An Exclusive Excerpt From That's How I Roll by Andrew Vachss

7/29/2019 An Exclusive Excerpt From That's How I Roll by Andrew Vachss

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THATS HOW I ROLL

Andrew Vachss

VINTAGE CRIME / BLACK LIZARD

Vintage Books

A Division of Random House, Inc.

New York


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FIRST VINTAGE CRIME/BLACK LIZARD EDITION, JANUARY 2013

Copyright 2012 by Andrew Vachss

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division

of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada

Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by

Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2012.

Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Crime/Black Lizard and colophon

are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the

product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to

actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Pantheon edition as follows:

Vachss, Andrew H.Thats how I roll / Andrew Vachss.

p. cm.

1. AssassinsFiction. 2. Death row inmatesFiction. 3. Political corruption

Fiction. 4. IncestPsychological aspectsFiction. I. Title.

PS3572.A33T53 2011 813'.54dc22 2011013503

Vintage ISBN: 978-0-307-94867-0

Book design by Robert C. Olsson

www.weeklylizard.com

Printed in the United States of America

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35

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

didnt miss a thing. All that happened about fifteen years ago, and

Roger Lucas is still waiting for his number to come up.

Id never been in prison, but I knew plenty of men who had,

and theyd all told me the same thing: if you were sick or weak

or old, youd be better off on Death Row than any other place in

prison. Its the only way to guarantee you get a cell to yourself.

And those cells, theyre bigger and nicer than regular ones. If youvegot 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 werent 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 racethe only question

was which kind of death would cross the finish line first.In fact, the more I think on it, the more Im 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 some-

EEE

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THATS HOW I ROLL

thing starts rolling, its 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.

Im the most patient man youll ever meet. You learn patiencewhen 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 wasnt patience that kept me from killing myself. I

needed folks to always say, Esau Till didnt give it up; he made

them come and get it.

If you leave that kind of name behind you, burned in deeperthan 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 didnt

care about the case, just the cause. Like that Mr. Diamond and his

followers. Theyre so against the death penalty that they end up

specializing in defending people who need killing.

You know the kind Im talking aboutthose who kill justbecause 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

WWW

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37

TV all the time. High-profile, they were called. Didnt 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 theyd say when they went in front of the camera.

Besides, it wasnt 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 trig-

ger, 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 didnt qualify as reliable, it didnt qualify as information.

Thats why I knew so much about Death Row. The first man totell me about it, his brother was there at the time. When he told me

that some of those men have fansI mean, like a movie star might

haveI didnt 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. Thats 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 didnt 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 couldnt see it with

your eyes; you couldnt hear it without a stethoscopebut if youd

worked with locks enough, you could feel it.

AAA

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The Feds proved they had the money, all right. Tons of it. But

they werent getting up off one dime unless I gave them informa-

tion. Hard information. The kind that would get me a lot of com-

pany in the Death House.

Oh, they could see easily enough that I wasnt 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. Thats why they kept

upping the offer, but always held it just out of my reach, like taunt-

ing a dog to jump higher if he reallywanted the bone.

That might be a useful tactic against most killers, but it was

doomed against me. The Feds never did understand what wouldhave worked. And I would have died a thousand times before Id

ever let them know.

If theyd ever known what button to push, I would have sung

like a whole aviary. But what they had wouldnt 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 littlepiece of it. We check it out. If it turns out youre being truthful with

us, then we release a little piece of what you want. Thats only fair,

right?

I didnt answer him. I already had that bad feeling you get

inside you when you know a promise is a lie. A girls smile, a mans

wordit doesnt matterthere were times when you just knew

they wouldnt 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, EsauUncle Sams got all the money there is.

I think he knew all along I wasnt going to do any trading with

him, but it was his job to try, so he kept at it.

Just like that dog who couldnt quite manage to grab that taunt-

ing bone.


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tep Seven came after days of their useless hammering, as if

I didnt understand that the Feds werent going to give me the

money I needed without me giving certain people up first.

I didnt panic. I still had money enough to make certain nobody

bothered Tory-boy for quite a while. And if theres one thing I know

how to do, its wait.

I was almost three months behind bars before someone whohad all the money I needed showed up. I hadnt reached out for

him. I wouldnt 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 theyhe meant the TV people

he fronted forthey wanted to put me in front of a camera. Kind

of like an acting job, he said. Theyd call it an interview. Id have

to pretend some plastic-faced fool had broken me down, sliced meopen 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

couldnt see any harm in repeating them on camera. And the

money man didnt care, either . . . just as long as I told hispeople

first.

But even with clean money coming in, I would still need onething only the Feds could give me. And I couldnt let them know

how bad I had to have that one thing, or theyd 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 theywanted.

I dont 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

SSS


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THATS HOW I ROLL

knew they wanted more than anything else, and stillkeep 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 squareand he was

standing his ground like a mother badger with cubs behind her.

Esau, you dont 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 youve been asking for.

I didnt like that word could. I wasnt about to be giving them

enough leverage to keep raising the bar, either. And they werent

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 hes selling you.

LifeStory: 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 Id go along but I had one little extra con-dition. That must have scared them a bitI could see the relief

spread over their faces when I spelled it out. The one extra condi-

tion was that they had to pay all the money direct into a trust I had

already set up for Tory-boy.

AAA


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