That’s How I Roll: A Novel (8 page)

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 puffers 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.