That’s How I Roll

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.

Pure logic doesn’t leave room for feelings. To a doctor, “heart” is an organ that pumps blood. If he isn’t going to be guaranteed payment for doing some medical procedure—around here, you spell that “Medicaid”—he’s not doing it.

A cliche never takes hold unless it had some traction to start with. Like the hillbillies with bad teeth you see in horror movies—Medicaid doesn’t pay for dental work. And meth isn’t exactly a cavity fighter, either.

When this reporter—Victor Trey was his name—broke the story, it was like the shingles rash breaking out on the government’s own skin. They took so much heat that Congress ran in and changed the Medicaid law faster than they’d take a bribe. When I read that, I knew Mr. Trey was the man for what I had in mind.

I wrote him a letter—he didn’t come across as a man who had a secretary to open his mail for him, especially a handwritten letter with a jail for a return address.

nd I was right. Mr. Trey came all the way from California to talk to me. He tried to tell me about journalism ethics, protecting sources, stuff like that. I told him none of that meant anything to me—I’d asked him to come and visit with me because I had to find a reporter with a national audience who was also a reporter I could trust.

“What could I possibly give you but my word?” he asked me.

“A man’s no better than his word,” I told him. “I have to make a big bet. The biggest bet a man can make. I asked you to come here so I could make that decision.”

He looked at me for a long time. Then he said, “You’ve done this before.”

“Done what before?”

“Read people. Looked for dishonesty tells. Took the measure of another person by more than just his words.”

I just nodded. He was the man I wanted, all right. I told him my plan.

gave Mr. Trey the whole story. And it was a story—the exact same one I was going to tell on TV, in court, and anyplace else where I got asked.

Our agreement was that he’d run the story in what he called the “bulldog edition” of his newspaper. The show would air from nine to eleven at night—the bulldog would go out at midnight, in print and on the Web.

I guaranteed Mr. Trey he’d be the only print reporter I’d ever talk to. And he guaranteed me that no editor was going to touch what he wrote. So, if the TV people played it loose with their editing, they’d look like fools. And liars.

Mr. Trey and I shook on that. There isn’t any more that could have been done, although he offered to put everything in writing.

“What would I do with a contract between men like us?” I told him. “For me, my word is a contract. Otherwise, I couldn’t have done a lot of things I’m going to tell you about. I’m taking your word the same as mine was taken.”

he next day, I told the TV people I’d let them bring their cameras in. They could ask me any questions they wanted, except for what I told them in advance was off-limits. I’d made sure they put that in the contract we all signed. Taking their word would put them in a class where they didn’t belong.

I already knew I wouldn’t have to answer the questions that frightened me to even think about—it would never occur to people like them to ask such questions. And the contract said they couldn’t “go beyond the scope” of my crimes. No backstory, no digging into my life. I was a little concerned they’d balk at that part, but it didn’t seem to bother them one bit.

“It’s actually a better story this way,” one of the TV big shots said to some of the others. He was talking about me like I wasn’t in the room, but I wasn’t insulted. The more invisible I could be, the more they’d say in front of me.

“Our audience is going to hear the story of a hired killer,” the big shot said. “A detailed account of every murder. It’s going to chill people’s blood. You want to know why? Because we’re not showing them some filthy, slobbering psycho; Esau looks like a college professor. That’s the best part. Esau killed a lot of people because he got paid to do it. There’s nothing more to the story. How scary is that?

“Serial killers, by now they’re … they’re almost boring. But what we’ve got is something truly unique—a pure predator. Not someone who kills because he’s sick; someone who kills to feed his family. Every crime he talks about, the facts are right there for anyone to check. And the bodies are always going to be right where he says they are.

“See the beauty of it? If the competition wants to speculate on how Esau came to be what he is, that’s fine with us. In fact, it’s better than fine. Every time they interview some expert, every time