Hot Prospect. Julie Kistler

he tried eventually, feeling like an idiot for not looking at his father as he spoke to him. “Are you going to tell me what this is all about?”

      “You in a hurry?”

      “I’d really like to get this show on the road and get it over with. Sean and Coop are probably already at the fishing cabin, wondering what the heck happened to me,” Jake reminded him.

      “Screw your vacation,” his dad said sharply. “Your brothers can wait. I got a problem. It needs to be fixed, fast. And you’re the only one who can help.”

      Jake didn’t know what to make of that. Sure, he was the oldest son. Sure, everybody knew that he and his father were cut from the same no-nonsense cloth, that they spoke the same language, that when he needed something done, Michael Calhoun turned to Jake first. But that didn’t usually involve mysterious meetings at the Navy Pier.

      “What exactly is the nature of this problem?” Jake asked, in the same even tone he would’ve used to question a witness.

      “A woman.”

      Aw, jeez. His father had a problem with a woman? That he didn’t need to hear.

      “Not what you think,” his dad said gruffly.

      “I wasn’t thinking anything.”

      “You better not be.” Exhaling sharply, Michael Calhoun leaned back into the bench. “You should know me better than that.”

      No response necessary.

      “Okay, so here it is. Some chick showed up out of the blue a few weeks ago,” he explained tersely, still not looking at Jake. “She says her name is Toni, and she says…”

      He trailed off, and Jake had to prompt him. “And? What did she say?”

      Finally his father began again. Staring straight ahead, he muttered, “She says she’s my daughter.”

      Jake blinked.

      “Yeah, that’s right. My illegitimate daughter,” he finished in a bitter undertone. “What a load of horse manure.”

      But Jake was still back on daughter. Had he fallen into a black hole or something?

      “You hear me?” his dad barked.

      “Yeah. Some chick named Toni says she’s your illegitimate daughter,” he said automatically. But when illegitimate and Michael Francis Calhoun were spoken in the same breath, the world might as well start spinning on a new axis.

      “So this Toni,” his father continued, spitting out the name. “She comes to me, and she says her mother was a good-looking con woman I allegedly gave a tumble back in the midseventies.” His lip curled into a sour smile. “She says her mom was running some kind of lonely-hearts racket out of the Shakespeare district back when I was still walking a beat, and me, being such a good cop as I was, I caught her red-handed shaking some old guy down. But because she’s such a looker, I told her I’d take sexual favors and some cash on the side rather than bust her. Me being such a dirty cop and all.”

      Jake didn’t bother to ask if it was true. He knew his old man as well as he knew himself, and there was just no way. He was sure. Or at least that’s what he told himself, quickly, before he had a chance to think about this. The midseventies. When he was barely out of diapers and Sean was on the way. When his parents were poor and happy and as crazy as ever, just starting their lives together, making macramé wall hangings to cover the bare spots and scrounging garage sales for cribs and high chairs. Poor. But honest. Always honest.

      The idea that his dad would cheat on his mother with some low-rent con artist was…unthinkable. Wasn’t it?

      Absolutely. Jake set his jaw. “So I’m guessing this fairy tale didn’t end there,” he said darkly, waiting for the payoff.

      “You guess right.” His father tipped up the brim of his crazy hat far enough to wipe sweat off his brow. “I met with this Toni broad a couple of times, just to shake out what the story was. At first I thought, you know, maybe this line of bull is something her mother fed her, and maybe she really does think I’m her old man, so maybe I should let her down easy.”

      “She got you to feel sorry for her?” Aw, man. Tough guy Michael Calhoun, feeling sorry for a hustler with a ridiculous story. Jake sighed. “So she’s that smooth, huh?”

      “Yeah, she’s smooth all right.” He shook his head. “Too smooth. It makes me think that part of her story is true, that her mother probably was a grifter. Trained from the womb, you know?”

      “So what happened?”

      “So she asks me to come across with a hundred thou,” his father went on. “I laugh in her face, like, yeah, your story was entertaining, but not a hundred-grand entertaining. Then she threatens to go to the papers, with ‘Love Child Exposes Chicago’s Number-Two Cop in Protection Racket’ splashed all over the place.”

      Jake whistled under his breath. “And why didn’t you have her arrested? Last time I looked, you were still a cop and blackmail was still a felony. Or do you want me to do it? Is that what you need? Hell, I can get a warrant in about three—”

      “Use your head, junior,” Michael Calhoun shot back, sending his son a savage look. He hadn’t called Jake “junior” in at least ten years. “If she really does go to the papers with this stuff, no matter how ridiculous, they’ll pass me over for First Deputy so fast it will make your head spin. They can’t promote a guy whose name is all over the papers as part of some alleged sex scandal, even if it is bogus.”

      “Dad—”

      “No, Jake. That promotion is mine, right in my hands. I been waiting for this ever since I joined the department. I’m not screwing it up now because of some little tootsie making up fairy tales.”

      “But if there’s nothing to what she says—”

      “I was a beat cop then,” he insisted, “in the Shakespeare district, right where she says. We did have a rash of complaints about a beautiful woman fleecing men in the area, and we never caught her. Her story sounds just plausible enough to cause me a whole lot of trouble.”

      “But you can do DNA testing,” Jake put in. “You can prove she’s not your daughter.”

      “After I’m raked through the papers for months,” his father said acidly. “And it’s not just the promotion. We’re talking your mother here. You know her. With all this stuff in the papers, she’d either haul off and kill me herself or just have a stroke, long before I got the DNA results back.”

      “Mom.” Jake swallowed. He hadn’t thought about her reaction. He loved his mother dearly, but she wasn’t what you’d call a clearheaded, rational person when it came to her husband. She was hotheaded and had a jealous streak a mile wide. Always had. Mom, confronted with these accusations…ouch.

      “And now, as if it couldn’t get any worse, the girl has disappeared.” Michael Calhoun shook his head.

      “What do you mean, disappeared?”

      “I mean she set up another meeting,” he said grimly. “A week ago. I was sitting out there on my park bench, waiting for her. But she never showed.”

      “You think she got scared off and took a powder?”

      His father shrugged. “I don’t know what to think. I put Vince on it, and he can’t find a trace.”

      “Vince?” Jake rolled his eyes skyward. This just kept getting worse. Vince had been his father’s right-hand man on the force for twenty-five years. He was loyal to a fault, a good guy from the get-go, but not exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer, even on his best days before he went deaf and had one knee and a hip replaced. Not exactly an ace investigator. “Dad, Vince retired six or seven years ago. What are you doing bringing him in on this?”

      “He’s my friend. I can trust him,” he replied. “You got a problem with that?”