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.