Fire Touched (Mercy Thompson 9)

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.”

Yep. It had been a real circus when I got here.

“How much can you drop that arm down?” Thorson asked.

“All the way to the ground,” Marley said. “We’d have already done it, but it doesn’t happen instantaneously, and if he wanted to jump off and kill himself, he’d have plenty of time to do it. Seemed to me that we’d be putting pressure on him to do that very thing.”

“How high is that?” Thorson asked.

Marley smiled like a proud father. “She’s 560 feet tall and she can lift six million pounds. Six million.” He shook his head. “I don’t know how he managed to climb all the way up there with one leg—that boom isn’t exactly equipped with a ladder.”

“He’s a werewolf,” I groused. “They are hardwired to do dumb stuff.” Maybe I wasn’t being fair to Sherwood, whom I didn’t know well, but, since it looked like I was going to have to follow him up there, I was entitled to be judgmental. I bent down to make sure my shoes were tied. I didn’t want to have to tie them while 560 feet in the air, though I supposed since the boom wasn’t at a ninety-degree angle, more like a sixty-five, it wouldn’t really be that high. Probably only like 400 or something. My long-ago unlamented geometry class was too far in the past to be of much help. I straightened up and started for the crane.

“What are you doing?” Marley asked in the tone of someone used to getting answers. “Stop.” But I didn’t work for him.

“Someone’s got to talk him down, and he didn’t bring his cell phone,” I told him, and hopped the chain that blocked off the metal stairway on the side of the crawler. Once I started moving, I moved fast; I was up and on top of the two-story-tall crawler before they’d considered doing anything but talking. By then it was too late to stop me because they were human, and no one who was just human could catch me unless I wanted them to. I heard Marley swear, but it didn’t feel like he was emotionally involved—his voice had a frustrated sound rather than honest anger. He wasn’t coming after me.