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 ction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the
product of the authors imagination or are used ctitiously. 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
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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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 fteen 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 youve
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 werent in there for some freakish crime. And if you were
white, of course.
I took all that into consideration.

EEE

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 nish line rst.
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 fty
that had started this whole thing rolling.

III

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-

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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 denition, I was already rolling myself.
And nobody or nothing has stopped me since.

W
W
W

hat I needed was to be gone.

Gone, but still around.
Im the most patient man youll 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 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 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.

III

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 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

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37

TV all the time. High-prole, 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.

A
AA

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 didnt qualify as reliable, it didnt qualify as information.
Thats why I knew so much about Death Row. The rst man to
tell 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-ve-dollar money order so I
could have pictures of myself taken to mail back to them.

SSS

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.

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THATS HOW I ROLL

The Feds proved they had the money, all right. Tons of it. But
they werent 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 wasnt afraid of dying.
That shook them a little at rst, 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 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 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 rst, but some little
piece 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 taunting bone.

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SSS

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 rst.
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 who
had 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 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
couldnt see any harm in repeating them on camera. And the
money man didnt care, either . . . just as long as I told his people
rst.
But even with clean money coming in, I would still need one
thing 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 nd out what I wanted, what would make me talk,
they were busy telling me what they wanted.
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

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THATS HOW I ROLL

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 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.

A
AA

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 Id go along but I had one little extra condition. That must have scared them a bitI 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.

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