“The first time we were here we met a woman, Lindsey,” Olive said. “She claimed she knew the man we were asking about.”

“Lindsey a meth head,” Winona said. “She gone.”

“We didn’t know the man’s name then. Now we know. Max Mulgrave.”

“Max gone too.”

“You knew him?” Olive said, flustered by the sudden revelation.

“He stay here for a while.”

“I know the guy?” Moe said to Kimo.

“Sure. The guy you call Smack.”

“Smack,” Moe said, and turned to Sharkey. “I know Smack. Why you didn’t tell me you looking for Smack?”

“His name is Max,” Olive said.

“I sell him all kinds of merch. Pakalolo. Batu. You name it. That Smack is hardcore. How he get the name is he using smack, no needles—he smoke it and sniff it and sometimes eat it.”

“We hear he pass,” Kimo said. He turned to scream at the barking dogs, and the dogs whimpered and crouched in the dirt. “Someone run into him at Waimea.”

“That was me,” Sharkey said. “I killed him. That’s why we came here before. I didn’t know his name. I was trying to find out who he was. He wasn’t carrying an ID.”

“You the guy wen’ kill Max?” Kimo asked, and stepped so quickly toward Sharkey that Sharkey backed away.

Intimidated, weakened by the question, fearful of what might happen next, Sharkey said in a faltering voice, “Yes. I ran into him.”

“You can prove it?” Kimo was leaning at him, looking eager.

“The cops know it.”

“I mean, you can prove he wen’ make?”

“His body’s in the mortuary,” Olive said, to distract the man. “Ashes now. He was cremated.”

Kimo had turned to Rhonda and was nodding vigorously. Her expression was ambiguous, at first sorrowful and slack, and then a faint smile, with something like satisfaction, flickered on her cracked and sunburned lips, which made her reaction macabre.

“It was all my fault,” Sharkey said, strengthened by the sight of the two people silently communicating a sense of pleasure. He’d expected to be assaulted by Max Mulgrave’s angry grieving friend, but the man had turned away from him.

Olive took Sharkey’s hand. She said to Kimo and the women, “I don’t blame you for being upset.”

Kimo shrugged, wiping his hands on his T-shirt. “We hear he wen’ make, but where the proof?” He gestured to Sharkey. “You did a bad thing, mister. He was a good guy—he live over there with Rhonda for, what? Year or so.”

“More,” Rhonda said.

“He set up her kids in school. Those kids you saw before. Smart akamai kids. He organize a trust fund for them.”

“He had money?”

“Not much left. He spend most of it on drugs.”

“I never charge him much,” Moe protested. “Smack like a braddah to me. But the trouble was the batu. The cheap stuff, it can wreck you. But . . . was his money.”