That’s How I Roll: A Novel by Andrew Vachss Read Free Book Online Page A

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 exceptthat 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