Runaway Heart (2003)

by Stephen Cannell

  All of this must have been playing across his big movie screen of a face, colorful and obvious as a Steven Seagal flick, because suddenly Susan asked, "What is it? What are you thinking?"

  "Huh?"

  "You look like you just had an idea."

  "I don't get many ideas. It musta been gas."

  "What were you thinking, Jack? I want to know," she demanded.

  "Well, if you must know, I was thinking you are one of the most beautiful people I've ever had the pleasure to know, and I think I'm falling in love with you."

  "Jack, that wasn't it."

  "But it oughta earn me some points, though." He smiled. "It was sweet and endearing and ..."

  "Jack!"

  "Okay, okay, what I was thinking was ..." He took a deep breath. "Everything that happened today makes no sense at all when viewed against what happened yesterday. That's it. That's the whole idea. Let's go to the next subject. Hey, this is a great-looking fish, isn't it? I love it when you can have eye contact with a meal."

  "Whatta you mean?" she said. "Explain that. And I'm not talking about the food. The thing about what happened yesterday not being in sync with today."

  Jack put down his fork and sighed. "We go out to that reservation and it's nothing but a used-tire exhibit. . . some old trailers, a few run-down barns. Nothing."

  "So?"

  "So, why is . . he stopped.

  "Yes?"

  "Why is there a Code Sixty-one on that place?"

  "A what?"

  "It's a federal no-fly zone restricting all flights over that reservation from the ground all the way to outer space. They only have Code Sixty-ones over top-secret military installations. If there's nothing out there to hide, why the FAA restriction, and why did a Blackhawk helicopter chase me off when I tried to fly over it? Why did they arrest and try to kill me if there's really nothing out there?"

  She sat in silence pondering it. "You're right. It makes no sense."

  "Right, none at all. So that means something is out there something they don't want anybody to see."

  "But there was nothing there. You saw. The place was deserted. There was no lab. They couldn't move a whole science facility in a day."

  "It's not the missing lab. It's the other thing that's missing that's got me puzzled."

  "What other thing?"

  "The toxic waste pit. Where the hell was that?"

  "Huh?"

  "Izzy told us they were digging it even before the tribe left, that it was a huge hole in the ground. But we didn't see a toxic waste site ... no dumping platforms or flow tanks, no sealed concrete hatches, nothing. So where the hell is the toxic waste station?"

  "My God, you're right."

  "Yeah. That happens with me about once every ten years or so."

  "What're you thinking?"

  "I'm thinking maybe that hole they were digging wasn't for a waste pit," Herman said. "These DARPA spooks love their underground facilities. The Dulce Lab at Area Fifty-one was underground. What if this chimera testing lab was built underground and the no-fly zone is because they don't want pictures from the air of the chimeras playing war games and doing training exercises out in the desert? What if the research lab is in that hole? After Herman filed his discovery motion this morning they just went underground, pulled the dirt up over their heads and disappeared."

  There it was his big ugly idea. Now it was out in the open, sitting between them, ruining his Monkfish with Champagne Sauce and her Lobster Florentine. The idea leaked intellectual pollution onto their expensive feast. . . because, if they accepted this as truth there was really no turning back for either of them.

  "You're right. You're right, Jack. Izzy said they were digging it even before the tribe left; so, at the very least even if they changed their minds about dumping there would still be a huge hole in the ground and there isn't."

  "Right. I think Amato knew what was out there and when Krookshank allowed Herm's motion he called 'em. By the time we got there everything was safely underground. That means somewhere in this big complicated mess we've got lawyers lying. Unique concept, huh?"

  "What do we do?"

  "I think we need to go back and see Izzy. Get him to draw us a map of exactly where that pit was."

  All of a sudden they weren't hungry, so they had the waiter bag up their food.

  "Was everything to your liking?" the handsome maitre d' asked skeptically as he handed them two tinfoil containers twisted into the shape of ducks.

  Hard question, Jack thought. Everything most certainly wasn't to his liking. In fact, he was scared to death. The last thing he wanted was to sneak back out to Indio and crawl under a barbed-wire fence with a knife between his teeth. But the guy looked so sad that they hadn't eaten that Jack assured him. "Everything was tremendous." He held up the two containers of artistically packaged food. "Just ducky," he added softly.

  Chapter Forty-Nine.

  It was eight at night and the temperature in the

  desert near Indio was dropping faster than Jack's meager stock portfolio.

  He and Susan were kneeling in a sand culvert with Chief Ibanazi and three other members of the Ten-Eyck tribe.

  A war party.

  Everyone was dressed in jeans and tennies, except for Izzy, who had added a chic leather vest from Brioni and a headband from Costume National. He looked like a painting of Cochise as they knelt in the moonlight. Jack had his trusty hunting knife in a leather scabbard on his belt, determined to put it between his teeth at some point during the raid. They were all packing handguns, nine millimeters

  mostly. But Russell's cousin, Carlos Ibanazi, had a scoped 30.06.

  "It's down here about another quarter mile," Izzy informed them in a stage whisper worthy of any of the great Warner Bros. Indians.

  "Okay," Jack nodded. "Susan, you're rear guard. You have the cell phone. If we need help you know what to do."

  "I'm through being rear guard. You be rear guard."

  "You can't go with us," he argued. "Too dangerous."

  "Then, I hope you brought your handcuffs," she shot back. Her eyes were flashing angrily and he could see there would be no stopping her. "Either that, or we can do what I suggested before call the cops and let them sneak in here," she added.

  "No cops," he said.

  "I still don't see why not," Susan argued.

  "Because as an ex-cop I can tell you we're shitty at covert ops. We always start by announcing stuff over bullhorns. We need to catch one of these chimera things out in the open before we add all the police confusion."

  It was good logic, but she still seemed worried about their safety; that was okay, because Jack was worried about their safety, too.

  "Okay, show time. Let's do it," Jack said, borrowing that tired line from just about every corny action film he'd ever seen.

  They stood to the side and let Russell Ibanazi take the point.

  Izzy headed down the culvert, his three-hundred-dollar tennies making squeaking sounds in the fine sand.

  Jack Wirta, renegade commando and complete medical mess, took the second position. Behind Jack was Carlos, who on the ride out from L.A. never stopped complaining about the assholes who stole his Rolls. As he gripped his long scoped rifle he asked Jack over and over if, as an ex-cop, he knew how to catch car thieves.

  "Gee, Carlos," Jack had finally said, trying to calm him down, "that's a tough one. But, since you got it back, if it was me, I'd just forget about it."

  "Can't forget about it," Carlos said. "Nobody steals my car. Gonna get the fuckers." He wouldn't shut up about it. It was making Jack wish he'd never stolen the damned thing.

  Behind Carlos Ibanazi was Bobby Horsekiller, who looked like he really could kill horses: six feet of gristle and bone stacked under mean eyes and a cruel mouth. Jack was glad he hadn't stolen Mr. Horsekiller's Rolls.

  Susan was behind Horsekiller, and bringing up the rear was somebody named Digby. Jack hadn't caught the last name, but he sure didn't look like a Digby. He looked like
an Indian version of Andre the Giant, all three hundred fifty-plus pounds of him. His tennis shoes looked like tuna boats. The guy was immense.

  So, off they went Indian file . . . apparently no lack of political correctness there either, because that's what Izzy called it.

  When they finally reached a large, metal drainage pipe Izzy stopped. Jack pumped his fist up and down, like John Wayne in The Green Berets, to announce that the column was coming to a halt. It was a cool-looking signal, and when you did it, everybody was supposed to put on the brakes. Trouble was, Carlos wasn't watching and climbed right up Jack's already tortured back. Then they all ran into each other. In a remarkable demonstration of human kinetic energy the entire column went down.

  "Shhh," Russell said as he regained his balance and stood. "Okay, this drainage pipe goes under the perimeter fence. When I was a kid, this was my way off the reservation to score girls after my folks were asleep. On the other side is an open field, and we'll have to stay very low. In this full moon we can be seen over a long distance in the desert, unless we get on our bellies." He looked at Jack and the others, who all nodded.

  "Okay, show time. Let's do it," Izzy said, sounding even sillier than Jack had.

  They crouched down and duck-walked through the four-foot-high metal drainage pipe that was full of rust and unimaginable stuff that slithered away in the dark. Jack could hear Digby grunting somewhere back there as he lumbered along.

  Soon they emerged on the other side and came up behind Russell who had proned out on the sand. Everybody stretched out next to him.

  Jack had a pair of old Bushnell binoculars around his neck, but he was lying on them and they were now punching a hole in his already injured chest. After he dug them out he could feel the hunting knife poking him as well. Maybe now would be a good time to slip it neatly between his teeth. White Eyes prepares for battle . . .

  Instead he focused the binoculars and began scanning the open terrain between where they were and the reservation beyond. Some pretty good tires out there looked like they still had lots of tread on them. He panned left and brought the old stables into view.

  "We got some choices to make here," Izzy was saying. "Those are the stables off to the left about a quarter mile . . . you can just see them in the moonlight. That's where the open pit was dug."

  Jack kept his Bushnells on the stables and sharpened the focus. They looked deserted.

  "Or, like I said in war council, we could try the old tribal long house and sweat lodge over there couple a hundred yards to the north toward the mountains," Izzy whispered.

  The war council had taken place two hours earlier at a Denny's restaurant off the Indio Highway. Jack had a cheeseburger with fries, Susan had the California salad, Russell, Carlos, and Bobby all ordered tuna melts. Jack thought it was unusual food for a war council. Indians preparing for battle should fast and ask the Great Spirit for courage. Digby made it worse by ordering everything else on the Denny's menu.

  Izzy had showed Jack a map of the reservation he'd drawn and pointed out where the two pits that the government dug were located. "Over by the old stables and near the sweat lodge," Izzy

  said. It was the first time Jack had heard there were two pits.

  Now, hours later, they were on their stomachs while Jack looked across the desert at the stables through his Bushnells, trying to make a decision: stables or sweat lodge?

  "Let's stick with the stables," Jack finally said, partly because he always tried to stay out of buildings where naked men sat in circles sweating, and partly because it was two hundred yards closer, and he still remembered the elbow crawls he'd been forced to do at the Police Academy.

  So they were off crawling across the desert on their stomachs. Halfway there Izzy stopped to catch his breath. "See anything?" Izzy said.

  Jack's back was killing him so he dug into his pocket for his last two Percocets. He slipped the pills into his mouth, then brought the binoculars up and scanned the stables.

  Jack shook his head. "Seems deserted."

  Izzy was looking at the stables with a puzzled frown. "Y'know, I thought that stable was in the wrong place this afternoon when we were out here. It used to be about forty yards to the east, I'm almost sure."

  "How?" Jack said, thinking he was sounding more and more like a real Indian.

  "This was my old trail. I used it all the time when I was a kid. I'm sure the stables used to be further east. Don't you remember, Carlos? They were over by that big Joshua tree."

  "I never went to the stables much," Carlos answered. "I had my brother's Jeep after he went into the Marines."

  "Why move the stables?" Digby asked. It was his first sentence since he'd said "Pass the ketchup" two hours ago.

  "I don't know," Izzy said. "But I've taken this route a hundred times and I'm telling you they moved 'em."

  "Maybe to dig the pit. . . then they put the stables back for camouflage, but not in the same exact spot," Susan volunteered.

  Just then the stable doors opened and five low shapes scampered out of the building followed by a man in cammies who turned and closed the door, locking up behind him.

  Jack focussed the lenses on the five shapes. They were slightly smaller than an average man maybe five-feet-four or -five and they kept low. They were dressed in metal that reflected the moonlight. Through the binoculars they looked like they had furry bodies and human faces.

  Chimeras.

  They were carrying long, two-handled weapons that resembled the Star Wars ordnance the commandos had used at Zimmy's wife's apartment and onboard The Other Woman.

  "Damn," Jack said aloud as the animals fanned out and started looking around in the moonlight. Their faces through the lens, even at this distance, looked amazingly human.

  Izzy snatched the binoculars away and trained them on the distant shapes. "What the fuck are those things?"

  "You don't wanna know," Jack said.

  Susan took the binoculars and looked. "It's them," she said, "chimeras!"

  The hybrid soldiers turned, then headed in five separate directions across the desert, staying low in the natural crevices until Jack couldn't keep them all in the wide-angle lenses. He was panning frantically back and forth, but they had scampered away. They looked like they were fanning out and getting ready to attack.

  "I hate this," Jack was saying. "I'm not sure what weapons they're packing, but they look like those rayguns."

  "Rayguns?" Izzy turned and was looking at them, his Costume National headband resting slightly askew over an expression

  of grave concern.

  "If these chimeras are the troops that I think they are, and they're armed with particle-beam weapons, we're fucked. Gimme the cell phone," Jack ordered. "Time to call in the badges and bullhorns."

  Susan dug in her pocket and handed over her phone. Jack had memorized the number of the Indio Fire Department. He dialed. Long experience had told him that firefighters had the best response time and always brought the cops with them anyway. He pressed the SEND button.

  "Indio Fire Department," a female voice said.

  "This is Bob Bailey. I'm driving by the Ten-Eyck reservation and there's a huge brush fire blazing out here!"

  "Where are you exactly, sir?"

  "I'm at the old reservation road. This desert is doing a major flambe. Better hurry." Then he hung up. "Let's move. Forget staying down. I don't know how they did it, but I think they've already seen us," he said, deciding if they changed positions they might just avoid a pincer movement.

  They took off running across the desert staying behind Jack who had now taken the lead and was running as fast as he could despite his impressive array of injuries. Izzy was right behind Jack. Susan was faster than Horsekiller, who lumbered. Carlos was keeping pace, but Digby was falling way back, grunting and woofing along behind them.

  The first two chimeras suddenly appeared off to the right. One of them stopped and pointed a weapon, then fired. The gun made a buzzing sound and a red light arced at them.


  "Down!" Jack shouted and dove to the right. The laser beam hit a granite boulder to his left. It instantly exploded.

  "Holy shit!" Izzy shrieked in panic, sounding nothing like a Warner Bros. Indian now.

  Susan was running in a zigzag until she caught up to Jack, who rolled onto his stomach with his Beretta out and chambered. She threw herself down next to him just as he fired at one of the chimeras. The animal was moving fast across the desert running toward them on all fours, its laser weapon slung over its back.

  Jack's wild shot missed badly. The bullet whined away in the dark, but the animal veered off.

  "On the right!" Horsekiller yelled. Jack spun in time to see two other chimeras loping across the high ground. They stopped, sighted their laser weapons down on the war party, then fired as Carlos's 30.06 barked simultaneously. The laser guns sent arcs of red light streaking across the desert. The first hit Horsekiller, frying him on the spot, setting his whole body on fire. He fell screaming and smoking onto the sand next to Susan and died before he landed. The second laser shot went wide, cutting a fiery line into the brush.

  As Susan looked up she saw that Carlos's shot had hit one of the chimeras. He was squealing in pain and rolling backwards on the sand. Seconds later, for no apparent reason the wounded chimera exploded and burned in a raging fire.

  Adrenalized with fear, the war party was off and running, leaving Horsekiller and the lone dead chimera smoldering in the sand.

  Izzy was now out front. "This way!" he screamed panic taking over.

  Susan didn't know where Izzy was taking them, but she ran for all she was worth. Jack ran beside her. She turned and saw that Digby was way too far behind. As she looked back, she saw a fast-closing chimera jump on Digby from behind. The big Indian and the hybrid beast rolled in the desert sand locked in a deadly struggle. The monstrously huge Digby screamed as his arm was yanked out of its socket. It wasn't completely ripped loose, but hung uselessly by his side. Susan saw that Jack had spun and was running back to help Digby, who seemed to be no match for the much smaller chimera. Although the hybrid warrior was only a third of Digby's body mass, the animal was easily winning the fight. In a last-ditch effort Digby finally slugged the beast with his good arm, knocking the chimera back slightly.