Shayne found coming back from the dead a disheartening and painful process. It was a lot easier to remain in the void where there was no pain, no physical discomfort. Each effort of his mind to return to consciousness brought unendurable agony, and he swam again into oblivion. Why should he encourage consciousness of the mind when his body was dead?
Lying stretched out on the floor in a semicoma, each resurgence to reality made his head a solid mass of pain circled by constricting bands of flame.
But there was something else. Something urgent. He couldn’t quite get hold of one thought before it frayed away and was replaced by another one. He kept seeing a girl’s face. First she was Lucile, then she was Margo. The girl was beckoning to him, her lips parted and her eyes sad with perplexed entreaty. Two girls who trusted him, and he was letting them both down.
He set himself for the final struggle. He knew it wasn’t going to be easy. He was pleasantly conscious of his own strength and determination as he grappled with the tenuous edge of reality. One strong wrench and he would be back.
He became conscious of the hard floor and of an unbearably bright light overhead which made it impossible to open his eyes. He was aware of voices, voices that were like hammers, pounding against the constricting bands around his head, producing a vicious ringing inside that made the words unintelligible.
Then he heard his own name spoken, and it was as though a brazen gong clanged against his brain, and he could hear again.
“—Mike Shayne don’t know when to lay off.” The voice was heavy, strangely familiar to Shayne.
“Why not get rid of him? I don’t see—”
“We can’t do that, Rudy. Not with things like they are. That’d mean getting rid of the girl, too. And it still wouldn’t take the pressure off the other murder. We got to fix it to clean things up so the investigation’ll stop right now.”
Shayne recognized the voice as Captain Denton’s. And Denton had called the other man Rudy. That would be Rudy Soule.