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

to stay with his grandmother when he was fifteen. She died a year later so he had to live on the streets since then. But DJ didn’t complain. He talked about how good life was and how much he was able to collect on the streets.
    “Man,” DJ said. “I wish they would let me up there in Beverly Hills just one week. Gimme one week with a pickup an’ I could live for a year offa the good trash they got up there. They th’ow out stuff that still work up there.”
    “How the fuck you know, man?” Bernard said. “When you ever been up Beverly Hills?”
    “When I was doin’ day work. I helped a dude build a cinder-block fence up on Hollandale. I saw what they th’owed out. I picked me up a portable TV right out the trash an’ I swear that sucker get ev’ry channel.”
    “I bet it don’t get cable,” Bernard said.
    “It would if I’da had a cable to hook it up wit’.”
    They talked like that for three hours. Calico cooed and laughed with them, happy to be in the company of young men.
    But Socrates was just mad.
    Why the hell did he have to wait for hours? Who were they in that supermarket to make full-grown men and women wait like they were children?
    At two o’clock he got up and walked away from his canvas wagon.
    “Hey,” Bernard called. “You want us t’watch yo’ basket?”
    “You could keep it,” Socrates said. “I ain’t never gonna use the goddam thing again.”
    Calico let out a whoop at Socrates’ back.
    O n Sunday Socrates sharpened his pocket knife on a graphite stone. He didn’t keep a gun. If the cops caught him with a gun he would spend the rest of his life in jail. But there was no law against a knife blade three inches or less; and three inches was all a man who knew how to use a knife needed.
    Socrates sharpened his knife but he didn’t know why exactly. Grimes and Crier weren’t going to harm him, at least not with violence. And if they called the cops a knife wouldn’t be any use anyway. If the cops even thought that he had a knife they could shoot him and make a good claim for self-defense.
    But Socrates still practiced whipping out the knife and slashing with the blade sticking out of the back end of his fist.
    “Hah!” he yelled.
    {6.}
    He left the knife on the orange crate by his sofa bed the next morning before leaving for Bounty Supermarket. The RTD bus came right on time and he made his connections quickly, one after the other.
    In forty-five minutes he was back on that parking lot. It was a big building, he thought, but not as big as the penitentiary had been.
    A smart man would have turned around and tried some other store, Socrates knew that. It didn’t take a hero to make a fool out of himself.
    It was before nine-thirty and the air still had the hint of a morning chill. The sky was a pearl gray and the parking lot was almost empty.
    Socrates counted seven breaths and then walked toward the door with no knife in his hand. He cursed himself softly under his breath because he had no woman at home to tell him that he was a fool.
    Nobody met him at the door. There was only one checker on duty while the rest of the workers went up and down the aisles restocking and straightening the shelves.
    With nowhere else to go, Socrates went toward the elevated office. He was half the way there when he saw Halley Grimes coming down the stairs. Seeing him she turned and went, ran actually, back up to the office.
    Socrates was sure that she meant to call the police. He wanted to run but couldn’t. All he could do was take one step after the other; the way he’d done in his cell sometimes, sometimes the way he did at home.
    Two men appeared at the high door when Socrates reached the stairs. Salt and pepper, white and black. The older one, a white man, wore a tan wash-and-wear suit with a cheap maroon tie. The Negro had on black jeans, a black jacket, and a white turtleneck shirt. He was very light-skinned but his nose and lips would always give him away.
    The men came down to meet