Suddenly her thigh muscles tensed to become steel bands around my head. Her ass rose up off the ground. Her hips twisted mightily. Her mouth locked around my foaming erection. She came. Once, twice, three times. For an instant it seemed as if my tongue might be torn out by the roots.
I forgot the threat with her third orgasm when it carried me along to the heights of my own climax. I could feel her gulping hastily, and that only prolonged my re- lease. My spurting, her exploding, went on for what seemed an eternity.
Finally, we rolled apart. Her juices had quenched my thirst; temporarily, her well had been pumped bone dry. Likewise, every last drop of my passion had been drained and savored. We lay there silently, not touching, for a few minutes of weary contentment.
Liberty broke the silence. “The only thing wrong is I’m cold again,” she said.
I took her in my arms and arranged what clothing we had to give both of us maximum warmth. Grateful for pleasures received, we were very tender toward each other as we snuggled together. I could feel the closeness between us. Opportunistically, I decided to capitalize on this afterglow.
“You know Phoebe Phreeby, don’t you?” I asked. When Liberty nodded assent, I framed the next question: “Did Phoebe have something to do with why those guys were trying to kill you?”
“Yes.”
“Will you tell me about it?”
Liberty appraised me for a moment. “All right,” she agreed finally. “I guess I have to tell someone while I’m still alive to do it. And you and I do seem to have become pretty close.”
“Yeah.” I grinned. “How did you get involved with Phoebe?” I prompted.
“We worked together in the Darnell Public Library. We were both librarian trainees. We got to be pretty close friends.”
“Is Phoebe black, too?”
“No. But then, some of my best friends are . . .”
“I didn’t mean it that way. Go on with the story.”
“Well, okay.” Liberty was mollified. “One night, after we’d had a few drinks in Phoebe’s apartment, she told me she was a phone phreak. I didn’t know what that was, and even when she explained, it sounded to me like something out of science fiction. So she showed me how it worked.”
Phoebe had taken Liberty out to the Playtime Amusement Park, to the same booth I’d had under surveillance, and called London free of charge. She’d used an M.F.-er to do it, explaining to Liberty how it worked step by step. The Londoner she called was also a phone phreak. Phoebe and he had stayed on for about twenty minutes, swapping technical information.
“Phoebe was really into electronics,” Liberty added. “She was a nut about it, like . . . you know . . . the way some men are with their cars.”
“Was there some sort of phone-phreak organization she belonged to?” I wondered.
“I don’t know. If there was, she never told me about it.”
“Did she ever mention Tom Swift to you?”
“No. The first I heard of him was from you before.”
“Go on with the story.”
One night Phoebe called Liberty and asked her to come to her apartment. When Liberty got there, Phoebe was in an extremely agitated state. It took Liberty awhile to calm her down enough to explain why.
Phoebe had been working for some time on a design for a truly superior M.F.-er. She’d built a model, tried it out, ironed out the bugs, and perfected it. And then she made the mistake of bragging about it to other phone phreaks.
Word had gotten around. Somehow it reached a gambling syndicate operating out of Seattle, Washington. For reasons of their own, they were interested.
First they offered to buy Phoebe’s invention. She wouldn’t sell. The device was illegal, and she was afraid that if they put it to the uses she suspected they would, it might be traced back to her and she’d really be in deep trouble.
The syndicate, however, wouldn’t take no for an answer. They leaned on her. Threatening phone calls, a tail wherever she went, her apartment broken into -- the works. Then, the day she called Liberty, they stepped up the pressure.
They tampered with the brakes on her car. The result was only a crumpled fender, but it really scared her. When she got home, her phone was ringing. What she heard when she answered it turned her fear to panic.
The voice on the other end told her that the brake job had been a final warning. Seattle was recalling the “negotiators.” Imported muscle from the east was being sent down to Darnell to replace them. This was Phoebe’s last chance. Either she turned over the M.F.-er, or the contract was for a hit!
“Phoebe wanted me to tell her what to do,” Liberty remembered. “She was afraid that if she gave them the thing, they might kill her anyway, because there would always be the threat of her going to the police hanging over them. I didn’t know what to say. Finally I suggested she get out of town as fast as she could. It was all I could think of.”
“And did she?” I asked.
“Yes. She left that night. About a week ago. And I didn't hear from her again until tonight. She called me around dinnertime. But she was afraid they might have bugged my phone. She was cryptic as hell.”
“What do you mean?”
“She talked in circles. She said I should ‘go to the bear’s den and take something maternally obscene from behind Pantyland. Finally I figured out what she meant. She had a big stuffed teddy bear in her bedroom, so that was the ‘bear’s den.’ The ‘something maternally obscene’ had to be her super M.F.-er. It percolated that she’d hidden it behind the dresser drawer where she kept her panties. Then she gave me a number. She asked if I remembered our English trip, and I dug she was talking about the call to London. When she was sure I had that, she told me to take the trip again with Mother Friend via the new route she’d given me.”
“Meaning she wanted you to use the M.F.-er to call her from the phone booth in the amusement park. Right?”
“Right. So, after she hung up, I went to her apartment to get the gadget. When I came out, crossing the street to get back into my car, this Caddy barreled down on me and deliberately tried to wipe me out. If I hadn’t jumped fast, it would have succeeded. There were four jokers in it. You met all four of them at the amusement park.”
“And they were still trying to wipe you out. But why you?”
“I think they were staking out Phoebe’s apartment, waiting for her to come back,” Liberty said. “When I showed, they thought I was Phoebe. This was a new team, remember. They’d never seen her.”
“But she’s white and you’re black.”
“So they don’t discriminate. What do you want to do? Give them a brotherhood award?”
“Did you reach Phoebe from the Playtime booth?”
“Yes. I used her super M.F.-er and-—”
“Tell me about the super M.F.-er.”
“It was built into a midget-size transistor radio that actually worked. Instead of pushbuttons, which might give away its function to phone fuzz, it had flush panels. Phoebe said there was no way to trace calls it made, and that it could hook up a dozen long-distance numbers simultaneously for cross-conversations. The casing was lined with Thermite, which could be detonated by shortwave from a button transmitter set in a little brooch she had. When things got rough on the midway, I pushed it and the M.F.-er disintegrated. Poof! Then I threw the brooch away. That was okay, because Phoebe was through with phone tripping. She’d gotten a job in this library in Texas where she wouldn’t have to sweat the Mafia.”
“Where in Texas?”
Liberty told me. She also gave me Phoebe’s number. I memorized the information.