anything that morning.

Greene pushed his case. “We found your blood at two crime scenes,” he said to Starsky, “and we found semen from two different men at two crime scenes. We also know that headquarters received a third note from an unknown messenger on that third day, Wednesday, instructing the police to your location.” Greene paused and then carefully added, “And then there’s the testimony we’ve obtained from a couple of nurses at the hos­pital about the injuries you were treated for that morning.”

There was silence for a minute. Greene didn’t like to hint at the details of Starsky’s sodomy injuries, but he felt he had no choice. He wanted the cops to know what they were up against.

Starsky finally ended the strained silence. “Your point?”

“That you’re right: We don’t have enough to lock these guys up for good—and for the right reasons—without your statement. Unless you say you were there, and tell us what they did to you, all we’ve got is that they were there. They were there and you got some busted bones out of it. But did you get them falling down a stairwell or did they give them to you? Were your other injuries deliberate or were they consensual?” He knew they hadn’t been; he believed Starsky had been forcibly sodomized and seriously anally injured in such an attack, but he defined the de­fense’s probable case for the sake of his argument.

“Then, there we have it,” Starsky again said sarcastically. “Insuf­ficient evidence. You go your way and I go mine. End of story.”

“You know we can’t do that,” Greene professed. He sounded as apologetic as he could. “You’re a police officer, Detective, not a private citizen, and you were a police officer at the time of the crime, so you know better than anyone that we can’t walk away, even if we wanted to.”

Starsky knew law enforcement couldn’t abandon it. He simply tried to find his own salvation in its due process somehow. He glanced at Dobey.

“I’m sorry, son,” Dobey said in an apologetic voice. “Don’t you think if there was some other way, I’d have offered it to you?”

Of course he would have.

Starsky lowered his eyes to look out of the corner of them at Hutch. He knew his partner would do anything for him, support any decision he made, flee to Bolivia with him if he had to. And he didn’t think Hutch would judge him for the decision he would make, either. He glanced back at Greene and met the man’s eyes. “You want the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, am I right?”

Greene confessed with a nod.

“Then I choose to remain silent,” Starsky reiterated. “A contempt of court jail sentence will last only as long as the trial—and it’ll have done me less harm.”

“My plan isn’t to arrest you if you refuse to give a statement,” Greene said. “My plan is to arrest him.” He nodded at Hutch.

Hutch laughed. He suspected as much, but he still wasn’t fully pre­pared for it.

“Arrest him for what?” Starsky asked.

“Breaking and entering. Property damage. Obstruction of justice. Tampering with state’s evidence. Conspiracy to—”

“Wait a second,” Starsky interrupted Greene. He knew—and he knew Hutch knew—that charges against Hutch were legitimate. Punish­ment would be graver than any contempt of court sentence. “You’re kidding me, right?” Starsky asked. And then he understood what Hutch already grasped. “Of course, you’re not kidding. What better way to fuck with me than to fuck with him?”

Greene waited for Starsky to change his mind, but only silence hung in the air. Greene then addressed Hutch. “You’re under arrest,” he told him. “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you—”

Starsky stood. “Don’t do this,” he said.

Hutch was hurt by those words. They were words he’d never forget: Starsky telling his attackers, right before they raped him the second time or maybe the third, to “don’t do this.” Starsky also used those words to beg Hutch not to leave him the night Hutch chose to abandon him at the house to force him into overcoming fear.

He hit Starsky’s thigh to get his attention. “Keep your mouth shut, bud­dy,” he warned him. “Don’t say anything else. Let this thing play out.”

“Not this way,” Starsky argued with him.

Greene removed handcuffs from inside his suit jacket. “Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law,” he continued, addressing Hutch. “You have the right to speak to an attorney and to have an attorney present during any questioning. If you can’t afford a lawyer, one will be provided for you at government expense.” He ap­proached Hutch. “Do you understand your rights?”

Starsky descended one step and intercepted him. He heard Dobey warn him to back off, but he didn’t heed it. “Arrest me for resisting his arrest,” Starsky told his captain, “or whatever other fucking law I’m breaking. But we’re not doing this,” he ordered.

Hutch got to his feet. “It’s all right, Starsk,” he said. “I’m not talking. No matter what they do or how they do it, I’m not talking.”

“That isn’t the point,” Starsky replied. He turned on the step and con­fronted Hutch. “You’re not going to jail. Not for me.”

“I’ll do it for you,” Hutch reminded him.

“Don’t you think I know that?” Starsky answered him, raising his voice. He stared hard into Hutch’s blue eyes, the ones he’d admired earlier, the ones that had seemed then so at peace and now were filled with anger, hurt, and fear. “And wouldn’t I do it for you?” Starsky asked. “Wouldn’t I go to jail for you, too?”

Hutch saw the fire in Starsky’s eyes. He wasn’t asked a rhetorical ques­tion; Starsky wanted a sincere answer. “Yeah,” Hutch replied, “you’d do it for me.” He didn’t understand. They’d go to jail for each other in a heartbeat, so why did Starsky resist? But then Starsky cleared up Hutch’s confusion with a simple question.

“Would you let me?”

Would Hutch let Starsky go to prison for him? Not in a million years. He surrendered. “You’d lay down your life for me because I matter that much to you,” he echoed one of their conversations from years earlier, “but I would never let you make that sacrifice for me—because you matter that much to me.” There. He said it. Right in front of witnesses.

“Jesus,” Davis swore under his breath. He turned away to hide his emotional reaction. He’d been told by his superiors that arresting Hutch would force Starsky to make a statement because Starsky wouldn’t allow his partner to go to prison on his behalf, but Davis hadn’t believed it. And he wished he hadn’t witnessed it, either. Starsky was right about one thing: The most effective way to “fuck with” him was to harm his part­ner, just as the attackers had done to Hutch when they abused Starsky. How different from those vile men, in intent, had the police just been? Davis was ashamed of his part in the coercion.

As was Dobey.

They had pushed a man—by way of his victimization at the hands of others—and by his devotion to the only person he trusted—into di­vulg­ing the details about one of the most personal and private experi­ences of his life.

“Un-arrest him,” Starsky told Greene, “and let’s deal.”

“Let’s deal first,” Greene ordered him, then spoke again to Hutch. “Do you understand your rights?”

“I understood that you read them to me,” Hutch answered, “and I know what they mean.” He didn’t want to say he understood his rights because the semantics implied that he would be cooperative; the truth was that he was prepared to resist arrest. All he needed was a word from Starsky.

Greene bravely stepped past Starsky to slip handcuffs on Hutch, but he put them on Hutch’s wrists in front of him, not behind his back. Hutch was no criminal and Greene suspected he’d take them off soon enough. Still, it was a painful image, to see one of his former cops, and a good one, restrained in handcuffs. But Greene needed that image, burned forever in Starsky’s mind, to wrestle the deal they’d make. “I’ll un-arrest him if you tell us everything we want to know,” he promised.

“I’ll give you what you want,” Starsky said, leveraging his own nego­tiation, “and more than what you know I have to give—on two con­ditions.” He didn’t want Hutch to resist arrest and complicate their legal troubles, so he never gave his partner permission.

“I’m listening,” Greene said.

“One condition is that you give Hutch full immunity in this case—from everything he’s done or anything he may yet do in regards to it—and put it in writing and have it officially approved by a judge.”

“And the other condition?”

“That my statement—and any evidence I have to give you—be sub­mitted to a closed court. No press, no public, no peers. Only the judge and jury and the necessary attorneys can be in the room. And I want that in writing, too—and notarized.” He knew he asked for a lot; they could throw Hutch in jail and force him to testify, to plea bargain, so Starsky had to offer more than his words.

“What evidence have you got?” Greene asked.

“The irrefutable kind.”

Davis was too curious to keep quiet. “Evidence that puts them and you at the scene in a manner that proves your unwillingness?”

Starsky shifted his eyes to Davis. “Oh, it’s much better than that,” he said, and he said it sarcastically because he was insulted that he was doubted to deliver on his part. “How about I give you video proof that they kidnapped, repeatedly beat, and raped me? Would that excite you?”

Hutch closed his eyes to absorb the blow. They had fought so hard, he had fought so hard, to keep those tapes private. On the other hand, he’d given them to Starsky to do with as he wished—and this was what Starsky wished. Maybe that was their purpose in the end. Leverage. Whatever it was, Hutch was sharply aware that more pain, not less of it, lay in Starsky’s future.

Davis, Dobey, and Greene were stunned. None of them said a word for half a minute. They stared at Starsky as if he joked and they didn’t dare ask in case they proved to be right.

Starsky realized he had the power then. “Have we got a deal? I give you my statement and the video and you give me back a closed court and full immunity for my partner. Otherwise, I leave the tapes buried in their grave.”

Davis spun the events in his mind. “They filmed what they did to you? And then they gave Hutch the evidence. That’s how he knew about the warehouse room and what the assailants looked like. That’s the part I couldn’t figure. If they sent a photo, why would they have included themselves? But if they wanted him to know exactly what they had done to you …” Davis glanced at both cops there on the steps and met the seri­ous looks in their eyes. He fleetingly imagined what the one had been through and what the other had seen. “This is beyond disturbing,” he said under his breath.

“Are you going to take those things off him?” Starsky asked Greene.

Greene un-cuffed Hutch and Starsky inaudibly sighed with relief.

Hutch was spent. He wished Starsky had let him go to jail.

Davis had dozens of questions, none of which he could ask at that awkward moment. He was sickened by the idea of it and, at the same time, he felt, well, some sense of excitement for the pending justice on the horizon. It was a mixed bag. Only time would ferret which terms he’d come to in his lifetime over what they’d done to Starsky and Hutch on those steps that day.

Greene backed away and then turned to the car. He told Davis to get in, and then for Dobey to join them. And the three men got into the vehicle without a word—except for the few Dobey parted with before he disappeared into the back seat. To Hutch and Starsky, he said simply and with conviction, “I’m sorry, boys.”

“Sorry, my ass,” Starsky said as he watched the car roll away.

“He’s sorry,” Hutch said grudgingly, “just not nearly as much as we are.”

They looked at each other. They themselves were sorry and they knew it, but there wasn’t a single thing they could do about it.

“It’s the nature of the beast,” Hutch decided. He shrugged at the obvious. “Nothing in life is free. This thing of ours, this brotherhood, this Us thing? Even it has a price—and we’re still paying it.”

* * *

“Have you ever been fucked in the ass?”

Hutch was jarred by Starsky’s question and momentarily speechless.

He and Starsky had spent a good part of the late afternoon at the book­store, a place Starsky seldom visited, but Starsky wanted to be with his partner, no matter where he was or what he was doing. He got caught up in picture books and titles and wandered away from Hutch in search of further treasures; in fact, he was so mesmerized by his aimless explor­ation of printed pages that he didn’t even remember Hutch was in the store with him. He found a hardcover book about the Lewis and Clark expedition and was so captivated by it, that time seemed to stand still for him.

It wasn’t any particular thing he heard or anything he felt or saw, but long into Starsky’s reading, he emerged from his trance when he sensed Hutch stop near him. Maybe it was because Hutch was the only one who could get that physically close to him—or maybe it was some unnoticed breath Hutch had taken or a familiar movement he made, the sound of his jacket sleeve against his jeans, perhaps—that had subconsciously found its way into Starsky’s radar, but Starsky wasn’t aware of it. He just knew, like he knew anything, that Hutch stood quite close and quiet­ly near him.

“I see why you love books,” Starsky said. He didn’t look up from the page. “If I had a library like this at home, I’d never get tired of it, either.”

“Books are to me what Glenn Ford movies are to you,” Hutch noted. “Can you imagine being surrounded by those?”

“In my dreams,” Starsky imagined. He closed the book and returned it to the shelf. “I guess you’re ready to go?”

Hutch was, but not before he picked up the book Starsky had been reading and added it to the collection of books he planned to buy. He was impressed to find that Starsky had been fascinated by a U.S. history book. “There’s hope for you yet,” he joked. And then they bought the books, stopped at a deli for a dinner sandwich, and went home.

After building a fire later that evening, Hutch lay on the sofa under a reading lamp and perused his how-to-plant-a-garden books. Starsky opened a bottle of red wine, sat on the patch of floor before the cozy fire, and slowly drank from a glass while he rediscovered the great dis­covery of Lewis and Clark. The only sounds in the living room that night, at least for a while, were the rhythmic ticking clock, the occasional pop in the fireplace, and the wisps of paper as each of them turned their respective pages.

Hutch glanced at Starsky a couple of times as the night aged. He wanted to watch him for a while, to picture Starsky as he sat there on the hardwood floor, cross-legged and reading a book, without a television any­where on his mind—because that was such a rare and precious image. But Hutch felt too lazy and contented to give it serious consid­eration; instead he indulged it by being in the moments, by feeling them instead of analyzing them, by savoring the picture of Starsky sitting by the fire.

But on his third glance, Hutch was jarred by what he saw. Starsky had set his book aside—as well as his wine glass—and sat with his face in his hand. Hutch waited. Minutes passed. Starsky didn’t move. He didn’t seem to be crying, at least not from what Hutch could tell or from where Hutch lay, because Starsky was as quiet as he was motionless.

Hutch closed his book and let more time pass. Then he set the book on the coffee table. The sound of his own movement didn’t alert Starsky; if Starsky heard Hutch, he didn’t acknowledge the change in his posture. So Hutch finally rolled off the sofa and, on his hands and knees, crossed the area rug and then the floor by the fireplace to sit in front of Starsky, cross-legged. He watched him instead from that vantage point. And waited. He knew Starsky had to have definitely heard him, to have at least felt his presence there, the way he had felt it in the bookstore—but Starsky didn’t react.

At least, not for some time.

When he finally did, he abruptly dropped his hand from his face, looked Hutch in the eye, and bluntly asked, “Have you ever been fucked in the ass?”

Hutch picked up the wine bottle near Starsky’s knee and held it up to the fire light. More than half of it was gone.

“Well, have you?” Starsky asked, more firmly that time.

“No,” Hutch replied. He retrieved Starsky’s nearby empty glass and poured himself the rest of the wine. “Can’t say I have.”

“Have you ever fucked anybody in the ass?”

Hutch drank a long swallow and didn’t make eye contact with him.

“Don’t answer that,” Starsky said on second thought. “It’s none of my business.”

The alcohol gave Hutch the strength he needed. “You mean, have I fucked anybody in the ass, as in, have I ever had anal sex?”

“What other way would I mean it?”

Hutch sincerely wasn’t sure. It wasn’t like Starsky to drink that much in a short period of time—at least not while he was off-duty; undercover was a different story, and their investigation into illegal moonshine bootleggers some years ago came to mind. But the most they ever drank together were a couple of beers and the occasional wine glass or two—and usually ones they shared.

“I wasn’t asking if you’d raped anybody,” Starsky explained.

“Once.”

“Once what?”

“I had anal sex once,” Hutch said.

“As the fuck-er or the fuck-ee?”

“The fuck-er. I’m not into sex with men.”

“It doesn’t mean you haven’t experimented,” Starsky imagined.

“It does mean that.”

“Okay,” Starsky said, “but whose idea was your one-and-only anal sex-making?”

“Mine,” Hutch admitted. “All mine.” He consumed another swallow of the wine and felt its warmth fill his chest.

Starsky took the glass from Hutch when it was surrendered to him. “Why only once?”

“Because she wasn’t that into it,” Hutch said, as if the answer should have been obvious.

“Was she the only one you tried to have it with?”

“I tried it with other women,” Hutch said, “but they didn’t like it or want it, either. In my limited experience, the few women I’ve known have hated even the idea of it.”

“You could buy it,” Starsky noted.

“I don’t buy sex—outright. Wine and dine for it, but not pay cash for it.”

“Because it’s illegal or unethical, or because—with your face—you don’t need to?”

Hutch laughed. “That’s one way to tell me I’m good-looking.”

“You know you’re good-looking,” Starsky said. “I’m not telling you anything you don’t know.”

Hutch couldn’t argue so he didn’t. He took the wine glass from Starsky and drank from it. Despite the relative seriousness of the conver­sation, he still didn’t understand its purpose. “Have you ever?”

“Ever what?” Starsky asked.

“Had anal sex—as fuck-er or fuck-ee?”

“No. Neither.”

“Why not?”

“Same reasons as you. Most babes just aren’t into it—and I’ve been through a lot of women, so I say that from experience. I haven’t been with any guys, either, in case you were wondering.”

“I wasn’t wondering, but have you ever wanted to?”

“Be with guys?” Starsky asked, incredulously.

“Have you ever wanted anal sex—as the do-er?” Hutch corrected him.

“No. I’ve been pretty good about not wanting what I can’t have.” He made serious eye contact with Hutch. “And I’ll never want it now—especially after what’s happened—so keep your dick in your pants.”

Hutch didn’t think Starsky was serious, or rather, that he was seriously threatened. “So, what’s your point, buddy?”

“What’s the attraction?” Starsky asked. “Why have you wanted anal sex? Why have you had it?”

“It’s naughty and nice. Or it was, anyway.”

“That’s it? Because it’s nice?”

Hutch searched for more. “It’s a different and tighter sensation. That, and …”

“And?”

Hutch was embarrassed, but answered anyway. “And, given my size, it was a fuller experience.”

“Given your size? Are you hung like a horse?”

“I’m above average, but Mr. Ed still has it over on me.”

Starsky smirked at him. “So, given your size, how does anal sex feel fuller?”

“I can go deeper,” Hutch explained.

“Oh, I see,” Starsky realized. “Because of your big dick, you can’t go as deep into pussy, but into ass, you can.”

Hutch didn’t like Starsky’s crassness, but he also knew the alcohol had given Starsky courage he wouldn’t otherwise have—and which he needed in order to have the conversation at all. “Exactly,” he said. “And being able to go deeper was a fuller experience for me.”

“But for her, not so pleasant.”

“Apparently—because she never wanted to do it again.”

“Did you get to come inside her? Did you get to finish that way?”

Hutch replied truthfully, despite how personal Starsky’s questions had become. “I did.”

Starsky seemed satisfied with the answers, which made him change direction. “But you’ve never had it done to you.”

“No. Like I said, I’m not into sex with men. Which part of that aren’t you hearing?”

“Well, they make toys anyone can play with,” Starsky said. “Strap-ons for women to use on women—or men—and shit like that.”

“It’s not my world.”

“So you wouldn’t care to have it done to you, I assume,” Starsky said.

“You assume rightly.” Hutch drank what was left in the glass and then said, on an impulsive thought, “Having it done to me isn’t some­thing I’ve ever entertained—and then I gave up fantasizing about doing it ‘to’ anyone long ago—so, like you, I haven’t wanted what I haven’t missed. Or is it that I don’t miss what I don’t want—or can’t have?”

They sat for a minute without saying a word. The fire was warm and relaxing at that moment.

Hutch set the glass aside. “Why did you want to know all that?”

Starsky rubbed his face with both hands and looked at him. “These guys,” he said, but then he stopped.

“These guys who attacked you?”

“No. These other guys …”

“What other guys?”

“The ones who are going to watch those videos,” Starsky said.

Lewis Greene. Wade Davis. Harold Dobey. Those guys.

“What of them?”

“Maybe they’re into anal sex.”

“So?”

Starsky didn’t know if he could explain it—or if he even wanted to. He felt the effect of the alcohol in his blood still and said it anyway. “Maybe they’ll get off on what they see. They’ll think it’s ‘naughty and nice,’ too.”

“Whoa,” Hutch said quickly. “Wait a minute. Stop right there.” He hit Starsky’s knee to get his full attention. “Your attackers weren’t out for sex. If they wanted sex with you, they’d have invited you to dinner first. Tell me you’re not comparing sodomy to forcible sodomy; you’re not comparing consensual anal sex to rape.”

“I’m not,” Starsky defended himself, “but maybe they will.”

“Starsky, there’s no way they can watch what I’ve seen and feel anything but disturbed and sickened by it. And that’s coming from a guy who’s had and enjoyed anal sex, so I know what I’m talking about. Maybe they’re the world’s leading connoisseurs of anal sex, but they will not—they cannot—watch what happened to you and think for a sec­ond that they’re watching some badly lit and poorly acted porn flick. What they’ll see is very real and very vicious violence unlike anything they’ve ever witnessed. You have to trust me on this. You know what you went through and I know what I saw.”

Hutch could tell Starsky needed to hear those words because the relief hinted in his eyes, and so Hutch added, “I almost feel sorry for them, for what they’re about to see. I know how painful it is to watch. They have no idea what they’re in for.”

* * *

“Right now, without thinking about it, tell me why the serious face,” Starsky said, “and don’t lie.”

Hutch actually had to think about what he was thinking to even appreciate that he wore any distinguishable expression whatsoever. But it was the last few words of Starsky’s request that caught him the most off-guard. “Don’t lie?”

Starsky faked a grin and said, “You know, don’t butter it up, smooth it over—or leave some of it out. Just give me the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. C’mon, cough it up, buddy. I don’t have all day.”

“You just pissed me off,” Hutch told him. He set his empty cereal bowl in the sink and chose to wash it later—when he felt better.

“You’re pissed because I want you to tell me what you’re thinking?” Starsky asked.

“Because you assume I would lie to you about it. Or that I’d lie to you about anything.”

Starsky’s playful grin disappeared. He could tell Hutch was gen­uinely angry at him and it unsettled him. He didn’t know what to say. He sat at the counter, having finished his own breakfast, and stared at Hutch. When Hutch turned to leave the room, Starsky stopped him with the only words he could find. “It’s not like I called you a liar.”

Hutch faced him. “You’re implying I’m capable of it, though.”

“You’re not?” Starsky thought back over the decade they’d been to­gether. “We’re undercover detectives. You’ve lied more times than you can count.”

Hutch was frustrated and annoyed. “But not to you.”

Starsky understood then. “Okay, hey, I was just playing around.”

Hutch approached him. “But that begs the question.”

“Which?”

“Have you ever lied to me?”

Starsky didn’t break his promise to himself. “Yes,” he said. “Once.”

The answer took Hutch by surprise, but then he thought Starsky still played around, so he posed a serious question. “Is that the lie? That you’ve lied to me?”

“No,” Starsky said solemnly. He didn’t like the predicament he was in, but the only way out of it was through it. “I lied to you—once. I didn’t like how it felt so I promised myself I’d never do it again—which is why I’m answering honestly now. But since I’ve lied to you once, I get why you won’t believe me.”

Hutch came closer. He couldn’t imagine why Starsky would lie to him, but, then, Starsky had been through a very traumatic experience, and no doubt some of it wasn’t Hutch’s business. Still, he hoped Starsky would have told him that, that it wasn’t any of Hutch’s business, but not actually deceived him instead. He squinted at him. “Tell me what you lied to me about.”

Starsky hesitated. “I can’t.”

“Because?”

Starsky shrugged.

“Shitty answer,” Hutch said. “Is it related to what happened to you?”

“No.”

That surprised Hutch. “Then why can’t you tell me?”

“Because I don’t want you even more pissed at me.”

“How about you tell me what you lied to me about and all is for­given, or you don’t tell me and I’m going to hold it against you for the rest of my life?”

“You sure play hardball,” Starsky sneered.

“You shouldn’t have assumed you wouldn’t get caught in a lie.”

Starsky surrendered, but not without a lot of anxiety. “Remember when I told you I didn’t remember a thing about the night we had that three-way with Emma?”

Hutch straightened. “So, you do remember,” he surmised.

“Every minute of it.”

Hutch didn’t know how he felt, but he didn’t think he’d ever seen Starsky look more sheepish than he did then. In a flash of time, Hutch remembered the details of that night, of him trying to pull Emma off Starsky before it was too late, of the angry dialogue between him and Starsky, of hearing Starsky climax in Emma’s mouth, of Hutch’s own wrest­ling with her to the point he hurt her and she told him so, and then his having sex with her right there on the sofa while Starsky sat on it beside them.

“Shit,” Hutch whispered under his breath as he turned away from the counter—and his back to Starsky. But then he embarrassedly laughed at himself. He wanted to know what Starsky had lied to him about and then he wished he didn’t know. “Son-of-a-bitch,” he whispered.

“Which part pisses you off?” Starsky asked. “That I remember it or that I lied to you?”

Hutch laughed, sadly that time, and rubbed his neck to calm himself. “I don’t know,” he confessed. “Both parts, maybe.”

“Are you embarrassed?”

Hutch faced Starsky and awkwardly locked eyes. “Yeah, I am.”

“Then we’re even,” Starsky decided, “if that helps.”

“How do you figure?”

“Now you know how it feels to be me and have someone else know something I wish no one knew.” He thought for a moment and added, “but especially you.”

Hutch thought deeply about what Starsky said. And he understood it. Completely. He wanted Starsky to respect him to the end of his life, to look up to him. He wanted to always feel worthy of Starsky’s devotion to him, to be trusted and dignified in his eyes. That his partner had wit­nessed such a personal and weak moment of his with Emma, something as shameful as hurting a woman, something as private as having sex with a woman, threatened that very foundation.

Or so it seemed on the surface.

He knew, underneath it, like Starsky knew, underneath it, that noth­ing could transpire between them or to them that would change the way they respected and revered each other. It was a stupid insecurity they had, a personal weakness they shared, and hoped to avoid, but it had no credibility.

Their bond had been tested. More than once. Even recently.

And it had withstood it all.

But Hutch appreciated the feeling, the unfounded fear, the embar­rassment, the shame, the guilt, and the sheepishness Starsky felt, and he understood it in the context of their friendship, and the weight that car­ried.

“Yeah,” Hutch said, to answer Starsky’s underlying concern, “now I know how it feels to be you, and that someone knows what you wish no one knew—especially because that someone is me.” He nodded at Starsky to let him know he appreciated why it mattered to Starsky that Hutch had witnessed the crimes against him.

Starsky relaxed. “So if we’re even, then you forgive me, too, right?”

“Forgiven. But, on that note, you know I’d still go to jail to keep any­one else from seeing what they taped, right?”

“Yeah. I know.” Starsky wasn’t about to change his mind, though.

Hutch accepted Starsky’s resolution. He started to leave the room a second time, but stopped and faced Starsky. “Don’t ever lie to me again, buddy boy,” he warned him, “even if it’s to spare my feelings.”

“I won’t,” Starsky promised.

Hutch winked at him. “But thanks for the effort just the same.”

Starsky smiled. “You’re welcome, Hutchinson.”

* * *

Starsky felt the dirt hit him and glanced up from his thoughts to find Hutch looked at him as if to say, “What’s up?”

“I knew it would come to this,” Starsky told him. He brushed the dirt out of his lap. “I spill my guts and you throw dirt at me.”

“I keep waiting for you to get to the good stuff,” Hutch joked.

They laughed—as if Starsky could tell Hutch anything more deeply private than he already had.

The skies threatened rain that particular afternoon, but it didn’t stop Hutch from planting his vegetable garden—or at least starting to. He dug the holes with a trowel and Starsky handed him the seedlings. But after reaching for the plants himself a couple of times, Hutch noticed that Starsky had mentally drifted away and seemed to forget he was involved in the process at all. Hutch let him stew long enough and then got his attention by throwing a handful of dirt at him.

“What’s on your mind?” Hutch finally asked. He resumed his plant­ing task.

Starsky sat cross-legged on the ground in front of Hutch and he didn’t miss a beat. “Rough sex,” he said.

Hutch could tell by Starsky’s serious expression that Starsky didn’t play around. “What about it?”

“I like it.” Starsky thought a minute, stared briefly at the dirt and into his past, and mumbled, “I did, anyway … I mean, at times … with a feisty woman.”

Hutch stopped planting and watched Starsky as he waited to hear more.

Starsky finally looked at him. “Maybe I still like it sometimes,” he added on yet another second thought, “if I like sex at all anymore.”

Hutch knew Starsky didn’t rush his relationship with Grace, but Hutch thought Starsky’s patience was because of her sexual inexperience and not because Starsky wasn’t sexually interested in her. “Are you not that into Grace?”

Starsky noticed Hutch’s blue eyes in the growing overcast and how intently they hoped his answer would be a positive one. But a positive answer was all Starsky had, really. “I have very strong urges to get ‘into’ Grace,” he said, trying a smile at his pun, “and I don’t think I’ll rest till I succeed. But, I mean, I don’t seem to have the kinds of urges I’ve had before … the chase sorts of urges … or the sometimes rough sex sorts of urges.”

Hutch took a break then and settled into the dirt. “Define ‘rough.’”

“You know, like wrestling a woman to the floor.”

“You’ve wrestled women to the floor—and then, what? stuck it to them?”

Starsky eyed Hutch. “Maybe you’re not the person I should talk to about this. I get the feeling you’re thinking as badly about me as I am right now.”

“I’m not judging you.”

“It sounded like you were.”

“You’re paranoid because you’re judging you.”

Hutch was probably right. “I don’t know what I feel anymore,” Star­sky said, frustrated.

“But you’ve enjoyed wrestling women to the floor to have sex with them,” Hutch noted.

“Yeah. Sometimes. Not often.”

“With their consent,” Hutch assumed.

“I wouldn’t have done it any other way.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“I got off on that,” Starsky explained, as if the answer was obvious. “I got off pretending to force a woman into having sex with me.”

“Did you do that with every woman?”

“Didn’t I just say I only did it sometimes? like rarely, but with a feisty woman?”

“So, just the ones who wanted to play the game,” Hutch surmised.

“The rape game,” Starsky clarified.

“Is that what it was? You played as if you raped them?”

Starsky dropped his face in his hands and sat quietly for a minute. He didn’t know. He didn’t think so, but he wasn’t certain anymore.

Hutch felt sorry for him and didn’t know why. Maybe because Star­sky was confused, maybe because Starsky was having a life-altering change in every aspect of his life and it made the ordeal of his attacks all the more painful to witness. Whatever it was, he pursued Starsky’s dif­ficulty with more questions to help his partner flush the core of the matter. “Did you knock them around?”

Starsky sharply met Hutch’s eyes with a defiant stare. “Fuck, no,” he answered emphatically. “I didn’t hurt anyone. Jesus. And fuck you for thinking I did.”

“I didn’t think that,” Hutch disputed him. “I asked. I’m just … well … Did you pull their hair, for example?”

Did that hurt them? Starsky wondered. “Sometimes,” he admitted, “but only with their permission ahead of time—and I didn’t pull it all that hard, either. I didn’t pull it to hurt them.”

“Then why pull it?”

“Just to play rough.”

“Slap their butts?”

“Who doesn’t?” He saw from Hutch’s expression that Hutch didn’t.

Hutch shrugged back at him.

“I never hurt anybody,” Starsky insisted again. “I never threatened or tricked a woman into playing rough with me. I might throw out some bait on occasion, based on their personalities, and they’d either take it or not; if they didn’t, I didn’t push it.”

“I wasn’t accusing you of wrongdoing.”

“But why do I feel like shit about it now?”

Hutch wouldn’t answer that question for him, but he’d do everything in his power to help Starsky find it. It was apparent, from Starsky’s frus­trated tone, and his openness with the conversation itself, that Starsky was confused and troubled by things he’d done, and that he wanted help, Hutch’s help.

“What turned you on about wrestling women to the floor?” Hutch asked.

“I don’t know.” But then Starsky thought about it for a minute, recalled an incident where he’d done that, and felt his way through. “It’s like … I liked that I could make a woman have sex with me.”

“You mean you liked to pretend to make a woman have sex with you.”

“Yeah. Like that. None of it was serious.”

“But the idea that you could pretend to make a woman have sex with you, in other words, your capability, even in play, made you feel … more like a man?”

“Like that. Not that I couldn’t get it any other way, and not that pressuring women into sex makes a man a man—because it doesn’t and you know I believe that—but something about the idea of pretending to make a woman who’s not quite sure she wants to be with me then want to have sex with me was a turn-on.”

“Like you had some special, some magical animal, some primal mag­netism or something.”

“Yeah.”

“And, so, if I read you right, these women would initially resist—or pretend to—but then they’d see things your way and pretend to surren­der, right?”

“Yeah.” Starsky propped his elbow on his knee and his chin in his palm and thought about it further. “More than that, though. They’d surrender and enjoy themselves.”

“Take what you were giving and have no recourse but to like it?”

“Exactly.”

“Did you ever tie them down?”

“Down. Up. Handcuff them and make them ‘assume the position.’ All in fun. At least that’s what I thought then. I mean, we always had a safe word, you know?”

“A safe word?”

“Yeah, a word they’d use that meant ‘stop’—whether it was right before or even and especially during sex—for whatever reason they didn’t want to continue; no questions asked.”

Hutch couldn’t help himself; he smiled, but he did try to repress it—too late for Starsky’s notation, though.

“Fuck you,” Starsky told him. “What’s so funny?”

“You, the cop, handcuffing women and having sex with them. I was picturing you—”

“Well, don’t picture it, dummy,” he implored Hutch. “Just talk to me about this, will ya?”

Hutch was no prude. He’d seen his share of porn and he’d thoroughly explored his own boundaries with sex—including whether he was sexually attracted to Starsky—but Hutch was amused then on a personal level to learn about Starsky’s till-then private propensities. It was a side to his partner he’d never known before, even after all their years together and the intimate conversations they’d had, and he liked what he learned because it was all new to him. Still, Hutch couldn’t always control his reaction. “I’m not making light of it,” he promised. “It’s just that you always struck me as the more romantic one between us, not one to play beyond candles, chocolate, and teddy bears. Casanova, you.”

“Really? You’re the one in relationships; I’m the one making the rounds—ever since, you know … Rosey, Terry, and Kira … three strikes and I was out—and you thought I was the romantic one?”

“All those women,” Hutch explained. “You had the gift—and the gift had to be romance.”

Starsky thought a minute. Then he said, “Well, maybe it seemed that way to you because I used romance as bait.”

“I see that now.”

“But don’t you think it’s a sick mind to want to even pretend the way I have, to get off on the idea that I can force a woman into sex? Rough them up, wrestle with them, tie them up, and have my way with them?”

“You mean, pretend to force a woman into sex and pretend to rough them up and pretend to have your way with them.”

“Well, yeah, dimwit. Which part of ‘I’ve never hurt anyone’ didn’t you hear me say? But, still … it’s the idea of it that’s the turn on and that can only be the mark of a sick mind, don’t you think?”

Hutch thought that’s where Starsky was troubled, that Starsky feared he’d done something unethical and depraved like his attackers had done. “When those guys were fucking you and you finally gave in to them that last night, did you enjoy yourself then?”

Starsky stared at him.

“Maybe that was the wrong question,” Hutch noted. He pretended like he didn’t know the answer and started over with a different inquiry. “When they grabbed you out of your house that night,” he reworded himself, “did you give them any cues ahead of time that you were willing to play their game?”

“I know the difference between rape and sex—”

“I’m not sure you do,” Hutch argued. He leaned back on his hands and watched Starsky. “I think you think pretending to rape a woman is the same thing as raping a woman. No, no, that’s not what I meant, either. I think you think playfully and consensually pretending to wrestle a woman into surrendering to a good time is the same thing as pretending to rape her. More than that, you think there’s something wrong with make-believe.”

Hutch was right. He’d hit the nail on the head. “Yeah,” Starsky said, “I’m thinking there’s something wrong with make-believe when it comes to that kind of thing. A man shouldn’t pretend to rape a woman.”

“But you’re not pretending to rape a woman.”

“How do you figure?”

“You tell me. I’m asking again. Did those guys ask if you wanted to play?”

“No.”

“Did they coerce you into enjoying yourself?”

They both knew the answer, so Starsky didn’t say a word, but he did scowl at Hutch.

“If you pretend to rape a woman,” Hutch explained, “then she’d have to pretend to be humiliated and degraded, and she’d have to fake feeling used and scared shitless—as part of the game—and that’s what you’d get off on. But that’s not the game you played with them. You played, ‘I’ll show you; you’re going to have as much fun as I’m having because I’m going to make you have it.’”

Starsky watched Hutch carefully. The man always had a way around him—and he liked it. He wanted to see things the way Hutch did because it forgave him for all his previous actions. “Have you ever wrestled a woman to the floor?”

“No,” Hutch said, “but, so what? Maybe I have turn-ons you don’t. Besides, maybe you have the right idea. Maybe your way enabled some women to fully enjoy themselves. Your way let them surrender to sex, freed them from their guilt or shame, and they had a much better time with you than they would have otherwise. Did any woman you played the game with ever come back for more?”

“All of them.”

“I rest my case.”

Starsky dropped his hand to his lap and looked at Hutch. “There might be some truth to what you’re saying.”

“I don’t doubt that there is.” Hutch tried a laugh. “Maybe it’s easier for me to see it than it is for you because I’m the one on the outside look­ing in. And I don’t have your sexual bravery. I’d be afraid if I got into things like bondage that I’d get turned on every time I had to handcuff some bad guy.”

“Now look who’s confusing reality with make believe,” Starsky laughed.

They didn’t say anything for a minute. They sat in the dirt with an un­finished planting chore in front of them and mulled over the conversation they’d had and the thoughts it brought them.

As was usually the case, Hutch killed the silence. “Do you have desires to take Grace to the floor? Is that what’s bothering you, given that you’re both survivors of rape?”

Starsky closely examined his want. “That’s the thing,” he said. “I haven’t had a bondage sex fantasy or desire since the, um, you know

… But, then, I haven’t had much of a sex drive at all lately.”

“So you and Grace still haven’t sealed the deal?”

“Just oral sex, but sex sex, no. We’re taking our time—mostly be­cause I want to. I don’t want her to ever have reason to be afraid of me.”

“So pretending to wrestle her into it isn’t an option.”

“God, man, I can’t even imagine doing that with her.”

“Because of what she’s been through or because of what you’ve been through?”

“Both maybe.”

“When you look down that road, can you imagine playing with her like that someday?”

Starsky did just that: he looked into the future and imagined himself ‘manhandling’ Grace. “No,” he said with certainty, even before he could entertain a single picture of it. “Never. I don’t think either of us would want to play that way.”

“If you stayed with her the rest of your life, would you miss that kind of play with other women?”

“Like you said earlier: I’m not missing what I don’t want. Or maybe it’s that I’m not wanting what I don’t miss.”

“Maybe this attack you suffered made you turn a corner. It’s not about analyzing who you were and whether you were of ‘sick mind,’ but acknowledging that this is who you are now—someone who’s no longer interested in rough sex—and learning to be okay with that.”

Starsky liked that notion. A lot. Maybe the past was the past and this new person, this person he was becoming was a person born out of tragedy—who just happened to be in love right in the middle of its recovery—and all by circumstance and accident. He should stop pun­ishing himself. It was time to embrace the man he was then, not chastise the man he’d been. The epiphany made him smile at Hutch.

“I guess I’m not the one you should have talked to about this, huh?” Hutch asked. He wasn’t certain they’d eased Starsky’s concerns.

Starsky laughed at him. “Actually,” he said, “you are.” He tossed a handful of dirt at Hutch. “You’ve always been that one.”

* * *

Starsky received a pleased glance, a flash of a smile, and a wink from Hutch when Hutch overheard Starsky tell Grace on the phone that after­noon that he wanted to take her on a “real date”—meaning that he want­ed to take her to her favorite restaurant. He wanted to get back into the world, into the outside, into the realm of risk without his bodyguard. Hutch’s wink filled Starsky with an unexpected pride, but, embarrassed by it, he turned his back to Hutch to finish his phone call.

“I’m finalizing a deal with I.A. in the morning,” he told Grace. “It promises to be another long day, so I thought … a quiet dinner tomorrow night, maybe an in-home movie, something normal for a change?”

She’d do anything for him. But she was also concerned. “I assume the deal you’re making is the right thing to do.”

“It’s the only thing I can do. It’s either I make a deal or Hutch could serve jail time.” He heard a movement from Hutch behind him, but didn’t look. They’d had lunch and Hutch still sat at the counter and read a magazine while Starsky called Grace. He told her he’d pick her up at six-thirty the next night, said his goodbye, ended the call, and then stared into the outside through the kitchen sliding glass doors. The day’s threat of rain had finally materialized that afternoon into a moderate downpour and its first roll of thunder caught his attention.

It caught Hutch’s, too. He left the counter to open the sliding door so they could listen to the rumbling skies. A bolt of lightning flashed in the near distance and another thunder clap sounded. It was wild—and Hutch loved wild, bathed in it. The rain poured down as if the clouds had been filled to bursting and would never empty.

There he and Starsky stood in the open doorway and watched it, listened to it, smelled it, and without a word between them. The storm brought a refreshed atmosphere to the day. Starsky imagined it washing away all his painful memories, though he knew it was impossible; but, at least for then, the rain cleansed him.

Hutch stood riveted with his arms crossed, and savored every second of the sounds and visuals that drowned his senses. If Starsky didn’t think him crazy, he may have gone out and danced in the lukewarm wet.

“You like that, doncha?” Starsky asked him when the storm some­what passed and the rain fell in a steady, calming rhythm. He couldn’t help but notice the expression of awe on his partner’s face.

“Perspective,” Hutch said. “It has a way of putting things in their proper places.”

“But don’t you always say everything is relative?”

“Exactly—but to the way things are, to the scheme of things, to what is, none of what matters to us matters. Time marches on, despite us.”

“This country living is rotting your brain,” Starsky said, squinting at him.

Hutch laughed. “Have I changed that much since I bought this place?”

“You’ve always been just this side of crazy. The nature boy.”

“And you’ve always been a street punk.”

Starsky stared outside for a minute. “I don’t feel so tough anymore.”

Hutch watched the rain with him for a while and then looked at Starsky and asked, “How’s your arm?”

“My arm? I have to wear this splint another couple of weeks, doc says, and I have to be especially careful with it in the meantime. It’s still useless, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“So you’re not completely healed then, you mean.”

Starsky bit his lip to repress his smile. He should have known, yet again, that he’d been baited. “Right,” he said. “I’m not completely healed. I guess it’s only natural that I don’t feel so tough.”

“I’d guess that, too.”

It made Starsky think about something else. “That reminds me,” he said. “There’s this other thing … That first night, the night they took me out of my house; they hauled me off to that warehouse and shoved me into a chair. Then one of them started to untie my shoe—and I kicked him. I think I kicked him in the face. And I kicked him hard.”

Starsky remembered how it felt to make contact with the assailant, how briefly it empowered him. But then he also remembered their reac­tion. “They didn’t care much for my sarcasm. Beat the crap out of me for it. Then they tried again to take off my shoes. I didn’t kick anyone, but I didn’t cooperate. So they shoved me onto the floor and undressed me there.” He had a flash of memory, of the cold hard floor on his unprotected bare skin. “I only had my shirt on, but they couldn’t get it off me because my hands were cuffed—or else I’d have been completely naked.”

Hutch looked outside into the falling rain and let it keep his sensibilities calm while he listened to Starsky.

“I couldn’t figure out why they wanted to strip me,” Starsky said. “The only thing that came to mind was … they thought it would keep me from running outside. Or that it would make me feel more helpless. But what they planned, well, it never crossed my mind.”

It hadn’t crossed Hutch’s, either, despite that Starsky was already half-nude when the video opened, and it hadn’t occurred to him until those video images led right up to it. He pushed against the visual recall and concentrated on Starsky’s words—and not the pictures they painted.

“It was about the time they pinned me on my stomach to the floor and sat on me, with one of them on my legs, and he … well … you saw it on video.”

“Actually, I didn’t see that first attack,” Hutch said. “I saw the last one. At least, I think it was the last one, the last attack that night, I mean. I only saw one attack on that first tape—and you’d already been stripped and beaten up, so I assumed what I watched was ‘in progress.’”

Starsky didn’t understand. When he looked at Hutch, Hutch didn’t look at him, so he couldn’t get clarification there. He fished for it. “Could you tell which of the three you saw attack me?”

“The video was quite clear, and it was the heavyset one, the guy who did most of the talking.”

“He was the last to rape me that first night,” Starsky remembered. The other two men hadn’t said much overall. “He was the leader of the gang, I think,” he added.

Hutch had thought that, too.

“The first two attacked me at his orders,” Starsky recalled. “Then they left me alone for a while before he did. He was the like the Grand Finale.”

Hutch looked at Starsky. “They left you alone for a while between attacks?”

“Yeah. First the two guys and then they all left the room for, maybe forty-five minutes, an hour or more maybe. When they came back in, that last one attacked me, the one who did most of the talking. He told me afterward some stuff like, ‘Is that how it’s done? Is that how you treat your buddy when you’re off-duty?’; things like that.”

“Actually,” Hutch said, “I think he was talking to me when he said those things.”

They made eye contact, firm and intense.

“He was talking to you?” Starsky asked.

“He got up close on the camera,” Hutch recalled, “too close to be in focus even, and said those things into the camera lens. And I took them to be directed at me, that he was asking me if that was how I treated you.”

Starsky saw it from Hutch’s perspective. Hutch had to be right. Star­sky only thought the attacker spoke to him because he didn’t know there was a camera in the room at the time.

“So, he raped me,” Starsky surmised, “and then asked you if that’s how you treat me?” He huffed. “Then he really was trying to hurt you, I mean, directly.”

“You’ve made me wonder about something,” Hutch said. “I’m won­dering now if they didn’t film those first two attacks because they didn’t have a camera then. The reason there was a pause between the first two attacks and the last one was because someone went to get a camera. Do you think that’s possible?”

Starsky measured the time he thought had passed between the attacks. “It’s possible. They left the room; then they’d come back in every so often, one or two of them, not say anything, and leave again. Then the three of them came back into the room and the game started back up.”

“I don’t think they planned to film it,” Hutch said. “I think the camera was a spur of the moment idea—which caused them to leave too many clues behind, too much DNA in their wake. At some point, they weren’t thinking anymore; they were acting, caught up in their own feeding frenzy.”

“But do you think the plan was to rape me?”

“I do think that, yes. They were prepared to rape you.”

“How do you mean?”

Hutch softened his eyes to ease the blow of his words when he re­minded Starsky, “The one had a tube of K.Y.—and he used it. You don’t bring lube to a beating.”

Starsky looked out the window into the gray afternoon. He listened to the rain for a minute and recalled the specific details of the attacks. Without sharing them, he said, “I had the feeling they’d done something like that before; they knew what they were doing. They seemed quite practiced at it—from the way they kept me tied, to the end.”

“And that might explain why they got sloppy,” Hutch said. “They started to feel invincible—especially if they’d done it before and gotten away with it.”

The idea made Starsky look closely at Hutch. “So … more reason why I should testify then.”

“I didn’t say that. I was simply explaining why they left so much evid­ence behind. They got careless.”

Starsky stared beyond the rain as it slowly eased. Had they attacked others that way? Were there kindred souls living quietly desperate lives out there?

Hutch broke his thoughts. “We digress,” he said. “You wanted to tell me something.”

Starsky remembered. “About that first attack, that I didn’t know what they had planned till it actually started to happen to me.”

“And?”

“Well, I, um … well, at a certain point there, I finally realized what they were going to do, and I—I, god, I panicked. It was panic, pure and simple. I panicked. I fought as hard and as desperate as I could, know what I mean? like a trapped animal, without thought, just with every­thing in me.”

Hutch had to keep from picturing Starsky squirming vainly in their grip; it was more than he could stomach. He waited for Starsky to get to his point, but to hurry.

“What I feared was about to happen happened.” Starsky said. He hug­ged himself, his sweater, and tried to find the courage to verbalize what he wanted to share. “I, um …” But he couldn’t. Frustrated, he growled at himself. “I can’t say it.”

“Then don’t.”

“But I want to,” or he would never have brought it up. “I just don’t know how.”

Hutch had an idea. “Can you tell me about it in a roundabout way? Make an analogy or something?”

“If I knew what an analogy is.”

Hutch repressed his smile. “Give me an example kind of thing.”

Starsky thought a moment. “Okay. Remember when you kissed me?”

Hutch couldn’t help his laugh. “I’d forget if you stop reminding me.”

Starsky laughed because he knew Hutch would never forget, regard­less of reminders or time itself. “Well, anyway, I told you at the time that it gave me a hard-on, remember?”

Hutch couldn’t forget that, either. He waited. After a minute, he realized Starsky wouldn’t say anything else, that that had been his clue, his ‘roundabout’ way of being told what Starsky wanted to tell him. He assimilated Starsky’s questions in context. “So maybe you want to say that you got a hard-on when you got raped.” He looked at Starsky, but Starsky didn’t look at him.

“Like that,” Starsky said, swallowing his embarrassment as best he could.

Hutch didn’t take his eyes off him, but Starsky still wouldn’t return the contact. He was that embarrassed, ashamed, and guilty. Hutch wanted him to break through the stupid, but natural, feelings Starsky had, so he told him, “God, that must really screw you up.”

Starsky finally shifted his eyes to Hutch’s. “Don’t fuck with me.”

“Have you ever had a prostate exam?”

“No.”

“I’ve had them. The first time I had one, I got a stiffy. Embarrassed the hell out of me. But the doc told me it was perfectly normal and went into some medical explanation about how one affects the other.”

Starsky eyed him as he tried to decipher truth from fiction.

“Ask your doctor if you don’t believe me,” Hutch said. “I’ll bet you the rest of my inheritance that you’ll find you simply had a reaction to an action.”

Starsky stared at him. Had it been that simple?

“Or maybe there’s more to your story,” Hutch said on a mock second thought. “Maybe you want to tell me you enjoyed what they did.”

“Now you’re fucking with me,” Starsky growled, “so fuck you.”

“I can’t help myself sometimes,” Hutch explained. He jabbed Star­sky with his elbow. “There’s nothing wrong with you, man. Life slam­med you as hard as it could against a wall—for no reason—and you’re still getting up from the wind it knocked out of you, that’s all. You said so yourself: In those initial minutes, during that first attack, in particular, you panicked, you were like a ‘trapped animal, without thought,’ and so you were reacting. Action, reaction.” That’s certainly what Hutch had seen, too. “Whatever your experience that night, it wasn’t sexual. I saw nothing but absolute fear, pain, and exhaustion in you.”

Starsky drew a relaxing breath. He definitely hadn’t felt anything sex­ual during the rapes, so maybe Hutch was right. Hutch wouldn’t lie to him, wouldn’t lead him astray; he’d bait him, provoke him, but he’d never genuinely deceive or patronize him. Starsky stared at the floor and noticed, in the background, that the rain had stopped. “Okay,” he said under his breath. “Okay. Action. Reaction.”

Hutch lightly hit him again. “Hey.”

Starsky looked into Hutch’s blue eyes.

“There’s nothing wrong with you,” Hutch reiterated. “You’ve never hurt anyone who didn’t deserve it. You liked sex with women then and you will like it again. You’re a normal human being, virtues and vices like everyone else, who’s trying to get up from a very bad fall. There’s nothing wrong with you. But don’t take my words for it.” He nodded to the outside, and looked up at the sky, to the passing rainstorm. “Take those.”

Starsky looked out the screened door and caught sight of the perfect arch of a brilliant rainbow that appeared against the passing black rain clouds. He laughed when he saw it. It was breathtaking and spectacular.

“You’re so corny, man,” he told Hutch, but he didn’t take his eyes off the colors in the sky, off its greens and reds and yellows. And, for a while, because he liked how it felt and what it meant, he decided to be corny, too, and accept the unexpected encouragement from nature’s rebirth.

* * *

AND JUSTICE FOR ALL

“This feels great, doesn’t it?”

“You’re easy to please,” Hutch noted dryly.

“Well, I mean, it’s like old times.”

Starsky sat behind the wheel of his car and turned the ignition when it struck him that they were headed to the police station—albeit for dif­fer­ent reasons from the ones in their working days, but headed there none­theless.

“Let’s hope it’s not like old times,” Hutch chuckled. “I’m done hav­ing you crack my head open on one of your famous wrong turns.”

“You’re so unadventurous,” Starsky said.

“Yeah. I like that ‘being alive’ thing.”

Starsky drove them from the house to the road and enjoyed the scenery of the trees along the way as if he saw them for the first time. He’d driven his car since the attacks, but this time felt different because he was relatively relaxed and stronger.

And, of course, he had Hutch with him.

Like old times.

It made him talk about the future and the new line of work that awaited them. Hutch had already contacted legal counsel to initiate the process and they decided it best to set up a home office first; Starsky agreed. Besides, he didn’t plan to spend any time in an office; he liked the feel of his car and looked forward to driving it in pursuit of bad guys. That led him to mention private gun permits.

“I refiled,” Hutch told him, “but you’re still a cop, so—until you re­sign—yours is legit.”

Starsky decided he’d hold onto his gun for a while, apply for a new one in the interim, and have an overlap with his resignation, so he wouldn’t be without a weapon. “I don’t know how you do it,” he said. “I wouldn’t feel safe without my firearm.”

“It’s important that you feel safe,” Hutch said. “And, besides—when I’m with you, I do have a weapon—and I don’t mean your Smith and Wesson.”

Starsky was empowered by those words. He knew that his and Hutch’s combined muscle was lethal, too—as long as they weren’t on a laughing jag. And, if nothing else, Starsky would run down the bad guys with his car.

“Drop me off first,” Hutch said. “That’s usually how you end up crack­ing my head open.”

Starsky missed “the good ol’ days.”

He, himself, had also been missed, but didn’t know how much till he parked the car at police headquarters and walked with Hutch into the build­ing. They were immediately swarmed by colleagues who patted and hugged and kissed them. There was a genuine excitement in the air and a bittersweet homecoming for Hutch. His fellow officers knew he’d resigned, but they hoped he’d return when Starsky did. Neither Hutch nor Starsky mentioned their upcoming business plans. Starsky was simply glad to learn he still had family in those hallways; he imagined none of them knew about the specifics of his attacks, but they certainly knew he’d been abducted and beaten, because they told him how healthy he looked, as if they expected to see him battered and bruised and were so relieved he wasn’t.

Starsky held the envelope that contained the videotapes of the rapes close to his chest and, despite how pleased he was to see everyone, was relieved when Hutch took him by the arm and led him away before the evidence got into the wrong hands by freakish accident.

“Internal Affairs awaits,” Hutch told them; it was the only way their colleagues would verbally or emotionally let go of Starsky. And then they wished Starsky good luck, told him to not take any punches, and allowed Hutch and Starsky to head upstairs.

Starsky would miss the team he’d grown to know and respect over the years, but he was excited about his future, too. It was the interim he had trouble with. He felt suddenly anxious and perturbed when he walked into Dobey’s office and found Lewis Greene and Wade Davis already seated there with a notary at their service. Dobey refused the hand­shake and hugged Starsky instead; Greene and Davis shook his hand—and Hutch’s, too. It wasn’t the most comfortable meeting, but it was cordial.

Starsky sat beside Hutch in the chairs to the left of Dobey’s desk; the Internal Affairs agents and the notary to his right. They didn’t take sides, but Starsky definitely felt alienated from everyone in the room—except Hutch.

Davis didn’t waste time. “I’ve done more research on that suspect of ours,” he said. “He went on that fishing trip with two buddies. One of them is Wayne Nelson. I don’t know the other. But our DNA database doesn’t have a record of a Dennis Fisher or a Wayne Nelson—which doesn’t rule them out; it just doesn’t rule them in yet. They come back tomorrow and Fisher reports to patrol duty tomorrow night; Nelson is unemployed and living with his girlfriend.”

Starsky had mixed feelings. On one hand, he wanted to face his attackers, deliver some needed justice the sooner the better, but, on the other, he wanted the entire ordeal to go away, to end—and permanently.

“The plot thickens,” Davis added. He searched his notes. “Seems a Mr. Adam Love filed assault charges against Fisher and Nelson about a year and a half ago—and then dropped them four days later.”

“Why didn’t that come up before?” Hutch asked.

“It’s not on record,” Davis said. “I couldn’t find a single shred of paper that documented the charges—or their dismissal. I happened to be talking to our booking officer a couple of days ago and she recalled the incident because she said she’d never forget Love. He came into the station to press charges and had obviously been beaten to hell and back; she said his eyes were so swollen he could barely see out of them. He returned four days later—still ‘visibly shaken’—to have the charges dis­missed. She said she tried talking him out of it, but he was insistent.” Davis searched his mind for more details. “She said she remembered it because one of the accused at the time was Officer Fisher’s husband—but neither she nor I could find a record of the filing—or the dismissal, for that matter—which struck me stranger under the circumstances.”

“So you suspect our own Rosemary may have removed or destroyed those documents?” Starsky asked.

“Who else would have—or had access and motive?”

No one in the room could think of anyone else but her.

“There’s more,” Davis said. “Adam Love was a deejay at the time, but quit working after the alleged attack. During his on-air appearances, he was obviously an un-closeted homosexual.”

Starsky exchanged glances with Hutch. He felt a sudden and unusual kinship with Love and was immediately compelled to talk to him. He asked Davis for Love’s contact information and was given “the last known address” on a notepad sheet.

“There’s no current phone number on record,” Davis said. He added that it was possible Love lived with “his boyfriend somewhere in Pom­ona and the phones were registered in his partner’s name. I haven’t gone searching. I thought you might want to be the one.”

Starsky gave Davis credit. The agent had a grasp of human nature. If Love had dropped charges against Fisher and Nelson out of fear, it was best that Starsky, a victim, and not an official police rep, approach him on the matter.

“Is that his real name?” Starsky asked Davis. “Adam Love? Sounds a bit made up.”

They agreed that perhaps it was; Love was an openly gay radio dee­jay, after all, so maybe the name was his on-air personality and they should search out his real name. It was a lead Starsky would follow.

Davis then handed Starsky the original documents of the agreement they’d made on Hutch’s porch steps the previous morning. They waited for Starsky to read the papers and pass them over to Hutch for approval.

Starsky got what he asked for—and then some. It didn’t get passed him that the document stipulated that the videotapes were not to be copied and that they would be returned to Starsky when the trial was over; further, they would not leave Davis’ possession throughout the proceedings.

Starsky looked up from his reading. He hadn’t asked for evidential security, but he immensely appreciated it and hoped he conveyed it in the look he gave the agent. Davis returned a nod of understanding.

Then Starsky handed the papers to Hutch and stared at the floor while his partner read them. If the verbiage was good enough for Hutch, it was good enough for Starsky. The agreement was clear: The videos and Starsky’s testimony would be delivered to a judge and jury only, and Hutch would receive full immunity from everything he’d done and every­thing he would “yet do” in connection with the case in exchange for what he knew.

Starsky sensed that Hutch had finished reading and glanced at him. Neither of them were lawyers, but they knew enough to know the deal they brokered was simple and to the point; in fact, it was quite generous where he and Hutch were concerned. Hutch nodded at him and Starsky nodded back to silently tell Hutch to sign them. When Hutch was done, he handed the document to Starsky and Starsky signed them above Hutch’s signature. Then Starsky passed them back to Davis; he, Greene, and then Dobey signed them. They were notarized on the spot, validated with fingerprints and personal identification from all parties, and then photocopied in the room by the notary. She gave them each a copy and then further papers were signed by all to attest to the distribution of the duplicates.

Starsky then handed Davis the envelope he’d brought.

Davis couldn’t have asked for a better gift, though the idea of the con­tents of the videotapes made his stomach churn even then. He didn’t know whether to thank Starsky for them or simply professionally accept them; in the end, he was speechless.

“The loose tape in there is the one I took from the player at Starsky’s house,” Hutch said, to explain the evidence. “The one in the opened mailer is the second one I received; it was in his mailbox—and I watched it at his house. I knew where to find it because, during the search for him, someone left a note on my windshield telling me where to find it.” He glanced at Greene. “My ‘unaccounted for’ time during those days Starsky was missing was time I spent watching the tapes.” He could tell by Greene’s expression that the I.A. Captain appreciated those facts. Hutch spoke again to Davis. “The videotape in the unopened envelope was the last to arrive—that one to my home mailbox, but I was given Starsky’s whereabouts before I had to watch it.”

Davis imagined he and Starsky had talked about its contents. “Do you know what’s on it?”

Hutch remembered Starsky’s explicit details in the kitchen that morning when Starsky recounted the events of the third night he was held hostage. “Relatively,” Hutch said in a low voice.

Greene then asked Hutch for more specifics about the “commun­ica­tions” Hutch had with Starsky’s attackers, so Hutch recalled his where­abouts and the times he received the notes and what his actions were accordingly. He told them the notes, in the attackers’ handwriting, were included in the envelope.

“Is there any other evidence?” Davis impulsively asked.

Just as Starsky said, “No,” Hutch said, “Yes.”

All eyes were abruptly on him—including Starsky’s.

Hutch knew he was fully protected by law then, so he had no qualms about truthfully answering their questions. And he was sure they kicked themselves for not having asked the question before they signed away their clout to prosecute him.

It made Starsky want to laugh, but he didn’t dare. He looked at them as if to say, “That’s just like him, isn’t it?”

Davis pushed past his shock. “What other evidence have you got?”

“I have a blindfold,” Hutch said, “which they also used as a hood when they abandoned him each night. I have the duct tape they used to seal his mouth and I have handcuffs and rope. Oh, I’ve also got the shirt he wore all that time—the one they no doubt jerked off on and han­d­led. And I wiped him down in the ambulance on the way to the hospital with a towel I still have—as well as took a DNA swab of his face where they came on him. I’m sure there’s enough DNA in all of that to convict all the suspects.”

There was a collective groan in the room. Starsky had to look at the floor again to keep from breaking a smile. He loved it when Hutch kicked ass, even when it wasn’t physical.

“What do you want for it?” Greene asked him.

Hutch pretended to think for a minute, and then said, “You take care of my boy here—make sure that document we all signed today is true to its every word, and you keep as much of this private as is humanly pos­si­ble—and we can negotiate down that road. But you expose him, or you fuck with him, and I set fire to the evidence.”

Davis liked Hutch, a lot, though he couldn’t help but stare in disbelief at him. How the man had gotten around him, he couldn’t guess; Davis thought himself a fairly intelligent and experienced guy, but he was definitely no match for Ken Hutchinson.

“Are we done here?” Starsky asked.

Greene gave him a stern look, but surrendered. “We’re done,” he said.

“I want it on record that I didn’t turn over those tapes because I agree with your tactics,” Starsky added. He got to his feet. “I did it for him,” and he lifted his chin at Hutch. “I’m sure I would do your jobs the way you’ve done your jobs and be just as commended for it, but—what does Hutch say?—that ‘justice isn’t always due process.’ Sometimes it’s messy, sometimes it’s outside the letter of the law. So, for the record: I did all of this for him—to keep him out of jail—and for absolutely no other reason.”

Dobey leaned back in his chair and exhaled. He hadn’t liked any of it, not a second of it, from Starsky’s disappearance to where they stood that morning. But it was out of his hands and wishing it could be different wouldn’t make a difference. He let Starsky know he heard him by exchanging a long look with him before Starsky walked past him and reached the door.

“Are you coming?” Starsky impatiently asked Hutch when he real­ized Hutch hadn’t followed him. He shot a reprimanding glance at his partner.

Hutch stood. “Yeah,” he said. “Sure.” He delivered his parting shot on his way out of the room. “Enjoy the movies, boys,” he told them, “and don’t forget the popcorn.”

* * *

Starsky was about to insert the key into the ignition, but paused instead. “Do me a favor?”

“Anything.”

He knew Hutch would do anything for him, but Hutch may not appreciate what Starsky wanted in that instance. “Tell me how to get to that warehouse,” he said, “the one you found me in.”

Hutch hesitated.

“Like you said: Perspective,” Starsky explained. He turned on the car engine. “Maybe it’ll give me some. Maybe none. I won’t know till I go.” He pulled out of the parking spot.

Hutch knew there’d be no talking Starsky out of it, so he said, “Start by taking the two-ten east.”

* * *

They parked the car several blocks from the warehouse, gave it as much official identification as possible—their light and siren on the dash­board, accompanied by a police vehicle registration card, and by the car’s already state exempt license plates—then grabbed a crowbar from the trunk, locked the car, bid it farewell, and left. They then cut across the warehouse parking lot, some of which was covered in coarse gravel, without a single other car or pedestrian in sight. Starsky pointed out to Hutch what Hutch already knew, that there wasn’t a surveillance camera anywhere in the vicinity.

“You’d be surprised how many of these places are left to the ele­ments,” Hutch said. “There is a security patrol—the one Fisher works for—but it may as well be watched by a cottontail.”

“As in a rabbit?” Starsky asked, confused by what he thought he heard Hutch say.

“As in a bunny,” Hutch corrected him.

“That’s your comparison? A bunny?”

“I couldn’t think of anything more harmless.”

“How about your brain? You’re warped, you know that?”

“If I forget it, you always remind me.”

Hutch tried the door he’d originally entered the day the police had opened for him—but it was expectedly locked—so they walked around the building in search of easier ways to get in, other than breaking-and-entering—till they couldn’t find any. They would have to smash a window.

“After you,” Starsky told him. “I could use my pistol to shoot our way in, but you’re the one who’s got the legal protection from all you’ve done and all you ‘may yet do’ when it comes to this case.”

Hutch laughed. “I love your spirit.” He busted a window with the crow­bar, left it hidden behind a dumpster to retrieve on their way out, and then used empty oil barrels to climb into the warehouse, first Hutch and then Starsky. Hutch backtracked them to the front of the building so he could get his bearings. Then he led Starsky up the stairs. It was a part­ly cloudy day so there was enough light to find their way, but enough darkness inside to fuel their gloom as they approached the room.

Hutch made eye contact with Starsky before he opened the door. They’d come all that way, driven all those freeway miles, walked those blocks, broke into the debris-filled building, but Hutch still needed to be convinced that Starsky wanted to return to the scene of the crime.

Starsky silently answered that concern with his eyes, but he also conveyed that he appreciated Hutch’s protective love for him, too. “It’s okay,” he said. “I can handle it with you here.”

So Hutch opened the door and allowed Starsky to pass before him. After he stepped inside with Starsky, the door closed, and they stood a minute to survey the emptiness of the room. The sun had shone that fateful morning and caught the reflections of the dust in the air, but on that afternoon, under partly cloudy skies, the room was darker and seem­ingly more hollow. Its cement floor appeared as cold and its enclo­sure as barren—except for the hole in the sheetrock on the north side wall. And, unlike the rest of the building, the room had since been profes­sionally cleaned.

Hutch was the first to approach the area where he’d found Starsky, to within a couple of feet from it, and Starsky followed him. When they stood side by side again, Hutch said, “This is the place.” And their eyes lowered to the spot.

The police had removed the large, heavyweight eye bolt from the wall stud, the one to which the assailants had roped, chained, and hand­cuffed Starsky, and they’d completely washed the floor of its blood and urine. The area appeared sterile, completely void of the pain and humiliation that had once dressed it.

Starsky stared at the scene. He remembered lying on the cold floor, mostly nude, feeling the pain of his broken bones, the sting of his more serious cuts and abrasions, the nagging hunger in his belly, and the stench. Nor would he ever forget the burning ache where they had repeated­ly penetrated him, the suffocating grips of the duct tape over his mouth and the lightless hood over his head, his labored breathing, or the uncontrollable crying he’d done there. He’d never been more help­less and couldn’t have been more humiliated.

He didn’t know what he’d think or feel as he stood on that spot, but he knew he had to stand there. And he had to do it with Hutch. He need­ed a different perspective, regardless of what it was. He imagined how Hutch found him that morning and what Hutch had seen, what Hutch heard and smelled, what Hutch felt.

Hutch’s thoughts weren’t on the past; his were the kinds of a detec­tive revisiting a still-viable crime scene. “Did they bring you here each night, do you think?” he asked.

Starsky had to find his way out of his painful memories long enough to answer. “I only remember going up stairs the one time.”

“They had an elaborate plan,” Hutch noted. “Attack you one place, move and abandon you in another, retrieve and attack you in yet a differ­ent place, and so on. And they had the power tools and the hardware, the lighting and the security schedule, to pull off their plan. They were thorough, right down to knowing things about us we hadn’t told anyone. This couldn’t have been a one-time adventure of theirs.”

Starsky looked at Hutch. “You think maybe they did this to that Adam Love guy? They didn’t just beat him up; they raped him, too?”

“I do think that—maybe they heard Love on the radio and didn’t like the things he said, especially an openly gay guy, after all.”

Starsky returned his gaze to the floor. What he’d endured was incom­pre­hensible at best, criminal at the least, and to think those depraved men had racked up a list of victims, of unknown others with whom Star­sky had an unexpected and disturbing kinship, actually made Starsky feel sick.

“How can anyone hate someone that much?” he asked. “I mean, I couldn’t do to them what they did to me—and they’re the ones who’d deserve it.”

“Be glad you can’t understand the way perverts think; if you could, it might make you one, and I don’t mean that facetiously.”

“But you’d kill them,” Starsky argued. “Doesn’t that put you inside their minds in a way?”

“I’d kill them, all right,” Hutch agreed. “But I couldn’t do to them what they did to you, either. I just want to take them out. Remove them from the gene pool. Think of it more as trash cleanup than homicide.”

“But you won’t kill them. You agreed you wouldn’t.”

“I wish I could kill them,” Hutch admitted, “but since you won’t let me do that, then I’ll beat them senseless if I get my hands on them. I’d take a crowbar to any one of them and break them into countless pieces. It’s not the same, though, Starsk. I’m not looking to hurt them because of who they are or how they feel about each other. I want them to pay for what they’ve done. But, to be honest with myself, it’s not something I’d do if the victim was, say, Adam Love. I want this revenge because the victim was you. It’s definitely a personal vendetta.”

Their eyes met and held the other’s. Starsky understood. The irony was that he couldn’t kill them on his own behalf, but he knew he could kill them had they harmed Hutch instead. “I can only think of one thing worse than what they did to me,” Starsky said.

Hutch tried to imagine what that was. “Dying?”

“You dying,” Starsky said, “not me.” He didn’t play with his words. “I’ll survive this,” and he gestured to the area where he’d been beaten and bound and left for dead, “but I wouldn’t survive losing you. In the end, you see, they really didn’t know how to hurt me.”

In the context of the room, on the very spot where they stood, Hutch felt the weight of that imagined loss and the strength of the friendship from which it would have come. He couldn’t keep the tears from pooling in his eyes. “Okay, so I’m to be glad they were only rapists.”

Starsky affectionately pushed him with his elbow to ease his part­ner’s pain, one he hadn’t meant to cause. “Re-promise me you won’t kill any of them. I don’t think that agreement we signed with Internal Affairs this morning is going to protect you from a triple murder charge and you going to prison is only a step away from you being dead.”

Hutch bit down on his empathy so he could do as requested. “I promise,” he said, “but I still reserve the right to break some bones. How long can they lock me up for something like that anyway?”

“Too long.”

“Not if I do it right.”

Starsky didn’t argue with him. They’d busted enough heads over the years outside the letter of the law and gotten away with it. He trusted Hutch’s judgment.

He looked back at the hole in the wall, the one the police had made when they removed the hardware to which the attackers had bound him. “Did they get any forensics off that thing?”

“None,” Hutch said.

“And off the floor?”

“I guess nothing they didn’t already have: The DNA from two sus­pects, nothing on that third—and your DNA, of course.”

“You think there might be something on the evidence you have?”

“You wore that hood and shirt for three days. And I gave you quite the wipe-down. Seems likely.”

Perhaps it was. Starsky stared at the floor and again imagined Hutch’s experience. “How’d you keep the cops out of here till after you covered me?”

“We were headed into the adjacent room together when I saw the door into here and backtracked,” Hutch recalled. “They went on and I came in here.”

Starsky also imagined how he must have appeared. “What did you think?”

“I thought you were dead at first. But then I saw you move and I knew the gods had smiled down on us.”

“I wreaked, didn’t I?”

Hutch looked at Starsky’s profile, his un-telling expression, to size up what Starsky meant. “You’ve smelled better,” he sentimentally joked, “if that’s where you’re going with this.”

Starsky gave him a sad chuckle and then said, “But that’s how I knew they weren’t coming back. When the two of them pissed all over me, I knew I was on my own after that. They were done with me.”

Hutch felt that familiar punch in his stomach. “When they did what, you say?”

Starsky lifted his head and looked into Hutch’s shocked blue eyes. “They pissed on me. Their parting shots.”

The rage boiled in Hutch’s belly again and made him speechless.

Starsky realized Hutch must have assumed the urine odor had been his own. “There wasn’t anything left in me by that second night,” he explained. “I hadn’t eaten anything since dinner Sunday and they didn’t feed or water me. I’m not saying I didn’t piss or shit on myself—though my aim wouldn’t have been that bad—but that last night, when I was here, it was all them.”

He could see that Hutch was still furious, too angry to even reply, so he broke Hutch’s rage with a question. “Do you think they filmed them­selves peeing on me, too?” Or at least he tried to break it. “Maybe that’s why the DNA of the third guy wasn’t here; he wasn’t in on the piss party because he was holding the camera.”

Hutch balled his fists. “Even if you let me kill these guys,” he said heat­edly, “I couldn’t kill them enough.”

It was a telling statement and one Starsky absorbed and mulled over as he stood quietly and stared into the recent past. Then he turned away from Hutch when the partly cloudy skies outside the window drew him over. For a few minutes, he gazed onto the parking lot from the second story. He pictured the cop cars that must have gathered below with their flash­ing lights—theirs and Hutch’s truck—and the premises crawling with police, his peers, the people who had enthusiastically greeted him that morning when he showed up at headquarters for the first time in nearly two months.

Hutch joined him; he leaned a shoulder against the window frame and watched the empty lot below for a while before he pressed his back to the wall and looked at Starsky instead. They were both dressed warmly for the cool day; his partner stood with his hands in his leather jacket pockets and contemplated the outside and the details of the past along with it.

Starsky sensed Hutch’s interest in him, close and quiet, and shifted his eyes to Hutch’s, and they met in that old, familiar connection. “You know the worst part?” Starsky asked. It was a rhetorical question; Hutch didn’t even try to answer it. “The rapes were torture,” Starsky continued. “The broken bones and the beatings, all tough stuff. But the worst part, and the worst time, was this room.” He broke eye contact to stare at the floor.

“How so?” Hutch asked.

“I was terrified each time they’d show up,” Starsky said, “but I was more scared when they left. I couldn’t figure how you could possibly find me so I thought I was going to die alone in some god-forsaken shit­hole. All those hours, all that time crawling by, and me wondering if I was going to wallow in misery day after long day, night after cold night, only to starve to death in the end—and then thinking how long that would take and how alone I’d be as I wasted away.”

There were no words to placate Starsky. All Hutch could do was listen and feel his partner’s pain as if it would somehow ease it for him.

Starsky looked at him again, into Hutch’s blue eyes, the ones that had been and still were more fond of him than anyone else’s—including his mother’s. It made him press his lips for a second in an appreciative half-smile. Then he said, “But that last night, the one they made clear they weren’t coming back, well, that’s a sort of hell I can’t even describe to you. I no longer wondered if they’d return; I believed they wouldn’t. I was totally on my own—and it’s an isolation I never want to go through again. I knew you were looking for me. I knew you were desperately looking for me, but I couldn’t, for the life of me, find a single thing to con­vince me that you’d find me. It could only have been by luck.”

“I’ve thought about that, too,” Hutch said. “You know the old saying: A chain is only as strong as its weakest link. One of them didn’t want a mur­der rap. So, after they left you for dead, he notified the police of your whereabouts. I bet the other two are still trying to figure out how it was possible that you got found when and where you did.”

Starsky examined Hutch’s theory. It had merit. “It did strike me that one of them was just along for the ride.”

“When the ship goes down,” Hutch bitterly said, “he can sink with it just the same.”

Starsky winked at Hutch to let him know he appreciated Hutch’s rage on his behalf. Then he turned around to look inside the room again, to stare across the barren floor to the wall where he’d been held hostage. He’d been the weak one, huddled there in the cold and the dark, crying like a child. He’d been utterly exhausted, unspeakably drained, and immeasurably emptied of his self-respect and his strength—as if he’d never had them to lose in the first place.

And it had happened right there on that floor up against that wall.

“Hey,” Hutch said. He noticed the pain in Starsky’s face, even from his profile, and when Starsky turned his head and looked at him, met his eyes, Hutch saw it there, too. “Remember when you were in the hos­pital?” Hutch asked. “You told me your captors never threatened to kill you, but you wished they had. Do you remember telling me that?”

Starsky nodded. He’d never forget.

“Do you feel that way now?”

Starsky looked deep into Hutch’s eyes to drive home the sincerity of his reply. “No. For you and for me, I’m glad they didn’t kill me.” Then he thought about the future, the near and the far one, and added, “And for Grace, too, I’m glad they didn’t.” In pursuit of Hutch’s point, he clarified, “I no longer wish they’d killed me.”

“Then, by that measurement alone,” Hutch said, “can you see how far you’ve come in two months?”

The progress of Starsky’s recovery, in light of Hutch’s notation, made Starsky smile. “Yeah, I can see that now.”

“That’s strength,” Hutch pointed out, as if he’d read Starsky’s mind only a minute earlier and knew Starsky had been remembering his weakness in that room, “and that’s what you build on.”

Hutch had empowered him—again. “Do you think you love me more than I love you?” Starsky asked. He wasn’t droll.

“You’re not always as obvious about it as I am,” Hutch said after a brief examination. “I’m the one you’re always calling a sap, right? But I think we’re both equal in the love we feel.” He winked at Starsky.

Starsky resized the man who’d been his partner for more than a decade, the one who’d come all that way from the northwest side of the city to be with him in that empty warehouse room, and the one who’d go with him as far into the future as their lives would allow. “Do you think other men talk the way we do?” he asked.

Hutch laughed. “Yeah, but they’re gay.”

The crack made Starsky laugh, despite himself. It was a sound they heard lightly echo off the walls and it made Starsky take the couple of steps between him and Hutch, without words, and pull Hutch into his arms. He would be more demonstrative, more ‘obvious,’ from then on, he decided. He held Hutch tightly and felt the strong affection for him in the reciprocated hug. There was no back-slapping, none of that awkward and superficial intimacy most men shared when they embraced each other; for Hutch and Starsky it was physically tight and it was confidently emotional and it was safely understood.

“I’ve got my perspective,” Starsky told him. “Is that the word you used about the rain?” He closed his eyes and squeezed Hutch close as he pressed his cheek to Hutch’s face and absorbed his brotherly warmth and the love he felt that came back to him in it. They had laughed. “Thank you, partner,” Starsky said. “Because of you, the story in this room has a different ending.”

* * *

Starsky found Hutch in what appeared to be their new home office. The spare back bedroom was, after all, filled with recently delivered office furniture—a couple of medium-sized desks, a work station table, a filing cabinet, and something resembling another filing cabinet in a card­board box, one Hutch tried to open—so what else was Starsky to think?

Hutch threw him a quick “hey” and then resumed his business of un­packing the second filer while Starsky sat on one of the desks and watched him. “When did you find time to get all this shit?”

“Last night,” Hutch said. He sliced open the cardboard with a box cutter. “While you were out getting laid, I was setting up our business.”

Starsky had to shake off the distracting images his memory of the previous night caused him lest he have an unwanted physical reaction and instead asked, “Did they just now deliver the stuff?”

“About a half hour ago.”

Starsky was impressed by the speed of their service. He studied the other desk from where he sat. “Why’d you get two desks?” He wasn’t about to use either one.

“This one’s mine and the other is for whomever we hire,” Hutch ex­plained. “I didn’t get you one because, if I know you at all, you’ll eventually take over mine.”

“You do know me,” Starsky laughed. He watched Hutch struggle with tearing the box away from the filing cabinet. “Need a hand?”

Hutch gave him a smile. “Only a good one.”

They both knew it was too soon for Starsky to use his arm.

“I could applaud when you’re done,” Starsky suggested.

“Well, that’s something,” Hutch said. He was finally able to unbox the furniture and, with the help of his wheeled dolly, he got the cabinet in line with the other one against the wall. Then he gave Starsky his un­divided attention. “I keep expecting you later in the morning after you’ve spent the night with Grace,” he said. “Tell me you’re not doing that usual hit-and-run thing of yours with her.”

“Would it piss you off if I was?”

“Yeah,” Hutch said sincerely. He had never judged Starsky before, and didn’t then, but he wanted Starsky to find love and reverting to Starsky’s old sexual propensities wouldn’t be healthy for him. “I want the best for you.”

“She’s the one who leaves,” Starsky explained. “She has to work. Re­member work? Remember that thing we used to do and that place we used to do it in?”

“Oh, yeah, that thing and that place,” Hutch said. He then told Star­sky he’d gotten his gun permit approved and planned to pick up a pistol that afternoon.

Starsky leaned back on his hands, but found it too painful for his arm, so he lowered himself instead to his elbow. “What more does a man need but a Magnum and a filing cabinet?”

Hutch shrugged to play along. Then he broke from his furniture arranging and sat on the desk next to Starsky, his hip to Starsky’s thigh, his knee to Starsky’s knee. He looked over the room and studied the layout as he tried to decide where to place the second desk. “So you’re not going to tell me, huh?” he asked after he abandoned his office design ideas. He patted Starsky’s leg as if he didn’t already have Starsky’s attention.

“Tell you what?” Starsky asked.

“If you got laid last night.”

“I don’t get laid anymore,” Starsky corrected him, “but I did make love, if that’s what you’re asking—like it’s any of your business.” His last crack was playful, spurred by embarrassment.

Hutch looked over his shoulder at him. “You’re my business—and good for you,” he said, sincerely. Starsky did appear more relaxed than usual—and contentedly resigned. “Welcome to the land of the living.”

“I also got married,” Starsky said factly.

Hutch took a second look at him. “You got married? No shit?”

“Nah. I was just testing your reaction.”

“Did I pass or fail?”

“It wasn’t what I expected.”

“What did you expect?”

“A lecture.”

“Why? because I was married once, long ago, and told you only morons get married?”

“Because I thought you’d tell me I’m not the marrying kind, that I haven’t known her long enough, that she’s too young for me.”

“Sounds like you’re trying to talk yourself out of something.”

Starsky hit Hutch’s arm. “I was prepared to talk you into seeing it my way and I had all your arguments cued up.”

Hutch snickered. “You think you know me.”

“I thought I knew me,” Starsky laughed. “Me, after all, thinking about getting married.”

“Yeah? You sincerely thinking about it?”

“I’m not ruling it out,” Starsky said on a second thought. “And it’s not like I just met her, you know?”

Hutch grinned at him. “That’s my boy. I figured if you spent any romantic time with her, she’d win you over.”

“So you know me better than I know myself.” He nudged Hutch with his knee. “But now I have a question for you.” He sat up on the edge of the desk, careful not to break physical contact with his partner.

Hutch was prepared for anything, though he sorely wished Starsky didn’t have more pain to purge.

“I was wondering,” Starsky said. He draped his forearm over Hutch’s shoulder and hugged him close as he pretended to formulate his thoughts. “Why would you sit right up next to me when you had the rest of the desk—and an entire other one—to sit on instead?” He knew the answer; he just liked to hear it.

It was apparent from Starsky’s tone and his physical affection that there’d be no purging that day; Starsky was in a playful mood, so Hutch turned his head toward him, briefly touched Starsky’s forehead with his own, and then, quite closely, he said, “Probably for the same reason you feel a need to hang on me like you’re doing right now.”

Starsky squeezed him. “Because I like ya?”

“Yeah, because you like me—and I like you.”

They shared a quiet laugh together—but it was short-lived because they heard a vehicle unexpectedly pull up outside.

“You get that,” Starsky said, trusting it was someone they knew by how casual the sound had been. “I’m going to call Grace; make sure she’s okay with last night.”

When Hutch eventually got to the porch, Wade Davis had just emerged from his car.

“I thought I was meeting you at headquarters,” Hutch said, confused. “What brings you out?”

Davis looked up at him from the bottom step. “Is Starsky here?” He noticed Starsky’s car in the driveway and assumed Starsky was still somewhere on the premise. “I need to see him.”

Hutch was suspicious of the change of plans and he didn’t like that he wasn’t greeted—or that Davis seemed visibly upset. “Why do you ‘need’ to see him?”

Davis finally stopped searching the area with his eyes and locked on Hutch. He hadn’t heard the question he’d been asked. “Can you get him for me? I need to see him.”

“You said that. Tell me why.”

Davis buried his hands in his pants pockets, shrugged, and strained to keep eye contact with Hutch. He couldn’t explain it—not even to himself. Then, as if pleading, he asked, “C’mon, would you mind?”

It was the tone of voice Davis used, his unusual demeanor, and that he’d driven all that way from the city when he already had a pre-arrang­ed appointment with Hutch, that made Hutch ask the begging question. “You watched the video, huh?” He knew the answer even before Davis nodded at him. “You want to see Starsky because you want to make sure he’s all right.”

“I know he’s all right,” Davis replied, frustrated with himself, “but, I can’t explain it. It’s like knowing it and seeing it …”

Hutch walked to the front door and called Starsky to the porch. Then he rejoined Davis at the top of the steps. “You’ll never shake those images. You can’t unsee what you saw.”

Davis knew he couldn’t. “I’ve never seen anything more repulsive in my life.” He mentally stared into the blankness of that frightening evidence.

Starsky opened the door after a couple of minutes and stepped onto the porch. He saw Hutch and Davis look firmly at him. “What’s up?”

Davis drew a calming breath. He looked Starsky over to check him for signs of injury. Though Starsky appeared not to have shaved that morning, Starsky at least looked healthy; no visible wounds, no far-away look in his eyes. He was as Davis remembered him last. It made Davis laugh at himself, at his silly need to lay eyes on Starsky, at his com­pul­sion to replace those haunting pictures in his mind with the reality of the moment. He avoided looking at either of them. “You know,” he said, “I have a friend who’s a veterinarian. She said that, no matter how vivid an imagination the human mind has, it can never really picture how grue­some and disturbing the inside of a slaughterhouse is.”

Starsky glanced at Hutch as if Hutch could silently decipher what Davis meant, but Hutch shrugged at him.

“I knew the video would be hard to look at,” Davis explained, “and I thought I was prepared to see what I would see, you know? I mean, I’ve seen videotaped violence before, even murder.” He finally made eye contact with Starsky again. “But I had no idea,” he said solemnly, to apologize to Starsky. “There’s no way to imagine something as sickening as what I saw done to you. Hutch was wise not to have watched that third tape.”

Starsky didn’t know whether to feel embarrassed or sorry.

“Had I known what I’d see,” Davis said, “I would have fought for your right to keep that video to yourself.”

It was an apology. Hutch and Starsky heard it underneath Davis’ words. But there wasn’t anything to say in reply—because the damage had been done. A silence hung in the air for a minute. Even Davis knew it was too little, too late, but it was all he had.

“I needed to see you,” he explained to Starsky, still visibly shaken by what he’d witnessed, “to reaffirm that you came out of it in one piece.”

Starsky nodded to say he understood what Davis told him, but he couldn’t give Davis a full pardon; there were pending arrests to be made and an upcoming trial yet to play out. There were more injuries on the horizon. “Well,” Starsky said, “I came out of it anyway.”

* * *

“Dennis Fisher?”

Hutch had ascended the porch behind Wade Davis at Fisher’s house, but he didn’t go near the door. He stood with his back to it, leaned against the porch post, exchanged a nod with the uniformed police officer who remained in the car, and then looked up the street from behind his sun­glasses. He wanted to hear Fisher’s voice before he saw him.

So it was Davis who asked the man who opened the door whether he was Dennis Fisher.

“Who’s asking?” came the curious reply. He couldn’t have sounded friendlier if he tried.

“Wade Davis. Special Agent, Internal Affairs, Los Angeles Police Depart­ment.” Davis flashed his badge and removed his sunglasses so he wouldn’t appear threatening—and he sounded as friendly. “Routine investigation,” he explained, though it was a lie. “I trust Rosemary told you one of our officers was seriously assaulted, abducted, and nearly killed.”

The man behind the screened door seemed unaware of such a thing, but he confirmed he was Dennis Fisher. “If she told me about it, it was too long ago to remember. Seems those kinds of assaults are common in our line of work, so how can I help ya?”

Hutch didn’t turn around; he wanted to see where the conversation would go before he got involved. And he couldn’t tell by voice alone whether Fisher was a prime suspect; he sounded too ordinary. The assail­ant on the video sounded much more, well, evil—and in an aroused state of violence. But Hutch couldn’t rule him out, either. If only they could get Fisher to laugh; Hutch would most certainly recognize that sound.

Davis was cordial. Downright personable. It made Hutch repress a smile because, as early as that morning, Davis had been beside himself with repulsion and guilt. He’d have made a better actor than a detective, and he was already a good cop at that.

Davis explained to Fisher that he was out of leads and reaching for straws, but he would leave no stone unturned before he abandoned the investigation. When Fisher asked Davis why he thought his case was so weak, Davis replied, “Because the victim won’t cooperate.”

Hutch casually looked across the street, though he felt all but non­chalant. He didn’t want his reaction to give anything away. There was truth to what Davis had said, but it wasn’t the reason Davis said it. Davis hoped to empower Fisher, to make him think his victim was so ashamed of what had happened to him—the way, perhaps, another of Fisher’s victims had been—that he wouldn’t help the police catch him. It was merely a ploy, but it seemed to work. Fisher told Davis he’d help him the best he could.

“We’ve already tested your wife’s DNA,” Davis reminded him. He figured Fisher knew that Rosemary had given a DNA sample to the police. “If you can believe that.”

Fisher chuckled. “She’s tough,” he said, “but not that tough. Besides, she loves the guys she works with.”

“But all these rules,” Davis muttered. “If we hadn’t tested her, we’d be brought up on sexual discrimination charges.” He acted as if he wished things were different, too, and then on its heels, he asked Fisher, “Would you mind donating a DNA sample? If you weren’t related to a police officer in the victim’s squad room, I wouldn’t ask, but we have to be as thorough as possible. We’ll have the results back by Friday, Mon­day at the latest. Would you mind?”

Hutch stared at the ground as he hung on the pause between Davis’ question and Fisher’s answer. Davis lied, of course. They’d have test results back in hours or at least by the next day. But Davis, he knew, tried to make Fisher as comfortable as possible. If Fisher declined to give a sample, he might appear as if he had something to hide; he was the husband of a police officer, after all, and a security patrol guard him­self. Davis also allowed Fisher a false time frame to strategize an escape if he did give a sample and feared it might link him to the crime; it would at least make Fisher think he didn’t have to flee in a hurry.

“Yeah, sure,” Fisher said. “I’d be more than happy to help.” He step­ped onto the porch as if he planned to say his goodbyes. “Do I make an appointment with you or call—”

“We’ll do it here and now,” Davis told him. He motioned for the cop in the patrol car to join him. “It’s a real simple test. Takes all of a min­ute.” Then he reminded Fisher of the time frame to keep him from bolt­ing even then. “We’ll get back to you Friday, like I said, or Monday. If you don’t hear from us by next Tuesday, call us or figure you’re in the clear.”

Hutch turned then to have a look at him. Whether Fisher recognized him didn’t matter; the suspect had agreed to give a DNA sample, and to change his mind then would mean two officers—and Hutch himself—would wrestle him to the ground, handcuff him and haul him off to jail on suspicion of attempted murder, kidnapping, assault, and forcible sod­omy.

They’d get their DNA sample one way or another.

Hutch continued to lean against the porch post and watched Fisher study the uniformed officer who approached him as he exchanged small talk with the Columbo-style manner of Wade Davis.

Fisher was overweight, of average height, and had a medium build—just like one of the men on the videocassettes. He also had means and access to David Starsky—by way of his law enforcement authority, his late night guard schedule in the warehouse district, and the occasional study of his victim in his wife’s squad room. Did he have motive?

“I already know I’m in the clear,” Fisher said with a snide laugh to Davis’ last comment.

And that was a sound Hutch recognized.

It was also at that moment that they made eye contact—and Hutch saw a flash of recognition and fear pass through Fisher’s eyes. The sus­pect was momentarily distracted when Davis explained to him how they would administer the test.

Hutch’s blood boiled. He wanted to lunge at Fisher and tear him apart limb by limb. Fisher recognized him and Fisher had hurt David Starsky. Hutch was as sure of it as that DNA sample would be. The only reason Hutch didn’t attack Fisher then was because he didn’t want to jeopardize an opportunity to seriously hurt him, something he couldn’t do in the presence of two police officers.

That, and he hoped he could punish the man in Starsky’s presence.

Davis saw the visual exchange between the two men and tried to control it before it escalated. “We appreciate you taking the time to help us out,” he told Fisher. “One more thing to cross off our list.”

Fisher suspected he’d been caught by Ken Hutchinson. He covered for it with a question he hoped sounded innocent. “Are you the guy they attacked?”

Hutch saw through the veil; it only made him want to hurt Fisher more than he already wanted to. But he bit his tongue with the hope he’d get a second chance to confront him. “By proxy,” Hutch said instead. “The victim is my partner.”

“Was he hurt badly?”

Davis worked quickly. With the aid of the uniformed cop, he was able to get into a pair of sterile gloves and the swab out of the plastic bag. He was about to answer Fisher’s question when Hutch beat him to it.

“Not as badly as I’m going to hurt the person who hurt him,” Hutch said. He gave Fisher a look he wished could have killed him. “But he’s all right overall,” he added on second thought when he noticed out of the corner of his eye that Davis had shot him a warning glance. He was thankful for the reprieve. “But my partner isn’t talking about the attacks, for some reason,” Hutch lied, “therefore, we don’t have any viable leads.”

Davis asked Fisher to open his mouth; he vigorously swabbed the inside of both his cheeks, then along each gum line, and finally under his tongue. Confident he had enough saliva for a valid sample, he rubbed the swab tip onto a sterile card and then put both the card and the swab into a small plastic bag. The cop sealed it for him and opened another kit. And then Davis repeated the procedure—to be doubly sure.

* * *

“So?”

Hutch pressed the receiver to his ear and honored Starsky’s question. “So I believe he’s one of them,” he said, relieved that Starsky had an­swered the farmhouse phone, so he could give him the news sooner than later. “I’ve never seen the fucker in my life—that I recall—but I knew that laugh when I heard it, and he sure as hell recognized me.”

“Did he cough up a sample?” came Starsky’s next question.

“He had no choice. It was either that or get hauled in—which I still think should have been the order of things. But Davis does it his way. He’s got to be more careful than we are.”

“Yeah, we would have skinned the guy by now.”

Hutch was as sure of his next statement as he hoped fate would allow. “We’re going to get an opportunity to do just that,” he said. “I’ll hold him down and you peel off his hide.”

* * *

Davis didn’t hesitate when the lab results came in that late afternoon. He drove straight to Fisher’s house. When Fisher opened the door that evening, he found himself looking down the barrel of a pistol aimed between his eyes.

“Step out of the house and get down on the ground,” Davis ordered him, “or give me a reason to shoot you in the face. Makes no difference to me.”

Fisher, dressed in his patrol officer uniform—but luckily, for Davis, sans his handgun—appeared shocked and alarmed and immediately did as he was told. He no sooner hit the ground when Davis jumped on him, pressed his knee into Fisher’s lower back, and—with a pistol still aimed at Fisher’s head—handcuffed him.

When Davis had Fisher secured, he lowered himself to Fisher’s ear. “How does it feel to be the one eating dirt, huh?” he growled. “You’re under arrest for the attempted murder, kidnapping, and assault on Detec­tive David Starsky. I’d read you your rights, scumbag, but I haven’t got time.” He pulled Fisher to his feet and roughly shoved him toward the unmarked police car. “I’ll tell you all about them, though,” he added, “on your way to prison.”

Davis opened the back door and pushed Fisher into the car.

Fisher protested. “Can I at least get my jacket?”

“Like I give a shit what you want,” Davis replied. He slammed the door closed. But he did go back into the house to retrieve the man’s car keys, his pistol, and his jacket—for alibi purposes only; Davis would locate Fisher’s patrol car later, if necessary. Then Davis drove them a couple of miles before he pulled over in a residential area. He placed a radio call from his car to Ken Hutchinson.

“I’ve got your man in custody,” he told Hutch. “I can take him in and book him or I can make a stop along the way. It’s up to you.”

* * *

Davis dragged Fisher out of the back of his car when the headlights emerged from the warehouse alley. Then he roughly shoved his captive toward them and kicked him in the back of his thigh, relatively hard. Still handcuffed, Fisher stumbled and helplessly fell to his knees in the gravel.

“You’re gonna like these odds,” Davis told him as the arriving car got closer. “Three-to-one seems to be your favorite.”

He wanted to kick Fisher in the back of his head and knock him all the way to the ground. He wanted to kick him into oblivion. But it wasn’t his place to dole the punishment, as badly as he wanted to. He waited with Fisher as the Gran Torino stopped within yards from them and Hutch and Starsky got out, closed their doors, and came forward. Starsky hadn’t turned off the headlights, so they brightly shone into Fisher’s eyes.

Fisher crouched in the gravel, his wrists handcuffed behind him, and bowed his head to avoid the intense beams.

Hutch carried a crowbar, the same one he’d used to break into the very warehouse in whose parking lot they then stood. He tapped it against his thigh and drew a deep breath as he stopped only feet from their groveling captive. Had he not taken that breath, he would have lost his cool and uncontrollably beat Fisher to death with the steel rod.

Starsky stopped beside Hutch and finally laid eyes on one of the men who’d attacked him—the fat one, the leader of the rape gang, dressed in a law enforcement uniform. Starsky tsk’ed at the irony. He glanced at Davis to silently thank him for enabling the rendezvous and then—not having spoken to Fisher since he’d been left to die—Starsky said his first few words to him. “Who’d have thought, underneath it all, that you were just a coward?”

Fisher didn’t move a muscle or even blink an eye.

“Can you get him to his feet?” Starsky asked Davis. “I want to see this guy face-to-face, figure out what makes him tough.”

“He ain’t tough,” Davis said. He applied enough pain and pressure to Fisher’s arm to force Fisher to stand.

“And, besides,” Hutch commented, “only superheroes are allowed to wear masks—and they don’t fuck the good guys.”

Starsky didn’t know what he expected, but he examined Fisher’s appearance as if a tell-tale sign of some sub- or non-human trait might ap­pear there. There was none. Fisher could have been anyone. He could have been a local bank clerk, or an auto mechanic, or the history teacher at a neighborhood high school, were he not wearing a guard’s uniform and badge. An otherwise thirty-something, overweight, clean-cut, aver­age-looking guy.

Starsky had always known that serial killers and serial rapists and cold-blooded murderers had no special appearances or manners, but to see it first-hand, from having been at the brunt of such violence, made it clearer to him. Dennis Fisher was simply an anybody—with a perver­sion—and one who couldn’t look his victim in the eye when confronted by him. That, Starsky then knew, was the mark of a coward. Not he, him­self, for looking over his shoulder the way he had in the weeks fol­lowing the attacks, for fear his assailants had re-found him. Cowardice lay in Fisher’s actions—and in his inaction when he faced the person he’d cruelly and viciously violated.

It pissed Starsky off that the man wouldn’t make eye contact with him, so he stepped up to Fisher and slapped his face as hard as he could. The sound echoed off the surrounding buildings. Fisher dropped his chin and refused to oblige Starsky, but it hadn’t stopped Starsky from thor­oughly enjoying the feel of the strike—and the insult he knew he’d deliv­ered.

“I can knock sense into him,” Hutch offered as he gripped the crow­bar tighter and savored the feel of the steel in his hand.

Starsky didn’t wait for Hutch’s discipline. He shoved Fisher with both fists, harder than he needed to, and the slam forced his former attacker backward. Fisher stumbled, lost his balance, though he panicked in an effort to keep it, and ungraciously landed on his butt in the gravel; the fall painfully twisted his bound wrists, knocked the breath out of him, and made him grimace with a deep groan as he fell hard against the ground.

Starsky stood over him. He had relished the look on Fisher’s face as Fisher fell backward; it was, at least, a reaction—and a fearful one at that. He felt vindicated even by the momentary panic he’d caused. He summoned enough saliva to spit on Fisher’s face—but then stopped himself at the last second and spit into the gravel beside Fisher’s head instead. In that moment of retaliation, Starsky had an epiphany. He surveyed the walls of the neighboring warehouses and laughed a disbe­liev­ing laugh with his realization. “You’re not even worth my spit,” he said.

Starsky glanced at Davis, who waited to help him severely beat Fisher, and Starsky felt Hutch’s presence to the left and behind him, and then he laid eyes on Fisher again; the look he got back was pure fear as Fisher anxiously anticipated Starsky’s impending retribution.

Starsky straightened. He backed away from Fisher and told Davis to get him to his feet again. He wanted Fisher to hear him. When Davis did as instructed, Starsky noted Fisher’s silent defensive posture as Fisher kept eye contact with his once-upon-a-time victim.

“I didn’t know what I’d do when I came face-to-face with you,” Star­sky admitted. He was unusually articulate—because his words came from that part of his heart that was desperate for healing. “I thought, if I at least laid eyes on you, I’d finally feel the rage and hostility that has been absent from me all this time … the kind of uncontrollable rage and pent-up hostility my partner here feels for you. I thought seeing you would trigger every fiber of my being into teaching you a lesson you’d never forget.”

He studied Fisher’s face again, its averageness, its nothingness, its benign-ness. “But then Hutch said something yesterday that’s preyed on my mind since. He said we couldn’t kill you enough to make up for what you’d done. We could kill you over and over and over again—in every way possible—and it wouldn’t be enough.”

Hutch remembered making that remark, but he didn’t realize till then just how profound it was.

“So, I got to thinking,” Starsky added, “and I realized that to feel any­thing for you is to give you more of me—and you’ve gotten all you’re going to get.”

Hutch was impressed by Starsky’s revelation. He understood it; it explained Starsky’s seeming nonchalance all those weeks whenever Hutch talked to him about killing his attackers. Starsky simply, even sub- or unconsciously, didn’t want to give Fisher or his cohorts more of his soul than he already had.

Davis heard him, too. He could wish Starsky would crack open the man’s head, but he was more appreciative that Starsky wanted to be done with those who’d hurt him, to move on with his life, something Davis wished for his sister, too.

“The funny thing is,” Starsky told Fisher, “the one thing you set out to smash, you only made stronger. Oh, you robbed me of a few days of my life, but when the smoke cleared and the dust settled, I found I was a stronger person for it.” He laughed at Fisher. “And this thing,” he said, gesturing to Hutch with both his head and his hand, “this brotherhood you tried to destroy—as if you could, as if you and yours, you and a team of anyones could or had that power—you only made better. Yeah,” he laughed again at Fisher’s failure, “you made this guy and me closer. Imagine that. We were steel-strong before; we’re invin­cible now. Your little plan backfired. The really bizarre thing is that we didn’t even know how solid we were till you pointed it out to us. What you gave us, the realization of that alone, is priceless. In other words, it was worth any price—including the one I paid.”

Hutch moved his eyes from Fisher to Starsky, to Starsky’s profile, and though they didn’t look at each other, he knew his partner felt the con­nection he sought. Hutch silently acknowledged his gratitude for Starsky’s profound revelation—and believed Starsky heard him.

Fisher finally looked away—and Starsky, and Hutch, too, knew then, for certain, that it had been Fisher’s plan all along to break David Starsky from Ken Hutchinson. Starsky was immensely satisfied when Fisher averted his eyes; he’d struck the nerve he hoped to hit.

“I got back more than you took,” Starsky told him. “That’s the beauty of it. You were just a means to an end—nothing more.”

Still, Hutch was disappointed. He wanted to cut Fisher to pieces.

Davis exhaled and pressed against his adrenalin. If David Starsky and Ken Hutchinson wouldn’t physically punish Dennis Fisher, he couldn’t, either. He had to let it go, too.

But Starsky had other plans. He looked over at Hutch, into his fierce blue eyes that night, flashed him a private smile, and then gestured with his head for Hutch to come closer—which Hutch did. Starsky embraced Hutch in a headlock and held him tightly while they eyed Fisher. “But what sort of friend would I be,” Starsky asked Fisher, “if I didn’t let this boy of mine do what he’s had his heart set on doing for two months now, hm? I’m done with you, but he isn’t. He’s been aching to beat the living shit out of you since the moment you decided to include him—which was the moment you took me. The moral of the story is: Don’t fuck his friends.”

Hutch met Fisher’s fearful stare with an intensely defiant one of his own. He didn’t bother to repress the satisfied smile that crossed his face, either, even though he was awkwardly and firmly held in the bend of Star­sky’s strong arm; Starsky gave him what he wanted and Hutch couldn’t get to the task fast enough.

Starsky let him loose, but when Hutch stepped toward Fisher, Starsky caught him by his elbow and grabbed his attention at the same time. Hutch silently pleaded with Starsky not to change his mind, especially at the last minute, but Starsky had no intention of recalling him. He simply wanted to validate the pain Hutch was about to deliver. “Make me proud, cowboy,” Starsky told him.

Hutch winked at him. “I promise you won’t be disappointed.”

* * *

“You have one hell of a mean streak, you know that?” Starsky noted.

Hutch laughed at him. “I had to make certain he couldn’t fuck any­one again.”

“I’m sure you succeeded, but how are we going to explain that? A broken nose, yeah, maybe, but how can we explain whatever you did to his dick?”

Hutch rode shotgun in Starsky’s car. His window was down and cool air tousled his hair. He liked its feel. They were on their way to Fisher’s house to get his patrol car after Davis had tossed Hutch a set of keys and told them to retrieve it and park it at the warehouse while Davis took Fisher to the hospital.

“This is where I arrested him,” Davis told them, as he outlined their alibi. “And this is where he resisted arrest, fled into that warehouse, and injured himself in a terrible fall. But you need to get his car here before his wife gets home and before the police need to verify my story.”

Night had fallen and Hutch was still pumped. He knew Starsky was worried about the damage he’d inflicted on Fisher or, more specifically, the kind of damage he’d done. “Can you just, for once in your life,” Hutch impatiently asked, “let something play out? Just let it play out.”

“You going to jail isn’t a game,” Starsky said. He kept his eyes on the road and struggled to squash his nervous stomach. Still, he hoped Hutch would make it all right, that Fisher had been seriously hurt and Hutch would stay a free man.

“Starsk, I’m not sorry for anything I did,” Hutch said, “and whatever price it comes with was worth it.”

In one fluid motion, and driven by his sincere disgust for Fisher, Hutch had walked right up to him and smacked him—using both hands—as hard as he could in the face with the crowbar. Every ear there heard the man’s jaw crack. Fisher dropped, hard, with a giant gash in his face, spewing blood. Hutch asked Davis to help him get the rapist to his feet so he could knock him down again and Davis obliged—while Starsky watched.

He had no intention of intervening.

Hutch shoved the injured and groaning Fisher against the side of the police car and got right in his bloodied face. “Every time you look in a mirror,” he angrily told Fisher, “and every time somebody asks you how you got that nasty scar on your face, you’re going to remember this”—and he swung the crowbar up as hard as he could between Fisher’s legs.

Twice.

Hutch played the fresh memory in his mind. Then he hit Starsky’s arm. “C’mon,” he coaxed him. “It was a misdemeanor assault—if that. I didn’t hurt him so bad. And I’m not a police officer, remember? They can’t get me on a felony charge of police brutality.”

“Conspiracy,” Starsky argued. He left the freeway for surface streets to Fisher’s house when Hutch instructed him to exit.

“They’d have to prove it,” Hutch claimed. “His word against ours. You’re overreacting. You’re scared—for me. It means you love me.”

“And if you gave a shit, you wouldn’t risk jail.”

“I’m not going to jail. Trust my hunch and get past your fear.”

Hutch’s hunches were usually accurate. Starsky didn’t want to feel anxious. He wanted to bask in the glory of the deliverance, the way Hutch did.

“I didn’t kill the motherfucker,” Hutch reminded him. “Give me cred­it for that, will ya?”

Starsky did give Hutch credit for it. He knew how badly Hutch wanted to kill Fisher—and how restrained Hutch had been, too, and that impressed Starsky because it wasn’t easy for Hutch to rein in such rage. A misdemeanor assault? Not likely. Hutch had seriously injured Fisher. The man would probably never have sex again. But there was, Starsky had to admit to himself, a certain satisfaction with that notion underneath his concern for Hutch.

“I’m not apologizing for what I did,” Hutch repeated. “That son-of-a­-bitch isn’t going to fuck anybody again—with or without their consent. So when you drop your head on that pillow tonight, you tell me: Are you really going to lose sleep over this?”

Starsky glanced at him and reluctantly surrendered his smile. He decided to trust Hutch so he could fully enjoy the payback. “Not a wink,” Starsky finally said. In fact, he might even have fond dreams about it. Forever.

* * *

“We’ve arrested Dennis Fisher and Wayne Nelson,” Captain Dobey told them, “but Fisher is in the hospital.”

“Whatever for?” Hutch asked, nonchalantly.

Dobey stared at him. He wasn’t certain what he believed because he trusted his own gut, too. “The perp needed emergency surgery—and I can’t help but think you know why, that you both know why.”

“Emergency surgery?” Hutch asked, and he actually sounded sur­prised, but he wasn’t. He sat in a chair next to Starsky across from Dobey’s desk. They’d been called in that morning for a briefing, even though Hutch was no longer an employed officer. He may as well have been, though, given his attachment, devotion, bond, connection, and anything else related to David Starsky. And Dobey trusted Hutch less to do the legal thing in that instance than he trusted Starsky, so he wanted Hutch there to look him in the eye.

“What happened?” Starsky asked. He tried to sound as innocent, but didn’t think he pulled it off as well as his partner had.

Dobey scowled at him. He hated being patronized. He imagined his two cops knew exactly what had happened and, further, that they were responsible for it. “The guy’s got a dislocated and broken jaw,” Dobey said. “A severe gash on his face, one that requires surgery. And one of his balls had to be removed; the other was partially salvaged. His dick was nearly severed, too.”

Hutch mocked a wince. “That’s gotta hurt.”

Dobey shot another glare at him. “This isn’t funny, pal.”

“I wasn’t laughing,” Hutch alleged. Not outwardly anyway.

Starsky hid his mouth behind a fist. He didn’t trust his ability to re­press a smile. He did laugh at Fisher, though he’d had plenty of glee the night before and most of that morning thinking about what Hutch had done to him, but right then he laughed at the way Hutch responded to his former captain. That amused him. He tried to divert Dobey’s suspicious anger at Hutch. “So how’d Fisher get hurt?”

Dobey glanced at both men, first the one and then the other, as if he could break their resolve somehow with a stare. It failed. “Davis said he caught up with Fisher—at the same warehouse where we found you—when the perp reported for duty. Fisher fled to a higher floor and acci­dentally impaled himself on a spiked rail during the pursuit. In trying to free himself, he fell face-first onto the concrete below.” Dobey waited for a reaction from his men, but none came. “I have a hunch I won’t find a ‘spiked rail’ anywhere in the area if I went looking.”

“Why would you say that, Cap?” Starsky asked, pretending to be con­cerned.

“You know why and you’d better come clean.”

Hutch and Starsky both knew they needed to confide in Dobey if they wanted any cooperation with the police. “I slapped him,” Starsky admitted, “and then I shoved him on his butt.”

“That was it?”

Together he and Hutch replied, “That was it.”

Dobey shifted his eyes to Hutch. He knew then where to direct his warning. “That deal we made with you doesn’t protect you from assault charges.”

“No doubt,” Hutch said.

Dobey appreciated their confessions, even as veiled as they were. He no longer felt patronized. But what did he presuppose anyway? If he gave it serious thought, and on occasion he had, he expected his men to kill the assailants under the circumstances. That they hadn’t murdered the one in their personal custody made him believe they weren’t out to kill anyone, but Dobey did want to protect them before they incriminated themselves on other charges.

“I’m going to give you boys an alibi on this one,” he said.

“Because you love us?” Starsky wondered.

“Because you deserve it,” Dobey said. “And we’ve got the second one in custody. But neither of you will not lay hands on that third one if you find him before we do, do you understand me?”

“I can arrest him, though, right, Cap?” Starsky asked.

“Yeah,” Dobey agreed, “but I’m going to put a uniform in the car with you till then.”

“Ah, now, Captain,” Hutch protested, “that sounds like you don’t trust us.”

Dobey pointed a finger at Starsky. “I trust you to keep this guy out of prison,” he warned him, meaning Hutch.

“I’m doing my best,” Starsky reminded him. “Trust me. I’m doing my best.”

* * *

Starsky walked into the interrogation room that morning prepared for a physical confrontation. There were police guards outside the door, and Hutch, Captain Dobey, Internal Affairs agents Wade Davis and Lewis Greene were on the other side of the two-way mirror, but he still felt it was he and he alone who faced Wayne Nelson.

He pulled out the chair across the table from Nelson and sat in it. He didn’t introduce himself—and he didn’t say a word. He sized up the thug, from his youthful appearance, average body build and height, his perturbed blue eyes and ruddy complexion. There wasn’t anything special about him. Nelson didn’t seem to possess evil super powers or have the ability to set the place on fire just from the angry look on his face. He was simply another street punk, the kind Starsky and Hutch had brought in by the dozens over the years, a low-life of a human being whose only redeeming virtue was how easily pegged he was as someone who’s life ambition was to see how much harm he could do to others to satisfy his lust for violence. He was a nondescript, a nobody, a nothing.

He looked at Starsky with a fierceness in his eyes. “You guys gonna let me outta here or what? I get a phone call, right?”

Starsky recognized the voice. He knew for certain that he sat across from the man who’d shoved him out of the chair that last night of his captivity and stomped on his arm till it broke. And, if Starsky wasn’t mistaken, Nelson’s pathetic defense was his angry offense; Nelson was the one who was powerless and he didn’t like it. It helped Starsky settle his own nerves.

“I believe a phone is being brought to you,” he lied. There would be no such thing, not then, anyway, but he wanted to stall Nelson, make him squirm a little longer. As soon as the offender asked for a lawyer, the interrogation would end, but Nelson hadn’t yet done that and, if Starsky knew certain criminal minds at all, the perp wouldn’t ask for one till he’d explored all his escape routes first.

“You married, Nelson?” Starsky asked.

“Who wants to know?” came the question to his question.

“Detective Bobby Crocker.”

Nelson studied Starsky for a moment; he apparently didn’t recognize the name from the television series, Kojak, because he didn’t react in any fashion. Nor did he recognize the face of the man he sat across from.

“Are you married?” Starsky asked again.

“No,” Nelson said.

“Girlfriend?”

“Yeah. What of it?”

“You like women, then, do ya?”

Nelson leaned back in his chair. He didn’t take his eyes off Starsky. “I like women,” he finally said.

“But you fuck men,” Starsky noted. He leaned his elbows on the table and raised an eyebrow at Nelson to solicit an answer. He could tell, by Nelson’s abrupt expression of concern, that he’d startled him. It occurred to Starsky only then that the police hadn’t yet charged Nelson with ‘forcibly sodomizing’ him—and Nelson was obviously alarmed to learn how close to his crimes one of them had come.

Starsky also realized that Nelson didn’t recognize him, despite all the clues he’d been given.

“I’m not into fucking men, no,” Nelson said. He nervously ran his fingers through his hair, but maintained his fiery-eyed charade in an effort to disarm the cop in front of him. “What’s this got to do with anything?”

“I guess they haven’t told you yet. The list of pending charges against you goes on for pages—and several of them are hate crimes, a number of them are sex crimes, and yet others are downright sick crimes.”

Nelson stared at him. “I didn’t fuck no men.”

“Not a one?”

“Never.”

It didn’t surprise Starsky that anyone capable of forcibly sodomizing someone would also lie about it. “And I suppose you didn’t kidnap a police officer, either, and beat the living shit out of him.”

Nelson summoned a certain hostility in his voice, as if it would make Starsky back down. “I think you’ve got me confused with somebody else.”

“The irony,” Starsky said with an insincere laugh, “is that you’ve got me confused with somebody else. Take a closer look, asshole. I’m the cop you abducted, assaulted, and raped.”

Nelson instantly sobered. He quickly searched Starsky’s clothes with his eyes to find the lie in them and reprieve himself from the reality that he’d come face-to-face with his victim—and didn’t know it.

“Is it coming back to you now?” Starsky flippantly asked. “You need to picture me stripped mostly naked, covered in blood, and blindfolded, hm? You didn’t give a shit who got grabbed or what he looked like; you just wanted in on the perversion. You’re the asshole who broke my arm because I wouldn’t suck your dick. Ring a bell now?”

Nelson knew that only the victim would have known such a detail—or anyone who’d watched the video. What man would admit to having been violated that way?

“But like that loser friend of yours, Dennis Fisher,” Starsky informed him, “we’ve got your DNA all over me and your actions on tape.”

“You won’t show that to anyone,” Nelson retaliated. That he sounded convinced of it confirmed for Starsky that his attackers figured all along that their crimes would remain a ‘private’ matter.

“I already have,” Starsky casually replied. “The videotapes are in police custody as we speak; they’ll be released to the prosecution at the time of trial. Do you really think I’d destroy that evidence because what’s on them says something about me?”

Nelson dropped his stare to the table. The fire had gone out of his eyes. His respiration also accelerated and he nervously swallowed. By the body language alone, Starsky would have known, beyond the con­firm­ation of the DNA, that Wayne Nelson was one of his attackers.

“Pretty scary, huh?” Starsky asked. “You can hold a guy prisoner for days, beat and fuck him till he’s blue in the face, leave him for dead in some rat-infested hell hole, and then completely not recognize him when you’re sitting only a couple of feet away.”

Nelson didn’t speak—and he wouldn’t look at Starsky, either.

“Now that says something about me,” Starsky said. “I must’ve cleaned up pretty good, don’t you think? Got my smile back. If you weren’t such a coward, you could look me in the eye now and see it for yourself.”

Nelson didn’t budge.

“Just as I figured,” Starsky said. “Underneath it all …”

They sat in silence for a minute. Starsky remembered that they were being watched and that Davis hoped he could get a third name out of the suspect. Starsky doubted that he could, but he’d at least try.

“For as long as I’ve been at this job,” he told Nelson, “I still expected I’d see evil incarnate when I laid eyes on you, but—like your buddies—you’re a nothing, a nobody, a punk.” He didn’t get a reaction, so he delivered his next provocative comment. “But I’ve also been at this job long enough to know that neither you or Fisher was the one who left a note at headquarters giving away my location the morning after you all left me for dead.”

Nelson shot a stare at Starsky and inadvertently gave him what he wanted.

“Yeah,” Starsky said, and he sounded disappointed for the guy, though he wasn’t, “one of you dropped off a note that morning and told them where to find me. You don’t think I’da been found any other way, do you? I mean, you guys had all the bases covered. But that third guy, the one we don’t have any DNA evidence on, and nothing telling in the video you took, well, he’ll have turned you in, and then he’s probably going to walk. And maybe he should. After all, unlike you and Fisher, he didn’t want to see me die.”

Of course, it was possible they had the third suspect’s DNA on the evidence Hutch had in his possession, but Starsky didn’t tip his hand.

Nelson panicked. “Suppose we cut a deal?” he offered.

“Suppose we do?”

“You know, I tell you who and where he is and you drop something against me or whatever.”

“I’ll run it by my superiors,” Starsky said.

He sat for another minute and looked at Nelson till the perp lowered his eyes. It was the attacker’s turn to be afraid; his turn to feel helpless; his turn to be held captive—except his incarceration would last a life­time.

Starsky stood. He was satisfied with the outcome, however which way it would go with a plea bargain. He had what he wanted: To look the man in the eye and have him not be able to look back.

For the second time since his abduction, Starsky was vindicated.

He had one more time to go.

* * *

Hutch squeezed Starsky’s arm when they met in the hallway outside the interrogation room and got the assuring nod he hoped for. They needed no words to convey the dialogue that passed between them—that Starsky believed he’d done the right thing and Hutch was proud of him for it.

They were interrupted only when Wade Davis joined them. He con­grat­ulated Starsky for what he knew must have been a difficult experi­ence and then excused himself to negotiate a plea, “the sooner the better,” but not before he learned what Starsky would agree to in a settlement.

“He gives us a name we can use,” Starsky reasoned, “and we give him possible parole in fifty years. I’d be happy with that. He’ll be in his seventies by then and I won’t give a shit.” Kidnapping a police officer in their state was a mandatory life sentence without possibility of parole. By giving Nelson the possibility, he might share information the police couldn’t get any other way.

Davis thought it was a fair trade, too. He left Starsky and Hutch in the hall and disappeared into Dobey’s office with his superior.

Starsky lightly punched Hutch in the arm, told him he wanted a few minutes alone with Grace before they left the station, but first dragged Hutch as far as Grace’s office door. He was glad he’d taken Hutch with him because her door was shut when he got there; her IN SESSION plaque was in plain view. He and Hutch then walked across the busy hall to the vending machine to wait there. At least, Starsky wouldn’t wait alone. Or be hungry.

He faced the candy display and eyed the colorful packaging of the items for sale with a desire he hadn’t felt in a while. “Don’t suppose you’ve got some change on ya.”

Hutch checked his pockets. “Don’t suppose I do.”

“You’re bullshitting me,” Starsky decided. He accused Hutch of the wrongdoing with an annoyed glare.

Hutch opened his arms and offered himself. “Would you like to check my pockets yourself?”

The two of them busted up laughing at the mental picture they drew together, one where Starsky rifled through Hutch’s pants pockets, the fronts and the backs.

A familiar but nameless face passed in the hall and, with a smile, commented, “Must have been funny.”

“Only to us, I’m sure,” Hutch noted.

Starsky didn’t stop laughing.

“And especially funny to you, for some reason,” Hutch said to him.

Starsky composed himself, but didn’t lose his smile. “Context, I guess. It’s a wee bit different than yours.”

That it was, Hutch silently agreed. He figured Starsky needed the release, given what he’d just endured—having sat face-to-face with a man who’d viciously attacked him. So he made certain not to break Starsky’s smile and pulled a couple of quarters out of his pants pocket. He held them up for Starsky to see.

“You bastard,” Starsky retaliated. He grabbed the coins out of Hutch’s fingers before Hutch could take them back. “Just when I believe you love me,” he said, “you pull this shit.”

“You’re looking at it all wrong,” Hutch said. “That I gave up my last two quarters for you proves I love you.”

And as he said that, another passerby overheard them and—given that Hutch’s last audible words were “I love you”—it made the two of them laugh out loud again.

“Get your candy,” Hutch advised him, “and let’s get out of here before we lose our cool in a laughing jag and make bigger fools of our­selves than we already have.”

* * *

There was something contentedly familiar about working alongside Hutch in the line of duty that Starsky had forgotten. But the ease with which they wordlessly communicated on that late spring afternoon in that quiet neighborhood not too far from a jammed freeway was over­shadowed by the significance of the suspect in question. Unlike the other two men who’d attacked Starsky, the one they’d just cornered was the one Starsky had been personally and officially assigned to arrest and bring to justice.

Captain Dobey had sent Starsky—along with Wade Davis and uni­formed Officer Ryan Rice, the latter in a marked police car—to hunt down the third accomplice, from plea-bargain information Nelson had given them, and arrest him on felony charges of attempted murder, kidnapping, and assault. Starsky wasn’t about to go without Hutch, how­ever, and though his partner didn’t operate in an official capacity, he was the only one Starsky trusted his life to on his first venture into law enforce­ment work since the attack. As Starsky drove behind the police car to the residence, he did it with Hutch, the only person in the world he trusted his life to—period.

Hutch didn’t carry a badge, but he felt no less an employed officer of the law than he had for the past decade. He quickly left Starsky’s car upon their arrival, drew his new pistol—a Beretta this time—and posi­tioned himself on the southern edge of the house. Starsky drew his own weapon and staked out its north corner. Neither of them had discussed the strategy; it was simply one they’d used over the years. It was second nature. Davis and Rice could tackle the rapist should he emerge onto the porch, but Starsky and Hutch were prepared to do both: Help nab him at the front of the house or bolt to the back to cut off the assailant’s escape in case he tried to flee.

Davis was disappointed to find a security screen door between himself and the suspect, but relieved and impressed to see where Starsky and Hutch had positioned themselves. No doubt the veteran cops knew what they were doing—and had done it together for a long time, but Davis would have to rely on his own personal talent to get the perp out of the house—or to at least allow the cops inside it.

Davis rang the doorbell. They waited. He flashed a disappointed glance at Rice who shrugged at him. He rang the doorbell again. It was only then that Davis noticed one of the front windows was open because he heard movement inside the house and much closer than he expected. He probably could have snapped off the window screen and plucked the perp from his reading chair had he been more cognizant.

The front door finally opened, but neither Davis nor Rice could tell who greeted them; the fine mesh of the security screen made it impos­sible to see anyone behind it. But the male voice was distinct and direct. “What can I do for you?”

“Wade Davis,” Davis introduced himself. He opened his wallet and showed his badge. “Special Agent, Internal Affairs, Los Angeles Police Department. I’m looking for Doug Grossman.” He was certain the homeowner couldn’t miss the uniformed cop beside him. “This is Offi­cer Ryan Rice,” he added as he pocketed his badge. “Are you Doug?”

A momentary silence hung in the air, and then the man replied, “I figured you guys would show up sooner or later.”

Starsky recognized the voice, even from that distance. It was one of three he’d never forget if he heard them again. Its familiarity triggered a fleeting apprehension in him when he flashed on memories of that cold tiled floor and the utter aloneness he felt during those long, lonely, frightening nights. He glanced at Hutch and discovered that his partner watched him. Hutch lifted his chin to solicit a wordless explanation for the apparent look of alarm on Starsky’s face. When Starsky nodded, Hutch knew they’d found their suspect.

“You were expecting us?” Davis asked the man.

“Long ago,” came the reply.

“So you’re Doug Grossman?”

The answer was somewhat subdued, seemingly reluctant, and yet resigned at the same time. “Yeah.”

Starsky nervously looked at Hutch again and got back a single nod that told him Grossman would soon be in custody and the ordeal of the manhunt would be over. Starsky appreciated Hutch’s confidence; it boosted his own.

“Then you know why we’re here?” Davis asked Grossman.

“It wasn’t my idea,” Grossman explained. He sounded contrite.

“Can you step onto the porch?”

“It was Dennis’ idea. I mean, I barely knew him, you know? Sort of a friend of a friend of a friend kind of thing. But he found out I worked for Allegiance Title and, I don’t know, talked his way in, I guess.”

“You lost your job there,” Davis noted. He didn’t think Grossman would cooperate unless he felt he spoke to a kindred spirit, so Davis used what he’d learned about Grossman to bridge the chasm. “Was that because you were gone so long on that fishing trip? Did they fire you for that?”

“Oh, I wasn’t on that fishing trip but a week,” Grossman explained. “I had to get back to work. Nah … I lost my job because … well, I just can’t sleep at night, you know?”

“Why don’t you come out on the porch and let’s talk out here? I can’t see you behind this door.”

“Besides,” Grossman clarified, “I broke some pretty serious rules, you know, when I gave Dennis information about a homeowner that wasn’t mine to give—or his to have.”

Davis could feel the rapist’s presence right at his fingertips and yet he couldn’t reach him. “Why’d you do it then?”

There was a pause, as if Grossman contemplated the question or because he realized he’d said too much. But then he replied, “I don’t know. Dennis and Wayne seemed like they had a legitimate beef. Dennis said some cop was harassing his wife. You know she’s a police officer, right? He said the police wouldn’t do anything to the police, that this cop was getting away with murder, you know? so Dennis had to inter­vene.”

Starsky exchanged glances again with Hutch. They both knew, from Grossman’s weak demeanor, that he had dropped the handwritten note at headquarters that Wednesday morning to tell the police where to find Starsky—and the assailant was now on the verge of a breakdown. Nei­ther he nor Hutch trusted that Grossman wouldn’t try to hurt someone or even himself—and hoped Davis was as keenly tuned.

“Are you armed, Doug?” Davis asked, right on cue.

“No, man. I mean, I’ve got a gun, but not on me, no.”

“Are you alone in the house?”

“Yeah.”

“Where’s your girlfriend?”

“She left.”

“To where?”

“She left left. She can’t live with me any more than I can live with me. I didn’t set out to do that to that cop, you know? It just sort of hap­pened, though I think they had it planned all along. Things really got out of hand and I was caught up in it. It made me sick and yet I couldn’t stop myself. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

Davis turned the handle on the screen door and found it expectedly locked. “C’mon and open the door,” he encouraged Grossman. “Come out and talk to me about it. Let’s put it in perspective.”

“I didn’t think I had such a thing in me,” Grossman explained. “That was some pretty sick shit, don’t you think? That’s how you fuck up a human being, you know? Maybe I should have let him die. Maybe he’d be better for it.”

“I think he’s glad he’s alive,” Davis said.

“You seen him?”

“I’ve seen him a lot lately. He’s doing all right.”

“So that’s the irony,” Grossman noted. “We thought we were fucking him up and what we did only fucked me up.”

“We can talk about it if you’ll open the door.”

“And Dennis and Wayne? Have you seen them, too?”

“They’re in custody,” Davis explained. “They’ll make amends by serving time for their crimes. You could do the same. All you have to do is open the door.”

“Someone should shoot those guys,” Grossman argued. “They’d done that sort of thing before, you know. They’ve made it a hobby—like golfing.”

Starsky looked sharply at Hutch who shook his head in empathetic disgust. Starsky was impatient to get his attacker into handcuffs, but Davis wasn’t having any success getting the door open. Starsky looked along the side of the house toward its rear. He could only see as far as the backyard fence, despite the opened gate. There was a closed window, but nothing else, it seemed, through which he could get easy access to the house interior without possibly having to break in. He motioned to Hutch to check his side, and got back a scrunched facial gesture after Hutch scouted the alleyway with his eyes.

It was at that moment that Grossman changed the dynamic. Without a word, he closed the front door.

Davis called to him a couple of times while Starsky and Hutch bolted for the backyard. Starsky went through the gate, but Hutch had to climb the fence. He got to the rear of the house only seconds after Starsky did, and the two of them pressed their backs to their respective outside corners, guns at the ready in both hands, while they waited for Grossman to emerge from a window or the sliding glass door that opened onto the patio.

But Grossman never appeared.

They heard him inside the room nearest Starsky. The screened win­dow was open and Grossman’s voice was close and audible. “It wasn’t my idea,” he said, as if he spoke to someone in the room with him, but it became apparent that he simply muttered to himself because he repeat­ed several times, almost crying, that it wasn’t his idea to “attack the cop” and that he “never meant to hurt anyone.”

“Doug?” Starsky yelled out. He was sure Grossman heard him; he stopped talking at the sound of Starsky’s voice and the scene grew eerily quiet. “Doug?” Starsky called again. “It’s me. Detective David Starsky.”

“Oh, Jesus,” came the audible reply.

Hutch noticed that the window beside him was also open. He grasped the tabs on its screen and popped it off.

“Things aren’t as bad as you think,” Starsky told Grossman. “Come on out and let’s talk to each other, okay?”

“Oh, man,” Grossman plaintively said. “Oh, Jesus. I can’t—”

“Just you and me. Let’s talk. Help each other.” Starsky wasn’t sincere for a second. He simply wanted Grossman on the ground with his cuffed hands behind his back and Starsky would say anything to get him there.

“I can’t sleep anymore,” Grossman complained. “I can’t live with myself.”

While Starsky kept Grossman talking so they could keep tabs on his whereabouts, Hutch started to climb into the window. But, suddenly, a gun fired inside the house, a startling and loud crack of a sound, one familiar to Starsky and Hutch, for they’d heard plenty of them over the years. This one was followed by the weighted sound of a heavy object as it hit a hardwood floor.

And then silence.

“Doug?”

Officer Rice quickly arrived on the scene with his gun drawn. He was relieved to see the two unharmed cops as he sized up the situation.

Starsky called Grossman again, but there was no answer.

“I think he shot himself,” Hutch said in a low voice. He had felt Grossman was headed in that direction, so it didn’t surprise him. Neither he nor Starsky took suicides lightly, but this one wasn’t a tragedy to them, though it disappointed Starsky for personal reasons. He wanted to look the man in the face, so he called him again and got a similar silent result.

Hutch looked into the house through the opened window. It appeared empty. Then he motioned to Starsky that he was going in, but Starsky cut him off. “Don’t,” he said firmly. “Stay out of there.”

“You cover me,” Hutch said.

“I said don’t.”

Hutch didn’t understand. Normally, he’d have gone after the bad guy without any hesitation on Starsky’s part. Was it because he was no longer a police officer and Starsky pulled rank? Or was Starsky especially afraid for Hutch in that instance, given the suspect in question? Hutch an­swered his own questions and then quietly told Starsky, “He’s already hurt me once.” The original injury had been purely emotional. “It’s not like he can do me any more damage than any other low-life we’re after. And you know how badly I want this guy.”

Starsky didn’t want to explain it. He trusted Hutch’s skill, appreciated Hutch’s need for payback, but Starsky didn’t want to see this particular ‘low-life’ cause them ‘any more damage’ than he already had. Starsky glanced at Rice. “You tell him.”

“Stay out of the house, Hutch,” Rice warned him.

Hutch didn’t have the authority to outrank a uniformed officer, either. He glared at Starsky, but he could tell it didn’t have any weight with his partner. Starsky didn’t want Hutch in the house, so Hutch wouldn’t go in. It was as simple as that.

Rice climbed through the window instead while Hutch and Starsky covered him. They heard his boots on the hardwood floor as he carefully entered the back bedroom, the one Grossman had retreated to, the one closest to Starsky’s position.

“He’s dead,” came the eventual announcement through the window. “He shot himself square in the head. Nobody could live through that.”

Starsky dropped his arm to his side and tapped his handgun against his leg. He wasn’t sorry Grossman was dead, but he was terribly dis­appointed.

“We don’t need him,” Hutch told Starsky as he walked over to him; he’d read Starsky’s mind. “I know you wanted to confront him, but he’s not going to make or break this case—or your recovery.”

Starsky knew Hutch was right; it was purely an emotional thing.

Rice opened the sliding glass door for them and, as Hutch and Star­sky entered the house, he went to the front to give Davis entry. In the distance, they heard the wail of sirens as additional police closed in on the scene.

Starsky made his way to the back bedroom; Hutch followed. The house seemed as quaint on the inside as the out, homey enough for a young couple who planned a bright future together. Who’d have guessed such corruption lay within its walls?

Grossman was on his back on the floor beside a double bed, dressed in jeans and a shirt. A pool of blood cradled his head and a pistol lay at his feet. Starsky entered the room, approached the body, and carefully stepped over it so he could get a look at Grossman’s face. He could at least put that much to rest.

Doug Grossman was not all that different in appearance from his crim­inally minded cohorts. He was of average build and height with sandy blond hair and blue eyes—now sightless. Maybe, unlike the other two, one could even say he was an attractive young male in his early thirties. He’d had a good job, a woman who loved him, a house in a quiet neighborhood, and yet something inside him fell prey to his own dark urges. Starsky laid eyes on the third of three men who’d violently abducted him from his home, wrestled him into their vehicle in the middle of a cold, late winter’s night, hauled him to some forsaken no-man’s-land of a building, and viciously and sadistically beat, broken, and raped him.

It wasn’t enough that Grossman was dead. Starsky wanted a face-to-face confrontation, to see in the man’s eyes that obvious, or even subtle, submissive shame for what he’d done. Starsky understood why victims often wanted to confront their attackers; they wanted—or, rather, needed—apologies. Redemption came in the form of the words themselves: “I’m sorry.” Sometimes it came in the averting of the eyes, the inability to look into the face of those they’d so gravely harmed. And maybe, some­how, on that late afternoon, it came by way of a self-inflicted bullet to the head.

Starsky lifted his eyes to Hutch’s—whom he’d left leaning on the door frame. Davis had arrived and stood silently beside him. They ex­changed eye contact, but it was to Hutch Starsky directed his question. “It takes more courage to live than it does to die, doesn’t it?” he asked.

Hutch knew what Starsky reached for and he handed it to him in one word. “Absolutely,” he said.

The coward had died. The courageous one was still alive.

* * *

“Adam Love?” Starsky was almost certain he had the right person because Adam, from his more effeminate manner, even through the screen door, was obviously gay—and extremely anxious about who Star­sky was and why he was there at all. “I’m Detective David Starsky,” he quickly said. He showed his badge and gave Adam a minute to study it. “I’m here with my partner, Ken Hutchinson.” He pointed to the red-and-white Torino parked along the curb. Hutch waited in the passenger seat; he had rolled down the window, rested his forearm on its frame, and planned to stay a while.

“That’s not a police car,” Adam noted.

“It’s my car,” Starsky explained. “I’m off duty. I’d be more than happy to wait while you call the police station to verify my facts. They’ll describe the car and the two of us to a tee for you.”

Adam studied Starsky and the car and the other man who sat in it. “Can you tell me what this is about?”

“If you’re Adam Lovwell—a.k.a. Adam Love—I want to talk to you about Dennis Fisher and Wayne Nelson.”

Even before Adam confirmed who he was, he gave himself away when he told Starsky, “I’ve said all I care to say about them, Officer.”

Starsky could tell by Adam’s shaky voice and his guarded body language that Starsky had made him uncomfortable—and that was the last thing Starsky wanted. “The men are in custody,” he explained. “They’ve been arrested for attempted murder, felony kidnapping, and assault on a police officer.”

“I heard about that,” Adam shamedly mumbled.

“Nelson has already plea-bargained and Fisher may plead guilty,” Starsky added, “given that we have their matching DNA locked up—so these guys aren’t ever getting out of prison. Kidnapping a police officer in this state is a mandatory life sentence without parole.”

Adam quietly gasped from sheer relief to learn that his attackers were forever in prison. “I’ve prayed they’d get caught someday,” he said, his voice full of emotion. “I’m sorry they had to hurt somebody else, but I’ve been looking over my shoulder ever since they attacked me. My life hasn’t been the same. I wasn’t strong enough to confront them when I could have.”

Starsky didn’t judge.

“Is that what you came to tell me, Officer? that they’re off the streets for good?”

“Partly, I guess. Can we talk for a minute?”

“What’s the purpose of talking to you if you already have their confessions?”

Starsky knew if he wanted the conversation he hoped for with Adam that it had to begin with the truth. Yet he stood on the porch and hesitated. He’d driven all those miles on busy freeways to reach Adam’s door, to talk to him about the experience they may have had in common, but then couldn’t bring himself to utter a word about it, not even to another man who’d endured similar abuse in those same hands.

He looked back to the car to get his strength from Hutch.

But Hutch dozed; he didn’t hear Starsky’s silent call.

Starsky swallowed his pride and made eye contact again with Adam. Love wasn’t a small man, but he seemed somewhat physically vul­ner­able, not the kind of man Starsky was used to dealing with. Gay men had never made him uncomfortable, but then he’d never talked as personally to one—as he was about to with Adam. “I’m not here on official busi­ness,” he reiterated. He noticed the sincere concern in Adam’s brown eyes; they conveyed an innocence, too, one that defied his age of a late-forties, publicly comfortable radio disk jockey in an open relationship with another man. Starsky braved it. “I’m the cop Fisher and Nelson are charged with kidnapping.”

Adam was stunned and empathetic at once. He looked at Starsky more closely in search of truth and believed he found it in Starsky’s quiet demeanor and laid-back posture, in Starsky’s subdued voice and the awkward way in which he fessed up to his reason for contacting him. Then Adam called over his shoulder to tell his boyfriend he would sit outside for a while, before he opened the screened door, closed the front door, and joined Starsky on the porch.

Adam squeezed Starsky’s elbow and then gently rubbed his arm. It wasn’t an overture and Starsky didn’t assume it was. It was Adam’s effort to comfort him, to let Starsky know—if Starsky had suffered any­thing like Adam had at Fisher’s hands—that he understood why Starsky had found his way to his door.

He pulled up a lawn chair and sat in it while Starsky leaned his butt against the porch rail. “You’re saying Fisher and Nelson are in prison—as we speak—because they kidnapped, assaulted, and tried to kill a police officer … who happens to be you?” Adam asked. “Is that what you’re telling me?”

Starsky removed his sunglasses so he wouldn’t be as intimidating as he feared and tucked them into his shirt pocket. He looked Adam in the eye. “That’s what I’m saying.”

He noticed that Adam wore sandals, knee-length shorts, and a tee-shirt, that he sat forward in the chair with his arms crossed over his knees, and he looked at Starsky with an expression that seemed to convey he had a million questions and didn’t know which to ask first.

“We learned late in the investigation,” Starsky continued, “that you accused Fisher and Nelson of assault about a year-and-a-half ago, but then dropped the charges four days later. Can you tell me why you did that?”

“Fisher called me at the radio station,” Adam said factly. “He threat­ened to hurt my boyfriend ‘likewise’ if I didn’t ‘back off.’ Kyle doesn’t even know what really happened to me, so for that reason, and because I believe Fisher would have carried through on his threat and hurt Kyle, I recanted.”

“Fisher called you at the radio station after he assaulted you?”

“They don’t make assholes bigger than him.”

Probably not, Starsky thought. And Adam Love would know, too. That was the thing: He and Adam shared a similar violence. Or did they? That’s what Starsky wanted to know, yet he didn’t feel comfortable asking.

But Adam inadvertently opened the conversation when he nodded at the car and asked Starsky if the man in it was his boyfriend.

“We’re not gay,” Starsky said.

Adam locked eyes with Starsky and straightened. “Then why did those guys attack you? Or, are you saying they attacked you, you know, beat you up kind of thing? Maybe I’ve misunderstood all this.”

“I think they thought we’re gay,” Starsky explained, “and I don’t think you’ve misunderstood anything.” He didn’t know any other way to say it than that way, but he could tell he and Adam had another thing in common: They wanted clarity, not vagueness. Starsky was the cop. He was the one who’d come to Adam’s door. It was up to him to take the first step. “There were three of them in my case,” he said. “The third shot himself yesterday as we closed in on him. About two months ago, they grabbed me from my house late one night and held me for a few days.” He heard the songbirds then and felt the quiet of a beautiful morn­ing. He was also keenly aware of Hutch’s presence not too far from him and that Adam intently listened.

But still he couldn’t bring himself to actually say it. So he found a ‘roundabout’ way, the kind of technique Hutch would have suggested he use. “Fisher and Nelson are facing charges of attempted murder, felony kidnapping, assault and battery, false imprisonment, and forcible sod­o­my—to name the highlights.”

Adam didn’t miss that last charge; he resettled into his earlier posture, but didn’t leave eye contact with Starsky. “You were raped,” he con­cluded.

“By the men who raped you,” Starsky said.

Their steady eye contact confirmed the truth.

“Why would they think you guys are gay if you’re not?” Adam asked.

“We’re comfortable with each other, I guess. We put our hands on each other in ways that make some people think we’re, you know—” He almost said “queer” but then caught himself.

The self-interruption made Adam laugh quietly at him. “Fags?” he asked.

“I wasn’t going to use that word,” Starsky said. “I was going to use the ‘q’ word, but that was offensive, too.”

“It would be all right if you did.” Adam wasn’t easily offended by words; it was actions that haunted him. “But I get your point. Your partner and you are a little too cozy for the comfort of others.”

“Now those are words I’ll use,” Starsky sadly laughed. “‘A little too cozy for the comfort of others’.”

Adam studied Hutch as he dozed inside the opened car window. “Does your friend know what happened to you?”

“He even saw what happened to me,” Starsky explained. “They filmed what they did and sent him the video.”

Adam leveled Starsky’s gaze. “Sick fucks,” he said under his breath. “I don’t understand that kind of hate.” Then he looked at Starsky for a minute. “What did you hope to gain by telling me?”

“I don’t know.”

“What is it he’s not giving you?” Adam asked, meaning Hutch.

It was a surprising question. “I can’t imagine what he’s not,” Starsky said. “I’m standing here today because of the power he gives me. Maybe it’s as simple as the fact that he’s a witness, and you, well, you’re a victim of such a crime. And, yeah, I could talk to female rape victims and get something from that, but I don’t think it would be the same.” It wasn’t completely the same even with Grace. He didn’t think anyone but a male rape victim would fully understand the complicated nature of his feelings.

“I’m gay, sweetie,” Adam said. He tried a smile to let Starsky know he played with him to make his point. “How could you possibly relate to me?”

“Because I thought there might be something to talking to a guy who’s ‘been there,’ but I don’t know, man.” Starsky pushed off the porch rail and stood a moment to stare into the grassy lawn as he searched his mind for answers. “I can talk to my partner easier than I can talk to anybody, so I don’t know what I want from you.” He felt he’d made a mis­take, and bit his lip to stall his unexpected hurt—caused by his disappointment. “I should have let sleeping dogs lie. I don’t know why I came—”

“Don’t leave,” Adam begged him. “You’ve talked to him about what happened to you, but I’ve never talked to anyone about what happened to me. Stay a minute longer. Maybe we can find something to help each other if we discuss it for a bit.”

He then told Starsky in vivid detail everything he remembered about his own abduction, from being snatched outside his work in the early morning hours and dragged to their desert campsite, from the repeated beatings and rapes to his frightening abandonment in a hostile land. There was a manhunt that lasted the following afternoon because someone noticed Adam’s car in the parking lot—and that it was there long before he was scheduled to go on the air. And all he could tell Kyle was that it was a hate crime, a ‘gay bashing.’ Even the charges he filed didn’t contain the words ‘forcible sodomy.’

“You’re brave,” he told Starsky. “I’m sick to think the attack on you lasted three times as long—on top of which you’re not gay, that you’re a police officer, and that the entire world is going to now know your business …”

Starsky sadly laughed again. “That about sums it up.”

“And I suppose you think—because I practice that other kind of sodomy, the non-forcible kind—that what happened to me wasn’t as foreign an experience as—”

“I don’t think that,” Starsky countered him. “That’d be like saying women aren’t as traumatized because theirs is a ‘familiar experience.’”

Adam appreciated Starsky’s reply. “Then you must know that I know how absolutely shocked and mortified you were to be violated that way.”

Starsky replayed the events of his own ordeal through his mind and imagined Adam’s experience at the same time. Alone in the desert with two men who repeatedly and viciously attacked him, not knowing whether he’d live or die, and then being left for dead in the middle of nowhere. “Yeah,” Starsky said. “I know you know how I feel.”

“Do you want to tell me what they did to you?”

Starsky gave him as many details as he could remember and saw tears of genuine empathy in Adam’s eyes. Then Starsky stared at the porch boards and wondered if he’d done the right thing to tell Adam about what he’d been through. He didn’t really know the man after all. He only knew they had something gravely in common.

Adam silently cried for a minute until Starsky broke the strain. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

Adam looked at him. “You know what I keep thinking?” He wiped his eyes with his hands. “Had I gone through with my complaint against those men, you wouldn’t be standing here now.”

Starsky had to catch his hurt that time before it made him cry. He looked at his car and noticed Hutch from the corner of his eye. The reminder gave him the strength he needed to arrest his reaction. “I used to kick ass to get women to name their attackers,” he admitted. “Then this happened to me, and, you know? Despite what you just said, I can’t imagine myself ever pushing another human being into such a thing again. My partner and me, we worked hard to keep it from going public, to going to trial, but it’s out of our hands and that makes me feel … helpless still. Don’t think for a second that I’d have done what you did—or what you didn’t do—any different.”

“That’s not good enough,” Adam argued. “The fact remains. Had I the courage to pursue them, you would not have gone through what you did.”

“Water under the bridge.”

Adam wouldn’t settle for it. “I will make amends.” He seized an idea. “I think you’ve given my life a purpose.”

“How so?”

“I’m going to tell my story—on the air. Maybe there are other Adams and Davids out there who need a voice. Maybe it’s time we broke the silence on man-on-man rape.” He wiped his eyes further and tried a smile. “I know me. This will only fester if I don’t do something to make up for it. Besides,” he lightly noted, “it’s time I stopped living the lie, don’t you think, David? I’ve been out of the closet for decades. No sense in hiding in one over this, either.”

Starsky sensed a friendship brewing. “Call me Starsky.”

He then told Adam about the organization Grace and another woman founded and recommended that they attend one of their events to open that ‘closet’ door.

Adam liked the idea. “And if Kyle freaks,” he said, “then so be it. He either accepts all that happened to me and it that wasn’t my fault or he doesn’t.” He looked at Hutch in Starsky’s car. “Would you mind too much if I said hello to him? I’ve never met two straight guys who love each other more than most of the gay men I know.”

“We’re the lucky ones,” Starsky agreed with a sentimental laugh. He then whistled, got Hutch’s attention, and motioned to Hutch to join them on the porch. As Hutch approached the house, Starsky watched Adam watch Hutch, and felt guilty about setting his partner up for a look-over. Adam did seem pleased to lay eyes on a good-looking man, but then he glanced at Starsky and said, “He’s definitely straight.”

Starsky laughed, that time amused. “How can you tell?”

“The way he looked at my neighbor on his way up here.”

Starsky glanced over his shoulder and saw a young woman watering flowers in the yard next door. He watched her for a second and then looked at Adam as Hutch came up the steps.

“You, too,” Adam noted. “It’s all about the girls, isn’t it?” he teased. “Those large mounds they have in the front sure put you boys in a hurtful way, don’t they?”

Starsky winked at him. Then he introduced Hutch to Adam and they shook hands.

“I wanted to meet his best friend,” Adam told Hutch. “I’m jealous.” His comment made them laugh with embarrassment. “That’s my big fat radio mouth talking anyway. It’s what got me in trouble with those sick fucks in the first place. Can’t seem to help myself.”

“Everyone’s responsible for their own actions,” Hutch reminded both of them. “There’s no comparison—and no accountability on your part for what they did. That’s the thing. Nothing you did—nothing you said—justified what happened to you. To either of you.”

Adam sobered and held eye contact with Starsky. “Do you believe that, too?” He glanced at Hutch. “The both of you? Do you believe you’re innocent?”

“We believe it,” Starsky answered.

“But are you still a little too cozy for the comfort of others?” Adam asked.

“And proud of it,” Hutch said.

Adam was envious, not jealous, even though he sat on his porch in the company of two very emotionally strong and good looking men. He couldn’t help but think he’d made friends and that excited him about the work they might do together to aid other male victims of violent sex crimes. To Starsky he said, “I hope I’ve helped you, even a little—though I still plan to make amends.”

“Yours is the first face, other than mine,” Starsky said, “that I’ve been able to put on this thing. It helps more than a little.”

* * *

Hutch and Starsky easily intercepted Bruce Daniels from getting into his car when he left work that late afternoon, and they were equally suc­cessful when they mentally disarmed him long enough to grab his undivided attention and pull him into a conversation. The detectives were quite rehearsed at nabbing “persons of interest”; they simply hadn’t done it in a while, but it was like riding a bike. Once on it, they kept their balance.

Starsky showed Daniels his badge and introduced Hutch. They told him they knew he was Michael Woods’ business partner and that they wanted a word with him about Michael’s “personal life.”

Daniels, a rather well-fed, slightly shorter than they, somewhat apprehensive man in his late-thirties, attempted to avoid whatever the detectives hunted for by telling them he didn’t know much about Michael Woods’ personal life.

“Then he probably doesn’t know much about yours, either,” Starsky said as he pretended to assume he knew a lot less than he did. He firmly grasped Daniels’ elbow and guided him toward his red-and-white Tor­ino, which was parked near the entrance to the lot. “But it’s in your best interest to at least tell us the little you do know.”

They didn’t overtly threaten Daniels except by their posture and their closeness—but Daniels felt their seriousness when Hutch crowded him at the car door. “How ’bout we take a ride and talk about the weather?”

Daniels hesitated when Starsky opened the door and pulled back the front seat to allow him into the rear one. “This isn’t a police car,” Daniels noted.

“It’s my car,” Starsky told him, “and I’m the police so, technically, it’s a police car.” He pushed Daniels into the back seat.

“How do I know you guys are for real?” Daniels protested.

Starsky and Hutch got into the front seats of the car and closed their doors. The only way out of the vehicle from the back seat was to climb over them. The answer to Daniels’ question was moot, but Starsky was flippant regardless. “Trust me, Bruce. By the time we’re done with our little chat, you won’t be able to imagine anything more real than this.”

Daniels knew then he’d been set up—but as to why, he couldn’t guess. As the car left the parking lot and traveled along surface streets at a slow pace, his mind raced—with neither of the cops talking. If they were cops at all.

Hutch opened a folder he’d brought with him and leafed through the papers inside while Starsky whistled, tapped his fingers on the steering wheel to an unheard rhythm, and maneuvered his car through traffic. They didn’t speak to their captive. They didn’t even speak to each other. They had someplace to go first, which was to a relatively deserted park inside the city limits. When they arrived there, Starsky stopped under a tree, cut the ignition, and rolled down his window. He retrieved the chocolate bar from his shirt pocket and opened the wrapper. Then he waited for Hutch to finish his perusing before he offered Hutch a bite of the candy.

Hutch looked at him over the rim of his sunglasses. “You’re kidding me, right?”

“Things change,” Starsky said to defend his action. “I thought maybe this might be one of those times.”

“Think again,” Hutch said. He noticed his surroundings. “Why’d you stop here? I thought we were going to someplace deserted—as in deserted deserted.”

“I want to have a sane conversation with our ride-along. If it gets insane, we’ll go someplace … isolated.”

Daniels shifted uncomfortably in the back of the car. “C’mon, guys,” he said, “what’s this all about?”

The detectives ignored him.

“It’s going to be a ‘he-said/he-said’ conversation if we don’t take it someplace else,” Hutch warned Starsky.

“It’ll be a ‘he said/he said’ conversation no matter where we go,” Starsky replied.

“You win.”

Hutch half-turned in his seat so he could glance at Daniels. “It’ll go something like this: ‘He said,’” meaning Daniels, “‘that I beat him to with­in an inch of his life.’”

Starsky mocked dismay. Then he turned in his seat, swallowed what he’d been chewing, and looked at Daniels. “‘He said’,” meaning Hutch, “‘that you fell down a flight of stairs.’”

“‘He said I pushed him down,’” Hutch complained.

Starsky pretended to argue. To Daniels, he cracked, “‘He said you tripped.’”

Hutch didn’t miss a beat. “‘He said I broke his dick in half.’”

Starsky looked at Hutch. “‘He said you said that?’”

And the two of them busted up laughing.

Daniels didn’t find the men amusing. “Okay, I get it.” He looked at both of them in turn. “You’re good cop,” he said to Starsky, “and you’re bad cop,” he said to Hutch.

Starsky wryly smiled at him. “You don’t get it,” he corrected Daniels. “I’m bad cop and he’s badder cop.”

“What have I done?”

Hutch reopened his folder and leafed through papers as if to search for the answer. He then removed his sunglasses and looked into Daniels’ concerned eyes. “How old are you?”

Daniels didn’t answer.

Hutch paged through the folder. “Ah, here it is. He’s thirty-nine.”

“Our age,” Starsky realized with a whistle, as if that impressed him. Another week and Starsky wouldn’t be able to claim thirty-nine, but accepting that was something he’d do on his birthday. “So … how old did that make all of us sixteen years ago?”

Hutch calculated and then answered, “Twenty-three.”

“Twenty-three,” Starsky repeated. “Right out of college, I’m guess­ing. Are you married, Bruce?”

Daniels held eye contact, but wouldn’t answer the question. He knew he’d been baited and he didn’t dare provoke the men who held him, except to leverage the law with the hope it would ease their pressure. “Isn’t this false arrest or something?”

Starsky looked at Hutch and feigned curiosity. “Or something?”

Hutch leafed through papers. “Nah,” he decided, as if he’d found the legal definition of the phrase and dismissed it. “But it says here he’s married. Wife’s name is Angela. He’s got two kids. Bryan and Anita. Bruce, Bryan. Angela, Anita. Nice little family, no?”

Their knowledge of his personal life made Daniels very uncom­fortable. He and his business partner, Michael Woods, had never done anything illegal, as far as he knew, so he didn’t understand the cops’ inter­est in him. And that they antagonized him to some degree made him suspicious and scared.

“You sure did your homework,” Starsky told Hutch.

Hutch mocked smugness. “That’s why they give me the big bucks. There isn’t anything about this guy I don’t know. Have him tell you what he did the night of …” He fingered his paperwork and pretended to find the notation he looked for. “… the night of April 8, some sixteen years ago. Have him tell you what he did to a twelve-year-old girl that night.”

Starsky looked at Daniels and saw the dread palpably pass over his face—just as Starsky expected it would. It was expressions like the one that rolled over Daniels that confirmed for Hutch and Starsky what their facts and their guts told them about the truths they pursued.

Starsky no longer played. “Tell me what you did to twelve-year-old Grace Woods sixteen years ago.”

Daniels panicked. He was smart enough to know there wasn’t any hard evidence against him, but that the men who held him in the back seat of the car that day weren’t interested in forensics. They’d come for due process. “I was really drunk at the time,” he explained. “And high on shit.”

His answer wasn’t good enough for Starsky. He slapped Daniels’ face—and hard. The strike left a red mark on Daniels’ cheek. “I’ll ask again,” Starsky said. “Tell me what you did to her when she was only twelve.”

Daniels dropped his head. He broke a sob. “I’m so ashamed,” he said, bemoaning his action that night all those years ago.

“Perhaps you didn’t hear my question,” Starsky said. He was about to strike Daniels again when Daniels lifted his head and quickly replied, “I had my way with her.”

“You had your way with her? What the fuck does that mean? You were twenty-three and she was twelve. What does it mean to have your way with a child?”

“I had sex with her,” Daniels clarified—and he blurted it to keep Starsky from hitting him again.

“Sex with a twelve-year-old? Is that even possible?”

“Yeah, did she ask you for it?” Hutch echoed.

Daniels knew better than to lie. “No.”

“Then you took it—without permission,” Starsky surmised.

“Yes.”

“Then it wasn’t sex, was it?”

“No.” Daniels hung his head and tightly closed his eyes.

“What was it then, Bruce?” Starsky demanded to know.

Reluctantly, Daniels gave Starsky the words he thought he wanted. “It was statutory rape.”

“Tell me again what you did to Grace Woods when she was twelve—and this time tell it to me straight.”

Daniels sobbed. For a couple of minutes he was so overcome with shame and grief, he couldn’t speak. If the men who held him captive beat him to death just then, he felt he deserved it. The silence in the car as the detectives waited for him to confess finally overran his emotions. “I raped her,” he confessed. “I’m sorry,” and he repeated it more than once. “I was drunk and high and I didn’t think about what I was doing.”

Hutch joined the interrogation. “Not too drunk to keep a boner and fuck her, though, right?”

“And twice, I hear,” Starsky added. “Once vaginally and another time in the ass? Isn’t that what you did, Bruce?”

Daniels nodded.

“Speak up,” Hutch ordered him. “I can’t hear you.”

“Yes,” Daniels blurted.

“Yes, what?”

“Yes, I raped her two ways.”

They then battered Daniels with questions.

“Did she try to stop you?”

“How hard did she cry, Bruce?”

Daniels’ shoulders shook as he wept.

“What did you weigh then, Bruce? Twice her ninety pounds or more?”

“Do you fantasize about what you did to her?”

“No!” Daniels snapped. He shook his head and reiterated his reply, in a low voice the second time. “I’ve never regretted or been more ashamed about anything in my life.”

Starsky punched Daniels’ chin from under it, heard Daniels’ teeth snap together, and abruptly brought Daniels’ eyes up to look at him. The jarring blow made Daniels stop crying. His eye contact with Starsky was intense—which was what Starsky wanted, to have the man’s abso­lute focus.

“You forcibly raped a twelve-year-old,” he reminded Daniels. “And all these years you’ve called her brother a friend of yours. How have you been able to look him in the face?”

Daniels knew Starsky wanted a deadly serious answer, so he gave him one. “I live with a daily fear he’ll find out—or that my wife will find out. Or that I’ll run into Grace somewhere sometime; I’ve spent a life­time avoiding her. God, I’m sorry. I never meant to hurt her. I can’t believe what I’ve done. And I’ve never been that drunk or out of control since.”

Starsky glanced at Hutch. “Did you get all that?”

Hutch pulled the small cassette recorder from his jacket and played back the last few seconds of the recording. “I did,” he said proudly.

“What can we get him on?”

“Statutory rape. Forcible rape. Forcible sodomy. Child endanger­ment. Felony child abuse—”

“What’s he looking at?”

“An easy ten to twelve years, after which he’ll be a registered child sexual predator and a felon. I think we can also convince a jury that she tried to leave the room and he wouldn’t let her, so add kidnapping to that list of charges and we’re looking at a life sentence.”

“Can you make me a copy of that?”

Hutch winked at him. “You betcha, bad cop.”

Daniels didn’t care that they had him dead to rights. “Tell me what you want me to do and I’ll do it.”

Starsky feigned disappointment. “I was hoping I’d get to smash your face in,” he said. He was actually serious. That had been his initial intention. But he didn’t expect to confront such a contrite individual. He explained himself. “That little girl you raped sixteen years ago is now my woman. Do you get the significance of this, Bruce?”

Daniels sat back against the car seat and never left eye contact with Starsky. The situation had taken a more serious turn, even more deadly than it had already, and he knew the accountability would be inescapable. Not that he wanted to avoid it, but it was vividly clear that he couldn’t. “I get it,” he said solemnly.

“So here’s what you’re going to do,” Starsky told him. “You’re a suc­cess­ful businessman. Got yourself a nice house in a posh neighborhood. Got yourself a nest egg of an impressive size, I imagine. But the price of your crimes don’t come cheap.” He looked at Hutch. “Is it ‘don’t’ or ‘doesn’t’?”

“‘Don’t,’” Hutch said playfully.

Were it not for their sarcastic banter, the rage they felt would be pal­pable, overdone, and deadly. Starsky wanted to stay focused on a fitting retribution, one that would benefit Grace, and not surrender to his anger and resentment; sarcasm helped him keep his cool. But on the punish­ment, he didn’t play.

“Grace and a friend of hers started the Woods Foundation for Victims of Violent Crimes,” he told Daniels, “and every year in the month of April—let’s say April 8, the anniversary of the night you attacked her—you’re going to make a donation to that Foundation in the sum of $50,000. You’ll make the first donation in the next ten days. If you don’t, well, then, I’ll have no choice but to first smash your face in—and then give a copy of our little recording to the police—for whatever it’s worth to them—but especially one to your wife, and another to Michael Woods, Grace’s brother, your business partner. He might be as compelled as I am to hurt you beyond repair. You’ll wish you’d gone to prison for life.”

Daniels knew he didn’t have a choice.

“I can make the donation,” he agreed. He didn’t know what he’d tell his wife—or his business partner, for that matter—about why he sup­ported Grace’s Foundation to such a degree, but he knew it wasn’t relevant. The detectives wanted what they wanted and they’d settle for nothing less. In the end, Daniels realized the price was nothing like the alternative.

Starsky handed him a business card with the Foundation’s title and address on it. When Daniels lowered his eyes to read it, Starsky punched him under the chin again and forced Daniels to look him in the eye. “You asked us when you got in the car if we were ‘for real,’” Starsky reminded him. Then he warned Daniels. “If you’re smart, you’ll never make us have to prove it.”

* * *

Starsky set his badge on Dobey’s desk and straightened. “Don’t think it hasn’t been fun,” he quipped. He winked at Hutch who sat in a chair in front of their former captain—like old times. “But me and Blondie are goin’ solo.”

Dobey reluctantly picked up Starsky’s badge. He knew that day would come, but he didn’t like it any better. He glanced at Wade Davis who was in the chair beside Hutch. To him, he said, “I hate to see good cops go.”

Davis grinned. “So long as they’re not good cops who go bad.”

“Oh, ye of little faith,” Hutch mumbled.

Starsky then set his pistol on Dobey’s desk. “I assume you’ll need that back, too.”

“What are you going to do for protection?”

Starsky patted his right upper arm to draw attention to his hidden pistol. “Got a replacement already. My wiser-than-me partner made sure to keep me covered.”

“You got a permit for that thing?”

“Now, Cap, c’mon, you don’t think my boy would leave me legally exposed, do ya?”

Dobey scowled at Hutch. He didn’t like how well his cops had trans­itioned into their new line of work. It made it too easy for them to leave their old one. “Who’s going to answer your phones?”

“We know it won’t be Hutch,” Davis joked. He could never get Hutch to answer one.

“We got that covered, too,” Hutch said. “Hired ourselves a secretary slash personal assistant. We’re going to be fine. You’ll see.”

Dobey retrieved Starsky’s pistol from his desktop and tucked it into a drawer. “Who’s going to chaperone you two?”

“We’ll watch each other’s backs.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Dobey said with a grunt.

Starsky set his fists on his hips. It was done. He had resigned from the police force after more than ten years of service. It didn’t feel as bad as he thought it might. Perhaps it was because he planned to do some­thing more rewarding—and still have Hutch to do it with him. Or maybe those two months away from the station helped him to break loose easier. Whatever the reason, the deed was done.

“You boys won’t be opposed to our hiring you as outside contractors, I’m guessing?” Dobey asked.

“Not at all, Cap,” Starsky replied, “but you remember we’re focusing our efforts on the most evil ones, right?”

Dobey rolled his eyes. “I remember. And I have the first case for you, too.” He pulled a file from a stack on his desk and dropped it in front of Starsky. “We think this one might be a serial offender. He nabbed a high school girl on her way home from a horseback riding lesson and raped her in the bushes behind a supermarket dumpster. Broad daylight. Start with the garbage pick-up guys.”

Starsky would start right away, but the case already depressed him, so he ignored it in order to focus on his resignation. “Is this where we talk about our hourly rate?” he suggested.

“Whatever it is, I’m sure it’s worth every penny,” Dobey said. “Just don’t go too far with the reprimands, huh, boys?”

Hutch exchanged glances with Starsky; they silently agreed to a compromise, which Hutch voiced. “We’ll go easier on the ones you hire us to bring in, how’s that? What we do with our own perps will be in line with our own private policy.”

Davis chuckled to say he didn’t believe Hutch and Starsky would distinguish between the two.

“You should talk,” Starsky argued. He hadn’t forgotten that it was Davis who handed over Dennis Fisher to two men who may have killed him.

“You got me there,” Davis replied. “And speaking of Fisher… He pled guilty this morning to all charges.”

The news was abrupt and startling and welcomed.

“No shit?” Starsky asked.

“None. He must not want his loved ones to see his film debut. So the only other person to watch those videotapes will be the judge at Fisher and Nelson’s sentencing.”

Nelson had already plea-bargained, so the news meant the complete dismissal of a public trial.

Starsky exchanged a smile with Hutch. “And they say there’s no God,” he cracked.

“They say?” Hutch pretended to wonder. “I think it’s me who says.”

“Yeah, you say—proving yet again you don’t know shit.”

“I have some other news for you, too,” Davis told him. When he got Starsky’s undivided attention, he said in a lower voice, “Our two sus­pects tested negative for STDs. We’ll have the third guy tested at the autopsy. I thought you might want to know that.”

“You thought that?” Starsky laughed. He made Davis laugh, too.

Hutch winked at Starsky when he caught his grin. “Feel like dancing now?”

It was the way Hutch asked the question that made Starsky sober, as if Starsky’s dancing had been a barometer of his recovery. As he flashed back over the past couple of months, he realized what Hutch had noticed all along: Starsky hadn’t danced. Not a single step. Dancing was some­thing Starsky loved to do. He loved it so much, in fact, that he’d break into a two-step even without music. But he hadn’t done it lately, not in a long while, and he didn’t know when he would again. His recovery still lay out before him.

* * *

EPILOGUE

Starsky wasn’t in his bedroom. He wasn’t in the kitchen. He wasn’t anywhere in the house. But his car was still parked in the driveway and the front door was open, as if he’d at least gone out to the porch—and then seemingly disappeared into thin air.

Hutch didn’t need to find him for any specific purpose; it was simply that he’d stopped by Starsky’s room, where he thought Starsky was, and found it empty. His detective instinct put him on Starsky’s trail, but it turned up cold, which made Hutch even more determined to find the man, especially since Starsky’s whereabouts had become a top priority for him in the past few months.

He stood on the porch and surveyed the grounds. The trees had fully leafed and it was harder to see all the way to the property boundaries. But just when he was about to get in his truck to widen his search, he saw Starsky on the off-side of the fence about halfway down the driveway—in jeans and a hard-to-miss red tee-shirt. Hutch’s first thought was that there’d been another rupture in the irrigation line and Starsky had gone out to fix it. So Hutch skipped off the porch and casually walked out to him.

“Hey, Goldilocks,” Starsky said as Hutch approached.

“Hey,” Hutch greeted him. “What gives?” He didn’t see mud or a water leak.

“Just hangin’,” came the relaxed reply. Starsky climbed onto the fence and watched Hutch. “Did you miss me?”

“If I did, I wouldn’t admit it.”

“Chicken shit.”

Hutch climbed on the fence near him on the opposite side. He gazed out over a field of grasses and wild flowers and weeds. “You thinking of mowing?” he joked.

“If I were, I wouldn’t admit it,” Starsky said. He looked up the fence line. “How come there’s this fence here anyway? You plan to have live­stock someday? Grow yourself some free-range beef? Get off that plant diet you’ve been on—”

“The last folks had horses,” Hutch explained, interrupting Starsky’s dig at him. “Why do you want to know? Planning on ‘growing’ free-range beef yourself? Baby steps into a healthier life?”

“Seems an odd place for a fence is all. But this is your field, isn’t it?” Starsky shook his thumb at the meadow behind him, the one in Hutch’s view.

Hutch pointed to the property boundaries to show Starsky where they were—and then they didn’t talk for a few minutes. They enjoyed the quiet day and the peaceful feel in the air and the resolutions that were behind them. The early summer morning was a rebirth, a time to look to the future. He squinted at Starsky. “Watcha got planned today?”

“I’m thinking about doing nothing for a while. Did you need some hole dug?”

“If I do, you’ll be the first person I ask—and damn your broken arm. It’s time you earn your keep.”

“I figured you’d be somewhere with that woman you met the other night,” Starsky said. “Here’s as good a place as any to have a picnic.” He gestured again to the field behind him, the one in front of Hutch.

It was a remarkably good idea, Hutch thought. The mention of the woman he’d ‘met the other night’ excited him. Starsky had finally agreed to attend one of Grace’s violent crimes workshops dedicated to male-on-male rape victims—as its Key Speaker, no less, and with his new friend, Adam—and, at the afterparty, Hutch met a woman—herself a recover­ing rape victim and a nurse—with whom he’d had immediate chemistry.

Hutch grinned at him. “Shall we double date?”

“I’d suggest it,” Starsky said, “but I’ll be naked in the grass with Grace while you’re still working up the courage to ask yours for a second date—and you know I’m not having sex in front of you again; it isn’t worth the fallout. You’re on your own this time, buddy.”

Hutch didn’t miss Starsky’s crack about his courage when it came to women. “You’ve got a mean streak in ya, you know that?”

“I do? I’m the mean one?”

“Sometimes.”

“Well, that’s what you get when you won’t admit to missing me this morning.”

“So, if I kiss your ass,” Hutch assumed, “you’ll be nice to me?”

Starsky jumped off the fence to gaze over the field in the direction Hutch faced. “Keep your mouth off my ass,” he playfully laughed. The tranquil view then sobered him and brought him back to his original thoughts. Still, he didn’t want Hutch to think he wasn’t interested in his personal life—because he was—so he asked, “What’s her name again?”

“Sara,” Hutch said.

Starsky repeated it as he mulled her name and remembered her face. “Sara.” She was pretty. “You seemed to like her.” He folded his arms across his chest. “A lot, you seemed to like her.”

“A lot, I do,” Hutch admitted.

“Good,” Starsky said. He was glad for it and decided for Hutch that it would be the way things would go. “It’s about time you got what you deserve.”

Starsky’s desire made Hutch smile. When he didn’t reply with words, Starsky looked up and over at him while Hutch still hung on the fence—and smiled back. And for a minute, a long one, they spoke that silent dialogue, the one where they both realized again just how close they were and how lucky they were to be so, the one that reminded them of those permanent ties that forever bound them.

They understood 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 might possibly yet some­day.

They knew where they stood with each other, both professionally and personally—and they were as consciously aware of it as they were grateful for it. It needed no words; it passed between them by way of the light in their 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 usually lasted an instant, but on that day, given those circumstances, it lasted much longer.

Starsky finally broke the satisfying contact when he said, “I’m thinking.”

Hutch stepped off the fence and hung over its top rail as he watched him. He sensed Starsky’s seriousness; up until that moment, he thought they’d had that mutual understanding, the one about where they stood with each other, but it seemed as if Starsky had other thoughts. “About what?”

“I have a woman now,” Starsky noted with excitement. “Maybe you’ve got one, too.”

“I hope so.”

“Suppose then … we start to live different lives? I get married and have kids, decide police work of any kind isn’t for me, and your babe wants to move to Sweden or Norway or someplace like that, you know, where all you blond-haired, blue-eyed people are from.”

Hutch would have laughed at Starsky’s supposition, but the question Starsky asked had a serious undertone. “You’re saying you think it’s possible you and I might drift apart someday,” Hutch assumed.

Starsky squinted at him. “Don’t you ever think so?”

Hutch didn’t. He couldn’t imagine anything that could keep him from Starsky, not even a woman. It disappointed him that Starsky thought it was possible—and enough to bring it up in conversation, espe­cially on a morning when Hutch had felt excited about the future for the first time in a long while.

“Life goes like that sometimes,” Starsky said.

“Even after everything we’ve been through?” Hutch asked.

“Maybe especially.”

Hutch didn’t understand Starsky’s perception.

“Maybe we’ve had our run, you know?” Starsky explained. “I mean, really, how much shit can two people go through without it being enough already?”

“I could go through a lot more and till the end of days,” Hutch said.

“You say that now. But try falling in love and seeing the world through a different pair of eyes. You might not feel that way in the long run. You might just feel old and tired.”

Hutch held Starsky’s eyes with his own. He didn’t understand where Starsky led him, but he knew he didn’t like it. Nothing could break the Us they’d known for a decade. Well, nothing but Starsky himself. The notion made Hutch speechless, at least verbally, but his disappointment and his hurt and his fear flashed in his eyes.

And that’s when Starsky realized he’d gone too far. He baited Hutch, the way Hutch often baited him, but it was time to end the tease. “Well, anyway, I got to thinking,” he said, “about that offer you made me a while ago.”

Hutch searched his mind for Starsky’s meaning, but couldn’t find one. “It must have been a long while,” he said.

“Not too long,” Starsky replied. “Just another lifetime maybe.”

“Tell me.”

Starsky scanned the meadow. “You said I ought to build out here.”

Hutch more than remembered. That Starsky even mentioned it caused his heart to race because the last time he made Starsky the offer, Starsky had told him it would make people think all the worse about them and that they had to be careful not to bring that kind of attention to themselves again. So maybe he misunderstood Starsky that morning. “Yeah? And?”

Starsky looked over his shoulder at Hutch. “Is the offer still good?”

Hutch couldn’t repress the smile of pure relief that came over his face when he answered. “Still and always.”

“Yeah, so, it might be smart for me to do that,” Starsky said, “to sell that new house, or rent it out, and build one out here, right there, in fact,” and he pointed to a spot in the middle of the field. “I figure if I put it right there, I can keep an eye on you better, make sure you don’t start packing your bags for Switzerland or Denmark or wherever you people are from.”

Hutch’s sigh of relief was audible. And he knew Starsky knew he’d been momentarily hurt, so he didn’t debate Starsky’s tactic. He rolled with the punch. “It works both ways, of course. I can keep an eye on you, too, to make sure you don’t pump out more kids than a private detective can afford.”

“Kind of a checks-and-balances thing between us as we go forward into our different lives,” Starsky noted.

“Yeah. That would work. We’d watch each other’s backs from across the driveway.”

“Seems to make sense, doesn’t it?” Starsky supposed.

“Perfectly,” Hutch echoed.

“So what do we do next?”

Hutch thought a moment. “We head over to the county seat this afternoon and get ourselves a building permit.”

“Good idea,” Starsky agreed, “and the sooner the better.”

Hutch reached over and tousled Starsky’s hair. “You son-of-a-bitch.” He couldn’t believe Starsky had made him think for a second that their friend­ship might fade with a sunset. They were unbreakable. They both knew it. No woman, no amount of kids, no call from a homeland, could pull them apart. There could be no greater test than the one they’d en­dured in the recent few months—and they passed it. In fact, they came out the other side even more bonded to each other.

Starsky pushed off the fence, walked out into the field, and even­tually stopped near the middle of the meadow. “The driveway can fork off right about there and come up to the house here.” He pointed to the spots he’d earlier assessed.

Hutch didn’t care where Starsky put the house. He was just pleased to hear Starsky plan his future right there on his farm. He tried to repress his satisfied smile, but couldn’t.

It was just as well because Starsky reveled in Hutch’s joy. “And the living room will go here.” He walked in a large rectangular area to out­line the room boundaries and then stopped and faced Hutch. “What do you think?”

“It’s a big room,” Hutch noted. He climbed back onto the fence and hung over the top rail to better see Starsky’s imaginary house plan.

“It’s a big room,” Starsky echoed, “because it has to be big enough for this.” And then he did what Hutch waited months for him to do, what he knew Hutch wanted to see him do more than anything else—because it meant Starsky had turned the corner in his recovery, that he had begun again. And he did it because he loved Hutch that much and would give him anything for all the support and protection returned to him over the years by his brother-by-fate, and especially lately. He didn’t have Hutch’s money, and he didn’t have Hutch’s real estate, and he didn’t always have Hutch’s ability to withstand the brunt of the blows he’d taken, the emotional ones, nor did he have the same degree of ease Hutch had to warmly put his hands on another human being, but he did have what Hutch wanted in that instance. And he gave it to him with every bit of his heart and soul.

He danced in the tall grass without a note of music.

And yet a symphony was heard.

Hutch choked on his joy and his inability to laugh because he was so instantly overcome by it. Tears flooded his eyes. He watched through the blur they momentarily caused him. He watched Starsky dance in the grass. He watched Starsky two-step, waltz and tango, and all with a big grin on his handsome face. He watched Starsky raise his arms to the sky, to honor his God, or maybe it was simply to honor the sky, to honor Hutch’s god, and then Starsky bowed. When he straightened, he looked right at Hutch—and winked at him.

“Yeah,” Hutch said, his voice heavy with the love and admiration and gratitude he had for the man directly in his line of vision, the one who would build a house on his farm so they’d be closer yet, as if it was humanly possible, “the living room definitely has to be big enough for that.”

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Next: Book Two From Dandelion Series 1: Saving Starsky