That's How I Roll

by Andrew Vachss

  ALSO BY ANDREW VACHSS

  THE BURKE SERIES

  Flood

  Strega

  Blue Belle

  Hard Candy

  Blossom

  Sacrifice

  Down in the Zero

  Footsteps of the Hawk

  False Allegations

  Safe House

  Choice of Evil

  Dead and Gone

  Pain Management

  Only Child

  Down Here

  Mask Market

  Terminal

  Another Life

  OTHER NOVELS

  Shella

  The Getaway Man

  Two Trains Running

  Haiku The Weight

  SHORT-STORY COLLECTIONS

  Born Bad

  Everybody Pays

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, incidents, and places either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2012 by Andrew Vachss

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon

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

  Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Pantheon Books and colophon are registered

  trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Vachss, Andrew H.

  That’s how I roll / Andrew Vachss.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-90713-4

  1. Assassins—Fiction. 2. Death row inmates—Fiction.

  3. Political corruption—Fiction.

  4. Incest—Psychological aspects—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3572.A33T53 2011 813′.54—dc22 2011013503

  www.pantheonbooks.com

  Jacket photograph by Don Farrall/Getty Images

  Jacket design by Christopher Brand

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  First Page

  About the Author

  my beloved brother Olaf

  29 December 2010 @ 11:30 p.m.

  he chose the night to depart

  bringing a new star to the sky

  a warrior’s star, casting its own light

  a guidepost to the path of righteousness

  a warning to predators

  and now the True North for all our tribe

  my brother:

  welcomed by Odin

  waiting for us

  and always, always watching

  My name is Esau Till.

  What I’ve put down here isn’t some “Death Row Diary,” like the bloodsuckers wanted to pay me to write. Don’t look for a last-minute confession to crimes I was never caught for. Or for the apology some think I owe.

  This is a bomb. The last one I’ll ever build. You’ll never even know it exists unless someone stumbles over the tripwire I left behind.

  That will happen only if I am betrayed. I don’t expect that, but I still have to plan for it.

  No bomb I made ever failed, which is why people paid me so much to build them. In my chosen line of work, you have to earn a reputation before you start earning real money.

  My bombs were always custom-tailored to the job. Now, the only ingredients I have for building this last one are my own words. Those words should be more than enough, but they won’t ignite unless they are believed.

  I know if I’m caught in one single lie people might well disbelieve my entire account … and they’d be entitled to do so. All it takes is a single clutch of termite eggs to bring down a whole house.

  People say the truth can’t be killed. Maybe not. But from my own experience, I know it can be buried so deep it might as well never have existed at all.

  Oh, you might get your ear close enough to the ground to hear it ticking. But no matter how close you listen, you’re still just hearing strange noises deep down in the dark.

  Your eyes won’t help, either. The brighter the light you shine, the more the darkness thickens.

  Only the most powerful explosive will light the way. So this bomb must be like the most carefully constructed house.

  I know it must stand up to the most microscopic examination. And it must stay standing, no matter what attempts are made to defuse it.

  For this house, each brick will be embedded in the cement of gospel truth. No flood will ever carry it away. No fire will ever incinerate it. And the most powerful wrecking ball would just bounce right off.

  I never broke my word when I was alive. That’s the one thing I get to take with me, and I intend on doing just that. I’m building this house out of nothing but truth, and no more powerful explosive has ever been invented. Once revealed, it will be denied by some, and “explained” by others.

  But it can’t be changed.

  When that last button is pushed, the roof will fly off. Inside, just a few empty rooms.

  And a map.

  I’m marking that map with an “X” for each spot.

  If you’re looking for buried treasure, don’t waste your time. But if you dig deep enough, if you keep digging, you will find that pure truth I promised. It’s all there.

  Whether that truth frees you or destroys you no longer matters to me.

  I’m done.

  e and Tory-boy, neither of us came out right. I was born with this spine thing. I’m past forty years old, and I’ve never once stood on my own feet.

  Tory came along about eight years after me. He was a big, handsome baby. It took a while before you could tell he carried the same curse I did.

  I’ve been protecting Tory-boy all his life. I won’t stop doing that just because the State is getting ready to end mine.

  Nobody expects anything less from me. They have confidence that I’ll come up with some way to keep right on protecting my little brother.

  People who truly know me, they know I’ll find a way. It took a lot of time and a lot of lives, but I finally forced that knowledge upon them—etched it too deep into their minds for them to ever believe otherwise.

  f you’re reading this, you’ll come to know my life.

  Not the fairy story I told on TV, or in court. You’ll know what parts I left out of those stories.

  By that, I don’t mean the crimes I never spoke of, or how I got them done. What good would it do if I explained how I could make our satellite dish throw out a plasma-cutter beam? People already know enough ways to kill other people. They seem to be getting better at it. The whole human race, I mean.

  So, when you come across certain people’s names in here, keep in mind that I am breaking no vows. Yes, I know I’m building a graveyard. But I’m really only marking the tombstones—those who betrayed me put themselves beneath them.

  I don’t feel any guilt. When it comes to such things, I don’t feel much of anything. And what I do feel is no more complicated than this: I know the difference between the best possible result and the best result possible.

  The best possible result would be for everyone to keep their word. Then my Tory-boy would still be protected, even long after I’m gone.

  But if certain people break their word—and you’ll not be reading this if they haven’t done so—all that’s left is the best result possible.

  Revenge.

  never trusted a word out of a government man’s mouth from the time I was old enough to understand how they were to blame for everything that had happened to all of us.

  If the government could look away from—well, you’ll see for yourselves—they’re even worse than the Beast they had kept on fe
eding for so long. If it wasn’t for me, they’d still be doing it.

  here’s only two people on this earth I trust.

  My little brother is one of those two, and he would never reveal who the other one is. All I had to do was say “secret” to Tory-boy, and nothing could ever make him tell it.

  Maybe you’ll think badly of me when I tell you this, but I promised the truth, so I have to say how I know Tory-boy would keep anything I told him was “secret” to himself, no matter what. He was still very small when I started training him. As soon as I thought he was ready, I hid some money—just a couple of dollars and some coins—and I told Tory-boy where I’d stashed it. Then I told him it was “secret.” And then I let it slip to Rory-Anne that I’d hidden some money.

  She knew better than to try and make me tell, but Tory-boy was not even four years old. And she did things to him I can’t write down, not even here. Listening to my brother scream cut me so deep I don’t have the words for it. And knowing it was me who had caused those screams cut me deeper … cut me in a place I didn’t know I had. But I had to know. If Tory-Boy couldn’t keep a secret …

  He wouldn’t tell. Three times, Rory-Anne tried. My brave little brother would not tell. Twice he passed out from the pain. After the second time, Rory-Anne came to me. She told me, straight out, what she was going to do to Tory-boy if he didn’t tell. Or if I didn’t. She wanted that money, and she was going to get it, even if she had to kill us both.

  I looked her right in her degenerate eyes and said I didn’t know what she was talking about.

  After that third time, she gave up.

  That’s when I could finally hold my little brother. I begged his forgiveness. He didn’t understand what I was saying, but he knew—I know he knew—what I meant.

  Tory-boy would never tell any secret of mine.

  know things can just happen. And I know my Tory-boy. He could die in a car accident. Or get himself shot over nothing. Killed by the kind of man who’d lose a fair fight and back-shoot the winner as he walked away. Where we live, even the most diligent watchers couldn’t prevent something like that.

  But the only one capable of detonating my last bomb, that person would know the difference.

  f you are reading this, I have been betrayed. So this is being revealed to you, just as I promised. Revealed by someone I know would never betray me.

  I have someone nobody knows of; someone not in the life I chose for myself. Someone pure. Someone who could deliver my last bomb with a clear conscience. To that person, delivering my message wouldn’t be informing; it would be doing the right thing.

  They might decide to wait a good long while. That’s because they’re in this story, too—I couldn’t leave them out even if I wanted to.

  But somehow I don’t believe it will happen like that. The person I am trusting with this wouldn’t want me to wait; they’d want me to show the whole world as soon as possible how I kept my word.

  My last word.

  know this all would be easier to understand if I started at the beginning and went from there. But the place where I was born, the place where I spent my entire life, it’s got a time rhythm all its own. It’s more than a dot on a map—it’s a living thing, as immune to the laws of physics as it is to the laws of man. Sometimes, things don’t happen in normal sequence. If you were born and raised there, you’d feel it, too. As if the earth itself stopped rotating in one direction, reversed itself, and then went back to the way it was turning before.

  I don’t mean to say that this is the only such place on earth. I know there’s others. I can’t say how I know this, but I can feel that truth of knowledge inside me.

  So I can’t tell my story any other way except how I’m writing this down. The only way for me to tell the truth is to tell it as I experienced it.

  I know I’m not helping you believe me, telling my story this way. But no matter how it may sound sometimes, this is no tale of magic; it is cold, hard fact. And if you read my story, you’ll know why I had no choice but to tell it.

  his is how I saw it happening:

  A mob of bears surrounded the hive, ripping at it like tall-timber chainsaws, desperate to get at the sweet stash of honey they knew was inside.

  Bears chasing honey don’t worry themselves about filing environmental-impact statements. They know they don’t need any of those weasel-word excuses for tearing things up—nobody is ever going to call them to account. You could pass a dozen laws a day, it wouldn’t make any difference to them.

  Legislation is just words. The real law is the law enforcers. It doesn’t matter what you call them—sheriffs, police officers, cops—those people, they’re the only true law.

  But, for all that, they’re still not the ones in charge.

  o matter how fierce the attack got, the hive stayed quiet. No swarm of drones rushed out, stinging, to protect the inner core. Layer after layer yielded to the slashing claws, but the core itself stayed untouched, as if in some impenetrable glass cage. The bears could see it, but they couldn’t touch it.

  It didn’t matter to the bears what kind of stingers might be waiting on them. They knew honeybees weren’t close to the worst they might have to face. They knew all about hornets, mahogany wasps … all the way down to fire ants. All nest-guarders come loaded with serious venom, and they’re always willing to spend every bit they have.

  But that didn’t discourage the bears. For all they gave a damn, the hive could have been surrounded by five-pound scorpions. Those bears knew the value of that special core of honey, and they were ready to pay whatever it cost to get at it.

  No matter what force was protecting that honey, they knew they could take the pain, walk right through it. What they didn’t know was that the greatest danger to them was that honey itself.

  ees might succeed in discouraging a single bear, but they can’t kill one. They have the desire, but they don’t have the power.

  Bears can kill each other, but they’ve got too much sense to do that. When mating season comes, if any two males catch each other’s scent, there’s going to be blood, sure. But that’s blood, not death. Soon as one bear realizes he’s not going to come out on top, he moves on.

  You might think it’s their place on the evolutionary chain that gives bears that much sense. Sharks are natural-born killers, but they don’t have the intelligence to get out of the way when they’re facing something that could turn them into a meal. Even with the best electrical sensors on the planet, they can’t tell the difference between pieces of an abandoned ship slowly sinking to the ocean floor and a pod of killer whales with newborn calves.

  Whatever drives sharks doesn’t have a reverse gear. The instant they pick up a trace of blood in the water, they go straight to whatever’s shedding that blood, and commence to ripping a chunk off for themselves.

  That makes more blood. And that brings more sharks. Soon enough, they’re in such a foamy red frenzy that it doesn’t make any difference where the blood’s coming from … even from themselves. Before long, they’re all slashing blind. That’s not a good time to be a shark.

  I’ve never seen a real shark, and now I know I never will. But ever since I read that there’s a special kind of shark that can actually go from the ocean right into a river, and back out again, that just fascinated me. A bull shark—that’s what they’re called—is also the only shark that has a memory. There’s no place to hide from something like that, unless you spend all your life on dry land.

  he more I read about that special shark, the more I wanted to be one myself. More like a mirror image of one, I guess—I wanted to become the kind of creature nobody would be safe from on dry land.

  Maybe I’m just making myself sound too important—I know I have to guard against that. But I think there’s some value in me writing this down. I don’t have any such pretensions about the account of my life, but I know there’s been times when a record of truth actually changed the world. Some of it, anyway.

  Actually changing thing
s, that’s a high bar to clear. No conspiracy theory could ever do it. No interpretation of the Good Book, no “expert analysis.” What’s required is scientific truth.

  I know what you’re thinking just about now. You never heard of “scientific truth.” No reason why you would. I made up that term because nothing else can explain what I did and why I did it.

  I won’t deny that some part of me wants to brag on myself. Maybe all the years I’ve spent in this cell caused me to finally grow an ego—or maybe just acknowledge something I had never allowed to interfere during all those years of doing my work. Any ego surfacing in me, that’s only now. Only after I was caught.

  Unlike so many others in here, I wasn’t caught because of my own boasting. Nor from taking false pride in the things I was able to do. If you burn a building to the ground, you have to first make sure that you know every single person who’s in that building. And make real sure that you’re willing for them to burn, too.

  I understand all kinds and types of people may be reading this. So, whoever you are, don’t mistake my motives. I don’t owe you—any of you—one damn thing. I never asked you for anything in my life, and I’m not asking now.

  Don’t waste your time trying to decode me. Save your “profiles.” Forget any “psychiatric autopsies.” You’ll never know me. What you’re reading isn’t some “story.” It’s my story, but it’s all fact. If you actually knew me, you’d know my story couldn’t be any other way.

  What I’m writing down here will pay off the only debt I have left—my life story is an accountant’s ledger. It will pay anything on my debit side, and I’m not asking for a discount.

  That’s what I want people to say about me after I’m gone: “Esau Till, that was a man who paid his debts. Every single one. And he always paid in full.”

  o mainframe computer could have predicted the intersection of runaway trains that caused me to get caught. And whatever put me in a position where I could get caught, that’s a true mystery. No matter how much I think back on it, no matter how deep I go, probing with the long, sharp-tipped points of my mind, I still can’t reach that part.