Hutch's POV

It was like one of those fat novels you buy to while away the plane trip; a new incident every two pages.

I went to the men's room. Dobey was sitting staring at the ICU.

I went into the men's room; as I went in another guy came out and nearly knocked me over – or maybe it was me too stunned to see where I was going.

I started to splash water on my face. I noticed that the flush had stuck in one of the stalls. The something caught my eye, a reflection at the edge of the mirror; a leg on the floor. I opened the stall and there he was; one of the interns who had been checking Starsky's vital signs only a few minutes earlier. I thought of the man who had brushed past me and understood. I ran out into the hallway and he was just about to slip into Starsky's room. Tired as I was, I found the strength to tackle him. He fought back and I went down. One of the uniformed officers went after him.

Dobey installed an office in the hospital and I knew that I had to get back to work. There was no point in sitting moping and wondering if I'd ever see Starsky's lop-sided grin again. Or whether I'd have to listen to one of his crazy tall stories about twenty-five pound births or men from Mars.

Dobey was yelling at me, telling me that we had no leads. I said I was going out there to find them and he told me I'd be a sitting target. Then he said I had to wait until he found me a new partner. I couldn't help myself. "I already have a partner."

I stormed out and was waiting for the elevator when Huggy caught up with me. "Car don't work without keys".

The elevator arrived and it felt like a descent into hell! "Starsky's going to die. Starsky's going to die and there ain't anything anybody can do about it." I didn't want to believe what I was saying. "But I'm still here and I'm going to find them."

The doors closed and I was alone in the parking lot. Huggy had told me that it was Dobey's car. I walked over and had to ask an orderly to get his wheel-chair patient out of the way.

The 'patient' had a knife. His partner shot him in the back trying to get me.

I lost it. I fired into the air just past his ear…"who?"

I radioed for help. Huggy recognized the name; Jenny Brown and top fashion model. I didn't bother to avoid hitting the other guy's car although he was cuffed to the door. The look of terror on his face was worth it. I was on my way to visit Jenny Brown.

Jenny Brown's lawyer sprung her before I could put her in a safer place (the fake orderly was killed in a holding cell). Whoever these people were they had a network that defied imagination.

I was beginning to feel that I was fighting something so big that there was no way I could win. I needed Starsky there with me. I missed his company and I missed his way of looking a things. I needed his friendship too. I could hear his voice whispering in my ear "me and thee, Hutch. Me and thee."

Instinct told me something was wrong. I called the hospital to see what was happening and Dobey told me to get over there as quickly as possible. As I burst through the doors on the ICU floor I saw Dobey and Huggy and three or four uniformed officers standing staring at the scene behind the glass. Just as I came alongside Dobey the Doctor came out and said "He's alive. I don't know how, but he's alive." I learned then that Starsky's heart must have stopped just as I thought I heard him saying "me and thee".

Huggy came with me to Jonathan Wells' office. He waited outside while I went into the weasel's lair. Wells was exactly that, a weasly little man with a big ego to match his big income. He looked up from the papers he was reading and pulled on his cigarette. Before I had a chance to get to the point his 'phone rang. I waited politely while he answered it. Then I tried again; but that damn 'phone seemed to be programmed to ring just in time to stop me getting the information I wanted. The next time it rang I grabbed his hand before he could pick it up. I told him to instruct his secretary to hold all his calls until I was finished…or I would tell her myself. He told her to hold his calls but made it clear that this was not going to take long. Bastard!

I asked him who paid for Jenny Browne's bail, but he just threw me back the old bullshit of not being able to divulge the information. I thanked him for enlightening me on the subject of prostitutes and left before he could react.

The secretary was not at her desk and Huggy was looking pleased with himself. We waited for the elevator and she returned just as we stepped into it. She must have noticed the missing page from the desk-log just as the doors closed. We saw her lift the 'phone.

Huggy handed me the page. It listed all the calls in and out of the office that morning. I was wrong, lawyers like Welles are worse than hookers. With a hooker you know what the price will be. Lawyers bill you for every breath they breathe on your time. Looking down the list I felt kind of sorry for a couple of clients who were going to have to pay maybe one hundred times the cost of a 'phone call to their exes just because Welles did it for them. One number came up again and again…and it was one of the calls that he took when I was in the room.

'Bates' and an out of town area code.

I put all the cash required into the pay-phone and gave the operator the number. Collect.

When the call was answered I said nothing and hung up. Huggy asked me who Bates was. I told him I didn't know but I did know where he worked. Gunther Industries; owned by James Gunther, the man who considered the post of President of the Untied States to be a drop in power.

I rushed back to Metro to find Minnie. Minnie is out computer expert; she can sit in that windowless room with all those whirring and humming machines and type away at the keyboard until the readouts start falling off the printer.

She has a very soft spot for Starsky (I think it's mutual) and I knew she would stay in the computer room until she found every last detail about the man who might have ordered the shooting.

It would take her at least two hours…I don't know how those things work, and to be honest I'm not sure I want to. I decided to go over and spend some time with Starsky.

As soon as I arrived Lily left to get some coffee. "I know you want to be alone with Davey, Ken. I'll be back in a little while." I watched her leave. She was amazing; she'd lost her husband to a bullet in an alley and now she was sitting with her eldest son; her beloved first born, praying that he wasn't going to follow his father's footsteps right to the very end.

I sat by his bedside and stared at the tubes that were keeping him alive and the monitors that were bleeping to prove it. I started to pour out my heart. How it was getting to difficult to do this on my own. I turned away for a moment, not wanting him to see me cry but knowing how dumb that was because he was unconscious. I looked at him lying there with the sheet up under his chin; his long dark lashes were starkly black against his pale skin. The nurses were shaving him every day and his face seemed younger and peaceful.

Then I noticed it. I pinched myself mentally and looked again. His nostril twitched. He had a tube up one nostril and he was twitching his nose as if trying not to sneeze. I walked over to the bed. One eyelid fluttered open. My heart thumped so hard I was sure that the nurse would come running to see what the noise was. Again, his eyelid fluttered again! Then he opened his eyes. Those beautiful deep blue eyes that I was beginning to think I would never see again were wide open and staring at me.

I started to whoop and shout. The nurse arrived and grinned. When Lily returned she sat by his bedside and wept

Minnie had worked wonders, all the information I had in front of me would have taken weeks to find if I'd had to read my way through all the files and press reports and god alone knows what else.

Minnie handed me a thick wad of printout. "Be careful not to drop it Hutch, it would take about hours to fold it all back again." She grinned.

I sat at my desk and started to work my way through all the information. Now and then I looked up automatically expecting to see Starsky perched on the back of his chair; his chin in his hand, grinning at me like some wild-haired Jewish imp.

I underscored a couple of things and went on reading. After a few more pages things were beginning to fall into place and a terrible light dawned in my mind. A few weeks ago Starsky and I had been involved in a case so Machiavellian that we actually quit the force in disgust at what was happening to us. We came close to losing Huggy's friendship when his friend became a witness in a complicated drug case. We promised him our protection and he was killed anyway.

Starsky had taken an emotional knock too.

When we quit the force we did it very publicly…it hit the local news. A couple of days later we came out of a café to find our car blocked by one of those little British sports cars. We were trying to get it out of the way when the owner appeared. She was very apologetic but Starsky seemed to be troubled by her. She told her that her name was Allison May and we exchanged addresses. Starsky seemed preoccupied and when I asked what was wrong he just muttered something about seeing a ghost.

We were waiting for Allison to get ready for a date with us; Starsky started looking at a photo album that had been left on the table. He stared at the pages and said nothing. When she came back he stood up.

"Laura?"

It turned out that she and Starsky had been childhood friends – he called her parents Aunt Marion and Uncle Frank; then the whole family had been killed in a car accident and Starsky never saw Laura again. Until now. She explained that the family had been given a new identity by the FBI in a witness protection program and that it was no accident that we met. Her father was in trouble and when she recognized Starsky in the paper she decided to try to find him.

Well to cut a long story short we managed to find out who was putting pressure on her father – but it was too late to save his life – and now I was looking at a computer printout that linked that story to the bullets in the garage. Bates. He had been behind the blackmail attempt against Laura/Allison's father. He was on the board of directors of the mortgage company that was using information extorted from Mr. May and he was also Gunther's personal Assistant.

I gathered up the printouts and ran down to my car. All the way to the hospital I was thinking how great it would be to tell Starsky all this.

He was sleeping. Lily had gone home with Rosa to get some real sleep for the first time since she arrived from New York what seemed like a year ago and was only a few days.

I sat by the bed and started reeling off the information I'd found. He opened one eye and smiled at me.

The nurse came in to see what the commotion was about this time. She was hatchet faced – but she was a sweetheart really and she was getting really fond of her special patient.

Starsky nuzzled his head against the pillow as if to say 'get out and let me sleep'. As I left I handed the nurse the printout and asked her to read it to him later. The last thing I saw was Starsky's big grin.

It took me a while to get all the evidence together in a way that would convince the DA to issue an arrest warrant. Because Gunther was in San Francisco I had to have a state-wide warrant and that had its dangers because he had connections in Sacramento – just like he had his puppets everyplace else.

Two weeks later I was on a flight to San Francisco. I took a taxi to the Gunther building and marched straight up to the elevator that would take me to the Penthouse office suite.

The black butler let me in. Gunther was behind his desk waiting for me. I looked at a wing chair that had been turned to face the fireplace. A man's legs were visible and I could tell that their owner wasn't aware of my arrival. Gunther smiled and apologized that Bates hadn't been able to meet me. I looked at Bates. His mouth was twisted into a rictus and he held a broken porcelain cup in his hand. The porcelain had cut his hand when it broke under the pressure of his dying spasm; his hand was still bleeding.

Gunther looked up at me and said "you've come to arrest me." He opened a drawer of the desk and pulled out a gun which he waved at me. I told him that there was no point in killing me because if he did my partner would come after him…who was I trying to kid? For all I knew Starsky might never walk again; he still hadn't spoken and he had a long period of hospitalization ahead of him. I said that if he killed Starsky then another cop would come after him and another until they finally got him. I guess I was talking up my own confidence faced with that gun. He lowered it and I lunged forward; for an old man he was surprisingly strong but I managed to force his hand up and the bullet hit the ceiling. I decided to humiliate him. I ordered him to assume the position across his desk. For a fleeting moment he looked like a naughty child waiting to feel the belt on his ass…I recognized it and bit the memory out of my mind. I cuffed him and recited the full Miranda, taking extra pleasure in emphasizing the bit about "if you do not have a lawyer one will be appointed for you". I shoved him into the chair opposite Bates and called the local police as pre-arranged.