This was about expectations. Run down the same highway to hell enough times and you develop a few. Like every other facet of our tangled little web, she had hers and I had mine. While I hadn't the vaguest idea what was really going on in that gorgeous head of hers, my expectations were short term and brutally simple. In two days I expected she and I to be on a different coast, and the only passengers on board a decommissioned Honduran naval vessel, headed for instant obscurity, -or else very dead from some very ugly, unnatural cause.

My sweaty palms fingered the boarding passes like a chump that just put everything he had on the longest shot at the track. Large letters stamped on the back in blue-black ink showed the pier number and name of the ship...

77 El Deora
Oblique Americana from the inky backwaters of the gene pool