Stephen Cannell - Runaway Heart

"Why?" she asked.

"The guy who owns it got the shit kicked out of him. He's in Cedars. They took him outta here in an ambulance about four hours ago."

He was in a private room in the trauma ward conscious but hooked to a drip trolley, his face swollen and already turning purple. Two of his front teeth were missing.

"I didn't tell anything," Miro slurred proudly, looking up at Susan through puffy eye sockets. She was holding his hand trying not to wince as she took in the damage. The doctors would only allow one visitor, so Shane was waiting downstairs in the coffee shop.

"Miro, Jack told you not to go to his office," she scolded.

"But I had to get the door fixed. We couldn't leave Jack's office open." His voice small, "I was just locking up when they came."

"But why would they beat you?"

"They wanted to find all of you. I told 'em to stop threatening, that it was against the law. But that just made them angry. They said if I'd tell them they'd let me go. But I didn't tell."

"Jesus, Miro…"

"Make sure Jack knows I didn't say anything… not about the DNA or the Octopus thing, or Dr. Adjemenian. Nothing."

"Even after they beat you?"

"When they thought I was unconscious they left me on the floor under the desk. But I wasn't unconscious. I just kept my eyes closed." Proud of himself now. "They called a man named Mr. Valdez from Jack's phone. Told him what happened. Promised Valdez they would find all of you and take you to some place called Black Star in Cleveland."

"Miro, I'm so sorry. Nobody meant for anything to happen to you."

"Tell Jack I didn't say anything. Tell him Miro's one gay man who knows how to keep secrets."

"I'll tell him." But she seemed hesitant, and Casimiro Roca, expert on human dishonesty, picked up on it immediately.

"Is Jack okay?" he asked, frowning.

"He's missing. They got him, Miro. But maybe with what you just told me we can figure out where he is in Cleveland," she said, wondering how they would ever find Jack in a city of several million.

"Black Star," Miro said. "Don't forget, Black Star."

"I won't," she said, and squeezed his hand.

"If anybody hurts Jack I'm going to the police," he said defiantly.

She leaned down and kissed his forehead. "I hope Jack knows what a great friend you are," she said as he smiled at her through cracked lips.

When Susan arrived at the cafeteria Shane Scully was sitting in a booth one over from where Dr. Lance Shiller had drawn his crude oval heart on the place mat and explained to her about Herman's arrhythmia. It seemed as if that had happened years ago.

Susan got some coffee and then slipped into the booth across the table from him.

"He okay?" Shane asked.

"Yeah, I think so, but, my God, his face is a mess. He lost some teeth… he took that beating but refused to talk." She paused to sip her coffee as she thought about it, then added, "Sometimes people surprise you, what they do, how strong they are, underneath." She told him what Miro had overheard while under the desk, about the call to Mr. Valdez, and the plan to take them to a place called Black Star in Cleveland. After she finished, they sat there looking at one another, each lost in thought.

"He's not in Cleveland. That doesn't make any sense at all," Shane finally said.

"But that's where Miro said…"

"I don't care. He must have misunderstood, or they said that because they knew he was listening. Why take Jack two thousand miles away? DARPA is a federal agency with access to offices everywhere. What's in Cleveland that they can't get here? It's nuts."

"I don't know, maybe that's where Valdez is."

Shane pulled out his cell phone and dialed a number.

"Who're you calling?"

"My wife, Alexa. She's the exec at Detective Services Group downtown and twice the cop I am. Let's get her take." After he got her on the phone and told her what Miro had overheard, he listened.

Susan watched and waited.

"Where is that?" he finally asked. "Okay, I'll get a map and look. Thanks, babe." Another pause, then, "Okay, I'll call and let you know." He folded the phone and put it back in his coat pocket.

"Alexa says she thinks there's a wilderness area east of here, between Orange County and San Bernardino County, called the Cleveland National Forest."

"A national forest. That would be federal land," Susan said.

"Makes slightly more sense than Cleveland, Ohio."

They left the cafeteria and went upstairs to the hospital gift shop where they bought a travel book that included a map of Southern California. They found the Cleveland National Forest and huddled together, staring at it.

"Some cop I am. It's less than sixty miles away and I never even heard of it," Shane muttered.

Susan borrowed a pair of magnified reading glasses from a display rack and squinted closely at the page. Little fire roads and trails crisscrossed the wilderness area. She could just barely read the tiny print on the map. She saw areas marked as Blue Jay Camp Ground and Trabuco Canyon Trail on the southern section of the Cleveland forest, then continued searching the tiny roads to the west. Finally, on the northeast section of the map, up around Lake Elsinore, near Riverside County, she found it a little trail that splintered off something called Santiago Road and lead to Black Star Canyon.

The room was small, locked, and windowless. The

air-conditioner cranked freon-cooled air down on him through two large ceiling vents.

He'd been taken there in the van from the airport in Van Nuys no stops his head sacked up again like a bag of vegetables. Toward the end of the two-hour drive he'd felt the tires bouncing on what seemed like a badly paved road. He thought he smelled pine needles, but that could have been his imagination.

The van stopped, the door was thrown open, and he was dragged out and roughly pushed across some open ground by commandos who kept the conversation simple and guttural, sticking to phrases like "Shut the fuck up" and "No talking, asshole." Mind-expanding discourse.

He was shoved into a room where the temperature was around fifty. Only two places Jack knew of kept the thermostat that cold: the Polar Bear exhibit at the Los Angeles zoo and the LAPD Computer Center. Crude as his captors were, he didn't think he was about to be fed to a bear so maybe he was in some kind of computer lab.

Detective reasoning at its tip-top best.

Taking it a step further, if this was a computer lab, maybe it was part of Octopus or Echelon.

After they pushed him into the cold room they uncuffed him and left. A few minutes later he decided, What the hell, go for it, and removed his canvas bag.

The room was concrete block no windows, no chairs. Minimalist digs.

The hours ticked by while he grew goose bumps. He paced the room. He put his ear next to the concrete wall and listened. Something was humming faintly in two separate octaves behind the thick concrete. Water pipes? Power lines? Motown singers?

"Well, Jack, you've really fucked up big this time," he said to the humming wall.

Later, the same, dark-skinned, snake-cold Hispanic man he'd seen at the airport entered the room and closed the door behind him. "I'm Vincent Valdez."

Jack thought it probably wasn't a good sign that the man told him his name. Valdez stood close, not ten feet away, as if Jack posed absolutely no physical threat to him.

Jack stood and growled: "Before ripping your geek head off and shoving it up your ass, I'm required to inform you that I'm a black belt in four martial arts disciplines." Tired old bullshit, but there it was. The guy was pissing him off.

"Let's see what you got then."

Jack shrugged and gave him his best police academy hand-to-hand move, the old feint-to-the-left and pivot kick to the right. Before he got halfway through it he was flying backward, spinning wildly in flight, yelping something Three-Stoogish, like woo-woo-woop! He flew against the wall, landing with a thunk like a load of wet laundry, then slid down to the floor. Immediately, his worthless back went into a full spazoid convulsion. He was jerking around on the floor like a power company lineman with a handful of hot ends.