Moran said to him, no longer grinning, “Mario, there’s a certain amount of shit you have to put up with in this business, but you just went over the limit. You want, I’ll give you the rest of your money back. But if I do I’ll probably pick you up and throw you in the swimming pool, and with all those fucking chains you got on you’ll probably sink to the bottom and drown. But it’s up to you. You want your money back?”

The piano player squinted his dark eyes and got hard drawn lines around his nostrils. This, Moran assumed, was to indicate nerves of ice banking the Latin fire inside. Moran wondered if the guy practiced it.

The piano player said, “Just wait, man. Just wait.”

That was a few days ago and Moran was still waiting for the Cuban’s revenge-the guy and the woman in the apartment right now doing whatever they did. While Mr. Nolen Tyner reclined in a lounge chair on the shady side of the pool, beer can upright on his chest, as though he might be sighting the beer can between the V of his out-turned sandals, aiming his attention directly at oceanfront Number One. Keeping an eye on the Latin lovers who, Moran had decided, deserved one another.

Wait a minute. Or was Nolen Tyner watching out for them, protecting them? Hired by the piano player.

Christ, he could be keeping an eye on you, Moran thought. It gave him a strange feeling. It reinforced the premonition he’d been aware of for a couple of weeks now, that he was about to walk into something that would change his life.

Except that it wasn’t time for Moran’s life to take another turn. He was thirty-eight, not due for a change until forty-two. He believed in seven-year cycles because he couldn’t ignore the fact that every seven years something happened and his life would take a turn in a new direction. Only one of his turns was anticipated, planned; the rest just seemed to happen, though with a warning, a feeling he’d get. Like now.