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MIND IF I JOIN YA? -- SCENE ONE

Starsky stared incredulously into the rear view mirror as reality registered and the LTD took the right turn. Should've known...trust him with your life, sure. But not with your dinner.

Briefly, he considered pursuit -- take the next right turn -- catch up -- that heap would never outrun the Torino -- use the Mars light, maybe, if other traffic proved a problem....

But there was no guarantee that he'd pick up his errant partner. Abruptly, the chasing game lost its appeal. It was no later than late afternoon but it had been a long crowded day, culminating in the garage shoot-out with Zale and Canelli. And as on all such days, Starsky was aware of a certain wind-down process to be gone through...one of the ways in which police work was different from other kinds. This job was a whole life-style. Work time and leisure time never really slotted into separate, neat compartments. He recognized the feelings after any shoot-out, unavoidable as they'd been warned from the start, but becoming no easier with experience.

The new place for dinner might have helped in this familiar aftermath. His suggestion hadn't perhaps been made deliberately with that thought, but he acknowledged that he'd had the connection somewhere in mind when he'd urged Hutch to try its cuisine. And they'd been working together long enough for Hutch to have known that, to have gone along with it. Couldn't he just humor a person -- just for once? Instead of making that treacherous getaway.

"I'll follow you...." His partner's facile assurance, not five minutes since, echoed in his memory. Should've known....

Starsky drove on. What now? Stop off for a beer? Then another beer...? Drinking alone wasn't what he needed right now -- no substitute for the presence of the partner who'd shared the hazards of the past few hours. And if beer was any support, there was beer right there at home in the refrigerator. TV? -- the all-American panacea, he thought wryly. Beer.... TV...sleep.... Probably what Hutch had in mind for himself anyway.

Dinner...who needs it?

Less than a half-hour later, he pulled in outside his apartment, locked the Torino and headed for his own front door. Slumped on the sofa, beer can in hand, he considered distantly the prospect of a shower. It took another ten minutes for resolution of form.

He was setting down the empty can when the knock sounded. Visitors? Did he really want visitors --? The knocking sounded again.

"Coming -- coming --" He opened the door and his visitor thrust a couple of boxes upon him. 

"Would you hold this, please?" Hutch politely requested.

Starsky stood there on the threshold, the packages clutched to his chest.

"So could I come in, please?" Hutch smiled ingratiatingly and squeezed past him to deposit the six-pack on the kitchen counter.

Starsky kicked the door shut and followed him into the apartment.

"Food's hot." Hutch gestured toward the cardboard containers.

"I noticed. Pizza, huh?" He raised a quizzical eyebrow. Hope -- of more than food -- fed zest into his question.

"Sure. With everything." Hutch paused. "You didn't eat already?"

Starsky swallowed his spontaneous question...why'd you change your mind like that?...no need to bother with words or with reasons. The day's tensions receded. Magic --  worked by a pizza? And by a partner...

"Actually -- no," he answered. He couldn't stop the grin. "Work fast, don't you?"

Hutch shrugged deprecatingly. "It's nothing. My treat." His look held Starsky's.

"Mind if I join ya?"

"There is nothing more important to a patrol officer than the partner with whom he will share more waking hours than with a wife; upon whom he is to depend more than a man should, with whom he will share the ugliness and the tedium, the humor and the wonder..." Joseph Wambaugh: The Onion Field

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