She knew we were here. It was her idea. She had scrounged up a naval engineer, or what she called a naval engineer—he had once been a stoker on a ferryboat. But he claimed he knew what he was talking about when he said the only thing the Queen needed to make ’er go was oil. And so we left him aboard to tinker and polish, with a couple of helpers Amy detached from the police force, and we tackled the oil problem.
Which meant Bayonne. Which was where we were.
It had to be a tanker with at least a fair portion of its cargo intact, because the Queen was a thirsty creature, drinking fuel not by the shot or gallon but by the ton.
“Saaam! Sam Dunlap!”
I looked up, startled. Five ships away, across the U of the mooring, Vern Engdahl was bellowing at me through cupped hands.
“I found it!” he shouted. “Oil, lots of oil! Come look!”
I clasped my hands over my head and looked around. It was a long way around to the tanker Vern was on, hopping from deck to deck, detouring around open stretches.
I shouted: “I’ll get the boat!”
He waved and climbed up on the rail of the ship, his feet dangling over, looking supremely happy and pleased with himself. He lit a cigarette, leaned back against the upward sweep of the rail and waited.
It took me a little time to get back to the boat and a little more time than that to get the damn motor started. Vern! “Let’s not take that lousy little twelve horse-power, Sam,” he’d said reasonably. “The twenty-five’s more what we need!” And maybe it was, but none of the motors had been started in most of a decade, and the twenty-five was just that much harder to start now.