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Hutch forced Starsky to hand over his watch after an hour had gone by - no use sitting here at all if you’re looking at that thing more than the building, he’d said, and he hadn’t been entirely wrong - meaning that now the only way Starsky can hope to tell the time is by the colorful little mountain of candy wrappers piling up on the seat between them in the Torino. And it’s growing, it really is. It’s a hard candy kind of day.
Starsky sighs while pulling at the ends of another wrapper, watching the middle twist itself free. Hutch doesn’t look over, but Starsky can see him roll his eyes, anyway.
“Hey,” Starsky says, around the candy, while flattening out the crinkly little wrapper on the steering wheel. He makes sure to look at the front door of the rundown apartment building more than his own hands, but so far, still no known murderers - which would be a relief if only they weren’t waiting for one to finally appear.
“Hm?” Hutch asks, reminding Starsky that he started a sentence there, and now he’ll need to finish it.
He decides on, “Kinda strange they don’t allow gay cops on the force if you think about it, right?”
Hutch never looks anywhere but straight ahead, but at least he deigned to slouch in his seat a little at some point. Starsky’s always glad to know that even eating rabbit food won’t give you superhuman powers of endurance. “Why are you?”
“Huh?”
“Thinking about it.”
Starsky shrugs, one of the few movements a man in a car can comfortably make. “What else is there to do out here?”
That, and ever since John Blaine was killed…
Well, there are things that can rattle a guy a little, and make him check up on political candidates’ stances on things that he never would have cared about in the voting booth before. Life is full of twists and turns that way.
Hutch, definitely one of the bigger loops in Starsky’s life - one he keeps taking, like a rollercoaster that leaves him giggly and weak-kneed and that he can never get enough of - plucks the latest candy wrapper from his hands. Starsky at first assumes it’s just to get him to stop making little plasticky noises while he fruitlessly straightens out the crinkles over and over, but Hutch lays it flat on the dash and folds it in half, and again and once more, and then he ties a neat little knot right in the middle, with an ease like he routinely does this to his trash.
Starsky huffs, more fond than surprised. Of course Hutch would.
The folded wrapper is an odd addition to the haphazard, springy pile of the rest of them. The candy under Starsky’s tongue is all but gone, but he decides against having another one for the time being. “Do you ever think about how we cruise the neighborhood?” he asks instead. “I mean, as our job?”
“Looking for men?” Hutch asks, confirming he’s caught Starsky’s drift in one. Might not have been that difficult, with the setup he gave, but it still feels good. Pitch, catch.
“Men we can nail,” Starsky agrees.
“Men who deal in hot stuff,” Hutch suggests.
Still, nobody at the door. “To put up against the wall, legs spread.”
“They’re going down.”
“Gotta check for hard objects on their person first.”
“We work the streets, Starsk,” Hutch says, like a little lament. It breaks the rhythm, but not the tension. “This was hopeless to begin with.”
Starsky breathes in it for a moment, the relative danger of what they’ve talked themselves into now. “Sounds a little queer,” he says, which strikes him both as a giddy punchline and a very sobering truth.
“You have a wonderful way of stating the obvious.” Hutch is appropriately dry about it. He’s a lot less so when he adds, “And I agree, it’s strange they won’t knowingly allow gay cops.”
There’s a word in Hutch’s phrasing that Starsky never used, and it has him doing an inverted loop that slings his heart up to about throat level even before Hutch turns his head to look at him. Starsky feels it might be time to stop gripping the bar of his little rollercoaster cart and trust enough to put his hands up in the air - he’s always been of the belief that surrender isn’t very manly, but if it’s Hutch… yeah, he might not mind letting himself get pinned down - when there’s a movement in the corner of his eye that-
His heart stops, right there in his throat, as inconvenient as this timing. “Hutch, that’s our man!”
Getting out of the car is a bit more of a mad scramble than usual, and by the time they’ve made it, their as of yet unsuspecting suspect is already through the door and inside the building. Starsky doesn’t need to coordinate with Hutch to know that they’re going in hot, because this guy will be packing, too.
“Cover me,” he calls to Hutch, and shares a confused blink with him over the car when they both hear how that sounds now that they’ve started listening.
“Maybe later,” Hutch says. There’s no time to linger on what that means, but with Starsky’s watch in Hutch’s pocket and Hutch half a step behind him as they storm towards the building, Starsky thinks he can wait, just a little longer, to find out what else Hutch would watch him unwrap. Could be a hard candy kind of night.