Back home, he scrubbed the dirt from his hands and tossed the gloves into the burn barrel behind the shed. Then he sat on the porch until dawn, the empty coffee cup cooling between his palms. He knew it was stupid and risky too but the thought of slowing them down, even for a day, gave him a flicker of relief he hadn’t felt in months.
By midmorning, as he watched from his porch, the first excavator rolled into the pit and stopped. A worker shouted for the foreman, waving something small and metallic. The commotion spread quickly. Within an hour, the trucks were parked, the workers gathered, and a white county van pulled up with Municipal Safety stenciled on the side.