The very first time Starsky saw Marianne Owens, in a blurry surveillance photo from her FBI file, she looked vaguely familiar—which was ridiculous. He hadn't worked any case involving these people before, didn't go to jazz clubs himself, and she certainly wasn't his type. Then, as Hutch picked up the photos one by one and Starsky saw the clearer ones, including her publicity photos, the feeling went away. Of course she wasn't anyone he knew.
But whenever he opened the file he got the same little jolt, and he searched his brain. He knew the association wasn't good. The little static-electric arc in his memory was laden with anger, grief, frustration. What was she reminding him of? He combed his memory, and she didn't even look like any of Hutch's women, or any of his ... he thought back farther ... not in the Academy, not in Nam, not in high school ....
Suddenly a shoe dropped in Starsky�s mind, and he grinned; unfortunately at the same moment, Hutch was hanging up the phone, and the snap of the receiver told Starsky all he needed to know about how helpful that informant had been. Not easy to get anything on Joe Fitch, that was for sure.
"What?" asked Hutch irritably.
"What what?" Starsky hedged.
Hutch glared at him across the file-strewn desk.
"Just thinkin'," said Starsky.
"There's a first," Hutch said. "I'll alert the papers." He picked up the phone again.
Starsky smirked. "Be sure to ask for C.D. Phelps."
But Hutch grimaced, unamused by the reference to the reporter who'd ridden with them for a while and written them up so unflatteringly. At first. Maybe he was still irked that she hadn't been bowled over completely by his big blond charms. Or maybe he was just in another one of his pissy moods. Starsky buried his nose in the file again.
Marianne's mug shots were what he wanted this time. The uncompromising black and white showed her dark, straight eyebrows, thin upper lip, and the prominent bones of cheek and jaw. She did look a little like Jackie Rizzo, the boy who'd dated Sharman Crane while thirteen-year-old Davey Starsky looked on, up to his neck in love, a crush the like of which he'd never felt before or even since—a goopy, drippy, wild infatuation. He'd hardly noticed Jackie, really, except as a kind of space next to Sharman that Starsky had wanted to fill instead. He'd been jealous, but then he'd been jealous of the straw in her milk-carton, for god's sake, and he could certainly look at straws now without that little jag in his breathing and tickle inside his spine that he'd had when he first saw Marianne.
If it wasn't Jackie he'd been remembering, then who? Starsky squinted. Marianne looked like a boy to him. A boy dressed as a girl ... in drag ... there'd been that bar in Saigon, but no, it couldn't be that either ....
The other shoe dropped.
The Green Parrot.
Nick Hunter wasn't a drag queen, just a hustler, a two-bit, scheming, half-witted, dishonest rent boy who'd chatted up John Blaine in the Green Parrot on the last night of his life, dumped him in his hotel room, emptied his wallet, and left the door open for his murderer.
Marianne looked ... well, not like Nick, not very, but enough to rub that sore spot in Starsky's mind. Even more than a year later it hurt to think of Johnny. John had taught him to fist-fight, helped him with his Algebra homework, lent him and Jackson a lawnmower the summer they made a business of doing lawns. He'd been more of a second father to Starsky than his Uncle Al ever was—even gave him the sex talk. The heterosexual sex talk, of course. But Johnny was also the one who'd caught Starsky with that magazine Jackson found in the trash, with just men in it. Thinking of what John had found to say about that made Starsky hot-faced and embarrassed, even now. And Johnny Blaine had been gay all that time, buying sex from hustlers like Nick.
"What the hell are you thinking about?" Hutch asked. He had a cup of coffee in one hand and put it on the desk as he bent over Starsky's shoulder—then, for a breath, was completely still. Then Hutch stood up again, retrieving the cup, and said in too brittle a voice, "All hot and bothered over Marianne Owens, Starsk? Maybe we set up this undercover job all wrong. Maybe you're the one who should've gone in. Or maybe you're thinking of trying your luck anyway?"
For a moment Starsky wanted to tell him to fuck off. But there was something really strange in Hutch's reaction to Marianne, too—not the first time Starsky had noticed that. "Wondering what you see in her," he said. It was true: he did wonder.
"I see a witness," said Hutch, but Starsky knew that wasn't the whole truth.
In the following days, Starsky could see that Hutch was tying himself in knots over this case. Cutting his temper shorter and shorter, chopping it like vegetables for one of his casseroles, until Starsky could hardly stand to be anywhere near him. And Hutch seemed okay about that distance.
"What is it—what is it?" Starsky asked at last, in the parking lot at Metro when Hutch turned down yet another offer for a meal at The Pits before going back undercover.
Hutch was sitting sideways in the driver's seat of his disreputable car, his hair lifting in a grimy breeze and the fringe of his leather jacket swinging as he shrugged. His mustache moved slightly as if he were chewing on his upper lip. Starsky wanted to shake him. He even got as far as gripping the leather-clad shoulders before Hutch raised steely eyes and said, "Maybe the shoe's just on the other foot for once."
Starsky opened his mouth to ask what Hutch meant, and then realized. Clamped his jaw tight shut with annoyance, and then opened it again to say, "Bullshit. For once? This ain't the first time you've shut me out. And I never did it about the job."
"It isn't the job part," Hutch said, softening a little.
If Starsky had answered right away, he knew he'd still have sounded angry, so he paused, letting his hands slip away from Hutch's shoulders, feeling the suede snag on his skin. And then, forestalling anything Starsky would have found to say, Hutch leaned forward, head bent over hands now clasped between his knees, and said, "She just seems so lost. Drowning. Even when she sings there's that sadness."
She sings the BLUES, Hutch!—he wanted to say it. Knew Hutch couldn't hear it. Kept his mouth shut but only barely.
But Hutch saw most of what he hadn't said, and the glint was back in his eye. "There's no point in going over and over this," he said in the would-be-superior tone that used to be amusing and now just rubbed Starsky the wrong way.
So, "Right," he said. "Fine. Give me a call if you find out anything. For the job."
Later that night Starsky did something he wasn't proud of. He drove to the Sunset Bowl and circled the block until he'd seen Hutch's car. Then he parked the Torino out of sight and walked up to the club door between its two leafy hedges, a little warily, but nobody seemed to notice him. Inside, he lingered in the shadows at the top of the staircase, one hand on the carved paneling of the wall, letting his eyes adjust to the light though he saw the beacon of Hutch's hair at once. Marianne was singing:
"There was a boy
A very strange enchanted boy
They say he wandered very far, very far
Over land and sea
A little shy and sad of eye
But very wise was he."
She tilted her head toward Hutch with a wink. Her voice was sweet, not high and not low, tremulous on the long notes, and Starsky understood why Hutch had said it was sad.
"And then one day
A magic day he passed my way—"
Hutch bent his own head, smiling, and Starsky knew as if they'd been only inches apart how the pale lashes swept down, how Hutch must have swallowed and let out one expressive breath—
"And while we spoke of many things
Fools and kings
This he said to me
'The greatest thing you'll ever learn
Is just to love and be loved in return.'"
The door opened as the audience began to applaud, and Starsky stepped back against the wall to let the new arrivals past. Then he ducked out the door and between the hedges again, and was on the street, red and white lights passing, the rise and drop of engine noise the only music.
He told himself that the undercover assignment was obviously going well. Hutch, when deliberately chatting up a girl, was sometimes embarrassingly awkward, but Hutch in this bowled-over, semi-bashful mode was lethal. Knocked 'em over like dominos, and it looked like Marianne was falling.
And maybe Hutch, too.
Trouble, trouble, trouble, chanted in Starsky's mind. Trouble on the way—if Hutch fell in love, or even if he didn't. And how could Starsky say a single word, when all Hutch had to do was raise those remembering eyes to bring up Rosey Malone?
They were too close. They were in each other's skins, each other's back pockets ... yeah, each others' pants, too. It had been years since either of them had a memory the other didn't share. Seventy-five percent of their lives together ... more.
He was in his own car, driving away from the club, but also in Hutch's, lying in the back seat in the stifling air of last summer while Hutch said, "Starsk, would you consider that a man who spends seventy-five percent of his time with another man has got certain tendencies?" Setting him up, getting back for Starsky's grousing over John's case, Hutch had meant the two of them, but actually Starsky hadn't caught on because he knew it was more than that, counting work. "... and you're not even a good kisser."
Two could play that game, so Starsky had leaned over the seat and asked, "How do you know that?" to see the startled look on Hutch's face.
And then, like so many things in that overheated week, it had gotten out of hand. "How do I know that?" Hutch was angry, a reaction Starsky had honestly not expected. "How do I know that? What the fuck are you talking about, how do I know that?"
"I was just windin' you up, Hutch," he said, weakly, but it was too late.
Hutch swerved suddenly, pulling over with his fingers splayed and his palms guiding the wheel, killing the engine and twisting in the seat at the same time. Those big damp hands held Starsky's head, and right there in the empty parking lane, in broad daylight, Hutch kissed him.
If the kiss had been as angry as Hutch's voice, Starsky would have been able to pull away and probably would have belted him one. But instead that generous mouth went all sweet, slow, moving in and out like waves of heat or the pulsing air from the office fan, and Starsky never could resist that. He was nothing to sneeze at himself in the kissing department, and he knew it, but Hutch was amazing. Toying with his partner's lips, finding tiny new erogenous zones that even after all this time Starsky hadn't known about, flicking, tickling, slurping a little and turning Starsky to Jell-O. Warm Jell-O. Except for his cock, which was suddenly iron. When Hutch let him go, he almost dropped his head to the seatback—his knee did thud against the transmission hump on the floor—and Hutch stared into Starsky's no-doubt glazed expression, one hand still in his hair.
"Caught my cold yet?" Hutch breathed.
"Fever," Starsky answered, shaking.
Not your common, everyday thing. Not at all. They'd gone to Venice Place, which tended to be marginally cooler than Starsky's apartment, and made the kind of love usually reserved for the nights after narrow escapes from death. Fierce, and fast, and bruising. Something to contend with, as he'd said, though he hadn't meant this kind of contest. They were different with each other. Not like John and Nick, for chrissake, or John and Mr. Peter Martyr Whitelaw either.
Different than they were with women, too. They fell for women, got infatuated and romantic, which meant, in Starsky's book, that they didn't prefer men. Someday, one of those falls would be permanent, and coping with that would be hard enough without making more out of their own relationship than it could really be.
But Starsky didn't believe this thing with Marianne qualified as 'falling in love.' She was defenseless and Hutch was attracted and guilty. And Starsky's hands were tied; he hated that. Nothing to do but stand back and wait. And worry. From a distance.
When he glanced out the squad room window and saw Hutch sitting like a ghost on the stairs, Starsky almost didn't go out, almost just sat looking through the glass. He'd spent the whole day chasing down leads alone without even a call from Hutch, and now the man was turning up, needy and lost?
But he did look all too solitary. Starsky got up, still too faithful a compass to abandon his personal North. But he didn't have to like the feeling.
He wished, as he passed through it, that he could slam the squad room door, but it was a swinging one.
~~~
"How exactly do you care for me?" asked Kira.
"Hmm?" Hutch was half-asleep.
Kira tweaked his nose, which woke him. "You said you'd never been to bed with a woman you didn't have feelings for," she said, her tone conversational, as if they were five feet apart in her living room instead of five inches apart in her bed. "Here we are. So tell me about your feelings."
"Well," he said, "you're beautiful. You have a wonderful smile. Your hair—" he reached for the soft, butter-gold, glowing mass of it, but she leaned away.
"Not that," she said.
"You're intelligent," he offered, "kind—"
But she was laughing. "No, no," she said, "I didn't say why. I said how."
He didn't know what she meant. He tried reaching for her again, and she let him stroke her shoulder and her breast, breathing a sigh that sounded like surrender. But when he got up on one elbow to lean over and kiss her, she held him off with both hands.
"Humor me." Her voice was steady, not angry, and her eyes were brightly curious. "Say you're walking into a room and I'm there. What exactly do you feel when you see me?"
He still didn't get the point, and that was beginning to annoy him.
"Before you check to see if your partner's there," she said. "Come on, that's only a window of maybe ten seconds. Think about it. What do you feel?"
"Don't tell me you're jealous of my friendship with Starsky." And he didn't want to think about his partner right now.
She grinned. "Oh, no, I won't tell you that. Not the way the jealousy is flowing in this situation at all." She laid a finger on his lips when he frowned and began to speak. "No, let's not get sidetracked. You. Me. Emotion. That's what I want to hear about."
He dropped to his back again and looked up at the shadowy ceiling. The curtains were drawn, and anyway the bedroom window was in the shade at this hour, so the whole room had a dreamlike dimness. It had seemed sexy, but now he began to feel shut in. Women, he thought.
"Now you're thinking up something to say to keep me happy and putting out. Don't bother, Hutch. If I wanted a Hallmark card, I'd buy one. And you can't think I'm reluctant to fuck." The crudity made him look at her again. Like her explanation that she slept around just as he did himself, her use of the word bothered him in a way he didn't want to admit to.
"Okay," he said, so she wouldn't keep talking about it. "Okay, I walk into a room and see you, and I ... I feel ... glad, because I know I'll be able to get close to you, smell your perfume, touch you. Because we'll flirt, and that makes me feel good. When I see you, I feel energized. Sexier. Stronger."
Now she touched him, a fingertip teasing in his mustache, at the corner of his mouth, and he smiled at the tickling sensation.
"Able to leap tall buildings at a single bound?" she teased.
"You know what flirting feels like. I don't have to tell you that." He set his jaw, then asked, "What about you?" more to return her challenge than because he wanted to know.
"Oh, what any woman feels when she sees you. 'Wow, look at that blond.' And then, because I know you, I think of how much fun you are, what a sexy game you make out of everything, and—well, just you, Hutch. I like you."
"I like you, too."
Her fingers brushed down his chest. "I thought so." Skirting his nipples, tracing a rib, and then another, skimming over his navel. "I want to keep that, Hutch." She fingered the hair above his cock, then brushed gentle circles on his thigh. He shivered. "Oh, yeah, this part of you likes me a lot."
"That part of me still needs rest," he warned.
"Okay," she said easily, with a bare hint of mischief, and she got out of the bed. Hutch sat up. "Don't go yet," she coaxed. "Let me throw something on and get us some coffee. While you're resting."
He lay back down, watching her dress and still feeling the room close in around him; he had no idea why. Wasn't she telling him that she didn't need commitment, didn't want avowals of devotion like the ones Starsky ... oh Jesus. Hutch squeezed his eyes shut, knowing that explaining to Starsky that he'd read the situation wrong was going to be ugly. 'You see, Starsk, she wants your tender heart but she also wants my flirting and my cock.' Hutch shook his head. Kira'd have to do it herself.
The doorbell rang.
Hutch sprang from the bed, trying to forestall the disaster he was suddenly certain of. Kira looked at him as if she wanted to laugh, and said, "My husband's out of town, you sexy milkman."
"No games," he said, "that'll be Starsky." He grabbed his pants and pulled them on without bothering with underwear, stepped into his shoes, reached for his shirt.
"Did you arrange to meet here?" She obviously had no clue. The doorbell had rung again, and now Hutch heard knocking as well.
"No. Will you get out there?"
She didn't know them, he thought as he pulled the shirt on and she left the room. She had no idea that Starsky would want to know where he stood just as Hutch had. Hutch should have known, too, shouldn't have let her get him into bed, but he'd thought they'd have a little more time—No, didn't think at all.
He went to the bedroom door as to a firefight, tense and irrationally angry.
And he was right, he was too right. Starsky had a gift box in his hand and outrage on his face; he was angry with Kira but furious with Hutch. He struck Hutch, really started a fight with him, and that was something that had never happened before. A solid body blow—he means it, really means it, Hutch thought as he crowded Starsky back against the wall, tried to contain his rage and his strength, knowing it wasn't possible. They could hold each other back from outsiders. Nothing could protect them from each other.
Kira's tears were a temporary stoplight, and they managed to get out of her house. Poor girl, she probably still didn't get it, and Hutch couldn't make real sense of it himself. He tried once more as he followed Starsky down the stairs, to the sidewalk, seeing how the Torino was parked to block traffic and the LTD. "Starsky, I wasn't trying to hurt you. Neither was—"
"Shut up," Starsky gasped, "enough already!"
"Are you okay?" Hutch asked idiotically.
Starsky whirled and grabbed handfuls of Hutch's black shirt, still only half tucked in, and shook him. "Shut up, shutupshutup!" He looked wild with pain, eyes wet and dark, mouth stretched wide and thin. He threw Hutch off and ran to his car, slammed into it and screeched away, and Hutch just stood watching, drawing in breath after breath, harder each time until he was gasping himself.
He looked over his shoulder at the window, but Kira wasn't watching. Turning back toward the street, he walked forward slowly, got into his car, stared at the dash, then dug in his pocket for the keys. Put the right one in the ignition. Leaned his forehead on the wheel for a while, maybe a minute, maybe five. Sat back up and started the car to drive by sheer rote to Venice Place.
Hutch sat in the greenhouse for some time. Then got up and checked over the plants methodically, took a few back to the potting table and took off the geranium's dead blooms, cut back the Wandering Jew.
Cut back the Wandering Jew. Twice, today. Laugh, anybody? My life needs a laugh track. But he didn't laugh himself, not at all.
After Marianne, gardening had helped. Felt good. Fingers in the soil, in the cool smooth leaves and stems. Moisture and good air after all that whiskey-and-cigarettes club fog.
But Starsky had been there, reading the paper. Then.
He took a deep breath, put the plants back in their places, and went to the phone to call his partner.
"Hello?" The familiar voice sounded remote, as if Starsky wasn't holding the phone quite right.
"Starsk, I want to—" Click.
The worst thing about it was that he hadn't slammed the phone down, no big clatter, nothing that sounded upset. Starsky would talk even to salespeople, sometimes chat them up if their voices were pleasant, but he'd just hung up as if Hutch were the weather recording.
Hutch put the phone down just as gently.
By two o'clock, he'd called twice more and been hung up on both times before he got out an entire sentence. He was angry himself, now, so perhaps it was just as well, but exactly how long was Starsky going to act like a teenager in a snit?
The next time he couldn't stand it any longer, he called Kira.
"Oh, I can't believe it," she said when she recognized his voice. "You guys! I'll have to change my number, move out of state, I don't know, maybe run—"
"Hey, calm down," he interrupted. "So Starsky called you? You explained to him?"
"Explain? No. He called, yelled and interrogated and, well—" the indignation seemed to fall out of her voice. "I didn't know he'd be so hurt," she said.
"I don't know why we didn't know," said Hutch.
"I don't have any idea about you," she said, voice rising again, "but I didn't expect him to freak out like that because I do what you both do!"
"Will you stop shouting?"
She said nothing, but her breathing was harsher than usual.
"So you told him that?" Hutch asked again.
"I don't think he heard me. But yes, I tried. He, um," and now she sounded unsteady, "told me to keep the box, you know? I didn't even remember it, not really."
Hutch found he was a little curious. "What was in it?"
She paused, and he was suddenly very curious.
"I haven't opened it," she said quietly. "I keep looking at it, and I pick it up, and then I just can't."
Hutch found himself in total sympathy with her. "Well," he said at last, "look, I'm sorry to bother you about it. He won't talk to me, is all, and I just wanted to know what was, well, what's ..."
"That's all I can tell you. I'll see you tonight at the dance hall." She sounded tired.
As he hung up, he knew there was only one more thing he hadn't tried, and it probably wouldn't work either. Still, he would have climbed into his car and done it, but then the phone rang, and it was Dobey. Mad as a wet hen. Even the image of Dobey as a wet hen couldn't make him smile right now, while his relationship with his partner was in tatters and another woman lay murdered by the killer they weren't anywhere near catching.
At the murder scene, Dobey noticed how distant they were, told them off—now that was guaranteed to make Starsky shut up like a safe-deposit box. The tirade irritated Hutch, too, even though he agreed with it. After that, Hardy was pretending he could walk off the case, punch out like a factory worker at five, and Hutch let his temper go. Then he was surprised and dismayed when Starsky just allowed him to fly off the handle as if it didn't matter. Not how they'd ever worked before. They stood farther apart than usual, and Starsky's back was to Hutch. Their eyes never met.
Starsky got into the Torino and drove off, not speeding but still obviously getting away from Hutch. Hell with that. Hutch got in his car, drove a longer, more indirect way so Starsky would get there first, but followed him home. Climbed the stairs and hoped he wouldn't be knocked back down them. Leaned on the doorbell.
Starsky opened the heavy door, but not far, and he stood squarely in the gap. Hutch raised his hand without thinking and put his palm against the dark wood, just under the little window, and Starsky raised his chin, his whole face set hard. Obviously bracing himself, as if he thought Hutch would force his way in.
They weren't to that point yet. Hutch dropped his hand.
Really it was all over then, but since he'd driven all the way here he had to go through with it. Try, anyway. "Let me in?" he asked.
Starsky's eyes narrowed. "No, I don't think so," he said calmly.
"We need to talk."
"We tried that. I tried it. Remember? I told you I loved Kira, and you went straight to her place and fucked her."
"It wasn't like that!" Hutch slapped the door in frustration, but Starsky held it almost still. "That's what I'm trying to tell you!"
"Oh, you mean there was somebody else in her bedroom you were fucking?"
Hutch began to think that finishing their aborted fistfight was not such a bad idea. Trying to calm down, he looked sideways, at the mostly dead tree whose massive limbs went right through Starsky's landing and the roof overhang. Hutch wondered why the builders had kept the tree instead of cutting it down. Oddly enough, Starsky didn't close the door, just waited.
Swallowing, Hutch looked back at his partner's frown. "So you won't talk to me."
"I," and Starsky closed his eyes, then opened them, too slowly for a simple blink, "I can't right now. I don't trust ... either of us."
It was obviously not what he had begun to say, but Hutch felt no gratitude for the tact. He turned to leave, but anger burned hotly in his chest, and he heard himself say, "That's quite a martyred-saint act you've got there, Starsk. Must be nice to be the only one in the right."
The door slammed so hard Hutch heard it shaking in the frame as he ran down the stairs.
He ran down to the LTD and then kept going, past it, up the hill. It wasn't a steep slope, and he'd run it before, the times sleeping at Starsky's and his intermittent jogging program coincided. In fact, he wished it were steeper: he wanted to work hard, feel the air really push and pull in his lungs, the stretch and burn of muscles. He tucked his head down and ran faster, then looked up to make sure he wasn't going to knock somebody over.
He kept thinking, that was the problem.
Hutch had not loved Kira. Not at any point, and he'd known it all along. She was all the things he'd told her she was, gorgeous and kindly and intelligent and sexy—though, to be frank, not much of a cop—and he loved the zing in the air around her when they flirted, the almost-scent of pursuit, conquest, play. It seemed like forever since he'd been able to feel those things so honestly and simply, with no guilt. Not then. Now there was guilt, and it was knotting Hutch's stomach and making his head pound.
But why had it been such a body-blow when Starsky said he was in love? Not like that was the first time. Even the fact that he'd evidently told Hutch before telling Kira wasn't all that unusual.
Hutch tried to think if it had ever happened with somebody they'd both dated. Plenty of those, actually... hell, they'd had threesomes, and one night they'd tried a foursome, though Hutch hadn't liked that as much. The next time Starsky seemed to suggest it, after the Nadasy case, Hutch had cut him off, somehow not wanting to try to make love to his own girl while Starsky was so near with another one. Especially not those two, who couldn't keep his and Starsky's names straight and were so much alike that he had the same problem himself. Taking two sex-Barbies to the same bed was the surest way of ...
... of making sure that Hutch would want to touch Starsky instead of either girl.
Well, there was nothing new in that either. They didn't always want each other at the same time. They'd both said no, and both heard it.
And surely that had nothing to do with Kira.
It had been a long time, though. Knowing it was unwise, Hutch still tried to think back to the last time he'd had sex with Starsky. After the Springsteen concert?
Starsky had bought the tickets for himself and Joey, catering to the teenaged girl's crush on him in a way that had made Hutch uneasy, and his unease had made him as condescending as he had accused Starsky of being. Hutch knew he did that but didn't seem able to stop. Like on the stairs just now.
No, he wouldn't think of that. He remembered instead the way Starsky had turned to him in the park, mischief lighting his eyes, and said, "Let's not waste those tickets." The surf beating behind them seemed to match his pulse. When they stood to pack up the cooler, Starsky's hand had reached out, squeezed once above Hutch's wrist, cold and clammy from the root beer bottle, and Hutch had shivered.
"Okay," he'd said, and it wasn't just about the concert.
Then, at Starsky's place, as they put the rest of the root beer back in the refrigerator, Starsky had taken the last one out of the melted ice and painted its chill wetness across Hutch's cheek, down his neck, around to the nape. Unbuttoned the shirt one-handed and then moved the bottle back, down the bare sternum, across to circle one nipple and then the other, then down to Hutch's navel while he squirmed and laughed. "Oh shit, c'm'on, Starsky, cut it out, what a fucking sadist, good thing Joey turned you down—"
Pausing as he fumbled with Hutch's belt, Starsky'd said, "It's illegal to do this with a minor," and the bottle had pressed right against Hutch's crotch, making him jump and harden.
Hutch stopped running abruptly and put his hot face in his hands. Then looked up, saw the empty sidewalk, and almost collapsed on the front stairs of the nearest house before bracing his elbows on his knees and covering his face again. Starsky ... Starsky ... what am I going to do?
What have I lost?
The companionship of the trip to the concert, the sidelong glances and chatting that made waiting in line seem—well, not short, but not unbearably long. The jokes about his poncho and Starsky's bleach-streaked t-shirt. The sizzling energy and charisma that had attracted a group of younger people to share their space on the hill, pool their food and drink, hand over their joint. The wicked, challenging grin as Starsky took the roach in his hand and again as he passed it to Hutch. The feeling of being fifteen again, or maybe eighteen. The way it felt to wave his arms in the air and sing along like every other crazy fan in the mosh pit and on the risers and up the hill. The weight and heat of Starsky, all over him in the car while they waited for the lot to clear, just high enough not to care, not to give a tiny damn about anything.
And that was all in just one evening, not even counting the sex.
Eight years of that, more if he went back to academy days, and it was dissolving in his hands. Tissue paper in the rain. Because of Kira, of all people.
No. Not possible.
Hutch got up and started back down the hill, not running now. His mind raced around in circles, raising plans and discarding them. Crazy things like flowers. Embarrassing things like bullhorns. Slow things like letters. Elaborate things like singing telegrams. Rough things like handcuffs. At least he made himself smile, though it was only a little twist of the lips. Couldn't he think of one really plausible idea?
Not really. But by the time he reached his car, he had thought of something to do. He scrabbled in the junk in the back seat until he found a fairly clean piece of scrap paper, went through the glove compartment and then felt along the dashboard for the pen he knew had been there yesterday. Found it. Got out and smoothed the paper against the hood and wrote, then stuck the paper under the Torino's windshield wiper.
Only a few words. Starsky couldn't miss them.
~~~
Starsky knew before he even reached the Torino who had written the note under the wiper. He didn't intend to read it. He took the crumpled edge between his fingers, lifted the rubber blade carefully, and began to ball up the paper, but he was looking down and there were so few words that he'd seen them before he could stop himself. 'Watch me tonight before—' and when he'd read that much, he had to see the rest, so he straightened the page, both hands now. 'Watch me tonight before you give up on us. Hutch.'
Before I give up on us! Have you got amnesia, Hutchinson? Then he did roll the paper between his palms, fiercely, until it was as tight a ball as he could make. He shot it away into the street, pulled the door open, drove off with a squeal of tires, and nothing he could do would drain the anger that sat and itched in his joints.
He didn't mean to watch Hutch, either. That wasn't what they were there to do—Starsky remembered their assignment if Hutch didn't—but the blond had hypnotized him somehow, and he kept forcing his eyes away only to realize in a few moments that he was looking again. Hutch was doing his usual sorry job of dancing, and that dark flasher's overcoat swung around him as he moved, concealing the lean body that Starsky had once observed so closely and with such pleasure. The flat dark cap hid much of the flaxen hair, and big aviator shades covered those baby blues. What was there to watch?
Hutch didn't return his gaze, and never seemed to look at Kira either. She was subdued, too, tonight; until now, Starsky hadn't realized how much it had lit her up to flirt with Hutch under his eyes. She'd just been sitting at that little table, looking forlorn, until the vet with the bad leg hauled the backgammon board over and plopped himself down in the other chair. She seemed startled, even dismayed, to have her thoughts interrupted; if she had really been a dance-hall girl, Starsky thought, she could never have gotten away with that attitude. He didn't wonder if his own brooding was credible for a dance-hall patron.
His chest twinged as he glanced from one blonde to the other, and he rubbed it absently while he walked around the periphery of the room. Stupid, sentimental—he only wished he believed, really, what he'd told Kira about just going through life taking things as they came, not expecting much, not wanting to possess beauty and love when they seemed so near, not staking any claims.
On the other hand, this room was full of people who'd done that, and where had it gotten them?
When he and Hutch had been assigned to this case, Starsky had honestly expected them both to stick out like sore thumbs, undercover or not. He'd approved his partner's unattractive garb even though he couldn't quite bring himself to wear anything like that. Then they got to the dance hall, and he found to his surprise that almost everybody there looked, well, normal. Not substantially different from the range of people to be found at your average disco or bar, the kind of place where you paid for the drinks, not the dances.
Still the place depressed him. He felt like the men here had given up, as if they must feel that they couldn't get a woman to dance with them just because she wanted to. Many of these guys were regulars, arriving night after night to take the same girls around the same dance floor, like johns who kept visiting the same whores, pretending that the girls would have chosen them freely, knowing that the motivation was really only money. That sordid. That artificial.
He'd turned to Kira so fiercely because he knew that when they weren't on duty she could just walk away, could see somebody else, so if she chose to be with him, surely it meant something?
Wrong. His teeth rubbed together as he clenched his jaw.
He got a beer, pulled off the tab, the tiny violence no release. After a gulp or two he put it down and started walking again.
Time was running out. Starsky was restless, uneasy, the back of his neck tickling with apprehension as if someone were staring at him. The man was here somewhere, he was certain of it, and they had no idea who he was. Their only information a misspelled note. Their only physical clue a piece of rubber the size of a dime.
Time so short. He felt like that personally, too. Couldn't Hutch see it? There were lines at the corner of his eyes, a droop to the mouth beneath the mustache, and they were both a little slower, a lot more cynical. Older. They could play around like they'd done at the Springsteen concert, but that had been as much of an act as anything he was doing here. The next morning he'd woken up with the headache marijuana always gave him and looked at the translucence of Hutch's skin in the sun, brushed the naked shoulder with his fingertips and then his lips—but thought, this has got to stop. Hutch ought to be able to wake up slowly with somebody he loved every morning; Starsky deserved the same; they had to stop sleeping around like it didn't mean anything before they were two old guys who had to buy it 'cause nobody would give it for free.
He moved up to Susan, the other blonde woman there and thus the other one in most danger from the killer, and they began, awkwardly, to dance while he tried no less awkwardly to find out if anybody had been acting strangely. He couldn't tell whether she was joking or just too stupid to keep track of what she was saying, but anyway she couldn't point out anybody who seemed stranger to her than the rest.
He was looking at his partner again, damn it.
And then Hutch peeled himself away from the clinging attentions of the girl he'd been dancing with and went over to Madame Bouvet's little ticket booth to take the phone. Starsky followed him. Hardy had a couple of ideas about the piece of rubber, none very revealing. Anyway the closeness of Hutch's body was hardly bearable as they talked about it in murmurs. Only once did Starsky look at the face bent nearly to his own, and Hutch's breath hit his cheek and forehead.
He forced his eyes around the room, around and around as they walked side by side back into the crowd, looking for rubber-soled shoes or a cane.
A cane. Starsky's eyes found the vet with Kira, saw the tension in her shoulders and the awkward position of her hand, in his, in the air, nothing romantic about it. It looked painful. Starsky walked closer, tried standing at one of the pinball machines to get a better angle, craned his neck to see, but the man was surging to his feet, knocking the table over, shouting, and in his other hand was—
—a grenade—
—how he'd prayed never to see one of those things again. But there it was, and they were seconds away from the worst, Hutch too close with his hand out, Starsky shoving everybody he could grab toward the nearest exit, brain thundering GET-OUT-GET-OUT-GET-OUT but Hutch couldn't and he couldn't either, moving up on the man, trying to talk him down but he was gone, in country, crazy, wanting to die, was this the end, then, of all of it? Time this short? Was he about to see Hutch blown all over the room? While they were still this angry at each other? Oh no, oh God, Hutch was going to kick it out of the crazy guy's hand, that would be the first part of Hutch blown off, that leg—
—but the grenade was in the air, and above Starsky, coming to him as sweetly as a baseball, so he threw it like one. It went off as it went through the window and blew the other pinball player over the railing onto the dance floor. Hutch brought the vet down and Starsky threw himself over Kira, and when the dust and the silence had fallen, Kira crawled out of his hold to comfort the crazy vet, stroking his face and calling him by name, Joey—weird, he's nothing like Joey, Starsky thought inanely.
Hutch was looking at him, but his eyes were as unrevealing as if he still had those shades on. Starsky's own face was probably pretty blank. Kira was crooning, impossibly tender.
She'd probably say she loved Joey, too. At last he knew her. Must have been the feathered hair that misled him. Ten years back she would have worn it straight under a headband, called herself Moonbeam or Deliverance, and definitely she wouldn't have been a cop. He'd known so many like her, slept with them, loved them for a night, thought of it like that, anyway.
He'd been so young then. She couldn't still be that young, could she? Couldn't she feel that faint self-congratulation under the 'free love,' tying it down, hollowing it out? Had she never loved anyone more than the little beer can of free love would hold?
He got to his feet, still brushing dust from his jacket, and walked on shaky legs to where his partner lay. He held out one hand. Hutch looked at it, then up at Starsky's face, and at last the big, quivering palm settled into his. Starsky pulled. Hutch got up, put his hands through his wild hair, glancing at Joey and Kira and then back at Starsky. For a moment they were as close as they'd ever been. But Hutch stepped back and said, "When the relief wears off, you'll still be angry."
"Probably," Starsky said honestly. "Meanwhile, gimme the cuffs and I'll secure the deer hunter here."
Hutch nodded, reached under his coat, passed him the handcuffs, and then went without a word to the ticket booth to phone Metro.
It was a long night after the arrest. The fluorescent light in the squad room felt harsh, stung Starsky's eyes, or maybe that was still the dust. Coffee tasted terrible; even the candy bar he bought, from the same vending machine he'd been eating out of for years, seemed strange in his mouth. Hours, it felt like, days ... reports, forms, typing, signing, getting yelled at by Dobey, yelling at Kira.
"You mean you had your gun on him? You had your gun on him and he just pulled out the grenade anyway, showed it to you ..." Starsky couldn't believe what she'd said, what he'd seen. "What in hell were you waiting for?"
"He had my other hand," she said. "He was squeezing so hard—hurting me."
"Yeah, and?"
"I don't think he believed me about the gun. I did tell him, but it was under the table, and—"
"Why?"
"What?"
"Why? Why didn't you show it to him?"
Hutch looked from one to the other as they fought, as if he were watching a ping-pong match from the middle of the table, and said nothing at all. Starsky wasn't sure whether he was grateful or whether he resented the hell out of it.
"I was undercover," she said. "You know, undercover! Does a dance-hall girl carry a weapon?"
He gazed at her: she was still beautiful, but he wondered how she could possibly say such a dumb thing with a straight face. She'd never been stupid before, not that he'd noticed.
And then Hutch chipped in. "There comes a time," he said mildly, "when the cover is, well, blown. And better that than you and him and half the people in the dance hall."
Starsky had to close his eyes as a wave of dizziness passed through him. Everything he'd imagined, expected, in those awful, slow seconds was back in his head. Light, noise, blood, flying body parts—Hutch—
And those hands clasped his arm and shoulder, the touch he'd know anywhere, while Hutch's voice was speaking, the spurious mildness gone and real compassion scorching through instead. "Hey, Starsk, buddy, it's all right, sit down." He did; a coffee cup was pressed into his hand, and he took a mouthful of the bitter overbrewed swill before he could stop Hutch from feeding it to him. He wanted to spit it out the way Hutch had spit coffee into Starsky's kitchen sink. Gulped instead, and grimaced.
"Was that only this morning?" he said.
Hutch grinned, evidently catching the reference right away. "Yesterday, now."
Starsky set the cup down and rubbed his face. "I gotta go home," he said. "I'm fallin' apart."
"Never," said Hutch.
And now it was Kira's turn to look like a tennis referee. Her face was blank. "If you're finished shouting, I suppose I'd better report to Captain Dobey."
She got up stiffly, absurdly bedraggled in her red clingy dress, and crossed the few feet, knocked—but before she could go in, Hutch took the door from her hand and called in, "Cap, Starsky and me are done, reports in the outbox, okay? Good to go?"
"Tomorrow—" Dobey's voice sounded far away. Starsky sipped the nasty coffee and convinced his hands to stop shaking.
"Sure, sure," Hutch said.
Somehow on the trip from the squad room to the parking garage, Hutch the Good Guy changed back into a pumpkin—or anyway into the man he'd been staring angrily at all evening. Starsky walked away from him, opened the Torino and got in, but couldn't close the door because Hutch had followed and was hanging on to it, both sets of knuckles white.
"I'm coming to your place," he said, a pure threat. "And I swear to you, Starsky, if you slam your door on me again I'm gonna break it down."
Starsky just nodded, eyes on the steering wheel. Hutch hung on a moment more, then let go, and Starsky pulled the door shut, so gently he wasn't sure the latch had really caught.
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