So easy to get to, so miserable; and the logical next thought: how simple for those desperate people to climb out of their stinking encampment, carrying a slasher, and find their way to houses up the hill or along the beach—to the lovely pole-house that Sharkey and Olive shared—and take revenge for being so poor. The experience of the homeless camp made them keenly aware that they had so much that these people wanted, running water and shelter and good food, what seemed like luxury.

How was it that on this lovely island such a blighted place could exist? And they knew that there had to be many such places. The homeless who camped on the beach or pitched tents on the side streets of Honolulu came and went, usually moved along by the police; but this camp in the clearing under trees, with the dog and the children and plants growing in pots and junked cars serving as shelters—this camp was immovable.

Olive envied Sharkey for his faulty memory—his response was a general feeling of woe, the detail fading. All she saw was detail, the ugliness of it, the resentment on the people’s faces, the village of dirty feet, just down the road.

They weren’t imagining that the dead man might have lived there. They had the policeman’s word for it—DeSouza, whose father had surfed with Sharkey, had said that he’d seen him “near the homeless camp on the bypass road” and added that he knew him by sight. And those people—the fat man, Lindsey, the woman she had called Rhonda—they had known something of the man, but they’d been suspicious and they’d calculated that any information they had was worth something. It was easy to understand their reaction—unhelpful, aggressive, mocking, threatening. They lived in an insecure world of leaky tarps and old cars and junk piles, of struggling to get by, always in a survival mode, scavenging or thieving.

The thought that the dead man could have lived there gave Olive a little glimpse into his life. Sharkey shrugged when she mentioned it, saying that the man was probably headed there when Sharkey had killed him. And now it was as though he’d never existed.

Sharkey and Olive stayed home, and in the ponderous way he went about his chores now Sharkey avoided discussing his reasons for abandoning the search for the dead man’s identity. Olive, who remained his motivator, kept to herself, stunned by the sight of the filthy homeless camp so near to where they lived in comfort.

They were afraid, not so much that they would be tempted back as that the people there, seeking them, conning them with “We got news . . . we know the guy,” would find out where they lived and rob them.