Hutch sat on a hospital bed, his feet dangling. The bandages on his face and chest and arms felt tight and itchy. A sign of healing he was told. He wondered if, under the numbing lull of the sedatives, Starsky was itchy too. Were the ribs healing? Was his scarred and tortured lung repairing? Regenerating?

Starsky had been in surgery for almost eight hours the day before. He hadn't...they hadn't lost him, Hutch had been reassured, but it had come very close a few times. Starsky had lost a lot of blood, internally, but the greatest concern was the scarring on his lungs from a previous injury, and the damage that new scars would do in the future.

There was danger of a blood clot

There was danger of the hit to the head Starsky had received leaving him partially deaf in that ear.

There was danger because of Starsky's almost suicidal loyalty. He'd passed out, after all, in the Torino, with the engine running, and nearly asphyxiated.

Hutch's burns and the broken nose were nothing. Superficial. Painful, but they would heal. The wound that was opening with every hour that Hutch watched Starsky breathe under an oxygen tent. And that would be left gaping if Starsky didn't make it. That wound might just kill Hutch.

There had been a bomb, several bombs. They had been placed around the promenade of the local baseball stadium and had been responsible for killing thirty-seven people, severely wounding 15 more and injuring a countless additional number that included Starsky, Hutch and their teenaged friend Molly.

They'd found her while picking up the pieces, and thanks to Molly and her adoptive brother Kiko, the 10 boys Starsky and Hutch had taken to the stadium that day made it out without a scratch. But the explosion wasn't the end of it. The stadium was taken hostage by a group of at least 30 armed and masked men.

They'd done their best to look like a military group but Hutch figured out they were cons. Ex-cons maybe, but bound by a single desire that they hadn't found out yet. The end result was an afternoon of pain and fear, then a single moment of excitement and the stadium once more falling into the hands of the good guys.

Then Molly had told them something she remembered. She had heard part of the planning, had made an attempt to tell Hutch before. She confirmed what Starsky and Hutch had both feared. There was a second bomb. This one was on a timer.

Hutch had taken Molly and a stadium guard into the bowels of the concrete structure, leaving a stubborn, hurting Starsky in the Torino.

They had found the bomb. A nasty, ugly thing that they couldn't disarm. Instead they moved it, out of the maintenance room it'd been hidden in, into the smoke filled tunnel, and out onto the cleared baseball field where it exploded before Hutch could make it out of the stadium.

He'd survived, Molly had survived, Tom the security guard had survived, along with fifty others...Starsky was one of the ones hanging on by a thread.

After Hutch had given a statement and discussed what was fast becoming a city-wide effort to find the man behind the 30 cons, he'd been given medical leave to recover. Dobey had promised to visit once he was free, Huggy had been by with flowers. Minnie had visited, sitting with Hutch on his hospital bed.

The rest had been long hours of sleeping…"Hutch?"

Long hours of waking. "Hutch…"

Long hours of staring, waiting, hoping...a hand touched his shoulder.

He turned, expecting a nurse with pills. Instead he found Captain Dobey standing with the same weary look on his face that had taken over Hutch's whole body. They went still in silent thought.

"They say how long he's gonna be in that...thing?"

"A week." Hutch said. "Just in case."

Dobey nodded beside him.

"What about you?"

"I'm….tired." Hutch said. "They find any other devices in the stadium?"

Dobey shook his head. His mind a hundred miles away and a few years too slow. It felt far too familiar. Too close to the past. Too much of the same kind of worry. The same kind of fear. Dobey physically pulled himself away from it, letting his hand slide off Hutch's shoulder.

"They did plenty of damage. Took a lot of lives." Dobey said, as if Hutch hadn't been there. Hadn't seen it himself.

"I know," Hutch said, then closed his eyes and shifted on the bed, swinging his legs up and leaning his back against the pillows. Setting his head down felt like heaven and the weariness in every muscle of his body piled on like Lilliputians strapping down the giant. Hutch was ready to pass out, but Dobey's presence and the worry for his partner, kept him right on the edge.

"They're gonna check on him every few hours." Hutch murmured, breathing deep through his nose, finally able to do it.

"I'll watch him, Hutch."

"Fluids should be changed...in an hour. Needs a new blood bag in four hours."

"Mmhmm…" Dobey said, watching his man's eyes close and stay that way. It was as if Dobey's arrival had been the switch to put Hutch more at ease, letting someone else watch his partner for a few hours. It had been the concern of the doctor Dobey had visited before entering the room. Hutch hadn't slept since being treated. He sat and stared at his partner.

"He needs sleep, Captain." The doctor had said, and Dobey, knowing his men the way he knew his children, entered the room with that one goal in mind.

Goals.

Dobey watched Hutch's muscles relax, his body settling into the bed, and the captain found a chair to sit in, resting between the two beds, and thinking about the goals of the men that had so effectively disrupted their lives.

If the goal had been to cripple the city by killing off almost a third of the people that represented its infrastructure, the attack in the stadium had been a good start. The roll call of those that had lost their lives was staggering. Far too many of them had been cops, firemen, servicemen and women. None of them should have been children but there were some younger people on the list too. At least one judge had been in the promenade when the first bomb went off. A vice cop had been gunned down on the field.

Most of the baseball players had made it out unscathed, having been sequestered away in the locker rooms when the first explosion went off. The day after, they had unanimously donated their blood and their time toward cleaning up the mess the attack had left behind. On a rotating schedule each of the players spent at least eight hours of one day in the hospital acting as temporary orderlies, helping the cooks in the kitchen, or visiting the wounded kids and grieving parents.

If the purpose had been to tear Bay City apart, the attack on so benign a symbol as a baseball park had done the opposite. Bay City pulled together as it had never done before. Each of the 30 men arrested in the raid had to be interviewed, processed, housed. They were all identified as ex-cons, some on parole, some released, some considered at large with outstanding warrants.

The long interview process, a matter of waiting out men who were experts at waiting, took the most manpower.

Dobey, and some of the other captains, had been forced to spend a few hours in an interview room with a man they didn't recognize, just sitting and waiting. Then another cop would come in with a fresh cup of coffee and sit and wait.

All of the witnesses, those that had been hospitalized and those that had remained unscathed, had to be interviewed, their information taken down, statements and charges made. That meant hours of paperwork, careful cataloguing of evidence, and all of it had to happen while the events were still fresh in the minds of those that had experienced them.

Every cop, including Dobey, spent time at a typewriter, pecking out statement after statement.

The cops had started a quiet betting pool, the proceeds to go to the families of their fellow cops that were hurting now, betting on which of the 30 cons would crack first. Dobey and the other superiors saw it happening and let it happen, knowing the men needed a way to distract themselves.

There was an entire city full of people demanding answers, wanting revenge, chomping at the bit, ready to take it for themselves if something didn't happen and fast. Too much had been televised, too quickly, for the department to get ahead of the media and dampen the impact it had on the community.

They were pulling together for the time being, but eventually tempers would run too hot, the demand for answers would grow too great and something would snap. They needed manpower. They needed the cops that were capable of helping back on their feet as quickly as possible. That was why Dobey was in a hospital room instead of the precinct.

Doing what he had to do so that Hutch would sleep. Let someone else watch his partner for a while. Get the rest he needed to recover.


It would be a few days before the first of the masked men finally gave in. He was a lifer looking at the death penalty. By that time the Bay City police department had collected over $2,700 in bets and all of it went to the widow of the cop that had been gunned down in the middle of the stadium. The support didn't stop there, but it slowed, only pocket change making it into a giant, glass jar in one of the stations, the cops adding to it, or their own collection jars, out of habit.

Hutch wasn't there for the interview, but Dobey saw that he got a transcript and was told that Hutch sat in the room reading it to his unconscious partner.

"The guy who cracked, his name is Ed. He's not one of ours. He was one of Mike's." Hutch shook his head, his eyes glazing over for a moment. No longer seeing the transcript, but remembering the captain that had died in his partner's arms.

"Ed had a lot to say. They call him Vega...the guy running the show. The guy with the voice. "Vega had a score to settle. He was set up good in Bay City once and got hurt. Had the rug pulled out from under him and he went down hard. He'd never done time before Bay City and he was a bear in the slam. You worked for him or you hid from him. We didn't have a choice when we got out. We were working for Vega until Vega said we were done.""

"Who do we know with that kinda clout?" Hutch asked, stared at his partner now free of the oxygen tent, then went back to the transcript.

"And that accent." Hutch added, thinking out loud. "Uh…."What did Vega make you in charge of?" "Accounts. I don't know where the money came from or how he got it, but each of us got paid. Damned good too. Cons don't get good paying jobs after jail. They get shit. Some of the guys were in it for the money. Some...cause it was what got them out of bed in the morning, know what I mean? I got paid more cause I could add to 20 without taking my shoes off. And I moved some numbers around. Trick I learned from a white collar guy in the slam."

Hutch shook his head, reading through the dense blocks of dialogue. "That's what a crowded jail gets ya, Starsk. Smarter criminals."

The blond checked on his partner again, studying the stillness that was so uncharacteristic of the brunet. Then he went back to the thick file and skipped a few pages.

""There were children hurt, and killed, in that attack. Do you know who was responsible?" "You know that's real sad….about them kids.""

Hutch stopped, snorted softly, and mumbled, "A con with a heart of gold." Then he kept reading. "" I mean...I wasn't one of the ones that killed 'em. And it was Vega that had his hand on the trigger with that bomb. He's one sick sonovabitch, he might'a killed 'em on purpose like." "Do you know, for a fact, who was responsible?" "No." "Can you give us the names of the men who participated in the attack?""

Hutch read on silently, watching in his mind's eye as Ed tried to weasel leniency out of the cop interviewing him, in exchange for names. In return the cop repeated over and over that leniency would be a consideration, if the information Ed provided was of use.

There were pages of that. Endless circles getting them nowhere before Ed tried to invoke his right to a lawyer. A right he'd previously waived. The transcript ended there.

Hutch knew that the next step would be to use the information they'd gathered against the other 29 men in custody. Try to get one of them to slip up or crack. It could be a domino effect if they did it right.

"We get these guys talking, we'll get Vega. He's probably out of the country by now." Hutch muttered, then set the transcript down on the table near his chair. He stood, winced at the soreness still settled in his muscles, and went to shift the blankets covering his partner. He put his hand to Starsky's forehead and brushed the curls back wishing the stubborn man would just open his eyes. Just once.

"What were they after, Starsk?" Hutch asked, bracing himself on the side of the bed. "What's the next step? What does Vega plan to do? We've got all the banks covered, all the schools have an officer in them. All the police stations are on alert, all the jails are on lockdown."

Hutch watched his partner's chest rise and fall, then stepped away a few feet to stare out the window. The sun was bright, like always. The streets were busy with cabs and cars, like always. The breeze was pushing through the palms, like always. Nothing was different, and yet everything was.

Their lives had shifted. Their city had been attacked and they still hadn't figured out why. That left a hole in the shield. It left them vulnerable and losing sleep because of paranoia. The risk of half the population panicking and rioting was very real, and other underlying issues, racial issues, economic issues, gender issues, were floating to the top. The "shit" metaphorically speaking, had been stirred and Bay City was responding slowly, but surely, to the wake up call.

It was the job of Hutch, and Dobey, and every other cop on the force, to look into the future and figure out, somehow, what the ultimate plan had been. How far had Vega intended this to go?

Why?

A gigantic question stuffed into three letters.

"Hutch…"

For the second time in a week, Hutch found himself pulled back to the present at the sound of his name. This time it came from a set of lips that had been still for too long. Hutch went to the bed, captured the floating hand and bent over his partner, laying his free palm against Starsky's forehead.

Blue, pain-filled eyes met his, Starsky's grip closed hard around Hutch's hand and Hutch hit the call button for the nurse a millisecond later. "Hey, partner, I'm here. I got a nurse comin'. They're gonna give you something for the pain. I'm here, buddy. Just take a slow breath, huh?"

Starsky's eyes remained glued to Hutch's while he drew in careful, tiptoes of breath, each one a little stronger than the last.

That something so fundamental and necessary to life, such as breathing, should be so painful for his partner, panicked Hutch and he hit the nurse call button a few more times until a crew of medical professionals stormed into the room.

Hutch stepped out of the way, reluctantly releasing his partner's hand. He watched them work, checking vitals, giving meds, checking bandages and breathing, and talking in hushed voices that seemed like shouts compared to Starsky's barely whispered responses.

It was a reassuring flurry of activity that Hutch became lulled by, only realizing it was over when a nurse laid her hand on his shoulder and asked if he needed anything.

"Uh...um. No. How...how is he?"

"He's awake." The nurse said, smiling softly. "That's a good thing."

Hutch let himself smile, but he knew it was weak. "Yeah…" He said, then looked back to the eyes that could read him in a heartbeat and communicate in silence. The blue scythed in half by drooping eyelids, but Starsky was in there. His mind was there, still intact.

Hutch went back to him, stroking the hair back from his forehead and holding his partner's hand until the man was asleep again, the lines of pain disappearing from his face. Hutch couldn't leave him. Not just yet. Starsky still needed him.

Hutch ignored the voice in the back of his mind that reminded him that he had a job to do. That bad things could be happening with him not out there to stop them. They had a city full of cops. Surely one of them could stand in for both Starsky and Hutch while the team was down. Starsky still needed him and there was nothing, nothing at all that could pull him away.

Or so he thought.

The phone call rang through to the hospital and Hutch was paged over the intercom. He left the room reluctantly and crossed the thirty feet of hardwood floor to the nurse's desk, picking up the hard, pale yellow receiver. The voice on the other end of the line was concerned for him. He heard the sounds of an airport in the background.

She wanted to know if he was okay, and he said he was.

She wanted to know if Starsky was okay, and he said, "He will be."

She wanted to know, "Can you meet me somewhere? I'm in Bay City. We have to talk."

"I...I don't want to leave the hospital, Luyu. Can you come here?"

"I'll meet you in the cafe. Give me twenty minutes to get there." She hesitated a moment, then said, "I love you, Hutch."

Hutch heard it in her voice. Something hard. Something that was scaring her. Something more than flying in to Bay City to find the whole town in an uproar. "Are you okay?"

"I'll tell you when I get there." Luyu said, then hung up.