Read Online Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned (Socrates Fortlow 1) by Walter Mosley - Free Book Online

from his foldout sofa bed. He’d been laid up with a bad chest cold for many days after he’d walked three miles in the rain. He’d been alone until Right Burke, a retired WWII veteran, came by to see where he’d been.
    After seeing Socrates prostrate in the cold house, Right went out for aspirin and soup mix. He brought flavored gelatin and apple brandy to ward off the virus.
    The first two days Socrates was too sick to say anything but what he absolutely had to. On the third day he thanked the maimed ex-sergeant and told him the story of Ralphie and Linda.
    “ I still don’t see why you had to walk home in the rain,” Right said.
    “I had to let’im go, Right. I had to let’im be.”
    “You mean you was gonna kick his ass if you got on the bus together?”
    “Uh-uh. Naw. I mean …” Socrates was lost for a moment, straining for breath on the thin mattress. “I wasn’t tryin’ t’help him. I wanted him to feel bad because I did. I wanted that girl. I wanted him to pay for ignorin’ me. But I was wrong. That’s why I walked home in the rain.”
    “I don’t get it,” Right said.
    L ater that night Right slept on the foldout lawn chair that was Socrates’ guest bed.
    Socrates awoke to the snores of his friend. Ralphie and Linda, and Angel sitting at home with Warren, were on his mind.
    The cold in his chest was breaking up and he was going to live.
    “I ain’t no niggah,” he said to himself.
    He repeated that phrase.
    “And if I ain’t then you ain’t neither,” he said to some imaginary friend. “It’s you and me, brother.”
    Right sat up then. He stared across the small and disheveled room at his friend.
    “You okay?” Right Burke asked.
    “If you is,” Socrates answered.
    The two old men laughed. Later they raised a toast, with apple brandy, to Lindas that they’d known.

E QUAL O PPORTUNITY
    {1.}
    Bounty Supermarket was on Venice Boulevard, miles and miles from Socrates’ home. He gaped at the glittering palace as he strode across the hot asphalt parking lot. The front wall was made from immense glass panes with steel framing to hold them in place. Through the big windows he could see long lines of customers with baskets full of food. He imagined apples and T-bone steaks, fat hams and the extra-large boxes of cereal that they only sold in supermarkets.
    The checkers were all young women, some of them girls. Most were black. Black women, black girls—taking money and talking back and forth between themselves as they worked; running the packages of food over the computer eye that rang in the price and added it to the total without them having to think a thing.
    In between the checkout counters black boys and brown ones loaded up bags for the customers.
    Socrates walked up to the double glass doors and they slid open moaning some deep machine blues. He came into the cool air and cocked his ear to that peculiar music of supermarkets; steel carts wheeling around, crashing together, resounding with the thuds of heavy packages. Children squealing and yelling. The footsteps and occasional conversation blended together until they made a murmuring sound that lulled the ex-convict.
    There was a definite religious feel to being in the great store. The lofty ceilings, the abundance, the wealth.
    Dozens of tens and twenties, in between credit cards and bank cards, went back and forth over the counters. Very few customers used coupons. The cash seemed to be endless. How much money passed over those counters every day?
    And what would they think if they knew that the man watching them had spent twenty-seven years doing hard time in prison? Socrates barked out a single-syllable laugh. They didn’t have to worry about him. He wasn’t a thief. Or, if he was, the only thing he ever took was life.
    “Sir, can I help you?” Anton Crier asked.
    Socrates knew the name because it was right there, on a big badge on his chest. ANTON CRIER ASST. MGR. He wore tan pants and a blue blazer with the supermarket