Chapter 7

Three days into further treatment and the drug had finally succeeding in its job. The man who used to be Ken Hutchinson sat quietly by the side of his bed, his eyes closed and his chin almost resting on his chest. Dressed in white scrubs and with his damaged arm strapped against his chest, he had no place to go, even if the door to his room had not been kept locked.

His final treatment had been three hours ago. Now the headphones were gone and the white room nothing more than a nightmare. Gone too were his memories – all of them. The man in the chair had no name, no identity, no memories and no strength to question why. The triple dose of drug he'd been given in as many days had finally killed off the last of the fight in the blond and now there remained only an empty shell to be filled up again with carefully chosen and planted information garnered by Dr Isaac, Mr Lake and the omnipresent Mr Da Luca.

The good doctor walked into the room, making the blond shell jump slightly in his chair. Cloudy blue eyes looked up slowly and focused on the doctor's face and a string of silvery saliva beaded from Hutch's slack mouth. Isaac knelt gently by the chair and wiped away the spit with his handkerchief.

'How are you feeling, my friend?' he asked softly.

'Dunno.' Hutch's voice was a shadow of its former self. He'd screamed Starsky's name into the white room until his vocal chords had threatened to snap. He'd flung himself time and again against the straps anchoring him down until blue/black bruises showed lividly against the skin of his arms and legs and chest. Not that he remembered any of that now….. memories were a thing of the past.

'You must have a lot of questions for me?'

Hutch glanced up, unable to meet the doctor's eye. Thinking seemed to hurt. Questions were too much hardship. 'Have I?' he asked.

'Do you know who I am?'

The flaxen haired man looked warily at the guy in the white coat. Nothing about the man looked familiar. Nothing about the room looked familiar. Sickeningly, not even Hutch's own voice sounded right. He shook his head.

Isaac nodded. 'I can understand you must be feeling a little confused right now. I'm your doctor. I'm here to make things ok for you. Will you let me help you?'

The question seemed to confuse the patient and for a moment he stared into space. Eventually something seemed to click and the blond man nodded. 'I guess. M'tired.'

'Yes, you've been very sick, but I'm going to help you recover. We need to take things a little at a time.'

'Sick?'

'Yes, that's why you feel tired. I want you to rest for the rest of the day. Is there anything bothering you? Is there anything you want to ask me?' Isaac held his breath. He'd come this far before and this was the moment of truth. He waited as Hutch closed his eyes. His head bowed again. Thinking seemed too difficult a task. Just breathing right then seemed too tough. His body ached, his head ached and he had a yawning cavern of dark and emptiness deep inside him. For an eternity Hutch slumped in his chair, the only sound in the room being the soft tick of a clock on the wall. Eventually though, the gnawing emptiness made him look up and one question was forced from his lips.

'Who am I?'

Isaac smiled a knowing smile. 'A good place to start. 'Your name is Ray Hunt. You came to us almost a month ago and since then we've been fighting to make you well.'

A small hint of light showed in the blue eyes looking up at the doctor. 'What's matter with me?'

The doctor stood up. 'It is too early for all this my friend. I will leave you to the tender ministrations of Adele, your nurse and I will be back to see you this evening. Try not to concern yourself with your worries. I will be here to answer all your questions in time. Rest. Get back into the bed now and sleep. You're amongst friends.'

Hutch nodded weakly. He didn't feel as though he were amongst friends. In fact he didn't seem to "feel" at all. Along with the emptiness caused by his memory loss, he seemed to be devoid of emotion. He felt weary; sore and weary, as though he'd run a marathon. He had the impression that he'd already been through a lot and yet that impression was insubstantial. He had nothing on which to base that assumption and he had only the doctor and the nurse to trust. As Isaac closed the door behind him, Adele came to kneel by his chair.

'Ray, shall we get you back into bed? It's been a big day for you and you must be exhausted.'

Carefully the man in the chair examined the woman's face. There seemed to be no deception there. In fact the only thing Hutch registered was an overwhelming need to help. He nodded and allowed the small woman to help him up. He stood on rubber legs feeling dizzy and weak. A sheen of perspiration bloomed over his back and chest and prickled across the bridge of his nose and the room spun. Hutch made a grab for the bed and leaned heavily against it.

'What's the matter with me?' he asked softly.

'You're weak. This is your first time out of bed in almost a month and you've hardly eaten anything. You need to do as Dr Isaac says and rest. Once you're in bed, I'll bring you some soup and then you can sleep. Does that sound good?'

Hutch eased himself into the bed and lay panting. 'Does the package include you?'

'I can sit with you a while, if you like?'

The blond nodded. He was almost afraid to admit to himself that he didn't want to be alone. Once upon a time he may have been good with his own company, but that was when he probably had memories; a family; friends. With nothing to anchor to he felt cast adrift on a huge empty ocean and the only safe port in sight was this small, pretty nurse. He nodded.

'I'd like that. Do you know anythin' about me? I mean is there anythin' you can tell me about…..well, me?'

Adele grinned. 'Apart from the fact that you are one hell of a fighter? Let me go and get something for you to eat. I'll be back soon, ok? Don't go anywhere.'

Hutch snuggled back against the pillow and looked up at the ceiling. He felt better than he had done when the doctor had first walked in. Then he'd felt as though he could hardly string two words together. Now he felt weary and…… He searched for the word. Incomplete. That was it. He felt incomplete and as the door clicked too and a lock slid softly into place, another emotion reared its ugly head – this one was called fear.

Outside the room, a little way down the hallway, two men watched on a monitor as Adele walked out of the blond's room.

'It's worked for sure this time?' Da Luca asked.

Mr Lake nodded. 'Isaac has assured me. Not even an Oscar winning actor could put on that sort of display. It's taken some time, but right now he's ours, totally. We need only feed him the memories we want to and we'll be all set for the showdown.'

'Are we ready?'

Mr Lake grinned. 'Oh yeah, we're ready.'

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Ethan Quade bent over to catch his breath as a drop of sweat slipped off of his nose to stain the green matting of the gym floor. At his side a woman almost as tall as he was and almost as tanned stood watching him quietly.

'I told you that you'd had enough for today.'

'I just wanted one more round, just to prove I could do it. Helga? Please?'

The physiotherapist threw up her hands in mock surrender. 'What am I going to do with you?'

Ethan wiggled his eyebrows suggestively. 'I didn't know that was on the menu!'

The woman gently swatted the oh-so-tight rump in front of her. 'It isn't. You are so not my type mister. The doctor will not be please if you split open your scar after he's taken all that time to patch you back together.'

Quade looked down at his body and snorted. 'Looks like he wasn't the first to try huh?' Gently he traced one of a group of long silvery incision scars down from the angle of his left shoulder and across his pectoral muscle. It disappeared into a small divot of flesh that looked as though it had once housed a drain of some kind. He looked up, chocolate coloured curls falling towards his left eye. 'I wonder if my middle name is Lucky?'

'The doctor said he has some news for you. Maybe today you'll find out?'

Quade shrugged. In reality he'd pushed himself so hard in the gym this morning because he wanted to take his mind off the meeting with the doctor that afternoon. Isaac had spent some time over the past week with the tanned patient. Starsky's fevers had come and gone and he'd gotten himself up and around. He'd even got rid of the drips and tubes and had started to come down to the gym twice a day. Helga he could handle. The doctor's visits were something else completely.

Quade had been fearful at first. Not having any memories was bad enough, but the fear of what those memories might be seemed worse somehow. He'd been amazed at the scars across his body when he'd seen himself in the bathroom mirror. The new scars from his accident overlay older, silvery ones across h. How had he got them? What ha dis left shoulder and further down on his right calf. What the hell had happened to him? Some of the scars were surgical, some spoke of other traumas. Some looked a little too much like gunshot wounds to be explained in any other way. Would an ordinary law abiding citizen really have a body as well-weathered as his? Could there be an innocent explanation for the scars? It seemed unlikely and as much as Quade wanted to have some memories of his own, he also wanted a quiet life – maybe to be told that he was the father of 2.5 kids and that he mowed the lawn on Sundays and took his family to the ball game on Saturdays. In his minds eye, he drove a truck or a four by four. He enjoyed a round of golf and he was maybe a member of the local shooting range.

In his darker moments, Quade didn't want to think about his past because to think of other possibilities made them all the more real. It was these possibilities that Quade feared and these possibilities that the doctor was likely to explore this afternoon.

'What do you say to some time on the punchbag?' the curly haired man asked, changing the subject.

Helga shook her head. 'I say no. you may not be scared to incur Dr Isaac's wrath, but I am. Go and take your shower, get dressed and I'll be waiting to take you back to your room.'

'I'm a big boy. I can find my own way.'

'Size isn't an issue Ethan! Just go and get showered huh?'

Quade took the towel from around his neck and flung it at the woman. She caught it neatly and pushed it into the laundry basket and watched as the muscular man made his way into the bathroom.

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At 2:30 that afternoon, Captain Dobey sat hunched behind his desk at the Metro. After getting off of the phone with Rachel Starsky again, he now had a new wrath to face and without any preamble or knock on the door, a tall man with thinning mousy coloured hair walked in, followed by a smaller Puerto Rican. Nether of them smiled at Dobey and both of them sat down without being asked. Dobey grunted.

'Carmichael….Ramirez.'

'Any news on your um….missing men?' Carmichael asked as though he expected Starsky and Hutch to spring out from behind Dobey's chair.

'You know I haven't. Neither have you Feds, otherwise you'd have been climbing all over this office with huge grins on your faces.'

'Captain we know you're close to your men and believe me, no one values loyalty more than I do, but if you know where they are, you're gonna have to tell us sooner or later.'

'When hell freezes over.'

'So you do know?'

Dobey scowled. 'No, I don't.'

Carmichael sighed. '$10,000 was found in Sergeant Starsky's apartment after Durniak's death. He and Sergeant Hutchinson were the only ones to have been with Durniak before he was shot. Shot, I might add by one Terry Nash who conveniently doesn't exist! Now they don't show up for the biggest funeral of the year and oh…..just to add to the mix, Durniak's niece turns up dead with their cards in her purse and Starsky's bullet through her brain! Now tell me they aren't involved. Tell me they aren't laying low huh?'

Dobey listened to the catalogue of incriminating evidence. Put coldly and logically like that even he would have convicted his men of murder. And yet….

Tiredly the Captain sighed. 'I haven't seen them. I don't know where they are. What more can I say?'

'You can tell me that when….. and I do mean when – you find them you're gonna arrest them, sling them in jail and throw away the key. Is that clear Captain?' Carmichael got up and Ramirez followed like a well trained puppy.

Dobey gave them his best blank face. 'I heard. Now get out.' He watched as Carmichael closed the door violently behind him. 'Where are you?' he muttered. 'C'mon guys, gimme a sign here.'