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“How old are you, man?”
    “Seventy-eight.”
    “No shit? You look pretty fit. I’d have said you were sixtysomethin’.”
    “Thanks. I guess.”
    “And they didn’t parole you sooner? How many people did you kill, anyway?”
    “I was convicted for one.”
    The guy nodded. He knew there were more. “You’re lucky, man. Most lifers stay lifers. How’d you avoid the chair?”
    I shrugged. “Had a good lawyer, I guess.”
    “Must have.” He winked at me. He, too, knew I was connected at one time. The family had good attorneys with judges in their pockets. “You’re a legend around here, Roberto.”
    “Better that than a fossil.”
    “Well, good luck to you.”
    “Thanks.”
    The doors opened.
    I was free.
    I walked out into the sunny streets of Ossining, past the shell that was old Sing Sing, the original prison that was declared some kind of historical buildin’. What a crock. A historical monument to pain and sufferin’ and death. I heard they were gonna make it a museum. They closed it in the forties. Thank God it was before I got in. It was supposed to be really awful. The so-called modern facility was horrible enough. I’d seen a lot in Sing Sing. I knew guys who did the sit-down dance. They finally abolished execution by the chair, thank goodness. I was there for the riots of eighty-three, but I didn’t participate. I knew better. I stayed the hell out of the way and made sure the guards saw I wasn’t doing anything. That went a long way toward improvin’ my conditions. I got offered more work/program assignments. My days of bein’ the prison badass stopped after my first twenty years, so I became known as a “model prisoner.” It took forever, but it got me paroled. Good behavior. And age. The heart murmur probably had somethin’ to do with it, too. The prison doctor told me to have it checked out by a cardiologist when I got out.
    Screw that. I had more important things to do with what time I had left on this stinkin’ planet.
    Like finding her .
    The cab took me all the way down the FDR Drive to lower Manhattan. The driver was some Arab guy wearin’ a turban. I didn’t expect that. Luckily, he wasn’t a talkative type, ‘cause I didn’t feel like chattin’. Man, things sure had changed. I hardly recognized the city. Well, parts of it were exactly the same. The skyline was different. More buildings. I wish I’d seen the Twin Towers. They were built and destroyed all durin’ the time I was up the river. Dothey still use that expression—“up the river”? It came about because you had to go up the Hudson to get to Sing Sing. There are probably a lot of expressions people don’t use anymore and many more they do use that I don’t know about. It’s gonna be a learnin’ curve. Will I reenter society smoothly? I had to attend some seminars in the joint that were supposed to help me “reassimilate.” They didn’t teach me a damn thing. Most of it was common sense. They told us about how technology had advanced, what we could expect when we tried to do somethin’ as simple as makin’ a phone call. Again, computers had changed the world. One of the first things I wanted to do when I got my dough was buy one of them laptops. I needed to get online. And I had to find some of my old friends—ones who were still alive, if any.
    I told the driver to let me off at the corner of Wall Street and William. I paid him and then looked up at the buildin’ I’d been dreamin’ about for fifty-something years. Imagine my shock when I saw it. Forty-eight Wall Street was completely different. It was supposed to be the Bank of New York. It had changed. It wasn’t a bank anymore.
    What the hell had they done with my stuff?
    I felt my heart skip a beat—that damned murmur thing again—but I took a deep breath and told myself to relax. They weren’t gonna throw out anyone’s money. The bank probably moved. So I went inside. The lobby was now some kind of museum of finance. I walked up to