Pedro Sanchez, a slight, narrow-chested youth, his sallow face studded with patches of acne, pressed against the smooth bole of a palm tree. He wore a black sports shirt, black slacks. The night was dark, without stars. His heart hammered as he searched the shadows, and he shivered slightly, although a necklace of perspiration beaded his upper lip.

He was supposed to be taking his time, but the extreme quiet was making him jumpy. Action he didn’t mind. He had been fighting all his life, in gyms and on street corners. But he had grown up in a big city, and the outdoors was mysterious to him, full of unknown dangers. He didn’t like this sneaking from tree to tree. He would rather walk openly up the driveway, the metal plates in his heels crunching on the gravel.

The big house on Normandy Isle, in upper Biscayne Bay between Miami and Miami Beach, belonged to Harry Bass. Sanchez had been imported from another town, in another state, but he knew that Bass was the big man in book-making and casino gambling in this part of the world, which automatically made him a bad man to fool around with. But everything had been worked out to the split second. By the time Bass discovered what had happened to him, Sanchez expected to be a thousand miles away, starting to enjoy the $10,000 that had been deposited in his account in the Liberty Savings Bank in St. Louis. For the first time in his life-he was twenty-two years old-he had a savings account. Most people didn’t realize, he was sure, that if you left $10,000 in savings-bank money alone, it would grow by four or five hundred a year. Not that he expected to leave it alone. He had plans.

Taking a deep breath, he moved quickly from the palm tree to an ornamental shrub. Now he could see the Cadillac on the graveled turnaround by the front entrance. It was too big, too black, too shiny, and Sanchez was pleased to think that before much longer it would be nothing but a twisted pile of junk.