Robert Ferrigno - Scavenger hunt

April rested her head against his shoulder, inhaling his aftershave. "Aqua Velva," she murmured. "It's been a long time since I smelled that."

"I'm just an old-fashioned guy." Sugar nuzzled her hair as he danced her round and round the room, and she gave in to him too, letting him whirl her faster and faster until he lost his footing and the two of them stumbled toward the open window. He pulled her back just in time, her knee already on the low sill, caught her as she started to scream. "That was a close call," he said, holding her tighter, his pulse pounding in his ears.

April disengaged herself, out of breath, shaking. She tried to close the window, leaning on the handles, tugging away without budging it. "S-sorry, Sugar," she gasped, her face flushed. "I'm so clumsy-"

"It wasn't your fault. I'm the one with the two left feet." Sugar put his arms around her again. She tried to push him away, but he had the dancing fever now. "Let's just finish out the song. Come on, beautiful, just this one song, and I'll let you go."

April stared into his eyes, searching for something, not sure what she was looking for. She finally nodded, giving in, but her body was stiffer now, her neck moist, and the moment of grace between them was lost.

Sugar moved to the music, trying to keep pace with Aretha's soulful lament of helpless love. The song was almost over. "'Chain, chain, chain…'", he started.

"Did you remember to tell Heather not to contact me?" said April, trying to bring things back to business.

Sugar didn't answer.

"Did you tell her?" April kept looking around as he danced her across the room in widening arcs, her hair flying like party streamers as he spun her off her feet again. "Sugar-" she gulped, eyes wild. "Sugar, I'm getting dizzy."

"Shhhhhhhhhh," he said, whirling faster now, a frantic pirouette.

"Sugar, please!"

Sugar pivoted on his hip and effortlessly tossed April headfirst through the open window. Nothing but net. An eight-story drop was hardly enough time to get out a good scream, but April gave it her best shot. He stood in the window, looked at her lying face-down on the sidewalk, one arm outstretched, reaching for the gutter, her rings gleaming in the streetlight. Rings on her fingers, bells on her toes. "Tell Heather, yourself."

The wind caught April's billowy black dress and hiked it up, exposing her pale thighs. If Sugar were a gentleman, he would have rushed right down there, tugged her hemline down, and maintained her modesty, but he stayed where he was, not moving until he saw headlights turn the corner at the end of the block. He stepped back into the room, pulled on a pair of surgical gloves, and went through the file cabinet. Heather Grimm's contract was at the very front of the G folder. Such high hopes, it was kind of touching.

Sugar took one last look around. April had probably been coming into this office for years now, coming in every morning, working the phone all day behind that cheap white desk, dreaming of hooking the big one, sitting there year after year. You'd think that after all that time a part of her would remain, some kind of lingering aura. But Sugar couldn't feel her presence, not at all. April had left the building. He was almost at the door when he turned around, went to the bookcase, and turned the radio back to the New Age station, wiping the knob clean. He could still hear her music playing as he walked down the hall, like an echo that April had left behind. It was something to think about on the drive home.

Seven years later "God, I hate blondes," said Tamra Monelli. "What's the big whoop about pink nipples anyway?"

"What's a blonde?" said Jimmy, standing with his arms around the Monelli twins, Tonya and Tamra, as Rollo checked the viewfinder of the camera, making sure the HOLLYWOOD sign was perfectly positioned behind them.

Tonya giggled and pinched Jimmy's bare ass.

"Last week we lost a part in a slasher film," complained Tamra. "Three callbacks, and at the last minute the director decides that the high-school shower scene is a blondes-only zone, because, and I quote, 'Blood contrasts better against white skin, and besides, blondes look more innocent. That's why everyone wants to fuck them.' Innocent?" She cupped her breasts, her nipples dark as anthracite. "Do these look guilty to you, Jimmy?"

"Smile." Jimmy Gage showed his teeth to the camera, dropping his hands to discreetly hold down his erection as the twins pressed against him, warm and naked and perfect. Jane was going to flip when she found out about this.

Rollo hit the auto-timer and rushed back, making sure they were all in the frame. The rickety HOLLYWOOD sign was behind them, paint peeling, covered in graffiti, the letters dangerously canted from the last earthquake. California Stonehenge. The timer clicked, the flash blazed, and a Polaroid slid out. Item number six on the scavenger hunt list of seven: nude group photo at a recognizable L.A. landmark. "I still don't like this place, Jimmy." He glanced around at the debris that littered the ground, winced at an air-conditioner half-buried from the impact. "All kind of bad shit happens here."

"Bad shit happens everywhere." Jimmy checked the backdrop of dark sandstone bluffs above them; the HOLLYWOOD sign was built near the top of a ridge, higher hills looming overhead. Dropping bowling balls off freeway overpasses was passe among young wannabees. Today's future lifer took pride in hauling heavy objects up onto the bluffs and dropping them on the sight-seers below. A couple of months ago a tourist had been flattened by an empty fifty-gallon propane tank.

Rollo scooted over to where the camera was perched on a broken Styrofoam cooler, a nervous, twenty-year-old filmmaker with thick round glasses and a Trotsky goatee, wearing only a pair of two-tone bowling shoes.

The Monelli twins stretched and preened in the warm night air, smooth and sleek as weimaraner puppies.

Rollo watched the twins, fanning himself with the Polaroid to speed the development. "Do you think I look okay, Jimmy? Physically, I mean."

"You're a credit to the human genome." Jimmy slipped on black pants and steel-tipped welder's boots, a powder-blue ruffled tuxedo shirt completing the ensemble. He was tall and lanky, somewhere in his mid-thirties, with dark tangled hair and an open smile. If you didn't know better, you'd think he was just another laid-back hipster-until you noticed his eyes, saw the edge there. A reporter for SLAP magazine, Jimmy was a troublemaker by trade and inclination, with fast hands and too much curiosity for his own good. Fight or flight, it made no difference anymore.

"Do I really look okay?" Rollo examined the Polaroid, then stepped into a pair of tie-dyed shorts, almost falling over as he hopped on one skinny leg. He reached for his Hawaiian silky, an original aloha shirt from the 1920s, museum quality, worth more than the VW van he drove. "I mean, if you were a woman, would you find me sexually attractive?"

"Sexually? So we're past 'physically' now?"

"Yeah, it was sort of like a rolling stop. So would you? If you were a woman?"

"I'm not really in touch with my feminine side."

Rollo glanced at the twins cavorting among the broken TVs and shattered microwave ovens. "I think I should start working out or something. Maybe get some B-twelve shots. Or human growth hormone. They say you can get cancer from that stuff, but it takes a long time. Five or ten years at least."

"At least."

Rollo glanced up at the bluffs. "We should get out of here."

The four of them had spent the last few hours driving around Los Angeles trying to fill the scavenger hunt list that Napitano had passed out at his party. Antonin "Nino" Napitano was the autocratic publisher of SLAP magazine, a smash-mouth monthly with a no-corrections, no-apologies editorial policy. Vanity Fair had perfected the art of the Hollywood air-kiss, fawning yet dignified, but SLAP's kisses drew blood, its eviscerating profiles and critiques sending the rich and famous scuttling for their spin doctors and libel attorneys.