“Thanks.”
He watched as Garcia mounted the steps into the bus. “Better if you don’t come back here,” he called after him, not unkindly.
Garcia turned and laughed. “Back here? Not a chance. You won’t see me again, not in this lifetime.”
“God willing,” Sandoval mouthed to himself, watching with relief as the bus got on its dusty, noisy way.
TWO
Six months later.
Strait of Juan de Fuca, aboard the ferry Coho
“Folks, if you look out the windows, you’ll see a pod of orcas only a hundred yards off the port side, at about eleven o’clock.”
At the announcement, most of the starboard passengers arose en masse to make for the windows on the other side. Ordinarily, Julie Oliver would have been among the first, but this time she simply sat there, her eyes glued to the laptop on the table in front of her. She and Gideon were returning from one of their periodic weekend “city fixes”-a concert or opera at the Royal Theatre, a walk in the gardens, a good restaurant or two-in Victoria, British Columbia, closer by forty miles to their home in Port Angeles, Washington, than Seattle was. Like the cyber-enlightened twenty-first-century couple they were, their noses had been buried in their laptops since the MV Coho had left Victoria’s Inner Harbor, the Empress Hotel-that grand, old, ivy-covered dowager-had disappeared behind the headland, and the ferry had slipped into the pale, thready winter fog of the Strait of Juan de Fuca.
“Julie,” Gideon said, “did you hear? There are orcas on the other side.”
“Can I ask you a question?” she said instead of answering and then didn’t wait for his reply. “Can you tell me what in the world made me think this Hacienda thing next week was a good idea?”