Profit and Sheen (1986)

James Colbert's novel pairs Daniel Profit, the New Orleans cocaine dealer whom, the jacket says, nobody likes and everybody wants to know, tired of the life and dreaming of one final score, with Sheen Vicedomini, an ex-street cop who left the force after too many bodies turned up on his beat and who has a talent for violence. The jacket takes them from the French Quarter to Miami mansions, a house on the sea cliffs of northern California and stilt shacks in the Louisiana bayous, and notes that the author served on the New Orleans police force. (Open Library)

Watches

Omega (unidentified model): The jacket names him Daniel Profit; the text calls him Profit. On the shoulder of Highway 1 past Sausalito, where the coast road first opens on the ocean, Sheen pulls the blue rental Chevrolet in beside Profit's car after driving it from the airport with a courier's suitcase in the trunk, an early job for him. Profit walks over, and through the open window Sheen notices two things: that Profit's expression and posture are relaxed, and that his gold Omega wristwatch is twisted round on his arm, face down and unreadable. By the end of the novel the Omega is gone, sold for the money to drive west, and a steel Seiko has taken its place. The maker is named; the model is not. The Omega 7 of the later chapters is an anti-Castro group, not a watch.

Source text: Through the open window Sheen noticed two things: that Profit's expression and posture were relaxed, and that his gold Omega wristwatch was twisted on his arm, face down, unreadable. (James Colbert, Profit and Sheen, scan cataloged as Houghton Mifflin, 1986, p. 33; the 1988 Jove paperback, which says it contains the complete text of the hardcover, has the sentence on the same page; the jacket flap names Daniel Profit and Sheen Vicedomini; Internet Archive scan OCR)

Seiko (unidentified model): Late in the novel Sheen finds Profit in the small town of Rayton, selling smoke alarms from a shop whose licence application led Sheen to him. Driving with Sheen's .45 on him, Profit explains that Moses cut him off from his supply, Sheen from his connections, and that the money burned with the house, so that he had to sell his watch for the money to drive out there. Sheen looks at his wrist and sees a fat stainless steel Seiko where the slender gold Omega used to be, above a long red scar across the back of his right hand. The maker is named; the model is not.

Source text: Sheen looked at Profit's wrist and saw a fat stainless steel Seiko where before there had been a slender gold Omega. (James Colbert, Profit and Sheen, scan cataloged as Houghton Mifflin, 1986, p. 182; Profit says on pp. 181 to 182 that he had to sell his watch to get enough money to drive out; the 1988 Jove paperback has the sentence on the same page; Internet Archive scan OCR)