Title: Deadly Imposter Epilogue
Author: Mogs
Type: Gen
Censor: PG
Disclaimer: Not mine, I’m just toying with them.
Summary:  Starsky & Hutch start to feel the fallout from Colby’s arrest.
Feedback/Critique: Please!

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It was seven-fifteen, and Starsky wanted nothing more than to go home.

He pushed his chair back from his desk. The prisoners had been booked, and reports and other paperwork had been done, and there were only three people left in the squadroom now - he, Hutch, and Hilary Rosen, a petite uniformed officer with dark skin who was deep in the middle of a phone call to one of her many boyfriends.

"What now?" Home, he hoped. It had been a bad day--so bad it was off the scale. It wasn't every day you got to bring in your old academy buddy on two counts of murder one, with who knew how many more just waiting to be unearthed.

"Beer." Hutch said without looking up from rereading his own report. He'd been rereading it for the past five minutes.

Monosyllables, was it? Damn. Tread carefully, Starsk. " You gonna sign that thing, or are we here for the night shift?"

He didn't catch what Hutch muttered under his breath, but it did at least achieve its object: a more than normally wild signature was scribbled on the bottom of the single sheet and it was flung - none too accurately - in the direction of Dobey's in-tray. Hutch stood up, glowering, and it was Starsky who retrieved the report from the corner of the floor and stuck it in the shallow tray.

"Hey, don't take it out on the poor paper. What'd it ever do to you?"

"It - oh, forget it. Let's just get that beer and go home."

"Now wait a minute, Hutch! Colby caught you a pretty good blow to the head. We oughta--"

"No we don't. I'm fine."

"C'mon, Hutch. I know you gotta headache, I c'n see you gotta headache--"

"Yes, all right, so I've got a headache! And yes, it's thanks to Colby. But it has nothing to do with being hit over the head, and everything to do with--"

Hutch stopped short, staring at Starsky across the squadroom as though only now aware of where he was. Officer Rosen had abandoned her phone conversation, receiver dangling in one hand, and was staring at him with her mouth open. He glared at her and she lifted it to her ear again. "Damn.” He looked down, rubbing at the crease between his eyebrows. “Damn, sorry."

Hutch apologising was a rare enough phenomenon that Starsky let it pass without comment. He might have known John Colby first, but Colby had latched onto Hutch like a younger brother, back when he, Starsky, had seen the pale midwesterner as nothing more than the world's most boring roomie. Sure, it hurt, but he could live with it--at least until Hutch could.

"Let's go home, partner. Okay?" he said quietly, resting a hand on Hutch's arm and guiding him to the door.