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Packing Heat

Harlequin Enterprises, Ltd.

Chapter One

He stretched out his legs on the Adirondack chair, settling his hands behind his head as he contemplated his next move. It was just fine sitting in the shade next to the fishing cabin, watching the morning sun dapple the calm blue water of the lake. But that didn't mean he was completely in the dark.

Something was up.

Oh, sure, his brothers and his parents all dismissed him as the family goofball, the clueless, irresponsible one. But they were wrong. Cooper knew very well that if he was at the fishing cabin all by himself, more than twelve hours after his two older brothers should've been there, that some new Calhoun family plot had been hatched, altering everybody's plans, and nobody had bothered to tell him.

"Par for the course," Coop grumbled, unwinding enough to pitch a rock into the lake. He ought to be used to it by now. "How long do they expect me to wait here just on the off chance they might show up?"

He didn't even like fishing. So what was he doing here? Brother bonding trip. Yeah, right. Hard to do any bonding when you were the only brother in attendance.

As the youngest and least illustrious of the True Blue Calhouns, that extremely illustrious family of Chicago police officers, he'd been living with this state of affairs for a long, long time. Dad was a career cop, a Deputy Superintendent in line to be First Deputy. Jake, brother number one, had followed all the rules and dotted all the is and climbed the ladder one careful rung at a time. Now a sergeant, he'd done very well for himself with his methodical approach to life. Sean, brother number two, took his own, more intuitive path, but he'd earned himself a meritorious promotion to detective with his amazing ability to cut through artifice and spot liars and felons from fifty miles away.

Compared to them, Cooper was a piker. No one took him seriously, not when he was still a rookie who thought there ought to be more fun in life than merely being True Blue. Hey, why couldn't you have both? What was so wrong about that?

Straightening, Cooper lifted himself enough to get his cell phone out of his pants pocket to check for messages one more time. Since there was no phone at the cabin, the cell should've been the best way to go if his brothers had needed to reach him. Cooper frowned at the silver gadget in his hand. Battery was running low. Plus there wasn't much of a signal, not enough to call out, and there hadn't been since he'd reached the cabin.

Hmm ... No signal. Would that stop messages from getting in, too? That hadn't occurred to him, but it suddenly sounded like the logical conclusion. It was actually kind of a cheerful thought. If it was just a mechanical thing, modern technology letting him down, Cooper would feel a whole lot less left out.

Rousing himself from the lounge chair, he went back inside for his keys. He didn't want to go all the way back to Chicago to find out what the heck the story was, but maybe he could drive in the direction of civilization, until he got close enough to a satellite tower to connect with his voice mail or get a call out to one brother or the other. It was better than lounging around doing nothing.

With his key in hand, Cooper jumped into his Jeep, plugged in the phone to at least charge up the battery, and started to drive away from the lake. He checked every few minutes, but there was still no signal.

He shook the phone, as if that might help. He held it out the window. Still no go. It took a good half hour and a stop at a bait and tackle shop on the top of a rolling hill before the phone managed to scrounge up even one little bar, the kind that appeared in the corner to tell him he could finally contact the outside world. And when the bars finally consented to multiply, the number 2 popped up in the bottom corner of the display. Meaning he had two messages. Two brothers, two messages. Didn't have to be a detective to figure that one out.

Cooper punched in the code to play them back. He could barely hear Jake's voice, from sometime yesterday afternoon, mumbling about handling some crisis for Dad and not being able to come. Timed about two hours later, the other message came in a little stronger.

"Hey, Coop, it's Sean. I'm tied up. Jake says he's off on a mission for Dad, and Mom is giving me grief about something else. You can go ahead to the cabin if you want," his middle brother's voice instructed through a bunch of static, "and I'll try to meet you there later."

Yeah, well, that was from yesterday, too, and Sean was nowhere to be seen today. It seemed as if later had turned into not at all.

"Thanks, bro," Cooper said darkly, shoving the phone back into its holder. Mom giving him grief about something, huh? Cooper knew his brother well enough to know that Sean didn't do anything he didn't want to. "Giving him grief" in Sean-speak meant she'd talked him into some mission, too, and he thought it was a better deal than fishing with Cooper, as long as Jake wasn't coming, either.

So they'd both taken off rather than meet him at the cabin - Jake on a secret assignment for their father and Sean on one for their mother - and neither was coming. It seemed like an incredible coincidence that both parents would cook up emergency errands just when the boys were heading out of town. Sean could say that his assignment wasn't related to Jake's, but Cooper had serious doubts that was true. If he knew his parents, they would be heading for the same target from different sides, pitting their favorite sons against each other. Of course, at the moment Coop had no idea what that target could be.

But one thing was for sure. When something interesting was happening in the Calhoun family, nobody trusted Cooper to do squat.

Heading back toward the cabin, he stewed. He was supposed to be on vacation for two weeks, so his schedule was wide open. Should he stay and drink beer and fish, all by himself, waiting for brothers who might never deign to show up? Forget them and have a good time, anyway? Or head back to the city, to find out what was really going on?

As he pulled back onto the dirt road leading to the cabin, Cooper made up his mind. He was tired of being the easygoing, adaptable, overlooked one in the family. Time to step up and prove a few things.

He was going to throw his gear back into the duffel bag and close up the cabin ASAP. If Jake and Sean ever arrived, let them be the ones sitting around cooling their heels all alone in the woods.

"I'm going back home," he said out loud. "I'm going to figure out where the heck they went and what they're up to."

Mom thought Sean was the son with all the answers, and Dad thought Jake walked on water, but maybe they would have to change their tunes. If Cooper played the hero for once and solved this puzzle before anyone else, they would have to admit that he was as worthy of trust and respect as any other True Blue Calhoun.

Cooper smiled grimly. Yep. That was exactly what he was going to do. He would show them there was one more Calhoun to be reckoned with. And beat them at their own game.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Packing Heat by Julie Kistler Copyright © 2004 by Harlequin Enterprises, Ltd.. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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