Fire Touched (Mercy Thompson #9)(68)
According to Bran, Sherwood had approached him in January and asked for a transfer to somewhere with a shorter, more congenial winter than Montana. Most places have more congenial winters than Montana, so Bran had a lot of places he could have sent Sherwood, but he sent him to us.
When the call came in about Sherwood and the crane, I hadn’t been able to get in touch with Adam other than to leave him a voice message. His office wasn’t answering, either, which meant whatever he was involved in was some security issue with the government contracts he held. I couldn’t feel anything through the pack bonds that suggested Sherwood was about to kill himself, but Bran hadn’t been able to tell when my foster father had gone out to commit suicide, either. Sherwood felt just as he always did to me—quiet.
I squinted, trying to see him, but he was too far up, and it was too dark.
I might not have known Officer Thorson, but I liked him. When I explained that all the extra people who’d been there when I arrived were problematical, he’d listened gravely. Then, without arguing, he’d dispersed everyone until there were just two guys from Lampson, Officer Thorson, and me. Marley continued to talk to the officer about his crane with the enthusiasm of a golf addict describing his new putter. “So not the biggest—that mark keeps moving. But it is the largest twin-crawler crane in the world, and the biggest crane we’ve ever built. So far, anyway.”
I hadn’t quite worked out if Marley was the night manager who’d summoned the police or if he was security, the CEO of the company, or someone in between. He wore scruffy jeans, a Western-style button-up shirt, and needed a shave. He also smelled like beer, but I think most of that was coming off his boots, so maybe he’d come over from a bar or party. I did wish he’d shut up about how big the stupid crane was because I was pretty sure I was going to have to climb it and see if I could talk Sherwood down.
I’d seen the crane before; you can’t help but see it when you drive across the suspension bridge—which we had not been able to do tonight. There were no estimates about when that bridge would go back in use. They had to figure out how badly it had been damaged, first. I didn’t know why I felt guilty about that—I didn’t turn loose a troll on the city. Still, even without being on the bridge, you could see the crane for a long way.
Lampson’s Pasco yard was located in a warehouse district near the railroad. The whole area still showed signs of the army depot it had once been with long wooden warehouses laid out in orderly patterns. It was haunted. If I looked—and I tried not to—I could see a few ghosts flickering around. There was one, dressed in a World War II army uniform, who watched me. I was pretty sure he was one of the rare self-aware ghosts. If I stared at ghosts for very long, even just the repeaters, they tended to start following me around.
This wasn’t the first time I’d come out here—there were a couple of junkyards not too far away. But I’d never seen the crane up close and personal before, and it was a lot bigger than it looked from the bridge.
“So Hitachi commissioned it to build nuclear power plants,” Marley was saying expansively. “Then along came that tsunami that hit the Fukushima Daiichi plant and, well, no one is building nuclear power plants in Japan now, are they? So here it sits.”
The big crane was part of the Pasco skyline, which admittedly was not much of a skyline compared to Seattle or Spokane. In the daylight, the crane part of it was bright orange with sections of white, and the crawler part—this thing moved with two tanklike treads that were taller than I was, each with its own control booth—was bright Lampson blue. Obviously, no one with a hint of estrogen in their veins had designed the color scheme.
In the dark, though, it rose above us, black against the lighter sky. We were standing right next to one of the treads, just beneath the crawler that allowed the humongous structure to move. Above the crawler, the crane rose like the orange, Leaning Eiffel Tower of Pasco. If I squinted and used my imagination, I could, just barely, see that someone was sitting on the end of the boom head—the highest point of the crane.
“We could start it up if you want,” said Marley, following my gaze. “But we waited until you came out because if we start moving it around, he could fall. I don’t know how you feel about your people, but we like ours to survive their tenure with us.” He squinted up. “So this guy’s tenure is going to end as soon as we get him down.”
The nameless guy standing next to him, the only one of the four of us standing there to whom I hadn’t been introduced, murmured, “Marley, that’s Sherwood Post. He speaks Russian and English without an accent, in either language, I’m told. That means when he’s on shift, everyone can communicate with everyone else. Let me say it again: everybody knows what they are supposed to be doing. And his shift mates say he can move a three-hundred-pound bar of steel all by himself.”
Marley made a growly sound. “So maybe we give him a second chance. But I hate to encourage this behavior. What if he jumps?”
“Then you probably don’t have to worry about firing him,” I said.
“What I don’t get,” said Officer Thorson, looking up to the top of the crane and saying it once more with feeling, “what I don’t get is how you let him get up there in the first place.”
“One of my guys saw him start to climb up,” the other Lampson guy answered. “He went running for help, and by the time they got back, he—Post, I mean—was most of the way up. He didn’t respond when they yelled, but truthfully, it is windy up there. I don’t know if he could have heard them.” He frowned, then shook his head. “But he sure as hell should have noticed all the police and the fire trucks with their sirens and lights.”