Shayne let the drink trickle down his throat. The girl was talking to herself, not to him. She seemed to have forgotten him, in fact, and was staring at the window with remote, glazed eyes. After a while she stood up slowly, her face twitching, and took one slow step toward the window. Abruptly she flung herself at it in one desperately swift motion.

Shayne lunged in front of her.

Then she was clawing at him, her breath coming in short gasps. Shayne’s face hardened; he smashed one big hand down on her shoulder, and shook her with an almost savage violence.

When she went limp he slipped his arm about her waist to keep her from sliding to the floor; she hung there with her head back and eyes closed, her breasts taut against the thin knit jacket of her sports outfit.

Shayne’s face lost its impersonal fierceness. He looked down at her face moodily, remarking how her lips were parted and her breath was coming unevenly. It was a hell of a note. She was just a kid, but old enough to know better than to act like one.

Abruptly, he realized he didn’t believe that stuff she had hinted about herself and her mother. He would have felt an instinctive repulsion if it was true, and she was not repellent. Far from it. He had to shake her again roughly to keep himself from kissing her.

She opened her eyes and swayed back when he shook her. “That’ll be enough of that,” he said with self-annoyance in his tone.

She sank back into a chair and regarded him gravely, catching her lower lip between sharp teeth. Her eyes were clearer. “I’m all right-now.”

Shayne stood before her with his hands on his hips. It hadn’t been an act, that hysteria of hers. None of it was an act. But it didn’t make sense. Still, he told himself, he liked things that didn’t make sense. Hadn’t he started passing up routine stuff a long time ago? That’s why he had no downtown office and no regular staff. That sort of phony front he left to the punks with whom Miami is infested during the season. Mike Shayne didn’t touch a case unless it interested him. Or unless he was dead broke. This case-if it was a case and not a case history-interested him. There was the feel of beneath-the-surface stuff that set his nerves tingling in a way that hadn’t happened to him for a long time.