Walter Mosley_Socrates Fortlow 01 by Always Outnumbered Always Outgunned

Author:Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned [Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Inner Cities, Psychological Fiction, Mystery & Detective, Ex-Convicts, Fiction, General, Watts (Los Angeles; Calif.), African American Men, Los Angeles (Calif.), African American
ISBN: 9780671014995
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 1997-01-01T06:00:00+00:00

THE WANDERER

{1.}

When Socrates Fortlow was released from prison he ran just as if he had gone over the wall. There was no family that wanted to take him in. There were no old friends except for other men who had been released from prison and now lived in the shadows of Indianapolis, Gary, and Chicago.

They paid Socrates twelve hundred thirty-two dollars and sixty-three cents for his twenty-seven years behind bars. He put the money in his pocket and took a bus to Los Angeles.

He had three reasons to go there.

The first was that even though he had been born and half raised on a farm he no longer knew the country. He couldn’t live the slow rural life and so he needed a city.

His second reason for escaping west was that the prison he’d come from was drafty and cold. The only cold he wanted from that day on was chill in the one thousand dollars’ worth of beers that he planned to imbibe.

He learned in prison that L.A. was a big rambling bunch of towns and that everybody was in too much of a hurry to remember faces, places, times, and events. An ex-con would need that kind of anonymity.

And so he got on a Greyhound hunched over, sullen, and silent like some kind of fugitive. He ran as far as California and then he burrowed in, hating every policeman, every clerk’s glance, and every footstep behind him.

He ran because he knew that in Indiana the cops would know him. If they knew him they’d try to bring him in every now and then. And if anyone tried to put him in a cell again he would try his best to kill them.

Socrates Fortlow was running for his life.

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