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Shooting the old lady had been a mistake. A fact which became more or less immediately apparent to Arnold, but what’s done is done. He probably should have taken like at least a gun safety class, he realized, but he hadn’t planned on using it for anything more than brandishing. It had gone off on accident, and to be honest, he was glad he’d just shot Auntie in the leg—for a second he was sure he’d blown his own head clean off.
The gun shot and ensuing hubbub had not gone unnoticed by the gathering mob of cops out front, and two burly paramedics in coveralls had been banging at the barricaded doors to the bank ever since. For her part, Auntie seemed unfazed. Perhaps this wasn’t her first bank robbery.
Cuz it was definitely Arnold’s, and so far it wasn’t going so sweetly. He was beginning to wonder if he shouldn’t have started a little smaller, like maybe knocked over a flower shop or a hot dog cart just for the practice. He had a Dora the Explorer Halloween mask, a loaded gun, and he was about two evictions past desperate for money—he kind of figured the rest would write itself.
Unfortunately, it was writing itself as a slapstick comedy, and he could have done nicely without quite so many madcap hijinks. A cowering victim or two would have been helpful, for starters, rather than this smart-mouthed gang of seemingly professional hostages. A gun, of course, commanded a certain amount of respect, and he had managed to wrangle a sack of money from the teller and a couple of watches from customers—all of whom apparently bought their jewelry at Walgreens—before word got around that he didn’t know how to handle it, at which point events slipped beyond his control with some alacrity.
After the initial smoky shock of the gunshot, a great hew and cry arose from his fearless band of hostages. “You shot an old lady?!” hollered the indignant teller.
“Hey, I’m not that old!” retorted Auntie, rather missing the point, Arnold thought, but at least if she was hollering defensively about her age, she wasn’t dead.
“You’re not that young,” remarked a frizzy-haired waitress.
“She’s too young to die!” wailed the teller, placing the back of his hand against his high forehead for dramatic effect.
“Thank you,” said Auntie.
“Nobody’s going to die!” Arnold cried, mostly to draw comfort himself from hearing the words out loud.
“No thanks to you,” the frizzy-haired waitress complained.
“Keep it up,” Arnold said. “If I do start killing people, you’re first.”
“That would have sounded a lot more threatening before we all saw what kind of a shot you are,” piped up the bank manager, sipping her diet cola.
“What’s that supposed to mean? I just shot an old lady, don’t forget.”
“I’m seventy-two,” said Auntie. “I’m not that old.”
“You’re also not acting that shot,” Arnold couldn’t help but notice. The linebacker-lookin’ paramedics were hurling themselves each in her turn against the doors in a noisy bid to offer aid, but nobody besides Arnold seemed to even notice, and his unwitting victim seemed the least concerned of the assembled.
“Get a hold of yourself, Calamity Jane,” Auntie counseled. “It’s a wooden leg.”
“Oh, phew,” sighed Arnold. This news calmed everyone besides the teller, who was far more annoyed to be robbed of this drama than he had been to be robbed of the contents of his drawer, and the paramedics, who couldn’t have heard Auntie’s announcement from the other side of the bank doors even if they hadn’t been engrossed in trying to rattle them off their hinges.
Any fear of her imminent departure dispelled, Auntie now allowed her fellow holdup hostages to coo sympathetically and gather ‘round, which gave Arnold a chance to gather his thoughts. He didn’t know how much money was in the pillowcase he’d brought from home, but it was heavy, and even if it was all singles, it was gonna go a long way towards helping him get his act together. He’d have to leave town, of course, but first he had to figure out how to leave the bank. Note to self, he thought. Next time you rob a bank, case the joint first and make sure there’s a back door. He liked to think things like “case the joint;” it made him feel like a real criminal. It hadn’t occurred to him to actually case the joint, though, until his only egress was blocked by a couple of door-rattling do-gooders with ponytails and apparently unbruisable shoulders. Perhaps, he found the time to think, he’d try to get his hands on a paramedic’s uniform before he knocked over his next bank—that’s what crooks do, knock things over—in case he needed to battering ram his way out.
Annoyingly, the doors to the bank were tempered glass, and so the whole debacle with the gun had unfolded in full view of half the police department. The bank manager had discretely pressed the alarm button under her desk as soon as she saw Dora the Explorer enter her bank carrying a pillowcase, and the SWAT team had been onsite to watch pretty much the entire holdup unfold. Arnold had prepared a list of demands—among them a ride to the airport and a fake ID, since he hadn’t been able to come up with one anyplace else—but his cell phone was dead, and the bank manager had refused to let him use her phone, so he had so far not had any contact with the police besides entertaining the lot of them when he dove for cover from his own gun shot.
And now a sporty red jeep was pulling up in front of the bank. A man who obviously knew every nook and cranny of his gym jumped out and conferred with one of the uniformed cops before bounding up the bank steps. At last a negotiator, Arnold was relieved to deduce. He was eager to get to the airport and get on with making good his escape, not to mention the fact that he’d had to use the bathroom since before entering the bank; did it always take this long to rob a bank, he wondered. He still had a lot to learn about this criminal business; stocking shelves at Office Max had been far less challenging and required way less planning.
The paramedics stopped hurling themselves against the doors the minute the absurdly fit negotiator appeared on the scene, and high-fived a greeting to him once he was within arm’s reach. They were not meeting for the first time, and they plainly expected any obstacles between them and their victim—who had helpfully unstrapped her prosthetic leg and waved it in an attempt to let the growing audience on the street know that she was OK—to be quickly removed.
The negotiator—whose chest, frankly, was quite distracting in such a tight t-shirt—rapped once on the doors to the bank, and a hush hit the squawking gang of hostages like a sack of sand. “Ooh, let him in,” the teller cooed.
“Yeah,” said Auntie, scrambling to reattach her leg under her purple poly-blend pants. “Come to think of it, you shot my good leg. I will need him to examine me.”
“Back of the line, old lady,” snapped the teller, adjusting his tie.
Auntie rolled her eyes.
Within minutes of the arrival of the man in the red jeep, the ordeal drew to a close. Even after it was ascertained that she had been shot in an artificial leg, Auntie was rushed to the hospital due to her age, which riled her; the frizzy-haired waitress got her watch back; the teller got the negotiator’s phone number; and the bank manager dumped the $842 from the pillowcase back into the teller’s drawer and offered diet colas all around. When he was interviewed at the police station before he was tossed in jail, a young detective in a sundress asked Arnold why he had surrendered his weapon, his loot, and ultimately his freedom so swiftly with so much seemingly on the line. She watched his face with an eyebrow smugly lifted; she knew he wanted to say it was because the negotiator had been so reasonable or so persuasive or because he had suddenly been overcome by remorse for his crime, but she also saw his real answer coming from a mile away. “I don’t know,” Arnold stammered. “I couldn’t resist, I guess. He was just so…” Here he blushed, then smiled wistfully and sighed. “Handsome.”


Chapter One
Bracy Hollander never went looking to be a super hero. He knew he was super hot, of course—he was born a beautiful baby and had not had an off day since. And he discovered at quite a young age that he could use his looks to bend people—especially boys—to his will. But he was almost thirty years old when he realized he could use that power to benefit more people than just the lucky bastards who were awarded the opportunity to buy him dinner and take him to bed.
Six years ago, it was the ascendance of his Very Best Friend since Kindergarten to the office of Mayor of Our Fair City that had eventually made way for Bracy’s current Super Status. When her baby brother Eustace was born, seven-year-old Murgatroyd Dirk-Nowitzki hauled off and hit her mother in the knee with a waffle iron, crying “You really need to learn how to name a kid before you have any more!,” and she had been known as Troy to one and all ever since. Troy had handily won her first election against her famously corrupt octogenarian successor, but inherited a shockingly sloppy city government of which almost every department was grossly over-funded and shamefully run, none sloppier, grosser, or more shameful than the police department.
Troy Dirk-Nowitzki discovered the crime fighting power in Bracy’s dazzling teeth and shimmering hair quite by accident one afternoon shortly after taking office. Long accustomed to his blinding physical beauty and to the neck injuries and near-miss traffic accidents that scattered in his wake, it took a minute for the full implications of this particular encounter to sink in, but once they did, she knew she had found her secret weapon.
Strolling along their favorite tree-lined side street on their way to lunch at their favorite bacon bistro, Troy and Bracy stumbled right into the middle of a purse-snatching in progress.
“Ya see,” Troy said, exasperated. “This is exactly the kind of thing I’m talking about. Little old ladies aren’t safe to walk the streets.”
“Who you callin’ old?” protested the lady in question, holding fast to her purse and stumbling down the street after her iron-gripped assailant. “I might feel safer if someone stepped in and helped me!” she posited loudly.
“Of course she would,” Troy affirmed for Bracy. “But where are the police? Who, I ask you, is there to come to the aid of our citizens if not the police?”
Bracy shrugged his impressively broad shoulders as the tug of war ensued. “One of you could help me!” suggested the little old lady.
Not anxious to see the scales tip further in his (surprisingly strong, for a little old lady) victim’s favor, her assailant piped up. “No, no,” he shouted. “The best way you can help her is to call the police. Go and look for a phone, why don’t you?”
“For all the good the police would do her,” Troy went on, having warmed to her theme.
Skinny and out of condition, the purse snatcher was losing steam, and readied himself for a final tug, knowing that if he failed to knock the little old lady down, he’d be forced to skulk away without her purse. He spared a quick glance to make sure that neither passerby was in fact readying him- or herself to come to his victim’s aid…
…and froze mid-yank. He’d never seen such a mouth-watering specimen; he didn’t know guys could actually be as handsome as Bracy. “Hello,” he said, straightening himself and tucking his excessively 80’s bangs behind one ear.
Never one to pass up an opportunity to bask in another man’s admiration, Bracy smiled. Troy knew it was a half-assed and distracted smile, but the dazzled miscreant nevertheless let go his hold on the little old lady’s purse and blushed in its glare, stammering through a barely audible “How you doin’?”
For her part, it took the little old lady a second to gather herself and realize that her purse was once again in her sole possession. While her erstwhile assailant scuffed his boots against the sidewalk and cast admiring glances at the brick-chested blond who seemed—she wasn’t sure quite how—to have come to her rescue, she straightened her knit beret, clutched her purse close to her chest, and toddled off down the street, stopping every few steps to turn and gaze back at Bracy. He saluted her with a hearty wave and, pink-cheeked and giggling, she eventually—regretfully—went on about her business.
“So anyway,” her mugger stuttered on, “maybe you’d like to, I don’t know, grab a coffee or something sometime…”
“Seriously?” Troy scoffed. “You’re trying to hit on him?”
“What’s it to you?” the kid wanted to know.
At which point it began to dawn on Troy what it could be to her. “Talk to him,” she stage-whispered to her toothsome pal.
“About what?” Bracy asked.
“About anything,” she said. “Just keep talking.”
And while the pint-sized purse snatcher wallowed wide-eyed in the nearness of Bracy, she slyly dialed 911 on her cell phone. Identifying herself as the Mayor to the emergency operator, she secured a speedy and splashy police response, and even though the sound of the sirens preceded the actual brake-screeching of the cop cars by several blocks, the young chucklehead couldn’t tear himself loose from Bracy’s orbit to put one foot in front of the other. He never even saw the cop who put the handcuffs on him; he was eventually driven away kneeling on the backseat of the squad car, ogling Bracy out the back window until he was less than a speck on the sidewalk.
“Come on,” Troy commanded, taking Bracy’s hand and resuming their lunchtime mission. “Lunch is on me. There’s something I want to talk to you about.”


Chapter Two
As her position as Mayor compared to his as Handsome Layabout might imply, Troy had always been the more ambitious of the two friends, and had warmed to the idea of Bracy-as-Super-Hero much more readily than had he. Unaccustomed to—and untempted by—work, Bracy resisted the notion of making himself available for fighting crime. Like Troy, he had grown up in Our Fair City, for one thing, and the way things were going, fighting crime sounded incredibly time-consuming, Crime being the one resource of which Our Fair City seemed to have an unending supply.
“You wouldn’t have to fight every crime,” she assured her pal, thinking aloud over her bacon lettuce and tomato sandwich. “Like, only high-profile crimes, and crimes in progress. Like, we wouldn’t need you at car accidents and break-ins and stuff. No… if the perp couldn’t see you, it would be pointless.”
“What’s a ‘perp?’”
“Don’t you read crime novels?” Bracy shrugged. He had a lot more important things to do than read—a body like his requires a lot of attention, after all. From himself and from others. Troy carried on, “You know, the perpetrator. That’s your power, Bud. You distract everyone everywhere you go—all you’d have to do is show up and look pretty until an officer arrives.”
Again with the shrugging. He could probably manage that, after all. Might not be so bad, as jobs go—it’s not like being distractingly handsome took that much effort. He had had a series of handsome-man jobs in his teens and early twenties—model, yell leader, barista, flight attendant—but never had any difficulty finding men to take him places or buy him things, and sweating over a cappuccino maker or hunching over a bar cart for a paycheck he didn’t need was ultimately unrewarding. But Being Handsome as a job in itself didn’t have a readily apparent downside, and it sounded like it might be an OK opportunity to maybe meet a couple of cops, or even a sexy Bad Boy every once in a while.
And so they set about hammering out a Hero Persona, which involved something of a learning curve.
For starters, there was the question of an outfit. Madame Mayor herself was enraptured by visions of a square-jawed, six-packed anonymous figure with magnificent quads astride her city in tights and a fluttering cape, arms akimbo, laughing while thieves and kidnappers scurried to the nearest jail to turn themselves in, while Bracy leaned rather more towards a City-funded shopping spree for new jeans, custom shirts, and designer shoes.
“What kind of a costume is that?” Troy groaned.
“What? I look great in jeans.”
“Honey, all Americans look great in jeans. You look ‘great’ in jeans, yeah, but you look like about a million bucks in Spandex.”
There was never any arguing with Troy—when she was right, she was right. “Can I at least get some knee-high boots?” he pressed.
The Mayor smiled. “In every color.”
*
The cape was ruled out on his first mission. Thick and ripe in all the right places, narrow and plank-flat in the others, Bracy Hollander’s was, no two ways about it, a body with which to be reckoned, and the shimmery orange spandex unitard Troy had picked out for him showcased every ridge and curve. But, in action, the cape was a hindrance and succeeded in distracting nobody but Bracy. Called out to a late-night jewelry store robbery in progress, he first had to fast-talk his way out from underneath an amorous young suitor who found it hard to fathom that a more egregious crime than asking a guy to remove his naked body from Bracy’s could even be perpetrated, much less that it might need foiling right this of all minutes. After promising to pick up where he’d left off, he arrived downtown later than expected, and almost dislodged his Adam’s apple in his haste to spring from the Jeep, a corner of the cape having wrapped itself snugly around the gear shift during his mad, windy race to the scene. Wanting to rule out any unforeseen public relations hiccups, Troy had hurried herself to the scene, and Bracy hurled himself headlong into her, difficult as she was to see dressed like a cartoon crook in her all-black warm up suit and knit fisherman’s beanie.
“Nice hat,” Bracy mocked.
“Never mind my hat. Get in there. And quit thinking about that boy!”
“How do you know I’m thinking about a boy?”
“Spandex, honey.” Madame Mayor winked lasciviously. “Now get in there.”
Bracy turned and ran. About two steps before he gagged and flew off of his feet, dropping to the pavement like a Spandex sack of potatoes.
Troy flung herself to her knees beside her best friend. “Oh my gosh, are you OK?”
Between loud, harsh coughs, a dazed Bracy grunted an affirmative.
“What happened?” asked Troy.
“You wanna get off my cape?” Bracy managed to croak in reply.
She jumped to her feet. “Oh, sorry. Did I do that?”
“Yes, Urkel,” Bracy scolded, resting on one knee before allowing Troy to help him stand up. “You did.”
“Alright, well” Troy said, resuming her Boss personality, “I’ll find a way to make it up to you tomorrow. Get in there and foil those crooks!”
Bracy turned, laughing at her comic book parlance, and made to charge through the doors into the jewelry store and stand around looking handsome until some kind of law enforcement official arrived to take over. He flung wide the door and was knocked again to his knees, this time by the screeching klaxon of the store’s burglar alarm. Better late than never, its installers had apparently decided, for seconds later Bracy went blind in the white-hot glare of blazing security lights. By the time he could see get his eyes to achieve some kind of focus, he saw evidence of a robbery interrupted scattered across the store. The counters were strewn with glass cutters, neat round holes handily marking the points in the store’s lavish display cases through which their contents had been extracted; he even had the presence of mind to look up in time to see the last eighteen inches of escape rope slither out the hole in the skylight like a snake. There had been thieves, alright, but by the time Bracy felt the gun press against the base of his skull, accompanied quite unnecessarily by several screamed suggestions that he “FREEZE!,” they were long gone. As, annoyingly, was any trace of the Mayor.