It was only a row of words. Laundry, Groceries, Pharmacy, Hardware Store. He was careful about that. Careful about everything. If someone picked this paper up or looked over Hawley’s shoulder they would think it was a list of errands. But each item was someone to be eliminated before they came after him or his daughter. He would leave nothing to chance anymore. He would leave nothing at all.
He’d had to bring in a cleaner at the lake. The cleaner took all the money in the licorice jars. The cleaner cleaned things. Got rid of Talbot’s body. Brought in a doctor. Paid off the man doing Lily’s autopsy. Scrubbed the police report. But the cleaner couldn’t clean Hawley. After the funeral was over and Loo was left with Mabel Ridge, Hawley had driven to the nearest bar and then stayed on a bender for two weeks straight. When he woke up, he was on a boat with Jove. His friend said Hawley had called him, though Hawley had no memory of picking up the phone. Jove had found him passed out on a mountain of garbage about to be trucked away to a landfill. That was before Hawley had made up his mind to kill anyone. He was still feeling too sorry for himself.
Over the years, Jove had finally learned to sail, and now he’d been hired to bring the boat they were on from Boston down to the Virgin Islands. On the way they met drop points and delivered various goods that he had stored underneath the floorboards. The yacht was a Bermuda-rigged ketch, with three sails: a mizzenmast, a mainsail and a jib. Jove was good at navigation, and he showed Hawley how to manage both the boat and his sorrow, giving him whiskey when he needed it, taking it away when he’d had too much. Talking him out of throwing himself in the water as they pushed through choppy currents. “Think of that daughter of yours,” said Jove. “You want to give her two dead parents instead of one?”
Their route went along the coast past Newport to Little Creek, Virginia, and from there on to Saint Thomas. The crossing took twelve days, and by the end of it, Hawley had sobered up enough to realize that the only thing that mattered was Loo. He needed to keep his daughter safe. And the first step was getting out from underneath Ed King. Hawley’s thinking was violent, but Jove talked him into putting the old boxer in prison instead. From the Alaska job he had enough to frame him for the pilot and the girlfriend, which wasn’t a frame exactly, since King was the one who had murdered them in the first place.
“Are you sure?” Hawley asked. “I know he’s your friend.”
“Not anymore,” said Jove. “Not after this.”
They made their final delivery and dropped the boat off. If there hadn’t been all that rain once they arrived, they might have stolen another boat and brought it back up the coast. But instead they caught a flight to the States and Jove went on to Alaska to take care of King and Hawley decided there were other people he needed to get rid of.
He’d meant to leave his daughter only for a week but it had been more than two years now. She was better off without him. Hawley knew that. But he also knew that he owed her this: a life without looking over her shoulder. And he was determined to finish the list to make sure that it came true, even though there were times when he could feel himself slipping, and he’d wonder if he’d last until the end. He’d scratch his beard and hours would pass, the skies darken and go light and then dark again. Sometimes he’d lie to himself.
He’d think: One day I’ll get over this.
He’d think: Tomorrow it will be less painful.
Then he’d scratch his beard some more and another day would be gone.
—
HE’D SPENT SOME time in Wyoming before, with Jove, back when he was in his twenties. It was after the Indian casino job and they’d both had some cash to spare. They went in on a three-way land deal with Frederick Nunn, whose house they’d robbed when they were first starting out, back when they were nothing but kids stealing silverware.
The land was near the Bighorn National Forest. Hawley and Jove had sold their shares off to a natural-gas company, using banks and intermediaries to keep the paper trail off. But Frederick Nunn’s property got declared a wildlife refuge for an endangered species: the black-tailed prairie dog. And then the feds came down and busted Nunn for money laundering and put him in jail, and in the process Nunn lost everything, even the great house in the Adirondacks. When he got out all he had left was the prairie-dog land, and it was full of giant rodents who lived in extensive colonies and tore down all the vegetation and dug their holes and ruined the soil until it wasn’t fit for cattle or horses or any kind of farming.
The land had been split into three separate properties. They had flipped a coin for the deeds. Hawley won the first toss, and got to pick first. Jove won the second. They didn’t think it would make a difference who got what, just ordered another round of whiskeys from the bar. Jove had even told Nunn about jacking his forks and spoons all those years ago and Hawley getting shot by the groundskeeper, and they had joked about it, aglow with the prospect of wealth, Nunn making a show of forgiveness, Jove and Hawley chipping in the next day and buying him a whole new fancy set of Mexican silverware. But later on Nunn said Hawley and Jove had known about the prairie dogs—that they’d fixed the toss somehow, and that they owed him. And then because Jove was in jail, Nunn started calling Hawley late at night and then every night, saying the dogs were laughing at him. That they could talk to one another. That they knew what Hawley had done. He’d thought of killing Frederick Nunn then. But instead he’d pulled up and moved on to Oklahoma, and Arkansas, and Louisiana, and New Mexico, and Florida, and then after Florida he’d met Lily.
Now, as Hawley drove west on Route 14 in a stolen sedan, he remembered how much he’d liked living out West. The sky so big and open and no one and nothing as far as the eye could see. Snow clipping the tips of the rolling hills, which were covered in scrub grass and packs of wild turkeys and elk and horses and cattle and sage. Trees were so scarce you could tell where the water was from miles away, sets of widow-makers clustered along the riverbeds, their weathered branches twisting out like giants turned to stone.