10-Story Detective Magazine Cover — page 28: what you’re looking at

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

26-———__-_————_10-STORY DETECTIVE within, and the man who had opened the door flinched and grunted as lead slapped into him. it was Blue-Jowls—the one with the flat shoe-horn nose. Millard stooped and got his gun, stared in- side. Eddie Fitz lay on the floor at the end of a hallway straight back from the door. He lay on his chest, facing Millard, and with his right arm outstretched and smoke eddying upward from the revolver in his hand. He was grinning, and his grin was red with blood. Silence, following the abrupt cessa- tion of sound, seemed to ring through the house. Then, from somewhere, May Fitz’ voice cried shakily: “Ed- die! Eddie! Are you all right? Ed- OS ae Millard had stepped over Blue- Jowls and was in the hallway when Eddie Fitz rolled over on his side and tried to answer his sister. Only a thick ‘gurgling came from his throat. Millard dropped to one knee beside him, and the stricken man stared up with bright, feverish eyes. Blood was pumping in vivid jets from a ragged hole in his neck. Fitz had shot it out with Blue-Jowls, killed the other man after taking a slug in his own throat. WEARING harshly, Millard tried to staunch the flow of blood with a handkerchief, knowing all along it was hopeless. “You crazy dope,” he said hoarsely. “Barging in like that! It took guts, I’ll say that. But look what it got you. Who killed Bonelli, Eddie? What’s behind this?” Fitz strained upward, sent his eyes and one arm slanting in through a doorway to a dining room. There were chairs drawn up to the table, glasses on the table top—and several empty beer cans. Golden cans with the label Sunshine Beer on them. “Sunshine Beer!” Millard muttered, looking back down at Fitz. Fitz nodded, trying to tell him something else with his eyes. His lips moved, grimaced, and a crimson foam bubbled out, as if he’d been eating red soap. His glittering eyes skimmed over with a milklike film and his head dropped limply to one side. The blood wasn’t pumping out of his neck any more. It was just a last thinning ooze. “Eddie!” May’s cry was shrill with anguish, “EKddie—answer me!” Millard got erect slowly, feeling very old and tired, moved toward the sound of her voice.-He found her ina bedroom outside of whose door lay the big bruiser Joe, dead as his partner was out in the front doorway. Joe had taken it through the guts and the chest, and he wasn’t a pleasant sight for anyone, especially a distraught girl who was tied to the bed and couldn’t get free and didn’t have any- thing else to look at. Millard stepped inside and closed the bedroom door on the corpse in the hall. May stared at him as if he were an apparition, whispered: AGP ce She was on the bed, her wrists tied to the metal bars at her head, her ankles bound to the bars at the foot. Her clothing was disheveled, torn, her hair awry. There was a dark bruise low on one cheek and her lips were puffed and swollen. Millard had lost his hat somewhere, and his lean face was lined, looked grim and haggardly compassionate as he erossed swiftly to her, began to work on the knots at her wrists. “The rats!” he choked. “What have they done to you, May?” “Hddie!” she insisted frantically. “What's happened to him?” He couldn’t meet her eyes when they looked up at him like that, searching his face. He finished loos- ening the knots at her wrists, brought her arms down and heid her hands in his, gazed down at them, said: “He was a great guy, kid—no mat- ter what others think, we know the truth. He went erazy when he heard you cry out in here, crashed in and Comichbooks.com