That's How I Roll: A Novel Read online

  You’d think that would be Homeland Security, but it was the FBI team who came out on top. Didn’t even break a sweat doing it, either. It wasn’t a blood-drawing fight; hardly a tussle, in fact. You could see who had the real muscle just by listening to them say “good morning” to each other.

  ATF was the toughest to push out. They only left after telling the FBI team that they “expected a complete report.” But the way they said it, it was the same way some guys mumble threats under their breath as they’re walking away after backing out of a fight.

  tep Three was revealed to me as soon as they trimmed down to one agency. The FBI couldn’t stop saying “RICO.” They soft-spoke it, like it was sacred.

  They told me I would be serving the people. Protecting thousands, all over the country. Doing the right thing.

  One of the older agents even told me that giving them what they wanted was my only path to forgiveness.

  I knew I was past any forgiveness. And if forgiveness was going to come from them, I didn’t even want it. Had this same government that now was trying to make me talk done the right thing when it had the chance, none of this would have happened at all.

  For that, I could never forgive them.

  ne of them was a black guy. He said if I told them everything I’d be a kind of savior. The people they wanted me to inform on were killing my community. Sucking the life out of it, parasites feeding on decent people. You could tell he hadn’t done any more research about this place than looking it up on a map.

  At first, nobody paid any real attention to me. They all had some routine they believed in, so that’s what each one went with. None of them even waited to see if I was buying it, just kept talking. Talking and nodding to themselves … like senile old men do in nursing homes.

  Finally, they stopped. All of them. Like they’d heard the same alarm clock go off.

  The next morning, they all sat around in this horseshoe, forming a wall around me to the front and sides. My back was already against the wall, so I was surrounded.

  They just sat there, waiting.

  I moved my head around the horseshoe, so each and every one of them would know I was including him in my deliberate silence.

  It was graveyard-quiet. I couldn’t hear them breathe. I guess they misunderstood my message—if I was ready to open the floodgates, they wouldn’t want to miss a drop.

  So I went around the horseshoe with my eyes again. Even slower this time. I had every molecule of their attention.

  “You know what’s lower than a maggot?” I said. “That would be a man who informs on his own partners. Everyone on a job takes some kind of risk. But if you’re caught, a man’s meant to play his own hand.”

  “How do you think we found you, Mr. Till?” one of the agents said.

  “I wouldn’t know about that,” I said, surprised it took them so long to try that sorry trick.

  “You want it spelled out, we can do that,” another one spoke up. “Would that do it? If we gave you the name of the man who gave us yours, would you be ready to—?”

  I stomped on the hand he’d been using to deal the marked cards from the bottom of the deck. I’d known enough men who’d been through this same game before to know exactly what to say to them.

  “If somebody gave you my name, why don’t you just ask him what you want to know?”

  They went quiet again. I let their silence settle before I said: “Sure. So you’re either bluffing, or the guy you got was some little messenger boy. Like a FedEx driver who knows where he dropped off a package, but couldn’t tell you what was in it, never mind who had it sent.”

  They just kept looking at me.

  “Anybody you got to talk to you, he doesn’t know anything,” I said. “A guy like that, he wouldn’t do any heavy lifting. All he’s good for is sticking up gas stations, running errands, getting drunk, and beating his wife. Probably has a long enough sheet so another felony would put him under the jail.”

  Watching their eyes was like reading a newspaper.

  “Sure … that’s probably it. You got this guy—the one you say gave you my name—but you got him for something else, didn’t you? Nothing to do with this other thing you keep asking me about.

  “Maybe he had warrants out. Maybe he was already on parole. But whatever it was—if you’re even telling me the truth—that would have been for his own crimes, not anyone else’s. So he can’t give you a thing. You could drill as deep as you wanted, you’d never hit a vein.”

  They still kept quiet. I guess it was some kind of technique: let me talk enough, maybe I’d drop something they could use.

  That wasn’t going to happen. But all that silence had already told me I was right, so there was no harm in telling them some more of what they already knew.

  “A man like that, he’d tell you everything,” I went on. “Spill his guts … if he had any to spill. Enough for a search warrant? Sure. But you already found enough stuff in my place to connect me to all kinds of things, didn’t you? Your problem is, there’s too much space between what you found and what you want. Especially what you want the most—names.

  “So you used your computers. Probably, by now, you can tell each other you know who hired me. At least you think so. Only problem is, you can tell each other all you want, but you can’t ever tell a jury.”

  An older guy with a short haircut—not like it was “styled” or anything, more like he didn’t want to be bothered with going for haircuts too often, so he told them to take off as much as they could—he had one of those ripsaw voices. He didn’t have to speak loud, because when he opened his mouth everybody else shut up.

  “You have to admire a man who won’t inform on his friends,” he said. A jab, just to watch my response.

  About ten seconds passed. When I still didn’t say anything, he threw the sucker punch he’d been storing up all along.

  “But the people we want aren’t your friends,” he said. “They aren’t your ‘partners,’ like you called them. You’re a hired hand. A day laborer. They don’t think any more of you than someone they’d hire to cut their lawns. Or scrub out their toilets.”

  I looked in his eyes—twin flecks of the ground we have around here, dark brown and rock-hard.

  “I know that,” I told him.

  That wasn’t the answer he was expecting. His face didn’t move a muscle, but I could feel the words hit him just the same.

  But this guy was too much of a professional to be taken out with one punch.

  “Then just tell me something, Esau,” he said. “Tell me why a man with your intelligence wouldn’t take this incredible opportunity. The opportunity we’re offering you, right now, here, today. Can you tell me that much? Just for my own understanding.”

  My hands rested on the wheels of my chair. Rested lightly. “That’s not how I roll,” I told him.

  And I smiled real friendly, so he’d know there was no hard feelings.

  ater that night, alone in my cell, I thought about what I’d said. There’s probably a lot of different ways to look at those parting words of mine.

  Maybe the Feds had meetings about that; I don’t know. As far as they were concerned, I guess those were my last words, in all respects.

  But just because I’d turned down their best offer didn’t mean they were going away. They couldn’t do that: there was a fire to feed, a legend to maintain.

  Kill a Fed and you die. You all die.

  But lurking shadows don’t scare me—I grew up under them.

  So, when Step Four came out a shade of gray, I plucked it out right away.

  very bomb-builder has his own style, but there are certain rules for all: handle the ingredients with respectful delicacy, and never close it up until everything needed is inside.

  That’s why I never stopped talking with the Feds. They had one of the ingredients I needed before I could wrap the package.

  Ever since I came to understand that money can buy more than just things—like cars or houses or big TVs—
I’d gone after it. I committed all kinds of wrong acts for all kinds of wrong people, all purely for the money. The money to buy safety for me and Tory-boy.

  I was all done with that kind of work, but I still needed money.

  It wasn’t just money I needed, it had to be clean money. I didn’t care what they called it, or whose name was on whatever paper they signed to get it, but the money would have to come from a source the Feds couldn’t ever trace back to those wrong people I had done all that wrong work for.

  I knew the Feds would be watching any money coming in to me. And even if I managed my way around that, I’d have to get the money back out.

  There’s ways of informing without actually saying a word. There’s ways you can draw a bright-red arrow pointing wherever you want it to. The people I’d worked for, they’d expect me to be aware of this.

  So I had to make sure they knew I was keeping faith with them. Because now the river was flowing in the opposite direction. A certain kind of work still had to be done. But instead of getting paid, I was fixing to make some payments.

  Maybe I should have said to myself, “Well, I was always loyal to them, why shouldn’t they do this one last thing for me?”

  But you don’t ask favors of your employers. That’s not the relationship. Nothing I had done for them had been an act of friendship. You might be friendly with a doctor, but you don’t walk into his office without expecting a bill when you leave.

  I never even considered the possibility. Even if they wouldn’t think of it as blackmail—and I wouldn’t blame them if they did—that’s just not how it’s done. I’d been paid fair and square for what I did, every time I did it. That’s where the old saying comes from: “If you don’t like the job, just put the bucket down.” My kind of work means that you put it down gently, not drop it and splash water all over everyone else.

  I’d had a goodly amount put away, in different places. But once they had locked me up, I’d been forced to spend a big chunk of that money.

  Most of that went toward keeping things in place while I waited them all out. That wasn’t so hard. I was used to doing business over the phone, and I could use the jailhouse pay phone anytime I wanted. After all, I hadn’t been actually convicted of anything yet, so I was what they call a “pre-trial detainee,” and that gives you certain rights.

  And moving money you already had stashed away wasn’t difficult at all—if the Feds couldn’t watch it come in, they couldn’t watch it leave. Which meant they couldn’t see where it landed.

  All I had to do was call certain people and tell them I was concerned about a project of mine: an ancient Ford I had found buried under a ton of garbage in this old barn that was on some property I’d purchased. That car was a pretty rare thing, especially because it still had the flathead V-8 it came with. I’d ask if they’d managed to find a certain part—like a fender or a headlight. For the people I called, those words were as easy to follow as a map.

  Paying our way to keep everything in place, that had always been costly. But there had never been a shortage of work, so it hadn’t been a real problem. In fact, even as expensive as certain things I’d needed had been, I’d still been able to put quite a bit aside.

  But now that I couldn’t work, there’d be no fresh money coming in, and no way to restock. I had to get my hands on one big chunk. No more installment plans for me; this one time, I had to buy what I wanted outright.

  I knew one way I could transfer money so the Feds couldn’t trace it in a thousand years, but that was something I could pull off only once.

  The people I was never going to name knew the position I was in, but they still trusted me. The way they proved that was by staying away. If they hadn’t trusted me, the first thing they would’ve done would’ve been to send in a lawyer. Only he wouldn’t be my lawyer; he’d be theirs. A spy.

  Had they done that, it would have hurt me deep. Might have insulted me enough to push me over to whatever side made me the best offer.

  By keeping their distance, they freed me from that choice. Maybe that was a show of respect, or maybe it was nothing more than them knowing I’d never trust any lawyer they sent. No more than I’d ever trusted them.

  But what it probably came down to was simple, brutal math: I might be holding some high cards, but they held the trump.

  My little brother.

  tep Five was kind of forced on me. Considering my income—all the government knew about was what I got from Disability—the judge said I couldn’t afford a private lawyer. That meant the State had to give me one. In fact, they gave me two.

  I didn’t want any special treatment from some judge that I’d never met—that was pretty typical of the way strangers had looked at me all my life. Strangers from around here, I mean. A lot of people I’d never met still seemed to know who I was when we got introduced.

  “Poor Esau,” that’s how I was looked upon. Not by way of money, but … the way I was born. What I was born with. The burdens I had to struggle with. I could feel them thinking how terrible that must be for me.

  And how glad they were it wasn’t them in that wheelchair.

  But after I finished researching it, I realized that judge wasn’t treating me special after all. I found out that the State always gives two lawyers to any indigent defendant in a capital case.

  I only met with those State-paid lawyers one time. “The first thing you need to understand is that we can’t do our job unless you’re totally honest with us,” I remember one saying before promising to come back in a few days.

  Before that happened, another bunch of lawyers showed up. They were a private group, they told me. Like missionaries, traveling around the country. Only their mission wasn’t to save souls from hellfire; it was to save bodies from the death penalty.

  They left me a bunch of stuff to read, the way a vacuum-cleaner salesman leaves his “literature” with everyone who’s not buying that day.

  That was because I told them I wasn’t going to take any prosecution deal. I was going to trial, no matter how heavy the prosecutor sweetened the pot. They really perked up at that—and worked hard at trying not to let me see it.

  I knew what was in their minds. It wasn’t that any of them expected me to be acquitted. But if I was going to trial, they had a good excuse to stick around. It was a capital case, after all. So even after—they said “if,” but I knew they must say it that way to every client they ever had—I was found guilty, there would still be what they called the “penalty phase.” And that was where they could outdo any court-appointed lawyers in the country, they told me.

  That was where they were going to step in and save me. In the penalty phase, whatever I had done wouldn’t be as important as why I did it. “That’s the most critical factor, Esau,” the girl they always brought with them told me. “We have to make the judge and the jury see you as an individual. They have to know who you are, from the inside out. Because the more they know you as a person, the less they’ll be willing to … hand down the ultimate sentence.”

  She just went on and on. They were going to show the jury how I really didn’t have any choice, the kind of life I’d had, blah-blah-blah.

  They didn’t know one single thing about any of that. All they knew was what anyone could see for themselves: I was born bad—the spine thing. They just assumed I was raised even worse, me being poor white trash, living on Disability, no education, no job, no prospects. “No hope,” she said, like that was a knockout punch.

  I’d rather take a bullet than pity, but how could these people know that? They didn’t know me.

  They didn’t even know how dumb they sounded. How could they be such great lawyers in capital cases if they had so much experience with the penalty phase?

  When I told them I wanted the death penalty, I thought they’d just pack up and go back to wherever they came from. Not a chance. They said that would be State-assisted suicide, and they weren’t about to let that happen.

  So I made it even clearer—they didn�
��t have any choice about what they’d let happen or not. That was up to me, not them. I reminded them that they weren’t my lawyers. I didn’t hire them, so I couldn’t fire them, but the court hadn’t appointed them, either. And wasn’t about to.

  What I didn’t tell them was that they reminded me of doctors standing around the bedside of a dying man, already counting up which of his organs they could salvage. I just told them to get lost.

  They kind of smirked when I said that. Especially the girl. She was way younger than me, dressed a little flashier than people around here consider seemly. Smelled good, too. She came over to where I was and sat real close.

  “The lawyers the State appointed for you have tried exactly three capital cases between the two of them,” she said, like she was sharing a secret.

  I just shrugged.

  “Mr. Diamond has tried over one hundred capital cases,” she said, her eyes getting all big and shiny over the man she was worshiping. “Only seven defendants were sentenced to death, and every one of those is still on appeal.”

  “They still won’t even let him in the courtroom without my say-so,” I told her.

  “It’s a question of qualifications, Esau. When the court hears—”

  “You went to Yale, Brooke?” I interrupted her. I didn’t even meet her eyes, just kept looking down at the sheet of paper with her name at the top. I wouldn’t normally have ever talked to a woman like that; I pride myself on my manners. But when a girl half my age calls me by my first name, like I was a child instead of a grown man, I admit I resented that.

  “Yes, but—”

  “That’s where you learned to be a lawyer?”

  “Oh, no. Law school is where you learn the law. It’s only down in the trenches where you learn how to practice it.” She glanced over at this Diamond guy, hoping for any little nod of approval—the only stake she was really playing for.

  “There’s no trenches around here,” I told her. “Just a lot of abandoned mines. I don’t need your little lectures, okay? You don’t know the people around here; I do. And the way they figure, if a man doesn’t take the stand and deny he did something, that’s the same as confessing to it.”