Title: The Shaving of Hutch (with apologies to Kassidy Rae g)
Author: Mogs Rating: PG Type: Gen ... so far Feedback: Please. I'm stressing out and it'll make my day.
Disclaimer: Not mine. Belongs to some american dude whose shoes I am not worthy to unloose.
Summary: A mysterious man has been hired to do a very dangerous job in Hutch's apartment.
A/N: Started because someone on the loveofmeandthee yahoogroup wanted people to write a paragraph of description without adjectives. This is what mine has now turned into.
Oh, and this is what happens when I get both bored and stressed. The way my mind is working at present there will be more. Flee, all of you! Flee while there's still time! Make for the hills!
(Did I mention I'm stressed?)
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The figure paused in the doorway to the room, blade in hand, and looked down at the bed. He'd laughed when he'd gotten the assignment; now he was starting to appreciate some of the difficulties involved.
There were no lights, but the streetlights outside gave him some help. The sleeper faced away from him, hair like a cornfield glimmering in the gloom. He rolled over with a sigh as the figure watched, the sheet that covered him twisting around his legs and revealing a foot and ankle as it receded. Another sigh, and the sleeper slept on, face turned toward the watcher.
On the nightstand, a clock ticked. The watcher stepped toward the bed.
The sleeper's eyeballs did not even twitch under their lids. The lips opened, just a crack and with each breath exhalations of air stirred the hairs of the mustache. The watcher eyed the mustache with trepidation and brought up the razor in his hand, wondering how on earth to assassinate that strip of hair before the sleeper awoke.
Get with it, man, you're a professional, the figure told himself. A professional in both senses of the word too: the people who knew how he had made his living in the decade before he'd become a barber could be numbered on the fingers of one hand. It was just a shame that one of those who did know had chosen tonight to call in the favor he owed him--to exercise both his professions--and on a cop, of all people.
And why? His hirer had called him away from a night out with his girl to call in a favor for this piece of insanity? There'd been no way to explain to Lindsay, which meant that she wasn't speaking to him at all, and she'd threatened to dump him if he wasn't back by three. It was now three-thirty.
He paused, telling himself not to store up trouble. His victim had drunk seven pints tonight: he wasn't likely to wake. But even that knowledge did not stop sweat from running down his wrist onto the handle of the razor. He put the razor down on the nightstand without making a sound and wiped his palm. Time to get to work.
Scissors before razor. The snick of the blades made him jump, but the sleeper did stir at all. An exhalation of air carried the hairs away to fall onto the pillow. He moved the scissors and cut, timing it so that the sleeper blew the strands away as before, and then repeated the motion, until the ends were stumps that could be shaved away, the hairs floating away on clouds of breath scented by beer. He warmed the metal of the razor against his palm; there was little he could do for the foam, but the absence of response from the man on the bed eased his worry. With only a handful of strokes the stubble from the cornfield was swept away.
What a difference five strokes of a razor could make! The intruder pocketed his razor and lowered the foam into the bag he had brought, careful to make no sound as they hit its base. The sleeper's face had lost years, maybe decades, as though the razor had shorn not hair but barriers away, and the intruder let himself smile. He was an artist, and now, looking at the sleeper's hair, he felt the scissors on the nightstand burning a hole at the edge of his vision. Such a work of art he could create ... just a little harvesting of that cornfield.
The sleeper stirred, nestling into the pillow, and the watcher stepped back. He'd done as he'd been asked, he was in a cop's home, for Christ's sake, and if he wanted to keep his freedom it was time to stop drawing castles in the air before the sleeping cop woke. Leave the message, and get out, moron, he told himself, 'cause if he wakes, he'll bust you, seven pints notwithstanding.
He wrapped his hand in the handkerchief and then brought out the note and laid it on the nightstand, reaching to pick up the scissors as he did so. The streetlights glinted off their blades, onto the sleeper's hair and the artist within broke free. He warmed the blades as he had the razor, so that the cold wouldn't disturb the sleeper and eased the hair at the nape down.
The sleeper stirred and mumbled something in his dreams. It sounded like a name, and turned into a purr of pleasure. "Starsssk..." The burglar-turned-barber-turned-burglar froze in his tracks, fingers still brushing the sleeper's neck. The head turned a little, and then the sleeper's breathing deepened, as though this Stars's presence was a reassurance and no threat. Ten years of breaking and entering told him that this sleep was no sham. He brought the scissors up, lifting and moving the hair with the gentleness of stealth, and no more motions disturbed his work. The cop did not react to any move he made and even turned for him without waking once.
Once he had finished his masterwork he was close to disappointment. He knew perfection when he saw it and knew that even one more cut would pass that point, but he wanted to run his fingers through that cornfield, get to know its moods and find out how it lay, and he could do no more than watch it glimmering in the streetlight's glare.
It was time to go. He tidied his scissors and with the handkerchief folded around his fingers teased open the note on the nightstand, the note his hirer had given him.
Next time, pay your tab.
Huggy.
The intruder looked at the note and sighed. He didn't want to know what was going on here, but either Huggy had lost his marbles this time or he was hallucinating. It was time he got out of here before the hallucination got worse.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Huggy didn't do sleep when his accountant started demanding the books, and this time was no exception. He was leaning on the bar with piles of papers spread round him, trying to find bills from three months back that matched his bank statements. Huggy was 'street', which meant that numeracy was innate for him, at least where currency was concerned. It just wasn't so easy to keep the evidence straight that he was an entrepreneur who did right by the law.
The door opened, and then banged shut, and he looked up to see John the Cat come in, dropping his bag onto a stool with a thud. The swinging door surprised Huggy: you didn't normally hear John come into a room.
"You done it, my man?"
John ignored the question, wiping a hand across his forehead. "That is the last time I ever do a favor for you, man. Ever." He sagged down onto the bar stool opposite Huggy, the sleeve of his jacket upsetting a pile of receipts. "I need a drink."
"Keep your threads away from my livelihood and the Bear will happily provide." He stared at John for a moment. "You look beat. What went down? Did he wake up?"
John shook his head. "I did it. He didn't wake. But Huggy, you hafta be crazy, doing a thing like that to a cop?"
Huggy handed a half of beer to his visitor, watching as he took a deep swig from it. "You ain't seen the size of that bar tab, my man, or you would not ask that question. The Revenue are on my back, and they ain't going to take no flak. When the IRS start calling time, Huggy calls in every dime."
John groaned, and drained the glass. "Just let me get home. I gotta find my girl and apologise in six positions. She's already mad about the state I left her bathroom in when I dyed her hair. Me walking out in the middle of a date--" He shook his head, shoulders slumped. "Days like this, I miss the joint."
"Man, you need a new girl," Huggy said. "Drive safe, my man." He began to gather the receipts into a pile again.
"Ohhhhhhhhh..."
Hutch groaned, and then cursed as the sound reverberated through his head. Someone had clearly taken a pneumatic drill to his head and his stomach wasn't too sure where it was. Everything hurt--even his eyeballs seemed to be pulsating this morning--and if he didn't move soon there was gonna be an accident. He lay there for a moment, eyes closed, trying to deny that there was daylight on the other side of the lids. If he didn't move...
If he didn't move, the situation would get worse, at least in the bladder department. He gave a mental count to three and lurched to his feet, and towards the bathroom.
That's the last time I tie one on, he thought, as he dealt with the most pressing of his problems. It's just not worth the pain. He stumbled to the sink, barely giving his blurred reflection a glance, and threw handfuls of water in the approximate direction of his face. His mouth tasted like the bottom of a parrot's cage, and he had just reached up for his toothbrush when he froze.
His ... reflection ... didn't look like him. Well, it did look like him, but not like he'd looked for ... for some time. His mustache, for one thing. He'd grown it fourteen months back when it'd become clear that his on-again off-again relationship with Starsky--the private one, not the professional one--was off again and wasn't likely to go back on again in this lifetime.
Clearly, he was still drunk, but he didn't think he'd drunk that much. "Get lost, you," he mumbled at the younger him. "'M not in the mood."
The reflection got lost, but mostly because it was too much effort to focus on the mirror for long. He shook two aspirins out of the jar, filled a glass with water and drank it, and scrubbed the parrot's cage lining out of his mouth with a toothbrush. After that, heading back to bed seemed the easiest thing.
Normally he'd have headed straight for the kitchen and his vitamin stash during a hangover like that one, but that took levels of determination that were currently beyond him. He'd get up again when he was sober.
He stumbled back into the bedroom, catching himself with a hand on the nightstand before he overbalanced, and collapsed onto the bed. He lay there for a moment before attempting to pull the covers over him, his right hand still resting against the nightstand, on a piece of paper.
Okay, so you did all kind of things when you were drunk, but he didn't remember having left--
He turned his wrist to grip it, not opening his eyes, and brought the paper in front of his face. A cascade of feather-light somethings fell onto his bare neck and chest and he opened his eyes in surprise, lowering and rotating the paper until he could read the words on its surface.
Next time, pay your tab.
Huggy.
Wait ... what?
He turned the words over in his head, much as he'd turned the paper, but he couldn't wrap his brain round what Huggy was saying, apart from the obvious. He felt for the particles that had fallen on his neck and chest, caught two and tried to read them with his fingers. They felt like hairs ... short, coarse hairs.
And the world spun giddyingly back into its appointed place, as Hutch remembered that image in the mirror and realised what exactly one pissed-off bar owner had done to him. He lurched once more towards the bathroom to confirm the truth of what his suspicions were saying, and to find out just how bad the damage was.
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Hutch gripped the edge of the sink hard and stared into the mirror at the new image that Huggy had inflicted on him. The image stared back, clearly as unhappy has he was with the situation.
Huggy hadn't just cut off his mustache: he'd done something to his hair too. The shape was different, more subtle than it had been, slightly layered at the sides, so that it caught the light more now. Objectively, it was a classy cut, and it suited him, but he looked ....
He looked fragile.
Well, of course he did. You didn't wake up with a hangover like that without looking as bad as you felt. The difference was, with his old face, it had given him a look of don't-mess-with-me grumpiness; with the new one he just looked like a sick kid, cop's hard body notwithstanding. You had to be tough to take a face like this on the street, and right now there wasn't enough tough left in him for that.
He turned away from the mirror, relieved that the jackhammer in his head had calmed down to a mere background unpleasantness, and was headed towards the kitchen when the phone rang, far too loudly.
He sank down on the bed again and snatched it up before it could ring again.
"Yeah."
"Hey, Hutch, you ready to come n' play tennis with me yet?" It was Starsky. A loud, ebullient, and not at all hung-over Starsky. Hutch felt a pang of guilt at having forgotten.
"Ah, Starsk, can't we cancel? I gotta hangover."
"Aw, c'mon, you can't let that stop you! It's my last day of freedom today, remember? You can't let me spend it on my own." He could almost feel the pout coming through the telephone wires. It was on his mind to Starsky that from tomorrow when Starsky hit the streets again they'd be back to all but living in a car together, but he suppressed the urge to snarl.
"Starsky, I feel like shit. You had as much to drink as I did. How come you're not feeling bad."
"Just lucky, I guess. Don't forget, I had the big burrito bonanza at Taco Shack, and all you had was a small green salad and a glass of water, so it figures you'd feel it more. Hey, I always told you that healthy diet of yours was gonna off you some day."
The mere thought of burritos was making his stomach churn again. "God, Starsk, do you have to be so-?" Words failed him. Starsky's digestive system was a freak of nature, he told himself. It had to be. The guy had lost a part of his stomach as a result of the shooting, and according to the doctors what he had left was still slightly larger than the average, and disgustingly healthy to boot.
"Hey, what did I ever do to you?"
"You're being cheerful"
"And that's a crime? Hutch, you-" Hutch flinched a little, held the earpiece a little further from his ear, and then felt a little guilty. Starsky was on top of the world; the least he could do was to make a little effort..
"And loud," he said. "Very loud. If you wound up dead, there wouldn't be a jury on earth would convict me. Ginny'd say it was natural causes.
Starsky laughed at that. "I'll make you something to fix it when I come over."
"You're coming here?" The horror in his voice was only partly feigned. Hangover or no, he didn't feel up to facing Starsky yet, not with this face.
"Yep. Can't neglect my partner when he's under the weather, can I?"
"Great. I'll get my gun."
Starsky laughed again, and then paused, and Hutch could almost hear him growing more serious. "Listen, I can leave it if you want. Don't want to force my company on you, 'cause God knows, you'll be stuck with me enough after today."
Once again, Starsky had read him too right. "Ah, no, Starsk, it's not that. I gotta go see Huggy, pay my tab."
"Oh yeah, he mentioned that to me last week."
"What did he say, exactly?"
"Just that he wanted everything outstanding paid by Friday, or he'd have to resort to what he called 'cruel and unusual punishments'. I told you, remember?"
"You didn't mention the cruel and unusual punishments."
"I didn't?" Starsky sounded puzzled, and then shocked. "Ah, man, I didn't realise it was that time of year again. So what did he do?"
"I don't want to talk about it." Hutch blinked at the phone. "You mean this has happened before? Why didn't I know?"
"You were laid up at the time. Remember Vic Humphries?"
"Vividly."
"Well, Huggy told me to pay my tab, 'cause he'd had this large tax bill come in, and I couldn't lay my hand on the money right then." Because he'd just bought a car for his laid-up partner, Hutch suspected, but Starsky would never mention that. "And ... well ... he took all my sneakers hostage until I paid up."
Hutch chucked. "Really?"
"Yeah. I had to spend a day wearing your boots before I could get the money together. It was that or carpet slippers, and I thought the perps would laugh." He paused. "So what did he do to you? Raid the greenhouse?"
"Look, I'll tell you later. I got to go and pay the man before anything worse happens."
He put the phone down before Starsky could ask anything else, and stalked into the kitchen in search of his vitamins.
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TBC
Author: Mogs Rating: PG Type: Gen ... so far Feedback: Please. I'm stressing out and it'll make my day.
Disclaimer: Not mine. Belongs to some american dude whose shoes I am not worthy to unloose.
Summary: A mysterious man has been hired to do a very dangerous job in Hutch's apartment.
A/N: Started because someone on the loveofmeandthee yahoogroup wanted people to write a paragraph of description without adjectives. This is what mine has now turned into.
Oh, and this is what happens when I get both bored and stressed. The way my mind is working at present there will be more. Flee, all of you! Flee while there's still time! Make for the hills!
(Did I mention I'm stressed?)
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The figure paused in the doorway to the room, blade in hand, and looked down at the bed. He'd laughed when he'd gotten the assignment; now he was starting to appreciate some of the difficulties involved.
There were no lights, but the streetlights outside gave him some help. The sleeper faced away from him, hair like a cornfield glimmering in the gloom. He rolled over with a sigh as the figure watched, the sheet that covered him twisting around his legs and revealing a foot and ankle as it receded. Another sigh, and the sleeper slept on, face turned toward the watcher.
On the nightstand, a clock ticked. The watcher stepped toward the bed.
The sleeper's eyeballs did not even twitch under their lids. The lips opened, just a crack and with each breath exhalations of air stirred the hairs of the mustache. The watcher eyed the mustache with trepidation and brought up the razor in his hand, wondering how on earth to assassinate that strip of hair before the sleeper awoke.
Get with it, man, you're a professional, the figure told himself. A professional in both senses of the word too: the people who knew how he had made his living in the decade before he'd become a barber could be numbered on the fingers of one hand. It was just a shame that one of those who did know had chosen tonight to call in the favor he owed him--to exercise both his professions--and on a cop, of all people.
And why? His hirer had called him away from a night out with his girl to call in a favor for this piece of insanity? There'd been no way to explain to Lindsay, which meant that she wasn't speaking to him at all, and she'd threatened to dump him if he wasn't back by three. It was now three-thirty.
He paused, telling himself not to store up trouble. His victim had drunk seven pints tonight: he wasn't likely to wake. But even that knowledge did not stop sweat from running down his wrist onto the handle of the razor. He put the razor down on the nightstand without making a sound and wiped his palm. Time to get to work.
Scissors before razor. The snick of the blades made him jump, but the sleeper did stir at all. An exhalation of air carried the hairs away to fall onto the pillow. He moved the scissors and cut, timing it so that the sleeper blew the strands away as before, and then repeated the motion, until the ends were stumps that could be shaved away, the hairs floating away on clouds of breath scented by beer. He warmed the metal of the razor against his palm; there was little he could do for the foam, but the absence of response from the man on the bed eased his worry. With only a handful of strokes the stubble from the cornfield was swept away.
What a difference five strokes of a razor could make! The intruder pocketed his razor and lowered the foam into the bag he had brought, careful to make no sound as they hit its base. The sleeper's face had lost years, maybe decades, as though the razor had shorn not hair but barriers away, and the intruder let himself smile. He was an artist, and now, looking at the sleeper's hair, he felt the scissors on the nightstand burning a hole at the edge of his vision. Such a work of art he could create ... just a little harvesting of that cornfield.
The sleeper stirred, nestling into the pillow, and the watcher stepped back. He'd done as he'd been asked, he was in a cop's home, for Christ's sake, and if he wanted to keep his freedom it was time to stop drawing castles in the air before the sleeping cop woke. Leave the message, and get out, moron, he told himself, 'cause if he wakes, he'll bust you, seven pints notwithstanding.
He wrapped his hand in the handkerchief and then brought out the note and laid it on the nightstand, reaching to pick up the scissors as he did so. The streetlights glinted off their blades, onto the sleeper's hair and the artist within broke free. He warmed the blades as he had the razor, so that the cold wouldn't disturb the sleeper and eased the hair at the nape down.
The sleeper stirred and mumbled something in his dreams. It sounded like a name, and turned into a purr of pleasure. "Starsssk..." The burglar-turned-barber-turned-burglar froze in his tracks, fingers still brushing the sleeper's neck. The head turned a little, and then the sleeper's breathing deepened, as though this Stars's presence was a reassurance and no threat. Ten years of breaking and entering told him that this sleep was no sham. He brought the scissors up, lifting and moving the hair with the gentleness of stealth, and no more motions disturbed his work. The cop did not react to any move he made and even turned for him without waking once.
Once he had finished his masterwork he was close to disappointment. He knew perfection when he saw it and knew that even one more cut would pass that point, but he wanted to run his fingers through that cornfield, get to know its moods and find out how it lay, and he could do no more than watch it glimmering in the streetlight's glare.
It was time to go. He tidied his scissors and with the handkerchief folded around his fingers teased open the note on the nightstand, the note his hirer had given him.
Next time, pay your tab.
Huggy.
The intruder looked at the note and sighed. He didn't want to know what was going on here, but either Huggy had lost his marbles this time or he was hallucinating. It was time he got out of here before the hallucination got worse.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Huggy didn't do sleep when his accountant started demanding the books, and this time was no exception. He was leaning on the bar with piles of papers spread round him, trying to find bills from three months back that matched his bank statements. Huggy was 'street', which meant that numeracy was innate for him, at least where currency was concerned. It just wasn't so easy to keep the evidence straight that he was an entrepreneur who did right by the law.
The door opened, and then banged shut, and he looked up to see John the Cat come in, dropping his bag onto a stool with a thud. The swinging door surprised Huggy: you didn't normally hear John come into a room.
"You done it, my man?"
John ignored the question, wiping a hand across his forehead. "That is the last time I ever do a favor for you, man. Ever." He sagged down onto the bar stool opposite Huggy, the sleeve of his jacket upsetting a pile of receipts. "I need a drink."
"Keep your threads away from my livelihood and the Bear will happily provide." He stared at John for a moment. "You look beat. What went down? Did he wake up?"
John shook his head. "I did it. He didn't wake. But Huggy, you hafta be crazy, doing a thing like that to a cop?"
Huggy handed a half of beer to his visitor, watching as he took a deep swig from it. "You ain't seen the size of that bar tab, my man, or you would not ask that question. The Revenue are on my back, and they ain't going to take no flak. When the IRS start calling time, Huggy calls in every dime."
John groaned, and drained the glass. "Just let me get home. I gotta find my girl and apologise in six positions. She's already mad about the state I left her bathroom in when I dyed her hair. Me walking out in the middle of a date--" He shook his head, shoulders slumped. "Days like this, I miss the joint."
"Man, you need a new girl," Huggy said. "Drive safe, my man." He began to gather the receipts into a pile again.
"Ohhhhhhhhh..."
Hutch groaned, and then cursed as the sound reverberated through his head. Someone had clearly taken a pneumatic drill to his head and his stomach wasn't too sure where it was. Everything hurt--even his eyeballs seemed to be pulsating this morning--and if he didn't move soon there was gonna be an accident. He lay there for a moment, eyes closed, trying to deny that there was daylight on the other side of the lids. If he didn't move...
If he didn't move, the situation would get worse, at least in the bladder department. He gave a mental count to three and lurched to his feet, and towards the bathroom.
That's the last time I tie one on, he thought, as he dealt with the most pressing of his problems. It's just not worth the pain. He stumbled to the sink, barely giving his blurred reflection a glance, and threw handfuls of water in the approximate direction of his face. His mouth tasted like the bottom of a parrot's cage, and he had just reached up for his toothbrush when he froze.
His ... reflection ... didn't look like him. Well, it did look like him, but not like he'd looked for ... for some time. His mustache, for one thing. He'd grown it fourteen months back when it'd become clear that his on-again off-again relationship with Starsky--the private one, not the professional one--was off again and wasn't likely to go back on again in this lifetime.
Clearly, he was still drunk, but he didn't think he'd drunk that much. "Get lost, you," he mumbled at the younger him. "'M not in the mood."
The reflection got lost, but mostly because it was too much effort to focus on the mirror for long. He shook two aspirins out of the jar, filled a glass with water and drank it, and scrubbed the parrot's cage lining out of his mouth with a toothbrush. After that, heading back to bed seemed the easiest thing.
Normally he'd have headed straight for the kitchen and his vitamin stash during a hangover like that one, but that took levels of determination that were currently beyond him. He'd get up again when he was sober.
He stumbled back into the bedroom, catching himself with a hand on the nightstand before he overbalanced, and collapsed onto the bed. He lay there for a moment before attempting to pull the covers over him, his right hand still resting against the nightstand, on a piece of paper.
Okay, so you did all kind of things when you were drunk, but he didn't remember having left--
He turned his wrist to grip it, not opening his eyes, and brought the paper in front of his face. A cascade of feather-light somethings fell onto his bare neck and chest and he opened his eyes in surprise, lowering and rotating the paper until he could read the words on its surface.
Next time, pay your tab.
Huggy.
Wait ... what?
He turned the words over in his head, much as he'd turned the paper, but he couldn't wrap his brain round what Huggy was saying, apart from the obvious. He felt for the particles that had fallen on his neck and chest, caught two and tried to read them with his fingers. They felt like hairs ... short, coarse hairs.
And the world spun giddyingly back into its appointed place, as Hutch remembered that image in the mirror and realised what exactly one pissed-off bar owner had done to him. He lurched once more towards the bathroom to confirm the truth of what his suspicions were saying, and to find out just how bad the damage was.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hutch gripped the edge of the sink hard and stared into the mirror at the new image that Huggy had inflicted on him. The image stared back, clearly as unhappy has he was with the situation.
Huggy hadn't just cut off his mustache: he'd done something to his hair too. The shape was different, more subtle than it had been, slightly layered at the sides, so that it caught the light more now. Objectively, it was a classy cut, and it suited him, but he looked ....
He looked fragile.
Well, of course he did. You didn't wake up with a hangover like that without looking as bad as you felt. The difference was, with his old face, it had given him a look of don't-mess-with-me grumpiness; with the new one he just looked like a sick kid, cop's hard body notwithstanding. You had to be tough to take a face like this on the street, and right now there wasn't enough tough left in him for that.
He turned away from the mirror, relieved that the jackhammer in his head had calmed down to a mere background unpleasantness, and was headed towards the kitchen when the phone rang, far too loudly.
He sank down on the bed again and snatched it up before it could ring again.
"Yeah."
"Hey, Hutch, you ready to come n' play tennis with me yet?" It was Starsky. A loud, ebullient, and not at all hung-over Starsky. Hutch felt a pang of guilt at having forgotten.
"Ah, Starsk, can't we cancel? I gotta hangover."
"Aw, c'mon, you can't let that stop you! It's my last day of freedom today, remember? You can't let me spend it on my own." He could almost feel the pout coming through the telephone wires. It was on his mind to Starsky that from tomorrow when Starsky hit the streets again they'd be back to all but living in a car together, but he suppressed the urge to snarl.
"Starsky, I feel like shit. You had as much to drink as I did. How come you're not feeling bad."
"Just lucky, I guess. Don't forget, I had the big burrito bonanza at Taco Shack, and all you had was a small green salad and a glass of water, so it figures you'd feel it more. Hey, I always told you that healthy diet of yours was gonna off you some day."
The mere thought of burritos was making his stomach churn again. "God, Starsk, do you have to be so-?" Words failed him. Starsky's digestive system was a freak of nature, he told himself. It had to be. The guy had lost a part of his stomach as a result of the shooting, and according to the doctors what he had left was still slightly larger than the average, and disgustingly healthy to boot.
"Hey, what did I ever do to you?"
"You're being cheerful"
"And that's a crime? Hutch, you-" Hutch flinched a little, held the earpiece a little further from his ear, and then felt a little guilty. Starsky was on top of the world; the least he could do was to make a little effort..
"And loud," he said. "Very loud. If you wound up dead, there wouldn't be a jury on earth would convict me. Ginny'd say it was natural causes.
Starsky laughed at that. "I'll make you something to fix it when I come over."
"You're coming here?" The horror in his voice was only partly feigned. Hangover or no, he didn't feel up to facing Starsky yet, not with this face.
"Yep. Can't neglect my partner when he's under the weather, can I?"
"Great. I'll get my gun."
Starsky laughed again, and then paused, and Hutch could almost hear him growing more serious. "Listen, I can leave it if you want. Don't want to force my company on you, 'cause God knows, you'll be stuck with me enough after today."
Once again, Starsky had read him too right. "Ah, no, Starsk, it's not that. I gotta go see Huggy, pay my tab."
"Oh yeah, he mentioned that to me last week."
"What did he say, exactly?"
"Just that he wanted everything outstanding paid by Friday, or he'd have to resort to what he called 'cruel and unusual punishments'. I told you, remember?"
"You didn't mention the cruel and unusual punishments."
"I didn't?" Starsky sounded puzzled, and then shocked. "Ah, man, I didn't realise it was that time of year again. So what did he do?"
"I don't want to talk about it." Hutch blinked at the phone. "You mean this has happened before? Why didn't I know?"
"You were laid up at the time. Remember Vic Humphries?"
"Vividly."
"Well, Huggy told me to pay my tab, 'cause he'd had this large tax bill come in, and I couldn't lay my hand on the money right then." Because he'd just bought a car for his laid-up partner, Hutch suspected, but Starsky would never mention that. "And ... well ... he took all my sneakers hostage until I paid up."
Hutch chucked. "Really?"
"Yeah. I had to spend a day wearing your boots before I could get the money together. It was that or carpet slippers, and I thought the perps would laugh." He paused. "So what did he do to you? Raid the greenhouse?"
"Look, I'll tell you later. I got to go and pay the man before anything worse happens."
He put the phone down before Starsky could ask anything else, and stalked into the kitchen in search of his vitamins.
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TBC