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.