“I was in suspense for a month.” Sharkey leaned closer to the windshield. “Moe thinks it’s been picked up by the feds. What I didn’t tell him was that I’ve been having my mail forwarded to the mainland, to the post office in Santa Cruz. And I’m pretty sure they know something about well-wrapped packages like that.” He leaned again. “I cannot see a damned thing.”

His talk, his story, nagged at her, when all she wanted was for him to sit in silence so that she could use the drama of the weather to claim his attention, like music swelling behind a spoken epiphany. She felt that his inattention, his halting way of telling the story, had left them exposed to the fury of the storm. She had needed to fortify herself to endure it, but, distracted by him, she was startled by the way the car was thumped by potholes. Every phase of the rainstorm was a surprise and—it was true—all she could see in front of them was the rain-splashed windshield. It was as if they were in a cage and saw nothing beyond the bars.

In the headlights of some oncoming cars, the wet road was briefly visible again. Passing the surf break they knew as Chun’s Reef, Sharkey saw the waves rising and dumping at the edge of the road, the froth pooling in the shallow broken pavement.

“Surf’s up,” Olive said, because he was stalled in his story.

“Junk waves,” Sharkey said, lowering his head toward the steering wheel to see the road better. “My foot is really killing me.”

In the dense and dirty nighttime rain, oncoming cars were licks and blobs of light stroked by the twitch of the wiper blades. Then he was driving blind again and could not see past his hood ornament. The drop of his wheels into the road ruts jarred his teeth; more cars, more headlights. He drove into the light as helplessly as into darkness.

“No sign of the package of pakalolo,” he said, gripping the wheel, fighting the potholes. “All this time I’m waiting for a visit from the feds. Then one day I go to the Santa Cruz post office and there it is, a small, well-wrapped box, innocent-looking, about the size of an old video cassette. Maybe a pound of weed, compressed in a brick.”

“Contraband,” Olive said, and averted her eyes from the glare of the oncoming cars rounding the curve at Waimea.

“Yeah. I was so spooked I destroyed it—burned it and buried the ashes. And I left Moe in the dark. He could have ruined me.”

“You didn’t tell him?”

“He doesn’t deserve to know. He’s a useless shit, like everyone else. Oh God—”