“I’m bothered by one thing,” she said as she tugged at the arms of her chair and got to her feet. “If you never convicted Max Mulgrave for his DUIs or drug possession or vagrancy or all the other mentions in the logs . . .”

She swayed slightly, unsure of how to finish her sentence.

“Yeah, so what?” Malo said, as though anticipating an accusation.

“Maybe you contributed to his downfall,” Olive said. “Maybe you could have saved him.”

“Maybe you could have saved him,” Malo said, and now he was staring stony-faced at Sharkey. “But instead you killed him.”

11

Smack

The rain had stopped; the land swelled with sunlight, alive now, limpid, dripping in the soft late-afternoon glow, a fattening rainbow arched in the cloudless sky over Hale‘iwa, its luminous stripes textured like tissue, or threadbare cloth spun across the town. Olive was at the wheel, Sharkey fixed in one of his silences, as they drove along the soaked and blackened bypass road, the big trees sparkling, their boughs still wet, the tall grass sodden, glistening from the purification of the downpour, the day washed clean.

And then a sudden ugliness. “The camp,” Olive said as they passed the tulip tree and the break in the roadside fence. “I don’t have the strength to face those people today.” She answered herself, as she often did these days, because Sharkey seemed numb and deaf. “Maybe some other time.”

But Sharkey was alert at the surf breaks. At Lani’s and Chun’s, and later at Leftovers and Alligators, he marveled at the storm-driven waves, ragged from the aftermath of the rain. The day was serene, but the chop still churned, an effect of the westerly that had dragged over the sea.

A solitary figure appeared at Waimea, and his darkness got Sharkey’s attention as they rounded the bay—a man, his back turned, but familiar, plodding down the bluff of sand to where it shelved and was undercut by the shore break. The man wore shorts but did not carry a board, nor did he hesitate to dip his toe first but walked into the low wall of surf and stepped into the sea and vanished as though into a hole.

Sharkey mouthed the words, “Gone under.”

At home Olive was talkative, seeming to reassure herself, her characteristic and chatty back-and-forth, the way she muttered when she was alone, thinking out loud, more slangy and British when she talked to herself—“Mustn’t grumble . . . Cuppa tea would do me a power of good . . . Get cracking”—all of it unintelligible to Sharkey.

She said, “That Chinese character tattooed on his arm that we couldn’t fathom—it was her name.”