Cook The paired numbers shot through his mind in quick metallic bursts, the dry slap of bullets hitting beach sand. It is the way he’d lived, like a man under fire, raked by numbers, no trees to shield him, no foxholes, only the endless open beach, with no sun or moon above him, just the melancholy stare of her sea-blue eyes. “Who is he, anyway?” “Eddie Spellacy.” He heard his brother Jack’s true voice for the first time in almost thirty years, heard it as it actually sounded, not over the phone, but here, beside his bed. “Eddie the Odds, they called him.” There was a hopeless sorrow in Jack’s voice, a yearning for things to have turned out differently, and so he didn’t open his eyes because he knew that his brother’s long sad face would break his heart. “He was always figuring the odds.” “The odds on what?”
