One part of his mind was wondering how the hell you purified a dozer, while the rest of him stood back and watched the ruckus spread. About half the crew was Indian—or “Native American,” as some of the activists liked to say—Osage, Creek, and Cherokee blood, mostly. Whatever, they were all Indian enough to be mad as hops about being asked to plow up a burial ground.

The foreman was as white as you got, though, except for his red neck, and he was ready to fire the lot of them.

Rich was right in the center of it, nose-to-nose with the foreman, giving him hell. “Look, you can’t make us doze that lot over!” he yelled, his foghorn voice carrying over everyone’s, even the foreman’s. “That’d be like asking Tagliono there to plow up the Vatican—or at least, the graveyard at St. Joseph’s!”

That shut them up—at least for a minute. And Larry felt some of the chill leaving him as he saw that with that single sentence, Rich had managed to get some of the white guys over on their side. Because the graveyard at St. Joseph’s church had been under threat for a while, back in the early eighties and the boomtown days of high-priced oil; and Tagliono and some of the other guys on the crew had been picketing the Skelly Building for wanting to dig up their grandparents and transplant them so they could put up an office complex. Transplant them to a city cemetery, not a Catholic one; a cemetery without the blessings that old-fashioned people thought absolutely necessary for their rest to be in holy soil. Way to go, Rich! he congratulated, silently, as the dynamics shifted and some of the white guys, Tagliono in particular, took the couple of steps necessary to put them on the other side of the invisible line separating the foreman and the whites from the Indians. And when Tagliono came over, so, eventually, did everyone but the company suck-ups.

The foreman knew when he was outgunned. With a muttered curse, he stalked over to his truck and picked up his cellular phone.

Larry drifted over to the rest. “What’s next?” he asked no one in particular.

“Five to two he’s callin’ Calligan,” Tagliono said, and spat off to one side.

Larry nodded. “I figured,” he said. “Question is, what’s Calligan gonna do about it?”

Silence for a moment; traffic noise from the highway nearby warred with the piercing wails of killdeers overhead. Then one of the dump truck operators spoke up.

“I was on a project that hit somethin’ like this,” he offered. “Feds made ’em close down.”

“Permanently?” Tagliono asked. The man shook his head.