10-Story Detective Magazine Cover — page 90: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

pe ee Mise pb Mar 8g———_——____—_—_—_—_10-STORY DETECTIVE long enough, we go back to Los An- geles and knock off a real bank. Isn’t that it, Jake? The camera truck being there will allow you to do almost any- thing and get away with it without interference, won’t it? “Shoot down all the cops you want —all the women and children that get in the way—and everybody will just stand around and laugh. They’ll think it’s just a movie, and that the cops, falling down into the gutters and hanging onto their bellies, are just acting. They'll wonder how you get that wonderful effect of blood spilling all over the sidewalk, Oh, I’ll say I get it, and I don’t want any of it, thank you. Shorty and I'll just be going now.” It was a bluff, and I knew I could- n't get away with it, but I tried. I turned around and started to walk down the road away from the rancho. Shorty followed me, I could hear his teeth chattering. We got about twenty feet away when the dust in back of our heels began to spurt up with bil- lets. Then, when one knocked off my © hat, I turned around. AKE was walking toward us, and | so were four or five other guys, their guns pointing right at our mid- dles. “Holy smoke,” Shorty breathed, “we sure got into something, Mac!’ Jake stopped a few feet away from us. “Now, if you guys are through with this act of yours, we'll start the real practice. I understand, boys, how you feel about your consciences and all that. But it ain’t any use. So now that yeu done what you can to salve ’em, lets go.” . “Suppose we refuse?” I asked. Jake reached out and patted Ham- my’s Tommy-gun significantly, then grinned at us, amiably as a kitten. “We really need your pan in this, buddy. It’ll make it look like the real stuff.” ‘ : “And if we do play ball, we’ll get it in the back anyway,” I said. Jake shrugged and turned away. “And maybe you won’t,” he said. “Tet’s go.” They had rigged up the old bat- tered klieg lights and a couple of sun reflectors in front of the barn door. Some heavy fire hose served as a fake for trunk lines with cables strung through them, They stretched these along the roadway and up into the sound truck, although the actual juice that was used came from a set of batteries inside the truck itself. Some of the boys were dressed in riding boots, slacks, turtle-neck sweaters and berets. They were to ar- rive on the scene at the same time as the sound truck, get the hoses out, the lights placed, and ropes set up to keep the crowd back, ete. They went through their routine about half a dozen times before we even began ours. By that time they had it down so they could do it in almost nothing flat. Then we rehearsed the stickup. All I had to do was to stand around, look ugly, and wave an empty Luger pistol. When the getaway started, the lights and the rest of the equipment were to be left behind. The two limou- sines would start off first, and then the sound truck close behind. The camera crane, with Shorty at the camera, would swing up and face him forward. He was to keep the camera trained on us all the time. I found a few unused reels of film in the sound truck and gave them to Shorty to put in the camera. It wasn’t their idea to have him actually shoot these scenes, but I thought a record of them might come in handy. “Take a few shots now,” I told Shorty on the sly, “and save the rest till later.” We went through the whole routine a few more times, and it really began to look pretty good. Then we ad- journed to the big front room of the ranch-house where Jake had a blue- print of the bank we were going to knock off. There was a lot of talk over this, a discussion about the place somewhere on the outskirts of Los “comicbooks (Eo)