6,161 Words

Chapter Three
“So, thanks for the backup last night, by the way,” Bracy cranked. He and Troy were out for one of their regular runs along the riverwalk, Bracy powering through the pain in his lower back from all the falling down at the jewelry store the night before. And maybe a little bit from picking up where he’d left off when he at last returned home to the hunk in his bed, as promised.
“Sorry, Bud,” Troy tossed out breezily, not sounding sorry at all. “I’m not trying to get my fingerprints all over this mess until we work out some of the bugs. Once you’re doing some actual hero-ing, we’ll have a press conference, all that. Last night, though, all we did was give those jewel thieves enough warning to clear out with about seven hundred and fifty thousand bucks worth of merchandise before the cops showed up. You understand that the Mayor’s not exactly going to take credit for that.” Her ponytail flopped rhythmically back and forth as she matched gazelle-legged Bracy stride for stride. Her boy had an incredible gym-toned body and his muscled legs were smashing in his short running shorts, but of the two, she was the more natural athlete, and kicked Hot Boy Butt during their habitual Sprint across the Bridge at the end of almost every run. “How bad could it have been, anyway? It’s not like I had to post your bail on my way in to work this morning.”
Bracy could have done without the adrenaline spike brought on by the click of the city-issued Glock being cocked at the base of his skull, but once the dust settled—and some quick-thinking flatfoot silenced the ear-splitting siren of the alarm—he had been able to extract himself from a potentially complicated situation with only a modicum of embarrassment.
His first instinct had been to call out for Troy. “Whose that?” grunted a gruff cop voice from behind him, “your accomplice?”
Yes. “No, she’s my⎯”
“Never mind!” the cop cut him off. “You wanna explain what you’re doing in a jewelry store in the middle of the night? In your—what are these, your tights?” The cop was astride Bracy, still with the gun to his head, and he kicked at Bracy’s orange-clad leg. “Don’t you criminals usually wear black? You don’t exactly blend in in this get-up.”
“See, about that…” The cop was well into his mocking guffaw when Bracy turned around to explain, but the laugh died on his lips.
“Shit,” the cop whispered, lowering his gun. “You… you’re gorgeous.”
Bracy smiled a modest thank you and the cop teetered on his suddenly weak knees. “Dang, dude, doesn’t seem like you’d have to resort to stealing jewelry,” the cop said. “I’d figure you could get a guy to buy you whatever you wanted.” He looked around the ransacked shop. “Is there anything in here you didn’t get? Cuz, shucks,” he blushed, “I’d be happy to buy you something. It might be a little early for a ring—not that I wouldn’t, mind you—but maybe a nice bracelet? A paperweight?”
“I’m not a big jewelry guy,” Bracy explained. “But you could get your knee outta my back and help me up if you wanted.”
“Oh man, yeah, of course,” the cop said, standing back and reaching for Bracy’s elbow. He helped his captive stand, but kept hold of his elbow. “No sudden moves, you understand,” he told Bracy by way of explanation. Bracy understood perfectly that few men voluntarily broke physical contact with him once it was established, and he just smiled again. Sweat beaded across the officer’s rather lush hairline, but Bracy resisted the temptation to reach out and wipe the other man’s brow.
Which shortly furrowed. “If you’re not much of a jewelry guy,” the cop wondered, “what are you doing robbing a jewelry store?”
“I’m not robbing a jewelry store,” Bracy explained.
The cop looked around, taking in the glass cutters and the holes in the counters and the empty display cases. “Well, someone was robbing the jewelry store.”
“I know,” Bracy said. “That’s why I’m here.”
The cop raised an eyebrow, again taking in Bracy’s shimmering second-skin outfit. “OK, what are you, like private security?”
“Kinda.”
“So, what, are you new? Or just not that good at it? If you’re not the thief, where is he?”
Bracy explained as best he could. His plan to arrive on the scene and distract the thieves until the police arrived, the clumsy execution of said plan that gave the thieves a warning and enough time to escape, the rope he’d seen slithering through the skylight. The cop knew a bill of goods when someone tried to sell one to him, but there was a hole in the skylight, and the big blond with the slammin bod was decidedly short of a big bag of jewels or other loot. “You’re not… what I mean is…” the cop had a hard time framing such an absurd question, but the guy was wearing sparkly orange Spandex and matching boots; eventually he spit it out: “You don’t think you’re some kind of a super hero, do you?”
Bracy could still hear the cops laughing as he drove away, whipping around the corner in the red Jeep. He felt like a jackass, but whatever—better a jackass in a Jeep than a jackass in jail.

Chapter Four
“What you need is a sidekick,” Troy declared. She was sitting with Bracy in her City Hall office, gazing out at Our Fair City sprawling below her panoramic window. After a recent spate of small successes, she was tinkering with Bracy’s Super Hero image, fine tuning in anticipation of an upcoming press conference.
The larger wardrobe issues had been ironed out through a process of trial and error. After the cape was rejected, Bracy thought maybe he’d try a mask, but these proved to be hindrances, too. The first attempt garnered way too many Lone Ranger jokes, most of them from a knee-slapping Mayor, and it turned out that the second, by obscuring his cheekbones of iron and his glittering copper tresses, rendered him essentially powerless, and it was only by ripping it dramatically away from his face at the last second that he had managed to save the life of a grateful gas station clerk whose knife-wielding assailant shredded nothing but air before he let his weapon clatter to the floor and jumped the counter, accosting Bracy with something very like awe. Gripping great handfuls of it, he found himself powerless to do anything but repeat, “I’ve never seen such incredible hair,” until the police arrived to haul him away.
“You have the right to remain silent,” the senior officer informed his prisoner while folding him into the backseat of his squad car.
“I cannot remain silent!” he cried. “Did you see that hair? Like spun gold, it sparkled.”
“Well, so, thanks for your help, I guess,” said the second cop to Bracy, who acknowledged the praise by tossing his bangs out of his eyes. “It is pretty shiny,” Bracy heard him say to his partner as he slammed the door.
So, while disaster was averted, the gas station robbery was the end of the mask trial period. It was the clerk who was nearly stabbed, however, that unwittingly gave wing to Bracy’s super hero identity for the first time that night on the local news.
“He pulled a knife, I was mostly afraid of how bad it was going to hurt,” she told local reporter Chubby O’Flynn. “Then this crazy man came in dressed like a luchador, I remember thinking ‘One robbery at a time, please.’ But he saved me. He pulled off his mask and he saved me. My, but he was a handsome man.”
“Did you hear that?” Bracy had cried, turning off the TV. They had ensconced themselves in his high-rise condo with wine and cheese to see how the afternoon’s drama would play in the press.
“I sure did, Handsome Man!” Troy replied, gleeful that a name for her hero had presented itself. Thanks to Chubby O’Flynn, it would rattle around in the public imagination with no effort on her part, and she could unveil Handsome Man to an adoring throng after his next, hopefully more high-profile, success.
“Not that,” Bracy scolded. “She called me a crazy man.”
“Well, you see a guy stalk into a gas station all in Spandex, what are you gonna think?” Troy laughed.
“My point exactly. The cops laughed at me that first night, now she’s making fun of me on the news. I keep running around in Spandex, you’ll be lucky if they don’t start calling me Crazy Man. Good luck selling that at a press conference.”
Troy was rather attached to the idea of Bracy—of Handsome Man, she reminded herself—in a visually arresting, comic book-inspired costume that emanated Hero at even a casual glance; a constant and colorful reminder, not as much to local bad guys as to the Citizenry at Large, that she was getting a grip on crime in Our Fair City and that any resulting expansion of prosperity could rightly be credited to her office. But Bracy had a point—if the Crackpot-in-Spandex angle stuck in the public’s craw, it would be curtains for the entire plan.
“Fine,” she said, pouring herself another glass of wine. “We can try it your way.”
“Then put down that glass of wine,” Bracy told her, gleefully slipping into a pair of picturesquely broken-in Sperrys.
“How come?”
“Cuz you’re taking me shopping!”
*
Anyway: “What you need is a sidekick,” Troy declared. Days had passed, and Handsome Man in jeans and a t-shirt was proving to be the ticket. Ditching the Spandex outfit had allowed the introduction of the Element of Surprise, and the jarring nature of Bracy’s beauty could be exploited to its full potential. Crooks saw the nut in Spandex coming from up the street, but the strapping figure in the expensive dress shirt was able to sneak right up on them, and the glare of his smile was all the more blinding when it appeared at full wattage as if from nowhere.
Handsome Man had foiled two pickpockets, a shoplifter, and a car thief in recent days, and it pleased Troy to see her plan take a more robust shape. But in the absence of a shiny skintight costume and a cape to flutter in the wind, she was still seeking a more graphically “super hero” element of Handsome Man’s image, and what super hero didn’t want to take a young, eager, plump-rumped partner under his wing? Yes, she decided, a sidekick would complete the picture, especially if she could cook him up a clever catchphrase.
The cop from the jewelry store had responded to more than one of Bracy’s intercessions, and Bracy was impressed both by his professionalism and by the tantalizing chocolate promise in his brown eyes. His was the first name to spring to mind when the specter of a partner was raised, and he said so. “What about Marquez?”
Troy wrinkled her nose. “Officer Marquez, you mean?” Bracy nodded with some enthusiasm. “He’s got a job. He’s your ally on the Force. Every super hero needs one of those.”
“I guess…”
“Plus he’s old enough to be your—well, to be your brother, anyway.”
“What does that matter?”
Troy shook her head. “Nobody wants to see a forty-year-old protégé tailing you around town. I’m thinking puppy; an eager young do-gooder who you can, you know, show the ropes.”
“But I was kind of hoping…”
“Don’t sulk,” Troy commanded. “I’m not saying you can’t sleep with Randy Marquez—hell, take him away for the weekend if you want to, I’ll approve his vacation time. I’m just saying, I’m not sure he’s sidekick material.”
“Well, who, then?” Bracy asked, brightening at the prospect of a weekend getaway.
Troy narrowed her eyes and surveyed her city far below, as if the perfect sidekick might meander across the park in front of City Hall. When he did not, she said, “I don’t know who. Yet. But he’s out there somewhere.”


Chapter Five
“Somewhere” turned out to be Bracy’s favorite dog park, but, while Bracy’s attraction to Kansas Burlingame was immediate, intense, and irresistible, the kid’s destiny as Handsome Man’s go-to guy took its sweet time revealing itself.
Bracy never had to wonder whether he might be noticed at the dog park. Of course he was the cutest thing that ever donned a ball cap and a pair of aviator sunglasses, and his feet in flip flops were unrivaled in terms of size, shape, and smoothness of heel, but he was almost outshone by Ryan Seacrest, his adorable, outsized mutt of many colors.
Days after his return from an athletically passionate getaway with Randy Marquez and his bottomless brown eyes, Bracy was charging across the riverside dog park in pursuit of an off-leash Ryan Seacrest when his path was crossed by a scraggly-haired vision in skinny jeans and a coffee-stained hoodie. Accustomed since his toddlerhood to rubber necked gawking and cartoonish double takes from passersby, he himself seldom succumbed to the siren’s song of the Second Glance, and he tumbled rather unhandsomely ass-over-teakettle down the hill when his feet failed to keep up with the urgent pirouette his head and shoulders made to follow the hotty’s trajectory.
He was more embarrassed than hurt by several degrees, an experience that intensified when the only person to gallop to his aid was the skinny-jeaned moppet himself. Coffee sloshed from his travel mug as the guy careened down the hill, splashing across Bracy’s face when he dropped to his knees and slid into Bracy like he was stealing third. “Are you OK?” he hollered repeatedly, shaking Bracy the way he had apparently learned in some kind of community CPR class.
Which made Bracy laugh. “I’m fine. Or I will be. I feel like kind of a klutz.”
“Kind of a klutz?” the guy teased. “You seem spectacularly uncoordinated.”
Bracy resisted the urge to refute this description, especially sputtering as he was under the exceptionally enthusiastic First Aid tongue of Ryan Seacrest. Still laughing, he giggled out, “Get off me, boy.”
“Oh, sorry,” said the hotty in the hoodie, retracting his hands from their exploration of Bracy’s shoulder and chest.
“Not you,” Bracy chuckled, wrestling his concerned dog’s face away from his own. He felt the absence of the guy’s hands and wished he had been more clear. “Ryan Seacrest, stop licking me! I’m OK, buddy, I’m OK.”
“So I can keep touching you?”
“We’ll get to that,” Bracy assured him. He thought he detected a pretty ripe body odor, but the dude had just run across a park in a sweatshirt, and Bracy had a face full of coffee and dog spittle—it could have been any combination of aromas. Propping himself slowly up to test the state first of one, then of the other elbow, he said, “You wanna help me up first?”
Amid awkward laughter, anxious doggie licks, and much extraneous torso groping, Bracy was helped into a sitting position knee to knee with his new friend.
“Thanks,” he said. “My name’s Bracy.”
“Very nice to meet you,” said the hotty, gazing goofily into Bracy’s face.
Bracy waited a beat, then two, before he prodded. “And you are?”
“Oh sorry, right,” said the hotty, giving his shaggy head a quick shake. “I’m Kansas.” Bracy caught another pit whiff and hoped it wasn’t him. He didn’t feel particularly damp, but who knew, maybe somersaulting down a hill like a bale of hay falling off a truck triggered a physiological response with which he was hitherto unacquainted.
No matter. Kansas’s friendly face quickly regained his full attention, and the smile it brought out of him he knew was a killer. “Charmed, I’m sure.”