Stephen Cannell - Runaway Heart

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.

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)

Herman 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.

Idon't need this now, he thought.

On the thirtieth floor the elevator doors hissed open revealing the art deco foyer of Lipman, Castle amp; 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 amp; 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 amp; 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.