Free Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned (Socrates Fortlow 1) by Walter Mosley

address just ’cause’ a some phone they call? Wouldn’t it be better if they wrote me?”
    “I’m very busy, sir. I’ve told you that we need a phone number to process this application.” Halley Grimes held out the form toward Socrates. “Without that there really isn’t anything I can do.”
    Socrates kept his big hands down. He didn’t want to take the application back—partly because he didn’t want to break the pudgy white woman’s fingers.
    “Do me a favor and send it in,” he said.
    “I told you …”
    “Just send it in, okay? Send it in. I’ll be back to find out what they said.”
    “You don’t …”
    “Just send it in.” There was violence in this last request.
    Halley Grimes pulled the application away from his face and said, “All right. But it won’t make any difference.”
    {3.}
    Socrates had to transfer on three buses to get back to his apartment.
    And he was especially tired that day. Talking to Crier and Grimes had worn him out.
    He boiled potatoes and eggs in a saucepan on his single hot plate and then cut them together in the pot with two knives, adding mustard and sweet pickle relish. After the meal he had two shots of whiskey and one Camel cigarette.
    He was asleep by nine o’clock.
    His dream blared until dawn.
    I t was a realistic sort of dream; no magic, no impossible wish. It was just Socrates in a nine-foot cell with a flickering fluorescent light from the walkway keeping him from sleeping and reading, giving him a headache, hurting his eyes.
    “Mr. Bennett,” the sleeping Socrates called out from his broad sofa. He shouted so loudly that a mouse in the kitchen jumped up and out of the potato pan pinging his tail against the thin tin as he went.
    Socrates heard the sound in his sleep. He turned but then slipped back into the flickering, painful dream.
    “What you want?” the guard asked. He was big and black and meaner than anyone Socrates had ever known.
    “I cain’t read. I cain’t sleep. That light been like that for three days now.”
    “Put the pillow on your head,” the big guard said.
    “I cain’t breathe like that,” Socrates answered sensibly.
    “Then don’t,” Mr. Bennett replied.
    As the guard walked away, Socrates knew, for the first time really, why they kept him in that jail. He would have killed Bennett if he could have right then; put his fingers around that fat neck and squeezed until the veins swelled and cartilage popped and snapped. He was so mad that he balled his fists in his sleep twenty-five years after the fact.
    He was a sleeping man wishing that he could sleep. And he was mad, killing mad. He couldn’t rest because of the crackling, buzzing light, and the more it shone the angrier he became. And the angrier he got the more scared he was. Scared that he’d kill Bennett the first chance he got.
    The anger built for days in that dream. The sound of grinding teeth could be heard throughout Socrates’ two rooms.
    Finally, when he couldn’t stand it anymore, he took his rubber squeeze ball in his left hand and slipped his right hand through the bars. He passed the ball through to his right hand and gauged its weight in the basket of his fingers. He blinked back at the angry light, felt the weight of his hard rubber ball. The violent jerk started from his belly button, traveled up through his chest and shoulder, and down until his fingers tensed like steel. The ball flew in a straight line that shattered the light, broke it into blackness.
    And in the jet night he heard Bennett say, “That’s the last light you get from the state of Indiana.”
    S ocrates woke up in the morning knowing that he had cried. He could feel the strain in the muscles of his throat. He got out of bed thinking about Anton Crier and Halley Grimes.
    {4.}
    “You what?” asked Stony Wile. He’d run into Socrates getting off a bus on Central and offered to buy his friend a beer. They went to Moody’s bar on 109th Street.
    “I been down there ev’ry day for