You’ve Got Mail!

190

Starsk will be worried. The thought played over and over in Hutch’s head as he turned down the dark streets. How long had he been able to drive in Los Angeles on auto-pilot? Twenty years, no, closer to thirty. He took a quick sip of the lukewarm, cream-laced coffee and grimaced. Once upon a time it was his partner who ran the risk of stomach cancer, not him. Oh for the years of healthy, vegetable shakes and soy and fresh fruit smoothies. That sort of lifestyle was a commitment and took time, focus.

Red light. He tapped restlessly on the steering wheel.

He’d had half a ham sandwich for dinner, no mayo, dry as dust, the bread white and chewy. A useless meeting to dicker over whether he had any chance to win an election in the city of Los Angeles. His preparedness team had concluded it was a waste of time; they were honest. Ken Hutchinson, hero cop, those days were in the past. Working for the coroner’s office, coming up the ladder to the executive level, didn’t mean beans to the average voter. He was not a name. He was not flamboyant or flashy. Just honest. Chief Coroner would have looked good on his resume. Oddly, he felt only resignation.

He was an ex-cop, with a scraggly mustache and not much to show for his life but a partner that loved him without reservation. Forty, pushing towards forty-one. The thought of Starsky briefly warmed him. Steering into the park and towards home, his nerves were getting the best of him, mouth dry, shaking hand combing through his hair.

HIs doctor had suggested Xanax. Haltingly, Hutch had to explain he could not take opiates. Not even sleeping pills. Echoes of a time long ago, that horror in a small room above Huggy’s bar, and knowing nothing but freezing, freezing and the only warmth what he found in Starsky’s arms.

Snatching up his electronic cigarette between his lips and took small comfort in the boost of nicotine and ‘taste’ of tobacco. One of those small things Starsky did not comment about. Years together of Hutch’s mood swings, dark depression, long silences. No complaints from his partner. Not even when he was told he’d never walk again.

Once he asked his partner how he put up with him, why didn’t he just go? The dark blue eyes crinkled with humor and Starsk just shrugged and made him a cup of hot cocoa. “I love ya,” he said softly, if that answered the question. Hutch supposed it did.

I’m no bargain, Hutch thought. One bad marriage, all it had meant was sex. Van had been quite a looker. God knows where she would be now if she’d lived. Vice President of the United States? He chuckled softly.

Christ.

Suddenly he had a driving need to stop this car, park it and wander…where? Slumped over the steering wheel, he took a cleansing breath as his psychiatrist had instructed. Hold six seconds, release. If it wasn’t for his desire to change he would not see a shrink. Starsky had never insisted he get help. Encouraged it a little, but no push, for which Hutch was grateful.

The call came mid-afternoon. Another murder, a request to report to the morgue to view the corpse and use his acute observation ability to help solve the crime.

“Pretty cut and dried,” Isaac stated, unzipping the body bag. He’d been Hutch’s assistant for three years now. East Indian, articulate, sympathetic to his boss’s mood swings.

Another senseless murder, Hutch thought. The one thing that made him vulnerable and a bad risk as a coroner. Feelings. And this one…too close, damnit. He bit his lip and almost turned away.

“Well nourished male,” Isaac intoned, reading from a hand held pad. “Thirty-two, found dead in Torrance of apparent gunshot wounds…”

Christ. The holes were blasted into the strong looking body. Open, gaping wounds. Just another dead man on the slab…

Closing his eyes, he rested his head against the back of the car seat and waited. Those memories were as vivid, in living color, as they had been on the day of.

Laying aside his emotion, he cut into the firm flesh, not wincing as the bone saw did its work, removing the skull as if it were a cap, slipping the brain from its cavity, speaking the words he was casually used to saying. Yet, all the time, in his head, he was saying, “He had blue eyes. Curly, curly hair. He may have laughed a lot, the lines around his mouth….”

“They’re still checking the caliber and trying to trace the weapon.” Glancing up from the small screen Isaac frowned. “You okay?”

Shaking himself, Hutch did his best to force the memories back. Of his partner, the horrific damage an automatic weapon can do to a young man. Except this wasn’t Starsky; this wasn’t his partner. Another body, this one dead and still, dreams shattered.

Like the glass of the car window crunching under his shoes as his brother cops held him back so others could do their work. How did he manage to not have one drop of blood on his white jacket? That was the worst, he thought. I did nothing to save him except stand there, gun in hand and gape. Thank God for the medical personnel.

The screams of the wheels of the getaway car, the explosion of gunfire, and Starsk, silent, dead on the ground. Other than Captain Dobey’s firm grip on his arm, someone easing his weapon from his hand, he was not aware of a single movement around him. No, nothing, just that focus, diamond sharp, on the still form of David Starsky. The moment he was handed his partner’s gun, it was like the crescendo of a symphony, sirens, shouts, and the echo of gunfire. Deadly gunfire.

Starsk died that night; he died a thousand deaths as they say in the old movies. Each time, Starsk struggled back, finally those deep blue eyes twinkling open.

I’m back again, every time when I see the victim of a shooting. So still, body blasted and torn. Why did I get in this line of work? So I could torture myself again and again with that image of David? Every single time I saw someone like this? Do I blame myself so much that I chose a career that would bring me close to death every day? Something that says, “We win, you lose, Starsk will never be like this, not dead and still on this table.”

Funny how he didn’t remember Isaac leading him from the room, or pressing a cup of hot, sweet coffee in his hands. Or how good it tasted going down.

That funny scar on his own wrist, Hutch thought, as he sipped at the reviving fluid. Where Gunther’s hitman had sliced open a tendon and inflicted him with a mere partial numbness in the fingers of his left hand. He’d never done the therapy the surgeon suggested.

As Starsky’s wounds healed, the months of guessing started. Intensive care for six months, they felt he would have to learn to walk again.

At first, I was in denial.

That was when the blaming began, the self-loathing.

If I had pulled my gun faster, if I had reacted quicker, not been eased into complacency by some goofy conversation they were having. He should have followed up with the investigation into Lionel’s death instead of thinking everything will end happily ever after. 

If I were to tell of the events of April 24th, 2010, it would be impossible to give anyone a complete picture.

A thundering bellow from the general direction of my living room awoke me. It took me a moment, between the shots I’d done last night and the hypnotic motion of my bedroom swaying to and fro to realize that the ‘bellow’ was no more than Starsky awakening with no hangover, a zestful hallelujah to the world and having another day on it. A petty annoyance I have had to deal with since we became friends on an Arab desert in 1990. Two twenty-year-olds fighting for God, truth, and the American way. In some ways, the last ten years had embittered me against my fellow man than gave me the yearning to serve them.

Looking back, I should have gone with my first thought and pulled the covers over my head and resumed some semblance of slumber. I had the right; we were off duty that day. After the entire mess with Lionel, the mob or whoever was running drugs between LA and Vegas, money laundering, and other really complicated crimes we had yet to unknot, I was beat. And having poured about five kilos of fine grain alcohol into me last night had not helped matters.

Yes, the pillow fit nicely over my head; it did muffle Starsky’s cries for Hutch, Hutch, Hutch. I heard more than saw the bedroom door burst open and bless my partner if he wasn’t holding half the menu items from the local Jack in The Box breakfast menu and looking triumphant.

I lifted just a tiny piece of blanket and peered at him. “It’s fucking six a.m.,” I began.

“Exactly,” he replied, oblivious to my condition or lack of enthusiasm. “I brought you coffee, know you like that cava, cava Java Jump, and considering your stomach is in, shall I say, a delicate condition, I also brought you some whole grain oatmeal with nothing on it.” He pouted a little at that. “They had berries,” he muttered. “Nuts, peanut butter, even, but since you don’t even try to have some variety in what you call a diet, I thought…”

The odor of grease, fries, and eggs was rolling my stomach in a true imitation of a man going down for the last time. My head began to pound. It was impossible to ignore my happy partner. He had that sad puppy look in his eyes.

He’d tried so hard to please me.

“Let me get dressed,” I stated, not moving from my nest. Hope lit his eyes. He looked all of six-years-old, not thirty-six. I envied his ability to not just wake up, but to drown everyone around him, whether they liked it or not, in his own orbit.

The sound of bags rustling as I went into the bathroom did something else to my stomach. A good hot shower may help and then again, it probably wouldn’t.

“Dobey called.”

I had a towel flung over one shoulder as I turned to face him. “We have today off,” I snapped. Our recent resignation and almost forced reinstatement was still driving at my nerves.

“Bad news, buddy boy.” Gathering the fast food bags around him like a shield, he turned and left the bedroom. I realized he was wearing his gun. “Half the crew is down with the flu.” He was eating something and speaking at the same time, which always seemed to make me shiver in disgust. “He wants us down at headquarters pronto.”

So I showered, got into shirt and jeans, forced a comb through my hair. Gazed in the mirror and took in that forty-some face with a scraggly mustache and blood-shot eyes and thought again, for the hundredth time, how in the hell I had let Starsky talk me into being a cop again? There was this little angry voice inside me that wanted to get in my car, and without a word of goodbye, leave him and Los Angeles and all this petty bullshit behind me. Go back to Duluth, live simply. I had a little saved. Maybe open a guitar shop or just get some little place where I didn’t have to deal with death, or violence, or a partner that was quickly becoming more to me than ‘just’ my friend.

I hated my job, I thought. I was beginning to hate being with him because he was the reason I had taken up the reins of this pointless career again.

And I loved the guy. Who didn’t? I jerked my boots on and felt my face burn. Yeah, I loved him, but right now I needed distance. A twelve-hour shift with him at my side in the car would only prolong and probably intensify the anger I felt. Sooner or later, I would blow, and that nice partner of mine would take the brunt of it.

As if he knew to back off, I found him waiting down in the car, tapping his fingers against the steering wheel of that pimped out Lexus. As I slipped into the passenger seat, the stench of his breakfast hit me, and, thank God, the heavenly scent of coffee.

“I got that coffee and a sweet roll, too,” Starsky said helpfully. “I sure hope you’re not in a bad mood, Hutch.”

The unbelievably earnest way he had of speaking melted my resolve to knock him flat and silly. Then I saw what he was consuming and nearly lost what was left in my gut from the night before.

There was egg yolk on his chin. It was a double burger with cheese, a large sunny side up, fried onions, and, probably in deference to my healthier side, a slice of tomato that was about to slip off the steaming tower of junk onto David’s lap.

Blue eyes sparkling, just a trace of amusement in his expression. “Want some?” he said.

Two hours later he was lying in a pool of blood in the parking lot. Before I could go to him, he was surrounded by medical personnel. I stood there with my weapon, useless, so useless. Barely remembered firing it, the sound of metal scraping against metal and nothing but that stillness.

I didn’t think of him as Starsky. I thought of him as Mine. Not two men, but one. 

Surgery, hours. I wouldn’t change clothes, eat. When I wasn’t pacing, I was sitting and staring at my image in a dark window. Waiting.

There was no chance of survival. The fact that he was alive more than an hour after the shooting was a miracle. Somehow through the dullness in my head I heard Dobey say he lived through the surgery. Then waiting, just waiting.

Waited, four months. God, how he struggled. The only thing Starsk complained about was the food. They had him on morphine for a while, then pills. Hinted that the pain would never quite go away, his heart was damaged but not his head.

“So when can I go home?” Starsky would ask. “Or start therapy? Or have a cheeseburger with onions and fries? C’mon, Hutch!”

It had been Huggy, good old Huggy Bear, that had found Hutch in the bar, discovered his secret that he was drinking, steadily, silently. The night of the midnight feast he’d been well soused.

“One day you’ll substitute one drug for another, m’man,” Hug said, placing a plate of dry toast in front of him the next morning. It had been a late night and his friend had crashed at his place. “Starsky will be home–“

“My father was an alcoholic.” The admission came out flat, dulled by a pounding headache and too little sleep. “It runs in families, I suppose…”

“Not you, Hutch. Starsky’s your drug of choice.”

“And you’re full of shit.”

“Wait ’til he’s home,” he said sagely. There was always something Hug knew before either he or Starsky did. “Just wait.”

***

This was the worst of it, Hutch knew. The panic that chilled him eased away like it always did. Every time it was a little less, until the day he forgave himself and realized he was worthy of the love of a good man.

Hutch had resigned. Between his time at the hospital, court, the suicide of Gunther, and that entire mess, he had no time to be a cop. Starsk was permanently disabled. It didn’t seem to faze him.

“We can run a restaurant.”

“Or go back to school,” Hutch responded. His mind was more on the game Starsky was playing on his iPad.

“I’m on level fifty,” he advised. “I need ya to send me extra moves. I sent six notifications to my friends.”

“Actually, Facebook is not what the doctor suggested when he said you needed to be more social.”

Shrugging, Starsky grimaced. The pain was often more intense when he used the small device. The fine hand movements on the touch pad were therapeutic, but he’d had muscle damage and may never have the dexterity he once had. The ability to type on a keyboard at 222 words a minute.

“So…” Hutch eased the pad from his friend’s hands. “The doc said something about therapy, possible expulsion from this…”

“You been drinkin’ again?” The words were said quietly, not accusing. “I need ya sober, Hutch. Right now.”

The tone chilled him. In all the months of recuperation Starsky had never been anything but optimistic, easily moving forward from one stage of recovery to the next. “What’s wrong?”

“I ain’t gonna walk outta here,” Starsky said. His face lifted and evening-blue eyes met his partner’s gaze. “Had some movement, but I gotta tell ya, it’s gone. Nothing you can do or the docs can do.” He sighed as if he had told Hutch of a leak in the ceiling of his apartment or loss of a distant cousin. “They’re springin’ me tomorrow. I’ll be doing out-patient therapy for a year, maybe. Gotta learn to use wheels instead’a legs.”

Warm fingers touched him through the horror of the words. Something soft against his cheek. And…as easy as breathing, Starsky kissed him.

Hutch broke the kiss first, eyes wide with surprise. “What??”

“I was savin’ that for when you needed it the most,” Starsky said. “We’ll be okay, Hutch. Promise.” Resting his head back against the pillow, the dark blue eyes strayed towards the muted black and white film that played there. “Dancin’ Lady,” he breathed. “1932? 33?”

In the midst of his shock, Hutch wasn’t sure of anything Starsky was saying. “Did you just…?”

“I remember when Pop died.”

Shaking, Hutch eased himself to the bed and pulled his partner to him, holding him as close as he could, more for his need of touch than his partner’s. Burying his face in Starsky’s shoulder, he closed his eyes and breathed in the clean, fresh smell of him.

“Ma told me the bullet severed his spine. He died just like that.” Pulling the blond head down to his chest, Starsky touched golden strands away from Hutch’s face. His friend was in shock and cold sober. “Now you gotta know I thought about what it would be like if he had been confined to a wheelchair all these years. How would he have handled it? More or less.” He shrugged. “Chair or no, he’d have been happy he hadn’t left us alone. Legs are less than important than really bein’ alive. He was a great guy, Hutch. Never cried about bad luck or anything. Made the most of his life.”

Burying his face in the warm red t-shirt Starsky wore, he could not speak. Perhaps it was best to just listen.

“So…this is the thing, the really funny thing. When Doc told me, I thought of Pop in a wheelchair and thought what a great trade it was. I was alive, Hutch. So I can’t walk. Lotsa guys got that–but I’m alive.” He tugged at the long strands until Hutch’s eyes met his. “I get second chances Pop didn’t get. You, too.” A small kiss planted on the pale forehead. “Aw, Hutch, it’s just another thing, y’know? Let’s just live, okay?”

One arm around Hutch, Starsky reached for and took the TV remote in his hand. He unmuted the TV and the tinny sound of Joan Crawford’s thin voice wafted into the room.

“Thirty-three,” Hutch said, rolling onto his back. He remained close as he could to his partner, not breaking the embrace.

“Huh?”

“‘Dancing Lady’,” Hutch said. “1933.”

***

In that moment, Hutch knew he had to let go or the life that he and Starsky had would be worth nothing. All at once he realized he was living life as if Starsky had died.

All those dreams, when Starsky was sleeping in the back seat of the car during a long stakeout, or huddled against him on a rainy night when they’d both watched football and drank too much beer.

He’d had that dream for a long time, to be with Starsky, to not just share his bed but be everything to him. Lover, partner…spouse.