“He’s breathing,” Rourke said.

The girl sat back. The pain in Shayne’s forehead slackened slightly and he was able to remember her name.

She wasn’t a figment of his imagination after all. She was a real girl named Kitty Sims. She owned a simple, modern beach house on the Key, and Shayne, his friend Tim Rourke and a second girl named Natalie something had been invited down for the day. Kitty had loaned the detective her diving apparatus so he could go down and look at the coral.

“Boy!” she said fervently.

Shayne rolled his head and looked at the other girl, a pleasant brunette in a one-piece yellow bathing suit. She shook her head, smiling. Rourke, the lank, bony reporter who was Shayne’s closest friend, was standing above him, all knobs and angles in the skimpiest of bathing trunks. He raked angrily at his untidy hair.

“I thought you were supposed to know how to dive, for Christ’s sake. Unless that was all a dodge to get some mouth-to-mouth respiration? There are easier ways.”

Shayne tried to lift his head. His face contorted with pain and he let it fall back.

“Get this stuff off me,” he said hoarsely.

Kitty worked the face-plate over his forehead and unbuckled the straps. The other girl unfastened the long ungainly flippers.

“Mike Shayne,” Kitty said softly, “you’re a hard man to convince.”

Her long wet hair framed a face which, at the moment, was unnaturally pale. Her blonde bangs came down almost to her eyebrows. Her eyes were gray and direct, her cheekbones well marked. She shivered. Drops of water sparkled on her lashes.

All at once Shayne remembered how she had lured him to the surface when he had wanted to go on with his suicidal dive. His lips moved in the beginnings of a grin.

Realizing abruptly that he was conscious again and she was kneeling on the deck beside him with absolutely nothing on but flippers, her hand flew to her mouth. “Natalie, for heaven’s sake throw me that towel!” The other girl, smiling, whipped a large striped towel around her. Kitty worked herself into it and knotted it under her arms. A flood of color had rushed to her face.