That’s How I Roll

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 feeding 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 things, 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.

The mind protects itself, so I understand I might be avoiding the truth. I understand that maybe it took nothing more than a single petty emotion to bring me down. Envy is a sin. Not because the Bible says so, but because it can make you do stupid things. When you’re born and raised like I was, you figure it out quick: if the only thing keeping you alive is your intelligence, acting stupid is committing suicide.

So, despite my circumstances, I never coveted what others had. And when I learned how I could change those circumstances, there was no need for me to envy such things, anyway: houses, cars, jewelry, things like that. Things, that’s one key. But understanding yourself means you have to be able to open a two-key lock.

You might be able to look back and see where you went wrong. But that’s a vision, not a tool. You can’t use what you see in your past to go back and change it. Sure, you can buy things you never had before, but you can’t change the “before.”

When I found that second key, I realized envy is no sin—it can even be a motivation. Wanting what others have, that’s not wrong. It can make you strive. Work harder. Reach higher.

You can change your own future.

You might want a Cadillac. So might another man. You each envy the man who has one. And you each have choices. You can work and save your money until you have enough for that Caddy. You can steal money other people worked for; it spends just as good as money honestly earned. Or you can just sit there, stewing in your own bile. That’s poisonous stuff, bile.

When two men each want a Cadillac, they can go their separate ways to get one. Usually, they keep going those separate ways for the rest of their lives.

It’s only when you and another want the same thing—not an assembly line thing, something there’s only one of—that real sin knocks on your door. If you open the door, greed and possessiveness come right on in and make themselves to home. Once they’re in, they never leave.

Two men want the same woman. This can bring blood, but that’s pretty rare. Most of the time, the man who’s not the woman’s choice gets over being rejected.

Sometimes, the woman doesn’t even know she’s wanted by that man. He might believe he wouldn’t be her choice, and keep his own feelings to himself. So there’s no rejection to resent … or regret.

But what about the man who does get what he wanted so bad?

He could treat his woman like a princess. Be grateful every day of his life that he got so lucky. Work three jobs to buy her nice things.

Or he could treat her like a slave. Not just making her work, but beating on her when she doesn’t work hard enough. Hard enough to support him when he quits his job or gets laid off. Hard enough to make him forget he’s got twice the stomach and half the hair he used to have.

Some men, the only work they do is keep watch on their woman—go through the phone bills to see if there’s any strange numbers there; sit outside a tavern where she’s playing a few games of eight-ball with her friends to see who she leaves with; third-degree question her every time she comes back into the house.

And some are too lazy to do even that much. They just keep their woman in the house. Cut her off from her friends, even from her own family.

That sometimes works. But it’s got strong potential for backfire, too. If a man catches his woman in bed with another man, and he ends the affair with a pistol, the jury’s not going to treat him too harshly. They call it the “unwritten law.”

But that only works for men. If a woman’s husband staggers in one night, drunk and nasty, a whore’s lipstick smeared all over him, she might be able to shoot him and get the law to treat her lightly, too. But only if she remembers to say he was acting like he was about to kill her. Self-defense. Around here, that means she only gets to fire once. A shotgun works a lot better than a pistol for that.

Now that I’m taking stock, I have to face up to things like that. Admit that it might have been something as small and petty as my own possessiveness that brought all this down.

“Might have,” that’s speculation. But this, this is absolute truth: I was never going to let anyone or anything take my little brother from me. That was never going to happen, no matter what the cost, or who had to pay it.

’d seen these same bears plenty of times—I’d been seeing them one way or another ever since I started earning money. The bears were all after the same thing. They all worked the same way. I’d seen them tear hives apart often enough. But this was the first time I’d ever been that hive-protected honey.

The kind of men I did work for, some of them would talk about how terrible the bears could make it for you if you stopped them from getting their paws on the honey. How much strength it took to hold them off. How that tested a man, deep inside.

Bragging? I don’t know. Maybe the men who never said a word about such things were the only ones who had really passed that test.

But I didn’t have to believe any of those stories to know how to behave when those bears came for me. All I had to do was act the way the storytellers claimed they had.

The whole thing was kind of stupid, because the one thing the bears did know was that I wasn’t going to talk. They never even hoped I would; it was as if something forced them to go through the motions anyway. Kind of like a dance, only with no music.

t was also a race with no winners.

The bears were racing to defuse one bomb, but all that time, I was busy building another. I even had a punch list, like the construction bosses always carried with them. I didn’t have a yellow pad, or an aluminum box to keep it in, but I had a better place to store things.

Step One came naturally. The locals always get the first chance—not only do they know the territory best, they’re already inside it before word reaches beyond their borders.

But this time, they knew they had to work fast, and that knowledge drove them something fierce. When you feel the Devil’s own breath on the back of your neck, you can’t even waste the energy it takes to turn around and see how close that hellhound is.

Even so, they couldn’t just crash through the brush without worrying about how much noise they made. Knowing the territory best also meant everyone in that territory knew them, too.

They would have liked to have the hive completely surrounded before they made their move, but they didn’t have that luxury. They had always been the top dogs here, but they knew that was due for a change.

And quick, too.

Bigger and more deadly bears were on their way; you could already feel the ground trembling under their weight. The locals knew they would never be able to drain the hive dry—the best they could hope for was to pull out anything that could hurt them before they were shoved out of the way.

hose bigger bears had no need to poke and probe and look for openings. They didn’t have to pussyfoot around—no matter what popped out when they squeezed, nothing in that hive posed a danger to any of them.

Why be subtle when you don’t care what kind of tracks you leave? When the bigger bears were all done squeezing, there’d be nothing left but a tiny little lump.

Just big enough to stick that goodbye needle in.

hen you’re arrested for murder, you don’t have much to trade. The rule is, you have to trade up, like when a drug addict gives up his dealer. But if you’ve done considerable killing, talking about who paid you for those services might make the Law so happy that they’ll spare your life in exchange. Or even turn you loose.

But once you get down to murder for money, the Law’s not the only player at the table. No matter how high up those you talk to may stand, no matter what they promise, you know that even the rumor of you talking can end it all.

Once the Law has you like they had me, you are going to die. There isn’t but one actual option left to you, only one thing you can still control. You get to decide who does the job.

If you make the Law do it, all they can kill is your body. Your spirit lives, and your reputation carries on.

When you die the right way, there’s no reason for anyone to seek vengeance on your loved ones.

Just the opposite, in fact.

he crime that finally brought me down made national news. But that was just because of the body count. National news doesn’t always bring in national Law.

All the killings had been in one state, so there was no way the Feds could just ram their way in and take over. That’s what the local Law kept telling themselves, anyway. They ran around saying “jurisdiction” to each other like it was a holy word … the way people in the movies hold up a cross to banish vampires.

That only works in the movies.

eeping the Feds out of our business, that’s like a religion around here. But if a federal agent gets killed—they are coming. Get in their way and, no matter how big you are, lawman or not, you’re nothing but a pile of hot asphalt waiting on the steamroller.

ll I could do was be patient. Deep inside, alone, watching the layers of protection I’d taken so many years to build up slowly come off.

I knew this would happen someday. I thought I was ready for it, because I’d had so much practice. When I knew pain was coming, I could go someplace in my mind. Someplace else. From there, I could watch it happening, happening to me, but I didn’t feel it. I’d learned to do that as a child. Maybe not “learned,” because I hadn’t studied on it—one day, I realized it had just happened. After that, it always did.

And now it was happening again. I was watching what the big bears were watching. Only, this time, what they were watching was an illusion. They weren’t getting any closer to what they really wanted. But the closer they thought they were getting, the easier it was for me to keep checking steps off my list.

t seemed like everyone in the world wanted to talk to me. But even if they weren’t undercovers, they damn sure weren’t showing up because they cared about me.

And I surely didn’t need any “spokesman.” There was no shortage of volunteers for that job.

I didn’t worship “the media” the way most folks did. Longing for attention is for killers who haven’t been caught. Like that Zodiac sex fiend in California who kept sending letters to the papers. Or that Unabomber psycho who wanted to see his stupid “manifesto” in print. Now he has the rest of his life to read it.

I’m nothing like them. I’m not crazy. I never wrote taunting notes to the police; I never got a thrill out of what I did. I was just an assassin, good at my trade. Like any skilled workman, I charged a fair wage for my work, and I never expected payment in full until I finished each job to the customer’s satisfaction. Contract killers aren’t all the same. The only thing we have in common is that we all commit murder for money. Speaking for myself, it was only for the money.

But there’s more to this work than making people dead. The contracts always have other terms and conditions to them, and those hold forever. It didn’t matter if I was caught—as long as I didn’t cross those lines, I was free to strike any deal for myself that I could.

Only I didn’t want a deal.

ust as the local bears got their first turn at me, the local boss bear—the District Attorney himself—took his before anyone else.

He came to the jail alone. Well, not really alone. He had a couple of assistants with him, and the Sheriff’s men were real close by all the time. They weren’t there to protect him; it was their job to bear witness to the act of Christian charity that the big boss was going to deliver.

When everybody was in place, he reached down and shook my hand.

“You’ll never face the death penalty in this county, Esau,” he said. “Folks around here, we all know what you’ve been through.”

He never specified on that, but he sure as Satan knew why I hadn’t stood up when he’d held out his hand.

I knew he would never try for the death penalty anyway. Not around here. Not for someone like me.

I’d read up on this, and I knew the defense could ask for a change of venue—that’s moving the trial to another part of the state. But if I had planned on actually putting up a defense, I’d’ve never let that happen. I knew what the DA knew—no matter who they picked for the jury, as long as it was from folks around here, they’d never vote to execute me.

They’d never vote to elect that DA again, either. They take insults like that real personal around here.

That’s why the words tumbled out of his mouth like a rolling bakery line of fresh lemon tarts, with a little strand of barbed wire hidden in each one.

I knew they’d come that way—you can’t use a harpoon when you’re fly-fishing.

But they kept using the wrong bait. I couldn’t come right out and tell them what to use, either. I did that and they’d all think I was the one holding the casting rod.

’d known this time was coming. I’d known it for many years. The only excuse I had for the hive not being fixed up just right was that I hadn’t planned on those other visitors—there wasn’t any reason to expect them.

The design did just what it was supposed to do: the more the bears dug at it, the stronger the hive got. Pull off one layer and the others would fold in on themselves, only wrapped much tighter. I was sure I’d made that honey armor-plated.

But, like I said, I hadn’t built it expecting the Feds. I had counted on never having to deal with them, because I’d been so careful to stay away from anything that might draw their attention.

It’s not like TV. This place could be home base for a dozen serial killers, and still the local Law would never call on the Feds for help. Around here, you could be anything from a U.S. marshal to a census taker; you’d still be a Fed.

Nobody likes the Feds. That goes back a long way, and its roots are deep.

But I shouldn’t have counted on all that to keep me safe.

tep Two kind of came by itself. Once the Feds took over, they acted just as smug and arrogant as you’d expect. Came straight out and said it, first words. Anything anyone in this whole state could do for me, the Feds could do better. A lot better.

They could even fix it so I’d never spend another night behind bars.

When the locals were trying to get me to hand over the honey, they called it “cooperating.” That word tastes foul in the mouth, just saying it. Like collaborating with the enemy.

The Feds were much smoother. They called it “debriefing,” like I’d been out on an undercover mission. That didn’t taste as bad. If I’d been with them all along, all the talking they wanted me to do wouldn’t be a killer pointing the finger at the people who’d hired him. No, it would be a special kind of federal agent, reporting in from the field.

They even said they’d get that put in the papers, so everyone would know what a hero I’d been.

I knew that what people would think of me had nothing to do with what they might read in the papers.

Maybe that’s why the Feds can never get in deep enough—all they ever have is a bunch of paper reports. If they needed someone to infiltrate a terrorist network, they had to recruit one who was already inside. Never occurred to them that they should put their own terrorists out there, and let the networks recruit them.

It’s not just that they aren’t patient enough, they’re too … disconnected, I guess is the best way to put it.

They know how to put their own people in with certain groups, but they can only pull it off when their agents are the same as the people in the group. White, I mean.

Maybe that’s why it never crossed their minds that I might have killed some of those people for my own reasons.

t least the Feds were honest enough to tell me that they were determined to fill their basket, and they had a whole shopping list. But my name wasn’t on it. Never been on it, they swore.

I did believe that last part.

When I say “Feds,” I’m using that blanket to cover a whole slew of them. It seemed as if a new agency hatched every day. FBI, DEA, IRS, ATF … the only one they always called by its full name was Homeland Security.

Way too many of them to accomplish anything. All they did was get in each other’s way. They kept telling me how they were all on the same side, but they kept going at each other like they were blood enemies … even right in front of me.

I started seeing them all the same way I do preachers: real good at telling other people how to act—but they had some special, private deal with God, so they were exempt from those same rules.

You want to buy yourself a real chance at salvation, well, you make sure you throw something in the collection plate. And chip in to buy the preacher his new car every year, too.

I guess it sounds like I hate men of the cloth. I don’t, not really—I generally liked those I met personally. Except for the fat old swine who had hinted that what had happened to me and Tory-boy was God’s punishment for some sin.

If any of the people I’d done work for had wanted that one killed, I would have given it to them cut-rate.

The more I thought about that man, the more hate came into me, like lungs gasping for air when you’d been underwater too long. Whatever sin had been committed didn’t belong to me or Tory-boy. Anyone who couldn’t see that was too dirty in his own mind to be allowed to call himself a man of God.

he way it ended with all those different Feds was when one of them told me that their task force was being disbanded because of “cooperation issues.” That was pretty funny.

What happened was what always happens: the strongest bear drove the rest of them off.

You’d think that would be Homeland Security, but it was the FBI team who came out on top. Didn’t even break a sweat doing it, either. It wasn’t a blood-drawing fight; hardly a tussle, in fact. You could see who had the real muscle just by listening to them say “good morning” to each other.

ATF was the toughest to push out. They only left after telling the FBI team that they “expected a complete report.” But the way they said it, it was the same way some guys mumble threats under their breath as they’re walking away after backing out of a fight.

tep Three was revealed to me as soon as they trimmed down to one agency. The FBI couldn’t stop saying “RICO.” They soft-spoke it, like it was sacred.

They told me I would be serving the people. Protecting thousands, all over the country. Doing the right thing.

One of the older agents even told me that giving them what they wanted was my only path to forgiveness.

I knew I was past any forgiveness. And if forgiveness was going to come from them, I didn’t even want it. Had this same government that now was trying to make me talk done the right thing when it had the chance, none of this would have happened at all.

For that, I could never forgive them.

ne of them was a black guy. He said if I told them everything I’d be a kind of savior. The people they wanted me to inform on were killing my community. Sucking the life out of it, parasites feeding on decent people. You could tell he hadn’t done any more research about this place than looking it up on a map.

At first, nobody paid any real attention to me. They all had some routine they believed in, so that’s what each one went with. None of them even waited to see if I was buying it, just kept talking. Talking and nodding to themselves … like senile old men do in nursing homes.

Finally, they stopped. All of them. Like they’d heard the same alarm clock go off.

The next morning, they all sat around in this horseshoe, forming a wall around me to the front and sides. My back was already against the wall, so I was surrounded.

They just sat there, waiting.

I moved my head around the horseshoe, so each and every one of them would know I was including him in my deliberate silence.

It was graveyard-quiet. I couldn’t hear them breathe. I guess they misunderstood my message—if I was ready to open the floodgates, they wouldn’t want to miss a drop.

So I went around the horseshoe with my eyes again. Even slower this time. I had every molecule of their attention.

“You know what’s lower than a maggot?” I said. “That would be a man who informs on his own partners. Everyone on a job takes some kind of risk. But if you’re caught, a man’s meant to play his own hand.”

“How do you think we found you, Mr. Till?” one of the agents said.

“I wouldn’t know about that,” I said, surprised it took them so long to try that sorry trick.

“You want it spelled out, we can do that,” another one spoke up. “Would that do it? If we gave you the name of the man who gave us yours, would you be ready to—?”

I stomped on the hand he’d been using to deal the marked cards from the bottom of the deck. I’d known enough men who’d been through this same game before to know exactly what to say to them.

“If somebody gave you my name, why don’t you just ask him what you want to know?”

They went quiet again. I let their silence settle before I said: “Sure. So you’re either bluffing, or the guy you got was some little messenger boy. Like a FedEx driver who knows where he dropped off a package, but couldn’t tell you what was in it, never mind who had it sent.”

They just kept looking at me.

“Anybody you got to talk to you, he doesn’t know anything,” I said. “A guy like that, he wouldn’t do any heavy lifting. All he’s good for is sticking up gas stations, running errands, getting drunk, and beating his wife. Probably has a long enough sheet so another felony would put him under the jail.”

Watching their eyes was like reading a newspaper.

“Sure … that’s probably it. You got this guy—the one you say gave you my name—but you got him for something else, didn’t you? Nothing to do with this other thing you keep asking me about.

“Maybe he had warrants out. Maybe he was already on parole. But whatever it was—if you’re even telling me the truth—that would have been for his own crimes, not anyone else’s. So he can’t give you a thing. You could drill as deep as you wanted, you’d never hit a vein.”

They still kept quiet. I guess it was some kind of technique: let me talk enough, maybe I’d drop something they could use.

That wasn’t going to happen. But all that silence had already told me I was right, so there was no harm in telling them some more of what they already knew.

“A man like that, he’d tell you everything,” I went on. “Spill his guts … if he had any to spill. Enough for a search warrant? Sure. But you already found enough stuff in my place to connect me to all kinds of things, didn’t you? Your problem is, there’s too much space between what you found and what you want. Especially what you want the most—names.

“So you used your computers. Probably, by now, you can tell each other you know who hired me. At least you think so. Only problem is, you can tell each other all you want, but you can’t ever tell a jury.”

An older guy with a short haircut—not like it was “styled” or anything, more like he didn’t want to be bothered with going for haircuts too often, so he told them to take off as much as they could—he had one of those ripsaw voices. He didn’t have to speak loud, because when he opened his mouth everybody else shut up.

“You have to admire a man who won’t inform on his friends,” he said. A jab, just to watch my response.

About ten seconds passed. When I still didn’t say anything, he threw the sucker punch he’d been storing up all along.

“But the people we want aren’t your friends,” he said. “They aren’t your ‘partners,’ like you called them. You’re a hired hand. A day laborer. They don’t think any more of you than someone they’d hire to cut their lawns. Or scrub out their toilets.”

I looked in his eyes—twin flecks of the ground we have around here, dark brown and rock-hard.

“I know that,” I told him.

That wasn’t the answer he was expecting. His face didn’t move a muscle, but I could feel the words hit him just the same.

But this guy was too much of a professional to be taken out with one punch.

“Then just tell me something, Esau,” he said. “Tell me why a man with your intelligence wouldn’t take this incredible opportunity. The opportunity we’re offering you, right now, here, today. Can you tell me that much? Just for my own understanding.”

My hands rested on the wheels of my chair. Rested lightly. “That’s not how I roll,” I told him.

And I smiled real friendly, so he’d know there was no hard feelings.

ater that night, alone in my cell, I thought about what I’d said. There’s probably a lot of different ways to look at those parting words of mine.

Maybe the Feds had meetings about that; I don’t know. As far as they were concerned, I guess those were my last words, in all respects.

But just because I’d turned down their best offer didn’t mean they were going away. They couldn’t do that: there was a fire to feed, a legend to maintain.

Kill a Fed and you die. You all die.

But lurking shadows don’t scare me—I grew up under them.

So, when Step Four came out a shade of gray, I plucked it out right away.

very bomb-builder has his own style, but there are certain rules for all: handle the ingredients with respectful delicacy, and never close it up until everything needed is inside.

That’s why I never stopped talking with the Feds. They had one of the ingredients I needed before I could wrap the package.

Ever since I came to understand that money can buy more than just things—like cars or houses or big TVs—I’d gone after it. I committed all kinds of wrong acts for all kinds of wrong people, all purely for the money. The money to buy safety for me and Tory-boy.

I was all done with that kind of work, but I still needed money.

It wasn’t just money I needed, it had to be clean money. I didn’t care what they called it, or whose name was on whatever paper they signed to get it, but the money would have to come from a source the Feds couldn’t ever trace back to those wrong people I had done all that wrong work for.

I knew the Feds would be watching any money coming in to me. And even if I managed my way around that, I’d have to get the money back out.

There’s ways of informing without actually saying a word. There’s ways you can draw a bright-red arrow pointing wherever you want it to. The people I’d worked for, they’d expect me to be aware of this.

So I had to make sure they knew I was keeping faith with them. Because now the river was flowing in the opposite direction. A certain kind of work still had to be done. But instead of getting paid, I was fixing to make some payments.

Maybe I should have said to myself, “Well, I was always loyal to them, why shouldn’t they do this one last thing for me?”

But you don’t ask favors of your employers. That’s not the relationship. Nothing I had done for them had been an act of friendship. You might be friendly with a doctor, but you don’t walk into his office without expecting a bill when you leave.

I never even considered the possibility. Even if they wouldn’t think of it as blackmail—and I wouldn’t blame them if they did—that’s just not how it’s done. I’d been paid fair and square for what I did, every time I did it. That’s where the old saying comes from: “If you don’t like the job, just put the bucket down.” My kind of work means that you put it down gently, not drop it and splash water all over everyone else.

I’d had a goodly amount put away, in different places. But once they had locked me up, I’d been forced to spend a big chunk of that money.

Most of that went toward keeping things in place while I waited them all out. That wasn’t so hard. I was used to doing business over the phone, and I could use the jailhouse pay phone anytime I wanted. After all, I hadn’t been actually convicted of anything yet, so I was what they call a “pre-trial detainee,” and that gives you certain rights.

And moving money you already had stashed away wasn’t difficult at all—if the Feds couldn’t watch it come in, they couldn’t watch it leave. Which meant they couldn’t see where it landed.

All I had to do was call certain people and tell them I was concerned about a project of mine: an ancient Ford I had found buried under a ton of garbage in this old barn that was on some property I’d purchased. That car was a pretty rare thing, especially because it still had the flathead V-8 it came with. I’d ask if they’d managed to find a certain part—like a fender or a headlight. For the people I called, those words were as easy to follow as a map.

Paying our way to keep everything in place, that had always been costly. But there had never been a shortage of work, so it hadn’t been a real problem. In fact, even as expensive as certain things I’d needed had been, I’d still been able to put quite a bit aside.

But now that I couldn’t work, there’d be no fresh money coming in, and no way to restock. I had to get my hands on one big chunk. No more installment plans for me; this one time, I had to buy what I wanted outright.

I knew one way I could transfer money so the Feds couldn’t trace it in a thousand years, but that was something I could pull off only once.

The people I was never going to name knew the position I was in, but they still trusted me. The way they proved that was by staying away. If they hadn’t trusted me, the first thing they would’ve done would’ve been to send in a lawyer. Only he wouldn’t be my lawyer; he’d be theirs. A spy.

Had they done that, it would have hurt me deep. Might have insulted me enough to push me over to whatever side made me the best offer.

By keeping their distance, they freed me from that choice. Maybe that was a show of respect, or maybe it was nothing more than them knowing I’d never trust any lawyer they sent. No more than I’d ever trusted them.

But what it probably came down to was simple, brutal math: I might be holding some high cards, but they held the trump.

My little brother.

tep Five was kind of forced on me. Considering my income—all the government knew about was what I got from Disability—the judge said I couldn’t afford a private lawyer. That meant the State had to give me one. In fact, they gave me two.

I didn’t want any special treatment from some judge that I’d never met—that was pretty typical of the way strangers had looked at me all my life. Strangers from around here, I mean. A lot of people I’d never met still seemed to know who I was when we got introduced.

“Poor Esau,” that’s how I was looked upon. Not by way of money, but … the way I was born. What I was born with. The burdens I had to struggle with. I could feel them thinking how terrible that must be for me.

And how glad they were it wasn’t them in that wheelchair.

But after I finished researching it, I realized that judge wasn’t treating me special after all. I found out that the State always gives two lawyers to any indigent defendant in a capital case.

I only met with those State-paid lawyers one time. “The first thing you need to understand is that we can’t do our job unless you’re totally honest with us,” I remember one saying before promising to come back in a few days.

Before that happened, another bunch of lawyers showed up. They were a private group, they told me. Like missionaries, traveling around the country. Only their mission wasn’t to save souls from hellfire; it was to save bodies from the death penalty.

They left me a bunch of stuff to read, the way a vacuum-cleaner salesman leaves his “literature” with everyone who’s not buying that day.

That was because I told them I wasn’t going to take any prosecution deal. I was going to trial, no matter how heavy the prosecutor sweetened the pot. They really perked up at that—and worked hard at trying not to let me see it.

I knew what was in their minds. It wasn’t that any of them expected me to be acquitted. But if I was going to trial, they had a good excuse to stick around. It was a capital case, after all. So even after—they said “if,” but I knew they must say it that way to every client they ever had—I was found guilty, there would still be what they called the “penalty phase.” And that was where they could outdo any court-appointed lawyers in the country, they told me.

That was where they were going to step in and save me. In the penalty phase, whatever I had done wouldn’t be as important as why I did it. “That’s the most critical factor, Esau,” the girl they always brought with them told me. “We have to make the judge and the jury see you as an individual. They have to know who you are, from the inside out. Because the more they know you as a person, the less they’ll be willing to … hand down the ultimate sentence.”

She just went on and on. They were going to show the jury how I really didn’t have any choice, the kind of life I’d had, blah-blah-blah.

They didn’t know one single thing about any of that. All they knew was what anyone could see for themselves: I was born bad—the spine thing. They just assumed I was raised even worse, me being poor white trash, living on Disability, no education, no job, no prospects. “No hope,” she said, like that was a knockout punch.

I’d rather take a bullet than pity, but how could these people know that? They didn’t know me.

They didn’t even know how dumb they sounded. How could they be such great lawyers in capital cases if they had so much experience with the penalty phase?

When I told them I wanted the death penalty, I thought they’d just pack up and go back to wherever they came from. Not a chance. They said that would be State-assisted suicide, and they weren’t about to let that happen.

So I made it even clearer—they didn’t have any choice about what they’d let happen or not. That was up to me, not them. I reminded them that they weren’t my lawyers. I didn’t hire them, so I couldn’t fire them, but the court hadn’t appointed them, either. And wasn’t about to.

What I didn’t tell them was that they reminded me of doctors standing around the bedside of a dying man, already counting up which of his organs they could salvage. I just told them to get lost.

They kind of smirked when I said that. Especially the girl. She was way younger than me, dressed a little flashier than people around here consider seemly. Smelled good, too. She came over to where I was and sat real close.

“The lawyers the State appointed for you have tried exactly three capital cases between the two of them,” she said, like she was sharing a secret.

I just shrugged.

“Mr. Diamond has tried over one hundred capital cases,” she said, her eyes getting all big and shiny over the man she was worshiping. “Only seven defendants were sentenced to death, and every one of those is still on appeal.”

“They still won’t even let him in the courtroom without my say-so,” I told her.

“It’s a question of qualifications, Esau. When the court hears—”

“You went to Yale, Brooke?” I interrupted her. I didn’t even meet her eyes, just kept looking down at the sheet of paper with her name at the top. I wouldn’t normally have ever talked to a woman like that; I pride myself on my manners. But when a girl half my age calls me by my first name, like I was a child instead of a grown man, I admit I resented that.

“Yes, but—”

“That’s where you learned to be a lawyer?”

“Oh, no. Law school is where you learn the law. It’s only down in the trenches where you learn how to practice it.” She glanced over at this Diamond guy, hoping for any little nod of approval—the only stake she was really playing for.

“There’s no trenches around here,” I told her. “Just a lot of abandoned mines. I don’t need your little lectures, okay? You don’t know the people around here; I do. And the way they figure, if a man doesn’t take the stand and deny he did something, that’s the same as confessing to it.”

“The State can’t—”

“They can’t say that’s the reason, that’s all. And, me, I’m not taking any stand, so …”

That’s when her Mr. Diamond kind of strolled over and put his hand on the girl’s shoulder. I thought she was going to swoon.

“It’s too soon to make that kind of decision, Esau. Way too soon.” He had one of those resonant voices, but he used it to talk down to me—like he was explaining something simple to someone even simpler.

I hadn’t much cared for him before, but now I had a true dislike. Not just for treating me like I was slow, but for trying to tell me he was in charge. In charge of my life.

I didn’t answer him. Just nailed his eyes until they dropped. Compared with other men I’d stared down, he was soft as custard.

There was another man on their team. He wasn’t a lawyer, they were quick to tell me, to make sure I didn’t mistake him for one of them. No, he was their investigator. The best in the business, they said.

This man was wearing a suit, but nobody would take him for a lawyer.

Black suit, white shirt, black tie. Nothing flashy, but anyone he approached, they’d know he was taking them seriously, coming at them respectfully.

He was a real tall, skinny guy. The minute he opened his mouth, I knew he was, well, not from around here, but from around around here, if you get what I mean. I could feel his eyes pulling at me while the boss was talking. I glanced over and I saw him shake his head. Not the way you do when you’re saying “no” to someone, more like when you’re feeling sorry for them.

I knew that look real well. Only he wasn’t looking at me; he was looking at the great Mr. Diamond.

I think he must’ve said something to them later. I’m sure of it, actually. Because, the next time they came, everyone who spoke to me was careful to call me “Mr. Till.”

I appreciated that not one bit—for them, it wasn’t showing respect; it was just strategy. And it didn’t change anything. Every fancy clump of words they peddled in front of me only added up to another No Sale.

Four days of them was way too much. But it had given me time to gather some information. They’ve got an Internet connection in the Sheriff’s office—the jail is right behind it, in the same building—and the folks on the night shift were always nice enough to look up whatever I asked them after those lawyers had left for the day.

As soon as I had all the information about them that I wanted, I just told them: “Go find somebody who snatched a little girl, had his fun with her, then chopped her up. That’s the kind of human garbage who’d want you all rushing in to save him from the chair. Or the needle, or whatever they use wherever he is.”

At that, Mr. Diamond got up. Like that was a signal, they all did the same thing. He tossed a card on the little wood table in front of me, like one of those old Have Gun–Will Travel reruns me and Tory-boy used to watch all the time.

“If you ever change your mind, all you have to do is give us a call. We’ll take care of everything from there.”

He didn’t call me by my name—first or last—when he said that. He didn’t look back, either. Why would he? None of that whole display was aimed at me.

I left his card for the guards to pick up. Maybe one of them would find a use for it someday.

very autumn, the trees blaze with color. When one of those fiery leaves falls to the ground, it holds on to its color for a while. But, even though you can’t tell just by looking at it, that leaf’s already dead.

That was me, that leaf. One way or another, I had lied to every one of those lawyers. It was always my plan to take the stand and testify. That was the only sure way I knew to tell the people who needed telling that I’d never tell on them.

It wasn’t death itself I wished for. If that’s all I’d wanted, I could have managed it on my own easy enough. What I wanted was the sentence of death. That would leave me in control long enough to make sure my last plan had gathered enough speed to keep rolling on its own without me pushing it from behind.

Staying alive in prison, that’s not a sure thing. And I wouldn’t have access to anything that would even up the odds. So I had to find the safest place to do my watching from.

The safest place in prison is Death Row.

That was the advantage of me knowing I was that still-fiery leaf. Lying on the ground, waiting for the weather to change. I knew any death-penalty case would drag out for years and years. It didn’t matter if there was real doubt about a man’s guilt, or none at all—one appeal after another was a sure thing.

Roger Lucas lived a few miles from where me and Tory-boy did. Roger killed a clerk who tried to stop him from robbing a convenience store. Then he went into the back of the place and 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 didn’t miss a thing. All that happened about fifteen years ago, and Roger Lucas is still waiting for his number to come up.

I’d never been in prison, but I knew plenty of men who had, and they’d all told me the same thing: if you were sick or weak or old, you’d be better off on Death Row than any other place in prison. It’s the only way to guarantee you get a cell to yourself. And those cells, they’re bigger and nicer than regular ones. If you’ve 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 weren’t 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 race—the only question was which kind of death would cross the finish line first.

In fact, the more I think on it, the more I’m 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 something starts rolling, it’s 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.

I’m the most patient man you’ll 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 wasn’t patience that kept me from killing myself. I needed folks to always say, “Esau Till didn’t 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.

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 didn’t care about the case, just the cause. Like that Mr. Diamond and his followers. They’re so against the death penalty that they end up specializing in defending people who need killing.

You know the kind I’m talking about—those 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 TV all the time. “High-profile,” they were called. Didn’t 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 they’d say when they went in front of the camera.

Besides, it wasn’t 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 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 didn’t qualify as reliable, it didn’t qualify as information.

That’s why I knew so much about Death Row. The first man to tell me about it, his brother was there at the time. When he told me that some of those men have fans—I mean, like a movie star might have—I didn’t 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. That’s 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 didn’t 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 couldn’t see it with your eyes; you couldn’t hear it without a stethoscope—but if you’d worked with locks enough, you could feel it.

The Feds proved they had the money, all right. Tons of it. But they weren’t 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 wasn’t 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. That’s 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 I’d ever let them know.

If they’d ever known what button to push, I would have sung like a whole aviary. But what they had wouldn’t 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 little piece of it. We check it out. If it turns out you’re being truthful with us, then we release a little piece of what you want. That’s only fair, right?”

I didn’t answer him. I already had that bad feeling you get inside you when you know a promise is a lie. A girl’s smile, a man’s word—it doesn’t matter—there were times when you just knew they wouldn’t 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, Esau—Uncle Sam’s got all the money there is.”

I think he knew all along I wasn’t going to do any trading with him, but it was his job to try, so he kept at it.

Just like that dog who couldn’t quite manage to grab that taunting bone.

tep Seven came after days of their useless hammering, as if I didn’t understand that the Feds weren’t going to give me the money I needed without me giving certain people up first.

I didn’t panic. I still had money enough to make certain nobody bothered Tory-boy for quite a while. And if there’s one thing I know how to do, it’s wait.

I was almost three months behind bars before someone who had all the money I needed showed up. I hadn’t reached out for him. I wouldn’t 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 they—he meant the TV people he fronted for—they wanted to put me in front of a camera. Kind of like an acting job, he said. They’d call it an “interview.” I’d 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 couldn’t see any harm in repeating them on camera. And the money man didn’t care, either … just as long as I told his people first.

But even with clean money coming in, I would still need one thing only the Feds could give me. And I couldn’t let them know how bad I had to have that one thing, or they’d 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 they wanted.

I don’t 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 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 square—and he was standing his ground like a mother badger with cubs behind her.

“Esau, you don’t 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 you’ve been asking for.”

I didn’t like that word “could.” I wasn’t about to be giving them enough leverage to keep raising the bar, either. And they weren’t 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 he’s selling you.

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 cliché 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 they ‘investigate’ Esau’s real motivation, they’re promoting our product. I’ll bet we sell more DVDs of this show than of all the rest we ever did, combined. It’s going to be in criminology classes. Libraries. Cited in textbooks.

“You can’t buy that kind of credibility. It’s not only going to enhance our network image, win us all kinds of awards—it could turn out to have the longest legs ever.”

You could see it on their faces. Even smell it coming off them like a thick, rolling fog of musk. To the other people in that room, what that big shot was saying was more important than oxygen.

With that in hand, I went on to Step Ten.

f everybody keeps up their end of the deal, I’ll die alone. Alone and silent, the way I’m supposed to.

To the newspapers, I’ll be the worst murderer in the whole history of this state.

I guess they should say that. I will have saved Tory-boy by telling the truth. A kind of truth, anyway. The kind of truth the Law feeds on. Once I learned how deep the Feds had their people planted in so many places, I had only one choice if I wanted to keep Tory-boy safe past my time.

The way I explained it was: I’d give all the politicians the truth-plus, if they’d agree to let it also be the truth-minus.

At first, there were some little disputes about who was going to have to kill me. I balanced it out for them: I told the Feds I could get the State to agree to push the buttons to send the poison through the IVs into what was left of my body.

I just came right on out with it: I’d clean up any unsolved murders on the State’s books. If they’d allow me to come home to die, I’d use the mouth of one devil to make a lot of heroes.

And if the Feds had any other undercovers close by who’d met with death, I’d take those on myself, too.

What politician would turn down an offer like that?

And what lawman ever got to tell a politician what to do?

kept my bargain. I confessed to every unsolved killing on the State books. Every killing I could have done, that is. Nobody was going to believe I raped a woman or kidnapped a child, or beat a man to death with a tire iron. The real truth is, I didn’t want my name associated with such things, so I was deeply grateful when the Law agreed—they didn’t want any taint on the big piece of paper they were going to roll out for the whole world to see.

When you took those kind of crimes out of the mix, you left a bunch of contract kills. The Law actually knew who did some of those—or ordered them, anyway—but they couldn’t hope to prove it. And it turned out that the Feds had people planted all over the place. So, when I confessed to those crimes, I made everybody happy.

I had to walk that last bit of the line with great care. Confessing to a crime you didn’t commit is tricky, because you don’t know the little details—things only the killer would know.

Like that little red ribbon tied to a branch of the white-oak tree where a hunter had waited for hours before he put a 30.06 round through the head of a man named Luther Semple.

The Law had to know who shot him. Luther Semple had raped a little girl, but she couldn’t identify him. She wasn’t even the first little girl he had taken that way: throwing a feedbag over her head from behind before he went to work.

The cops were in a bad position. Everyone in that little town probably thought they knew who had fired the shot, and the little girl’s father never denied it—just told the cops he wanted a lawyer and wouldn’t speak to them at all.

The local prosecutor wouldn’t touch the case. If he had, people would have looked at him as if he was the defense attorney for the rapist.

Still, nobody likes an unsolved murder. I don’t mean “nobody” the way you’d talk about actual people; I mean “nobody” the same as the statistics the government keeps on everything. So, when I admitted that I’d killed that man, everybody was pleased. Me knowing about that piece of red ribbon, that was the clincher—even skeptical folks would have to admit that only the actual killer could have known that; it had never been made public.

But it wasn’t all as easy as I’m making it sound. The way it worked was that the Feds would take all my confessions, then they’d call in the Law from whatever area the different crimes had happened in.

When those cops showed up, they’d be smart enough to get certain details out of me, so I could tell a straight story … but that’s as far as they went. I damn near ended up telling them they were being stupid. Knowing a few facts just wouldn’t be enough. The story had to ring true. How was a man in a wheelchair supposed to get into the deep woods? And why would I give a damn about somebody’s little girl getting raped when I didn’t even know them?

It reminded me of when I gave the Beast a story to tell the cops. I didn’t just give him a version that sounded good, or that he wanted to be true. No, I planted it so deep in his mind that it even felt real.

So what I told those cops was this: I’ve got a rifle I built myself. The wheelchair is a natural brace to hold me steady, especially with its entire back made out of three-quarter-inch steel, and I could assemble the tripod by myself by just touching a push button. Any little flicker of doubt they might have had, I erased by telling them where they could find the whole apparatus. I hadn’t even told the Feds that part. I could see in the eyes of the state cops how much they appreciated that.

I also told them that I was a dead shot—I could take a man at a hundred yards as easy as if he was sitting across from me. They didn’t doubt that part.

I already knew that Luther Semple had been killed at a bit more than that distance. He was just sitting on his front porch, having a smoke, like he was pondering some big problem. He was tilted back, relaxing in his big chair, when his head exploded.

I knew more about that particular killing than anyone could imagine. I almost laughed out loud, confessing the truth to cops who were sure I was lying.

I wasn’t lying. In fact, I had details they didn’t have … but not the kind I’d ever speak of. The rifle I’d built was double-barreled with the scope mounted between them, chambered for .220 Swift. I hand-load all my ammunition, and that includes casting the slugs. If one of my home-built slugs hits you anywhere, you’re not going to live long enough to get to a hospital.

There’s almost no recoil, but that wasn’t why I picked that cartridge—my legs are worthless, but my shoulders are like a pro linebacker’s. The reason Luther Semple’s head had exploded was the micro-warhead I had cast into the heart of the first slug.

My second shot was a hardball I always used as a make-sure. But the exit wound from the first was so big that the second slug went right on through, all the way into the woods behind his house. It was never found.

And it never would be. I don’t know what it cost, but the man who’d hired me not only had that slug cut out of a tree, the same tree had been gas-fired right afterwards. I know who got that done, because the intact slug was turned over to me. That was how the man who’d hired me proved he was never going to betray me—he dropped the proof right into my hand.

He never did explain why he wanted that man dead, and I never asked.

The police report said Luther Semple had been ambushed by someone using a 30.06. That was an estimate, of course—the coroner’s jury was told the slug was never recovered.

When the prosecutor from that little town drove down, he wanted to interview me, too. All he really wanted to know was why I’d killed that man. I told him it was over a gambling debt. Three thousand dollars.

It’s common knowledge that there are poker parlors around here, and the man who hired me had a dozen people ready to swear they’d been present when I won all Luther Semple’s money. They particularly remembered that time because I’d been such a gentleman, taking his marker when he wanted to keep on playing. That’s the kind of thing you just don’t see much anymore.

So the man owed me money, and he wouldn’t pay. Even laughed in my face: what was I going to do about it, chase him down in my wheelchair? Plenty of witnesses heard him say that, too.

Since I’d already confessed to quite a number of other killings, that story worked for everyone.

Everybody knew: Esau Till, he was one seriously vengeful man. If he’d take your life just for looking at him wrong, think of what he’d do if you did him wrong.

y court confessions were part of a deal—a patchwork quilt, big and warm enough to cover everyone who needed to climb under it. But I made sure to weave a pull-thread into that quilt. I put that part in about shooting Luther Semple because I did plead guilty to it, and anyone reading this needs to be able to separate which crimes I actually did from those I confessed to. So, if you’re reading this, and you wonder why a contract killer would do such a thing, you’ll know that confession was a real one.

There’s nothing noble about any of this—what I’m writing now, I mean. I didn’t write a word until I was sure that nothing I might put down could hurt the only people I ever cared about. You’ll know who those people are soon enough.

But I do want vengeance. And I don’t want anyone to think otherwise. Whether you speak a promise or a threat, it’s still giving your word. And I never broke mine.

tep Eleven was nearly the last. When I finally got enough to make a real big pot, I anted it up, every dime. When I slapped it down on the felt, it wasn’t to show off—it was to tell them to cut it right down the middle. All of it. I wasn’t there when that was done, but the boss of each outfit was.

It was a ton of money, but it came with one condition attached: if either of them spent so much as a dime on anything but what we’d agreed on, then the other side would get my records.

Those records weren’t going to send anyone to prison, but they would give the outfit that got them a big edge over the other one. Maybe even big enough to take over their territory.

That would be fine with me. If only one outfit failed me, I wanted the other one to be stronger, the better to keep Tory-boy safe. It didn’t matter to me which outfit did whatever had to be done.

And if they both failed, if they both cheated me, I couldn’t do anything about it. Except get even with them, and they knew I would do that.

Some people are born under misfortune, some travel a good distance to get there.

I was giving each boss a chance to choose his own fate. Not many get that opportunity.

They knew if the Law ever saw my records the State would have to build a whole new Death House—the one I’m in now is just about full up.

But which Law am I talking about? When I first came up with this idea to keep protection on Tory-boy, I wasn’t sure which agency should get my records if word wasn’t kept. But when I saw how just saying “RICO” got the FBI people so excited, that’s when I knew.

There’s a fairness to picking the FBI as well. If it hadn’t been for them, I never would have been caught.

If they do get this, how they use it, that’s up to them. I know they can’t just show it to a judge to get a bunch of warrants. They do that and later on some slick defense lawyer is going to get to look at all of it.

And if that were to happen, dozens of closed cases would suddenly get unclosed. Cold cases the FBI claimed it had solved would turn into even colder ones. Promotions would get rescinded. Reputations would get unmade. And every agent who reached a higher post from all that stuff I confessed to would turn into a leper overnight.

That’s why there’s a copy. Of everything. And other hands are already holding it. I don’t give a damn for anyone on the government’s side of the line. No matter what they call themselves, they’re still the government. And it was the government—every lousy part of it—that looked away from things that shouldn’t have happened at all. Not to me, not to anyone.

So, even if the FBI does end up with my records, I know what they’ll do with it. Same thing the government did with me. And my brother. And our sister, Rory-Anne—our mother. They’ll razor out the parts they don’t want known, and pay somebody to take care of the rest.

If that happens, the world will learn I was ready for it.

I don’t know who’ll be passing final judgment on any of the people in my story—I guess that depends on whether anyone ever gets to read this. “Final judgment” in a court, I mean. I don’t know if there’s a Heaven or a Hell or any of that.

I guess I’ll find out, soon enough.

Or maybe I already have.

ou’ll see Step Twelve by the time you get to the end of this. Then you’ll know that my “last word” wasn’t the kind you put in a will. It was a threat. And you’ll see I made good on it.

The back door I built years ago would always stay in place. If either boss failed to watch out for Tory-boy like each had sworn he would, I’d expect the other one to take over the job himself, even if that meant doing work in the other man’s territory.

That’s because it wouldn’t be the other man’s territory, not anymore. With the package the other one would be getting, he’d be taking over the whole town. Inside, he’d find all the other boss’s contacts, from cops to politicians to the judges they put on the bench. All the murders, bought and paid for. All the inside businesses, from taverns to gambling joints to whorehouses. All the street businesses, from drugs to numbers. Where they got their guns, and where they kept their arsenals.

With that knowledge, nobody would be able to stop the man who held it. Not anyone from around here, and not anyone who tried to move in.

Two separate packages, one for each boss. That way, only the boss who broke his word would be at risk. And the other one wouldn’t need to know anything about me or my life to do the job I left to him.

I believed that that boss, whoever he might turn out to be, would do exactly what was promised. He’d have to know there was another package, one I could still have delivered.

ut you’d have to be from around here to understand that there was something far more potent than any poison cloud of information hovering over the people I had worked for.

Folks around here know death isn’t always the end of the story. Some people come back. Good people, bad people—that piece of it doesn’t seem to matter.

When I say “come back,” I don’t mean coming back to life. That doesn’t happen. What comes back are spirits. You can’t see them or touch them, but you know they’re still around.

And nobody wants their attention.

Outsiders could never understand this, but if I died while still keeping certain names from coming out of my mouth, those I protected by doing so would owe me a debt—a debt of honor. If they didn’t do what they had promised, they could never be sure I wouldn’t come right out of my grave. If there’s a God, even He’d know I’d had good reason.

ou’ve come this far, why not go the rest of the way? Make your own judgments of me. I know you won’t all decide the same. And I truly don’t care.

But your God … He just might.

rom the beginning, anyone could take just one look at me and know I was born bad.

Spina bifida. You get born with it. That’s why they call it “congenital,” because it comes right along with your body as it leaves the womb. That whole network of nerves which branch out from the end of your spine never gets fully developed.

I never got told those words. Doctors don’t talk to children around here; they only speak to parents. To the Beast, it was just “that spine thing.”

It’s a sorry world when a child has to look up his own disease in a book. I read everything I could find about it. When I came across speculation that there might be a genetic component involved, I let my eyes slide over those words.

I even learned there’s ways you can help prevent it—the woman who’s carrying the fetus can, I mean. Folic acid is best. You can make sure you have it in your diet, or even buy pills in one of those vitamin stores.

Not much brings a smile to my face, but the thought of Rory-Anne changing her diet so she could make healthier babies made me laugh inside.

What she should’ve done was have abortions. Probably would have, too. But she wasn’t allowed—the Beast wasn’t going to lose out on any of the money the government paid Rory-Anne to look after us.

ver since I can remember, I’ve been able to go away. Not walk away. And I sure couldn’t run. I mean, go away in my head. I saw things happen to Rory-Anne. I saw things happen to me. But it was all like watching some hideous horror movie—it terrified me, but I didn’t actually feel any of it.

It’s not that I can’t feel pain. All that spinal thing did was numb me up pretty good downstairs. But the Beast knew he could hurt me, and that was real important to him.

He’d punch me in my chest, backhand me across the mouth, stuff like that. But even though I could see the blood and the marks later on, I never felt anything while he was doing it to me. It was like I was floating above, watching it happen.

It wasn’t only the Beast. One time, Rory-Anne told me she was going to teach me to mind her. I didn’t know what she meant, but I could hear the evilness in her voice.

I watched her drag my chair over to the stove and hold my hand over the flame. It must have hurt—the skin on the back of my hand came right off—but I didn’t feel that, either.

When she saw what my hand looked like, Rory-Anne got scared. She picked me out of my chair and threw me in her car. All the way to the hospital, she warned me what she’d do to me if I told. I was to say I accidentally fell against the stove when my wheelchair skidded, and I couldn’t move away from the fire.

So that was the story I told. At the hospital, they made such a big fuss over me that I wished I could stay there forever. And I could see they didn’t want to turn me loose, either. Not because of the way they looked at me, because of the way they looked at Rory-Anne.

All that happened before Tory-boy came.

Tory-boy came and changed the world. My world, I mean.

ater, I learned how my life might have turned out different. When I was first born, Rory-Anne wouldn’t claim me. The way I understand it, when she was told about the spine thing and all the special care I’d need, she just walked right out of the hospital, leaving me there.

It took a while for the government people to locate Rory-Anne, so the people at the hospital had to name me themselves. By the time they carried me to where Rory-Anne lived with the Beast, my birth certificate read “Esau.”

Naturally, Rory-Anne had never told them who my father was. They had to put something down on the birth certificate, so they used Rory-Anne’s last name.

Branding me with the mark of the Beast.

Some folks thought the Beast was doing a charitable thing, keeping me home after Rory-Anne had tried to abandon me. But most knew better than that. They knew he’d found out that a baby born as crippled as I was could fetch even more government money than a common Welfare child.

Rory-Anne never got over hating me—never tired of telling me what an ugly, twisted thing I was. But Tory-boy was different. He was born so big and beautiful that the nurses said he looked like a little prince. They even took him in to show Rory-Anne, told her how lucky she was.

So Rory-Anne not only claimed her second child; she even named him after herself.

It wasn’t until a couple of years had passed that anyone knew Tory-boy was born as deeply cursed as me, only in a different way.

o matter how bad things ever got after Tory-boy came, I always managed to keep things in balance. Not the perfect balance I learned later on, but close enough so that we could get by.

“Getting by” is one of those sayings everybody uses. But those words mean different things to different people.

For me, they meant I had to keep me and Tory-boy alive until I could find a way to get us both out.

ory-boy never could understand complications. For him, having our own place, that was everything. He didn’t care what the furniture looked like, or if we had a big-screen TV or a microwave. Tory-boy never did covet things. But feelings, they were precious to him. And the most precious feeling of all was feeling safe.

What Tory-boy prized above everything on earth was the knowledge that nobody was going to wake him up in the middle of the night and start hurting him.

He probably thought that first little trailer of ours was magic. Oh, how he loved just hearing me say the words “our place.” I could see it on his face every time I said it. Like I was casting a spell to keep us safe.

After a while, he started saying it himself.

ory-boy wouldn’t ever be able to understand how all this had happened, how it started way before he was even born.

I never burdened his mind with what I knew. Letting him believe in magic worked just as good. Better, really. There are things no child needs to know.

Magic soothed Tory-boy, just as logic did for me. I don’t remember the exact day, but I remember the feeling when it hit me, like an invisible lightning bolt striking deep inside my body.

From that moment on, I knew. It didn’t matter what road map you followed: magic and logic would take you to the same place.

Place, that was the key. It’s not the place you live in that keeps you safe; what keeps you safe is your place in the world.

nderstanding how something works isn’t enough. If you want to master it, be in complete control, first you have to take it apart … all the way down to its smallest component. Then you examine each separate piece to learn how they all fit together to form a functioning unit.

Doesn’t matter if it’s a grandfather clock or a criminal organization, the same rule applies—once you truly understand how things work, you can make them stop working.

I can do that. All of it. And I don’t say this lightly. I taught myself, and I tested myself. Over and over again.

I had no other option. I knew I had to pass every test. So I stayed on every new one that popped up, like a barn owl who’d just spotted a mouse.

Getting it right once isn’t worth a thing. That’s the difference between validity and reliability. If you add x and y, and get z one time, then z is a valid answer. But if every time you add x and y you get z, then z is a reliable answer.

There’s no higher honor for a man than a reputation for reliability—folks saying that you can always be counted on. In my world, it didn’t matter whether folks said that about you in admiration or in fear. When they saw you coming, it didn’t matter if they ran over to greet you or ran to get out of your way.

You aren’t what people call you; you are what you do. What people know you can do.

So, when I say you need a place of your own to be safe, I’m not talking about some piece of ground. You can’t make something your own with a title or a deed. The only things that are really and truly yours are those that can’t be taken away. Being safe isn’t about keeping people out; it’s about bringing them in.

Bringing them inside a place you control. If they act right, it doesn’t matter if they think they were invited in or just couldn’t be kept out. It’s only if they act wrong that they learn the truth.

You can’t inherit a safe place; it’s something you have to make for yourself.

That’s the way the world works—and not just around here, either. If people don’t need you for something, then they don’t need you at all.

I’m not talking about some task you might be able to do, like washing their car or painting their house—that’s not needing you; that’s needing a job done.

Needing you, that’s different. Reliability is the foundation to that. They not only have to need you, they have to count on you.

If people don’t need you, there’s no such thing as a safe place.

Plenty of people might have a use for you, but all that does is get you used up. It’s only while they need you that you’re in that safe place.

Just because people can count on you doesn’t mean you can count on them. I once read that the definition of insanity is to act against your own self-interest. If that’s true, I guess the definition of stupidity is not to know your own self-interest.

So you can never be sure of but one thing: sooner or later, you are going to get used up. Why people think they don’t need you anymore doesn’t matter. Any safe place you find, it’s temporary, not permanent. That’s why you always need the next place picked out in advance.

Most folks wouldn’t understand how Death Row could be the safest place on earth. Not just for me—for Tory-boy, too. Every minute I stayed alive, he was safe.

It was what came after I was gone that I fretted so much about. But once I had my plans, I tested them in my mind, over and over again. It wasn’t until I knew I could truly rely on them that I was finally at peace.

hey always let Tory-boy visit me in the jail. The good folks around here, they might have lynched the Sheriff if he had barred that sweet, slow boy from visiting his crazy, crippled big brother.

Besides, the Sheriff worked for the same people I did, and he wasn’t the kind of man who could live on his salary.

“Esau, I’m scared,” Tory-boy whispered to me.

“What have you got to be scared of? Didn’t I tell you our house was always going to be safe?”

“I know. But … who’s going to tell me what to do now?”

“Me. I am.”

“But people say you’re going to …”

“Die? You can say it out loud, Tory-boy. It’s not a spell-word. It won’t come true just because you say it. I promise.”

Those last two words had been soothing him since he was a baby, and they had never failed to do so. “All right, Esau. Do you want me to—?”

I held my finger to my lips. He knew that signal before he could talk.

I didn’t like the way Tory-boy had been sneaking looks around the room where they let us have visits. I knew what was growing in his mind. Tory-boy can’t think more than an hour or so ahead, but inside of that hour, he could clamp down on any one thing. Clamp down and hold.

I could see his mind: There’s no guard near us. They don’t even lock the door behind me. Only one man on the desk in front. I can hit him hard. Then I can wheel Esau right out and put him in the van. We can go back to our place.

“I don’t want to get out of here.” I knew saying that wouldn’t frighten Tory-boy—he was used to me reading his thoughts.

“But … but you always say there’s a way out, Esau. Like our secret mine, right? We can go home, and get right down there, like you said we might have to do someday—right, Esau?”

“I’m not going to die,” I promised my big, powerful, life-cheated little brother. “Not until I decide to.”

Tory-boy nodded. I’d never need to tell him that again. If I said it, Tory-boy knew it was true. And once Tory-boy had something from me, King Kong couldn’t make him turn loose of it.

“I’m just going to another place,” I told him. “You can come and see me there, too.”

“Don’t you want to come home, Esau? To our place?”

“Not yet. My plan is going to take years to work. In the meantime, I need a quiet place to think, so I can make more plans.”

I could see by his face that he didn’t understand. But I never get impatient. And I knew just what to do.

“ ‘Our place.’ Say it with me again, Tory-boy.”

“Our place,” we said together.

“Our place is always safe, isn’t that true? Nobody ever hurt us in our place, isn’t that the truth?”

“Yes, Esau.”

“Well, I have to stay here for a while to keep it that way. It’s part of the spell. This is one hungry spell, Tory-boy; I’ve got to keep it fed. Remember how I taught you all about that?”

Now I had him—he was back on familiar ground. But when I told him I wouldn’t be coming home for a long time, it was more pain than he could conceal.

“Esau …”

“Don’t let me catch you crying,” I said, real soft.

Tory-boy fixed his gaze on me. One blink—dry eyes.

“You know how we watch TV together?”

“Sure!”

“We’ll still do that. I’ll be right next to you, like always. You won’t see me, but I’ll be there. I’ll always be there, Tory-boy. If you talk to me, I’ll answer. Right inside your head.”

He nodded. But I wasn’t sure he had it locked in as deep as I needed. So I said, “Didn’t I swear to you that the Beast would never come into our place? Into any place we had?”

“Yes, Esau.”

“It’s been way over twenty years, Tory-boy. Isn’t that long enough for you to believe me yet?”

“I always believe you!”

“Shhhh … I know you do. So you best believe me now when I tell you that I’ll always be there, even if you can’t reach out and touch me. I will never allow the Beast inside our place. Do you believe that?”

“Yes, Esau.”

“That’s my baby brother. My strong baby brother. That’s what I’ve been waiting to hear. Now, tell me: are you still getting your checks?”

“Miz Avery brings me the money every month. The first Monday. She always does.”

“Good. And what do you do with the money?”

“I keep one hundred dollars, and I give her the rest,” he recited.

“Good! And she buys food and puts it in our house?”

“Yes, Esau. Every time.”

The electricity and cable are paid right out of my account. Same for the propane. There’s no landline, but the bank is set up for the cell-phone deductions, too. Tory-boy and me, we each have one. I’ve got all the right numbers programmed into his phone, and all the speed-dial numbers programmed into his head.

The Sheriff was letting me keep my cell phone in the jail, but I know they won’t do that once I get to the penitentiary. Not unless money works as well in there as some people say it does.

But I’m playing it safe. I’ll get Tory-boy ready for when he won’t be able to call me anytime he wants. And there’s enough in my bank account to cover my baby brother’s bills for the rest of his life. Even if he lives to be a hundred, he’ll never have to leave our place. Our safe place.

“You know who to take your car to?” I asked him. I deliberately said “your car,” because, the quicker he got used to not using that van we had all fixed up for me, the better.

“Delbert’s place. Every month.”

“Perfect!”

He smiled when I praised him. If you want to see “innocent” for real, all you need is to watch Tory-boy smile. He doesn’t have any badness in him. None. Tory-boy’s as close to goodness as any man born of woman could ever be.

Delbert knew he had to keep our near-new Camaro factory-fresh. He got three hundred dollars a month for that, regular as clockwork, even if he didn’t do anything but put gas in it.

“That car’s still under warranty, Delbert. And I know Tory-boy’s not going to be using up that kind of money on gas and oil changes,” I’d told him when he came to visit me. “You’re getting money. Regular. In cash. So there’ll be plenty of extra for you to keep on the side. Sooner or later, that car’s going to need work. I don’t care if it needs a new engine, or transmission, or … anything. You have to keep that car working. That’s the car Tory-boy knows. It has to last him his whole life, even if you have to replace every panel on the body and every bolt in the chassis. Fair deal?”

We shook hands.

There was no need for threats. I knew Delbert wouldn’t cheat Tory-boy.

he man Tory-boy knew could never come inside our place had been a huge, powerful monster. I never used his name. I never called him “Dad,” or “Father,” or anything like that. It wasn’t until Mrs. Slater snuck me over to church a few times while he was doing ninety days in the same jail they first put me in that I learned his true name. After that, in my mind, he was always “the Beast.”

I don’t know what names other people had for him, but I suspect they were similar. He was a man who’d stomp you or stab you just for getting in his way. The Beast really liked hurting people, and he didn’t miss many opportunities.

Drunk, he was dangerous. Sober, he was lethal. If you crossed him, he’d kill you right where you stood … unless there were witnesses around.

Then he’d wait. And he wouldn’t touch a drop until he settled up. When he was doing that kind of waiting, the Beast would go as quiet as a snake watching a rat.

In his own way, the Beast was a reliable man. If you did something to him, you could count on him coming for you.

But you’d never know when he was going to make his move. When it came to business, the Beast could bury his own ego in a cake of ice. He was proud of saying that an ambush is better than a gunfight.

Everybody hated him, but the Beast was always safe, because he had his place in the world. People needed him. Sometimes for certain kinds of work. But mostly what they needed was for him to leave them be.

Nobody needed for him to leave us be.

eople don’t take care of you just because it’s the right thing to do. The law might prohibit some things, but a man owns his children same way he owns his livestock. Despite what some said, I never could find anything in the Bible to back that up, but there was no need—the Beast himself had taught me even before I could read.

He didn’t teach me by talking; he showed me.

“Nobody’s coming,” he’d always say. “Nobody’s ever coming here, you crippled little piece of shit. Not without my say-so. Not unless they want to die. It’s my land they’d be stepping on. Ain’t nobody around would do that, not even the Law.”

he Beast knew people would always deal with you if you had something they wanted. He didn’t have a friend in the world, but certain people always had work for him. “Jobs” is what he called that kind of work.

That’s how I first learned that being safe is all about your place in this world—nothing else matters.

Later on, even when I was still a child, I could have found a place for myself alone easy enough. But had I done that, Tory-boy wouldn’t’ve lasted out the week.

hen Rory-Anne got big in the belly, I told the teachers I wouldn’t be coming to school for a while. I could see they weren’t all that upset, but they were obligated to ask me why that was.

When I told them Rory-Anne had a baby coming and I’d have to help her out, they just shook their heads.

Just like most people around here: they might get sad, but never enough to get helpful.

I read everything I could find about taking care of a baby, but there was no way around the one thing I’d never be able to do. If it wasn’t for Mrs. Slater, Tory-boy never would have made it.

She came over one afternoon. The Beast’s truck was gone, and a whole carful of people had come by and picked up Rory-Anne. I guessed Mrs. Slater had been watching, waiting for the right time.

“You know what every baby needs, son?” she asked me.

“Yes, ma’am. Milk.”

“Is that what you’ve been crying over?”

“I guess so,” I said, even though I didn’t think there were any tears on my face—I had wiped it with my shirt soon as I heard the knock on the door.

“All right,” Mrs. Slater said. “This is what we’re going to do. Can you make it over to the lightning tree by yourself?”

“Yes, ma’am!” I was sure I could do that, because I’d already done it, plenty of times. That tree had been struck by lightning a long time ago—before I was born—and everybody steered clear of it because it’s supposed to be real bad luck to touch such a tree. The way I figured it, I’d already had about all the bad luck there was, so the lightning tree never spooked me.

And everybody avoiding it made it a perfect place for me to hide whatever I didn’t want to keep in the shack.

Now that I think back on it, I’m sure Mrs. Slater had seen me go back and forth between that tree and our shack. She lived not a hundred yards from us, but way higher on the hill, in a much nicer house.

“God bless you,” I said to her. I had nothing else to offer, and I was still young enough to believe that truly meaning what I said would count for something.

kept reading up on the subject, but mostly I learned just by taking care of the baby.

That was my job. Nobody had to say it; I just knew. I knew nobody else was going to do it if I didn’t. I was bound to do it when I learned that Rory-Anne was going to give birth. But the first time I saw Tory-boy for myself, I wanted to do it.

This is the best way to make you understand that feeling I had: I wanted to protect him even more than I wanted to walk.

The wheelchair didn’t stop me. I could roll right over, pick up Tory-boy, and do everything that had to be done. Just like I could pick up the milk Mrs. Slater left for me every day. It was always in actual baby bottles, in a little cooler. I knew how to heat it up, how to test it, and everything.

There was other stuff Mrs. Slater left, too. Mostly little jars of baby food, but there was also a blue blanket, stuff to put on Tory-boy’s gums when his teeth were coming in … so many things I couldn’t even count.

It was like Mrs. Slater had read the same books I had, because, every time a book said a baby would need something, she’d have it waiting for me.

hen I was taking care of the baby, I knew he always had to be in the center of this gyroscope I was building in my mind. Maybe “gyroscope” isn’t the right word: what I saw was all those spinning rings, constantly in motion around a center post. I don’t know how I knew—it wasn’t anything I’d read.

Maybe it was the spirits talking to me. That’s the only way to explain how I was so dead certain about “balance” and “safe” having the same meaning.

I knew the exact nature of my balance. I could see it in my mind: swirling rings of pure black obsidian, every blade sharpened to such an edge that it made a surgeon’s scalpel look like a flat rock.

Like everything of value, that perfect sharpness came at a price. Those “black knives” you can read about in Aztec legends were made from volcanic glass. Such a blade could be used only to slice, never to stab.

Somehow, I knew if I could always keep those rings spinning the center post would never fall over. It might lean—sometimes so far over that I’d be afraid—but it would not fall. No matter what hit against those rings, the center would stay upright.

I knew something else. I knew that, once anyone tried to cross into our side of those rings, me and Tory-boy would be safe from them, no matter what evil might be on their mind to do.

It may have been the only thing a half-person like me could ever manage to put together by himself—I had to do all the work inside my mind. But I knew, I absolutely knew, that if I used the half of me that worked I could get it done.

I never questioned how I knew this.

couldn’t walk, but I could always get around. And I was so smart the teachers didn’t know what to do with me. None of that made me safe. The Beast could unbalance my whole world just by tipping over my wheelchair.

He did that a lot, especially when he was drunk. Which was most of the time. But he did it when he was sober, too. He liked doing things like that. Liked showing you who was holding the whip hand. His favorite thing in life was raising fear in others.

ory-boy might have been slow in the head, but he was fast on his feet. Soon as he could crawl, he would always try to scramble away when he heard the Beast coming. But there was no place to hide inside that miserable little shack, and he got hit on plenty.

Whenever the Beast went into one of his rages, Tory-boy would run to me. He never ran to Rory-Anne. He learned real quick that she wouldn’t do anything. But even though I was only a child, and crippled to boot, Tory-boy developed the belief that I could protect him.

Maybe that was because, lots of times, I actually did. I knew that all I had to do was say the right words to the Beast and he’d forget about beating on Tory-boy and go right after me.

And I knew he’d stop a lot quicker if I didn’t cry or scream. When he whipped Rory-Anne, the more she’d scream the longer he’d keep at it.

I think that’s when I stopped feeling the hurt he put on me. After a while, I could see him doing it but it was like I was hovering above it all.

Every time he was finished with me, I would go find Tory-boy. I’d cuddle him on my lap, rub his chest, and whisper soft until he stopped being afraid.

Years before he could understand words, I promised him that, one day, I’d make it stop. All of it.

For good and forever, I’d make it stop.

I chanted it like I was calling up a spell.

I didn’t try praying. I had already figured out that God wasn’t listening.

But once my little brother came, if I could have sold my soul to the Devil to make things right, I would have done it on the spot. And spit in the face of Jesus to seal the bargain.

ory-boy believed anything I told him. He always did. And that was only right, because I never once lied to him.

Tory-boy had faith in me. True faith. I knew even the truest faith couldn’t save people. They’d scream out in church how they’d been saved, but their lives would stay the same misery they’d always been. Nothing would change, yet their faith would persist. Like the people who tore up their lottery tickets and walked away chanting, “Maybe next time.”

I’d had faith, once. The Bible was right about the Beast; I knew that was the truth even before I could read. So maybe God just didn’t think me and Tory-boy were worth saving. But if He created us, how could that be? Why bother to plant rocks?

That was a puzzle I couldn’t solve, so I put my trust where it belonged. Once I accepted Tory-boy’s pure faith in me, it was up to me. Me, alone. My balance wasn’t enough, not then. Even though I was building it, working on it constantly, I knew it would take time for me to get it perfect.

I didn’t have that time. The only person I knew whose world was in balance was the Beast himself. I couldn’t hope to match his balance. Only if I could find a way to disrupt it would he be vulnerable. Only then.

I watched him like he was under a microscope. I not only had to recognize the opportunity to disrupt his balance, I knew I’d only get the one chance to try it. If I failed, I wouldn’t get a second one. The Beast would take me outside, crush my skull with a rock, and tell the Law I must’ve fallen out of my wheelchair.

It wasn’t that I would have minded dying so much. But then Tory-boy would be left without protection. Not from the Beast, not from Rory-Anne, not from anyone at all.

I could not chance that. My plan had to be perfect. It had to throw the Beast’s balance off so bad that he’d never get it back.

Somehow, I knew that that could be done, and that I could be the one to do it. I was always searching for a soft spot. I was … Ah, there’s no truth in nice words. I needed to kill him. But I couldn’t see how to do that, no matter how hard I looked.

It’s a good thing I never needed much sleep—the only dreams I ever had were worse than being awake.

kept studying. After a while, I learned about certain things that would poison a man to death. Plants I could find for myself, right out in the woods. Only, I also learned that it would take a long time—not hours, not days, weeks—for that kind of poison to work. I could cook, but it wasn’t like the Beast was around to be fed every day.

It would only take a few seconds to blind him. I knew what I’d have to mix together to do that, and the Beast slept deep when he was drunk. But it was still too risky—even the smell of my fear might wake him up in time.

And, inside that shack, the Beast could find me and Tory-boy even if he was stone-blind—he’d done that in pitch-tar-black nights often enough.

I daydreamed about getting a pistol. I knew just the place to keep one hid. But I’d never used one, and I’d never get to practice shooting without drawing attention.

By then, I had one thing truly my own. My faith. Not the faith that makes you believe in things you’ll never see, the faith you have in yourself.

By then, I knew all I needed was patience.

And I surely knew I had that by the ton. Patience may be a virtue, but I didn’t need to be virtuous. I had such patience not because I was blessed with it, but because I learned it. When you’re born under a curse, you better learn it.

iss Webb was almost enough to make me believe there were angels on earth. She was the library lady, just out of the community college, not even twenty years old. Probably the only woman the County Library could find for the money it could pay.

It wasn’t much of a library, and it was a few miles from where we lived, too. At first, I couldn’t get over there but every once in a while. Then the school-bus driver started dropping me off at the library in the morning instead of taking me the rest of the way to school.

I realized that couldn’t have been good luck—I knew there was no such thing, not for someone like me. And, sure enough, I found out later that Miss Webb had talked to him. There wasn’t any point sending me to school when I was way smarter than the teachers. Besides that, some of the kids at school were as cruel as torture itself, and I couldn’t waste any of my mind-time on fixing them—I had to devote every second to coming up with a way to kill the Beast.

I’d read and study at the library every day. All the books I ever asked for were science books—could be anything from physics to botany. Miss Webb never could have guessed what I was trying the hardest to learn from all that work.

The bus driver would pick me up in the afternoon and take me to where we lived. I think he must have been sweet on Miss Webb. It was for damn sure that nobody was paying him to carry me and my chair all the way to the door, both ways, like he did all during the week.

I wished I had a way to show my appreciation for that, besides just thanking him each time—that was nothing but common politeness.

I think the driver maybe even knew that. Because, when I asked him if I could know his whole name, he just said, “Charles Trammel, son. I mostly go by ‘Charley,’ but that there’s my proper Christian name.” I don’t think he would have said all that if he couldn’t tell that I felt bound to repay his kindness in some way.

Everybody at the school knew all about me spending my days at the library. But nobody ever said a thing about it. Who would they tell?

iss Webb was the first girl I ever gave a Valentine card to. The only one ever, to be truthful about it.

She knew I could never bring books home—the Beast would tear them up just to be doing it. But I could bring the things she baked, and the big bottle of milk she always had for me, too, as long as me and Tory-boy could make them disappear quick enough. We got real good at that.

Miss Webb never tried to get me to read anything special; she just left me on my own. But she could get books I wanted just by ordering them from bigger libraries. I loved her for doing that even more than I loved her for feeding me and Tory-boy the way she did.

You are what you do. So I was able to love Miss Webb just for being herself.

I was a little ashamed of that feeling. I know I should have been wishing that Mr. Trammel and Miss Webb would get married, but I just couldn’t make myself do that.

I’m not even going to lie and say I tried.

’ve had this sense of balance inside me ever since I can remember, but I didn’t really feel it kick in until I found science. It was like a holy spirit, the way it beckoned me.

Preachers will say they “got the call.” I don’t know how it was for them—or even if they’re being truthful when they make that claim. But for me, there could be no doubt. Science called: loud, hard, and sharp. A bright-white light calling, “You come this way, boy!”

Igniting something that had been inside me all the time, as congenital as my disease.

That does happen; I know it for a fact. Homer LaRue is the finest fiddle player there is, even if you’ll never hear him on the radio. Folks say he just picked up an old fiddle one day and made it sing. Every year, people would come back from Branson and swear they hadn’t seen anything to compare to him. And Homer LaRue never had a lesson in his life.

Folks say the music was born in him, but he didn’t know that himself until it called him. That was like it was for me with science.

When Miss Webb saw me with an algebra book, she asked me if she could help me with it. I was stuck for a minute, like I was being pulled two different ways. I wanted to say yes; I always loved having her close to me. But I wanted to show off for her even more.

When I demonstrated that I already knew how to do all the problems, she couldn’t hide her surprise. “Oh, Esau, I never imagined—” Admitting that she had underestimated me caused her to blush. It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.

I was only about twelve or thirteen when it happened, but I remember it like it was yesterday.

And I will treasure it forever.

Oh, how I wanted to see that blush again. But I couldn’t surprise her twice. After that, no matter what outlandish claim I’d make about what I knew, I couldn’t even get her to raise her eyebrows.

t wasn’t just killing I studied. I had to know about why me and Tory-boy had been so cursed. And I finally found the explanation I prayed wouldn’t be there when I looked.

Once I followed the trail down to its natural end, I found myself studying genetics. After that, it didn’t take me long to work it out.

I don’t remember my mother. No, that’s wrong. That’s just dishonest. What I mean to say is that I have no actual memory of the Beast’s woman—the one he always told people had run off on him. I knew that she hadn’t given birth to me.

I remember thinking how, if her first child hadn’t turned out to be a girl, she might have lived long enough to have actually been my mother.

I couldn’t think past that point without crying, so, after a few tries, I stopped. For good.

es, I wanted it more than anything on earth. And, yes, I worked at it every waking moment. But when that flower finally reached full bloom, it wasn’t due to any plan of mine.

It just happened, as if its time had come.

If people could look at a videotape of what happened, they’d get sick. And if they liked what they were seeing, they’d be sick.

The way it started, I didn’t have any feeling about it at all. It wasn’t new; it was part of my life. But when the Beast turned vulnerable, it was like looking at a beautiful new butterfly, opening its glistening wings as it rested up for its first flight. One of those rare sights, one you knew wouldn’t last but a few seconds.

And something you’d maybe never see again.

I say it just happened because it started the way it always did. Rory-Anne came in real late one night. The Beast was waiting. He said he could smell it on her, what she’d been doing. Rory-Anne was too messed up to notice his eyes had already turned red.

He made us watch. I was nearly fifteen then; Tory—the child she’d named after herself—he was turning seven. Old enough for school, but nobody ever thought of sending him. He’d watched the Beast hurt Rory-Anne plenty of times, just as I had. He didn’t understand that this time was going to be different. At first, neither did I.

The Beast had done all kinds of things to Rory-Anne before. We were used to it; she was used to it. He always called it “God’s punishment for whores.” First he’d use his belt on her, and then …

That night, when he was finished with the belt, he made her get on her knees. I thought I knew what was coming next—I’d seen that particular punishment a lot of times, even more since Tory-boy had been born.

By then, I knew why the Beast wanted Rory-Anne to get pregnant again. He wanted a baby girl.

The Beast unzipped his pants, but when he pulled his thing out, it just hung there, limp.

Rory-Anne burst out laughing at him. She called him all kinds of dirty stuff. I thought he’d beat her some more for that, but he just zipped up his pants and walked away. I figured he was headed for one of the bottles he always kept in his room.

When he walked back in, Rory-Anne was sitting on the couch. But she wasn’t crying, she was having a good time. Kept calling the Beast all kinds of foul names, pointing at him, laughing like a crazy person.

“Good thing you can’t get that little thing up no more, old man. Nigger cock tastes a lot better than yours, anyway.”

She didn’t stop talking that kind of stuff until she saw the pistol in his hand.

The Beast walked up real close to her and shot her in the face. Pieces of her head flew off behind her.

He looked at what was left of Rory-Anne’s face like he expected her to say something. Seconds passed. Then he put down the pistol, spun around, and walked over to the kitchen. He came back with the butcher knife in his hand.

When he started to pull Rory-Anne’s body by the hair, I knew what he was going to do. And, sure enough, he told me what to tell the cops if they ever showed up.

“I don’t expect no cops,” he told me. “That whore must’ve run off with someone. Not the first time she did that. But if they do show up …”

The Beast told me that if I didn’t say what I was supposed to, say it exactly the way I was supposed to, the Law would carry him off.

“Then you wouldn’t have nobody to take care of you and that little dummy,” he said. When he saw that wasn’t much of a threat, he told me if they put him in prison the Welfare would come and take me and Tory-boy away.

That didn’t scare me, either. But the Beast knew me better than I thought. When he said the Welfare wouldn’t just take me and Tory-boy away from the house, they’d take Tory-boy away from me, those words stabbed me right in my heart.

“They take me down for this and he’s gonna be put in one of those schools for retards, you understand that? You know what those places are like? You seen those things I always done to that whore for punishment? That’s what they’ll do to him. They’ll fuck him in his ass until he can’t walk. Every day. Every night. But you won’t get to see that for yourself. No, they’ll put you in a place for crips. You’ll never see that soft-in-the-head little freak again.”

aybe the Beast had never read a book, but he knew a lot. He was always sly—crafty in his ways.

It wasn’t just that he knew telling me what was going to happen to Tory-boy would fill me with terror; he also knew the cops wouldn’t believe any story he could make up. He knew most people believed he’d killed Rory-Anne’s mother.

And why he’d done that, too.

Where we lived wasn’t like what you see on TV—nobody was going to be digging up the ground looking for her body. But the Beast knew the cops wouldn’t hesitate to take him away if he didn’t have time to make Rory-Anne disappear. And if he had a pistol in his hand when they showed, they’d cut him down where he stood.

The Beast was a very crafty man. He knew I’d expect the Law to take me and Tory-boy away—with Rory-Anne dead, they’d have no choice. But he also knew the cops would believe anything I told them.

Everyone seemed to feel sorry for me, but kind of proud of me at the same time. They’d say what a shame it was, that spine thing, me being such a genius and all. After I won the State Science Fair, they said things like that even more.

Why would a boy like me tell a lie?

As the Beast talked, I felt the balance-power grow inside me. It became so powerful that it took over my entire spirit. I could feel it telling me that, for the first time in my life, I could put my own hand on the scales.

That feeling, it transformed me. Even my voice came out different. When I spoke to the Beast, he listened real close. It was like I was the one in charge, and he wanted to be sure he did everything I told him correctly.

What I told him was to give me his pistol, so I could put Rory-Anne’s prints on it, too.

He looked at me strange when I said that, but he didn’t argue. When I told him that nobody would believe any story about Rory-Anne running off, not with what they already suspected about his wife, he listened like missing a single word could cost him his life.

I told him how hard the ground would be that time of year; how it was already near four in the morning—it would be getting light too soon. If he tried to dig deep enough to bury Rory-Anne all by himself, he’d probably be caught in the act.

“The only way out for you is self-defense,” I told him. “Now, you listen. I’m going to tell you what happened here, and I need you to memorize it.”

He nodded his head when I spoke. If he’d been a dog, it would have signaled that he was submitting.

“That pistol there?” I told him. “That was Rory-Anne’s. Not yours—hers. Understand? She always carried it around. I saw her put it in her purse myself, plenty of times.

“Now, what happened was, she just walked in the door, sat down on the floor, pulled out that pistol, and said she was going to kill herself.

“Rory-Anne said things like that before, but this time she wasn’t playing. We both saw her pull back the hammer and hold it right to her head. That’s when you jumped up and snatched it away from her.

“Next, you went into the bathroom to find some of her pills. I kept trying to calm her down, but she wouldn’t listen to anything I said.

“Then she kind of staggered up on her feet. Before you could stop her, she ran into the kitchen, grabbed that butcher knife, and charged right at me, screaming and slashing like in that old Psycho movie.

“You didn’t have any choice—if you hadn’t shot her, she would have hacked me to death.

“There’s plenty of proof of that. Rory-Anne always hated me. She hurt me before—just look at the back of my hand; they’ve got hospital records on that—but she never actually tried to kill me before.

“Maybe it was the drugs or the liquor—you know the cops are going to find plenty of both in her body when they cut her open.”

I could see the Beast nodding to himself, taking it all in. Tory-boy was wailing. When I whispered to the Beast that I’d take care of the baby, get him to say the right things, too, he believed me.

Why shouldn’t he? He knew Tory-boy would do anything I told him to do.

That was the first time the Beast ever acknowledged me. “You’re a good son, Esau. And you always did have the brains in the family.”

With that, he acknowledged something else: this time, I was driving the car. He was just a passenger.

I told him to go brush his teeth, get that alcohol smell off, clean himself up. We still had plenty of time. There was no phone in the house, and the Beast would have to walk up the hill to get Mrs. Slater to call the police. This time of night, he’d be waking her up. Wouldn’t do if he showed up looking like he was drunk, would it?

He went right off to do like I told him. But somebody must’ve heard the shot. It had to have been Mrs. Slater, although nobody ever said. The Beast was still in the bathroom when the Law showed.

he Beast heard them pull up. He ran right out of the bathroom, his face still all soapy. He was just in time to hear me tell the cops how he made Rory-Anne get on her knees, then shot her like he was putting down a sick dog.

I had Tory-boy on my lap, holding him while I talked to the police. He was sobbing, and I was rubbing his chest to make him stop, the way I always did. None of the cops asked him any questions.

All the time they were cuffing him up, the Beast kept staring at me. He never said a word, but I could feel his hate. A white-hot arrow lanced out of each eye, seeking my soul.

I used my balance on those arrows. I could feel it working that time, just as I had felt his hate so many times before. But I was losing strength. Somehow, I knew my only chance was to get him inside the rings. And, sure enough, the very instant I parted those rings the Beast charged on through—he wanted to get at me so bad nothing else mattered.

That’s when he learned that even his evil power wouldn’t work from inside my balance rings. Every new blast he threw only made the blades spin faster and faster, stabilizing the center post. I was getting stronger, but the Beast kept on coming—it was all he knew.

A black-widow spider can kill a man. But if the man has that spider inside a glass jar, all the spider can do is wait—it’s not his choice to make, not anymore.

t first, the DA was real worried. In fact, he was terrified. People around here don’t pay much attention to what goes on in the court. They’re a lot more interested in close-to-home gossip, like whether it’s true about the pastor’s wife and that guy they send out when your satellite dish needs an adjustment. But get yourself known for losing a big trial—especially one people really wanted you to win—and they will remember that.

“No offense, son, but your sister did have herself quite a reputation, if you know what I mean.”

I knew what he meant, all right. But it wasn’t Rory-Anne’s reputation that made the DA’s hands tremble and his voice go thin; it was the Beast’s.

The DA was standing between two men on a dueling ground. He knew if he offered a nice enough deal—say, two, three years in prison—the Beast would not only snatch at it, he’d be beholden to him as well. But then the town would have a new thing to gossip about.

And not the usual petty stuff—rumors of corruption would be flying about. Worse yet, everyone wanted the Beast gone, and they expected the DA to handle that business for them.

There was no real possibility of compromise. The DA was an expert in such things, but no matter how he tested those waters, they came up foul. So he not only had to charge the Beast with murder, he had to make it stick.

Sure, he was a politician, and he didn’t want to chance losing an election. But this was worse. A whole lot worse. When you dealt with the Beast on any matter, win-or-lose always came down to live-or-die. Either he’d owe you a debt, or you’d owe him a death.

If the DA lost any murder trial, that would cost him some prestige. But if the Beast walked out of the courtroom without shackles on his wrists, the DA knew it was only a matter of time before dirt would be shoveled over his own coffin.

t’s not a question of believing you, Esau. I know you wouldn’t lie. But juries are funny—you just never know how they’re going to act.”

“But—”

“Let me finish, now, son. It’s not as cut-and-dried as you seem to think. See, we don’t really have that ‘forensics’ stuff juries expect to see today. All that damn TV, it’s polluted their minds. Sure, we have the pistol, we have the bullet, and we can prove that your father …”

I hadn’t said anything, but he must have felt some of the rage coming off me when he used that word. The Beast wasn’t my father. He wasn’t anybody’s father.

“… that the defendant”—he switched words so smoothly that I knew he must have had a lot of practice—“shot the … victim. But there was that butcher knife out in plain view, and everyone in the house had left some prints on it. Even you.

“So what it comes down to is one person’s word against another’s. And that’s never a choice you want to leave up to a jury.”

“There isn’t a person in this town that wouldn’t take my word over his,” I told him.

“I’m not saying that isn’t true. But Lord knows your sister had good reason to hate that man. You, too, truth be told. And everybody in this town knows that, too.”

When a silver-tongued man says something blunt, you’d best listen. The DA was warning me what was going to come out at the trial—what would be all the motivation I would ever have needed to hate the Beast. Even enough to lie under oath.

I visualized a horde of savage termites attacking our house, boring their way in so deep that the wood was going to collapse in on itself.

I reached desperately for my balance like a man grabbing for a handhold while tumbling down a quarry wall. I clawed my hands until they caught. Then I hauled myself up, hand over hand. A man doesn’t need legs for that.

That’s when I started talking. And I didn’t stop until I’d blocked those termites with my sworn promise that the DA would never lose that trial.

I promised him that by the time they held that trial Tory-boy would be a witness, too. Nobody would doubt anything a child like Tory-boy said—they’d know he couldn’t make up a lie if he wanted to.

I even told the DA he could test it for himself. Give me a couple of months to work with my baby brother. Then he could ask Tory-boy anything he wanted. If he didn’t like the answers, he could make whatever deal with the Beast he wanted to.

The DA, he was an important man. Not just a lawyer, the prosecutor over the whole county. But when I looked into his eyes, I saw just what I expected to see.

I think maybe that was the first time I realized the full truth about how having your place in the world was the only thing that could keep you safe.

For as long as people needed you, you were safe from them.

For that long, and no longer.

he DA had Tory-boy tested. They let me be there while they did it—they knew they couldn’t leave him in a room with a bunch of strangers and expect much more out of him than throwing a fit. And even at his age, nobody wanted to be around Tory-boy when he went off.

The social workers and the psychologists wrote reports. They all said the same thing. They sometimes used different terms, but “developmentally delayed” was their clear favorite.

That just means slow, not stupid. No reason in the world why Tory-boy couldn’t do the same things other children did, he’d just always be a little behind his years, and he’d never catch up.

Although he tested out to have a mental age of about five, Tory-boy was almost nine at the time. So first they had to hold this little trial—I think they called it a “hearing” because there was no jury there—to see if he’d be allowed to testify at all.

The judge was real clear about that—it wasn’t the age of the witness that mattered; it was whether he knew the difference between telling the truth and telling a lie. And whether he knew it was wrong to tell a lie.

Some children were so young that, no matter how smart they might turn out to be later in life, they couldn’t do those things. A two-year-old, you wouldn’t expect he could do that.

But a five-year-old, he could. So, even if Tory-boy was behind other kids his own age, he might be allowed to testify. That’s what we were all there to find out.

The Beast’s lawyers only had a couple of hours to break Tory-boy. They’d’ve had a better chance of digging a mine shaft with their bare hands.

Two hours, when I’d had every other hour of his life to teach him what he needed to know. Passing school tests wasn’t my concern; I just had to teach my little brother how to answer the kind of questions that I knew were going to be asked. The DA gave me some transcripts to study first, so it was even easier.

It wasn’t about memorizing. I had Tory-boy’s total, absolute trust. If I told him he had seen something happen, he had seen something happen.

He looked so magnificent in court, sitting up straight, handsome and proud. What he was proud of was that he knew the answers I’d taught him—I was the only person in the world he’d ever wanted to please.

“A lie is when you say something that isn’t true,” he spoke right up, clear and confident.

One of the Beast’s lawyers—the older one—tried to trip up Tory-boy by asking a long, complicated question. But Tory-boy was ready for him. He remembered what I’d taught him to say, and he’d die before any old man in a suit could make him say different.

“Well, then,” the Beast’s lawyer asked, “how do you know when something isn’t true?”

“A truth is what is real. If something really happened, and you say what really happened, you’re telling the truth.”

The lawyer kept trying, but you could see Tory-boy had taken all the heart out of him. Finally, the judge stepped in and took over.

“Do you know the difference between a truth and a lie, son?” he asked Tory-boy.

“A truth is right. A lie is wrong.”

“What happens if you tell a lie?”

“Telling a lie is a sin,” Tory-boy recited, letter-perfect. “If you tell lies, you burn in Hell.”

“Seems clear enough to me, counsel,” the judge said to the Beast’s lawyer. “There’s plenty twice his age who don’t know as much as this boy does.”

“But, Your Honor—”

“Enough!” the judge snapped at him. “You’re asking the same questions over and over. We are finished with this witness.” I took that as a signal to roll over to where Tory-boy had been sitting and pick him up. I was almost eighteen then, but Tory-boy was damn near my size. If it wasn’t for all those years rolling myself around, all those exercises I did with Tory-boy, I doubt I could have carried him away like I did.

We sat right next to each other in the back of the courtroom, just waiting to see what would happen next.

“I’ll hear oral argument,” the judge said.

“With all respect, this is res ipsa, Your Honor,” the DA said. “The standard has not only been met, it’s been satisfied with room to spare.”

“The only ‘res ipsa’ here is that the boy is retarded,” the Beast’s lawyer fired back. “There’s no dispute about that. In the Morrison case, this state’s highest court held that—”

“This court is quite familiar with Morrison,” the judge said. You could tell he was insulted, like this outsider was questioning if he was retarded himself. “As you undoubtedly know, counsel, Morrison referred to a child found to be so profoundly retarded that he was unable to do anything more than babble a few simple words, with no regard to their actual meaning.

“Furthermore, Morrison was a civil case, concerning charges of sexual abuse brought against the owner and several employees of a private care facility. The matter before this court is distinguishable on several grounds.”

“I certainly was not implying—”

“Sir,” the judge said, using that word without a drop of respect in it, “this court has made a finding. I trust you are familiar with your appellate remedies. If you believe you can get past the threshold of outright frivolousness, I assume you will act accordingly.”

When the judge cracked his gavel down, you could see where he wished he could have cracked it.

We waited until everyone had filed out of the room. As the DA passed me, he moved his head just enough to let me know that, next time I told him I could make something happen, he wouldn’t doubt me, not ever.

Not ever again, is what he meant.

he trial itself came almost a year after that hearing, so I had plenty of time to teach Tory-boy some new things. The DA told me what questions the Beast’s attorneys would be likely to ask, and I worked my little brother until he had it down perfect.

“Most capital cases try for delay,” the DA told me. “This delay is going to help the defendant right into the Death House.”

You don’t get a performance like that from a child out of fear. Just the opposite, in fact. If Tory-boy hadn’t wanted to please me more than anything in the world, he could never have managed the task.

Lord, how his face would light up every time I told him what a fine boy he was!

hen the State called Tory-boy as a witness, they let me wheel him up to the stand. I couldn’t stay there with him, but they let me move my chair over to one side, so Tory-boy would know I was still there.

The Beast’s lawyer raised all kinds of holy hell about that. He said I was going to be a witness, too, so I shouldn’t be allowed to stay anywhere in the courtroom at all.

But the judge was ready for that. He read off a whole long string of different cases where what he called a “vulnerable witness” was allowed to testify under special conditions. The one I remember most was when they let a little girl who’d been raped by her stepfather take the stand with a dog sitting right next to her. The dog was trained to be with kids when they testified; she helped them be calm when they had to talk about terrible things that had happened to them.

The lawyer for the Beast still wasn’t satisfied. He switched gears, said I could be giving Tory-boy the answers, signaling to him in some way.

“Let me understand, counsel,” the judge said. “Are you saying that a child whose testimony you sought to bar on the ground that he was mentally incapable of distinguishing the truth from a lie has now acquired the power to translate some secret signals from his brother into answers to questions you ask him under oath?”

“No, Judge. I’m not saying that. But, still, even the appearance of impropriety—”

“There is no such appearance,” the judge chopped off whatever the lawyer was going to say. “Unless you can show this court that the witness is some kind of ventriloquist’s dummy in the hands of his caregiver, your motion is denied.”

The DA jumped to his feet. “Your Honor, may the record reflect that, regardless of any ludicrous claims by defense counsel, the matter is moot, as the witness’s caregiver is sitting well beyond the sight line of the witness?”

“So ordered,” the judge said.

I’d never heard myself called a “caregiver” before, but, from the way the judge had leaned so heavy on that word, I knew it had to have some special legal meaning. I even forgave him for using the word “dummy.”

ll the DA did was to stand close to Tory-boy, making sure the jury could see he wasn’t coaching, just treating a child the way you’re supposed to. He didn’t have but one question:

“Can you tell us what happened that night, son?”

And Tory-boy spoke right up: “Mommy was on the couch. Daddy made her get down. Then he took his gun and shot her. In the face. Bang!”

The Beast’s older lawyer was some geezer the County had paid for; the Beast himself didn’t have any money, so they had to do that. Even so, that lawyer really tried, but he couldn’t move my little brother an inch. Once Tory-boy had something in his head, it stayed there. Unless I moved it out. I was the only one who could ever do that.

“No, no, no,” Tory-boy kept saying. Over and over again. Then he started crying a little, because the lawyer was being mean to him, and he knew it.

Everyone in the courtroom knew it.

But every time the lawyer tried to stop asking Tory-boy any more questions, everyone saw the Beast raging at him to get back in there and try again.

The harder that lawyer tried to push Tory-boy, the more you could feel the anger against him vibrating through the courthouse. Especially from the women. What kind of lowlife would scream at a poor little retarded boy, making him cry and all?

That lawyer wasn’t local—the county covers a lot more territory than the town where we lived—but he wasn’t from that far away. When he felt those waves hit, even the Beast couldn’t make him ask Tory-boy one more question.

hen they put me on the stand, both of the Beast’s lawyers had a turn, and they didn’t have to hold back. But every question they asked me was giving me a chance to put another spike in the Beast’s chest. And I hammered those spikes like I was John Henry himself.

“You hate this man, don’t you?” the younger lawyer shouted at me, pointing to where the Beast was sitting.

“You mean for beating us all the time? I may have hated him while he was doing that, especially to my little brother, sir. I admit that. I keep working on forgiving him, and I believe I might be able to do that, someday. But I don’t know if I can ever forgive him for killing my sister—”

“Objection!”

“Invited error, Your Honor,” the DA shouted back.

“You opened the door, counsel,” the judge told the Beast’s lawyer, barely able to keep the smile off his face.

I was grateful the jury couldn’t read my thoughts then. I didn’t even know a half-man like me could have a battle cry, but I could hear it ring out inside my mind: Yeah, you opened that door, Beast. And I just rolled right on through it, didn’t I? Now what?

I felt powerful enough to knock that lawyer out without ever leaving my chair, but I didn’t let it show on my face. It didn’t matter what that man said, it didn’t matter what tricks he tried, the jury never took its eyes off me. And they all listened like I was sanctified.