Fluke: Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings

water, Amy," Nate said from the drears of morpheum opus. "We're coming up on Pike's Place Market, and there's fish to be had."
    Clay waited, not quite smiling, not quite not, while Nate sat up and rubbed sleep from his eyes. "Driving a boat on the street?" Clay said, nodding. All skippers had that dream.
    "Seattle," said Nate. "The Zodiac lives in cabin six."
    "We haven't used the Zodiac in ten years, it won't hold air." Clay went to the closet that acted as a divider between the living/sleeping area and the kitchen. He pulled down a stack of sheets, then towels. "You wouldn't believe how they had this kid living, Nate. It was a tin industrial building, out by the airport. Twenty, thirty of them, in little stalls with cots and not enough room to swing a dead cat. The wiring was extension cords draped over the tops of the stalls. Six hundred a month for that."
    Nate shrugged. "So? We lived that way the first couple of years. It's what you do. We might need cabin six for something. Storage or something."
    "Nope," said Clay. "That place was a sweat box and a fire hazard. He's not living there. He's our guy."
    "But Clay, he's only been with us for a day. He's probably a criminal."
    "He's our guy," said Clay, and that was that. Clay had very strong views on loyalty. If Clay had decided that Kona was their guy, he was their guy.
    "Okay," said Nate, feeling as if he had just invited the Medusa in for a sandwich. "The Old Broad called."
    "How is she?"
    "Still nuts."
    "How're you?"
    "Getting there."

CHAPTER SEVEN
    Sanctuary, Sanctuary, Cried the
    Humpback
    When a visitor first drives into the Hawaiian Islands Humpback Whale Sanctuary – five baby blue shiplap buildings trimmed out in cobalt, crouching on the edge of the huge Maalaea Bay and overlooking the ruins of an ancient saltwater fish pond – his first reaction is usually "Hey, not much of a sanctuary. You could get maybe three whales in those buildings, tops." Soon, however, he realizes that these buildings are simply the offices and visitor centers. The sanctuary itself covers the channels that run from Molokai to the Big Island of Hawaii, between Maui, Lanai, and Kahoolawe, as well as the north shores of Oahu and Kauai, in which there is plenty of room for a whole bunch of whales, which is why they are kept there.
    There were about a hundred people milling around outside the lecture hall when Nate and Amy pulled into the parking lot in the pickup.
    "Looks like a good turnout?" Amy said. She'd attended only one of the sanctuary's weekly lectures, and that one had been given by Gilbert Box, an ill-tempered biologist doing survey work under a grant for the International Whaling Commission, who droned through numbers and graphs until the ten people in attendance would have killed a whale themselves just to shut him up.
    "It's about average for us. Behavior always draws more than survey. We're the sexy ones," Nate said with a grin.
    Amy snorted. "Oh, yeah, you guys are the Mae Wests of the nerd world."
    "We're action nerds," Nate said. "Adventure nerds. Nerds of romance."
    "Nerds," Amy said.
    Nate could see the skeletal Gilbert Box standing off to the side of the crowd under a straw hat whose brim was so wide it could have afforded shade for three additional people and behind a pair of enormous wraparound sunglasses suitable for welding or as a shield from nuclear flash. His gaunt face was still smeared with residue of the white zinc oxide he used for sun protection when out on the water. He wore a long-sleeved khaki shirt and trousers and leaned on a white sun umbrella that he was never seen without. It was a half hour before sunset, a warm breeze was coming off Maalaea Bay, and Gilbert Box looked like Death out for his after-dinner stroll before a busy night of e-mailing heart attacks and tumors to a few million lucky winners.
    Nate had given Box the nickname "the Count," after the Sesame Street vampire with the obsessive-compulsive need to count things. (Nate had been too old for Sesame Street as a preschooler, but he'd watched it through grade ten while baby-sitting his younger brother, Sam.) People agreed that the Count was the perfect name for a survey guy with an aversion to water and sunlight, and the name had caught on even outside Nate and Clay's immediate sphere of influence.
    Panic rattled up Nate's spine. "They're going to know we're faking it. The Count will call us on it the first time I say something that we don't have the data to back up."
    "How's he