“Where — How did you—?” Jane said.
“I won her in a poker game! She was dry-docked here while the Gateway Clipper Fleet was tied up in probate court after the founder died in 2009. Apparently everything in Pittsburgh was entangled in the entire question of do humans or the elves own orphaned property. This spring, the heir used his inheritance as excuse to get a visa to visit Elfhome. He didn’t have any way to get the boat back to Earth, so he used it as collateral in a high stakes poker game. I pulled a freaking royal flush. I won twenty thousand dollars and this!”
“Twenty thousand dollars? What were you doing at a game like that?”
“The heir hired me to be native guide. What he really wanted was access to a pit crew. He was a rabid hoverbike racing fan. I figured if I turned him away, he’d just pay Team Big Sky or Team Bonzai. I had Nathan keep a close eye on him and made sure he knew he could look, not touch, especially with my riders. He got me into the card game, but he sucked at poker.”
Her family were all sharks at cards. Once in, it wasn’t surprising that he’d cleaned out the richer players. The surprising part was that they let him keep the winnings.
“You can pilot this?” Jane asked.
“Not me. Sean!” He turned to point at the pilothouse. Her oldest cousin waved and tooted the horn.
Jane recognized the man beside Sean. “Wait. That’s Lee. He’s a sound engineer. He worked for WQED until KDKA hired him away.”
Roach backed out of striking range. “Yeah, yeah, Sean is going to be taping part of the hunt for the monster. I’m sorry, Jane. Please don’t hit me! It’s the only way Sean would do this. He spent four years crab fishing in Alaska before coming back to Pittsburgh to do the DJ thing. Everyone in town is going nuts about the oni and Tinker and these monsters. Sean thinks that having the listeners know that someone is doing something will go long distance in calming people down. And I have to agree with him. Besides, we’re all big fans of Nigel Reid. We want to meet him. That thing he did with the red pandas? Far too cute for words.”
Jane waved at the Team Tinker members moving about the boat, getting it ready to cast off. “I would have thought you’d be out looking for Tinker.”
“We did for a week. I had to cut Andy out of a strangle vine and we got chased all over the South Hills by wargs. We don’t know if she’s even in the city. The oni might have taken her down river a hundred miles by now.”
Everything Yumiko said seemed to indicate otherwise. Team Tinker didn’t even know which haystack to look in for the needle.
Team Tinker was the last group of people Jane wanted to know that she was working with the tengu. Her cousins would protect Boo, but the others would want revenge for Tinker. “I didn’t want all these people along. I don’t want someone along who doesn’t how to stay out of my firing range.”
He nodded. “I totally understand. Lee isn’t staying. He’s afraid of Hal. Apparently working at WQED, he got to know Hal a little too well. He does not want to be stranded with Hal in the middle of a shark-infested river with a crate of dynamite. I’m not sure I want to be onboard with Hal. I know how accident prone he is.”
“I’ll be sitting on him. Your team…”
“Is not staying. I just needed help with the engines. It’s been a few years since the motors were last run. Also I wanted someone here checking for leaks. I didn’t want to put her in the water and have her go straight to the bottom with my entire family on board.”
“Andy can stay.”
“Nah,” Roach drawled out and dropped his voice to a whisper. “Baby brother means well but I think he was dropped on his head once too often as a child, which probably is entirely my fault. He’s dangerously absentminded and has two left feet and hands. Giant river monsters, you shooting at anything that moves, warriors from another universe kidnapping people right and left, a crate full of dynamite, Hal…” Roach shuddered at his list of dangers. “I’m going to send him off on a wild goose chase to keep him out of our hair.”
“Good plan.”
The wheelhouse was a small room on the top deck. The KDKA crew had soundproofed the space with acoustic foam for a clean recording. The space that remained was not much larger than the front seat of a truck. Between the cramped quarters and Sean’s need to stay focused on the river, Jane decided to set up two fixed cameras to record the interview for Chased by Monsters. It gave a slight fisheye view but most likely she’d only use the audio part of the conversation over more interesting shots of the river. She placed more cameras at the boat’s cardinal points of stern, port, and starboard.
Jane set up the portable monitor station on the bow of the middle deck. She would listen to the interview with an earpiece while keeping guard with her rifle. She had the box of dynamite secured nearby so that Hal couldn’t get into it without her noticing. Taggart paced the ship, camera on his shoulder, carefully picking his shots.
They were going to be on the river for hours, if not days, so Sean allowed the conversation to flow naturally, only occasionally reining it back to the nests that they were hunting. After years of being one of Pittsburgh’s most popular radio personalities, Sean had much of the same hosting super powers as Nigel. He held his own in the lively conversation.
Nigel clearly was fascinated by the idea that Sean had been born on Elfhome, left to work on Earth and then returned. It made Sean a very rare beast. Nigel had worked on a documentary featuring the wildlife of the Kodiak Island where Sean’s crab fishing boat had been docked. Their conversation drifted from Nigel’s visit to Pittsburgh to the differences between the Alaska wilderness and the forest of Elfhome.
“Kodiak wasn’t as fierce,” Seth maintained. “Yes, there was the grizzly bears and the wolves and sharks.”
“And the cold,” Nigel added to the list.
“Oh god, yes, the cold. But that was about it. Here in Pittsburgh we’ve got the man-eating plants on top of bears and wolves and river sharks. Alaska has nothing like the black willows, saurus, the wargs and steel spinners. The Alaskans talked a lot about how newcomers couldn’t take the isolation of the little towns but in truth, you could pick up the phone and call people all over the world. You could watch five different football games on television at once. Live. You can go online, order just about anything you can freaking imagine from Amazon and have it delivered within a week. In a day if you paid the insane shipping cost of next day air. I have trouble even explaining Amazon to my listeners. It’s like something out of a fairy tale. A genie in a box fulfilling wishes.”
“We were filming in the Maasai Mara.” Nigel realized that Sean’s listeners would have no idea where that was. “It’s in Kenya. Africa. It’s a five hundred and eighty square mile game reserve with elephants and zebras and giraffes. We were staying at the Keekorok Lodge, which is in the Mara, in the direct path of the wildebeest migration. It was the height of the migration, thousands and thousands of these massive beasts were swarming around the stone bungalows, and someone stole two of our bags. Camera. Lens. Memory cards. The entire lot. Gone. We went online, ordered replacement equipment, paid an exorbitant amount for express shipping, and in a matter of two days we were back to filming.”
“Exactly!” Sean cried. “If you have the money, you are not truly isolated anyplace on Earth. Not like here in Pittsburgh where if you can’t find it within the city, you cannot buy it. We are in a universe wholly separate from the sun and moon and the stars of Earth.”