Today, though, Jallen wasn’t sure what he was going to do. He certainly wasn ’t going back to Frank and Linda Gilmore’s house. There wasn’t much point in calling his social worker, either; Jallen long ago learned that he had two choices, go with the flow, or go to juvenile hall for a couple of days worth of detention.

So he played round ball. And then he played some more. And then more again, and on and on, well into the night. By the time midnight rolled around, Jallen was the only one left, the last of the consecutive groups of hoopsters having called it a night. None of them quite caught onto the fact that he’d been playing full out for something like eight or nine hours. He wasn’t quite aware of it himself.

Jallen sat on the bench next to the basketball court, crossed his massive, sculpted arms across his powerful chest, and stretched out his spectacular legs, one of his size 14 Reeboks idly scraping sand across the concrete.

He let out a heavy sigh.

“What am I gonna do?” he asked himself.

Suddenly a light flared in his face.

“Son, ain’t about time for you to be headin’ home?” a deep, quiet voice rumbled at him.

Jallen looked up ­ and then kept on looking! About where he’d usually expect to see a person’s head was a very wide, very thick chest covered in blue / black cotton polyester.

“Police,” he thought. “Oh, shit.”

He cocked his head further back to see the cop’s face ­ and sucked in his breath.

Jallen didn’t have much on Officer Brian Molloy in the looks department. At 40, Molloy was all man. Majorly receding hairline, which suited him just fine because he liked to keep it buzzed short. As furry in back as he was in front, which was VERY. A mustache and goatee so thick and dark they looked like the pelt of some wild animal. A perpetual five o’clock shadow. Plus startling blue eyes, a strong nose, high forehead and cheekbones, dimples and a small cleft in his chin. Tom Selleck looked a bit on the nelly side compared to Officer Molloy.

His face wasn’t what people usually noticed first, however. What they noticed was his size -- and not just his height. Brian Molloy had always been tall, even as a child, and he reached his full height ­ 6 feet 8 inches ­ when he was only 16 years old. At that point he’d been rail thin and not at all happy about it. He started lifting and as soon as he started lifting he started growing and he never stopped.

At 16 he was 150 lbs., all knees and elbows and wrists and ankles.

At 20 he was 250 lbs., not that huge for one so tall but a big man even so.

Still, that wasn’t enough.

At 30 Brian was 325 lbs.

He was bigger than any other man on the force and stronger, too. His supervisors told him that that was enough, that any more than that would cost him promotions.

“You intimidate people, Brian,” his supervisor told him. “That’s OK on the street but it’s not a good thing when it’s the chief or, God forbid, the mayor!”

Still Brian kept growing.

At 40 he weighed 400 lbs. Of solid muscle.

“Well, it IS Texas,” he’d point out when people gawked. “Everything’s bigger. Even the cops.”

There wasn’t one bigger than Brian Molloy, however, even that guy on the Arlington P.D., Ronnie What’s His Face, the Mr. Olympia titleist. He’d visibly blanched the first time he met Brian who stood 8 inches taller and outweighed him by a hundred pounds.

Like Jallen, Brian’s muscles weren’t the only thing huge about him. More than one of Houston’s Montrose residents ­ the predominantly gay neighborhood Brian frequently patrolled ­ had remarked that Brian seemed to have forgotten that he was supposed to wear his nightstick on the outside of his pants, not inside. Brian never wanted to tell anyone how big it was but from time to time he’d let himself be maneuvered into revealing that it was, indeed, a bit longer than his nightstick ­ regulation 12 inches ­ and quite bit thicker.

“Jeez,” Jallen finally said. “You are SOOO fucking huge!” •