Thank you again to all my facebook friends, who are always motivating me, and thanks to everyone who would like to leave a short comment about the story!
Michele.. you are my Angel!
Starsky was a little surprised when he saw Hutch sitting spontaneously on the rear seat of the Torino, in order to leave the passenger's one to Hannibal. The two partners shared a quick glance and Hutch's small nod gave Starsky a reassuring feeling: now they were together in this and nothing could make him feel more comfortable.
Hannibal's features were visibly tense: his light blue eyes, that the passing of the years had made even more bright in pride and experience, were now dim in worry and anguish. The man had always a witty word for every situation, but now he was just concentrated on staring at the area, to find out any possible obstacle that could stop them from joining his wounded man.
Starsky followed the instructions he received from the Colonel in silence and he tried to stifle his instinct to answer, "Yes, Sir"; his time in the Army was over now. Over.
Hutch broke the silence from behind: "We met Laura and Abby yesterday. They're fine and really grateful to you for what you have done".
Hannibal took a cigar out of the hidden pocket of his jacket. He just watched it, without even try to light it up.
"Yeah, they will be fine now. That jerk received what he deserved…. Now it's up to you to put him where he belongs, right?"
Hannibal cast a glance to the rear and Hutch nodded without saying a word.
"Yeah, I know that our help may be … how can I say … "unrequested" by authorities, but, believe me officer, my men and me have great respect for what you represent. We are just kind of filling the gaps left by the Law," Hannibal added with without the slightest shadow of disdain in his proud tone.
Hutch scooted a little forward and planted his left elbow on the driver's seatback.
Hannibal was watching the dirt patch in front of them, while Hutch was looking at him and Starsky was spying on his partner in the rearview mirror.
"Why do you do it, Colonel?"
Hannibal, with his cigar still in his left hand, turned over to face Hutch and with a half-smile he just answered: "I guess for the same reason you do it, Detective".
After a few seconds of silence the answer came, "Hutch. My friends call me Hutch."
"Friends call me Hannibal."
Three pairs of blue eyes met again for one second, before Starsky saw the van and parked where the Colonel had shown him. He turned the engine off and he saw two M16 aimed at the car.
Hannibal got out of the Torino and he addressed his men, "It's ok, guys…how is Murdock?"
"Still the same but he's bleeding like hell, Hannibal" answered Face, his gun now more relaxed and leaning to the ground.
" Face, BA, here are Detectives Hutch and Starsky, they are going to help us out of this mess..."
"What are you talking about, man? They're cops?" BA barked in an indignant voice, stepping towards with his gold necklaces clinking on the iron of his gun.
"Take it easy, Sergeant… we already know this man," Hannibal stated, putting one hand on Starsky's shoulder. "You may remember him from Hang Gai.. we gave him a lift to the field hospital and now he's ready to return us the favor," he explained briefly, wishing to see Murdock as soon as possible and not to waste precious time that could save his friend's life.
Starsky and Hutch followed the Colonel and the two other men walked behind them, scrutinzing the dark-curled man they were supposed to recognize.
Murdock was still lying in the same place, groaning softly and speaking indistinctly in his overwhelming pain. Hannibal checked his state and Starsky crouched next to him, slowly lifting the leather jacket that had been laid on the wounded body to keep him warm. There was plenty of blood flowing out of the wound and the smell of it took Starsky back to that place where they first met.
"We need to take him to the hospital right now." He knew he was stating the obvious, just to get distracted by the sudden nausea he felt. "We can put him in my car and in a few minutes…."
"No way, man! You're not gonna take him away from us that easy! Right, Hannibal? You told the crazy man that we'll always stick together!"
Hannibal and Face shared an understanding look… they needed nothing else to get along.
"Our friend is right, BA. This time we have to take a step back, for Murdock's sake. Do you think you're ready to do it for him?"
"Hell no! I won't leave him! I gave him my word!" BA shouted out.
"C'mon BA…think about it…he is not chased by the MP's. He can get the medical attention he needs and then get back to the VA with no risks." Faced added in his persuasive tone.
As the VA was mentioned, Starsky and Hutch shared a startled glance, but there was no time for explanations now. There was no time to speculate on what kind of physical or emotional scars the war had left. Scars were endurable, as long as the men were alive.
While BA and Hannibal were trying to ease Murdock onto the rear seat of the Torino, giving him as little pain as possible, and while Hutch helped by keeping the wound pressed with the cloth, Starsky got ready to sit behind the wheel and fly to the nearest ER, but Face stopped his side door and said, "I remember you now. You were the only survivor in Hang Gai… we took you away from there and after a few weeks I heard you refused the Medal of Honor for what you did in that hell. Did you really do that?"
"I deserved no medals , Lieutenant Peck. Not that day," replied Starsky in a broken voice.
Face didn't answer but kept watching him, while he turned on the engine.
"And what about you, guys?" asked Hutch before getting into the car.
"We're gonna make it out" Hannibal answered back "This is the telephone number of our van, please call us if anything happens to him… otherwise, we'll get in touch!"
The Torino sped away and the three men stayed there, immobile, with a stone on their heart and hidden tears in their eyes.
"He's gonna make it. He's in good hands now" Hannibal said, slightly voiceless, but still sure…putting one hand on the shoulder of each of his men.
"Hannibal, he.. he has to…" Face let out in one sob that made a shiver run along BA's spine. "We were always kidding and I often said things I didn't mean and don't believe… and … and Hannibal… there are things I didn't tell him at all," the sudden breakdown of his Lieutenant shook the Colonel's deepest soul and a big lump jumped up in his throat. He was still the commander, though, and he knew what he had to do: he held Face's shoulders in a firm grip, shaking him slightly to hook his gaze: "He knows, Face. He knows. He can watch farther and deeper than most of us."
It was hard for Starsky to speed down the dirty patch without making Murdock's body jump on the rear seat. Hutch knelt on his own place, his back to the windshield, to reach out for the suffering man and trying to steady his body and keep some pressure on the wounded side. The Captain kept groaning and his incoherent words were whispered but very fast. They seemed to come directly from another world.
"The VA, Starsk… Can you believe it? Psychiatric Hospital… God knows what he has seen… " said Hutch, as to himself.
"Our mind is a strange device, Hutch. It tries to protect us… sometimes from real life, other times from memories… from the past and the future…" Hutch laid his right hand, the one that wasn't completely covered in blood, on Starsky's arm, understanding perfectly the meaning of his partner's words, addressed both to Murdock's situation and to his own."It tries to protect us from ghosts," Starsky added in a breath.
"Anyway," he kept talking, now with a more confident tone, "Captain Murdock has always been something! I remember when he took me to the field hospital in his helicopter... he kept talking to me, to cover my own thoughts with his voice. I was hurting bad, both physically and emotionally, and he talked about all those western movies," Starsky let out a small laugh, "about cowboys who get shot and still stand up and stay strong in what they believe in."
At this point Hutch's heart missed one beat. He remembered when Starsky was poisoned by Vic Bellamy and, resigned to a certain death, he reached out for his partner's hand saying: "If this was a cowboy movie, I'd give you my boots." Now Hutch got the meaning of it and he squeezed his partner's arm a little tighter to signal his understanding.
"Yeah," acknowledged Starsky, perfectly understanding the meaning of his partner's gesture but without taking his eyes away from the street.
"And you know what? I remember Murdock quoting many lines he remembered from those movies… yeah… he knew a lot of them and tried to act them-imitating the original voices to make me laugh a little. His favourite was…. " Here Starsky stopped talking but it was clear it wasn't a gap in his memory but a dive into the past. Hutch wanted to keep his friend there with him and he insisted: "What was it, partner?"
"It was… - Oh, doesn't matter… we've arrived! Here's the hospital."
Doctors had already been alerted by Hutch, using the radio, and the moments that followed the arrival at the hospital were extremely hectic; Murdock was immediately taken away on a stretcher and he received an oxygen mask.
Starsky and Hutch were asked many questions about the man they were delivering directly to the surgery room, but they realized they didn't know anything about him…not even his first name.
"He's gonna be just fine Starsk, don't worry," Hutch said, putting his arm around his partner's shoulder.
"Yeah, he is."
"And what about you? Are you going to be fine?" Hutch was now looking at his friend's pale and tense face.
"I think I will, Hutch. I'm going through all of that again but this time…"
"This time you're not alone, pal." Hutch interrupted.
Starsky rested his head on Hutch's shoulder for a moment and his partner cupped his head with a gentle but manly gesture that felt good all the way down to Starsky's bones. That cold place in his mind was now warmed up by Hutch's touch and he felt his own hands clasping his friend's jacket as if it was his lifeline.
Waiting for a doctor that should have come out from surgery to update the detectives about Murdock's situation, the friends were all alone in the silence of the waiting room and Starsky could hear his own breathing against his partner's body.
"I'm sorry, Hutch" were his suffocated words.
Hutch pulled away and bent his head so he could watch into his friend's eyes. "Sorry? Sorry for what, Starsk?"
"Sorry for involving you in all this, sorry for being so scared and weak… this is not the kind of partner you need or deserve."
"What are you talking about, buddy? We have always been there for each other when we were most vulnerable…God knows you have seen me wrecked and broken!"
"It's different Hutch…sometimes life has put you down, right, but…"
"But what Starsk?"
"But you have always known what you wanted, even before being a cop! You knew you didn't belong with your snobbish family, you knew you hated war and demonstrated for it, you knew the kind of man you wanted to become…"
"Starsk, wait.. wait! Are you saying you didn't know the kind of man you wanted to become when you have taken care of your mom and your brother after your father's death? Or when you decided you didn't belong to the Brooklyn underground you were supposed to grow up in? You left because you wanted to fight for your ideals!"
"And I fought Hutch. But for no ideals. Once you're in the midst of hell you don't seem to recall what the reason was… you just try to patch up the limbs of your friends when you find them scattered on the ground…"
"Starsky, listen to me now. You know what I consider to be one of the strongest qualities in a man? Being able to go through hell and coming out, from the opposite end, with the same innocent and pure eyes you had before. That makes you a Man. That makes you the partner I'll always want.
"I love you Starsk, you already know it… but above all I respect you, I admire your strength and your ability to stand up again and again when life knocks you down. I wish I had your ability to keep loving that life as I did before it tried to crush me, without blaming it for trying.
"You are the man I'd like to be... if I wasn't Captain Marvel of course!"
Both men let out a little laugh and Starsky could now feel his head getting lighter. There was an unknown place in his gut that had seemed unreachable to him, until now: he felt Hutch's acceptance melt his sense of guilt and give space to the forgiveness that Starsky borrowed for himself from his friend.
At that very moment a Doctor and a nurse entered the room, capturing the attention of the two men immediately and dragging them out of their overwhelming emotion.
"Detectives, your friend has been lucky. The bullet hasn't damaged vital organs, it just caused him massive blood loss and a small secondary infection. We have fixed the first problem with a blood transfusion and we're going to fix the other with a mixture of antibiotics."
"But he will live?" Starsky always looked for matter-of-fact statements, and he always double checked what he thought to have understood with a plain question, simple as that.
"Yes he will live. He was lucky you brought him here on time or he would have died for sure. He's in ICU now and is still sedated, but he may wake up in a few hours so I guess we should call the family."
"We'll do it Doctor," Hutch answered, automatically looking for the piece of paper that was in his pocket, with the van phone number on it.
Starsky and Hutch shared a look… they had to call. The A-Team was his family.
Only a few hours later Starsky, still sitting on a chair near Murdock's bed, while Hutch had gone to make that call and to get something to eat, heard the pilot moving and saying a few words. The talking was indistinct, but Murdock's eyes were now open and looking around.
Starsky immediately got up and he imagined what he would have felt if he had woken up all alone in an unknown hospital without knowing what was going on and what happened to his friends. So he came closer and talked gently: "Captain Murdock, you are in the hospital. You've been shot and you've lost a lot of blood but you'll be fine. Do you understand me?"
Murdock nodded. His eyes seemed extremely present considering he had been sedated.
Starsky lowered his voice: "You're friends are fine; they will come back soon"
That sentence seemed to recur over and over again in Starsky's head lately.
"They will REALLY come back soon, Captain, they were so worried about you…They entrusted you to my partner and I; we are friends."
The effort in Murdock's eyes to try and recognize the man in front of him was enormous.
"We met in Hang Gai , in Vietnam, Captain. You and your Unit saved my life. You can't remember me…I was…"
"C-c-cow-boy!" Murdock muttered in a raspy and almost voiceless attempt to speak, his mouth still dry and rigid.
Starsky stared at the pilot in amazement, while Murdock even tried a quick half-smile when he saw the astonishment in Starsky's eyes for being recognized.
"Yes, yes Captain…it was me…I still recall that line from the movie TheAlamo that you were always repeating to me. Davy Crockett's words….Yeah, you told me Davy and I shared the same name and so we would share the same destiny, too!
"What was it like... 'There's right and there's wrong. You gotta do one or the other. You do the one and you are living, you do the other and you may be walking around, but…"
"… You're dead as a beaver hat," Murdock completed with his hoarse, dried up words.
Starsky was moved to tears and so surprised that he could only answer: "I've tried to live that way Cap'n."
In the frame of the doorstep Hutch was silently watching, a small package of sandwiches in his hand and eyes swollen in emotion. "So that was the line" he whispered to himself. "The line that makes you a Man, partner."