TORTURED MIND

What happened to Starsky that has him teetering on the edge of insanity?

Beta read by ProvencePuss

CHAPTER ONE

The neon light outside his window flickered on and off, casting red and yellow shadows across the room. It was late but he wasn't tired enough to sleep. If he slept, he'd only have to wake up again the next morning and face another day. Another day where he'd have to find a reason to keep going, to go through the motions, to live with himself and the choices he had made. David Starsky's life as he knew it had ended two years, six months, 3 weeks, and four days ago. Now there was nothing left but the empty shell of the man he used to be.

As far as his family and his friends were concerned, to everyone he had known in his previous life, he was dead. Killed in a fiery inferno when his beloved Torino was run off the road and over a cliff, exploding on impact sparking a fire so intense that the body inside had been reduced to little more than ashes, not even enough left to make a positive identification through dental records. Hell, he'd even been to the cemetery and seen his own grave. Something like that leaves an impression on a man, a searing memory burned forever into his soul.

Starsky turned away from the window and rubbed the heel of his hand over the three days growth of beard on his chin. It itched like crazy but he couldn't seem to find the motivation to shave it off. What was the use? The only women he'd been with since this whole nightmare began had been prostitutes and they didn't particularly care about his personal hygiene or lack of it. He eased his weary body down on the hard single bed in the far corner of the room. He'd lost track of how long he had been here in this place. One cheap room in another rundown building looked just like the last one and the one before that. He had money in the bank, more money then he would ever need. He was good at what he did and it paid well, even if a little piece of him died with each job he completed. He had sold his soul to the devil and now he would have to pay the price.

Absentmindedly, he rubbed the old scars that decorated his chest and abdomen. Reminders of that day in the parking garage at police headquarters when he almost lost his life in a hail of bullets from a hired assassin's gun. The doctors had given him figuring he was a goner when he was wheeled into the hospital, technically more dead than alive. They flatly stated that it was a miracle that he had survived long enough to even make it to the hospital without bleeding out on the way. They shook their heads in amazement when he made it through the seven hours of surgery it took to piece his shattered insides back together. When he coded in the intensive care unit eighteen hours later, they called it a miracle when his heart inexplicably started beating again against all the odds.

Two days later, he surprised them all by coming out of his coma, awakening to a world of pain unlike anything he had ever known. For the next two months, he had fought the hardest battle of his life, the battle to survive and recover enough to walk out of the hospital under his own power. He had battled life-threatening infections, two bouts of pneumonia, four additional surgeries, a seriously damaged lung, blood poisoning, and eventually, addiction to the powerful pain medications they pumped into his system just so he could function on a daily basis.

Even after he left the hospital, he needed twenty-four hour care for several weeks. His partner and best friend, Ken Hutchinson, had taken an unpaid leave of absence from work to become his full time caretaker. For the first six weeks, Hutch had fed him, dressed him, bathed him, and even wiped his ass because he was too weak to do it for himself. Then for an additional eight months, Hutch had coaxed him, threatened him, and bullied him into completing his physical therapy sessions. In the end, he had regained most of his stamina, his strength and his muscle tone. But he only regained eighty-five percent use of his left lung, not enough to qualify him to go back to work on the streets as a cop. In a curtly worded letter thanking him for ten years of service to the Bay City Police Department, he was pensioned out on permanent disability due to injuries received in the line of duty.

He had fallen into a deep depression, shoving everyone away who tried to help him, even Hutch. Hutch became the primary target of his rage, his frustration and his violent outbursts in the weeks that followed. Maybe that was what had made him so susceptible when a ghost from his past suddenly appeared at his door. He had spent two years regretting the decision he was forced to make that day.

He often found himself thinking about Hutch, wondering where he was now and what he was doing. Sometimes that was all that got him through the day, the memories he held dear to his heart of their friendship and their partnership on the police force. But, even Hutch would turn his back on him now if he knew what Starsky had become. For the weary brunet, there was no turning back and no hope for the future. He was a man with no soul, an unwilling captive in a situation beyond his control just waiting for death to free him from the living hell his own life had become. Starsky finally let his eyes close and drifted into an uneasy sleep that was disrupted by nightmares that were filled with the nameless faces of the people he had murdered, guilty only of being targeted for elimination on the whim of a higher political power. And Starsky had been hand picked as their executioner.

The first rays of the rising sun were just peeking in through the dirty grime covered window when his screams awoke him from his nightmares. Starsky quickly shoved himself to an upright position, panting heavily as he struggled to calm his racing heart. His face and torso was covered with sweat and his eyes burned with unshed tears. He often wondered if this was how it felt to lose your mind because he knew that he was slowly losing his. He stumbled to his feet and made his way to the tiny cubicle that passed as a bathroom. Stripping off his faded, threadbare jeans and equally faded tee shirt, he reached into the shower stall and turned on the shower, adjusting the spray until it was hot enough to burn his skin.

Stepping into the shower stall, he hissed as the hot water hit his skin, turning his normally olive toned skin red. Lowering his head so the water ran over his tangled mass of dark curls, he stood there and let the water burn away the remnants of his nightmares. Grabbing the washcloth hanging over the shower rod he scrubbed at his body furiously in a futile attempt to feel clean again.

Finally, he stepped out of the shower and walked back into the other room, shaking his head to dispense some of the water that still clung to his curls. Opening the closet, he pulled out a pair of jeans with holes in the knees and a long sleeved light blue shirt with a couple of buttons missing. His choice of attire helped him to blend into the neighborhood without being noticed, even though he was one of the few Caucasians in the city.

Sitting down on the edge of the bed, he pulled on his old Adidas, one of the few reminders of his old life besides his faded jeans that hung loosely on his slender frame. He'd lost a lot of weight in the past two years as his appetite decreased until he was barely eating enough to stay alive. Maybe eventually he'd manage to kill himself, one way or the other. Lifting the pillow on his bed, he took out the Beretta he kept hidden there. Checking the clip to make sure it was fully loaded, and double-checking to make sure the safety was on, he slid the gun beneath his belt in the middle of his back. Grabbing a thin black windbreaker from the foot of the bed, he shrugged into it, making sure it concealed the gun.

He left his room and climbed down the rickety steps to the front entrance. The building rented rooms by the month, the week, the day or the hour with no questions asked. It was the kind of building where the other boarders looked the other way and minded their own business. Starsky walked to the tiny café on the corner and went inside.

When the pretty oriental girl with long black hair came to his table, he ordered breakfast, speaking in fluent Vietnamese. The girl nodded shyly and hurried off to get his food and coffee. He ate in silence, ignoring the other diners around him. He was just finishing his coffee when the front door opened and a short, portly man wearing a three-piece suit came in. Spotting Starsky sitting alone at the back of the room, the man smiled and nodded slightly. Starsky nodded back and pulled some bills out of his pocket, leaving them on the table to pay for his order. Shoving himself to his feet, he left the café without a second glance at the other man who was standing at the counter ordering a cup of coffee to go.

Darting into the alley that ran between the café and the shop next door, Starsky leaned against the brick wall and waited patiently. Within a few minutes, he was joined by the portly man in the suit.

"You're right on time, David. As usual." The man said with a thin smile that never quite reached his eyes.

"Can the small talk, Regan. You wanted to see me. Remember?" Starsky said impatiently. "What do you want?"

"The Major needs to see you."

"Why?" The request was somewhat unusual. Starsky normally received his assignments through Regan without meeting with personally the Major.

"How am I supposed to know? I was just told to deliver the message. Three o'clock today. The usual place."

"Tell him, I'll be there." Starsky growled, turning to walk away without another word. He blended in with the rest of the pedestrians on the busy sidewalk and headed east, walking slowly, his eyes darting from side to side as he surveyed his surroundings for any signs of danger. It was an ingrained habit from his years on the police force, one that had saved his life numerous times in the past.

He spent most of the morning just walking and thinking, wondering how his life had ended up like this. He was thousands of miles away from home, in a foreign land he had sworn never to return to again. A man without a home, a man without a country, a man without an identity.

Saigon, renamed Ho Chi Minh City in 1976 was the capital city of South Vietnam with a population of over five million people. There were large shopping malls, supermarket chains and million dollar businesses. But there were also red light districts, sex arcades, and areas of the city that were controlled exclusively by the Chinese mafia. It was a city where it was easy to disappear into the shadows without being noticed. A good place to hide right out in the open for a man like David Starsky.

At three o'clock that afternoon, he made his way to a nondescript building on the east side of the city, near the docks. This was the part of town that reminded Starsky of the city during the Vietnam War in the late 60's when he had been stationed in-country. A naïve nineteen year old scared out of his mind most of the time. It seemed like a lifetime ago and most of the memories from that time in his life were securely locked away in the back of his mind, a place he never visited voluntarily. He had spent too many years trying desperately to forget.

Starsky knocked on a rear entrance to the building. Three raps, a pause than three more raps. The door was opened by a tall, good-looking young man in a military uniform, who looked at Starsky questioningly.

"Sergeant Starsky to see Major Lewis. He's expecting me."

The young officer consulted a clipboard hanging on the wall beside the door and then nodded, gesturing for Starsky to follow him. He led the way down a long, dimly lit hallway to a closed door at the far end of the building. He opened it and Starsky stepped inside.

There were four men gathered in the office, three youthful looking men dressed in Army fatigues and an older, more distinguished looking man with salt and pepper hair sitting behind a desk. The older man smiled and looked at Starsky as he slouched into the room. He was accustomed to the brunet's insolence and had given up trying to reprimand him for his appearance or his behavior. After this meeting, it wouldn't matter anyway. David Starsky would no longer be a thorn in his side.

"You wanted to see me?" Starsky said gruffly, staring at the other man with a hint of defiance glittering in his sapphire eyes.

"Yes, I did." Major Lewis acknowledged with a barely perceptible nod to the other men in the room.

Without warning, Starsky's arms were grabbed and twisted behind his back. He struggled against his captors but they only tightened their hold, forcing his wrists up towards the middle of his back putting a painful pressure on his shoulders.

"What the fuck is this?" Starsky growled, glaring at the Major, his eyes smoldering with barely repressed rage.

The Major nodded again and the two men holding him forced him to a wooden chair sitting in front of the desk. They forced him down into the chair, continuing to hold his arms while the fourth man in the room, snapped a pair of handcuffs around Starsky's wrists, effectively immobilizing him. Only then did they release him. Starsky pulled at the cuffs angrily, knowing it was useless to try to free himself.

"What the fuck is this?" he demanded again, his voice rising with anger as he sought answers to his questions..

"This Sergeant Starsky is the end of your assignment." The Major said with a faint smile. "You've outlived your usefulness to us."

"So what now? You gonna kill me? Go ahead. Be my guest. Blow my brains out." Starsky snarled, "You'd be doing me a favor. Save me the trouble of doing it myself."

"Nothing so mundane, Starsky…you're going to take an overdose. A terrible accident committed by an unstable individual." The Major said smugly.

"You're nuts." Starsky growled, glaring at the other man belligerently.

"I was afraid you'd feel that way." The major nodded at the other three men in the room once more. One of them grabbed Starsky's head in a headlock, while a second man took an amber colored bottle out of his fatigues. He popped off the lid and poured out a handful of red capsules into the palm of his hand. "All you have to do is take the pills and I promise you, you won't feel a thing. It'll be quick and painless."

"Fuck you!" Starsky spit out, clamping his lips together tightly and refusing to open them as the other man tried to force the pills into his mouth.

The third man instantly squeezed Starsky's nostrils shut making it impossible for him to breathe. He held his breath as long as he could but eventually had to open his mouth to pull much needed oxygen into his burning lungs. As he gasped in a lungful of air, the man shoved the handful of pills into his mouth and then clamped his hand over his lips so he couldn't spit them back out.

The next few minutes became a battle of wills as Starsky tried to keep from swallowing the lethal dose of pills and the other man tried to keep him from spitting them out. Eventually, it didn't matter since the pills began to dissolve in his mouth causing the brunet to gag on the bitter taste. The other man kept his hand clamped over Starsky's mouth until Starsky swallowed convulsively, reluctantly choking down the pills.

When the other man finally removed his hand, Starsky began to cough and gag. The Major watched him with an amused smile on his face. "If you throw them up, we'll just have to start all over again." He said with a smirk.

It wasn't long before Starsky felt his eyes growing heavy and his body growing weary. He struggled to keep his eyes open, fighting the effects of the barbiturates but it was a battle he knew he couldn't win. His head fell forward with his chin against his chest as he fell into a deeply drugged slumber.

The Major looked at his subordinates and ordered, "Get his body out of here and dump it somewhere where it won't be found for a few days."