That’s How I Roll: A Novel (39 page)

No matter how I phrase this, it still comes down to trust. That’s a very complicated thing, trust. I’d felt obligated to kill Jackhammer Judakowski for what he’d done to Miss Jayne Dyson. And a big part of that obligation was that she had trusted me to do it.

Not in so many words, maybe. Even with the life she had to live, how could she have expected it to end as ugly as it did? No, the trust obligation came when she handed me a stick of dynamite late one night.

“I was going to be a secretary, Esau. Imagine that. Ah, it doesn’t
matter, not now. See this? I bought this steno pad before I even enrolled in school. And I never wrote a single word in it. But I did bring it with me when I decided to come home, and now it’s about full up.

“It’s not one of those ‘little black books,’ but it holds the same information you’d expect to find in one, understand?”

“Why are you giving this to me, Jayne?”

“I’m not giving it to you, Esau. I’m asking you to hold it for me. Hold it in a safe place, a place only you know about.

“If you go first, I won’t need it. And, most likely, you won’t need it if I go before you. But if anything should happen to me—something bad, I mean; something deliberately done—the name of the man who caused it to happen will be in my steno pad. You’ll know what to do with it then, won’t you?”

“Yes” is all I said. But I knew I was taking on a debt with that one word. And I wasn’t lying when I told her, “I’d be proud, Jayne.”

o I’ve got even more than the records I kept on myself and my work. Judakowski is already finished; in fact, he was gone before I ever looked in Jayne’s steno pad. And now that steno pad was a weapon all by itself. It might not put anyone in jail, or get them killed, but it would sure teach certain people the high price of hypocrisy.

ike I said: trust. Who else but Miss Webb would I have left any of this with?

ut I wouldn’t have been able to sleep a single night if I hadn’t allowed for possibilities beyond the knowledge of any mortal man. So, if Miss Webb doesn’t show up in person to claim all three of her copies by a certain date, well, there’s two more copies. And those just go out by themselves.

If she goes where I told her to go, she’ll not only find the books, she’ll find a laptop computer, too. All she’d have to do is plug it in and turn it on. A screen would come up, with only two choices:
SEND
or
DO *NOT* SEND
.

Miss Webb knows, should she press that
SEND
link, my story, my
true
story, will be all over the world in minutes. I told her a long while back that I couldn’t tell the total truth without her name coming out—I cautioned her about that, more than once.

But she never wavered. That was the way she wanted it, too, she told me.

“I’ll make sure of it, Esau. I swear on my heart. I’ll make sure of every single thing, even if I have to go down in your mine with Tory-boy and hold his hand while he presses that button.”

hat’s the wonder of knowing the date of your own death in advance. I could leave in peace, because I had protected my baby brother all the way up to the time when he’d join me.

And I had people watching. People who knew they had to wait six months to hear from Miss Webb. If they didn’t get a
DO *NOT* SEND
message by then, they were going to launch my last bomb.

Over the years, I had gotten to be friends with two different Internet investigators. One’s out in the Mojave somewhere, the other’s in Norway. They both might be a little off-center, but they
wouldn’t have to do any more with what I’d be putting in their hands than Tory-boy would if he ended up down in our mine.

Just push a button, and wait for the explosion.

don’t want to be associated with the other men in this place, not even in the minds of whoever might be reading this.

Yes, there’s some here that the State shouldn’t be killing. Why kill a man who heard voices inside his head commanding him, voices he couldn’t disobey? Why kill a man whose IQ is so low that he doesn’t even know where he is, or what’s waiting on him?

I feel sympathy for those men, but no kinship with them. I knew what I was doing when I did it, and the result was the one I’d intended.

So, if anyone’s reading this, they know there was more than enough good reasons for the State to take my life.

Some are here—on Death Row, I mean—only because they had lousy lawyers. One guy, he and his partner robbed a store. They took one of the clerks with them, to make sure nobody called the police until they set her free. Only that never happened.

The partner got a life sentence in exchange for telling the police where the girl’s body was hidden. The other one, the one that’s going to be executed, he didn’t get the same deal. Which is double-wrong, because the guy who got the break was the one who raped that girl before he shot her in the head. At least that’s what the man here says.

I do agree that what happened in that case was unfair. But I don’t think it should be fixed by giving the condemned man a life sentence. No, what I think is that his partner should be right here with him.

The mystical word on Death Row is “DNA.” There must be over a dozen men here who claim to be purely innocent. All it would take to set them free is this magic test.

I wonder if they actually believe that.

t was Miss Jayne Dyson who showed me that I wasn’t really dead below my waist. But it was Miss Webb who showed me that my heart wasn’t closed to everyone but Tory-boy, as I’d always believed.

That’s why, if you’re reading this, you get to hear me say what only one other living soul has ever heard.

I love you, Evangeline
.

he guards have promised they’ll let me wheel myself into the Execution Chamber. We shook hands on that, and I believe they will keep their word.

I’ve come to think highly of some of them, and I think they regard me the same way. Not all of them, of course. The ones who tried to get me to give them something they could sell, they finally gave up. “No hard feelings,” they assured me. But even if they were telling the truth, they were only talking about their own feelings.

’ve been rotting long enough. I don’t need any more stays of execution. I only waited this long until I could be sure my last bomb was built, and that the detonator was in the right hands.