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Authors: Stephen J. Cannell

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Runaway Heart

Scanned & Semi-Proofed by Cozette

 

 

 

RUNAWAY

HEART

Stephen J. Cannell

 

 

St. Martin's Paperbacks

 

 

 

To Mike Post. . .

My Music Man,
partner, and great friend. You have enriched my life.

 

 

RUNAWAY HEART

Copyright © 2003 by Stephen J. Cannell.

Excerpt from
Vertical Coffin
copyright © 2004 by Stephen J.
Cannell.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or
reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the
case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For
information address St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2003041585

ISBN: 0-312-99718-3 EAN: 80312-99718-2

Printed in the United States of America

St. Martin's Press hardcover edition / July 2003 St. Martin's
Paperbacks edition / August 2004

St. Martin's Paperbacks are published by St. Martin's Press, 175
Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

10 987654321

 

 

 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

 

I would like to thank all my usual
suspects: Grace Curcio, Kathy Ezso, and Christine Trepczyk for their tireless
help in fielding the manuscript each day, Stan Green for his usual clever help
on computers, and Dr. Roger Fouts for his insights on primate behavior. Dr.
Wayne Grody explained the complex field of genetic engineering and Sandy Toye
helped me on animal-rights law. Wayne Williams and Jo Swerling proved their
worth as always, while my agents, Eric Simonoff and Mort Janklow, helped me
chart the right course.

     
I am blessed with a wonderful group at St. Martin's Press: Sally
Richardson, our publisher and guiding light, Charlie Spicer, my editor and
workmate, Matt Baldacci, Joe Cleemann, Gregg Sullivan, and Mathew Shear all do
a remarkable job to bring these books to you.

     
Finally, thanks to my three children: Tawnia, Chelsea, and Cody. You
keep the smiles coming. And to my wonderful wife, Marcia; next year makes
forty. I'd be lost without you.

 

 

 

 

RUNAWAY

HEART

by Stephen J.
Cannell

 

 

Advances in genetic engineering, which one day could
transform animals into subhuman slaves, are developing much faster than
expected, and Congress must monitor the field. Our legal and ethical structures
are unprepared for the question that will be forced upon us by human genetic
engineering.

                                           
                                 
—Albert Gore,
Jr. (D-Tenn.), 1982

 

The development of subhuman slaves by genetic transfer is
a possibility and must be guarded against. There is no evidence that any
government is now using the idea, but we must remember that Nazi Germany once
experimented with eugenic theory against the Jews, slaves, and mentally
retarded people.

                                                                            
—Testimony before the subcommittee on investigations and oversight of
the House Committee on Science and Technology; from the Presidential Commission
Report Splicing Life (1982)

 

 

 

 

 

ONE

 

H
erman Strockmire Jr., attorney at law,
got his fourth severe ventricular arrhythmia at 7:45 Tuesday morning while
riding up to his borrowed office on the thirtieth floor of the Century City
high-rise. It was the day before he was scheduled to appear in federal court to
argue his case to protect the monarch butterfly. He was in the plush-pile
elevator, rocketing upwards at blast-off speeds, his ears popping every ten
floors, his short, bulging body feeling as if it were pulling at least two Gs.
His heart arrhythmias always started with the same curious sensation: first a
mild loss of energy, followed by a sinking feeling as if a hundred extra pounds
had just been strapped onto his five-foot-eight-inch, lunchbox-shaped frame.
This heavy sluggishness was immediately accompanied by a sensation of
light-headedness that quickly left him short of breath, dizzy, and slightly
woozy. Fifty-five-year-old Herman didn't have to take his pulse to know that
the old ticker had just gone into severe arterial flutter. He didn't have to,
but he did anyway—force of habit.

     
He set his faded briefcase down, grabbed his fat, furry left wrist, and
wrapped his stubby fingers around it, finding his pulse.

     
"Jesus," he muttered into the elevator Muzak. "It's doing
a damn fandango." He didn't want to count beats; didn't have to, really.
He knew from past episodes that it was up over 150, maybe as high as 185.

 
    
I
don't need this now,
he
thought.

     
On the thirtieth floor the elevator doors hissed open revealing the art
deco foyer of Lipman, Castle & Stein, Entertainment Law. They had
thoughtfully placed a marbleized mirror on the opposing wall (actors love
mirrors) and Herman Strockmire Jr. was forced to take a depressing personal
inventory as he stepped off the elevator into his own sagging, bulging
reflection. He looked like shit.

     
In the last ten years his Bavarian gene map had veered. The decade had
turned him into a stocky carbon copy of his dead father.

     
Herman Strockmire Sr. had been a foundry worker—a metal press
operator—banging out steel sheets in the humid heat of a Pittsburgh mill, each
thudding, hammering stroke of the metal press pounding the poor, elder Herman
shorter and lower, until the old German immigrant seemed like a fun-house
distortion of a human being.

     
Now, as Herman Jr. studied himself in the law firm's marbleized mirror,
he saw his dead father: short, Teutonic, absurd. The hand of gravity was
reaching out with gnarled fingers and pulling him down toward the grave, while
his runaway heart spun wildly out of control.

     
Herman's borrowed office at Lipman, Castle & Stein was an
accommodation that his dear friend, Barbra Streisand, had arranged for him.
These power brokers were her show business lawyers and they constantly reminded
him of their huge respect for her star power.
$tar
was spelled with a
dollar sign at Lipman, Castle & Stein. The partners, two Jerrys and a Marty,
had acceded to Barbra's "request" and loaned him a small, one-window
office that overlooked Century City and the Fox movie studios across the
street. For some reason that defied natural selection, Herman had learned that
most agents and entertainment lawyers were named Jerry or Marty, with a liberal
sprinkling of Sids. Herman had spent the last two weeks in this slick retreat,
doing pretrial deps and federal court writs.

     
Because the trial started tomorrow, Herman had driven in from Barbra and
Jim's beach house early that morning, via Malibu Canyon Drive, just before
sun-up.

     
Dear, sweet, politically conscious Barbra had not only prevailed upon
her show biz attorneys to loan Herman the office while he was in L.A., but she
had lent him the use of the ocean-front pool house at her Malibu estate while
she and her husband James Brolin were on vacation in Corsica.

     
Herman and his thirty-year-old daughter, Susan, had been residing there,
using the cars and eating the food, and had permission to do so until Herman's
current federal case was adjudicated—which, he figured, would be in about two
weeks—if he didn't die of a coronary first.

     
He shuffled down the hall to the men's room thinking it looked more like
a sultan's harem than a shitter. Black marble floors, brown Doric columns, and
decorator washbasins with arched dolphin faucets profiled under directional pin
lights. The little, gilded, flippered critters spit water delicately into
hammered artificial gold sinks. Herman hefted his briefcase full of writs,
pretrial motions, and law books onto the marble counter and popped the latch.
It wheezed open like a broken accordion. He rummaged around inside for his pill
bottles and, finding the Warfarin first, shook two of the little capsules into
his palm. They were blood thinners to prevent strokes during an arrhythmia. He
dug out the bottle of Digoxin that was supposed to control his heart rate, then
grabbed a paper cup from the built-in dispenser. He had never before been in a
corporate men's room that supplied Dixie cups. Herman tossed the pills into his
mouth and washed them down. That was when he got a second look at himself in
the well-lit bathroom mirror. He was used up and tired. He'd seen raccoons with
subtler eye markings.

     
But he had no choice; he had to go on. He was on a mission, maybe the
most important of his life. An entire species of butterfly was about to be
wiped out by biologically enhanced foods. It wasn't just any butterfly he was
fighting for, but the heart-stoppingly beautiful monarch, the majestic creature
that had introduced Herman to the wonders of nature as a child. He had studied
the beautiful orange-and-black-winged treasures for hours as a boy, lying on
his stomach in the grass behind his parents' tiny row
house, marveling
at their delicate markings, seeing in them God's divine artistry.

     
The monarch butterfly, once the most common in North America, was now in
danger of going onto the endangered species list. Unless Herman blocked the
FDA, EPA, USDA, and all the other federal letter agencies that controlled
bio-enhanced foods, these priceless treasures of nature might disappear
forever, unintended victims of the new gene-spliced Frankenfoods. Specifically
corn.

     
His federal lawsuit was for injunctive relief and damages on behalf of
two organizations chartered to protect the monarch. It had been filed and
fast-tracked to beat the spring planting season. If successful, it would stop
this year's trans-genetic corn crop from going into the ground in May and would
pay out damages to his two client organizations. However, the real reason for
the suit was to force the government to reexamine the long-term, downstream
effects of bio-enhanced food.

     
Herman felt a surge of anger as he had these thoughts, and with it
adrenaline coursed through his tired, sluggish body, doing god-knows-what to
his already jackhammering heart. He fumed about his lawsuit and the arrogant
disinterest of the government watchdog agencies and private labs he was suing.
The biologically enhanced com was engineered to kill off mites and pests that
ate the cornstalks, but because of inadequate or sloppy testing, it was killing
the monarch butterfly as well, and no one else seemed to give a damn.

     
Herman stood in front of the men's room mirror and glowered at his
sagging jowls and shaggy, curly hair that always seemed unkempt. It was then,
he noted with mild consternation, that he had "mixed his numbers"
again. Herman was colorblind and used a number scheme to stay in one color zone
or another. He had the clothing taste of a mill worker, which, like his poor
dead father, he'd once been. He never paid attention to trends, always bought
cheap, and wore it until the stitches broke. After all, he
reasoned, it was
hard to dress for success when you were built like a steamer trunk.

     
His lovely daughter, Susan, light of his life, friend, colleague, and
paralegal, carefully chose his court attire, sewing little numbers on the
labels of matching outfits. Unfortunately, he had dressed in the dark this
morning, not wanting to wake her. She'd been up all night, typing pre-trial
motions. He had decided this would be a number-3 day, but standing in the dark
closet, squinting at the numbers, he had mixed some 8s in with the 3s. He now
realized he had on his gray-and-black-checked jacket, a blue-and-green-striped
shirt, and a bright yellow tie. He thought he must look like the host of a
Saturday-morning cartoon show.

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