Chapter 1
"Listen to me, girl. These bastards peddling kiddie porn have no respect for cherry reporters like you," growled Bill Potters.
Intensely penetrating eyes, shaded by caterpillar eyebrows, glared beyond the glass cage of the news director's office to flick lightly over the temptingly chipper reporter sitting across his desk. Beyond, the howl of teletype computers vomiting out news copy from UPI and AP, chorused the scream of telephones to create an atonal cacophony for the assignment editors in their electronically rigged cage next door.
Exciting though it be, the newsroom could be a snake pit, hissing with tempers, spitting venom, making careers, breaking careers. For Potters it was a love-hate relationship. The newscast, six o'clock and eleven P.M. was his life; it made him itch with the omnipotent power of feeding the public's empty heads with daredevil cocaine smuggling and sex crimes. Nielsen and Arbitron ratings were his fix.
Yet his consciousness could not cope with the imminent guilt of throwing this fresh-faced creature, the neophyte of the news channel 2's news investigative team, into the syphillitic reality of the Tenderloin's porno ring dealers.
Sherrie read the indecision in the set of his narrow brow. "But this morning in the conference room meeting, you said.. . . " The anxious lovely leaned forward, thrusting out melonous breasts as if Potters' seeing eyes were the mini-cam's lens.
"I know what I said," conceded the wiry man, straightening. "Herb'll be back from Mt. St. Helens tomorrow, if the fucker doesn't blow again . . . he'll cover the story."
The finality made Sherrie's proud shoulders droop with frustration. Throwing one lithely stockinged leg over the other, she squirmed agitatedly in the chair, mindless of the creamy thigh peeking out from beneath her slitted black skirt. A strand of honey hair twirled about a slender, red-tipped finger as she stared him boldly in the eye. One direct glance just might break Potters' iron-willed determinism.
The risky assignment of penetrating the Tenderloin's kiddie porno ring was the ticket out of the tedious newsroom. Rewriting UPI teletype releases and munching down salads at your desk hardly paved the road to the network news' door. Sherrie's heart pulsed beneath the stretched knit of her pink angora sweater.
Potter had solicited volunteers, and she had offered. Flat and dried. Now what was the problem? No way was this 'tits and ass' news director going to snuff out her career! Sherrie's glossy lips pouted girlishly.
Potters' fingers drummed a tattoo, facial muscles pulled. Why the hell didn't he hire an ugly intellectual, instead of this sweet bodied Marilyn Chambers look alike. Instinct warned of trouble.
Chloe perfume, symbolic of her softness, made his nostrils flare stentoriously, distorting his aquiline nose. He couldn't get within ten feet of her without getting a hard-on. Damn female news reporters think they got balls between their legs!
"You could get raped, murdered . . . these aren't pussy cats, honey . . . we're talking cold blooded assholes who'd sell their baby daughters to a syphilitic paraplegic with hemorrhoids," Potters drove into her, wishing he were giving her a cock lashing instead of a verbal one. He threw his arms behind his head and leaned back to ease the zipper's bite into his balls.
"I'm a brown belt in karate," came the silvery peal of confidence.
Potters squinted. 'Tow?" he snickered sardonically. That the power to hurt lay dormant behind thick and curly, fluttery eyelashes windowed by Mediterranean blue eyes made him laugh. He envisioned some black bastard wrapping his fingers in those honey blonde locks and yanking at her lovely head while he unzipped his pants and hauled out a hunk of black meat about to be stuffed down her swanlike throat.. . . Potters eyes were fixed in space, with rational hanging onto a star. To feel those cherry-red lips nibbling at this cock, throat bloating to swallow all of him.. . .
"Mr. Potters, are you okay?"
"What?" Potters flushed like a young boy caught toying with his genitals under the covers. "I was just thinking. . . . "
Pearly white teeth clamped over a pouty bottom lip. Instantly she straightened, jutting out a dimpled chin. "Please be practical," Bill. This station can't afford a sex discrimination case right now and that's exactly where you're coming from!" she charged.
Potters rubbed his brow. Be practical.. . yes that Was a damned good idea. Mentally, he pulled his cock from cherry lips, hauled up his zipper and fixed on the station's ratings.
Channel 2 was sorely trailing both channels 7 and 9 . . . the precise reason why the 'Two Is There' investigative team had been sent out to sniff the kiddie porn kingpin's trail. We haven Y had a juicy cult killing or assassination in two goddamned months, he cogitated silently. Potters smacked his lips decisively.
Time to go after vice, when murder failed.
Potters' hand slipped from behind his head; he shook a bony finger at her. "Shaker Jones is no Martin Luther King. He's the kind of bastard who kidnaps boys and forces the brat into oral sex with dirty black whores . . . how do you feel about that?" he challenged.
Sherrie's mouth went dry. Butterfly wing eyelashes fluttered.
"See . . . see what I mean!" He banged his fist on the table. "One fuck up on your part, and my career is dead." Palms flat on the desk, he levered himself up off the seat. "Innocent kiddies sucking dirty cunts . . . that's what sells news! Who the hell cares about dirty water, radiation, earthquakes . . . it's dirty cunts the public wants to hear about!"
Nielsen ratings . . . 20 in a 30 share, flashed red in his tired eyeballs. "You think you're reporter enough to handle that?"
Sherrie's hand flew to her flushed throat. "Mr. Potters, I promise I'll get us back in first place.. . . "
Potters' jaws meshed overtime, like he was chewing gum. "We gotta beat those suckers at channel 9!"
"Let me do it!"
"Tits and ass, Sherrie, that's what sells the news!"
"I can do that! I can do that better than anybody in this station!" Blue eyes scintillated confidence and a hot streak of repressed sensuality that hadn't passed by Potters unnoticed.
"Get your ass out of here before I change my mind!"
Potters fell with a grunt into his chair.
"Yes, Mr. Potters!" she rasped and flicked a twirl of honey hair behind a gold-ringed ear. "And . . . and thank you!"
Richly swelling hips rose from the chair and trembling hands methodically gathered the notebooks and news clippings which she clasped to her pink angora chest. Beneath her lace brassiere, her heart pounded and nipples hardened. Pink flushed her cheeks.
Potters noticed how Sherrie's puffy nipples had a habit of hardening into bumblebees under tension . . . when a UPI release was tossed on her desk with a five minute rewrite deadline . . . or now, at the thought of preparing to meet Shaker Jones. The news director dwelt upon that lusty thought as Sherrie's curvy half moon buttocks slunk between the tightly laced cubicles that was the newsroom and headed down the hallway to the research library.
Sherrie dropped the file of clippings and notebooks on the table, tremulous with ambitious apprehension as the thought struck home that this was it! Working in teLevision, the pressure of making your mind do what your body dared not attempt, was fun and exciting . . . but that wasn't the meaty guts of it. The newsroom was just a reflection of the real world of news, where people were born and died in crazy patterns of fate that attract the public's empty-headed attention. And news reporters who took themselves too seriously. Then, too, women who'd sleep to get a story. Who needed that? You had to prove yourself in this business . . . and that meant coming face to face with the Shaker Jones of the world.
Hurriedly, Sherrie rifled through the papers, sorting news clippings from reporter fact sheets. "Born December 13,1948." She gazed at her scribbled notes, mentally piecing together the murderous puzzle that was Shaker Jones, rapist, murderer, dope peddler and God only knew what else. "Kingpin in San Quentin uprising, January 1972. Convicted of heroin dealing and aggravated assault on prostitute." Sherrie gulped. Never convicted of the heinous crimes he stood for!
The "Two Is There" reporter plucked a mug shot from the litter and held it studiously before her eyes. "Rapist. . . " The word caught in her throat, no corporate water polluter he. Aside from the Marin County dog poisoner, this reporter had yet to encounter violent death in her one year of reportage. Now the dark, compelling eyes of a convicted rapist stared back at her . . . the eyes of the man she must investigate!
Uncontrollably, Sherrie's shoulders began to shiver; she drew a few deep, calming breaths to still her heart and cool the flush swabbing her neck and rushing southward to unnervingly titillated nerve centers. This nearly hysterical, electrical sensation had been attacking her with undue regularity of late, and she knew what it meant.
Job burnout was the latest in psychic complaints, these days. True, she had been thinking more of work than pleasure, and exhausted herself to the point of ignoring social inclinations. Somehow, the photograph of a panther-like rapist with a sensuously shaven head and shining black eyes depthless and daring, had triggered the core of feminism.
The photograph fluttered from her fingertips; one hand clutched at her throat, red flush creeping northward to add a pink glow to her apple cheeks. Nervous, strangely agitated and tingling to her curled under toes, she wished to God she could turn off the switch to that part of her feminism that was too long void of satisfaction, and too short on control. After all, she was a career girl, not a cheap, gum-chewing secretary prowling singles bars in hopes of quick gratification, night after night after night. Dimpled chin squared with determination. She was an intellectual, a teLevision reporter who should be able to suppress the physical.
Abruptly she blinked and stared at the wall. What if she had to play cheap trick female to investigate Shaker Jones? Brown belt or black belt, a man with demonstrated instincts such as Shaker's, could snap her in half in no time! Could she sleep with him to get the goods on him? Was it worth it?
A delicate hand flapped uselessly in the air. Of course not, she rebuked doubt. A man like that could sniff sex three blocks away-even from the gutter of the Tenderloin. Yet the withering feeling that she might not have the experience to even attract his libidinous interests struck home.
Last weekends' foray at Studio East, a singles disco, wafted back to haunt her. Dolly, the assignment room editor, had coerced her into an after work drink. The week had been a bruiser; misreported news, one reporter fired for showing up late for work, disappointment of losing the arsonist story to Herb who hadn't time for it anyway, since he was sitting on the rim of Mt. St. Helens at a swanky resort, sipping wine and waiting for the dome to blow. An after work drink sounded like a good idea . . . at the time.
Everything sounds like a good idea . . . as when she jitter-bugged with an IBM salesman under strobe lights, dizzy on screwdrivers and ended up in the parking lot, squished against the salesman's leased BMW with his fingers itching toward the see-through support of her gauze brassiere!
"I've never met a news reporter," he'd hissed in her ear, unlocking the car door and easing her inside the rich, leather smelling interior. "Do you like cocaine?" he smirked, leaning over her lap to open the glove compartment and haul out a compact mirror and razor blade.
Sherrie gulped, eyes bugging. "I-I've never tried it . . . I . . . "
A rolled dollar bill was thrust up her right nostril and the hissed demand to take a deep snort.
"This shit's expensive . . . don't spill none," he barked, keeping his hungry eyes on every white flake.
"Feel good?"
Not wanting to insult his generosity, she complied; a warm gush of blood numbed her skull. "Mmmmmm . . . yes . . . "
"Makes most women hornier n' hell," he chuckled, filling his own nostril. "Makes you wanna fuck. Had more "menage a trois" on this shit than booze," he added, keeping one eye expectantly rapt on her expression. His expression screwed up more tightly with each snort. "You into women?" came his final question before locking the cocaine mirror behind the glove compartment door.
He lingered over her lap. Sherrie let out a yelp of alarm and numbed disgust as he clamped his mouth to her right breast and blew hot air into her sweater, bathing her nipple in soothing warmth. It puckered . . . instantly. She shivered at the feel of coolness between her trembling thighs and wailed in alarm as one hand shot expertly under her skirt to roam into the forbidden territory up between her thighs. But no leg stroker this one! One practiced finger dipped below the lacey leg of her black silk tap pants to dip into the softly curling yellow fleece nesting her vagina. The touch sparked off that strange, tingling sensation racing through her entire body-something she had experienced for the first time in a long, long while. She squirmed on the crinkling leather seat and bit down hard on her lower lip, trying to quell tne devilish, tickling sensations. The hot-blooded IBM salesman in his leased BMW probed deeper into the warm, moist depths of her femininity.
"Please, no.. . . "she hissed through clenched teeth, thinking she might strike the gentlemanly nerve within him. Another whine . . . this time metallic, and Sherrie drew in her breath as he rolled to one side and yanked down the zipper to his gray Halston pants.
Parking lot lights deter neither robber, mugger or rapist, and Sherrie Williams felt helplessly thrust into that last category as streams of giggling, wine-sodden disco fans spilled from their cars to the rocking club. "Please . . . I.. . " She clawed at the window.
A tall black man in white suit and black shirt winked at her and kept on walking.
Sherrie's eyes fell downward-onto the light splashed, throbbing, pulsing shaft of his penis, flexing with lustful energy. Before she could react, he had grabbed her hand and wrapped her fingers around that squirming, hot, mushroom-tipped staff of male flesh.
"Nooo...!"
He glared up at her, insulting the woman within her. "I didn't turn you on to coke for nothing.. . now get me off . . . just rub me a little," he cajoled.
It felt warm and strangely inviting, but foreign; she would have drawn back her hand, had he not pushed his adventurous fingers more boldly into the tight warmth of her quivering young vagina. This sudden invasion into unknown territories, sent an electric shock of rippling, almost unbearable pleasure up her backbone, pinning her to the leather seat, and gasping in deep, steaming breaths.
Was it the drug? Was it the liquor? Why was Sherrie Williams squeezing that warm pulsating cock? These were questions the demure teLevision news reporter demurred asking herself.
Her feminine instincts took over, drowning out emotion, helplessness and sparking the need for satisfaction. Within seconds, the two of them were pumping and plumbing each others genitals, creating unholy moist sounds within the tightly locked car. Crowds passed by the window now, but Sherrie didn't care.
TeLevision was spontaneously exciting, but sex, Sherrie decided in a rare moment of inhibition, was unthinkingly wonderful No thought involved in this reportage, ran a silly refrain through her miasmaed brain as she gazed with wonderment down at his enormous penis clutched in her red-fingered fist.
She looked silly, propped up in the seat with her legs shamelessly spread, as a man mangled her tidy skirt and plumbed the depths of parts of her she hadn't known existed. Furtively, she began to stroke that long hard shaft, moving the leathery foreskin up and down over the bulging mushroomed tip, marveling at the elasticity of the hot, smooth skin. He moaned with pleasure and she echoed the refrain, the two of them rocking back and forth in the seat to the scream of Donna Sommers' "Love To Love You, Baby" emanating from the club.
"I shouldn't be . . . do-doing this . . . " her brain screamed; but her sizzling nerve ends retorted joyously. Instinctively, her creamy, slender thighs fell open, opening the playground to the moist mysteries of her virginal cunt. Her hand pumped at the rigid tube, until.. . .
"Oh Christ . . . Oh Christ.. . " he muttered, ramming his fingers so high up into her cunt he raised her two inches off the seat. Suddenly he gasped and, lopping an arm around her neck, pulled her flat down on the seat, draping one slender ankle around the gear shaft.
Sherrie fought to stave him off . . . no luck. He had flattened her on the seat, one hand ripping her black silk panties off her body like tissue paper on a child's gift. Her blonde head thrashed from side to side and undecipherable epitaphs spilled from her rosebud lips.
With a snarl, he flicked his hips forward powerfully, stabbing blindly with his lust-thickened penis and trying to shove the hot tube into the defenselessly, seeping hole of her virginal cunt while she wiggled and squirmed to avoid him.
She beat at his chest, she tore at his hair. She forced her thighs together with an iron will, clamping his pulsating penis between the silk stockinged thighs.
Maybe the lacey friction of her garter belt rubbing against the smoothness of his cock did it.. . but he exploded in a fiery gust of sperm that shot in an arc between her quivering thighs to glisten like dew drop.. . .
Facing the smirking Dolly was the hardest part.. . that and the fear of her own sexuality, fear of being swept away without warning.
Now, as Sherrie gazed at the penetrating eyes of a felonious criminal, that same powerful feeling swept over her again.
But why should Shaker Jones upset her? "Six feet six inches tall, with dark eyes and shaven head. Enormous build," the description read. Exactly the description of a common Tenderloin thug who needed to be put behind bars.