Work Text:
Off Road
By TLR
Plot: An accident reveals more than an injured Hutch.
::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
The semi was doing forty in a fifty-five and holding up everybody behind it.
Starsky drummed his fingers on the wheel of the Torino and gave the truck ahead another look.
“Tell me again why truckers think they own the road.”
Hutch, slouched in the passenger seat with his tie mostly undone and the last of a stale courthouse Danish in his hand, said, “Maybe because they’re bigger than us.”
“Could be.”
Late light spread copper over the industrial belt east of Bay City. Freight yards. Chain-link. Billboards. The air carrying diesel and hot metal.
They were heading back from a dead-end interview in Vernon Heights that had gotten them nothing but a headache and a witness too scared to remember his own address.
Starsky had wanted dinner twenty minutes ago. Hutch had wanted quiet.
Instead they had the truck.
The tractor was blue, the trailer a weathered white box with dirt streaking the lower panels. No company name on it, just a faded number stenciled near the back and mud flaps slapping at the asphalt. It rode heavy and uneven, and the driver wasn’t in any hurry to let traffic by.
Starsky tapped the horn once.
“Don’t aggravate,” Hutch said.
“I’m not aggravating. I’m expressing.”
“You’re impatient.”
“That too.”
Starsky checked the mirror, saw the left lane open, and moved out to pass.
As the Torino came up alongside the trailer, Hutch looked over automatically. Years in the car taught them both the same thing--never pass blind if you could help it.
He was just about to say the truck was drifting too close to the line when he saw movement in the driver’s side mirror.
Not the driver.
The mirror caught the side of the cab and the little sleeper window behind it. In this reflected angle, for half a second, Hutch saw a child’s hand hit the glass from inside.
Small hand. Bloody palm. Fingers spread wide in panic before jerking away.
And maybe a face behind it. Maybe.
Hutch straightened and turned his head to tell him.
“Starsk--”
The trailer wheel came off with a bang like a cannon shot.
It sheared free from the right tandem, bounced once, then cleared the lane divider and hit the Torino’s windshield on Hutch’s side in an explosion of steel and glass.
Starsky never remembered making the sound he made.
The windshield imploded inward and Hutch vanished behind it, the Torino slewing hard left, then right.
Starsky fought the wheel with both hands and still lost it. The car shot off the shoulder, dropped nose-first into a drainage ditch, and slammed broadside into the culvert wall hard enough to turn the world white.
Then there was silence, but not true silence. Steam hissed under the hood. The engine ticked. Distant brakes whined on the road above. Somewhere a horn blared and didn't stop.
Inside the car, for one long second, time stood still.
Starsky lifted his head.
Blood had run into one of his eyes and his hands were still clamped around the wheel. His shoulder hurt and his mouth tasted like metal.
“Hutch.”
Had he said his name? No answer. Had he said it?
The passenger side of the Torino was wrecked. Glass gone, dash shoved inward, Hutch curled into the door at a bad angle, half under the crushed glove compartment, face white under blood at his temple. One side of his shirt was soaked dark where the windshield had torn through it. His breathing came shallow and ragged and too fast.
Starsky’s heart slammed way too hard inside his chest.
“Hutch!”
He got his seat belt loose and lunged across as far as the ruined dash would allow. Hutch made a small sound then, dragged out strange syllables nothing like words.
“Okay, Hutch. Okay, buddy. Stay with me.”
He got one hand against Hutch’s face, the other at his neck. Warm. Pulse there. Too fast.
Up on the road, people shouted, doors slammed, and somebody yelled for an ambulance.
Starsky shoved his own door open with his shoulder and climbed out into ditch water and weeds. One look at the passenger side told him what he already knew--the door was jammed deep.
He scrambled back around, shoes slipping in mud, and reached in through the shattered windshield frame.
“Hutch, hey, listen to me. I’m gonna pull you over the seat, you hear me?”
Hutch’s lashes fluttered. One eye opened a little while the other stayed swollen with drying blood across his brow.
He whispered now. “Hurts.”
Starsky stroked his hair. “I know. I know.”
Two motorists came running down the slope, one of them already shouting to somebody else to call it in. The other crouched beside Starsky.
“How can we help?”
They worked carefully because there was no other way. Starsky took Hutch under the shoulders from inside the broken frame, the stranger braced his trapped leg, and together they dragged him inch by inch across the seat. Hutch cried out weakly once when his right side shifted, then it cut off halfway as his body sagged.
“Easy, blondie,” Starsky said, voice breaking around the word. “Easy.”
They got him out through the driver’s side and laid him on the bank above the ditch. Hutch’s breathing was worse out here, short and catching. Blood bubbled at the corner of his mouth and that scared Starsky more than anything else yet.
“Truck,” Hutch murmured groggily. “The truck. I saw...”
“Don’t talk,” Starsky said. “Just breathe for me.”
Hutch’s hand moved, fingertips finding a bit of Starsky’s jacket, and clung.
“Star...”
The first highway patrol car arrived just ahead of the ambulance.
The semi was gone.
::
The doctor at Memorial was too tired to bother sounding brisk.
“Three fractured ribs on the right. Small pneumothorax. Lacerations to the shoulder and upper arm from the windshield. A concussion. Multiple contusions. We’re putting in a chest tube now.”
Starsky stood in the ER hallway with dried blood on his cuffs and a few fresh stitches at his own hairline.
“He’s gonna make it?”
The doctor gave him a look.
“Yes. But he isn't going to enjoy the next several days.”
Dobey arrived before the chest tube was in. He took one look at Starsky and said, “You all right?”
“I’m fine.”
Dobey waited.
Starsky looked away first. “Hutch has a ways to go though.”
Dobey got the short version of the crash and listened without interrupting. Starsky told him the truck never stopped, the wheel had come off, hit them, then and he'd lost control and put them in the ditch.
::
By eleven that night, Highway Patrol had nothing but broken glass, tire fragments, and a description of a blue tractor with a white trailer disappearing toward county roads.
Hutch came out of the chest tube procedure pale, hurting, and under the morphine.
Starsky went in to visit while the nurse was still adjusting the wall suction. Hutch lay propped slightly to one side, oxygen under his nose, one arm bandaged, the other free. His eyes opened when Starsky reached the bed.
“You look lousy,” Hutch whispered.
“Flatterer.”
Hutch would have smiled if it hadn’t hurt so much.
Starsky put one hand lightly over the blanket near Hutch’s wrist. “You sure know how to scare somebody.”
After a moment, as if trying to retrieve and relay a lost memory, Hutch said, “The truck...”
Starsky leaned in. “Yeah, you keep sayin' that. What about it?”
“There was... someone in the sleeper.”
Starsky went still. “What?”
“A kid I think.” Hutch swallowed against the pain. “I saw a small hand in the side mirror. Blood on the glass. Pounding on the sleeper window.”
Starsky stared at him.
“Hutch... you took a pretty good knock to the head. Are you sure?”
Hutch opened his eyes wider. Pain sharpened them.
“I know what I saw.”
Starsky hesitated.
“A kid?”
He nodded.
“In the mirror?”
He nodded again.
“You’re sure?”
“Ninety-nine point ninety-nine percent.”
Starsky exhaled long, thinking and looking at him, seeing that Hutch wasn’t fogged or drifting. Hurt, yes. Exhausted, yes. But not unsure.
“Okay,” Starsky said quietly. “I believe you.”
Hutch shut his eyes, suddenly spent.
“Good.”
::
They had a missing child report by two the next morning.
Twelve-year-old Carrie Carvel, taken from her neighborhood in South Gate sometime between four and five that afternoon. She’d been riding her bike alone to a corner store three blocks from her house. The bike had been found in an alley. No witnesses to speak of. Her mother had called it in when Carrie didn’t come home by dark.
Starsky was in Records and Information when the bulletin crossed their desk.
Female. Twelve. Brown hair. Red windbreaker. White sneakers.
He stared at the teletype too long.
Dobey stepped into the room and saw his face. “That her?”
Starsky handed him the sheet.
“Could be. Right age. Right time. And if Hutch saw blood, she may have fought, or the driver hurt her for the hell of it.”
Dobey nodded once. “We work it like an abduction.”
That changed everything.
The truck was no longer just a hit-and-run and vehicular assault on two detectives. It became part of a child kidnapping, and every hour that passed added to the urgency.
Carrie’s parents came in before noon. Her mother looked like she might break in two anytime. Her father looked ready to start punching someone. They brought her most recent school picture, a bright-eyed girl with innocent eyes and a trusting smile.
Starsky took the photo and thought of Hutch in the hospital bed insisting through pain that he knew what he saw.
By evening they found the truck.
Abandoned in an equipment yard near Norwalk, the cab doors still open, the trailer empty. The inside of the sleeper told its own story. Blood on the window glass. Blood on the bunk. A torn piece of red windbreaker fabric caught on a hinge. One white canvas sneaker under the seat.
No child.
Dobey said, “He moved her.”
Starsky stood looking at the sleeper and felt cold.
“Alive?”
Dobey's non-answer told him enough.
::
Hutch hated being in the hospital while the case moved without him.
Starsky could tell by how he kept asking short questions in a voice still husky with pain.
“What’d they find?”
“They found the truck.”
“And?”
“Blood. And her shoe.”
Hutch turned his face toward the pillow a second and shut his eyes.
Starsky sat in the chair and watched him breathe around the ribs and chest tube and all the rest of it.
“We’re gonna find her, Hutch.”
“You better.”
Starsky almost smiled at that. “Bossy for a guy in a hospital bed.”
Hutch opened one eye. “How’s your car?”
“Demolished. But don't worry, I'll get another one.”
Then Hutch said, after a pause, “She tried to get our attention, so we could see her, and help her.”
“I know, buddy. And we are helpin' her. You noticed her. That's the important thing. We'll find her.”
Hutch looked away again with wet eyes reflecting something like helpless anger.
Starsky stood up and put one hand briefly on Hutch’s shoulder.
“Rest some, huh?”
Hutch answered with the slightest nod.
::
The break came from Huggy.
There was a man who did body work on trucks and liked staying out of police business, until Starsky started asking about children.
The man told Huggy that a loner named Conn Whelan had come through looking for help with a damaged rig and blood to clean out. The mechanic had turned him away. Whelan had a history--indecent exposure, suspicion in one old attempted abduction that never stuck, two charges of assault that pleaded out lighter than they should have.
He also had a place outside Bellflower, a dead aunt’s bungalow he used for drinking and not being found.
Dobey sent Simmons and Babcock with Starsky and two uniforms.
They reached the house just before dark.
It was a small place with an overgrown yard, detached garage, drawn curtains, and no car in front.
Starsky looked at the windows and felt the now-familiar pressure of time.
Dobey said, “Quiet.”
They spread out.
Starsky came in along the side yard, stepping over a rusted bicycle frame and dead weeds, and heard it just before he reached the back window.
A dull thud inside.
Then a child’s cry, cut short.
He didn’t wait for the formal knock.
He hit the back door with his shoulder and broke through.
Whelan was in the kitchen, one hand over Carrie Carvel’s mouth, the other reaching for a revolver on the table. She looked smaller than twelve in that second, hair hacked off rough at one side, wrists tied in front, face bruised and hollow-eyed with fear.
Starsky drew on Whelan. “Don't touch that gun.”
But Whelan grabbed the gun and Starsky shot him cleanly through the forehead. Then Carrie ran straight for the man who saved her, and Starsky caught her up in a desperate hug.
“It's okay, kiddo. You're safe now. Your mom and pop are waitin' for you.”
Dobey came and cut her wrists loose.
::
Carrie Carvel was dehydrated, bruised, and frightened nearly speechless, but alive.
After turning Carrie over to the medics, Simmons and Babcock, and the captain, Starsky went to Memorial, dust on his shoes and anger still hot under his skin.
Hutch was awake when he walked in.
One look at Starsky’s face and Hutch said, “You found her.”
Starsky nodded. “She's alive, bronco. Bruised and shaken up, but she'll be okay.”
Hutch shut his eyes and let out a long sigh. “Thank God.”
::
Three weeks later, Hutch's cottage boasted the aroma of coffee and Starsky's signature oven-toasted bagels.
Hutch was home, pale still but upright, moving carefully around healing ribs and his various bruises.
Starsky had practically moved in the first week, doting shamelessly, and now limited himself to dropping by once a day, which was progress.
The second week found Hutch to be stronger physically, and both lighter in spirit. So much that they were eager to see the Carvels stop by with a young daughter who looked healthy and happy.
“Carrie insisted we visit,” the mother said. “She wanted to meet the man with the blond hair who saw her waving, and the curly-haired man who saved her from that monster.”
Starsky and Hutch smiled at Carrie, who walked to the kitchen table where they were sitting.
“Thank you,” she said looking from one to the other.
“You're very welcome,” Hutch said, and Starsky gave her a wink.
“Hey,” she said looking at the pan of toasted bagels, “can I have one of those? With some yogurt on top?”
Hutch ruffled her hair and looked at Starsky. “My kind of girl.”
end