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

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