The Avenger 4 - The Devil’s Horns (11 page)

With her was a man with cheeks as pink and smooth as a girl’s, but with the flat, hard eyes of a killer-shark. So Mac knew both of them. Lila Belle—and Buddy Wilson, the deadliest gunman in Ashton City.

Lila said something, with a low laugh, and justified Mac’s forethought by going straight to the bedroom. She threw her coat on the bed, glanced at her face in the vanity-table mirror, and came back out. Wilson had put a cigarette between his lips, flicked a lighter and sunk into a big easy chair.

She sat on its arm.

“There’s money in what you told me,” she said. “I’ll bet anything on it.”

“Aw, look, now,” protested Wilson. “We’re gettin’ along all right. Why take a chance on upsetting things?”

“But look at the set-up,” said the girl. “We might bleed this guy for a million—if we could find out who he is. And you ought to be able to do that.”

“Pretty hard,” grumbled Wilson.

“So since Pop Groman passed out of the picture,” the girl mused, “you five run things. Five men meeting masked, at the warehouse, to rule Ashton City! It sounds like something out of a movie. And four of the five are you and Sisco and Norman Vautry and Johhny Singell.”

“I didn’t say those were the guys,” said Wilson, looking uncomfortable.

“You don’t have to, sugar. It’s a natural that they are. But, anyhow, it’s the fifth one I’m interested in. You say he’s a real big shot. Somebody high in business and money circles. The rest of you four know each other, under the masks. But none of you know who the fifth is. Some big business man, meeting with you crooks—”

“Hey, whadda you mean?” said Wilson, scowling.

“Come off it, sugar. You are crooks, aren’t you?”

“Well,” said Wilson, twisting.

“Don’t you see?” the girl went on. “It’s perfect! If we can find out who’s under that fifth mask, we can blackmail him for the rest of our lives. It’ll make the money we take from the regular stuff look like a kid’s penny-bank.”

Wilson chewed his lip and looked vacantly toward the window.

“Maybe there’s somethin’ in what you say,” he mumbled.

Then he became still, and looked very hard indeed. But Mac, behind the curtain, couldn’t see his face. The girl’s brunette head was between.

“We could think it over, anyhow,” said Wilson.

Mac saw him get up out of the easy chair, and saw him begin to pace thoughtfully back and forth across the room, coming all too close to the drapes that hid the Scotchman. He could see Wilson’s face now, but the girlish-looking countenance told him nothing.

“The question is,” said Wilson, pacing, “how to get a peek under that mask without havin’ everybody else cut down on you. That’s—”

His pacing had brought him so near that Mac had to move so he wouldn’t risk being seen in the narrow crack between drape and window.

And then the drape was whisked aside so fast the end snapped, and Mac’s bitter blue eyes stared into a gun muzzle.

“Anybody with feet like yours,” said Buddy Wilson, public enemy, “shouldn’t stand behind drapes. Your toes stuck out six inches.”

It is a common characteristic of professional, long-experienced killers to be chillingly impersonal about their work. They’ve taken lots of lives. It means little.

Buddy Wilson was like that now. He trained his gun on MacMurdie with the calm of any workman handling a long-accustomed, common tool. And his voice was emotionless, almost indifferent.

The girl had kept her back to the drape while Wilson’s clever pacing brought him gradually within striking distance. Probably she didn’t feel that she could control her features after Wilson’s warning wink. Now she whirled, and glared like a tigress at the intruder.

“Buddy! Do you suppose he heard—”

“He did if he ain’t deaf. And I don’t think he is.”

The gun prodded Mac out of the window niche and to the center of the living room floor. Wilson’s girlish face was a horrible thing, with the flat, shark eyes.

“Who are you, buddy?” he said. His nickname had come from the fact that that was what he called everyone else: “Buddy.”

Mac said nothing. There wasn’t much to say.

“Speak up,” cracked Wilson. “Are you one of Cattridge’s men? Or some stooge for the Civic League under that glass-eyed bank president, Willis? Or what?”

“I’m the gas-meter reader,” said MacMurdie, who had his moments of doleful humor. They usually occurred when he was in an impossibly deadly spot. When things went well he had no jokes and was the most pessimistic soul alive.

“You’re going to be a dead gas meter reader in about thirty seconds,” began Wilson, “if you don’t talk.”

“He’s got to be anyway,” said the brunette dancer, shaking with rage and fear. “After what he’s heard? Buddy—you know what you’ve got to do.”

“Sure! You’re right. So it don’t make any difference if he talks. I’ll walk him out of here—”

“There’s a better way,” said Lila Belle hoarsely. “He was in a good place a minute ago.”

Buddy Wilson frowned, then got it.

“Sure!— The window! If a guy jumps out of a window, nobody can tell what floor he jumped from, and the guy himself would never tell. Not from the fourteenth story! You got brains, lady.”

“Don’t ye think ye’re a little loose with the term lady?” said MacMurdie, hands obediently in the air. He hadn’t a chance with that expert gun so relentlessly on him.

“Why, you—” screeched Lila Belle, clawing for him.

Buddy Wilson batted her back with his left hand, at the same time keeping eye and gun rigidly on the Scot.

“Keep out of the line of fire, dummy,” he snapped. “And you, with the map of Scotland on your homely face, back up to the window again.”

Lila ran ahead of the two and opened the window wide. Nice girl, Lila.

Mac slowly backed to it, bleak blue eyes colder than Wilson’s own. He felt the window sill hit him just above the knee, and stopped. Wilson came on till the gun almost touched his abdomen. Then, grinning, Wilson reached out his left hand to give Mac a shove.

It was a necessary move—and just the one MacMurdie had been waiting for.

The Scot’s knee flashed up as he tilted back, and his hands flashed out. The knee caught Wilson’s gun so that it whipped up and exploded a slug past Mac’s ear instead of into his stomach. The bony left hand caught the barrel after that, and the equally bony right grabbed Wilson’s left wrist.

The gun fell to the floor. A moment later Public Enemy Buddy Wilson staggered backward and followed suit, with a white welt on his jaw where the bone mallet of the Scotchman’s fist had landed.

Screeching again, the dancer leaped for Mac. He pushed her out of his way and stepped up to Wilson just as the raging gunman got to his feet, with another automatic in his hand.

The toe of Mac’s big foot sent that one flying, before it could be used, and then, in a leisurely way, Mac planted a right fist wrist-deep into Wilson’s stomach, and lashed him in the mouth with a straight left.

“I don’t like rats who masquerade as men,” remarked MacMurdie. So he belted the public enemy three times more.

He deliberately pulled his punches so that unconsciousness wouldn’t result too soon. He wanted the gunman on his feet for a little while longer.

The girl was off his hands for a moment. She had flown to the desk and clawed out the .25 automatic. She was snapping it again and again at MacMurdie, cocking it and pulling the trigger and sliding back the barrel again, waiting for a slug to work up from a clip she’d supposed was full.

Mac smashed the killer’s girlish nose, split his lips again. Then, as the dancer screamed and threw the empty gun at him, he shrugged and ended it with a sock to Wilson’s groggy jaw that seemed to have broken his neck.

“He’ll get you for this!” screamed Lila Belle, trying again to scratch MacMurdie’s eyes out. “Nobody can do that to Buddy Wilson. You’re a dead man right now! He’ll get you! And if he don’t, I will.”

MacMurdie was scrupulous even in a pinch. He didn’t hit women, even of Lila Belle’s sort. He held her clawing hands till he could get to the door. Then he pushed her back away from it, leaped out, and went to the fire escape.

And with him went the most valuable secret picked up so far. Knowledge that five masked men, taking over Groman’s robes of leadership, met to rule Ashton City.

Ashton City’s local jail dipped back into the past history of penology about fifty years. There was a half acre or more on the edge of town, surrounded by a high stone wall. There was a two-story building with cells above and offices and mess hall below.

The prisoners, small offenders, or men, like Smitty, waiting for trial, had just finished lunch. They were out in the snow-covered prison yard for their regular exercise. That consisted of walking around with vicious short steps and cursing fate, the law, and everything else the prisoners could find to curse for their incarceration. Everything except themselves.

The giant, Smitty, was pacing alone near the wall. On top of the wall, two men with guns negligently paced while the men were out of their cells.

Three prisoners came slowly up to Smitty. One was a big, hulking man with the scarred features of a prize fighter. Another was as lean and agile as a snake, with a snake’s flat head and dull, baleful eyes. The third was an apish-looking man with an empty grin on his face.

The three, Smitty had noticed before, were the rulers of the rest of the cell inmates. They were the bullies of the place, and what they said went.

The biggest man, with the twisted nose and cauliflower ears, stopped truculently in front of Smitty.

“What’s your name, punk?” he rasped.

“Smith,” said Smitty, looking thick-witted and slow and good-natured. The big fighter stared at the giant’s bland blue eyes and amiable moonface.

Easy pickings, he obviously thought.

“Well, Smith,” the prize fighter growled, “we been talking about y’u, and we’ve decided we don’t like the shape of your mouth. So we’re gonna change it—unless y’u wanta pay the fine.”

“Fine?” said Smitty, looking perplexed.

“Yeah! We got kind of a court. See? I’m the judge and my two pals, here, are the jury. Now, we’ve judged y’u, and we’ve fined y’u ten bucks.”

“Ten dollars?”

“Y’u heard me. Come on, shell out, or we’ll go to work on that mouth of yours that we don’t like.”

Smitty looked bewildered, but wasn’t. Not at all. He knew just what he was up against; a variant of the cruel kangaroo court, in which prisoners judge other prisoners and fine them whatever amount they think they can wring from them.

“Come on, come on,” snapped the fighter. “Shell out!”

“I ain’t got any money,” said Smitty. “They stripped me, in the office.”

“Y’u can get it, can’t y’u?”

“Well—”

“Ah, cut out the soap,” drawled the snaky-looking man wearily. “Give him a sample. The guys on the wall are looking the other way.”

“Okey doke,” said the fighter cheerfully.

His professionally fast left hand lashed out toward Smitty’s abdomen, to be followed an instant later by a smashing, knockout right to the jaw.

But some very peculiar thing happened.

The left hand hit home—and seemed to bounce back as if it had collided with a wall of stone and rubber. Which was about what Smitty’s abdomen, sheathed with tremendous pads of muscle, was.