“What kind of bike?” Sharkey said, repeating it, because the question was unexpected. “An old bike. A junk bike.”

“The kind of bike a bum might have,” the woman said carelessly.

She’s trying to shock me, Sharkey thought, but she does not know that after what I’ve been through I am shockproof.

“That man had a Ferrari—he had millions,” she said. “And he threw it all away.”

“You pieced together his life,” the man said. His slight accent made him seem slow and skeptical. “What did you find?”

The man’s voice was self-important; the woman’s was sour. They sat side by side, giving Sharkey the sense that he was being questioned in stereo, the woofer on the left, the tweeter on the right.

Why should I tell them what they probably already know of his life? Sharkey thought. They’re testing me. But he had come for a purpose: he needed a favor from the ex-wife, so he began.

“He was, in the beginning, just a dead man lying in the road,” Sharkey said. “He was surrounded by people, the strangers who slow down when they see a car crash. Most of them knew my name, but none of them knew his name. I was stupid. I didn’t bother to find out who he was. He was a drunk homeless guy I’d crashed into. I even started to tell myself it was all his fault.” He sipped at his lemonade and continued. “But then things started to go wrong in my life—accidents, illnesses, bad-luck things.”

“Such as?” The woman seemed to be smiling again.

“My girlfriend had a miscarriage. I almost drowned.”

“You look perfectly all right to me,” the woman said. “And by the way, Max always wanted tattoos like yours.”

“Inside I was dying,” Sharkey said. “My girlfriend convinced me that it had something to do with killing that man and not admitting it. Maybe bad karma.”

“Or guilt,” the man said. He pursed his lips and added, “La culpa.”

“Yes, or that—it doesn’t matter. People say ‘I conquered the wave’ and the next time they surf they wipe out, or face-plant, or die.”

“Anyway, you did detective work,” the woman said. “Pretty easy in the age of the Internet.”

“Right, it’s not hard to find facts, but facts don’t tell you enough. We got his name from his fingerprints, and then his military record, his high school stuff, his hometown. But that’s just paperwork—I hate the word. Books, documents, photocopies. That’s not a man’s life. That just a bunch of paper.”

“It’s how the world works,” the woman said.

“That’s the trouble with the world,” Sharkey said.

“What’s the alternative?” the man said.

“I went to his hometown.”