That's How I Roll: A Novel Read online

  “The State can’t—”

  “They can’t say that’s the reason, that’s all. And, me, I’m not taking any stand, so …”

  That’s when her Mr. Diamond kind of strolled over and put his hand on the girl’s shoulder. I thought she was going to swoon.

  “It’s too soon to make that kind of decision, Esau. Way too soon.” He had one of those resonant voices, but he used it to talk down to me—like he was explaining something simple to someone even simpler.

  I hadn’t much cared for him before, but now I had a true dislike. Not just for treating me like I was slow, but for trying to tell me he was in charge. In charge of my life.

  I didn’t answer him. Just nailed his eyes until they dropped. Compared with other men I’d stared down, he was soft as custard.

  There was another man on their team. He wasn’t a lawyer, they were quick to tell me, to make sure I didn’t mistake him for one of them. No, he was their investigator. The best in the business, they said.

  This man was wearing a suit, but nobody would take him for a lawyer.

  Black suit, white shirt, black tie. Nothing flashy, but anyone he approached, they’d know he was taking them seriously, coming at them respectfully.

  He was a real tall, skinny guy. The minute he opened his mouth, I knew he was, well, not from around here, but from around around here, if you get what I mean. I could feel his eyes pulling at me while the boss was talking. I glanced over and I saw him shake his head. Not the way you do when you’re saying “no” to someone, more like when you’re feeling sorry for them.

  I knew that look real well. Only he wasn’t looking at me; he was looking at the great Mr. Diamond.

  I think he must’ve said something to them later. I’m sure of it, actually. Because, the next time they came, everyone who spoke to me was careful to call me “Mr. Till.”

  I appreciated that not one bit—for them, it wasn’t showing respect; it was just strategy. And it didn’t change anything. Every fancy clump of words they peddled in front of me only added up to another No Sale.

  Four days of them was way too much. But it had given me time to gather some information. They’ve got an Internet connection in the Sheriff’s office—the jail is right behind it, in the same building—and the folks on the night shift were always nice enough to look up whatever I asked them after those lawyers had left for the day.

  As soon as I had all the information about them that I wanted, I just told them: “Go find somebody who snatched a little girl, had his fun with her, then chopped her up. That’s the kind of human garbage who’d want you all rushing in to save him from the chair. Or the needle, or whatever they use wherever he is.”

  At that, Mr. Diamond got up. Like that was a signal, they all did the same thing. He tossed a card on the little wood table in front of me, like one of those old Have Gun–Will Travel reruns me and Tory-boy used to watch all the time.

  “If you ever change your mind, all you have to do is give us a call. We’ll take care of everything from there.”

  He didn’t call me by my name—first or last—when he said that. He didn’t look back, either. Why would he? None of that whole display was aimed at me.

  I left his card for the guards to pick up. Maybe one of them would find a use for it someday.

  very autumn, the trees blaze with color. When one of those fiery leaves falls to the ground, it holds on to its color for a while. But, even though you can’t tell just by looking at it, that leaf’s already dead.

  That was me, that leaf. One way or another, I had lied to every one of those lawyers. It was always my plan to take the stand and testify. That was the only sure way I knew to tell the people who needed telling that I’d never tell on them.

  It wasn’t death itself I wished for. If that’s all I’d wanted, I could have managed it on my own easy enough. What I wanted was the sentence of death. That would leave me in control long enough to make sure my last plan had gathered enough speed to keep rolling on its own without me pushing it from behind.

  Staying alive in prison, that’s not a sure thing. And I wouldn’t have access to anything that would even up the odds. So I had to find the safest place to do my watching from.

  The safest place in prison is Death Row.

  That was the advantage of me knowing I was that still-fiery leaf. Lying on the ground, waiting for the weather to change. I knew any death-penalty case would drag out for years and years. It didn’t matter if there was real doubt about a man’s guilt, or none at all—one appeal after another was a sure thing.

  Roger Lucas lived a few miles from where me and Tory-boy did. Roger killed a clerk who tried to stop him from robbing a convenience store. Then he went into the back of the place and killed the two other people he found there. Shot each of them in the head because he was worried they might have seen him shoot the clerk.

  No one will ever know what they saw, but the security cameras didn’t miss a thing. All that happened about fifteen years ago, and Roger Lucas is still waiting for his number to come up.

  I’d never been in prison, but I knew plenty of men who had, and they’d all told me the same thing: if you were sick or weak or old, you’d be better off on Death Row than any other place in prison. It’s the only way to guarantee you get a cell to yourself. And those cells, they’re bigger and nicer than regular ones. If you’ve got the money, you can have a TV and order books and hobby-craft materials … all kinds of worthwhile stuff.

  Even the guards were supposed to be pretty decent, as long as you weren’t in there for some freakish crime. And if you were white, of course.

  I took all that into consideration.

  ven with all the crimes I was planning to admit to, I knew years and years would go by before they ever came for me. And with this disease I carry, my life was a two-horse race—the only question was which kind of death would cross the finish line first.

  In fact, the more I think on it, the more I’m convinced that it was hearing that doctor tell me I was unlikely to ever see age fifty that had started this whole thing rolling.

  remember reading the dictionary when I was just a kid. I could only do it during the day back then, so I just skimmed it, looking for words that called to me.

  “Inertia,” that was my favorite of all. It means that once something starts rolling, it’s going to keep rolling unless some stronger outside force stops it.

  By the time I read that definition, I was already rolling myself. And nobody or nothing has stopped me since.

  hat I needed was to be gone.

  Gone, but still around.

  I’m the most patient man you’ll ever meet. You learn patience when you have to do everything for yourself. When nothing about you past the end of your spine works, it takes a lot of time to do even the smallest things.

  But it wasn’t patience that kept me from killing myself. I needed folks to always say, “Esau Till didn’t give it up; he made them come and get it.”

  If you leave that kind of name behind you, burned in deeper than anyone could ever chisel a tombstone, it counts for a lot.

  Others have done so. And it spooks folks seriously whenever they hear their names said aloud.

  was pretty sure I knew how to make all that happen. The trick was to keep the lawyers away.

  The free lawyers, that is. Some would be the kind who didn’t care about the case, just the cause. Like that Mr. Diamond and his followers. They’re so against the death penalty that they end up specializing in defending people who need killing.

  You know the kind I’m talking about—those who kill just because they like doing it. Only makes sense that normal folks would enjoy killing them.

  In fact, I was counting on that.

  The other kind of free lawyer would be one of those you see on TV all the time. “High-profile,” they were called. Didn’t matter if they won or lost, people would remember their names. Which was the whole point.

  Problem with their kind is that you lose all control. No telling
what they’d say when they went in front of the camera.

  Besides, it wasn’t their name I needed people to remember, it was mine.

  ll my life, I gathered up information like I was harvesting a crop. A man who buys a pistol may never have to pull the trigger, but it comforts him to carry it around. Some places more than others.

  Every piece of information I gathered, I tested, every chance I got. If it didn’t qualify as reliable, it didn’t qualify as information.

  That’s why I knew so much about Death Row. The first man to tell me about it, his brother was there at the time. When he told me that some of those men have fans—I mean, like a movie star might have—I didn’t believe him. But enough other folks said the same thing that I eventually came to accept it.

  Serial killers, especially the ones who killed girls, they had women wanting to marry them. That’s the truth, too, although I never believed it until I started getting those same kind of letters myself.

  I surely had a high enough body count to qualify as a serial killer and mass murderer, both. But I didn’t need any fans; I needed money. Real money, not some twenty-five-dollar money order so I could have pictures of myself taken to mail back to them.

  tep Six was a tumbler falling into place. You couldn’t see it with your eyes; you couldn’t hear it without a stethoscope—but if you’d worked with locks enough, you could feel it.

  The Feds proved they had the money, all right. Tons of it. But they weren’t getting up off one dime unless I gave them information. Hard information. The kind that would get me a lot of company in the Death House.

  Oh, they could see easily enough that I wasn’t afraid of dying. That shook them a little at first, but not all that much. They had studied how to make people tell them things. That’s why they kept upping the offer, but always held it just out of my reach, like taunting a dog to jump higher if he really wanted the bone.

  That might be a useful tactic against most killers, but it was doomed against me. The Feds never did understand what would have worked. And I would have died a thousand times before I’d ever let them know.

  If they’d ever known what button to push, I would have sung like a whole aviary. But what they had wouldn’t draw a peep from a born canary.

  “This is the way it works,” one of them told me. “You give us something. Not everything we want, not at first, but some little piece of it. We check it out. If it turns out you’re being truthful with us, then we release a little piece of what you want. That’s only fair, right?”

  I didn’t answer him. I already had that bad feeling you get inside you when you know a promise is a lie. A girl’s smile, a man’s word—it doesn’t matter—there were times when you just knew they wouldn’t ever prove true.

  “Then you turn over a little bigger piece,” the Fed went on. “And we get you a bigger chunk of the money. It can go as high as you take it, Esau—Uncle Sam’s got all the money there is.”

  I think he knew all along I wasn’t going to do any trading with him, but it was his job to try, so he kept at it.

  Just like that dog who couldn’t quite manage to grab that taunting bone.

  tep Seven came after days of their useless hammering, as if I didn’t understand that the Feds weren’t going to give me the money I needed without me giving certain people up first.

  I didn’t panic. I still had money enough to make certain nobody bothered Tory-boy for quite a while. And if there’s one thing I know how to do, it’s wait.

  I was almost three months behind bars before someone who had all the money I needed showed up. I hadn’t reached out for him. I wouldn’t have even known where to look. He just came.

  He had the money, all right. But he was a man who was used to being accommodated. He said they—he meant the TV people he fronted for—they wanted to put me in front of a camera. Kind of like an acting job, he said. They’d call it an “interview.” I’d have to pretend some plastic-faced fool had broken me down, sliced me open with his scalpel-sharp questions, then pulled back the skin to show everyone the truth underneath.

  Since I was planning to tell a pack of lies in court anyway, I couldn’t see any harm in repeating them on camera. And the money man didn’t care, either … just as long as I told his people first.

  But even with clean money coming in, I would still need one thing only the Feds could give me. And I couldn’t let them know how bad I had to have that one thing, or they’d have me on a steel leash.

  I worked it over and over again in my mind, trying to strengthen it, the same way you do with a muscle. And, sure enough, I came up with a perfect package. All the while the Feds were working so hard trying to find out what I wanted, what would make me talk, they were busy telling me what they wanted.

  I don’t mean who paid me to do what, I mean that special piece. The one they wanted bad. All I had to do was listen.

  Step Eight came when I realized I could give the Feds what I knew they wanted more than anything else, and still keep faith with the people who had hired me for all the jobs I was never going to talk about.

  A simple formula: if I could just get the right lies accepted by one side, that would prove my word was good to the other.

  But that formula was easier to memorize than put into practice. For that, I had to move the TV man off his square—and he was standing his ground like a mother badger with cubs behind her.

  “Esau, you don’t have to tell us a thing about the crime itself. If you just talk about your life, what happened when you were just a little kid, how you raised your younger brother all by yourself … well, that alone could be worth the kind of money you’ve been asking for.”

  I didn’t like that word “could.” I wasn’t about to be giving them enough leverage to keep raising the bar, either. And they weren’t going for any kind of money-in-front deal.

  So I had to sell them. And I knew that the only way that ever works is if the other man thinks he’s selling you.

  Life Story: As Told from Death Row, they wanted to call it. It kind of disgusted me, but the TV people outbid all comers, even one of those newspapers that have stuff like two-headed monkeys on their front page.

  I thought I had milked it as dry as I could, but when they learned I was going to the same Death House that had once held the Beast, that started them slobbering like dogs watching a butcher cut up a side of beef. Everything changed, then.

  Still, the TV people held their place, made sure they were the last bidder standing.

  So I told them that I’d go along but I had one little extra condition. That must have scared them a bit—I could see the relief spread over their faces when I spelled it out. The one extra condition was that they had to pay all the money direct into a trust I had already set up for Tory-boy.

  o I was going to do it. Sit in front of their cameras as long as they wanted, and spin out the same lies I was planning to tell in court.

  I was already inside my own balance when I finally made the deal. That’s my lord and savior, balance. If that revelation hadn’t come to me long ago, I wouldn’t be waiting on my own execution as I write this down.

  That’s why I cleared all those lies I was planning to tell the TV people with the Feds. They weren’t happy about it, but they went along … provided I didn’t change what I was going to say on the witness stand.

  I was almost done. Still, I knew I had to keep everything in balance, right to the end.

  tep Nine was a surprise. That’s when I really called on my balance. I had no choice—the negotiations hit a snag. Put straight up, I just couldn’t risk the TV people editing what I was going to say. And they couldn’t risk putting me on live, since they had to pay all that money into the trust before I said one word in front of a camera.

  We stayed stalemated, with the clock ticking down. Finally, I saw a way to lure them in. I sifted through a giant pile of garbage at rocket speed. Easy enough, because I knew exactly what I needed: an investigative reporter. Almost all of those were entertainment puffer
s or celebrity snoopers, so there weren’t but a few real possibilities.

  I picked a guy who had a long track record of exposing things, bringing them to light. He’d just won a Pulitzer Prize for a story about a fearsome disease that actually could be prevented except that the vaccine wasn’t carried by most doctors. In fact, it wasn’t even mentioned by the medical people, all the way up to the Surgeon General’s office.

  Shingles, that was the disease. If you’d had chicken pox as a child—and most do—you were at risk for getting the shingles later on. The older you were, the greater the risk. Shingles can cause horrible pain. It’s a kind of herpes; causes a rash that’s so distinctive they can make the diagnosis just by looking at it. If you’re unlucky enough that the rash reaches your face, you could even lose an eye.

  And there’s a vaccine to protect against it. A vaccine nobody ever talks about. Not even those giant national organizations that claim they’re representing the elderly.

  Everybody over sixty should be vaccinated, the same as they do for the flu, or pneumonia. And even if you had the shingles and it got cured, a vaccination could keep it from coming back.

  So how come they kept this vaccine such a secret? It was this simple: Medicaid wouldn’t always reimburse doctors for using it. Some insurance companies wouldn’t pay for it, either.

  Pure logic doesn’t leave room for feelings. To a doctor, “heart” is an organ that pumps blood. If he isn’t going to be guaranteed payment for doing some medical procedure—around here, you spell that “Medicaid”—he’s not doing it.

  A cliché never takes hold unless it had some traction to start with. Like the hillbillies with bad teeth you see in horror movies—Medicaid doesn’t pay for dental work. And meth isn’t exactly a cavity fighter, either.

  When this reporter—Victor Trey was his name—broke the story, it was like the shingles rash breaking out on the government’s own skin. They took so much heat that Congress ran in and changed the Medicaid law faster than they’d take a bribe. When I read that, I knew Mr. Trey was the man for what I had in mind.