The Avenger 4 - The Devil’s Horns by Kenneth Robeson

dressing case, in the bottom of a jewel box with a lock that a child could have picked, was a folded paper. The paper said:
Good work, toots. Here’s the grand.
    J.M.S.
    Sometimes shrewd, ruthless men are betrayed by habit. It apparently was John M. Singell’s habit to initial things leaving his desk. So he had initialed this, without thinking. And Lila Belle, like a good, careful crook, had saved the little note for future emergencies.
    Mac put the note in his pocket—and heard voices.

    The next instant, he heard a door open—the door leading from the hallway into the apartment, here. So Lila Belle never got home before three! Well, this was one night she was breaking the rules. And with her was some gentleman friend.
    Mac, lips taut, flattened against the bedroom wall, near the door. But the bedroom would be the first place the girl would come on arriving home.
    The two hadn’t turned the lights on yet. Mac, unbelievably silent and fast on his Gargantuan feet, slid back into the living room and to one of the windows. There was no way out there, but the drapes—
    He stood behind one of the heavy, pink things—and the light went on.
    Between drape and wall there was an inch crack. Mac peered through this. He saw a girl of twenty-four or so, but looking older by reason of the hard line bracketing her mouth. In spite of the line, however, she was very pretty, with creamy shoulders rising bare from a low-cut gown revealed when she took her fur coat off.
    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