“I’ve mentioned Hunter Thompson,” he said.

“Many times.”

“I really related to him.”

“You told me you never read his books.”

“Right,” Sharkey said. “But it’s not about reading his books. It’s that he wrote them. Lots, I think. He did journalism. Writing—that’s all he really did. The drugs, the women, the crazy—yes. But the writing was all he really cared about. That one thing.”

He was nodding, jogged by the movement of the plane, which had begun to speed down the runway, and suddenly lifted. Then they were in the air, tilted over Waikiki, in the distance the vast hollow battlements of Diamond Head, which when they passed it seemed like a gigantic barnacle. Sharkey was murmuring, his hand still pressing the papers, as though rehearsing what he would say next.

Olive leaned nearer to him. “Where are you going with this?”

Sharkey did not look at her. He seemed more earnest facing forward, squinting in the roar of the plane. When he spoke it was with a voice of certainty, raised to be heard above the noise of the engines.

“My one thing,” he said, “the only thing I ever did, was surf. That was my life, all I cared about. That’s all I did. Monster waves.”

He smacked the folder and pressed again, and in its thickness it seemed to pulse with life, to hold more warmth than when in his hand.

“Unlike him,” he said.

“He’s got a name, Joe.”

Sharkey lifted his hand and lowered his head to the label at the top of that stack of papers. “Max Mulgrave.”

“The man you killed.”

Sharkey bent his head, inclining it closer to the name, his eyes squeezed shut, his lips twisted in confusion.

“We’ll find him.”

In a pained whisper of self-reproach, Sharkey said, “He did so much in his life.”

Olive stroked his cheek but, daunted by the howl of the air rushing against the plane, could not think of anything more to say.

“All I did was surf.”

Then he slept, and they flew into darkness, waking hours later with a sudden bump of turbulence and the pinpricks of lights below them, meaning they’d crossed into California, and he dozed again. Dawn over the desert woke him. A wheelchair was waiting for him in Dallas, and the next flight, to Little Rock, was short. They were soon in a rental car, Olive at the wheel, in the paler light and bushier trees of the mainland, flatter hills, a chill in the air, October in the Ozarks.