He had first taken her to be a thin boy, but he saw that her hair was piled into her baseball cap. She was dark, thin-faced, Filipino, with large dark eyes, and seemed too small, too thin, for the fat tire on the big wheel, but she controlled its movement, balancing it on top with the flat of her hand. In contrast to Keoki, her overalls were clean. Steadying and stopping the wheel, she looked at the car as though wishing to claim it.

“Totaled, right?”

“So this man says.”

She made a knowing face, widening her eyes.

“Georgie, he wants it, eh?”

“That was one primo year,” Keoki said.

“You wen’ buss up someone, yah?”

Sharkey was startled by her confident statement, having taken no more than ten seconds blinking at it to size up the car. He said, “How do you know?”

“Koko,” she said.

“Whaaa!” Keoki wailed. “Where you see koko?”

And the woman approached the car and with a thin hovering hesitant finger pointed daintily to a smudge of brown like a scabbed blister on the jagged rip of the front fender.

Sharkey said, “You mean blood?”

“Poor buggah blood,” the woman said, and used her finger to flick a stray wisp of hair over her ear.

“Cannot,” Keoki said, and turned away in disgust. “No can buy ’um.”

“How much you want for dis?” the woman said.

“I guess you’re not superstitious.”

“This car kapu,” Keoki said. “It a bad ting. It stay wid human blood. Koko bring trouble”—and it sounded worse in his pronouncing it tchrouble.

“How much?” the woman said.

Sharkey said, “I don’t know. If it’s totaled, you do the math. The estimate to fix it, subtracted from the Blue Book value. I’ll sell it to you for that, or best offer. I’ll buy a new one.”

“Suppose was da poor buggah head?” Keoki said, rocking in his greasy overalls in a clumsy anguish. “Da head is sacred kine. Full of mana. Da mana is on the car, but it a curse, yah. Why you no tell me you hit one buggah?”

“It was a drunk homeless guy on an old bike. Maybe a tweaker.”

“He wen’ make?”

Sharkey sucked his teeth, tossing his head at the same time, sound and movement indicating yes.

“Josie, you take da car. I no want ’um.” He grimaced, averting his eyes from the smudge of blood.

“Deal.” With the heel of her hand, graceful but firm, she pushed the wheel she’d been steadying beside her, and when it was rolling trotted next to it to a car canted upon a red upraised jack.

When Sharkey, half laughing, told Olive what had happened at the garage, she said, “Are you surprised? Hawaiians have a thing about blood and bones—any body part of a human is power. And potential trouble. That was the first lesson I learned at the hospital here.”