The group inside the stadium had grown restlessly quiet.

The cloth that Starsky had used to clean Hutch's face had been slung over the blond's shoulder and had stayed there, wet cotton clinging to Hutch's shirt. Hutch used what remained clean of the cloth to get under the blood on Starsky's face and gauge the damage. Every touch of the towel caused his partner to flinch, especially the deepening bruise under his ear. A trickle of blood had escaped from the same ear but Starsky responded to Hutch snapping his fingers a few inches away.

Starsky's breaths were ragged, congested, but that could've been from the blood from his cheek or the damage to his side. The bruising against his ribs had spread. Time would tell how far it would go, how bad the damage was. The few words Hutch had gotten out of his partner were veiled requests to be left alone, and Hutch's head finally began to pound so bad he didn't have a choice.

Hutch lay down and Starsky squirmed weakly until his head was propped against his partner's thigh. The group around them was settling in for the hour wait before the promised waterbreak. Quiet shielded conversations started and ended quickly once any of the speakers noticed masked eyes pointed their way.

Tom had edged toward the wounded pair in the interim, followed closely by Kiko and Barbara.

It'd taken the dark haired youth a few minutes to find Starsky and Hutch. Watching Starsky's beating had struck Kiko silent and terrified, remembering half-forgotten parts of his 'd felt shame after, and had thought about staying hidden in the crowd.

When both men were forced to lay down because of their injuries, Kiko's need to protect his mentors overwhelmed his shame. Kiko found a way to sit in the 90 degree angle where Starsky's head met Hutch's leg. It was strange to have both men be so still. So silent.

They were always full of energy and movement, wisecracks and jokes. The two shells, pale with pain, weren't Starsky and Hutch.

Starsky was the first to notice the dark-haired kid and he rolled his head painfully to the side, his voice cracking as he said, "Hey Kiko…"

"Hey." Kiko said, his voice filled with the sorrow and fear and uncertainty that had built in him in just the past ten minutes. "I'm sorry I didn't stop it."

"No…" Starsky tried to shake his head, but didn't get much farther than rolling his head a few inches. "No...s'better this way." The brunet's hand rose, palm up, fingers stretched. Kiko took the hand and felt a powerful grip squeezing his before Starsky grunted and let him go. "Stay outta trouble."

Kiko's gaze shifted from Starsky to Hutch, and he blinked, surprised to see Hutch focused on him. "S'good advice." Hutch said.

Kiko nodded, drew in a breath that sounded suspiciously like a sniffle, then looked away from both men.

He missed the smirk on Hutch's face, the soft smile that almost made it to Starsky's lips, but they were expressions that were meant to be have been missed. Some day...when Kiko was older perhaps…

Hutch had almost passed out and Starsky was finally breathing evenly when they heard the roar of a car engine, the squeal of tires, then the crash and crunch of a car driven recklessly through a parking lot and out of locked metal gates. The quiet tension broke into barely controlled chaos, and the order went out instantly. A dozen men ran for the tunnel that led to the locker rooms. The same tunnel they had dragged Barbara out of 10 minutes before.

From the other side of Tom, Starsky heard Barbara giggle softly in triumph, then drop the smile when she realized she had an audience. They waited, listening to the fade of the car engine, a series of shots that were aborted quickly. Then silence. A long, terrible breathless silence.

Then a sight that none of them wanted to see. Two of the black clad men entered the stadium dragging the bloodied body of a third. They dropped him just inside the fan of turf, each of the dozen gunmen staring up at the pressbox.

The sound system squeaked.

"Is he alive?"

Hutch raised his head and squinted, feeling his heart sink as both the men that had carried the body shook their heads.

"Very well." The voice said, then the sound system shut off. There was no need for the order to be given. The men knew what to do. They lowered their guns and walked in two columns of six toward the crowd of people scrambling to put distance between themselves and certain death. The only two that couldn't, became the target of the men with guns.

Other than Kiko, Barbara was the first to make a move towards the two cops, instead of away. Maybe she hadn't heard the ultimatum from the man on the intercom. Maybe she was choosing to ignore it. Maybe she had begun to see herself as the heroine in the story. Brave, intrepid female reporter defends helpless men. Full story at 11. Think of the endorsements.

Tom watched it happen and berated himself for what he was thinking. He'd only been on the job a year. It wasn't the best job in the world, nor the best pay. He didn't owe any of these people anything, least of all his life. Why should he stand up for a bunch jokers that he was pretty sure were cops, but were hiding behind the flimsy aliases of reporters. Regardless of who they really were, they'd managed to make instant targets of themselves.

The wise thing to do would be to stay away. Let the weak get culled from the herd. It was nature's way. Who was he to argue with nature? And yet...Tom found himself moving toward the blond guy that the Kiko-kid was struggling to get upright, even as Barbara moved to the brunet. What were their names again? Ken and...Dave? Did it matter?

Ken was trying to get his friend up and finally managed it with Barbara on the other side. The blond then tugged at Kiko, and tried to situate himself in front of his buddies but a weak protest from Dave, and Tom and Kiko dragging the blond backward, ended that little sacrifice. They rejoined the group of hostages that was tightening in on itself, and the men with guns slowed their pace, gradually surrounding the large circle of potential victims. Tom and Kiko followed Barbara's voice blindly. Backing beyond the edge of the crowd and into the thick of it. Barbara kept saying, "Come on, come on. Little more." The people parted then closed around them again and before long the four of them were in the center of the crowd.

It wouldn't take much for the guys with guns to breach the circle, of course. The crowd they were in was moving like sheep, herded by thirty sheep dogs that could force the fuzzy gits into fancy shapes if they wanted to. Why the hell was Tom making himself a target again?

The blond was reaching for his buddy, pulling the the barely upright brunet against his side, keeping the both of them on their feet with Tom, Kiko and Barbara shielding the pair on three sides. The men with guns had stopped on the edge of the circle, waiting.

Tom scanned each of their...well...masks, trying to discern who was in charge, and how the group of 30 guys could even tell who was who. An older couple on the outer edge, older maybe because of the gray in their hair but easily the well-kept athletic type, had began to speak to the gunmen nearest them in soft, reasonable tones.

"We can't let this happen...Hutch...we can't let this happen." The brunet was muttering, his arms wrapped around his bruised and broken torso, barely on his feet, and looking like he was about puke again at any moment. 'What the hell was Dave gonna do?', Tom wanted to ask but he kept quiet, still scanning. Listening to the couple tell the gunmen about their grandchildren. About the money they could give. About the private plane they could charter.

Tom noticed that Barbara was shaking, wrapping her hands gripping her arms tight enough to leave white marks, despite the heat that the crush of terrified people had begun to generate. So she had brains enough to be scared after all, Tom thought. Good for her.

"Shut up, Starsk." Ken said, brusquely.

Starsk. Hutch. Starsky. Hutchinson. Suddenly Tom knew them. Suddenly he understood who they were. Not just any old cops. The names Starsky and Hutchinson were either famous or infamous in certain circles, depending on who you talked to. They weren't photographed often but their names frequently showed up in news articles when high-profile witnesses were being escorted into the courtroom. The courtroom where Tom had worked as janitorial staff for almost forty years.

Retirement had forced him into another field but...he remembered those two now. Hot shots. Unlike the cops that showed up in real suits and dress shoes, these two would barely give the judge the respect of a sport coat and tie. They liked to shout about the injustices of the system and had made more enemies of lawyers and judges and DAs than any other police partnership in the four decades that Tom worked there.

He was custodial staff, yes, but that meant he was the one cleaning up the courtrooms after one or the other lost his temper. At least once one of them had managed to rip the small swinging door that separated the public from the front of the court room, clean off its hinges. Bending the metal frame and snapping off the head of one of the screws. It had been a real bitch to repair overnight. All because the blond had had a bad day in court.

Then there was cleaning the blood out of the men's room when the brunet was kidnapped. The police had taken over the room for a few hours, taking photos and fingerprint impressions. None of them had been interested in helping him clean the mess. Mess, mess, mess. And ever so frequently connected with those two cops.

Now the stadium he was meant to guard was blown to bits, there were dead bodies scattering the turf and the stands and lining the concrete promenade. Someone had just crashed a car through the gated staff parking area and those two...Tom gave them a heated glance, then refocused on the older couple at the edge of the group.

They'd walked away from the crowd, either side of one of the gunman, looking like they were negotiating with him. The older man had a hand hesitantly laid against the gunman's shoulder. The older woman was walking with a sway to her hips, scanning the other gunmen, inviting them to sample the goods, if only with their eyes.

They might have thought they were saving themselves but Tom knew they'd just been culled. It was a different sort of weakness, and yet the same. Weakness born of arrogance. Arrogance that tricked the mind into thinking there was no reason to fear. That money would win out. Tom watched the two cops when the older couple was executed.

He kept a hard hold on the blond's arm, especially when the cop tried to surge forward. Tom yanked him back, harder than was necessary and the blond caught the edge of the hate-filled glare Tom had been giving him. The guard tried to look away in time but failed, and was captured by the deep blue eyes. A lot passed between them in that moment.

Tom looked away. He didn't want to see the blond's resolve hardening. He didn't want to see what he had, perhaps, misjudged in the man. He wanted to hate somebody, and the blond was the closest. Another burst of gunshots and they were ordered to sit on the turf again. Most of the crowd responded immediately.

Starsky and Hutch were the last to go down, Hutch stubbornly clinging to his partner and Starsky watching the gunmen handle the bodies of the older couple. Some of the back-clad men had begun to drag the rest of the bodies from the turf as well, into the stands. The dead became a grotesque audience for the 'game' on the field.

Before his knees and his lungs stopped cooperating, Starsky wondered if the macabre irony had been part of the plan all along. Or if one those masked sadists just had a weird sense of humor.

Thirty minutes later, as if nothing had happened, the men in black rolled catering carts onto the field with barrels of water, and styrofoam cups were passed through the group, filled with water. A cup for each person. Enough to keep them hydrated, but not enough to begin a rash of bathroom breaks.

As Hutch recieved his cup he remembered the bottle of aspirin in his pocket and wondered why it had taken him so long to remember. He'd purchased the aspirin before the explosions, for a headache that paled in comparison to the pain in his skull now.

There were eight pills in the bottle and he took two for himself, palmed two for his partner and reserved part of what was in his cup. The water was ice cold enough, that it could be used to treat some of the swelling on Starsky's face. His partner had passed out, but Hutch brought him around with a swipe or two of the cold water against his forehead. While Starsky drank his cup of water in slow sips, swallowing the aspirins in the process, Hutch looked at the bruising on his side.

Tom watched the blond's face pale, his eyes expressing instantly how bad the injury looked. Blue eyes went to Starsky's face, as if Hutchinson were reassuring himself that, despite the bruising, Starsky was still conscious, coherent, drinking water on his own without drowning. The act of staying upright, drinking a full cup of water, and breathing all at the same time, exhausted the dark haired man. Hutch was there to guide him back to the ground, make sure he was comfortable, then Hutch buried his own face in the same blood stained wet towel.

The light from the sun had shifted over the hour, the temperature on the field going from blazing and uncomfortable to warm and breezy. Soon the sun would be blocked by the stadium roof, casting the group on the field in shadow, and warming the stadium seats. And everything in them.

Their discomfort was going to rise. The likelihood that the group of mostly strangers would begin to fight amongst themselves was growing. Hutch lowered the towel and scanned the group hoping for some of the familiar faces he'd noticed that morning. He had to smirk at the sight of Dorice on the other side of the circle, her frightened face quiet and in profile. There were a few cops too, but they were soldiers. Young guys only a few years out of the academy. He recognized a few court officers vaguely.

There was Tom and Barbara, though the accusatory look he'd gotten from Tom seemed more like a death threat. Kiko...him….Starsky. Not enough. The crowd had stretched out, giving Starsky and Hutch room to lay down and making room for themselves as well. The horror of the execution had wiped some people out and even the revival of a cup of water had done little to keep them awake.

Sleep was necessary, yes, but Hutch had the feeling that if they waited another hour...

The group of black clad men had seemed calm, mechanical, robotic...but they were also showing evidence of sadism, calculated madness.

If their goal was to level the playing field...to wipe out a good portion of the cops and the city workers that would otherwise be processing their bail, reading them their rights, putting them through the system and back in…..back in jail.

"They're cons…" Hutch said.

Starsky rustled against his knees and mumbled, "What?"

"Cons...Starsk. Who could afford this many mercenaries? To be exposed for this long? Huh? When have you seen professional killers willingly….mishandle bodies? They're wearing masks but none of them have their hands shielded. Starsky-"

"I get it...get it. What do you wanna do about it?"

"Well…" Hutch said, looking around him at the group. No...at the collection of individuals. They weren't a group, not yet. "We gotta figure out what our strengths are...our weaknesses. Become cohesive."

"You wanna give a motivational speech?"

Hutch frowned at the sarcasm, then frowned again at the pain that frowning caused. Then he thought about the one thing he didn't have that might have passed him off as a writer, and looked to Barbara.

"Hey…" He called quietly, and Barbara's hazel eyes snapped towards his. Hutch mimed pen and paper and Barbara had another spasm, patting her pockets before she produced both.

Barbara scooted over to them, forcing Tom to move away, rather than just handing the articles over. "What do you need them for?" She asked, whispering, but in a way that drew the attention of twelve people around them.

Hutch glared, amazed at her incapacity for subtlety, then set the pad of paper on his knee and tried to think. Then he wrote, "The men with guns are cons." He ripped the piece of paper from the pad and folded it then said, "Pass that around."

Barbara stared at the simple note for a long time before she handed it to Tom who reluctantly gave it to Kiko. From Kiko the note disappeared, and Hutch could only hope that it circulated quietly but effectively to the whole group.

He waited fifteen minutes, watching the crowd, making quiet conversation with Barbara while Starsky tried to sleep, letting the group settle, watching the masked men in black. Then he wrote, "If we work together, we will get out of this alive."

Again the note was passed and Hutch hid the notepad and the pen under his legs before he checked on the bruising on Starsky's side. It hadn't spread, that he could tell, but the sound of Starsky's breathing hadn't improved any.

Heads were starting to rotate, trying to figure out where the note had come from. Hutch joined them, pretending like he wasn't the origin and encouraging Tom, Barbara and Kiko to do the same. Again he let the group settle, waiting until no one was looking around, then wrote his final note before their second hour was up.

"Nothing happens without risk. If you want these guys to go down, when you hear the words, "Take them." Jump the guy nearest you. Take away their guns. There are more of us than there are of them."

Barbara took the note from him, read it, then crumpled it up and snatched the pen and paper from him.

Hutch frowned, looked a little hurt and collected his crumpled note, trying to see what Barbara was writing. She kept the pad of paper tilted away intentionally and wouldn't let him see it, folding the note herself and passing it down the line.

Conversation immediately followed this note, but the crowd kept it to a minimum, more surreptitious than ever about passing the note along. Hutch ducked his head and demanded to know what Barbara had written.

"You know...if you tell people they're probably gonna die, they're not gonna risk their lives. You gotta lie to 'em a little."

"What did you write?"

"Back up is on the way. When you hear the signal, "Take them." we clobber these guys. Take away their guns. Go home to supper."

"Back up…is on the way?" Hutch clarified, his voice even quieter and sharper than before.

Barbara shrugged and Hutch rolled his eyes. The catering carts were rolled out again, the cups of water passed around. This time Hutch didn't drink his at all, but woke his partner, gave him a warning then laid the towel against Starsky's bare chest and soaked it with the entire cup of water.

Starsky's eyes went wide and he squirmed a little, but it woke him up and after a few minutes, admittedly felt good. Hutch gave Starsky two of the remaining four aspirin, waiting until he had swallowed them.

"I think we have a plan partner."

"Yeah, I heard. Didn't sound like a plan. Sounded like-"

A couple of shrieks rose from the group. Two of the gunmen were wading into the circle, one of them with a crumpled white paper in his hand. They were headed right for Hutch and Starsky, and Hutch grabbed the pad of paper and pen from Barbara at the last minute, letting the the gunmen see it intentionally before he shoved it under his shirt.

Starsky was trying to get up, and Hutch called Kiko, then pointed at his partner on the ground before the blond was dragged to his feet. Kiko and Tom moved in, easily keeping Starsky from rising.

"Let me up!" Starsky screamed, even as Barbara and a few others shot to their feet.

Hutch caught sight of Starsky's white face, strained with pain, rising into a sitting position with Kiko's help, then he was turned, took a gun butt to the belly and went to his knees on the turf thirty feet from the group. The crumpled white paper was shoved in his face and one of the men demanded, "Did you write this?"

Hutch didn't respond and the crumple of paper was forced against his swollen nose, shooting agony through his face and down his spine. He choked on fresh blood, spat it out of his mouth with a cry of pain and let his head hang, eyes blinded with tears he couldn't control.

The blood didn't last long this time, old clots encouraging new ones quickly. Hutch raised his head, snatched the crumpled ball out of the man's hand and opened it to find his first note. Hutch spat, the blood and saliva landed on a military boot, inexpertly tied. The boot disappeared from his field of vision and Hutch expected the gun butt to come crashing down on his back.

Instead he was dragged back to his feet.

The note was the first one he had written, the expose identifying the men as cons. They'd gone to a great deal of trouble to look uniform, with the black outfits, the boots, each man carrying the same kind of weapon, wearing the same kind of mask. Hutch supposed putting all that effort to waste with one note might upset them a little.

"You think we're cons?" The man demanded. Behind the cloth of the mask his breath stank. The speaker took a handful of Hutch's shirt in one fist and jerked Hutch's head and shoulders around, rattling the headache. Rattling the broken bones in his nose. Hutch closed his eyes tight and worked at schooling his features.

"A two-bit, half-pint writer boy...ain't it illegal for reporters to write shit that ain't true?"

"Only if its published." Hutch bit out. "In this case...it is true." The grip on his shirt tightened and twisted and the fabric of his collar tightened painfully around Hutch's neck. The man behind the mask saw it, liked it, and gave another twist that Hutch wasn't going to take anymore.

He kicked out and connected with something soft and vulnerable with his knee, then was dropped. Barbara's blind, liar's promise, rang in his pounding head as he stumbled back. His arms were captured, yanked hard behind his back, then up, and Hutch waited for the first blow thinking, 'Back up. Why wouldn't back up be on the way?'

He watched the now wheezing bad guy struggle to get a pair of brass knuckles out of a pocket of the black coat and wondered why the man in the press box was still silent. Who? With that accent, and absolute control of these ex-cons...who could possibly be behind all this? And why?

The blow to the nether regions had done a lot of damage, buying Hutch time, even if that time was spent with his shoulders nearly dislocated. Time to think...time for his mind to bounce haphazardly from one worry to the next. To wonder if Molly and the others had made it out after all. If Molly had gone for help. If backup, real back up, really was on the way.

He'd just gotten done thinking that when they heard the unmistakable roar of a V8 engine coming from one of the tunnels. The engine was louder and deeper than the one that they had heard plowing through the parking lot hours before. The car that had likely killed the now very dead bad guy was not the same car that came tearing onto the field, flying over the edge of the ramp and tearing up turf in a headlong slide into the outfield. The steering wheel was turned toward the third base line, the driver invisible or else non-existent...or a teenager who had, more than a few times, played the "invisible man" gag on her friends.

"Oh….that's bad." Hutch said, panting, sagging against the arms that held him.

Starsky's eyes had been focused unceasingly on his partner. He'd managed to coerce Kiko into getting him on his feet and it'd hurt like hell, but he was pretty sure he was standing. He heard the engine before he saw the car, instinctively knew the sound of the growl and he watched the turf fly with a hard grin forming on his face.

The bad guys were breaking apart, some going after the red car, others getting the hell out of its way.

Hutch took in a deep breath, pushed hard against the turf and forced the bad guys holding him to backpedal. Before they could get the right footing, all three had tripped and gone down to the turf and Hutch shouted, "It's now or never, guys! Take 'em!"

And suddenly Tom and Barbara understood why the name Starsky and Hutch came up so frequently. Because an entire crowd of otherwise cowed, sheepish people instantly responded to that voice and started to mob the thirty men with guns, easily outnumbering them 4 to 1.

The Torino continued to roar in circles, tearing up the turf and taking out a few of the bad guys before one of them landed on the roof. By then Starsky had managed to get to the edge of the crowd with Kiko's help. He put his fingers to swollen lips and whistled shrill and loud. He was able to keep to his feet if he stood in one spot. He picked a deserted one and waved the Torino closer, and watched the cherry red Ford with a white blaze came to a fishtailing halt, inches from his knees.

The sudden stop knocked the bad guy from his perch and Starsky side stepped the flying body, then used the hood of the car to get around to the driver's side, thumped into the bucket seat and worked hard at staying conscious. He didn't have time to tell Molly how he felt about his car being used as a distraction, so he just shook his finger, squeezed the grinning girl's hand, then did the one thing he could probably still do from his deathbed.

Drive his baby.

It took him a couple of hard turns to get his breath back and when he did he spared Molly a glance.

"Get the kids out?"

Molly nodded. She had slipped down into the footwell of the passenger seat, managing to fold herself into a small, but comfortable looking ball there. She'd made no attempts to get up and see the action and Starsky figured there was a good reason for that. It was just as well.

"Is Kiko okay?" She asked, then held on tight when Starsky shouted for her to brace herself, closing her eyes tightly at the impact of the front of the Torino side-swiping someone, then fixed her brown on Starsky's blue.

"Yeah. He's fine." Starsky said, not bothering to mention that since Hutch's shout for a charge he had no way of knowing if anyone was ok. Starsky drove the car toward the outskirts of the field, avoiding the melee for a bit and scanning the stadium seats, then the pressbox. The first bout of fire had come from there. He doubted that the mysterious voice had been alone in his 'castle' or that he was unarmed. Why the voice was choosing not to open up and back up his guys concerned Starsky.

In fact, the voice had been quiet since before Hutch had been singled out from the crowd. Why was the voice quiet? Had he turned tail? Saved himself? Was there more to come? That second explosion Starsky had been, at the back of his mind, hoping wouldn't happen?

The euphoria that seeing his car, and a second chance at turning the tables, had brought him was sinking into his stomach. The pain that had been hidden by the rush of adrenaline was coming back, along with the nausea, and Starsky leaned back, forcing his lungs into a rhythm.

"What's wrong?" Molly asked. Her voice quiet, small.

"I dunno." Starsky said, then gritted his teeth, put the car in gear and rolled back into the fray. "Stay down."