That's How I Roll: A Novel

by Andrew Vachss

  And maybe, if the prison was as open to cash-money deals as the men who’ve been here say, maybe even a chance to kiss my Evangeline goodbye.

  will keep my end of the bargain. Lansdale and Judakowski, they’re both gone now. That doesn’t change a thing.

  Judakowski was one killing I’d never confessed to. It happened just before they caught me, but I’d still had a number of opportunities to meet with the new boss of his gang.

  “Lou Money” was what he went by—I didn’t know if that was his real name, and it didn’t matter to me. Didn’t matter to me that some even say he was the one who’d put Judakowski on the spot. Lou Money knows better himself. I made sure he knew. I told him every detail, and I knew he had his own sources inside the local cops, so he could find out for himself that I’d told him the truth.

  That was very important to me, that Lou Money knew I told the truth. That was because I told him the truth of how Judakowski had been killed, but I lied about the reason. What I told Lou Money was that Judakowski had broken his word to me, and Tory-boy almost got himself in deep trouble as a result. I couldn’t have something like that ever happen.

  Lou Money was a very understanding man. He’d make a good boss.

  o Judakowski’s gone. And Lansdale’s not around anymore, either. He died in a fire. The way I heard it, he was doing some business with a man who lived in a trailer, way outside of town. They were still talking out in the yard when the trailer just blazed up. Everyone started running away. Then one of the trailer’s windows broke out and they could hear a woman screaming inside.

  That stopped them dead in their tracks—the man they were doing business with, he was supposed to be living there alone. The woman was wrapped in flames, but they could still hear her screaming. When Lansdale heard “My baby!” he just spun around, wrapped his coat over his head, and charged into the trailer before any of his men could stop him.

  It must have seemed like forever, but Lansdale finally burst out of the trailer, bringing some of the fire with him.

  His men had been standing there with their own coats off, ready to beat out the flames. But they could see they were too late. The way it’s told, nothing was left of Lansdale but a burned-to-the-bone thing of disfigured horror.

  There’d be no open-casket funeral for Lansdale, but the baby he went after was alive. The baby had some burned flesh, but they got him to the hospital in time to save him.

  I heard they shipped him off to the Shriners, and he’s going to be as good as new, eventually. Folks say the Lord was watching over that baby. If that’s true, I guess Lansdale went out doing the Lord’s work. That’s about as squared-up as a man can get.

  ow do I know all this? It’s not complicated. Lansdale wasn’t like Judakowski. Not only didn’t he think he could never be replaced, he had named his own successor a long time ago, and he made sure everyone knew it. Including me.

  Coy came to see me on a visit. His name wasn’t on the list every Death Row inmate is supposed to file with the Warden’s office, but they never enforced any of those rules any too strictly with me.

  Coy was still too young to carry himself like Lansdale, but I could see he was following clear footsteps, and he’d walk to the end of that road. Coming to visit me, that was sending a message. And taking a risk to do it. But I knew Lansdale would have expected nothing less.

  All I really knew about Coy—he must have written down his last name to get inside for the visit, but he never told it to me—was that he was some kind of martial-arts expert. And the story people tell about that does sound embellished a bit.

  The story was this: Lansdale was holding a sit-down at the bar he owned, The Blues ByYou. It pulls in a pretty rough crowd, but everybody knows you leave your attitude at the door.

  Regulars knew the signals. Like if Chester Phillips took off the black pullover he always wore. Chester could sweep a few balls off the pool table into that pullover and grab both ends in one hand before you could blink. He had this spinning motion he’d do, which always ended with that loaded pullover striking someone. Whatever Chester hit with that move was going to break, and his preference was for heads.

  Maybe the young man who walked in the door that night was looking to make a name for himself. Nobody had ever seen him before, but he must have known something about how things work. He walked right past Chester and over to Lansdale’s table.

  It was Coy he wanted. He cursed him out every way you could imagine, going way over the line that people call “fighting words.”

  Coy just ignored him. As long as the stranger didn’t put his hands on anyone, nobody was going to so much as acknowledge his presence.

  All his challenge-talk finally got out of hand—he was making so much noise that Lansdale had to tell the young man to leave.

  “You gonna throw me out, old man?” He must have been well past crazy to say something like that. Or his veins were running wild with meth courage. Maybe even both.

  That’s when Coy stood up from the table. He wasn’t a bouncer or anything, but the other man had singled him out first, so he was the natural choice.

  No sooner did Coy stand up than the hyped-up guy whipped out a push-button stiletto and snapped the blade to life.

  Eugene folded his hands on top of the table. That should have told the young man something right there—you flash a knife in front of Eugene, you’re going to end up contributing to a blood bank the Red Cross never heard of. But Eugene was a surgeon, not a coroner. Folding his hands like he did, that was the same as telling the other man he was already as good as done.

  The young man didn’t know Eugene, so he couldn’t read the smoke signal.

  “Son,” Lansdale called over to him, “didn’t your daddy ever tell you not to bring a knife to a gunfight?”

  The young man watched as Coy walked toward him, both hands held in front of him, palms up, like he was waiting for something to fall.

  “I don’t see no gun,” the young man said as he slashed the air in front of him. He handled the knife like a man having an epileptic fit.

  Coy just kept closing the distance, moving slow, like he was worried about that blade. The only person in the whole bar who might have believed that was the demented fool flashing it.

  While he was still too far away for a knife to reach him, Coy shot out his left foot. There was a sound like plastic bubble-wrap popping and crackling at the same time. You didn’t need a medical license to know the knife-man’s kneecap was shattered.

  Coy sure didn’t. He’d already turned around and was walking back to the table before the guy with the blade hit the floor.

  The young man was shrieking like a bat using its sonar to hunt in the dark. The only word you could make out was “Hospital!”

  Nobody in the bar looked his way. At the back table, everybody stayed quiet, waiting for Lansdale to speak.

  “That better be a cell phone you’re reaching for,” Lansdale told the young man. “Use it to call a cab. And be sure to tell them you’ll be waiting on the sidewalk. Outside.”

  One of the waitresses opened the door, then slid a chair in place to keep it open. Somehow, the guy dragged himself outside.

  ansdale really died a hero, saving that baby like he did,” I told Coy that day he visited.

  “Yeah, he did. Good thing we’d come in two cars. If we’d had to wait until Eugene was finished carving up that scumbag, the baby might not have made it.”

  “Why would Eugene—?”

  “Could’ve been because that miserable little piece of shit had told us he lived in that trailer alone. Could’ve been because he was such a foul weasel that he just walked away when that fire broke out—that had to be his woman who broke out the window, probably his baby, too.

  “Could even have been that Eugene figured that slimeball was responsible for Mr. Lansdale’s death. Me, I never asked him.”

  truly believed both Lou Money and Coy would keep the word their bosses had given me all those years ago. For different reasons, sure
: Lansdale wasn’t a boss to Coy; he was family, and that means certain things would be expected of him. Whatever anyone expected of Lou Money didn’t matter—he wasn’t going to risk his whole operation being exposed over the little bit of it I was asking him to keep secret.

  The reasons didn’t matter—both men’s word would stay as rock-hard as the men whose positions they had inherited.

  I’m still relying on that, but I can’t see into the future.

  hat wasn’t enough protection to satisfy me. Giving one man power isn’t a guarantee he’ll use it right.

  So, if Tory-boy ever got a call from the one person I told him he could always trust, my little brother would go down to our mine. Then he’d finish it just the way I’d taught him. All he’d have to do was push a button.

  That same person who I told Tory-boy he could always trust would mail out one final package. That one would have everything I had on each of the two operations.

  I didn’t know what Lansdale’s son would do with that pile of information, but I had a pretty good idea.

  ’d set all that up way before I was handed another card to play. For this town, a trump ace.

  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.

  I’ve only got a little time left to me, no matter where I spend it.

  This is where it ends. Me and this story, both.

  I apologize to nobody on this earth. This is no plea for forgiveness. I know I don’t deserve forgiveness, and I’m not looking for any. I did the best I was capable of, and your judgments have no more meaning for me now than they ever did.

  But there will be judgments; I’m convinced of that. I think about all the different people I’ve run across in my life. I think about them all the time. And what I think is that almost all of them should stop pointing their fin
gers and get themselves down to church. Fall down on their knees and pray.

  Pray there is no God.

  don’t know where I’m going after they wheel the gurney away with my lifeless body strapped to it. But one thing I know for sure. If there’s another place beyond this one, I’ll get there under my own power.

  Don’t doubt me.

  My name is Esau Till.

  About the Author

  Andrew Vachss has been a federal investigator in sexually transmitted diseases, a social-services caseworker, and a labor organizer, and has directed a maximum-security prison for “aggressive-violent” youth. Now a lawyer in private practice, he represents children and youths exclusively. He is the author of numerous novels, including the Burke series, two collections of short stories, and a wide variety of other material, including song lyrics, graphic novels, essays, and a “children’s book for adults.” His books have been translated into twenty languages, and his work has appeared in Parade, Antaeus, Esquire, Playboy, The New York Times, and many other forums. A native New Yorker, he now divides his time between the city of his birth and the Pacific Northwest.

  The dedicated website for Vachss and his work is www.vachss.com.

  Other eBooks Available from this Author:

  Another Life • 978-0-307-37782-1

  Blossom • 978-0-375-71905-9

  Blue Belle • 978-0-375-71903-5

  Born Bad • 978-0-375-71909-7

  Choice of Evil • 978-0-375-71913-4

  Dead and Gone • 978-0-375-41361-2

  Down Here • 978-1-4000-4299-9

  Down in the Zero • 978-0-375-71908-0

  Everybody Pays • 978-0-375-71914-1

  False Allegations • 978-0-375-71911-0

  Flood • 978-0-375-71429-0

  Footsteps of the Hawk • 978-0-375-71910-3

  The Getaway Man • 978-1-4000-7511-9