Read No Accident for Free Online

Alex said.
    “Pro’bly ’cause it’s too dark . . .” Del said. He replaced Pamela’s jacket and put on an old jacket of Alex’s, then returned to the kitchen and took another gulp from the beer bottle.
    “Very funny,” Alex said. He wished Del would get to the point instead of poking a stick at Alex’s problems. Alex’s problems weren’t in the same league as Del’s, no way. Not on the same planet. “Are we going to do this all night?”
    “Do what?”
    “Play ‘who’s on first’ while I try to guess why you came here.” Alex took a beer from the fridge and uncapped it with a bottle opener. The brothers stood an arm’s length apart, leaning against opposite walls in the small kitchen.
    Del smiled coyly, daring Alex not to care. “Why don’t you just ask me?”
    Alex shook his head. “Why did you come here, Del?”
    Del smiled again, this time more self-consciously. “I guess you could say I’ve got trouble with some bill collectors,” he said.
    Del’s words didn’t come as a surprise, but they still hit Alex in his gut. “Jesus. Again?”
    “Don’t start with me, Alex. You think this is easy for me?”
    “Apparently it’s easy enough for you to do every year or so.”
    Del gave Alex a doe-eyed look full of genuine hurt. To his own private embarrassment, Alex found himself wondering cynically whether this was the same routine Del gave to his bookies. “That’s not fair,” Del said. “This time it actually isn’t my fault.”
    “Wow. Where in the world do you get the money?”
    “Look, I’m a good customer, so some people fronted me the cash. I had a system this time, but the NCAA has been a roller coaster this year, and even when the favorites win it’s like they refuse to cover the spread—I mean, Stanford playing its second-stringers for almost the entire second half last week—that’s not sportsmanship against a weaker opponent, it’s like giving the middle finger to sports fans nationwide. So like, so much for my system—you still follow basketball, right?”
    Alex ignored the question. “It’s not a system, it’s gambling.”
    “It’s a fucking system, Alex”—he stopped himself and lowered his voice. The doe-eyed look was gone. Now Del’s eyes showed the glassy intensity of a starved dog’s. “It’s a system, a proven system that I got from a guy who has made millions betting on sports. Millions, Alex. You don’t chase the sexy long shot, you look for a lot of little inefficiencies and exploit them. See, you can use math to model basketball scores: there’s a mean, and a variance. It’s like a bell curve, right?” Del made the shape of a bell curve with his palms. “And the idea is you stay right in the hump of that bell curve, and the odds will work for you.”
    “But you didn’t,” Alex said.
    Del swallowed a large mouthful of beer. “But I did, Alex. I did. But like I said, this season has just been crazy. Outside the mean.”
    Alex didn’t want to hear any more. It was the same story Del had been telling for the past seven years, but with different words. It was like the Bach etudes Del used to play on the piano before he gave up music for basketball —Del’s crises were all variations on a theme. “Del, I don’t have any money.”
    Del narrowed his eyes in suspicion. “Bullshit. Since when?”
    “Since the real estate market went south and one of my renters moved out. I’m just trying to keep my own head above water.”
    “Yeah, that’s convenient.”
    Alex rolled his eyes. A secret part of Alex was relieved that poverty meant he didn’t have to feel guilty about not helping Del—or, for that matter, feel guilty about helping him. “Sure, Del, I engineered a global recession just to spite you.”
    “You know what I mean,” Del said, but Alex really didn’t. As kids they could almost have passed for twins; Del was always tall for his age. In sports with the neighborhood boys it was like they could read each other’s minds —Del