Chapter 8

Pacing his office like a trapped animal, Jack Pierce strove mightily to keep the roof from falling in on him. If a breath of hump-scandal were to be enleashed by that damned reporter, Bill Fogarty, not only would he never be Senior Vice-President over Harrison Home Products, he'd be politely booted out of his present position as well. And he didn't see himself starting at the bottom of the ladder again after all these years at I. E. C. Too bad I. E. C. had such a hypocritical puritan code of sexual behavior for its employees.

It was funny, in a way, that the threat of exposing blackmail should be aimed at him through Jean, his wife. He knew he was guilty as hell. He had been living with the fear of being caught in his motel fucking with Connie, his boss' wife. But that was a calculated corporation politics risk-he stood to gain the Vice-Presidency. Connie also gave him a sex thrill he had never had with Jean.

Now, if he didn't come up with something, Jean's naked humping with delivery boys, and maybe the milkman, the gas man and the TV repair man would be spread all over Harrison City.

But Jack Pierce was basically a sensible, rational logical man. He knew that he neglected giving Jean enough hump in order to build his own business career. He had left her alone, night after night, half a week at a time when the need dictated it. And even the nights he had been with her, he had usually been too exhausted from the strains and tensions of his burgeoning career to screw her properly.

Jean was a passionate woman. Pierce knew. A most passionate cunt. It was not the most astonishing thing in the world that she would fill up the emptiness of her cunt with extramarital cock.

Besides, Pierce knew, he was not in a position to seem holier-than-thou. Not after the many torrid nights he had spent fondling the tits and fucking the lush body of Bob Satterlee's wife!

So he could come to emotional terms with the idea that he had been wronged.

What he couldn't take was the notion of being blackmailed.

It was like sitting on a keg of live ammunition. So long as he remained in business life, Pierce knew, the reporter Bill Fogarty could smash him at a whim.

Just let a print of that picture get into the right hands, into the hands of church leaders, into the hands of the bluenoses who swung such influence in the community.

True, Fogarty had promised to destroy the negative. For a price. Ten thousand dollars. But what guarantee was there that Fogarty would also destroy every existing print? No guarantee at all.

Fogarty would probably squirrel a few prints away-an investment, call it, against hard times to come. Why shouldn't he? Reporters got paid peanuts. They had no job security in this time of merging newspapers. Fogarty probably had a mountain of debts, kids to raise, bills to pay. His windfall now would net him ten grand, but how long would that last? He'd pay his current debts and still be behind a perpetual eight-ball. Another year, sixteen months, and he'd be back looking for more cash.

It wasn't the money that worried Jack Pierce, despite what he had said to the reporter. The business had been good to Pierce and he had plenty of money, no fortune but enough to live comfortably on. He could afford to pay Fogarty his ten grand, if he had to, and he could afford to go on paying Fogarty additional blackmail from time to time as the reporter exacted it. No, it wasn't the money troubling him. It was the insecurity, the uncertainty. How could a man build for his future with a time-bomb ticking away underneath him like blackmail. Suppose Fogarty needed a big scoop to save his job, a year from now? What better than to dig up a sordid little scandal involving Jack Pierce? If he happened to be Vice-President Pierce by then, so much the better. It was impossible to plan, impossible to strive, with something like that menacing him at all times.

Something had to be done.

What?

Pierce pondered the problem. After a while he thought he saw how he could do what needed to be done. He contemplated his plan for a while.

Then he went downstairs, around the block, and across into Wellman's Drug Store, where there was a pay telephone. This was not the sort of call you could make from an office telephone that could conceivably be tapped. Pierce called a girl he knew.

Her name was Dorinne. Her trade was entertaining men. She got a good price for it. Jack had screwed with her a few times, when the mood had taken him, and now and then he had employed her to go to fuck on his behalf with visiting party bigwigs from out of town, who needed to be shown a hot time while in Harrison City.

"I've got another job for you, Dorinne," Pierce said.

"Do tell, darling."

"It's a very special one. I'm willing to pay you three hundred bucks for your complete cooperation."

Dorinne sighed. "What new and distinctive sex perversion am I supposed to practice this time?"

"So far as I know, none."

"Then why the bonus?"

"You'll see," he said.

He told her as much of the story as she needed to know.

Then he made a couple of other phone calls.

Then he went across to his bank to take out some cash. There were payoffs to be made.

Bill Fogarty brought his rickety old Ford to a halt in front of the roadhouse, and let it glide down the slight slope into the parking lot. The raucous sound of the jukebox music drifted through the air. In the moonless dark, the towering trees behind the building looked like menacing, unfriendly giants.

He eyed the garish neon sign. "Manetti's," it said. "Beer, Wine, Liquors, Pizza, Clams, Steaks. Accomodations." Everything in a nutshell, and everything actually spelled right. Fogarty had never been here before, though he had passed it on the road many times. It was ten miles beyond city limits, on the northward road to Broughton.

The reporter felt a little apprehensive about going in. He scouted the place first. Eight or nine cars in the parking lot, all of them with suburban licenses except two. Old jalopies, for the most part. This was a place where kids liked to come. You filled yourself up on beer and pizza, and then you rented one of the five buck-a-night rooms and went upstairs with your piece of ass. Sure. A real hot spot.

Fogarty sighed, and thought of the wild teenage hump-sessions that he had never had. Married at eighteen, a father at eighteen and a half, moonlighting for years to make two lousy jobs pay some of the bills, now another kid coming. He felt like an old man at twenty-three, ten years past his youth. He had never had time to fuck it up with the chicks in roadhouses. The diapers and formulas had come much to soon, for him.

Well, things were looking up a little now. He felt dirty about having had to blackmail Jack Pierce but his own back had been to the wall, financially speaking. With Pierce's ten grand, he could pay off his bills and start to straighten himself out for the first time in five years.

And then, if he could dig up some other story, do something to earn a promotion and a raise

The temptation was great to take Pierce's money and then expose him anyway. That way, he'd get both the dough and the promotion. But Fogarty fought back that yearning. Even a blackmailer has to have some honor, he figured. He didn't want to dip any deeper into the cesspool than he had to. It was a risky thing trying to blackmail a powerful man like Jack Pierce in the first place; doublecrossing him might be equivalent to committing suicide. No, a deal was a deal. He would play square with Pierce.

But maybe tonight, a new story would materialize that would get him the promotion he wanted. That strange phone call from the girl, Dorinne, the most expensive call girl in Harrison City. "I've got some important information for you about political scandals in the state," she said. "It's hot enough to get you a Pulitzer Prize."

Bill Fogarty would settle simply for a promotion and a raise. What the hell, though it was a chance he couldn't pass up. He couldn't afford to refuse to come out. So here he was. He hoped Dorinne wouldn't be too expensive in her price for the information. The paper would reimburse him, up to a certain amount, but beyond that he'd be on his own. He wondered how high he could afford to go to buy a big story.

He went in.

There were fifteen, twenty people in the place, mostly teen-age couples out on dates, though there was one older couple, and three beefy-looking men who looked like truck drivers were sitting together over drinks in the far comer. Bored-looking waitresses ambled back and forth carrying pizzas and trays of drinks.

Fogarty glanced at the teen-agers with envy, and thought of how carefree a life it was. He had gotten to love only one girl in his life, and he had married her two months after he had first had her, and that was the sum total of his amorous experience. Now, with Mary pregnant again, Fogarty was hardly ever getting humped these days, and his cock felt the strain.

He wondered what Dorinne was like. And whether she had invited him all the way out here just to peddle some scandal, or whether he could tear off a piece of ass with her on the side. Jean Pierce didn't have any monopoly on adultery, after all. And nobody was going to blackmail him.

"Yes?" a waitress said to him. "I'm supposed to meet someone upstairs. Which way are the rooms?"

"Stairway to your left."

Fogarty went up. There were eight rooms along the corridors. The doors of seven of them were ajar; no hump rentals there tonight. He knocked on the eighth door.

"Come in," a throaty voice told him. "Door's open."

The reporter's hand shook a little as he turned the knob. He stepped in, and then gasped involuntarily as the impact of the call girl's beauty hit him like a battering ram right in his balls.

She was standing in front of a lamp, and light filtered through the gauzy black negligee she was wearing, to reveal as though she were naked the lush contours of the firm, pink body beneath. Dark-tipped tits strained against the filmy fabric. Full hips, voluptuous asscheeks, magnificent legs. Fogarty felt a gripping in his cock and balls at the thought that men were fucking a girl like this night after night, while he was condemned to share his bed with a thin, hypertense, over-aged teen-ager like Mary, permitted to touch her meager breasts and to know her scrawny cunt only on those rare occasions when she wasn't in the last three months of pregnancy, or down with a cold, or up with a headache, or whatever.

"Hi," Dorinne said. "I was afraid you wouldn't come. You're a little late."

"Sorry. I had a last minute story to finish writing."

"You'll have a better story to write when you leave here," she said.

"I hope so. I could use some front page exposure."

"Oh, you'll make the front page, all right." She indicated a bottle of bourbon on the nightstand. "Care for a drink, Mr. Reporter?"

He grinned at her. "I wouldn't mind one."

"Pour one for me too, while you're at it," she said.

He fixed drinks for both of them. He gave her a stiff one, so it would loosen her tongue for him. He started to pour himself a light shot, realizing that he needed to keep his head clear for whatever revelations she had called him here to impart, but then he decided there would be time to sober up later, and tipped an extra ounce and a half of the sour mash whiskey into his glass.

"Thanks," she said. She smiled seductively and clinked her glass against his. "Are you in a hurry to get down to business?" she asked.

"It all depends."

"On what?"

"On whose business it is well get down to first," he said. "Yours or mine."

"Yours?"

"I prefer yours," he told her. "I've heard a lot of things about you and your business, Dorinne. I wish I could afford to lay you."

"Maybe you can."

"Uh-uh," he said. "I know the rates. A hundred bucks a night, no discounts, no pro rata for short hours. I just about make a hundred bucks a week."

She smiled at him. "There's a special rate for important people," she said. "Cheaper."

"That's not how I heard it."

"Well, it's how it is."

"Am I an important people?"

The call girl nodded. "You're a big man in this town, Bill. You wield a hot typewriter. You could make me or break me with a single news story. I don't want to be run out of town, so I prefer to keep on your good side."

"Which means?"

"That you get a special discount with me, if you want it. For this night only, a hundred per cent off."

"You mean you'll fuck me for free?"

"Call it a business investment for me. I want to keep you happy, so you'll keep me happy. Okay?"

"Well, sure," Fogarty said, his heart pounding at the thought he was going to get a chance to fuck with this bagulous creature after all, and without paying a penny for it.

"Come here," she crooned.

He started toward her. Then he hesitated and said, "First, though, why don't you tell me a little about the story you want to give me?"

"Later."

"Just a hint?"

"Later-"

"But-"

"Everything in its own time," Dorinne said. She made a sudden graceful gesture, and the next instant her negligee was off. Fogarty found the sight of her nudity almost blinding. Her bare body radiated light, like the sun. He was staggered by the beauty of her, the splendor of her heavy, hard-tipped tits, the voluptuous promise of her ass.

He began to tremble. He had not realized until this moment how thoroughly bored he was with fucking his wife, how little true enjoyment of cunt he had known in his twenty-three years. Now he stood in a room with the prettiest woman he was ever likely to see in his life, and in another moment he was going to be allowed to possess her, to actually fuck her.

He moved toward her.

Her arms stretched to him. She glided into his arms. Fogarty shivered, overwhelmed by the burst of sensual bliss rising within him. His arms tightened around her. The skin of her back was smooth as satin. He could feel the heavy rounds of her lush tits pressing against his shirt. She was wearing a soft perfume, and that was all she was wearing.

He wanted to release her, to get his clothes off, but she held him. She did not want to end the embrace. Her vuluptuous nudity clung to him, and he answered her kisses with kisses of his own, panting as she ground her cunt against his loins sending the most exquisitely voluptuous sensations ripping through every atom of him.

Then she released him and stepped back a pace.

"Kiss my breasts," she whispered.

He cupped the left one, raised it a little, brought its firm tautness to his lips, the nipple, like a ripe cherry, stood out swollen and big. He kissed it, moving it around with his lips exciting her. Then he went to the other breast. He pressed his face forward against the sweet-smelling lavishness of her flesh. He kissed the other breast again, then planted his face between them.

He sank to his knees in front of her. He spread his hands out over the firm cheeks of her buttocks, and began cunt-lapping her.

After a moment she said, "Get up. Hold me again."

He rose, and she came at him, kissing him again, flattening herself against him with such intensity that she actually forced him backward, back toward the door. He yielded to her aggressiveness, moving three steps backward.

Then the door opened and things began happening very quickly.

Fogarty heard the sound of the opening door. But he was so drugged by Dorinne's beauty, and he had had so much to drink, that his reflexes were foggy. He let go of her sluggishly and started to turn, but he was only halfway around when an arm descended and something rock-hard crashed with stunning impact against the base of his skull.

He sagged and went limp. The blackjack descended a second time and the reporter dropped numbly to his knees. He was still conscious, his eyes open, but he was weak, paralyzed by the blows, unable to rise or speak out.

He saw the three men come into the room-the three whom he had thought were truck drivers when he saw them drinking in the cafe downstairs. They looked enormous now, three 200-pounders, grim and businesslike.

Dorinne was still nude. Fogarty caught the way the eyes of the three thugs lit up and gleamed at the sight of the call girl.

"Hurry up," he heard Dorinne say in a crisp, hard voice. "Get him the hell out of here."

"Sure baby," a gravelly voice replied. "We'll take care of him."

Another voice said, "You wait right here for us, honey. Don't you put a stitch on, neither."

"Yeah. You just leave that gorgeous cunt showing till we get back, you hear?"

"Some chance," Dorinee retorted. "Go on! Hurry it up!"

"Maybe we can chip in and buy some cock-time with you, huh?" the first voice said.

"You couldn't afford me," Dorinne said. "For you three, the price is a million bucks. And if you scraped up a million, I'd raise the ante to two million."

"Damn, Dorinne-"

"Get him out!"

Fogarty stirred, tried to rise, and drew a third slug with the blackjack. It nearly tore his head off. Stinging pains shot through him, forehead and nose, as well as skull. He sprawled forward and felt powerful arms lifting him, drawing him to his feet, hauling him out.

He got a last look at Dorinne, still flaunting her dark-nippled nudity with boldness.

Then the door closed.

Fogarty moaned. He struggled for words, but no words would come. His tongue lolled limply in his mouth.

Some sort of paralysis, he realized. The effects of the slugging.

They were taking him down a back way. Nobody had seen him leave, out into the night, out into the menacing woods that came right up to the back of the roadhouse.

The mind plays funny tricks on a man who gets slugged on the head, especially after also having some alcoholic slugs.

In the half-luminous haze that was swirling inside Bill Fogarty's skull, he saw Dorinne coming towards him again, nude and fantastically lovely. He was lying on his back in the bed and she leaned over him and caressed his face with her luscious breasts. He clutched her and gobbled hungrily at her large, strawberry-tipped breasts. They became hard in his mouth and he felt her sudden cunt-warmth surrounding his cock. She was astride his throbbing, erect dick. Her full, tender buttocks and thighs stimulating him with an expert erotic grind. Fogarty was breathing hard as he felt his cock pulsing with aroused desire. Before he knew it, her cunt was deftly working his dong with a sensuous hip rhythm. Fogarty felt her cunt begin to twitch and contract spasmodically, then his very being seemed to drain out of his cock and he was lost in overwhelming ecstasy and blackness.