Magliore has Dawes' house checked for listening devices planted by the city and later agrees to sell him a load of explosives. Dawes gives half the money from the house sale to Mary, gives $5,000 to a homeless man in a coffee shop, and has Magliore invest most of the remainder on behalf of Olivia after paying for the explosives. In January 1974, with only hours remaining before he is required to leave the property, Dawes wires the whole house with the explosives and barricades himself inside. When the police arrive to forcibly evict him, he shoots at them, killing no one but forcing them to take cover and attracting the attention of the media. Dawes coerces the police into letting a reporter - the same one who interviewed him in 1972, though neither recognizes the other - enter and speak to him. Once the reporter has left, Dawes tosses his guns out the window and sets off his explosives, destroying the house and killing himself. A short epilogue reveals that the reporter and his team ultimately won a Pulitzer Prize for their coverage of the incident and uncovered the truth about the extension project: there was no real reason for it. Unless the city built a certain number of miles of road per year, it would become ineligible for federal funding of interstate construction projects. The city quietly began preparing to sue Mary for her share of the eminent domain payout, but dropped the suit in the wake of public outcry. Author's comments In the introduction to The Bachman Books, King stated: "I think it was an effort to make some sense of my mother's painful death the year before – a lingering cancer had taken her off inch by painful inch. Following this death I was left both grieving and shaken by the apparent senselessness of it all... Roadwork tries so hard to be good and find some answers to the conundrum of human pain." King also described his disappointment with the work, and stated that he was of two minds about having it reprinted, but decided to proceed, in order to give readers an insight into his personality at the time. In a new introduction to the second edition of The Bachman Books, King stated that he had changed his mind and that Roadwork had become his favorite of the early books. Connections to other King works