Tick Tock

windage-reducing profile, and the hull's after sections are virtually flat—”
    “You might as well be talking alien abductions again.”
    “—two deep, wide-spaced propeller pockets give it a whole lot more turning leverage,” she continued as she passed three smaller lines and went to the back of the craft, where she untied the stern line from another dock cleat, coiled it, and tossed it aboard. “You have real shaft-angle efficiency with this sweetheart. Twenty-one tons, but I'll make it pirouette.”
    “Twenty-one tons,” he worried, following her back to midships. “Where are you planning on taking this—Japan?”
    “No, it's a coastal cruiser. You wouldn't want to take this too far out on the open sea. Anyway, we're just going across the harbour to Balboa Island, where the police aren't all agitated. We can get a car there without being spotted.”
    As Del unzipped her ski jacket and stripped out of it, Tommy said, “Is this piracy?”
    “Not if no one's aboard. Ordinary theft,” she assured him brightly, handing her jacket to him.
    “What're you doing?”
    “I'm going to have my hands full with the boat, so you're our only line of defence. The jacket pockets are full of spare ammo. You might need it. Position yourself on the bow deck, and if the damn thing shows up, do what's necessary to keep it from getting aboard.”
    As the skin crawled on the nape of his neck, Tommy looked back across the dock, along the pier and east to the gate through which they had come from the Fun Zone. The Samaritan-thing was not yet in sight.
    “It's getting close,” she assured him.
    Her voice was no longer at his side, and when he turned to her, he saw that she had already climbed aboard the yacht through the gap in the port railing.
    Scootie was also aboard, ascending the port-side steps to the open upper deck.
    “What about these lines?” Tommy asked, indicating the three dock ties that she had not cast off.
    “Forward spring, after spring, and breast line. I'll take care of them. You just get in position on the bow.”
    He shoved the Desert Eagle under the waistband of his jeans, praying to God he wouldn't stumble and fall and accidentally blow off his manhood. Draping Del's jacket over the shotgun in his left hand, he grabbed the railing with his right hand, and pulled himself aboard.
    As he started forward, another worry occurred to him, and he turned to Del. “Hey, don't you need keys or something to start it?”
    “No.”
    “For God's sake, it can't be like an outboard motor with a pull cord.”
    “I have my ways,” she assured him.
    In spite of the deep gloom, he could see that her smile was even more enigmatic than any with which she had previously favoured him.
    She leaned toward him, kissed him lightly on the mouth, and then said, “Hurry.”
    He went forward to the open bow deck. At the foremost point of the yacht, he stepped into the slightly depressed well in which was mounted the anchor winch. He dropped the jacket, which wasn't going anywhere because it weighed about ten pounds with all the ammo in its pockets.
    With a sigh of relief at not having been neutered, he gingerly withdrew the pistol from his waistband and placed it on top of the jacket, where he could easily get hold of it if the need arose.
    The rain-swept docks were still deserted.
    A halyard rattled mutedly against a mast on a sailboat. Dock rollers creaked and rasped over concrete pilings, and jammed rubber fenders squeaked between a boat hull and a dock.
    The water was oil-black and had a faint briny smell. In the detective novels he wrote, this was the cold, murky, secret-keeping water into which villains sometimes dropped chain-wrapped victims in concrete boots. In other writers' books, such water was home to great white sharks, giant killer squid, and sea serpents.
    He looked back at the dark windows of the enclosed lower deck, immediately behind him, wondering where Del had gone.
    The smaller top deck began farther aft, and as he raised his gaze to it, soft amber light appeared at the windshield of what might be an upper helm station. Then he glimpsed Del as she slipped behind the wheel and looked over the instrumentation.
    When Tommy checked the docks again, nothing moved on them, although he wouldn't have been surprised to see policemen, harbour policemen, Coast Guardsmen, FBI agents, and so many other officers of one law-enforcement agency or another that the Samaritan-thing, if it showed up, would be unable to shoulder its way through the crowd. He