12,025 Words

He leveled his gaze at Bracy. “What did she just call me?”
“I heard all about what just went down with that pizza delivery driver!” Troy exclaimed by way of explanation. “Randy Marquez said those guys were leveled by the time he got there—the driver didn’t come to for fifteen minutes. He said whoever you were, you must be pretty ripe.” She wrinkled her nose, sniffing around her office, following her nose right up into Kansas’s face. “You smell fine to me.”
Kansas stiffened his arms to position Troy at something of a safer distance.
“What if we try this from a different angle,” Bracy suggested, gently guiding Troy back to her desk. He took Kansas’s hand; Troy could be a tough first meet, Bracy knew, especially if she was gnawing on a bone like this one. “Troy, this is Kansas. Kansas, meet Troy.”
“Charmed, I’m sure,” Kansas murmured.
Troy waved off this pleasantry. “Why is he acting like he doesn’t know what’s going on?” she asked Bracy.
“What is going on?” Bracy asked her back.
“Well, I thought you said you’d found Handsome Man a sidekick.”
“Well, we talked about it, yeah. He’s open to the idea. We hadn’t necessarily landed on a name. We were hoping maybe not to emphasize the b.o. angle quite so heavily.”
“Nonsense,” Troy declared. “Randy Marquez said those muggers got what for. He said they were still crying when he got ‘em down here to book ‘em. B.O. is the angle.” Kansas blushed, and Troy dialed down her Bossy Best Friend voice by about one degree—the most Bracy had known her to dial it down in her career. “Don’t worry, sweetie,” she told Kansas. “You’re going to be famous! You’ve even got a catch phrase.”
“I do?”
“Natch. ‘Crime is the pits!’ Ha! Do you love it?”
“I don’t have to actually say that, do I?”
Troy dismissed those concerns with a wave, too. “Say it, don’t say it, I don’t care. As long as we can attribute it to you in the press, do what you want with it.”
“Well…” Kansas said, “I do kind of like the idea of using my smell as a ‘power.’ It’s always been a problem; I’ve always been so ashamed of it. I kind of like the spin, like maybe I can be proud of it instead.”
Troy stuck her tongue out at Bracy, who rolled his eyes. “You’ve already put two crooks behind bars, and you haven’t even really started yet,” Troy told Kansas. “Darn right you can be proud.”
“Do I get like an outfit?” Kansas asked.
Now it was Troy’s turn to roll her eyes. “Bracy’s anti-outfit. There were a couple… let’s say ‘false starts’ around outfits.”
“The hoodie’s perfect,” Bracy said. “It’s quick release, and you look super cute in it.”
Kansas grinned.
“Well, he’s got you there,” Troy agreed. “So you’ll do it?”
Kansas looked at Bracy, who nodded encouragement. The sun through Troy’s window refracted off of Bracy’s hair in such a way that he seemed to literally glow approval, and Kansas saw no reason to disappoint such a radiant face.
“Truthfully,” he said, “I think the name B.O. Boy is the pits. But how many more chances will I get to be a super hero? Call me whatever you want; I’m in.”
Troy stood and held out her hand to shake, but Bracy swooped in and planted a big welcome kiss on him, and a brief tangle ensued. Troy extracted herself as gracefully as possible and sat back down, steepling her hands on the desk in front of her, the better to get down to business.
“Excellent,” she said. “So B.O. Boy it is. How old are you, sweetie?”
“Twenty-six.”
She shook her head. “Bracy’s barely thirty, twenty-six won’t do. We’re calling you B.O. Boy, after all.” She appraised Kansas like a cut of meat, dragging her eyes up and down the length of him two, then three times. Then a fourth time, with a wink of approval at Bracy. “This kid might be a keeper,” she said to him as an aside, then addressed Kansas anew. “With those hips and enough makeup,” she mused, “you could pass for seventeen. But that might make Handsome Man come off a little pervy.”
“A little?” Bracy and Kansas chorused.
“What if we say nineteen?” Troy suggested.
“That’s still a little young,” Bracy feared.
“But at least it’s not illegal,” Troy said. “We wanna work the young protégé angle.”
“Can I at least be twenty-one so I can go out and have a beer?” Kansas wondered. “I got a hunch I’m gonna want at least one by the time we’re done here.”
Troy laughed. “You and me both, baby. Fine, twenty-one. But just.”
She sifted through the papers on her desk and pulled a memo to the top of the pile. “Well, so, now that you two are officially a Super Duo,” she said, “let’s get down to business. Next week I’m hosting a gala at the museum, to which you are both of course invited, to kick off—not to mention highly publicize—the opening of a big exhibit. The Jewels of Mary Magdalene has been in some huge museums—Chicago, New York, San Francisco—and it took some doing to get it to swing through our little burgh.”
“Mary Magdalene?” Kansas asked. “As in, Jesus’s friend? They had jewels in those days?”
“Well, from what I can tell, they mostly look like polished rocks. And of course it’s been a million years, so they don’t look all that polished. Basically it’s a bunch of rocks in a glass case that look like something the Cub Scouts dragged home from a trip to the river.”
“I see.” Kansas said.
“And what does this have to do with us?” Bracy wondered. “Sounds like you’re gonna need more than super powers to get people to come and see an exhibit like this.”
Kansas laughed.
“Ha ha,” Troy said. “Frankly, I don’t care if anyone comes to see it.”
“Then what’s with the gala?” asked Kansas.
“She loves having galas,” Bracy explained.
“Right, and you hate coming to them. We all know how you hate the attention you get in a tux.”
Kansas sat up quite straight in his chair. “Ooh, I bet you look dynamite in a tux.”
“He looks alright,” Troy said, rolling her eyes. “He’s right, though: I want to have a gala because it’s an excuse to have the City pay for the champagne. But I also want everyone with a TV, a radio, or a newspaper stand up the street to know this exhibit’s in town because someone has tried to steal Mary Magdalene’s jewels from every museum they have been exhibited in in the last thirty years.”
“And you’re looking for a security headache?” Kansas asked.
“No.”
“You’re wanting us to steal a pile of rocks that the Cub Scouts could get you?”
“No.”
“You want⎯”
“I want to finish telling you my plan,” Troy declared. “Pipe down. You’re cute, but you’re new here. I’ll do the interrupting.” She smiled to show that she was teasing, but she kept talking. “What I want is for someone else to try to steal the Cub Scout rocks, and for Handsome Man and B.O. Boy to help the police apprehend them. Look,” she continued, leaning across her desk and assuming a confidential tone, “no offense or anything, Bracy’s been working hard at the whole Handsome Man thing—the last three days notwithstanding, although now that I meet you, I get it and I’m gonna let him off the hook.” Kansas smiled and Bracy seized another opportunity to lean in and kiss his craggy mug, and Troy sailed on. “But saving gas station clerks and delivery guys isn’t News. It’s great, and gas station clerks and delivery guys especially love it, but if we’re gonna try and sell Handsome Man as some kind of Savior of Our Fair City, he’s gotta save something a little more…”
“Important?” Bracy posed.
“Let’s say ‘glamorous.’” Troy corrected him.
“I get it.” Kansas said.
“You do?”
“Kinda.”
“Good,” said the Mayor, rising from behind her desk. “Now, if you boys will excuse me, I’ve got a four thirty with the delivery drivers’ union. And thank you for giving me some good news to take to them. Now Bracy,” she said, hugging her pal, “this kid’s a cutie, but please try to keep your hands to yourselves for at least the time it takes to rustle him up a tuxedo. The gala is Tuesday at eight.”
“We’ll be there,” he assured her.
“Good,” she said again. “Kansas, it was a pleasure. You’re gonna be perfect.” She held up a manicured hand for a high-five, which Kansas raised his arm to meet.
“Whoa,” Troy said, taking a step back. “Now I’m getting it. Bye, Boys. See you Tuesday. Amanda!” she called to her assistant, who dropped her People magazine in a drawer.
“Yes, ma’am?”
“Bring me some air freshener.”
Kansas’s jaw clenched, but Bracy took his hand and guided him firmly towards the elevators.
“Better make it extra strength,” Bracy heard Troy say as the elevator doors whooshed closed.

Chapter Eight
The Mary Magdalene’s Jewels Gala was a success from every almost every angle. Bracy had a ball, as he always did when the food and the champagne were free and he didn’t have to go thirty seconds without hearing someone say, either to him or sotto voce to a companion, how amazing he looked in his tuxedo. Kansas was in seventh heaven on the occasion that marked his public debut as the Luckiest Man in Our Fair City, Bracy Hollander’s boyfriend. He received an intoxicating combination of hearty congratulations and thinly veiled death threats as Bracy squired him from clique to clique around the Museum and, adding authenticity to Troy’s falsified claims about his age, he drank way too much champagne, like maybe it was his first time; when it came time to Do the Hustle, he was roundly applauded as the Life of the Party. And the Mayor, who did not herself exactly come off as a slouch in formal wear, dazzled both Honored Guests and, more importantly, the media. With her photogenic hairdo and a flawlessly on-topic sound bite—“Let he who is without sin be the only one who stays home and misses these stones!”—she was assured a video clip on every news cast on every channel for at least the next three days, and, flanked by the two grinningest men in town, she was splashed across the front page of the newspaper in a photo almost large enough to be advertised as a Souvenir Poster. That two thirds of the people that bought the paper would be doing so for the opportunity to clip and save a snap of Bracy’s face mattered to her not a whit; word had gone out to relic thieves across a five-county area that the Cub Scout rocks had come to town and were up for grabs.
The only problem, Handsome Man mused to B.O. Boy on their fourth night in a row camped out in a Museum broom closet, seemed to be that relic thieves were apparently not huge fans of Local News. Night after night they had slipped into the Museum minutes before closing through a long-forgotten delivery entrance, and night after night, if you didn’t count late-night reruns of The Golden Girls or forbidden sex in the mouth of the Museum’s humpback whale skeleton, nothing happened.
“Is being a super hero always this boring?” Kansas whined late one night, walking the plank in the Pirates! diorama.
“Well, this is my first super hero stakeout,” Bracy reminded him from astride a dodo bird sculpture. “But I mean, I can’t fly or anything. I don’t have X-ray vision or a magic lasso, remember.”
“So it is boring,” Kansas teased.
Bracy shrugged. “For the most part there hasn’t been a whole lot to it.”
“Tomorrow night we should at least bring Ryan Seacrest with us,” Kansas opined. “All these bones? This joint’s Doggie Heaven.”